Amityville 3-D, dir. Richard Fleischer (1983)

STEVE says:
I went 25 years without watching this fucking thing. A quarter of a century; 67.5% of my life - possibly longer than I've ever purposefully not watched any other movie. Tonight the streak was broken, and the wait more than completely justified.

There really was no excuse for this movie. The story, as it was, deftly side-stepped that set-up in the first film, choosing instead to go with some ghostly tom-foolery, and then went nowhere for what seemed a really long time, but was in fact only 89 minutes. Long enough, I suppose.

Adding insult to injury, the 3-D isn't used to any particular effect. The occasional "shock-shot" of a hand reaching out toward the screen, yeah, but how many times can we see that in the same movie and still be bothered to care?

.5/5

NIKKI says:
Just when I thought I'd never watch another non-3D movie again... This was just horrendous. I'm starting to think Jaws 3D was actually a shameful film that blinded me with its fish effects.

I said to Steve, perhaps I would have been blind to this film's dumbness had the 3D effects been better, It would appear we had a slightly colour-skewed print, so not all of the 3D worked. This was bad. The main shots were good -- people and walls and stuff were very 3D, but the money-shots -- pole going through car window, hands reaching out, flies and ghost-forms buzzing around -- all split the red and blue in two. So, instead of seeing something coming at us, we just saw it big and twice, as though we had a weird double-vision.

So, that was disappointing.

Not as disappointing, though, as the movie itself, which was stupid, boring, and made very little sense. That is all.

.5/5

Corey Haim: Me, Myself and I, dir. William L. Boyd, Brooke McCarter (1989)

NIKKI says:
So, I wake up in the morning, come out to the computer, flick the monitor on, and I see this. Well, I see Corey Haim, crayon in hand, writing his name on a wall. It's Corey Haim's video diary from 1989. Little does Steve know, he has just found my Holy Grail.

Or perhaps he did know... And, to be honest, my Holy Grail became something far different as of about 1992. Still, watching this "film" so many years after my Haim-obsession was just brilliant. It was everything I thought it would be and more. So, so much more.

I told Steve I had the most success with this when I stepped back into my 1989-self, back when I was going to marry Corey and would save all my pocket money to buy Teen Beats with his picture on the front. I could more easily view this as I may have then, loving Corey as he played tennis and drive his Alfa Romeo down Sunset Boulevard. I needed to put myself back there, because this really is a sad, sad piece of work.

I don't blame Corey. He was 17 at the time, and probably spent much of his teens being told he was the shit, and that everybody loved him, so he acted like it. He really does love him some self here, parading for the camera, saying stuff he thinks is funny or deeply profound, and spending much of his time getting pampered and primped by make-up girls. It's no wonder he acts the way he does.

Research informs me that this video was not a fan piece, but a PSA from Corey Camp that he was off drugs and ready to start his adult career. Apparently, he'd had some law troubles at this time, though I don't remember hearing about that in my only source of Corey news: the teen mags. Funny that. At the end of the movie, Corey tells us to stay in school and avoid "getting messed up". It's all so sincere, and then a make-up girl comes out. Well, maybe she doesn't, but she may as well have.

As ridiculous as this movie is -- it's 37 minutes of Corey playing sports, winking for the camera while floating in his pool, hitting some keys on his synthesizer, doing a fashion show, and talking about how can't wait to live in a mansion in Tahiti -- it's a product of its time, and really shows how blinded we fans were to the lives of our fave stars. There was no Internet, no YouTube, no E! Hollywood Story -- just the teen mags and the movies. We could believe in our favourite stars' innocence for a lot longer than kids can today. I think that was a good thing.

1/5 for content;
5/5 because my life is now complete.

Steve did not view.

The Border, dir. Tony Richardson (1982)

NIKKI says:
Remember when movies were like this? If I could go back in time, anywhere at all in world history, it would be to this time, when Jack Nicholson could slap Valerie Perrine and we'd understand him fully.

To be continued...

STEVE says:
I couldn't believe Nikki had yet to see The Border (Lyndall, I'm looking at you...), but I'd only seen about 10 minutes of it myself, and that as a kid of 11 or 12, so I couldn't throw stones. Not too hard, at least.

The Border was less plot-driven than we'd expected and more of a character piece. Nicholson plays Charlie Smith, newly relocated to Texas from California, and working as a Border Guard. Here he finds all sorts of corruption, from the Chief (Warren Oates) all the way down to his neighbour and co-worker Cat (Harvey Keitel), which makes him take a look at his own life, and decide to do something good for a change by helping a young Mexican woman find her kidnapped baby, thereby attaining redemption for his own transgressions in the past.

Again, not a great movie, but definitely a very good movie. Watching Nicholson and Harvey Keitel together for the first time was a cinematic gift. Not a bad choice for Nicholson's 71st birthday!

3.5/5

Jaws 3-D, dir. Joe Alves (1983)

NIKKI says:
The skeleton hand! Ahhh!

This movie kinda restored my faith in the art of the 3D sequel. After Friday 3, I was a bit concerned that the gimmick had worn thin. As awesome as those opening sheets were in that movie, the package as a whole felt like a waste of time. The movie underneath the 3D effects was just that terrible.

This one, though, wasn't so bad. And it was the perfect setting for a 3D film -- under the sea. It's not set under the sea, as such, but there are lots of shot of underwater worlds, with fish swimming right by your face. The sharks pop out, we get stuff in a syringe splurted in our faces, the skeleton hand comes right out and grabs you by the head (pretty much), and it's all very tense and scary.

Okay, so it's not tense or scary, but there are moments in the end when you think one of the dolphins has perished. And that was pretty moving.

Dennis Quaid, if I've got this right, is an architect at an underwater, sea-based theme park. His girlfriend takes care of the dolphins. They learn that a shark family has broken through the sea barriers and entered the park. It's potential devastation for all, obviously. So, they devise a plan to get the sharks out, before everyone visiting the park perishes.

Fairly standard, but not boring. And Bess Armstrong is just a great heroine -- she's dedicated to her dolphins, in love with her boyfriend in a cool, non-obsessive, non-bitchy way, and she's sure of herself. Not once do you hear cries in this movie that a chick can't save the day.

Not the best movie of all time, but certainly right near the top of the list of 3D sequels.

3/5

STEVE says:
The best part about watching any 3-D movie is the first few minutes, when Nikki is just getting used to the effect. Priceless.

Though I've only seen this movie once before (in the theater on its initial release), I remembered quite a bit of it - a whole lot more than I do from other films I saw only once 25 years ago: Shawn Brody's fear of the water (which he got over real quick, by the way, thus making it a set-up with no pay-off); the POV shot as Simon "Manimal" McCorkindale gets smashed up inside the shark; the fact that there were two sharks involved this time (which Benchley would later echo with giant squids in Beast); the massive underwater shark explosion and the triumphant dolphins. Clearly the film had an impact on my young mind. I mean, it's not a great movie, but the fact that I recalled as much as I did has gotta be testament to something.

Compared to Friday the 13 part 3 in 3-D, Jaws 3-D was a freakin' masterpiece. On its own, however, it was really just kind of average. But I'm giving it an extra half-point for effort.

3/5

Slow Burn, dir. Wayne Beach (2005)

STEVE says:
This was a good-but-not-great Noirish thriller whose only failing, as far as I'm concerned, is that it relied too heavily on the Usual Suspects/Keyser Soze gimmick with its Danny Luden character.

This is one of those movies where red herrings abound, so when it's pushing you too far in one direction, you can be sure it's the wrong one. Usual Suspects never falls into that trap because the film posits that Keyser Soze might not even exist in reality, so you're never sitting there trying to guess which one of the gang is hiding his identity. With Slow Burn, it's a constant shell-game, where each new lead points to a different character. And when it starts pointing too insistently, you instinctively start looking elsewhere. The twist-upon-twist-upon-twist ending was a bit much, I'm sitting there thinking, "End already!" but it was solid enough to keep me interested for the duration, even though we figured out pretty early what was going on.

None of which means that it deserves the caning it's receiving over there at RottenTomatoes.com.

The critics are just ripping Slow Burn to shreds, which is unfortunate and unfair. It's not like it's trying to bring anything new to the thriller table; it's taking the conventions of the genre and using them as necessary. Does that merit a 12%? I think not.

3/5

NIKKI says:
You know, I never once thought of The Usual Suspects while watching this movie. Looking back, I can see that movie's influence all over this one. Still, I was happy with the goings on. I thought figuring out LL Cool J was the killer and then realising he wasn't then thinking he was again was actually fun.

There were bits and pieces here that I didn't like. Mainly that the Assistant DA would even think for two seconds that her DA boyfriend (Ray) would believe her story for a second. I'm questioning, too, the fact that Ray never once suspected her of anything during the months she was seeing someone else.

So, yeah, if you pulled a thread, the whole thing might unravel. I still liked it. Perhaps I just liked watching Ray face off against LL? But who wouldn't like that? I also loved the movie's soundtrack. Some really great soul tunes in this one.

So, did you notice how Ray Liotta aged badly in his 40s, and now seems to be aging REALLY well in his 50s? I said to Steve in the movie that Ray would be approaching 50, as all my crushes from the early '90s seem to be, and here I find Ray's 53! He looks 40 in this movie. Svelte, healthy, delish.

There's a point right there.

3/5

The Hive, dir. Peter Manus (2008)

STEVE says:
Two minutes in and we were ready to shut this off. I don't know why neither of us brought it up - maybe we thought we deserved this after so many good horror movies - but we didn't. We suffered through it.

In 2005 Tom Wopat could be seen on Broadway, playing James Lingk in Glengarry Glen Ross. Now he's appearing - top billed, but still - in Sci-Fi Channel shite like The Hive. Tom, can I send ya a few bucks?

I don't know what to tell you: Ants decide they're taking over Thailand or something; some exterminators are called in but the ants have become self-aware and are able to create tentacles and smash people to the ground. Pseudo-scientific jargon is bandied about, lines like "We don't negotiate with ants" are delivered without a trace of irony, then suddenly there's a giant ant made up of billions of ants, a glowing alien mosquito-looking thing, Wopat becomes a suicide bomber and then it's over.

This ranks right up there with Shockwave. Avoid at all cost.

0.5/5

NIKKI says:
The streak had to run out sometime.

If if wasn't midnight, and I wasn't really tired after work, I would have turned this off. Thinking about it now, I turned it off in my head about 20 minutes in. I thought Steve was going to query why I was bringing up random things to him during the movie. It was because the movie was going on in front of me, but in my head I was thinking about my writing, my drum lessons, Steve's play, my dog, work, anything.

I thought we would get a crappy-but-fun little ant movie. But it was horrible and dumb. It had big wormhole-looking ant cobras floating about making pattens of DNA.

Ugh, that's all I can say. You get it.

.5/5

Noise, dir. Henry Bean (2007)

NIKKI says:
When I read the synopsis, I thought of Falling Down, the movie where Michael Douglas gets fed up with his day job and starts to go mental. Here, we have Dave Owen, a guy who is so tired of New York City's car alarms disturbing him at random moments in his life, that he goes around smashing windows and cutting battery lines. Obviously, the law is not on his side, and so he finds himself in trouble. Still, Dave has a purpose. He is the only man who believes in keeping the peace.

I enjoyed Dave's story. It was funny, and there were a lot of good discussions throughout the movie about the meaning of peace, and how we struggle for it. I even understood Dave's insanity as I, too, can't stand the incessant and often unnecessary noise of daily life. I close the door at work so I can't hear the voices and the traffic; I often go to sleep with a pillow over my head; I'll turn on a fan to block out noise... Steve and I used to live behind a motorcycle repair shop -- that almost drove us both out of our minds. So, Dave's plight was one I could get behind.

What I didn't enjoy about the film was the cartoonish characterisations of those Dave was up against -- the mayor and his lackey, for instance, played by William Hurt and William Baldwin. What is with Hurt these days? Every film he's in, he seems to be some weird version of his former self, with bizarre hair and a weird voice.

I also didn't like Dave's sexual experimentation while on his mission and separated from his wife. Steve mentioned something about the importance of the discussions going on in those scenes, that they were oddly philosophical, and I did notice that. But I felt jumping from Dave's relatively playful journey into intense sex scenes involving talk of him making a young woman come and the beauty of another woman's "pussy" was just a bit strange. I don't know what those moments contributed. The "pussy" woman spoke of Dave finding a "heaven for the ears" while she wanted a "heaven for her body" (she wanted a more beautiful vagina) -- why couldn't she have been talking about her eyes, or her lips?

Anyway, my prudishness aside... I liked it. It had its faults, but Dave's story was strong enough to overcome those.

3/5

[REC], dir. Jaume Balagueró / Paco Plaza (2007)

NIKKI says: I thought he meant Wreck, as in a boat capsizes and there are zombies or something. Oops.

What is going on with all this good horror? I'm not used to enjoying so many of them in a row. We're going to have a hell of a time picking our Top 5 for this month. So much has been great.

This one just heads straight to the top of the list. I never would have guessed we'd see another film this year that would match the frights or the smarts of Welcome to the Jungle, Cloverfield, and Dead in 3 Days.

And, yet, not a day later, we watch this one, which manages in 70 crazy minutes to top all three.

Yep, [Rec] is brilliant. It is so cleverly written that each mark the movie hits, you just want to stand up and applaud. The first bite comes without warning, and it's absolutely frightening. Then the second person goes down, and the method in which that happens is even worse than the first bite. And so it goes... it just gets scarier and more effective as it goes on.

Assisting here, too, is some excellent character development. We meet some of these people so briefly, bit we're somehow devastated to see them go.

Steve and I both noted, too, the screaming of a lot of the dialogue. You know how in movies when victims are being pursued by rampaging killers, they're scared, screaming, maybe sweating a bit and breathing heavy? Well, here they do things a bit more realistically. The panic in the voices of these actors is perfect. I've never heard dialogue delivered this way in horror before. I sometimes felt they were really freaking the hell out of the girl playing the lead the way she spews out her words at times with such terror. Whoever requested that of her, and the others, is a bit of a genius, I reckon.

So much about this was fresh and different. And that's saying something in a genre so overcrowded. From the dialogue and its delivery, through to the actual horror itself -- some great effects here, and absolutely no punches pulled in the grossness of neck bites and hatchet kills. And then there's final ten minutes of the thing which pretty much sent us over the edge of what we thought we could handle, movie-wise.

Good luck, horror makers, topping this one.

4.5/5

STEVE says: [REC] left me speechless. Even now I'm having a difficult time articulating what it was, exactly, that made the movie work for me, because so little of it actually felt like a movie.

I can tell you what didn't work for me: There's a bit early on where Angela asks Pablo to run some footage back for her, and we actually see the footage rewind and watch it again. And the voice-over bit at the end where one of Angela's lines from earlier is repeated once she meets her fate. If we're meant to be experiencing their footage as it was shot, these little flashes of clever film making don't help. They take me out of the movie - or, rather, bring me back into it - which was my major problem with Diary of the Dead (the narration and the score) in that you're dragged right out of the drama and reminded that, no matter how good the movie is, it's still just a movie.

But [REC] is second only to The Blair Witch Project as far as presenting a believable reality. The only reason I'm not rating it any higher, apart from the aforementioned, is the pseudo-explanation for the Zombie outbreak. While certainly original, it raised more questions than it answered, serving only to stretch the movie for an extra five minutes. And damn it for that, because I would have loved to give this a perfect score.

[REC] was scary as all fuck.

4/5

In 3 Tagen Bist Du Tot (aka. Dead in 3 Days), dir Andreas Prochaska (2006)

STEVE says:
One question, before I get into this: When the hell did Austria start making teen-slasher flicks? I like to think I've got my finger on the pulse of the teen-slasher flick market, but the Austrian contingent has apparently left me alone in the dark.

Makes me wonder what I've been missing all these years 'cos this one rates right up there with the best of the sub-genre.

If I'm being honest, though, it really wasn't all that original - kind of a re-telling of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but with a grisly twist - yet it felt like what that film wanted to be. Like this was the original and Last Summer was the pale American imitation. It was very tense, well-acted and beautifully shot... which already separates it from Last Summer by leaps and bounds. And our teen heroes weren't complete knobs, either, which scores the movie extra points in my book. For once I didn't want to see everyone killed in nasty ways.

The sad bit is, no one is going to rent this one because of the sub-titles. Yet shite the likes of Saw IV and Hostel 2 is leaping off the fucking shelves. Too bad.

Apparently there's a sequel on the way. Normally, that would bother me. But here, Prochaska is returning - not only as director, but also as writer this time around - as well as Sabrina Reiter as Nina, Julia Rosa Stöckl as Mona and Andreas Kiendl as Officer Kogler. I don't know how they're going to make it work - as in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel seems as implausible as it is inadvisable - but I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.

4/5

NIKKI says:
We were supposed to watch a Spanish movie called Rec but the version we had didn't have any subtitles. Man, were we pissed. So, at was nearly midnight, my holidays are over (sigh) and we needed something stat -- somehow a Masters of Horror episode just doesn't feel, to me, like our daily movie quota filled.

I scrabbled through the preview tapes looking for something 80 minutes long that screamed HORROR and came up with Dead in 3 Days. We fretted, but went with it. Lately, the second-thought movies have been some of the best.

This was really good. We enjoyed it right from the start. The scenes with the kids finishing school were genuinely funny, and the classic slasher set-ups were in place -- happy kids who have no idea what's coming to them, a sneaky nerdy kid who seems to dislike them, and a scene involving roadkill that shifts our mood from jovial to wary. Stuff can turn on a dime. Ah, horror movies. How can you not love the art?

And then the kids start getting weird calls, and start disappearing, and it's all so tense and interesting. The film hits every mark. It throws us red herrings then proves they can't be responsible. It reveals possible reasons behind the slaughter at mid-point and by the middle of the movie, everything that needs to be set up is set up and so we're not scratching our heads, but nodding along because it makes perfect (inevitable) sense. And it reveals it's basic truth right at the very end, which is the classic tying of loose moral ends.

This is a smart, stylish horror movie that knows what it's doing. That's all we ask for in horror, right?

4/5

The Damned Thing, dir. Tobe Hooper (2006)

STEVE says:
Hmm, yes. Another entry from the Masters of Horror collection; this one from Tobe Hooper, written by Richard Christian Matheson and based on a story by Ambrose Bierce.

Not a bad pedigree, and one it almost lives up to. But only almost.

Starts off okay, with young Kevin witnessing his dad go from genial family man to shotgun-toting lunatic in mere seconds. "It found me," he says. "The damned thing." After killing Kevin's mom, dad chases Kevin outside, through a field, and up a tree, and just before he's able to shoot Kevin down, some unseen force tears at his chest, rips him open from nave to chops, and spins him around a bit before we -

Cut to: Present Day. Kevin (as played by Sean Patrick Flanery) is now Sheriff of Cloverdale. When townsfolk start going mad and turning on one another - and in some cases, themselves - Kevin realizes it has to do with the Damned Thing that did his dad in. He learns that the same thing happened a few towns over in 1959. Some of the townsfolk who survived - including his own father - relocated to Clovafield. Now the Thing is back, and it's found them.

There is never any explanation as to what this Damned Thing is, where it came from, or why it's after any of the survivors - and, it seems, their offspring - from the 1959 incident. No matter. Kevin figures the Damned Thing wants him and will go away if it gets him, so he sacrifices himself to save his wife and child - not realizing, I guess, that the Thing would want his child as well. Which is where it ends, Kevin's wife and kid being done in by the Thing as well.

This was very unsatisfying in the end, but I was with it up until then. It was good - not Black Cat good or Homecoming good, not by a long shot, but still not as horrendously bad as this series tends to be. I'm rating it on a special Masters of Horror curve.

3/5

NIKKI says:
It started out well. I enjoyed the opening scenes with the dad going slightly mental on his family after the black stuff dripped through the wall. And then I was reasonably interested in why the townsfolk, all those years later, started doing themselves in in mass numbers.

What annoyed me, though, was that old thing of, well, here we are however many years later, and the thing is back and it wants YOU, Sean Patrick Flanery! It was a bit Here We Go Again. But that's the nature of horror and supernatural stories -- so much ground has been tread since the Poe days that not much is going to be shocking and new.

Still, this one perhaps could have upped the ante a bit. Instead, it went exactly where one expected it to go. Flanery's kid was in peril, wife went mental, thing ate Flanery. Ho hum. Man, do I hate the Monster At The End ending. It's lazy, it bores me, it's the main reason why I broke up with Stephen King. Note to horror writers: Big mud monsters are not scary.

I do wish Flanery would get more work. And the scene where the guy kills himself with a hammer has to be seen to be believed -- these shows do not hold back horror-wise. That's a plus.

2.5/5

Il Mistero di Lovecraft: Road to L., dir. Federico Greco / Roberto Leggio (2005)

NIKKI says:
I said to Steve last night -- April has become "Handheld Month". We've had Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield, Welcome to the Jungle, and now this. Although not entirely handheld, the scary bits were mainly seen through a camera lens. I've decided movie directors are right: Things are scarier when presented in that style.

In this movie, the group is down in some abandoned tunnels. They stumble across some gutted fish. The one guy is all, hmm, let's go back. And then he looks forward and sees... briefly, quickly... SOMEONE! They scream and head back. Because this is Lovecraft territory, and we know it's not a person but a giant FISHMAN!

Not that we see the giant fishman. But still... we know.

The situation is this... A group of American filmmakers come to Italy because of a manuscript that has been found that features journal entries by H.P. Lovecraft that suggest he visited certain parts of Italy prior to writing his most famous works, Call of Cthulhu and Shadow over Innsmouth. The entries specifically mention the creepy things Lovecraft supposedly saw in those abandoned places.

The filmmakers want to solidify this apparent connection by finding something specific that proved Lovecraft was inspired by Italy, and not just his imagination.

So, they take their cameras and they start their seeking. Meanwhile, the main director guy just becomes more and more of an arrogant prick, and alienates everybody, so they get very little done. It's not the area that's doing this guy in, he was an asshole from the start, so we get this weird juxtaposition of an angry group in an angry area that just wants to be left alone. It's an interesting tension. And separates this film from Cloverfield with its camaraderie in a bad situation, and Welcome to the Jungle, in which the stresses of the situation turn those guys against each other.

Here, it's tense from the outset. Very cool twist on this sort of group-tries-to-solve-mystery sub-genre. This group eventually finds what they're looking for, and the final moments of the film are really creepy. I was afraid of fishmen in the house for a little while after it ended. The best scene, though, was the group asking some old fishermen for directions... man, that was harsh. Oh, and the scene where they hear music playing FROM NOWHERE!

Good movie, interesting story, love the concept, and there was some phenomenal acting by the one guy -- Fausto -- who just couldn't take the director's smarminess for one more second.

3/5

Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder (1944)

STEVE says:
Well, what can you say? Double Indemnity is simply one of the best films ever made. Where do you go from there?

Showed this one to my class tonight. I've got them looking into Film Noir this term and since Double Indemnity was the first Noir I saw (not the first I'd watched, but the first I really saw for something other than just "an old movie"), I decided to open with it. As I'd hoped, it blew them away. The dialog, the plotting, Edward G. Robinson's "little man"; it all made an impact, and elicited some spirited discussion afterwards.

Something I learned while researching the movie for class: It's based on an actual event. In Queens in 1927, a woman named Ruth Snyder talked her boyfriend into killing her husband Albert, after having Albert take out a big insurance policy with a double-indemnity clause. This inspired James M. Cain to write not only his novel Double Indemnity, but also The Postman Always Rings Twice. Apparently this story struck quite a chord with Mr. Cain.

5/5

Nikki did not view.

La Terza Madre (aka. Mother of Tears), dir. Dario Argento (2007)

NIKKI says:
Did somebody say this movie was Dario "back to form"? I'm sure I heard that prior to watching it. It's very true, at any rate. For the first time since discovering Tenebrae or whichever Argento I watched first way back when, I felt genuinely creeped out, by the story, the effects, the horror, and I genuinely cared for the woman in peril.

My god, how gruesome. New wave horror has nothing on Dario. The blood spatter here proves that old school horror/violence is still the most effective, even if you can tell the spike through the eyes is so totally fake. It just looks good. And I don't think much of it was CG, which is even better. The woman at the start stumbling around in her own intestines -- gross! But awesome.

The story wasn't bad, either. This is apparently the final film in the Three Mothers trilogy that includes Suspiria and Inferno. Here, Asia Argento plays the daughter of a woman killed by the Mother of Sighs from Suspiria. In this movie, she and a friend at a museum open an ancient urn, inadvertently bringing into this realm, the Mother of Tears. Asia must steel herself against the witch and her powers, which see the entire city turning on itself in horror and fury.

Asia goes to an old house to face off against the witch, ad stumbles across an awful party scene where the women are all chanting and singing for the one main witch in the little red dress. It's all so creepy and weird. Asia ends up swimming through a body-infested sewer, and -- ugghh -- it's just awesomely revolting.

But it never feels exploitative. I did find myself cursing Dario when not one, but TWO, babies found themselves at the receiving end of his horror vision, but that's Dario, I guess. Taking me places I don't want to go so sharply and so quickly that I barely have time to register it. These days, with the drawing out of the gore, they've just got it so wrong. It's so much harder to process Dario's type of violence that aims not to gross out, but to shock. It's fast, and it's mean. Just dare to watch the woman get her mouth ground open (AHHHH!), or the spike up the dress, or the spike through the gullet, or the poked out retinas. Snap, snap, snap.

This was a fitting conclusion to the director's weird vision.

3.5/5

Angel-A, dir. Luc Besson (2005)

NIKKI says:
I haven't seen Wings of Desire, which this apparently borrows from in terms of theme and style. Had I seen that film, my perceptions of this one might have been different. In any case, I enjoyed Besson's little fable, and while I realise Angela's eventual means of making Andre believe in himself are a little simplistic, I still found it moving.

The style, too, adds much. What a beautiful picture to watch. The Parisian streets, the landmarks, the quadrangles overlooked by the Eiffel Tower, the bridges. I think Angela comments several times in the film just how beautiful Paris is, and at the end, when she's rising above this gorgeous backdrop, in full flight, it's even more exquisite, with this heavenly feel.

I remember reading that Angela's "job" was supposed to be some great secret. As if knowing she was an angel would ruin the thing like finding out Bruce Willis was actually dead the whole time. I don't think that's true. You'd have to be quite the simpleton not to see what was going on. She shows up out of nowhere, she's absolutely stunning, her name is ANGELa, and, at one point, she stands up against a statue, the statue's cement wings protruding up as though out of her back. It's a brilliant shot, and purposely reminding you this woman is otherworldly.

So, visually it's brilliant. The story is funny and touching, and a tiny bit inspirational. I thought the end was a bit too easy. I think Andre should have taken Angela's advice and gone off to live his life. But the movie chooses a different fate for him. If only what happens to him could happen to us all. Suicide might be eradicated, that's for sure.

3/5

10 Items or Less, dir. Brad Silberling (2006)

NIKKI says:
This was pretty much exactly as I expected: a cute movie about two different people who manage to strike a bond and influence each other's lives.

In a way, it was quite standard -- the young and willful young woman who needs calming down is given a sort of peace by the sage-like older man. He's been there and done that, and he knows the screaming and the kicking won't do anyone any good. He gives her self-belief, that she is worth something.

What does he get out of it? I'm not so sure, really. He is in town researching a role for a film, and that's where the two meet. But what is his goal beyond finding the inspiration for a character? He does say something about life being in the conversations, the interactions with people in their daily lives. He goes around making little impacts -- smiling in appreciation of a woman putting on makeup, watching a little boy show off his golf swing, things like that.

He's also afraid of committing to his latest project, so perhaps he goes around researching, getting what he needs from people for life, and then shying away from the working thing. I'm rewriting the movie -- perhaps that could have been explained a bit more.

His goal seemed to be real interaction. There's truth within all human being if the surface is scratched even just a little bit. If that was the movie's (and Freeman's) overall reason for being, then I can handle that. A nice little movie.

3/5

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, dir. Sidney Lumet (2007)

NIKKI says:
Never has a film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman promised so much and delivered so little. Although, admittedly, I appear to be on my own with this, as the film is receiving positive reviews all over town.

I just didn't care. I started caring because the story started out so interesting -- brothers in need of money, one seemingly well-to-do, the other a hopeless fuck-up, plan to rob their parents' jewellery store. Things go wrong, and our story starts.

But as it played out, I found myself less and less interested in where these down and dirty lives ended up. I found myself only interested in just where Ethan Hawke was going to take his character, acting-wise. His performance was extraordinary, and just made me think how much I have missed him in movies. This was the first time, I think since Tod Anderson, that I've genuinely been enthralled watching him. Usually, he seems a bit bored. Here, he appeared to care a bit more.

I'm so sad that I didn't. I felt the movie just ached with melodrama -- and not the good kind. This was just sad people doing sad things. And I realise Phillip Seymour was really at the end of his rope, but how he ends up dealing with it just didn't ring true to me.

A good set-up, but ultimately disappointing.

2.5/5

Untraceable, dir. Gregory Hoblit (2008)

NIKKI says:
You know, I expected this to be far worse. Usually, with these sorts of procedural films, the stupidest people in the audience are catered to first. So, we have lots of Law and Order-like expository banter buzzing about, and inept investigators who don't know their nucleic acid from their dermal papillae.

This had elements of that, but I didn't find myself scoffing every five minutes, as in Murder By Numbers or any Ashley Judd film based on a James Patterson 'novel'.

I wonder, though, if the reason for my non-hatred of this film was due to Diane Lane. Steve and I both felt that had Judd or Sandra Bullock starred in this one, we may have tossed around a few more jibes. After all, the set-up isn't particularly clever -- guy angry at horror-obsessed media takes his revenge. And the situations the killer manages to create are too sophisticated, his connections to chem-labs and his web smarts are a bit too convenient. But throw Diane in, and something clicks. You believe every crease on her face, every emotion in her voice. You believe her, you suddenly believe a college student might rig up a sulphuric acid tank in a suburban basement.

So, in praise of Diane:


Right?

Diane has done much good work lately. She was great in this. She was the second best thing about Hollywoodland. And she adds class to every film she's in that would otherwise drown in lameness: The Glass House, Murder at 1600, even Jumper. I'd love to see her in better movies, where her greatness can be used not to lift poor films, but to further elevate good ones.

In short ... Untraceable was not entirely awful, even if we'd seen the story before, and guessed who the killer was from the names in the opening credits. (We pretty much said: "If it's not this guy, it's that guy, and if it's not that guy then that guy will be killed by the other guy." We were right.) And Diane Lane can make anything watchable.

2.5/5

Welcome to the Jungle, dir Jonathan Hensleigh (2007)

NIKKI says:
Here's how this goes: We're watching Southland Tales and the phone rings. It's my dad. "Why aren't you at the Club," he asks? Oh crap -- we forgot we had a family dinner. We stop Southland Tales and get ready to go out. We're 29 minutes into the movie.

I'm brushing my hair, and Steve says to me: "So, what do you think of the movie?" I reply: "Um, I was gonna wait until the end before I said anything ... what do you think?" He says: "So far, I'm not impressed." I can then release my held breath and blurt: "I'm hating it!"

We discussed our issues a bit on the way to the Club. On the way home, we decided to pick something else. I looked through the movies and preview tapes and happened to pull out Welcome to the Jungle, the cover of which is adorned with bloody skulls. Perfect -- when in doubt, Crappy Horror. I tell Steve the rating on it says it has cannibalism, strong horror violence, and gore.

He says: "You had me at cannibalism." And we went with it.

OH MY GOD. Welcome to the Jungle was as far from crappy as we could ever expect to get. It was some of the most compelling, frightening, shocking filmmaking EVER.

We fucking loved it.

It starts out fairly well -- four friends get together to hang out in Fiji, and decide to shoot over to New Guinea, specifically Irian Jaya, to find missing rich guy Michael Rockefeller. They go, and it's all fun, and then they realise, as we do, that New Guinea may not be the most inviting nation to solve great mysteries in. The good thing is, these are not your average horror movie teens. They're actually smart and funny, and we like them. A-plus.

The friends get shot at, briefly captured by some sort of border rebels, before heading into the wilderness in search of Mr. Rockefeller. I kept waiting for the shit to really hit the fan, but it just wouldn't. Instead, a power struggle erupts between the four friends, and the playful ones begin to break away from those more focused on the plan at hand.

Eventually, the camps separate. And ... mmm, yes.

Jonathan Hensleigh has some good credits to his name. Die Hard 3, for instance, which was kinda cool. I'm surprised this wasn't more popular the way horror movies are going at this point. Why does shit like See No Evil and Catacombs get on the New Release wall, while this one lingers in obscurity? Especially when it is just so good?

This is effective, smart horror. Its handheld, doco-style and unknown stars add a realism, and the director knows how to build tension, and when to reveal his hand. The least graphic scenes, such as the natives walking the riverbanks (ahhh!!), are some of the most tense film moments I've encountered. Just superb. I want to buy copies for everyone.

We have decided that we will go back to Southland Tales. Someday. Bad as it may end up being, it inadvertently pointed us to this great movie (oh my god, the spearmen!!), so it already has points.

4/5

Pierrepoint (aka. The Last Hangman), dir. Adrian Shergold (2005)

STEVE says:
Pierrepoint is a harsh movie. A biopic of Britain's most celebrated and prolific hangman (between 1933 and 1955, Albert Pierrepoint was responsible for the hangings of 608 people), it wasn't going to be a laff-riot.

Although it's pretty free and loose with the facts - not the least of which, that Pierrepoint was not Britain's last hangman, despite the movie's US title - I can't hold that against it because I wasn't exactly conversant with the facts in the first place. But facts, to paraphrase Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, should never get in the way of a good story.

And it was a good story: Pierrepoint tried to keep his job as Executioner completely separate from his daily life as a grocer, and later a publican, but it would eat away at him over his 22 years of service, as he first tried to live up to his father's reputation as Executioner, then avoid the same pitfalls that destroyed his father later in life. It's a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, really - I can only wish it had been told with more care.

As I said, it wasn't so much the shuffling of the facts that bothered me about Pierrepoint; it 's that it felt rushed. I know it's difficult to go through 22 years of a man's life in under 90 minutes, but this was a bit much. Early in the movie, Pierrepoint is shyly trying to ask Juliet Stevenson's Annie to a movie. Then they're dancing, then they're married and she's serving him dinner, then they're at the cinema watching newsreel about Nazi War Crimes. Hang on - that's something like 13 years in the space of only ten minutes. Then it's 1950, and then the movie's over. While I didn't feel as though I missed anything, I also didn't feel like any time had actually passed. Simply superimposing the year in the corner of the screen every now and again would have gone a long way in keeping me temporally grounded.

And it has to be said, I've a newfound respect for Timothy Spall (who I'm now coming to think of as The Great Timothy Spall). To this day, I've always found it difficult to separate him from his role as the pitiful-yet-creepy Dr. Polidori in Ken Russell's Gothic, but he was moving and utterly convincing as this man who basically led a dual life, and was almost destroyed by it.

3/5

NIKKI says:
Steve is right: This movie needed more time to tell its complex story. So much went on in Pierrepoint's 20 years at the gallows, and though the film did very well in eliciting concern for the man, respect, and pity, I felt there was more to his life that could have been explored.

This was very much the snapshot version of a life, so instead of viewing it as a biopic about Pierrepoint, I think I appreciated it more as a lesson in history. Just how Britain selects its hangmen, what they have to do, how they cope -- all intriguing elements of this story. I was enthralled by Pierrepoint's handling of his position. The manner in which he dropped the floor on 13 Nazi war criminals (men and women) without batting an eye was just fascinating. What it does to him in the end is even more so.

The routine-ness with which Pierrepoint carries out his duties speaks to this sad time in world history. This is not the place to get into issues of capital punishment, but I would have liked to know a bit more about Pierrepoint's eventual change of heart, speaking out against the death penalty as a means for revenge. What does Pierrepoint think of the fact that he put innocent men to death? I realise he's carrying out orders, and who gets to the gallows is not his decision, but that has to do something to a person?

His downfall began when he became famous for his work, and when he put a friend to death. But what of these other things? Again, reason this was too short. There's so much to explore here. Still, a good film about a horrible thing.

Abolish the Death Penalty.

3/5

See No Evil, dir. Gregory Dark (2006)

NIKKI says:
Apart from my oft-mentioned addcition to baaad horror movies, I wanted to see this one simply because The Condemned, another WWE Films production, was so enjoyable. I had a sneaky feeling this, too, would be smart and satirical, with Kane sending up his status as a mad wrestling machine, as Steve Austin did so well in the other movie.

Well, how wrong I was. See No Evil appeared to take itself quite seriously. I think we were actually supposed to be scared of all the goings on. Instead, we were simply amused. Or, we may have been amused if we cared to be anything at all.

The gist? A group of hot prisoners (already your disbelief is well-suspended) are sent to a big old mansion on day release (I assume) to help an old woman tidy up. Before the prisoners (all about 20, all in suspiciously non-regulation hot clothes) do any work at all, they settle in for the night. One showers, two get it on, another looks for a escape hatch. Soon, though, the reverie is disturbed by giant marauding Kane, who catches his hot, young prey with a giant hook attached to a chain.

As expected, the kids start dying off one by one until the remaining few realise something is up and attempt to rescue their friend who Kane has locked in a cage.

Throughout, Kane has flashbacks to his own childhood locked in a cage. His mother tells him all about dirty pillows and sinful, lusty kids who need wiping out. Kane, she believes, is the Hand of God, eradicating sinners from the world. Quite an elaborate scheme she cooks up, though, with the prisoners. No seeking out hookers on Main Street for Kane.

Kane like to gouge eyes out, too.

So, it all goes downhill where it never really went uphill so bad storytelling becomes worse as the thing progresses. The kids become more annoying, the revelation about the old woman and Kane is just dumb, and the eventual killing of Kane is downright disappointing because by the end of it, I was hoping Kane would win. He'd killed his insane mother in order to save one of the girls, and then he was eventually overthrown by a guy who earlier in the piece threw something at the head of a stray dog. Who's my hero again?

Confusing, really, that I should be made to feel sympathetic towards poor, tortured Kane, and then feel good when he gets a pole through the head. Indicative, I guess, that the writers here had no idea what they were doing. It's world's removed from The Condemned.

.5/5

STEVE says:
I did not expect See No Evil to be any good at all, and in that regard it did not disappoint. A horror movie produced by the WWE, with zero star-power and helmed by a former porn director, in my book, is the absolute definition of poor quality. It was destined to suck.

And suck it did. But then you've got to get into degrees of suckitude. Was it worse than 7eventy-5ive? No, clearly not. The story, while heavy on cliché, was at least coherent. And porn director or not, Gregory Dark knows not to close in on three empty pizza boxes to get the point across. Was it worse than Prom Night? Yes, but in different ways and for different reasons. Death Row? Hmm... unknown cast heads into spooky prison/hotel (or other convenient single-set location), are attacked by ghosts/ax-wielding creep (or what have you), and only three make it out alive. Yes, that's about the level we're looking at here.

But in the end, does it really matter? Each of these movies only received .5 ratings, so are any really either better or worse than any others? You could argue either way, but it would only waste more time than has already been wasted just watching the movies.

Hey, at least we watched a half-decent movie before blowing our evening on this one.

.5/5

Cleaner, dir. Renny Harlin (2007)

NIKKI says:
Where did this movie come from? Until last night, I'd never even heard of it. It's weird that a movie with these themes and this cast should pass by us. Alas, we just found it on a preview disc alongside something called Bats: Human Harvest.

It wasn't a bad little movie at all. Sam Jackson plays a crime scene cleaner hired for a particularly sticky job at the home of a local businessman. A master of his profession, Sam leaves the place spotless.

He has cause to head back to the place the following day, and learns from the woman of the house, that he shouldn't ever have been there at all. Has he just cleaned up a fresh, evidence-filled crime scene? An ex-cop, Sam is intrigued, and must get to the bottom of the thing, especially when he links the scene to a corrupt official.

And so the story plays out -- Sam is a step ahead of his cop friends, and starts putting pieces together while attempting to help his young daughter come to grips with the death of her mother. So, we have crime drama and family drama playing out simultaneously, and though they wind up connecting through circumstances the end, I'm not sure I fully understand why.

Still, at 88 minutes, this was a tight little thriller. Nothing particularly new is added to the genre, but the performances, and the twisty plot certainly made for entertaining viewing.

3/5

Prom Night, dir. Nelson McCormick (2008)

NIKKI says:
Free tickets. And even that didn't make me feel any better about seeing this pile of utter monkey-drivel. It was stupid, meaningless, and made no sense whatsoever.

So, there's a school teacher obsessed with the Main Girl. He loves her and kills her family who want to keep him away from her. Then he gets insanity, gets locked up, then he escapes. He comes to get Main Girl on the night of her prom. He manages to get into the same hotel in which the prom is being held and just goes about killing everyone around the place instead of heading straight for her, which he has many opportunities to do.

Why kill her friends? They weren't keeping him from her, standing in her way, or anything. All the time he spent chasing Big Boob Blue Dress Girl in the gym area, he could have been out finding his lady-love. Was her death so necessary?

The police investigation section of the film was just hilarious. They're trying to catch a guy who is hiding in the hotel. So what do they do? Send out a major red alert and evacuate everyone from the building. Not exactly stealthy police work, really.

The most embarrassing part of that? The Main Cop asks specifically for the locations of all exits in the building. There's a 30 second scene about him asking for those things. Every other movie would just have the guy say, "Exits are manned!" I'd believe that. Instead, they take the time to make it all known, and then after the evacuation, they can't find Main Girl. Well, all the exits are manned, the cop says. BUT NO ONE THOUGHT TO PLACE A COP AT HER HOTEL ROOM!

Oh my god. They're all, where's Main Girl? And some other guy goes, "She went back up to the room." And the cops and everyone just look at each other and go, "Of course!" Well, where the fuck else would she be, you idiots!?

And then the bad guy gets away anyway, kills more people, including Main Girl's boyfriend, in her room, right near where she is in the bathroom, with people vigilant all over the house, knifed in the throat without making a sound.

Oh god, this was just TORTURE.

1/5 (The added half-point ONLY because Big Boob Blue Dress Girl was nice to look at.)

STEVE says:
John Huston once said, "Don’t remake good movies, remake bad ones!"

A good point there. After all, he was the director of the third, definitive and - pray gods - the final version of The Maltese Falcon. But good points always get lost somewhere between the Hollywood sign and the dollar sign, and here we are today, threatened with unnecessary remakes of The Thing, Fame and The Birds, still feeling the sting of Rob Zombie's Halloween and reeling from the news of a Friday the 13th remake that eschews Mrs. Voorhees as the killer and moves straight on to Jason.

But then here comes Prom Night. It seems someone has taken Mr. Huston's philosophy to heart.

We hated the original Prom Night. Boring and predictable, not even one of the true classics like Halloween and Friday the 13th, but one of the many wannabes that rode their bloody wave of success all the way to the bank. From the ridiculous opening to the obvious conclusion, we sat through every disco-tinged moment, rolling our eyes, sighing, and crying Get On With It! It seemed like an excellent candidate for a remake. Surely this new one had to be an improvement.

Not so.

Of course my expectations weren't that high, and to say they plummeted would be a gross exaggeration, but they dropped as far as they could when I saw the name Johnathon Schaech in the opening credits - he of the abysmal The Foresaken and the curiously pointless 8MM 2. (I would later look up the film's writer, J.S. Cardone, and find that he directed both of those crimes against humanity, and that he and director McCormick will next be tackling - and, one assumes, beating to death - The Stepfather.) So once again, we're sitting there from ridiculous opening to obvious conclusion, rolling our eyes, sighing, and crying Get On With It! That is, when Dana Davis wasn't on screen. I found her very distracting. I'm talking Rosario Dawson in Josie and the Pussycats distracting. That blue dress, man...

And speaking of which - I know I mentioned this before in my Pumpkin Karver review, and I don't want to sound like one of those guys, you know, whose shelves are lined with the ever-popular Girls with Low Self-Esteem DVDs or anything, but - where's the fucking nudity? I was brought up in the 80s, dammit! Blood and sex went together like Hockey Mask and Machete back then. It was the age of gratuitous violence and gore in horror movies and, yes, that included people getting killed for no other reason than having sex. That was the very basic formula for slasher films, their raison d'être, if you will - or if you won't! But Mssrs. McCormick and Cardone apparently felt that formula was no longer relevant and decided instead to imply the slashing - seriously, there was more blood in Knocked Up than there was in Prom Night - and cut the carnality before it even gets started.

It's because of this lame-ass, ball-less, soul-less modern horror that we now have to contend with shite from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, shite like Saw and Hostel, and this new sub-genre of torture porn or "gornography" as someone so wittily called it. If horror hadn't been watered down since the early 90s, there would have been no such backlash, and we'd still have some decent R-rated (but admittedly probably still b-grade) horror.

Granted, Prom Night sucked for so many other reasons - poor plotting, lame character development, expository dialog, impossibly stupid police, etc. - but apart from all this, I maintain that it would have sucked anyway because PG-13 horror Does Not Work.

So it seems that Mr. Huston's philosophy only extends so far. Perhaps the next remake of Prom Night will get it right.

.5/5 (I can't even give it an extra .5 for Dana Davis - the .5 I'm giving it is for Dana Davis.)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, dir. Tim Burton (2007)

NIKKI says:
We found out yesterday that Marcus Nispel is remaking Friday the 13th, with the backing of original Friday production studios, Paramount and New Line. In the new movie, Jason Voorhees, who is a child in the original film, is a man of 40-odd, played by the hulking, strange-looking Derek Mears.

Already, we have a problem. The classic story has taken a butchering, and, yet again, the horror world suffers. You want to make a film about a crazy loon in the woods? Just make your own, and leave my classics alone.

What's the bet the New Jason has a hockey mask? Something you'll remember only showed up in the third installment of the original series.

My point? It's loosely connected, I'll give you that. But I'm disgusted by these remakes. These people who think they know what we horror fans want, yet fail us again and again for the sake of cash. It's fucking disgusting. It's, I'm gonna say it, the dark ages of the horror universe. The genre has eaten itself and now we're getting the consequential vomit-ridden aftertaste.

And so... when one hears Sweeney Todd is to be filmed (not techincally a remake, but close enough to make my point), one immediately runs in fear that something beautiful will again be tortured into something idiotic. And then you hear Tim Burton is doing it and you breathe a sigh of relief. Never has story and artist come together so perfectly. Who better to do this than a guy who trades in operatic oddness?

The film did not disappoint. It's dark and beautiful. And way more brutal than I was expecting. Tim Burton knows how to represent pain and hurt, and throughout the film we understand more and more Todd's anguish. His brutality, then, is an apt manifestation of this. It's so palpable, this pain, that when Sweeney kills, we feel relief.

The Burton-ness of the whole thing just added so much to it. The reds and blacks, and whites. I loved how they made it visually interesting as a movie, with Mrs. Lovett's fantasy sequence, and her death scene. We just marvelled at this new way of seeing these famous scenes.

The only thing that bothered me was a lack of clear conclusion for two of the main characters. The closing scenes was almost powerful enough to make me forget that the kids were running about closure-less. An extra scene somewhere prior could have helped that.

Still, this bordered on masterpiece. A word I usually despise, but that so rightly described the grandeur of this film.

4.5/5

Cloverfield, dir. Matt Reeves (2008)

NIKKI says:
The Hype Machine murdered this one for me before I'd even finished watching the trailer. All the Blair Witch-wannabe Internet publicity, the handheld camera, the hiring of relative unknowns in leading parts. Is it a monster? Godzilla? A big, giant octopus? What is ravaging New York in this movie without a name from the oh-so-cool J.J. Abrams?

Whatever!

Sitting down to watch the thing tonight, long after the publicity began, I felt similarly. Alright movie -- just try and impress me. But keep in mind, I've had a long day at work, I hate CGI, and I care very little for party-going New Yorkers.

If the movie could have said "Fuck you", I'm sure it would have. Instead, it just sat there, did its thing, and was absolutely, ridiculously brilliant. "Fuck you" enough, I suppose.

What a great movie! Who thought of this? Party-going kids -- who, thankfully, didn't repulse me every time they opened their mouths -- are saying goodbye to their friend, Rob. He's in love with Beth, who he hasn't called in weeks because he's afraid of leaving her. But he has to go. So she comes to his party with another guy, he gets pissed, yells at her, she leaves. This is all recorded by their friend, Hud, who is in charge of documenting Rob's send-off.

So, Rob's brother tells him life is about moments. And if he wants Beth, he has to go fight for her. And about two minutes after that, the head of the Statue of Liberty comes to rest outside their apartment. Moments, indeed.

And it just doesn't stop after that. The kids run, they lose each other, the big thing swaps its tail about, and Hud films the whole thing. They go in the tunnels and things attack them. And they have to get to Beth, and a bridge collapses. Then someone gets bitten and, oh my god!

This goes straight up into my Top 5 for the year, and well into my list of Favourite Movie-Watching Experiences. Alongside, of course, Blair Witch. The only thing I didn't like was that everyone else in the group had families, but none of them mentioned their loved ones, or were contacted, or wanted to run to their homes and friends and whatever. It was all about saving Beth. So, that bugged me. Even mention of the others' families would have been good. Still ...

You win, movie!

4.5/5

Bee Movie

Directors: Steve Hickner, Simon J. Smith
Writers: Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, Andy Robin
Released: 2007
Cast: Jerry Seinfeld, Renee Zellwegger, Matthew Broderick, Patrick Warburton, John Goodman, Chris Rock, Kathy Bates, Barry Levinson

NIKKI says: I'll admit, I wasn't expecting much from Jerry Seinfeld playing a bee in yet another animated movie about a little guy making good. Am I the only one sick to death of Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks/whoever taking one premise and just remaking it with different bugs? It goes like this:

Little bug tries to get by in his community. Sees something he doesn't like, usually this has to do with his desire for freedom, or world exploration. He battles the authorities, which can be parents, bosses, children, other bugs. He has a difference to make, dammit. And then he makes it and becomes a hero and Randy Newman sings a song about him.

Over it. Bee Movie follows pretty much that exact premise. But, this time around, I lost the battle against the Dreamworks Demon of Cuteness, and fell in love with Barry and his story. I think much of it falling had to do with the film's humour, which is very smart. And with the film's overall lack of condescension and sap. They actually tranquilise Winnie the Pooh at one point! And a guy pulls a box-cutter on Barry! They didn't do that in Finding Nemo, I bet.

Perhaps it was Seinfeld's humour that boosted this one for me? He's comedian with obvious ability to look at minutiae of human behaviour. Sticking his voice inside the mouth of an animated bee with a lot to say on that exact subject really kinda works.

This will be one of the few new animated films I'll watch over and over. The only other one I can think of is Toy Story, and maybe Ants. They're really running out of bugs.

4.5/5