Ugh. A derivative, bland Tarantino/general cool-guy genre knock-off that is about twenty years out of date. A movie so dumb and “clever” that its big structural rug-pull had absolutely no impact on me whatsoever as I didn’t even realise I was supposed to see it as anything other than what it was (like, imagine watching The Sixth Sense knowing full-well Bruce Willis was dead and once the film makes a big deal of revealing it you ask “oh, I wasn’t supposed to know that?”) Stupid. I also hated Smith’s film Triangle for the exact same reason. The dude is British too. Stop letting me down!
The sting of Detour is even more painful given it has two great young actors with faces made for the big-screen – Bel Powley and Tye Sheridan – but I’ll be damned if this material isn’t so far beneath them. I must admit though that there is something cheaply entertaining about seeing Powley be knowingly fetishised as a blonde stripper called Cherry. She’s clearly enjoying dabbling in that territory but again it proves to be a total waste of her time and talents. You’ve also got Emory Cohen giving an obnoxiously tone-deaf and irritating performance mainly consisting of him shouting the half-assedly stylised dialogue at everyone’s faces. The fact Smith even had the audacity to have Sheridan’s character at one point watching Edward G. Ulmer’s legendary noir Detour on TV made me want to punch the fucking screen. Terrible, terrible, terrible. I aint got time for this shit.
Bruce Campbell as the best movie Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK fighting a fucking mummy in a care-home. I can’t believe this movie exists. Also Coscarelli’s art-film pacing is inspired. He never goes for the easy, self-aware gags that this material could easily be mined for. He works harder than that and forces the audience to work harder by finding the weird in less-obvious places. Pretty spectacular. Even Reggie Bannister shows up. A four-star masterpiece.
While certainly nothing major for either Demme or Cody, you can feel their fingerprints coming together. It’s got that quirky sense of detail which is central to both of their careers. Cody moreso perhaps. For instance, when I think of Cody I think of the burger phone in Juno or the saliva on the printer low on ink in Young Adult. She fills her scripts with these little flourishes and you get the sense she absorbs these things in real life. So when you see a row of cheesy motivational signs in the kitchen in Ricki and the Flash, your thoughts don’t immediately go to the production designer or the the director, but to the written page.
Cody’s caustic wit is here too but softened somewhat and more hopeful to fit with Demme’s primary outlook on life and his characters. It’s refreshing to see a movie about a walking trainwreck of a woman who is pretty mild in her messiness. She’s no Mavis Gary for instance and Streep’s Ricki never has a huge catastrophic breakdown. Her problems are more mundane and relatable, more insular and richer because of her age. She’s come to terms with her own flaws and problems and isn’t about to change for anybody, but she still can’t help exerting her mess onto other people. It’s a pretty great turn by Streep and in complete contrast to her work in Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate. If anything its nice to see her chew into a lead role that doesn’t feel pre-tailored to be an awards season campaign. This is a small, small movie but the main character warrants her name in the title.
When all is said and done, Ricki and the Flash ends with a proper movie ending – everyone converges at a wedding, Ricki and her band play a song, everyone starts singing and and dancing – that could easily illicit groans, but Demme makes you thankful for it. Despite never putting you through an emotional ringer or anything near that, you’re still happy to watch all of these characters sing and dance together while the credits roll. It’s those kind of simple pleasures the movie dabbles in and is all the better for it.
When I first watched Phenomena a few years ago I found it to be one of Argento’s weakest movies, and while I still hold that opinion to a certain extent, I vastly underestimated the replay value of its set-pieces and design.
As with anything Argento, this is all about aesthetics. At a certain point (probably right here actually), he just flat-out gave up trying to write scripts that had any logic to them knowing full well his audience would forgive any shortcomings as long as the set-pieces delivered. There are random explosions of excess here that are equal parts thrilling and baffling. The opening scene which culminates in a girl (Argento’s own daughter, Fiore) being decapitated in uber-slow motion is pretty standard Argento-does-blockbuster-carnage fare. Her head plummets into a waterfall below, the camera watching it disappear down the slipstream. But then you get to Jennifer Connelly conjuring up an army of insects and a chimpanzee that pushes Donald Pleasence around in a wheelchair for two acts before savagely slashing Daria Nicolodi to ribbons with a razorblade at the end. THAT is the kind of unforgettable bat-shit you come to an 80s Argento movie for.
I even warmed to the dumbass thrash metal songs on the soundtrack the second time around. They’re still wildly misplaced and inappropriate but they’re a big part of the film’s truly weird charm. The atmosphere worked wonders on me, with all the shots of trees rippling in ominous nighttime winds being good foreplay for the truly disgusting finale that features poor young Jennifer Connelly falling into a pool of rotting corpses that is surely among the most icky sequences Argento ever dreamed up. Love all those close-ups of insects (maggots!!!) too. Phenomena aint great, and is even worse when you hold it up against something like Suspiria but when enjoyed on its own silly terms, with your senses primarily dialled to the visual it does deliver some sort of satisfaction. Being a forgiving fan of Argento, as I am, helps too.
Formally, this is as fascinating as anything Demme has ever done even if it seemsunremarkable on the surface. It falls under his more experimental works like Swimming to Cambodia but nowhere near as successful. It’s clearly an directorial exercise for him but one that becomes bogged down with its own weight and words. Wallace Shawn’s slimy performance is a lot of fun as are those of his younger his co-stars, especially that of newcomer Lucy Joyce. Really though, this is just rather overlong for anyone who isn’t completely captivated by the words adapted from Ibsen’s play. At 130 minutes, my attention did occaisonally drift and in the end this just turned out to be an exercise in Jonathan Demme completism. Now that I’ve seen A Master Builder, I’m fairly confident I’ll never watch it again. Or maybe I will? Who knows.
Let’s be honest, seeing a bunch of sexy women rip each other’s clothes off behind bars certainly has its appeals but it only gets you so far. Nevertheless, Black Mama, White Mama contains some of my favourite things in movies; Pam Grier, Sid Haig, a Roger Corman aesthetic, badass women and to top it all off you’ve even got a young Jonathan Demme with a “Story by” credit. Still, this is minor grindhouse, minor American International, minor everything.
The totally-female cast is an appealing conceit but, as ever with this kind of movie, it’s at the cost of them being infinitely sexualised and objectified. However, an actress like Pam Grier manages to rise above all that. This is pre-Coffy Grier but even here she masters The Pam Grier Glare and is capable of melting hearts, weakening knees and icing over volcanos. Grier is paired up with statuesque blonde Margaret Markov and the central hook – take a strong black woman and a strong white woman, both convicts, and handcuff them together to see what ensues – is ripe for so much potential that the movie only half-assedly takes advantage of. At best, it’s a 90 minute romp, a lark, a caper; at worst it’s just forgettable. I’d happily watch Pam Grier sit still and blink for two hours though so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
One of the great pleasures of the movies is that moment when you see something so singular and bizarre that you actually laugh out loud and ask yourself “what the fuck am I watching?” I live for those moments. Frank Henenlotter’s entire filmography is essentially one big “WTF moment”.
True to form, Brain Damage is fucking weird. It’s about a dude called Brian who becomes host to a leech-like parasite called Aylmer (pronounced “Elmer”) which secretes a blue hallucinogen into his brain in exchange for human victims to feast on. So far, so Cronenberg. But this being a Henenlotter movie, the film is primarily a gory, gonzo comedy containing a barrage of distinct imagery, sleaze-sex undertones and fabulous rubbery effects. Aylmer is voiced by famed late night horror host John Zacherle and boasts jumping eyebrows and shit-eating grin. It’s basically the parasite equivalent of the troll face meme just, you know, if it looked like a veiny blue rubber cock. Either way, he is surely one of the most unique and memorable horror nemesis’ the 80s had to offer.
At its core this is a story of addiction and to submerge it under such a loopy surface is one of the film’s main pleasures. The blue-tinged cinematography is a delight and all the blue liquids – think blue toilet chemicals – and close-ups of brains with little electric sparks detonating around it harken back to the laboratory-bound early days of Universal horror. It’s equally retro and transgressive but, more than anything, it’s just a super entertaining slab of grindhouse madness. There’s also a crossover with Basket Case – Henenlotter’s previous freak out – that is way too good for me to spoil here.
I’ve never read Toni Morrison’s seminal novel that this is based on and came to it as a Demme completist more than anything but crikey does this have a lot to plow through. The combination of sincere humanist storytelling with imagery and subject matter that is genuinely disturbing and distressing, not to mention the supernatural undercurrent, is hard to swallow in places but as a tonal experiment it’s very ambitious.
It definitely suffers from “lets adapt a big important book into a big important movie” bloat but the three hour running time is nevertheless justified with the numerous grace notes and character tangents all being pleasurable. Beloved holds some of the most striking images I’ve seen in a mainstream “prestige picture” of this calibre (the film bombed, unsurprisingly, but it was certainly mounted as a potential Oscar contender). The southern gothic grotesqueries are piercing and individual sequences – the opening poltergeist attack, the introduction of Thandie Newton emerging from a swamp swarming with mosquitos – are proper horror-movie moments but damn are they beautiful.
Demme is at full-force here. Calibrating all the performances in his own way and being stubbornly experimental with his technique. The film does become less interesting the longer it runs but it does have texture and soul that carries it home. It combines all Demme’s talents whilst also showcasing him pushing himself into more leftfield, abstract territory. This may also be his scariest film by some margin, and yes that includes Silence of the Lambs. Here, the horror is deeply, tragically real. Not a complete success, but a pretty remarkable achievement everything considered.
Unashamedly designed and paced to appeal to the youth of the 1990s, for a certain generation Romeo + Juliet is the film that transformed the Bard from boring english lesson into something closer to blockbuster entertainment. This is Shakespeare as a Fellini cabaret. Baz Luhrmann shares Ken Russell’s sense of exuberant grotesqueries and there’s no doubt this is a visual sensation. The use of pop music-as a form of communication is an inspired way to ease down the stylised dialogue. How can you forget “Lovefool” blaring, Mercutio singing “Young Hearts Run Free” or Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” during DiCaprio’s woozy sun-kissed entrance? You can’t. Not to mention the countless individual images that are immediately tattoo’d onto your retinas. So good. Watching it today, the sheer sense of youth is quite remarkable and seeing Danes and DiCaprio look this naturally young, real and untouched is lovely.
That being said, I don’t think the film holds up quite as well as the years tick by but I’ll always remember seeing it for the first time and not really having a clue what the characters were talking about but still getting it and learning to enjoying the language. It provided an experience so strong and unusual that it made me dig deeper into the words, to explore and study them. It made me care. As a pre-teen this was probably the closest I’d been to an art installation.
Oblivion is the most unusual entry in the Phantasm series and it’s an easy one to write off. Faced with increasingly limited budgets and an uphill struggle to get an epic Roger Avary-penned sequel (Phantasm’s End/Phantasm 1999) financed, Coacarelli decided to scramble together a fourth entry by any means necessary in the hope of both keeping his fans happy and re-igniting interest in the series for financiers.
The finished product is at once disappointing and ingenious. Putting a halt to the relentless forward momentum established in the previous two entires, Oblivion slows things down and acts as something of a prelude to the planned epic Avary entry. It’s more of a cinematic stream-of-conciousness; a dream stupor of a film that unfolds like an endless montage of imagery built from new footage as well as unused odds and ends from the cutting room floor of the original Phantasm. We jump forwards and backwards in time, in and out of memory or alternative timelines while also checking in on Reggie and Mike – separated – as they inch closer to their ultimate showdown with the Tall Man. While it doesn’t necessarily amount to anything substantial, it does deepen the mythology and stubbornly indulges in the series’ strongest elements: atmospherics and dream logic.
I didn’t think much to Phantasm IV the first time around but upon rewatch, as a legit die-hard phan, I thought it was surprisingly satisfying and fascinating. Once again Coscarelli utilises creative solutions to budgetary limitations and turns a potentially cheap gimmick – re-using old footage – into something far more rewarding by placing it in a very cerebral and surrealistic cinematic framework. There’s very little dialogue in this movie and the limited locations – death valley, mausoleums – are pillaged for maximum impact. Like the first Phantasm, Coscarelli cuts the film for emotional response, for feelings and moods over continuity or plotting. The Reggie subplot is in the vein of the more humorous II and III (sphere tits is a series highlight) but it’s the Mike sequences that really stick with me in this one. The scenes of him sat in the hearse studying his memories for clues of his future are so simple but also soPhantasm.
It brings things full-circle somewhat too. The mysterious fortune teller from the first movie shows up, the Tall Man’s backstory is finally filled in and Mike’s ultimate fate – to become the new Tall Man – slowly comes into focus. Not all of these things are heavily sign-posted though, Coscarelli makes you work hard to decipher a lot of the mystery and meaning which is probably why a lot of casual horror fans might see this entry as load of old nonsense. Coscarelli forces you to question things that go back to the beginning of the series. The old footage doesn’t feel like resurrected scraps but new pieces of the jigsaw that were somehow shot with the cast looking twenty years younger. Magic!
For a movie mostly set in cars and using dreams and memories as plot-momentum – I’m impressed with how experimental and existential this film feels. It’s very internal and claustrophobic. More psychological than fantastic but still emotionally resonant. One of the things I like about the Phantasm movies is how the films become increasingly minimal and by this entry the series is almost completely paired down to only its key components – Mike, Reggie, The Tall Man and the skeleton of America. There’s some brand new truly iconic Phantasm moments too like the Tall Man slowly walking towards camera in a huge desert vista, or him marching through a deserted, post-apocalyptic LA. I really dig this one and it’s tragic we never got to see Avary’s script come to life to really take a lot of the loose-ends over the finish line.
"This Film Should Be Played Loud" 