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marshallwayne
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The Shape of Water (2017)
Beauty and the Beast. Girl and the Gill-man.
Beauty and the Beast. Girl and the Gill-man. Guillermo del Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER is a charming, funny, sensual and horrific love story and the best film Guillermo has done since Pan's Labyrinth. It's a hilarious 1950s Soviet-era sci-fi romance with a very nice, bloody touch of horror.
Elisa, a mute woman played by the adorable Sally Hawkins, works at a top secret laboratory in Baltimore as a cleaning lady. Every night she visits THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, who has been captured and is being experimented on by the evil Strickland played by Michael Shannon. Elisa falls in love with the creature and she has to get the creature out before he's killed.
The brilliant DOUG JONES plays THE CREATURE. He's a perfect interpretation of Universal's Gill-Man. This could be a sequel to the original Black Lagoon film. Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer are also charming supporting roles.
A Twisted Tale (2017)
The Problem With Ultra-Low Budget C-Movies (like Twisted Tale)
In this digital age of Youtube videos, streaming movies and video on demand, a movie like "A Twisted Tale" is a dime a dozen. Low budget, b-horror movies have always had an audience but it's unclear if the ultra-low budget, c-horror movies like this one has any kind of viewership whatsoever.
Ultra-low budget, c-movies are shot digitally, which means the scenes can run as long as they want without any kind of direction, point or substance. The director doesn't have to worry about burning through film so there's no thought of what may or may not be important to capture on film. These scriptless movies are not edited properly and are often riddled with sound issues, clichéd dialogue and boring improvisation. There are no camera shots, no lighting or production design. More than being ultra-low budget films, they are amateur movies.
A Twisted Tale depicts a group of camp counselors as they try to wrangle their campers, female juvenile delinquents, whom go out into the woods in the middle of the night in search of a ghostly legend called the Fire Lady. Instead of watching over their campers, the counselors decide to get drunk and party while the campers are out getting killed by the actual Fire Lady in the middle of the night. The twisted part of this tale is that the irresponsible camp counselors all live while the teen girls all die. The hungover counselors wake up the next morning unharmed and oblivious to what happened the night previous.
The movie's strengths are in one or two key moments that are dark and creepy due to very good makeup effects and lighting effects. Other than these two moments, the movie has few redeeming qualities.
This "tale" was clearly not written. The long, drawn-out scenes indicate that the director simply told the actors what was supposed to happen in the scenes and the actors improvised, poorly at that. Every scene is littered with loud, cluttered, overlapping dialogue and lines that are repeated more than once without a single cut or edit. There's a scene where a character tells a joke and in the next shot of the same scene tells the same exact joke in a different way, as if the editor forgot to do his job.
There is no hero. There are no actual defining characters. A young African American girl named Diamond is introduced and is the only character that gives a backstory as if she was going to become the hero, or "final girl," of the horror movie. However, she never makes an appearance again the entire remainder of the film. Our supposed hero, Kat, seems to be the one who makes a connection with the Fire Lady in the end in order to get her to stop killing people. However, there is little to back up her connection with the ghost. We spend a great majority of the film with a wacky camp counselor named Barb who is so overly-improvised she isn't even funny. Lasting only an hour, the movie manages to be too long because of the unnecessary and unfunny antics of Barb the camp counselor.
It's hard to see where or how this fits in the world of horror. Perhaps it's just a fan film. The lack of basic filmmaking skills and horror storytelling knowledge would suggest it's simply a fun amateur movie. The problem is that it's not fun and ultra-low budget c-movies like this one being released each year, by the hundreds, cause really good low budget independent films to get lost in the mix and suffer.
Bodies (2012)
A filmmaker said ""I've seen a movie once and I'll try that."
The best way to describe this "movie" is that it's about an alien from another planet named Terry who supposedly only has had experience with the human race through watching murder mysteries. When he comes to Earth and moves into his new apartment, he immediately decides to investigate the neighbor woman because apparently that's what humans do, right? What's frustrating is the movie isn't actually about an alien. He's just a boring character portrayed by a strange actor who was directed by someone who might be an alien. At least, the director could be an alien to movies or to how human beings interact with one another. Either way, the actions of the characters are so illogical that it seems alien to anyone who has ever interacted with another person before.
Terry moves into a new apartment and immediately stalks the woman next door because he heard she was a photographer of provocative subject matter (i.e., naked girls). He is socially awkward, creepy and lacks any kind of personality. There is a scene where Terry sits next to his door in the dark, staring blankly ahead as he listens to hear if the neighbor girl is coming home. Before he meets her, Terry does research on her for no apparent reason. In his first interaction with her, he quizzes her on the most intimate details of her life without even having said hello first.
You would assume this is the crafting of an interesting villain character. Unfortunately, Terry appears to be our hero and all of this setup falls on the poor choices of the writer, actor and director. How so? When Terry plays twenty questions when first meeting his frantic neighbor, Jane, she actually replies with the most detailed and expositional responses no person would ever give to a complete stranger. We end up knowing way more about her than about Terry. In fact, Jane is actually the hero of the film, yet we follow Terry the whole time. Later on, a character actually asks what Terry has to do with anything. Not surprisingly, the audience is left asking the same question.
This movie is baffling because it seems like the filmmakers know what they're doing. It's well paced and very well edited with adequate production design, makeup and wardrobe. Sure, the camera work, lighting and sound affects appear a tad shoddy, but the directing of the actors and the writing of the script scream "amateur." Not amateur like, "I love movies and I'm going to make one on my own." It's amateur as in, "I've seen a movie once and I'll try that." What's strange is that a couple of the characters in the movie are actual movie fanatics who complain about the state of modern cinema. It's an obvious commentary from the filmmakers, which is odd considering this movie doesn't seem like it was made by anyone who actually knows anything about movies.
Animals (2014)
Animals shows the reality of addiction that most drug movies don't
Drug addiction movies that I can recall often depict the characters in a crazy state to get their fix so they can have the best trip ever. These drug films don't often show the hunger for the drug fix that Collin Schiffli's Animals explores. Our heroes, Jude and Bobbi, need to eat, sleep and get heroin. They need it to survive and they can't get it alone. So they stick together. One pulls the other down and together they crash and burn. It's pretty sad
But Animals is charming. Jude and Bobbi are pretty fun to hang out with. That's what it feels like, hanging out with a pretty cool couple. But when they aren't on their fix, they fall into a pretty depressing state. Schiffli does a good job balancing the tone of the film. David Dastmalchian is so charming (who would have thought after playing such creepy characters in Prisoners and Dark Knight?). Kim Shaw is amazing! She kept making me want to cry. How could someone so beautiful and sweet like Bobbi fall into a situation like this? The problem points to Dastmalchian's Jude!
Dastmalchian wrote this from his true life as a former heroin addict and it makes the experience all the more rewarding. I've been hearing some people call Animals a clichéd drug movie. I think that viewpoint makes you realize how addiction is still a problem and drug films haven't really shown it like this. Again, most drug films show the fun of the fix before the characters crash and burn. This film shows the reality of it.
PS – This indie film is low budget and it doesn't look low budget at all! This is the game- changing movie that could have Hollywood running for their money. If an independent filmmaker such as Collin Schiffli (like David Robert Mitchell with It Follows) can make a low budget film that looks and feels as big as a studio movie, then there is a change on the horizon for the studio system.