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Griff64
Reviews
Josie and the Pussycats (2001)
It's jerkin'!
Okay, so:
1. It comes very close to being the thing it satirizes.
2. The ending stretches credulity like a bungee cord over a sumo wrestler.
3. That guy who plays Josie's boyfriend looks like James Spader. A lot like James Spader. It's actually pretty creepy.
4. Every mug and smirk of Alan Cumming and Parker Posey scream "WE'RE SLUMMING!!!"
But on the other hand:
1. While the Tara-Reid-brains-Carson-Daly scene would have been overly cutesy had they not subsequently broken up, now it's actually pretty funny.
2. I keep hearing that "3 Small Words" song in my head. And not in a bad way.
3. Rachel Leigh Cook shows every sign of actually being a pretty good actress.
4. The fake boy band, especially Seth Green and Breckin Meyer, are a closeted, faux-homeboy hoot. Listen to the lyrics to their song "Backdoor Lover" during the closing credits. I dare you.
The Forsaken (2001)
On no one's Oscar short list, but . . .
. . . "Forsaken" is a good, solid, highly watchable B-movie. I honestly don't understand all the critical hostility toward this film. You see a movie with the tagline "The night . . .has an appetite!" and you're expecting -- what? -- "Citizen Kane?"
No, it's not any great cinematic achievement. Yes, it does owe thematic debts to both "Near Dark" and "The Hitcher." But like those two movies, what it DOES manage to accomplish is to play with our expectations a little bit -- to step outside the box of generic Hollywood so-called horror films like "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "From Dusk Til Dawn." The shots and the editing are imaginative, the plot is a clever twist on vampire movie conventions, and the movie in-jokes are clever. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I LIKE my horror movies with nudity and gratuitous violence. (And that, Wes Craven and Robert Rodriguez, means violence of the non-cartoon variety.) It's a horror movie, fer cryin' out loud! Besides, a lot of the gratuitous violence in this particular horror movie gets inflicted on Jonathan Schaech. What's not to like?
My prediction is this: "Forsaken's" reputation will get better over time, and will continue be watched by those who appreciate a quality genre film long after better reviewed nonentities like "Scream" are, well, forsaken.
Summer Camp Nightmare (1986)
A guilty pleasure
This movie is titled and packaged exactly like a slasher flick. It's not. Which begs the question what IS it exactly? Well, think "Animal Farm" meets "Lord of the Flies" at summer camp. It's a none-too-subtle play on the old Nietzschean quip that whoever battles monsters ought to take care they don't become monsters themselves. It's probably carrying things a bit far to call this flick (I cannot, with a straight face, refer to it as a "film;" this is a flick) a satire. Oh, I suppose there's a serious message in there somewhere about power and its abuses, but mostly it's just good, campy fun.
My personal favorite elements are Chuck "The Rifleman" Connors as the fascistic camp director who is quite clearly Ronald Reagan, and the camp talent show act ("The Horndogs") who perform a gleefully over the top lip synch of Fear's "Beef Baloney." A fun, fun rental.
Left Behind (2000)
Porno for fundies
There is a great movie to be made from the Biblical prophesies of the rapture, the tribulation, and the rise of the antichrist. The events involved are so inherently dramatic that at some point ("no one knows the hour") someone is going to mine them for a couple of decent hours of film. Left Behind is, however, not that couple of hours. It is instead 95 minutes (it somehow seems so much longer) of shoddy craftsmanship in virtually every aspect of filmmaking: bad writing, bad direction, and some of the worst acting ever recorded on film, all aided and abetted by amateurish cinematography and special effects that -- well, to call them cheesy is actually an insult to cheesy special effects. (That this film even exists suggests that someone -- I'm not sure who, but someone -- owes Ed Wood an apology.)
Now, it's possible, of course, for all of the above to combine to produce a movie that is still enjoyable -- in spite of its flaws, or sometimes even because of them. Left Behind isn't that movie either. Its ineptitude is not even oddly charming in the manner of, say, Dolemite or Plan 9 from Outer Space (although there are some amusing moments of unintentional humor, many of them the result of the antichrist's truly execrable Russian accent). In fact, for something so bad in its every aspect, the movie is oddly dull.
Another reviewer very aptly observed that for a movie whose stated purpose is converting people to Christianity, it had an unsettlingly contemptuous tone with respect to non-believers. I would suggest that the reason the movie and the books upon which it's based are so successful is that they're essentially porn for Christian fundamentalists: dramatizations of a future in which they're proven right, and get to look down from heaven like the mean-spirited children in the opening credits of The Wild Bunch as the scorpions (everyone not in strict conformity with their narrow world view) are tormented in various ways. Now, if that's what does it for you (if, that is to say, you're the type of person who's already memorized Kirk Cameron's anti-abortion rant at the conclusion of Listen to Me), then by all means buy the DVD and put it up on the shelf next to your KJV. Otherwise, this is a must to avoid.