The Gold Bug

Director: Robert Fuest
Writer: Edward Pomerantz
Released: 1980
Cast: Anthony Michael Hall, Roberts Blossom, Geoffrey Holder

The Conversation

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writer: Francis Ford Coppola
Released: 1974
Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Robert Duvall

The Orphanage

Director: Juan Antonio Bayona
Writer: Sergio G. Sánchez
Released: 2007
Cast: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep, Geraldine Chaplin

Blind Horizon

Director: Michael Haussman
Writers: F. Paul Benz, Steve Tomlin
Released: 2003
Cast: Val Kilmer, Never Campbell, Sam Shepard, Faye Dunaway, Amy Smart, Noble Willingham, Gil Bellows, Giancarlo Esposito

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Director: Chris Carter
Writers: Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz
Released: 2008
Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner, Callum Keith Rennie

Chinatown

Director: Roman Polanski
Writer: Robert Towne
Released: 1974
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, James Hong, Burt Young

STEVE says: Every fledgling screenwriter should have a look at this script. It's perfect. Hits every beat with atomic-clock precision, it never lags, and it never telegraphs exactly what's going on, yet makes it all seem inevitable in the end. And of course it is. Right from the beginning.

5/5

Dark Night of the Scarecrow

Director: Frank DeFelitta
Writer: JD Feigelson
Released: 1981
Cast: Charles Durning, Robert F. Lyons, Claude Earl Jones, Lane Smith, Tonya Crowe, Larry Drake, Jocelyn Brando, Tom Taylor

NIKKI says:
Wow, one of my all-time favourites. This is about as scary as movie get. Again, it's all to do with the atmosphere, the themes, the paranoia that comes with guilt and distrust. Of course, there's also a sackheaded scarecrow which is way fucking insanely creepy, but he's not the cause of all the creep. Not really.

It's really a horror movie fairytale, with poor Larry Drake attacked after saving the little girl from the scary dogs. So, on that other level, it's about love and understanding, unconditional friendship. Drake's revenge is very sweet, and I don't think I can think of a death scene more horrifying than the guy in the big silo. Ughghgh. It's horrible.

Good movie -- scary and beautiful.

4/5

The Dark Half

Director: George A. Romero
Writer: George A. Romero
Released: 1993
Cast: Timothy Hutton, Amy Madigan, Michael Rooker, Julie Harris, Robert Joy

STEVE says: Not one of the best Stephen King adaptations, but surely one of the better ones. The fact that it's Romero gives it a bump, as well.

3/5

Session 9

Director: Brad Anderson
Writer: Steven Gevedon, Brad Anderson
Released: 2001
Cast: Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Steven Gevedon, Josh Lucas, Brendan Sexton III

STEVE says: This is one that we originally almost passed by, largely because it stars David Caruso. I have no problem with him, personally, it's just that I was sick of hearing about him and what a Prima Donna he can be. Getting past that, we thought it might be a fun, low-budget haunted house pic to kick back to.

It turned out to be one of the scariest movies ever. Not only that, Session 9 manages to be suspenseful, scary and intelligent all at once, and without resorting to cheap scare tactics. I wish we hadn't watched it in the middle of the afternoon, though, because we may have cheated ourselves out of some of the effect. That said, the movie takes place in broad daylight from beginning to end, and the only dark places are those in the abandoned mental hospital it's set in - and there are many of those.

Watching again, nearly seven years later, I am still completely drawn in by it.

4/5

NIKKI says: This is without doubt one of my favourite movies of all time. I absolutely adore it. It comes so close to perfection -- it's scary, it's smart, it's tense, it's a great story, it's got a wonderful setting, it looks great, it's paced well, the acting is great... come to think of it, what faults are there?

We discovered this movie entirely by chance. Ooh, a horror flick set in an old mental hospital starring David Caurso -- that's the kind of stuff we love to watch and make fun of. Well, "fuck you" didn't the movie just shout in our faces? We were glued, enthralled, terrified all the way through. I couldn't sleep with Mary's voice in my head all night afterwards. And she still creeps me out. I think I looked behind me at least once watching this tonight, and I've seen it a bunch of times. It just does that -- it grows on you, creeps through you. It's an amazing piece of work.

Instead of more raving, I'll do a Top 5 Best Moments in Session 9, the best mental hospital movie with David Caruso EVER:

5. When you realise the phone is broken and Gordon is talking to himself.

4. Hank in the stairwell: "What are you doing here?" (OH MY GOD!)

3. The lights turning off as nyctophobic Warren runs out of the tunnel.

2. The little wobble on the tape player that puts a shake in the recorded voices. Oh god, whoever thought of that... It just makes the recordings seem even more authentic. I was convinced they're pulled a real interview from the '50s or something.

1. Simon. Yes, okay movie -- you win.

Why does it creep me out just thinking about it? A brilliant, amazing, awesome movie. Fuck it, I'm just gonna give it five.

5/5

Dead & Buried

Director: Gary Sherman
Writer: Ron Shusett, Dan O'Bannon
Released: 1981
Cast: James Farentino, Jack Albertson, Melody Anderson, Lisa Blount, Robert Englund, Christopher Allport

Friday the 13th Part II, dir. Steve Miner (1981)

NIKKI says:

It was a toss-up, but I think after watching Friday 1 and 2 back to back, Amy Steel has stepped out as the best Jason Girl. Man, she kicks some ass. And I know Adrienne King has the greatest villain-kill in cinematic history, but there's just something about her that screams innocence and naivete, whereas Amy has guts. And she has to actually kill big and scary Jason, not his aging mum. So, Amy wins.

I still love Part 2. I don't know if I like it more than the first one, because Mrs. Voorhees' head on the table, though, freaky and weird is not nearly as icky as the woman herself faking saving Alice in the first one only to throw her to the ground in the dirt paddock thing like the two of them are mud-wrestlers. Still, number two has some cool characters, fun situations, and no-one is running around in a headdress. Though Stu Charno comes close with his creepy monster outfit and speer.

There are some major plot issues with this one, too. Jason lies in wait for people that he can never know are actually going to go where he is waiting. Also, Amy, at the bar, comes up with the whole scenario for why Jason is out killing in the woods, but as far she knows it's all just a myth and the boy died at 12. How did she figure it all out with absolutely nothing to go on? Her child psychology course can't be that good.

Whatever it's faults, though, it's a good sequel. It and part one are awesome. Everything that follows is complete shite. And I still think Jason should have kept the hessian sack. It's just scarier.

2/5

Friday the 13th, dir. Sean S. Cunningham (1980)

NIKKI says:

Steve asked me while we were watching this: "Do we like it because it's good, or because of what it represents?"

It's a hard question to answer, because the truth is hard to admit. Yeah, it's not a great movie. People are underdeveloped, the timing is all over the place, the scares are few and far between, there's a problem with the logic of the killer stalking some and not others to no real end. But it's Top Five in the list of horror history-makers and genre-definers (with Texas Chain Saw, The Howling, Elm Street, and Halloween) and you can't fault that, regardless of how ultimately crap it kind of is.

Still, it's a fucking cool movie and way fun to revisit. I reckon I've seen it more than most other movies in the collection. I've definitely seen it more than any of those other classics I mentioned. Why? Is it Kevin Bacon in the tiny blue togs? Possibly. But I just think it's the most accessible, the easiest to escape to. Chain Saw creeps me out and makes me ill; Elm Street shits me with its cartoonishness at times, Halloween is too serious, and The Howling doesn't feature kids, so it wasn't so easy to relate to.

Friday just does the simplest thing -- takes some nice kids, puts them in paradise, and starts offing them one by one. It's not that complicated. And then it goes and twists at the end to feature one of the awesomest killers ever in film. It's like a good song -- you can just keep going back because it's familiar, it's fun, and you can chill out to it.

My only complaint? Too many A-cups. What's with all the tiny boobs? Were they trying to save on bikini material? Thank god we get Marta Kober in Part 2, or the early Friday series might have been entirely boobless.

3/5

Cast a Deadly Spell, dir. Martin Campbell (1991)

House of Wax, dir. Andre De Toth (1953)

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, dir. Danny Cannon (1998)

STEVE says:

This one sucked from the title on down. I'm wondering if "Last Summer" here refers to the events of the original summer, or the summer that followed. If it's to be taken literally, then "Last Summer" refers to the events that made up the bulk of the original film, and therefore "Still" doesn't really apply because it's a different incident altogether.

However, if it's referring to the events of the original summer, then this movie should be called I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago, which is really a mouthful. Still, "Still" doesn't work there, either because, what, you may have forgotten about being run over by four teens and left for dead? I'm thinking probably not.

Here, again, the killer does away with a bunch of people who had nothing to do with his plan for revenge, but does manage to set up an elaborate trap to kill Freddie Prinze which involves a mannequin, another rain slicker and a crashed BMW, yet decides - for reasons passing understanding - not to kill Prinze but his friend instead, and leaves Prinze on the side of the road, unconscious, to be revived and come back in the third act to save the day.

Amazing. Jaw-droppingly idiotic.

1/5

Nikki did not view.

I Know What You Did Last Summer, dir. Jim Gillespie (1997)

STEVE says:

Couple days ago we watched an episode of VH1's Super Secret Movie Rules featuring Slashers. While it tried to go through the "rules" of a slasher film - Sluts Must Die, Loners are Goners, etc. (most of which were covered in Scream, anyway) - it didn't work for me because it went movie by movie instead of rule by rule. You bring up one rule, you can talk about eight, ten movies and how each handled it. Instead, they focused on one movie and how it handled a specific rule. Kind of backwards, but no one asked me.

However, since the movies were presented in chronological order, we got to see an overview of the evolution of the Slasher flick, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 to "the beginning of the end for the horror film" (as Joe Bob Briggs put it) with Scream in 1997 to the complete travesty that is the Scary Movie series in the present. It was kinda fascinating.

One of the movies covered in the chronology was, of course, I Know What You Did Last Summer. I saw it in the theatre, and I remembered not hating it. But once again, memory has used me hard and left me bleeding.

There's s plenty to hate about this movie. Kevin Williamson's script, for starters. It's not uber-smart like Dawson's Creek, and it's not clever like Scream. In fact, it's the opposite of both - ultra-dumb and derivative. How many times can the Killer predict where each of our Teen Stars is going to be in order to jump out at them? A lot, it seems. He can also pack a dead body and about a thousand crabs in the back of J. Love's car, and when she runs off for help, remove the body and the crabs in a matter of minutes - in broad daylight. Niiiice! There's also the matter of the Killer wearing this rain slicker all the way through the film, right up to the end where he pops out in Average Joe Wear because we're supposed to not know it's him. It should be noted, too, that Ryan Phillippe is just plain awful as the asshole boyfriend who's first instinct in a crisis is to yell incomprehensibly and grab people by the throat. Not that that's Williamson's fault, I guess, I'm just saying.

I'm left wondering what the moral of the story is, here. These four kids are involved in a hit-and-run, are stalked and killed (along with at least two people who had nothing to do with the hit-and-run whatsoever, but whatever), and don't cop to it in the end, anyway. Where's the acceptance of responsibility? I'm pretty sure that goes against one of the rules, yeah?

1.5/5

NIKKI says:

Wow, does it take me back. To the days of Dawson's Creek and Party of Five and afternoon-long talks on the phone with Deb about Dawson's Creek and Party of Five. Those were the days, too, when Love Hewitt's tight shirt was the height of contemporary sexy. Compared to 10 years later, she may as well be Amish in this.

So, that's about all this movie is needed for today. A flashback to times gone by. To new horror and Love on the music charts. The movie is not at all frightening -- it never really was. And it does very little to advance what appeared at the time to be an advancing genre. At least in a direction away from the norm pre-Scream. But as Kevin Williamson's follow-up to Scream, this needed to be far better than it was. 

I thought Williamson was up on horror, as demonstrated by Scream. But when you look at this, he appears to know very little. People die who needn't, there's very little suspense, and the killer, unlike Jason or Michael, alters his MO when it suits the mood. Faceless black slickered ghoul one minute, nice old man with no black slicker the next, for instance. It just didn't come together well enough to be any kind of memorable piece.

Still nostalgia value gives it a place in our collection. That and Love is hard to throw away. 

2/5

Agency, dir. George Kaczender (1980)

NIKKI says:

At work yesterday, we got this delivery of about 200 of the worst and weirdest DVDs ever. Things like Adam and Evil and Concrete Cowboy. Most of them star people you've never heard of, the DVD cover art is so dodgy, and we're selling them for about four bucks.

Obviously, though, even in a pile of trash like that, Steve and I will find something worth watching. In fact, I bought five. One was Agency, a thriller starring Robert Mitchum and Lee Majors about an ad agency's secret plan to place subliminal imagery in soda and snack commercials in order to influence public political opinion. It's a dastardly idea and it's up to ad-man Majors to figure the plot out and get to the bottom of it.

The movie was full-on '70s cheese, but it was earnest and witty, and I actually thought it was quite good. I would have liked to have seen more on the imagery and less of Majors and Valerie Perrine getting chased around, but that's a small issue. It's one of those movies about technology from a time when the world was only just figuring out how to harness and make use of machines in the best and worst ways, and like Alvin Toffler books, I can always get into that.

2.5/5

Inland Empire, dir. David Lynch (2006)

STEVE says:

Never one for straightforward storytelling, David Lynch seems to have abandoned the concept altogether and just filmed a stream of consciousness nightmare of random, increasingly bizarre images that culminate in a final act of violence that resolves nothing.

And what the hell was up with the bunnies?

I've always liked Lynch. Even if I didn't particularly enjoy one of his movies (Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, for example), I could appreciate Lynch as a storyteller. But with Inland Empire, he seems to want to keep the audience at arm's length, to the point of alienating them altogether. It took an hour for anything in Inland Empire to grab my interest, and as soon as it did, Lynch shifted gears and moved away. Well, fuck you, too.

Lynch has stated previously that he hates it when a mystery is solved. My advice to him would be to Stop Making Mysteries.

.5/5

Donnie Darko, dir. Richard Kelly (2001)

The Dark Knight, dir. Christopher Nolan (2008)

STEVE says:

I thought Tim Burton's Batman was dark. I mean, compared to Adam West's camp comedy and Joel Schumacher's neon-loaded glam-fests, of course it was. But Christopher Nolan's new movie makes Burton's look like a little girl.

Even compared to Nolan's own Batman Begins, The Dark Knight has upped the darkness quotient. It's got a whole different feel to it. More realistic. Like it's, for once, not a comic book movie, but a movie set in the real world, of which Batman happens to be a part. Like Heat with a superhero.

But nobody's talking about the production design, or how good Chicago looked doubling for Gotham. It's all the Joker. So let's get this out of the way.

Heath Ledger was good. Very good. Different from the Joker of days past - no César Romero, this guy, and definitely (let's be very clear about this) better than Nicholson's portrayal where he showed up and, basically, gave us Jack Nicholson in white-face. Ledger took the Joker to a whole new level of dark, playing him as an anarchist instead of insane. Deeply psychotic, still, but the anarchist thing was new. So, having said that, let me say this:

Wasn't he really just doing Christian Slater?

Everybody's talking about how he channelled Jack Nicholson, but I just don't see it. First of all, you put those two performances side-by-side, and Nicholson comes off as a try-hard, playing a thug with a grudge - which is all the script really allowed for him, to be fair. But I don't see any Nicholson in Ledger's performance. If anything, it's Slater he's channelling, from Heathers.In that movie, Slater's Jason Dean was a deeply psychotic anarchist who wanted to destroy the school and everyone in it just for the sake of doing it. Ledger's Joker really isn't that far removed. Sure, there were Slater/Nicholson comparisons when Heathers hit the screens, and they weren't inappropriate. But can we please, for the love of God, stop rolling out "Nicholson" every time someone does something brilliant in a movie, huh?

4/5