When Union spies steal an engineer’s beloved locomotive, he pursues it single handedly and straight through enemy lines.-imdb.com
Out of all the silent era comedians, Buster Keaton is notable for his lavishly large set pieces and there is perhaps no better example of this then 1926’s The General. With the restrictions of silent era technology, most humor of the time was slapstick, because only a visual was required. Most of the time slapstick is relatively simplistic in its presentation and sophistication; however that doesn’t mean you can’t put a good plot around it and that’s exactly what Keaton did. The General is fairly simplistic. Obviously. The acting, production, etc… isn’t the best. Obviously. But! Keaton does his finest to stretch the limitations of the time to their max.
Keaton’s protagonist is a breath of fresh air from the Chaplin copies that perforated this era; he’s kind, brave, but still clumsy. Keaton’s mugging to the camera may be generic by the times standards, but on occasion his reactions to all the crazy shit going on around him is priceless.
The movie progresses through a civil war landscape (on the southern side nonetheless) with the danger of war always present. This plays back into the plot, but what it really achieves is a sense of tension. The people around Keaton are willing to kill him and this leads to genuine moments where you wonder how he’s going to pull this off and stay alive. The only problem is that when Keaton isn’t on screen, this war backdrop proves immensely boring, but if you’re willing to wait just a little bit longer Keaton will pop back up just in time to provide a few smirks.
This movie is most likely not going to get you to laugh out loud, but chuckles and smirks will abound. The choreography of many of the slapstick scenes is truly astonishing, because they are so sophisticated compared to the rest of the movie. Mock silent film all you want, they had slapstick down to a fucking science. The first act is set piece after set piece and this really is astonishing, not only does it convince you of the Keaton’s comedic genius, but also his general filmmaking genius, since it truly feels like a train chase. Now to be fair this could also be the work of his co-director Clyde Bruckman, but alas we’ll never know.
The General is not your average slapstick movie. This one is big. It’s grand not only in price but scale. The ending train scene is a great example of this, as well as the other primitive effects. This movie was a remarkable achievement at the time and still stands as a classic to this day. If you want to dip your toes into silent film, this is a great way to start and if you’re a silent film fan, then you should have seen this by now.
A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves.-imdb.com
Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is considered a classic of Japanese cinema and has spawned many American copies, such as The Magnificant Seven and A Bugs Life. But how does this 1954 movie hold up today? Quite well actually. For its length (over 3 hours) and place at the beginning of Japanese cinema, Seven Samurai has an engaging plot, unique characters and genuine moments of tragedy, comedy, and tension.
Seven Samurai has the plot of a film you’ve seen before. It’s spawned so many clones, that it’s nice to see the original in all its glory. That being said, it’s not perfect. The films pacing is rather uneven, with the first act moving at a very quick pace, which was refreshing until the second act started dragging on way too slowly. The films length definitely is correlated to this and maybe if some cutting had been done to that second act, a more compressed and smooth story could have been created. That’s not to say that the second act is bad, it still upholds the good writing and acting the other two have, but it just slows down to concentrate on various smaller issues. Great for character development, but not as necessary as it one might think.
The titular seven samurai are all unique characters, with solid performances backing them up. You’ll never get confused as to which samurai is which, even if you’ll never remember their names. The villagers are rather interesting too, in that they aren’t played up as the helpless, innocent victims. To the contrary, Kurosawa portrays them as human to a fault, selfishly trying to keep what they have, even if it means betraying their protectors. This fascinating dynamic between them and the samurai and how it changes is a highlight of the movie
Kurosawa’s brilliant directing is truly something to behold, and way beyond its time. The way he shoots action, comedy, and the haunting ending scene are all extremely effective. A lot of older movies, especially foreign ones, loose their effectiveness when watched today because it feels so distant. Kurosawa’s comedy is funny, particularly the scene with the horse. His action is exciting and nowhere nearly as confusing as the post-Transformers action sequences of today. In fact his use of different frame rates to either speed up the action or slow down the dramatic deaths is really effective and not as cheesy as one would think. His drama is very real; as he sets the mood well and with his strong actors delivers true heartbreaking moments. He’s also not afraid to let you be confused, as there are a few scenes where you really sit there wondering what’s going on, just like the characters are, until it’s finally explained to you.
The hardest thing for someone going into this film is the cultural difference. The names are hard to remember, there are references to things you won’t know, and a lot of the history involved that just won’t make sense. It’s the side effect of being a westerner, but try and keep an open mind. As you watch the movie, you begin to understand how this world works, just with any other movie and soon you’re just as immersed as with the latest blockbuster.
I saw this film on VHS and you know what… it wasn’t that bad. The subbing was ok, even if it wasn’t present for every line and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything because… I wasn’t. This film isn’t widescreen so don’t bother looking for a copy like that. I wouldn’t recommend pirating this movie, as it truly deserves a non-pixilated watching. If you can get this on Blu-Ray or DVD because it’s totally worth it, and you will want to show this classic to everyone you know. If you can get past the length, and the very nature of the film being a 50s Japanese movie, then you should have a remarkable viewing experience ahead of you.
An introvert freshman is taken under the wings of two seniors who welcome him to the real world. -imdb.com
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is yet another coming-of-age film, this time not brought to us by John Hughes, but instead by Stephen Chbosky. Chbosky has taken his book and created a film that’s… different than the average teen movie. This is a coming of age film that reflects an entire years worth of growth, not a couple of days or random events. It departs from any semblance of a plot to show the arc of not just one character, but many. It shows real problems from a very specific perspective, and does so very seriously. It takes place not at the time it was released, but 15 years prior. All these things compound to create a film that stands out from its peers in its presentation, even if its themes and motifs are a mixture of Empire Records and The Breakfast Club.
The characters are all unique and easily attachable, partly because most of us have known people similar to them, but also because Chbosky takes advantage of every method he can to get you to like them and understand who they are. He uses snappy dialogue and even glorifying the two main supporting characters (Sam and Patrick) to get you to understand that they are awesome. This can be interpreted as a bad translation across mediums (which it is), but also as just Charlie’s perspective. He’s telling the story to us and since he saw them as these elite and special people, that’s how we see them. All the characters get quick simplistic introductions, either through exposition or key dialogue. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, but for a character piece it could be considered a flaw. Any and all simplifications are easily compensated by the mostly strong and dynamic performances by the actors who all do their best to make their characters unique, even the purely cliché ones. The characters, particularly Charlie, are seemingly identifiable, because they would be in any other film, but this movie stands its ground and forces you to stop thinking of Charlie as the awkward kid that’s just like you were and instead as a person with his own severe problems. Odds are you won’t be able to identify with his life’s issues, as they are very specific and in fact all the characters here have rich white kid problems. That’s not to say that they don’t happen to other people, but if you’re not a middle class white person the chances of you identifying with these characters and their issues decreases drastically.
There is a years worth of story told here, which in a book is fine, but in a film requires more compression to get it into that 90 minute time slot. Perks picks up the pace by using mostly quick and snappy transitions to move between scenes that seem to have little correlation to each other. This actually works for the most part, as we understand the passage of time and the changes in the characters. These vignettes, for lack of a better term, that the film cuts between are merely presented, not really analyzed or gone into depth on. This is an unfortunate symptom of the compressed time, leaving you to do the analysis if you’re looking for anything more then reflection. Luckily the film knows this, and doesn’t try to do anything more then show you what’s going on. For the amount of plot it has to tell, Perks does a good job of getting that across. That is if you can call it a plot… Perks is more of a collage of different subplots, all with varying degrees of importance. The “main plot” is the romance between Charlie and Sam, but there are large chunks of the film that have little to do with that. This more aimless approach to traversing through a year may be off putting to some expecting a flat out “get to point B” plot or character arc.
The intertwining subplots are an attempt to show that every person has a story. That each student in the hallway and each fan in a crowd is a person with their own problems and own lives. Sometimes it takes a wallflower to see that or the forced clashing of people, like in The Breakfast Club. As I stated before, you have to be within a certain range of people to specifically identify with Charlie and his problems, but a lot of the themes and details surrounding Charlie are what are going to get you to attach to this movie. The concept of the past always affecting you is strongly represented by the Aunt Helen “subplot.” There are the usual high school tropes such as being an outsider, those cliché people that always pop up even in real life, and those school events that are all awkward. These are mainstays of the genre and emotional reaction is instinct, even if we understand how cliché they are. And of course, with all of these movies there’s the “getting away from it all.” Characters throwing away their problems for a carefree laugh with their friends. No past, no future, just a tunnel in-between the two where you are as big as you want to be, even infinite. That’s what being a teen is about. Facing that maturity of adult life and turning away from it, because fuck it you can.
Those internal feelings and experiences of what it’s like to be a teen, to go through high school, to leave high school, and all the times in-between are what make this movie special. It doesn’t hit every universal mark though. While its 90s setting does make it more timeless and cross-generational, it can be off-putting to the current generation who never had those big phones or even used a cassette. The more mature issues it tackles, such as mental illness, child abuse, and homophobia can be alienating as well to anyone whose life wasn’t as dramatic as that. A film like The Breakfast Club will work better on these people because the issues tackled are more basic, but Perks, when it hits home with its audience will surpass others because the issues are more intimate and thus, emotion-evoking.
On an exterior front it’s average because it’s appealing to a specific audience and its conflicted attempts to attract a larger one ultimately fail . On an interior level though, as a reflection (not an analysis, or a dissection, but a reflection) it succeeds better than any other film for its true audience. If you can identify with those feelings, if you knew people like that, if you’ve dealt with these issues then this will have the nostalgic and emotional power of every John Hughes film combined. I dealt with those issues, I felt that way, I knew people like that and I was that observer. Perks doesn’t hit every mark for me, but it hits enough that it pushes itself above the rest and makes the viewing experience one of the most powerful I’ve ever had. Watch it and figure it out for yourself, but if you find yourself discussing afterwards not the general themes, but instead whether or not it portrayed PTSD properly, then this movie wasn’t intended for you.
Five extremely disturbed, sociopathic children escape from their psychiatric transport and are taken in unwittingly by a group of adult villagers on winter vacation. -imdb.com
The Devil Times Five or Peopletoys as it was originally called is a low budget, very indy horror film from 1974. It stars… no one. Is directed by… no one special… and has a legacy of… being a low budget indy horror film from 1974. And sucking. Ah yes, The Devil Times Five does indeed suck, mostly due to its amateur filmmaking. Now I’ve dealt with amateur film makers before, in my video review of The Legend of Sorrow Creek, but I wasn’t as fair to it as I should have been. It was the first directing and writing job of Michael Penning, so some tolerance should be given. I was planning on giving the same fairness to this film’s director, Sean MacGregor, but then I discovered that this was his third movie as a director, and that he had done both writing and acting for quite a few years before this. And yet he some how managed to make a movie that makes Chain Letter look like fucking Citizen Kane!
The technicals in this film are a nightmare, with too many visual and audio mistakes and continuity slip-ups to count. Just the very camerawork itself screams basic film school, with different takes noticeable to a snob like me. While the average viewer won’t notice that, what they will notice is the almost constant snow on the lens whenever they’re outside! The special effects are… nonexistent, with the exception of a rather good fire stunt. The rest of the kills are fairly bland, most of which being impossibly intelligent, but unique traps. To compensate for his $0 budget, MacGregor uses different camera “tricks” to little effect. Such as putting the footage in slow motion, in order to create a “surreal effect” that will somehow convince us that the beating the victim is getting is real. However, it clearly wasn’t shot for slow motion so we get a choppy mess for wayyyy too long as the kids spend minutes wailing on this guy, who’s identity is only properly explained after he’s dead. Another kill uses a freeze frame and slow motion to get away with an axe to the back of the head, almost making you think it’s the end of a 80s sitcom. The audio work is not terrible, but it’s quality overall is fairly low, leading to you having an even harder time understanding what’s going on.
The acting is, big shocker, a fucking nightmare. The adults either over or underact, all the while being generally unlikeable. Shoutout goes out to the actor who did a good job as Lenny from Of Mice and Men, I mean the housekeeper. The kids do an occasionally good job coming across as psychotic, but the majority of the time they are just obnoxious little shits. Speaking of the child actors… they do a lot of fairly traumatizing stuff for kids that these days a filmmaker might not be able to get away with. They see someone on fire, they swear, one of them cross dresses, they hold guns, the list goes on. I know it’s a weird, but if you are dumb enough to watch this film after reading this review, imagine doing that stuff as a kid and you’ll see what I mean.
The writing is probably the second worst part of this movie, because it wouldn’t be as bad as it was if the technicals could back it up. The pacing of this movie is all over the place, with scenes going incredibly slowly or just being completely superfluous. This is usually almost immediately compensated by a huge time skip, leaving us confused as to what just happened and it takes a good while to catch up. That’s something you’ll do a lot of with this movie, catch up. It’s hard to follow, as the nonsensical dialogue teams up with the aforementioned issues to confuse the crap out of you if you stop paying attention for a few seconds. The beginning was the worst example of this. I must have missed some dialogue in the first scene, because the lack of basic exposition on the characters and their relationships, coupled with the dialogue and awkward scene transitions, had me confused for a half an hour. Even if you do pay attention to the story, there’s not much to actually derive from it. It’s a fairly simple movie, perpetuated by genius children and outright stupid adults to keep the plot going. Actually, if this movie were any complex, odds are I wouldn’t have been able to follow it at all, so maybe simplicity is for the best.
The Devil Times Five is… a movie. It’s not that much fun to watch, even for its weird premise. It’s a dull movie at its best and a confusing movie at its worst. It may or may not be nunsploitation, but it definitely is childsploitation. The credits of this movie say it all. Instead of “The End” it says “The Beginning” displaying its stupid and cheesy nature and the extremely short crew list show how lacking this movie is, not just in budget, but in skillful filmmaking. If you really want to waste your time on a cheesy low budget 70s horror film, then do yourself a favor. Skip this waste of time and go see Death Bed: The Bed That Eats instead. You may or may not thank me later. You know, if you think Death Bed sounds like an interesting watch, or you’ve seen it, then you might as well give this a watch since you’re prolly the kinda person that would like this kind of movie and appreciate it’s offbeat crappy horror style.
The parents of a girl who was killed by a savage dog are granted the opportunity to spend three days with their deceased daughter -imdb.com
Sometimes the biggest detractor from a movie is not its flaws, but its lack of strengths. Wake Wood falls victim to this in the biggest of ways. This is a clearly low-budget production and it’s well made considering that, however the lackluster nature of pretty much everything in this movie prevents it from rising above what people would normally expect from a low budget horror movie.
The acting is fair, even if we don’t care much for the characters. A stand out performance is Wormtail as the leader of the Wakewood cult as well as the little girl, who while stoic, is a good child actor. The movie manages to create enough atmosphere and use odd sets and angles to occasionally get you to feel a touch uncomfortable. The effects are okay, even if there’s not much there. Again, everything technical in this movie is, to an extent, fair.
Where this movie fails is its complete failure to do… anything… to make you interested or scared. The film’s borrowed plot from Pet Semetary is barely accentuated, just replacing an unexplained force with a cult using an unexplained force. The girl has a ticking clock to evil from the beginning, so when the movie’s transition into such isn’t subtle we know exactly what’s going on. There are so many caveats to the rules that defeating this zombie should be easy, so when it comes time to climax we’re faced with a solution we say from a mile away. There are lots of little inconsistencies that perforate this movie, leading me to give even less of a shit about what’s going on. The film does have, to its credit, a lot of strangeness. Little details and twists throughout this movie that do make it unique, but not enough to be special (if that makes any sense). The strange-ass ending should be noted as it’s a wonderful homage to the 70s british horror movies this film is trying to emulate.
Overall Wake Wood is worth your time if a) You’re a fan of 70s british horror b) You’re okay with low budget movies and c) You’ve never seen Pet Semetary. Other then that I’m afraid that this movie just doesn’t due enough to justify the time, even if it’s not an all out bad movie.
Oh man, I’m finally mixing up the two places I review stuff.
Here’s my much belated video review of The Conjuring!
feel free to check out my other stuff on youtube or blip.tv/thebloodfiles
A maniac murders teens when they refuse to forward chain mail.-imdb.com
In an attempt to come up with a horror movie that would actually scare this generation, I stumbled across the concept of using our technology against us. The idea of being hounded or even abandoned by this crutch of life would, if played right, make for some good scares or at least a thought provoking story. Deon Taylor, director of Chain Letter, has taken this concept and twisted into an old man’s rant at teens for their “new-fangled technobizzy” then proceeded to shit all over it and smash it to a pulp not unlike how I want this film to look after I get my hands on it. Chain Letter is a poorly made, mean-spirited mess of a movie that fails to live up to its pretentious message.
Now for being a 2010 low budget horror film called Chain Letter one should not expect the acting to be good or the characters developed. And believe me, expectations are met, however one would expect that the teenagers would look less like they were fresh out of college and more like they are oh… I don’t know… high school students! The accentuated racks on these “girls” are only rivaled by those in High School of the Dead and the men have facial hair that should be in an Old Spice commercial. The characters are… big shocker… fucking obnoxious! It’s that annoying cliché that has continued to survive through this decade where we refuse to develop people we actually care about and rather have targets that we can enjoy seeing getting slaughtered. The writers and directors always seem to forget that we have to spend a whole movie with these people, and the best they can offer in compensation is someone so bland they leave no impression at all, rather then a bad one. The movie is adequately made, but its more artistic flairs are all annoying. The overuse of chains. The overly long title sequence. That’s used twice. Seizure inducing cutaways that in a TV show would signal a commercial break. Special effects that awkwardly alternate between goofy and grotesque. These continually failed attempts to be stylistic end up getting no more of a reaction then a raised eyebrow and a disgruntled sigh.
Where this film ultimately and truly fails is the writing, both in the plotting and its message. Taylor seems to be using the anti-technology motivations of the killer not to satirically promote technology or provide a cautionary tale, but rather as a scorning of the current generation for being so arrogant. This mean-spiritedness, whether it was intended or not, is interwoven throughout and as a member of that generation I was taken out of the movie by it. I don’t needed to be ranted at that I’ve lost so much privacy and that I’m trusting the internet too much and that I can be tracked with my phone and that every bit of personal data could be stolen by a hacker. I’m aware of the consequences of my actions on the internet and a good chunk of my generation are too. Don’t get me wrong there are still plenty of people who act like complete assholes on the internet or bully or what-have-you, but they at least know that hey, I could get hacked. The idiocy of all the characters that “abuse” technology and the outstanding cleverness of those who don’t (yet do since they use it to start the chain letter) is a marked indicator of this, but odds are I’m just reading too much into amateur writing.
I dislike my generation, but to see us represented by a director who has no idea how teenagers act is weirdly insulting. The concept of a video game lounge, studying at an arcade and two girls calling each other “slut” and “bitch” are all the exceptions, not the rule when it comes to any generation, not just ours. We’re not all spoiled rich kids, and for someone who “is up to date on the state of technology” you would think that he would notice that it’s actually the opposite with the state of the economy. If it weren’t for these grandiose claims about technology and generalizations that are made, I wouldn’t care about any of this stuff but, like plot holes, you notice these things when the movie can’t get you to be immersed in it. In fact the very premise of how the killer operates seems nonsensical, after all how is it that those who blindly follow technology and just forward chain mail are those worthy to live? And as for surviving the email, why wouldn’t you just forward the chain mail to people in a foreign country? The killer’s not there now is he? But nooooo that would be far too much logic for these idiotic characters and this idiotic movie.
Chain Letter is not worth your time, unless you feel like being condescended to by a toddler. The pretentiousness required by a filmmaker to put a Nietzsche quote before their low budget email slasher movie is ridiculous. The plot is inadequate, requiring complete stupidity from characters to push it along. Luckily there’s a large supply of that thanks to the either boring or obnoxious over-age cast. The message is convoluted, exploiting serious issues in today’s society just so it can shit all over them. Don’t watch this, and don’t let your friends watch this, it’s not even riffable and for a slasher film, that’s saying a lot.
Christina Tarling (Allison Lange) is a teenage girl who lives with her unstable father James (John Savage) and her younger brother Bobby (Lorne Stewart) in the family’s new home. While Christina is trying to sort out her feelings for both Eddie (Brendan Fehr), her boyfriend, and Howie (Brad Rowe), a handyman she’s become infatuated with, she soon discovers she has bigger fish to fry: there is a stranger in the house who begins leaving messages and gifts for Christina — and who isn’t averse to the idea of killing people in order to make an impression.-rottentomatoes.com
Christina’s House is a VHS I found at a second hand store for 40 cents. The back stated that its plot twists were shocking. Having been burned by Shyamalan and enraged by other shitty teen movies, I figured that this was ripe for the riffing. And ooooohhhh my it was. Christina’s House was delectably bad, with nonsensical story-telling, terrible acting, and… just plain weirdness. It’s not terrible like Dick Tracy where it enrages you because it’s terrible nature comes from how unfunny it is, but rather this film is fun for all from beginning to end because it’s bad moments hit all the right notes.
The movie centers around Christina (big shocker) who’s a whiny teenager with a dumbass younger brother, an horny asshole boyfriend, a creepy father, a ditzy best friend and a shy handyman. Weird things happen in Christina’s house, such as loud noises, random visits from her boyfriend and the inability of anybody to approach her without grabbing her from behind. The movie’s plot isn’t exactly the strongest, with those so called plot twists being just random events that Christina puzzles over while her boyfriend and dad fight over her. The appearance of a dead body means that shit gets real… sort of. The killer is revealed an hour later, but it’s really not a surprise and… well we stopped caring by that point. The movie really does just meander along, hiding so much from us that it doesn’t end up showing us anything and instead just lets us chill with the red herrings. If anything does happen, it’s because the characters acted even more stupid then they already are or the movie just said “fuck it” and screwed both continuity and logic. The killer’s reveal at the end makes no goddamn sense, with none of the kills or strangeness being explained by it.
The killer (who I won’t spoil out of courtesy) is brilliantly acted, not because it’s good, but because it’s sooooo weird. It makes no sense, but the killer’s ramblings and inconsistent behavior are a ball to watch. The rest of the acting is, of course, shit, but also shitty to a degree that made me wonder why they didn’t do another take. It makes me cringe to think those were the best. That being said, all of the performances stand out for being, again, so weird. The dad in particular is so borderline incestual, so much so that your brain is yelling “Bad Touch!!” whenever he starts to pet her. The boyfriend is a complete asshole and throughout the whole movie is fighting Christina on having sex. It makes you wonder why there a couple in the first place if they disagree on such a key issue and have nothing else in common. Sure the actors aren’t good, but the director clearly didn’t know what he was doing, as even the experienced actors can’t get their shit together.
The movie takes itself way too seriously, trying to pass little noises as huge events and characters freaking out over little things and doing random shit as if it was… well logical. To be at least partially fair to the writing, there are some points where there are clear cuts to the movie, and if those scenes had been left in, maybe some of the nonsense could have been… slightly less nonsensical. Character interactions might have been a little clearer and plot holes might have been solved. That’s not to say you won’t be able to follow along, rather it just means you’ll have a couple things to raise an eyebrow at. Christina’s House suffers from the post-Scream syndrome, where horror movies stopped being horror and became thrillers, and this is a detriment to it. If it had more gore and a better designed slasher finale, then this movie could have become a cult favorite. Instead it relies on plot twists that make no sense and a mystery it gives no clues for and doesn’t give a shit about until the finale.
Christina’s House is nowhere close to a good movie; in fact some could call it a bad one. It comes down to the clearly amateur filmmaking, as I got the same vibe from this as I did Devour. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it. If you’re tired of watching Final Destination 5 for all your horror movie giggles, then give this a viewing. It’s a film you should definitely watch with a few companions, because you will make jokes. Its just gonna happen. If you can find this movie then buy it, because it’s b-movie badness at its best.
The comic strip detective finds his life vastly complicated when Breathless Mahoney makes advances towards him while he is trying to battle Big Boy Caprice’s united mob.-imdb
Dick Tracy is the comic-strip based action flick that attempts to throw a goofy flair to itself. The comic strip style is translated directly to this film through many technical marvels that make this film a unique piece to look at, but not necessarily one to watch. It’s all-star cast, over the top visuals and campy yet serious writing all give off the vibe of a similar adaptation: Batman and Robin. Yes it’s eerie how similar the flaws in these two movies line up, the first and foremost being the convoluted tone.
Dick Tracy takes the comic-strip origins literally… and at the same time comically. It makes fun of the cliches of the comic, or goes for over the top goofy, but then the next minute expects you to take it seriously with the visuals or even the story. They try their hardest to make the universe look real, using shots that are impossible to get without complex green screening or intricate models. The colors of the costumes, sets and lighting are all vibrant, and coupled with the Elfman music it’s quite epic. Prosthetics are applied to all the actors portraying bad guys in order to make them look like their strip counterparts, but instead of immersing you in the Tracy-verse, it instead instills disgust as they look utterly hideous. It takes a long time to get used to it, and even then you’re never comfortable with it. They must have known how ugly it looked, because otherwise Warren Beatty would have had a chiseled chin glued on to fit the role. The sets, the costumes, the colors, are all taken so literally, but they expect you to laugh at how the villains look, or laugh at how loony Dick Tracy’s hunches are? Now to be fair, this could have worked in a more Airplanesque way, where they play it straight all the time, but they don’t, instead pointing out what you should laugh at. I could go on with contrast after contrast, but I think only one more example needs to be given. Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy plays him straight. Not as an overly confident superhero or an overly gritty detective, but as an almost human version of Dick Tracy. I say almost because the only time he shows personality is when the plot (or rather subplots) demand it. This serious Tracy against rubber bad guys is… odd. Like a semi-serious Batman facing off against a pun-spewing austrian while wearing a rubber suit… oh wait.
So while the writers and directors can’t seem to decide on a tone, it seems they also can’t seem to decide on a plot. The film has so many different subplots and such an unfocused main plot that when you look back at what’s happened you ask “why?” Entire scenes just seem pointless, and if they were removed it would make about as much sense as the rest of this movie since there are so many plot holes and leaps of logic that one more won’t harm it.There seems to be so much going on in the main plot that needs to be fleshed out, but if it was it would be a trilogy of movies. It almost feels like several tv episodes smashed together, but despite this the film still on occasion will careen to a stop to focus on one of the ridiculously predictable subplots and then compensate the actual plot’s screentime with a shitty montage that is never put to the right music, even ironically. It should be noted that the events of one of these montages could take up half a Burton or Scorsese film, but Beaty needs to keep trucking along. After some researching I found this movie was in development for 15 years, and then once it got into filming it had it’s shooting script combined with the novelization to fix the plot holes. Imagine what the script was like beforehand.
Even if you actually bother to pay attention to the convoluted shit on screen, there’s no way you can care about it. The actors never pull off a portrayal that can convince you to actually care about them because the material is just not there. Even one of the more tragic characters, played by Madonna, comes off as just stoic for half of the film and then overly dramatic for the last half. It’s either overacting or underacting, there is no middle ground for anyone, with the exception of the diner guy. He was cool. The dialogue is not convincing, interesting, or even seem to have a point to it. They repeat things too much and some characters NEVER SHUT UP. They go on and on and on and you want to pull your ears off. Most of the characters have little motivation or just pull 180 flips when needed. The kid goes from being an obnoxious little shit to being the bestest sidekick ever. Madonna loves Tracy because…??? Tess loves Tracy because…??? If they were attempting to portray the rather stilted strip dialogue or rushed character interactions, then they fail to understand that film and comic strips are not the same medium. A straight adaptation of Dick Tracy doesn’t work the same way a straight adaptation of The Great Gatsby, The Hobbit and The Shining wouldn’t and doesn’t work.
Dick Tracy provides you with enough action and visual appeal to get you through it IF you can get past the dialogue, the characters, and the looooonnnnng ass plot that either moves too fast or too slow. But the odds of that are pretty slim. My recommendation is to instead go to your local library and check out The Complete Dick Tracy volumes. They feature both the weekly and sunday strips and can actually be quite entertaining. As for this movie, it can sit next to Batman and Robin as it’s more obnoxious, but definitely more beautiful cousin.
With a dead body lying between them, two men wake up in the secure lair of a serial killer who’s been nicknamed “Jigsaw”. The men must follow various rules and objectives if they wish to survive and win the deadly game set for them.-imdb.com
If there’s one film that despite my best efforts people refuse to see it’s Saw. Saw is wildly thought of as being at least a bloody movie, if not a 90 minute gore-fest. And with fair reason, after its release Saw was accused of being sadistic and is many times cited as the start of the “torture porn” trend of 2000s. Well this is partially true. While Saw was responsible for opening the door to films like Hostel, it is very much not sadistic or “torture porn”. People and studios liked what they saw (no pun intended) when Saw came out, and much of the positive fan reaction was towards the genius of the death puzzles, not to mention the controversy over the rather brutal titular amputation. Other studios ran with this and turned it more into torture-centric style, focusing on brutality and disgust rather then actual horror. See there’s one major difference between Saw and its “contemporaries” that a good chunk of the critics fail to see. Saw has a fucking plot. In fact, Saw is very plot-centric, pushing it dangerously close to the thriller category. After all the screenwriter studied Seven for inspiration when it came to the actual investigation parts of this movie, but luckily it’s not and has sufficient scares to carry the sometimes hefty storytelling.
Cary Elwes stars as the captured Doctor Gordon and while he definitely has presence on screen, he can be a little wooden and his accent slips a lot. His companion in the room is a far weaker actor, but he’s not bad. The acting of the side characters is adequate, but could have used the hand of a stronger director. The finest acting moments come when the characters are just screaming for their lives, a chilling reminder of the stakes of Jigsaws games.
The costumes and sets in Saw are all gritty and dirty. The traps all have an industrial, twisted steampunk vibe to them which was so popular that Lionsgate changed its logo to reflect it. The room that the two are in feels gross, just in how it looks and how the actors interact with it. Saw is made rather uniquely, with a lot of digital filters and such added to make it feel dark and dirty. It feels very different then any other horror movie pre-2000s and the films that came out at the time. Of course after Saw this kind of tone became more popular, even if Saw wasn’t directly responsible for this trend.
There are plenty of fast edits and time lapses that all add to the chaos on screen and it’s frankly something I haven’t seen very often. This is the very early work of James Wan, who just released The Conjuring and these two movies couldn’t be more night and day, but there are still some similarities. The unique camera angles and the slow silence surrounding the horror in particular are things that you can pick up on, but there’s a noticeably higher level of skill in The Conjuring that shows he’s grown as a director.
The effects in this movie are quite good, when they’re seen. The traps are really where they shine, but other then that it’s mostly just blood. Saw has a reputation of being super gory, and to be fair it has gory concepts, but they’re barely shown on screen. Wan adapts the technique that Toby Hooper used for Texas Chainsaw Massacre and leaves most things to your imagination. Funny how both of those are considered the goriest mainstream films ever made. The gory reputation that Saw has is unfairly given to it by its sequels, which admittedly do amp up the effects. However, Saw is better and more timid then its follow-ups and it can be seen on its own, as long as you don’t let the “gore” deter you.
The writing for Saw… well it’s hard to call it a mess. It’s fast and loose with time and I typically like that, but in this film it seems to be utilized more as a way to confuse the audience until the last minute. It’s not terrible, because at the end everything makes sense, but during that interim it can get annoying. It’s mostly made up for with the fantastic twist ending that does leave your jaw on the floor and also highlights how this film was tailored to make that twist work. Not that you’ll need much thinking to see that, since the movie quickly edits together plenty of footage from over the course of the movie and throws it in your face, so much so that it actually gets annoying.
A good deal of taste comes in to judging how effective that journey is since it’s very much not perfect. If you like dark and horrific movies then you’ll forgive the films clumsiness, but if you’re not a fan, then these misgivings are only going to grind against you more. That may seem like stating the obvious, but when 50% of critics praise the film and 50% hate it, then it becomes pretty clear that personal taste dramatically impacts your perspective of Saw more then your average movie.
Saw is a thrill ride through the elaborate plan of a killer, whose unique nature really makes this film stand out as one of the greats of the horror genre. One does not need to see the body tearing traps of the sequels to see this convoluted, but well planned thriller/horror flick with an ending that I consider one of the best I’ve seen in horror or in film in general. If you can get past the dark concepts and the brutal traps, you might find yourself just as engrossed in the mystery as the detectives and as terrified as the victims.
Mental Multiverse 