Halloween Movie Roundup!

Happy Halloween everyone! As you probably know, this is the holiday when the barriers between the living and the dead are the most permeable, and supernatural creatures wander the earth. They’ll probably want to watch movies, so you’re gonna want to have some decent horror movies onhand. I mean, if you were a ghoul come over to this side of the veil, would you want to watch The Ugly Truth? I thought not. So here is a quick roundup of great scary movies to watch on Halloween. Many of these are movies that even scared me—and I have a protective layer of cynicism towards most horror films that keeps me insulated from their effects. Okay, so let’s get to it: Gunmonkey’s Best Movies for Halloween!

REPOST: Again with the crocodiles: “Rogue”

Well, color me surprised and not a little contrite. Here I was going into Rogue with my critical scalpels sharpened, ready to properly eviscerate it, and to find—surprise, surprise—that’s actually an effective little thriller. In my defense, I did sit through Primeval, and the experience left me predisposed to treating giant crocodile movies in more of less the same manner as the villagers treated Frankenstein’s monster. Yet, this movie exceeded my expectations.

REPOST: God is in a Really Bad Mood: “The Reaping”

Sorry I didn’t get around to reviewing some new horror films, but I had some work and family issues come up. So here’s my review of “The Reaping,” first uploaded on August 12 of 2007. You probably weren’t reading this blog back then anyway, so it’s new to you.

By the time The Reaping slouched to its inglorious climax—beginning as it did like a hybrid of The Exorcist and Star Trek 5: The Really, Really Bad One and then moving on to feature Divine Retribution—I couldn’t help but think that more movies should end with The Almighty smiting the evildoers. Seriously, how can a movie end better than that? I mean, yeah, the cavalry coming over the hill is rousing, and Han Solo deciding to join the rebellion and saving Luke’s bacon just in time to help him destroy the Death Star is a crowd-pleaser, but what truly beats The Big Guy taking center stage and dispatching the baddies? What better way is there to establish who is Good and who is Evil than to have Maker of Heaven and Earth weigh in on the matter?

James Cromwell invents the future: “Surrogates”

What is it with James Cromwell? How did this character-actor (always awesome, btw) become the inventor of the future? Check out his resume: In I, Robot he played the dude in charge of the massive company that had the monopoly on personal androids (though, it should be noted, they didn’t go batshit crazy on his watch); in Star Trek: First Contact, he was the scientist who invented warp speed, and allowed William Shatner easy access to hot-to-trot alien babes throughout the galaxy; and now, in Surrogates, he plays the ousted CEO of the company which produces “surrogates”—artificial human avatars who go about daily life, while their controllers lay strapped in futuristic Barcalaungers.  I know the guy’s a workhorse—his IMDB page has him in 6 projects in 2009 alone—but what is it about this guy that makes people think, “Huh. When flying cars are invented, I’ll bet the dude running the company will look just like him”?

Beware the yogurt-zombies: “The Stuff”

I’ve complained a lot over the course of this blog about the drastic drop in quality of lousy movies over the years. Sure there have been crappy movies probably since time began going back to the Garden of Eden (I think it’s in the King James version). With the advent of VHS, DVD, and other pump-and-dump technologies, the amount of effort that goes into a dopey B-movie enjoyment has dropped precipitously. Once there was a time when bad movies featured good actors and crackling dialogue alongside the moronic premises and bad special effects. Few films showcase this drop in quality as well as Larry Cohen’s 1985 schlock-fest The Stuff. It’s a movie that unfolds in the manner of a long, humorous anecdote delivered with a straight face, the teller inventing details more and more outrageous, but never quite breaking the spell of maybe/possibly seriousness. This, after all, is a movie that plays straight nothing less than the subjugation of mankind by malevolent yogurt.

You have a great body…may I use it? “Saturn 3″

Something is wrong on Saturn 3! shouted the ads for this movie. And, yes, something is indeed wrong on Saturn 3. First off, Harvey Keitel’s voice is all hinky. It’s not his voice. It really couldn’t be farther from his voice. In pretty much every role he sounds like a Brooklyn wiseguy. Hell, even as Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ he was all like “This mook, Jesus…give me my silver, you Roman shitbag before I put the heel of this Italian boot through your fuckin’ eye!” At least I think he said that. The other thing that is wrong is the fact that a 64 year-old Kirk Douglas is tagging a 33 year-old Farrah Fawcett. That’s very wrong. And it just keeps getting wronger as the movie progresses. In a movie in which a schizophrenic android slaughters and dismembers people and uses their organs for parts, the sight of the geriatric Douglas canoodling with a woman 30 years his junior is easily the most disturbing set of images in its run time.

More Capsule Reviews!

Okay, a couple movies fell through the cracks while covering G.I. Joe and doing Michael Mann week. Fear not, gentle reader, for I wish to rectify that situation right now. So, there were three notable films I missed. Two horror movies and one sci-fi drama. Two of them suck, one isn’t so bad. They are Clive Barker’s Book of Blood, Solstice, and Timecrimes. Heard of any of them? No? Well, don’t get to worked up about it.

Gunmonkey Presents: Capsule Reviews (and Reader Contest)

You might think that the toughest thing about writing these reviews is coming up with new ways of saying “it sucked.” Not so. I just think of the cinematic injustice done to me and let the venom flow. Next think you know I’m typing something like, “If Hitler barfed, it’d be this movie.” See how easy that is? (I was thinking of The Horsemen just then). No, oftentimes the toughest thing is coming up with 700-1000 words to say about a film. Many of the movies that don’t get reviewed here get skipped because there’s simply not that much to say about them. Some merit a half-review—hence the twofers—but many are just too unremarkable, even in their badness, to warrant writing up a review. So, to that end, we have the first Gunmonkey Capsule Reviews for the ADD-Afflicted!!! Yeah, I’m already working on a new name for them—preferably something with a cool acronym. Anyway, without further ado…

The first final frontier: “Star Trek”

Now this is a summer movie.

 After the self-serious, leaden, insert-gun-in-mouth grimness of Wolverine, we now have a blockbuster that understands the importance of being light, airy, and fun. And inexplicably, that movie is a Star Trek film. Well, I guess if we can elect a black President, we can make a summer blockbuster out of Star Trek—a franchise which seemed to have hacked up its death rattle sometime around the early 2000s.

Feel Free to Eat the Eye-Candy: “Supergator”

I went into Supergator already disappointed. See, the movie I had actually bought on eBay was Aztec Rex. Aztecs! Pyramids! Tyrannosauruses! How possibly can anything be awesomer than that (unless it’s Daniel Craig riding the T. Rex’s into battle with the Spartans…but don’t get me started on my my long-gestating screenplay…) Alas, the DVD that I pulled out of the padded envelope was not Aztec Rex, but instead Supergator. Maybe the words are deceptively similar in Thai. Maybe the dude who packed the DVDs in whatever sweatshop on Chatachuk is selling these things, just figured one big lizard is pretty much the same as the next. Whatever the case, I had no T. Rexes, no pyramids, no Aztecs. Just an alligator. Which may or may not be super.