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The Brides (2018)
Different, That's For Sure
"The Brides" is one film that cannot be accused of not being out of the ordinary. Basically about events both in Edgar Allen Poe's life and in his fiction, and updated for no particular reason to the 1950s even as it retains a general feel of Poe's 1800s, it takes place almost entirely on the creepy set of an old Belgian countryside house.
Slow-moving and oddly acted in English, this is not for impatient viewers. But I enjoyed it as it quietly and steadily examined the deterioration of a fictionalized Poe. Here he believes he has perfected an evil experiment that will bring his beloved late wife back to him, even as it consigns another young woman to a living death. Real events from Poe's life are woven into the narrative so that they mix with the creations of his writing.
There are only a few actors on hand here and they all give it a great, low-budget go. Director "James Desert," as he is often known by pseudonym because of his lengthy Belgian name, has a plodding and contemplative style all his own that will appeal to fans of the unusual. Not at all "professional" in its presentation, the film will instead attract admirers of the offbeat and underground-arty, and works hard to deliver us the entirely different sort of experience that we crave.
Here Poe is in pain from a wasting disease he refuses to have diagnosed, shoots morphine, quaffs booze, becomes paralyzed on one side until he hypnotizes himself to become unparalyzed (!!) and obsesses over his beloved Virginia. The Grim Reaper hangs around, ominously staring at people. The atmosphere is oppressive and autumnal even though it is summer outside, and the air of an old Hammer Studios type of production, only in miniature, is palpable.
Desert started off with the gruesome underground necrophile-serial killer movie "Lucker the Necrophagus" in the 1980s, and has since been involved in producing many low-budget films over the years. May he continue to do things in his own eccentric way. You know who you are if the descriptions in this review have appealed to you, so get on over to Tubi and punch "The Brides" into its search engine.
Alpha Wolf (2018)
Watchable For The B-Movie It Is
"Alpha Wolf" has all of the low-budget eccentricities that those of us who are B-movie fans like. There are lovably bargain-basement werewolf costumes and there is amusingly awkward acting and there are nice California countryside settings. What more could a bad movie fan ask for?
Over-aggressive Casper Van Dien and his wife and their dog are going up the country to re-connect with nature and with each other. Before long there is a werewolf attack, Van Dien gets bit and all low-budget lycanthrope hell is breaking loose.
Van Dien's real-life wife Jennifer Wegner carries much of the movie, even as she struggles with a script that contradicts itself on how long she's known Van Dien's character! Van Dien himself turns out to be playing such a jerkoff that even fellow werewolves can't stand him, and only Wegner's dog Larry is loyal and trustworthy.
While bad CGI (is there any good CGI?) is used for fires and such, good old practical effects are used for the werewolves and in the violence scenes and there is some blood-splash here and there, a heart gets ripped out, a guy gets brained with a hammer and so on, with the gore shown briefly and the violence on the moderate level. There is also a jaw-dropping surprise involving were-transformations that I'll let you see for yourself. Even though it has a "You've got to be kidding me" quality to it and should have been done better, I don't believe any other moviemakers have ever used this idea, so "Alpha Wolf" deserves credit for that.
Other than that, characters regularly contradict themselves here and the script seems to have been written by utter amateurs who never even bothered to double-check it. Luckily this becomes part of the fun and one soon begins to sense the ghost of Ed Wood hovering around.
Even the fact that the real-life couple Van Dien and Wegner's love scenes are actually awkward, or that Van Dien appears to have had plastic surgery, does not detract from, but adds to the overall enjoyable air of B-movie angst. You know who you are if this sounds like something for you, so head on over to You Tube or Hulu to catch it!
Secret Obsession (2019)
Not THAT Bad
"Secret Obsession" is a "Lifetime style" thriller if there ever was one. But this does not have to automatically make it unwatchable for all but women who spend a lot of time at home. In my opinion all the negative reviews of it are exaggerated, though certainly correct on some points.
This is a technically very competent and decently acted and photographed movie. But it doesn't dig very deep and might have been edited and even directed according to a computer program. It is okay for a laid-back watch, but not if one is expecting anything new or a new way of looking at such thrillers. The surprises are zero, but they need not be more than that if you're just looking for a simple thriller.
Logic is also completely lacking as the bad guy does not take the amnesiac Song away somewhere where no one knows them, but stays right in town where he's bound to be spotted. He also kills some other guy who is looking for Song, who is never identified as to who the heck he even is!
But logic is something no one should expect too much of in movies and these offenses can be overlooked. What cannot be overlooked is the blithe dismissal of serious themes. Early in the movie, cop Haysbert has a nice moment concerning his long-missing little daughter. We then get nothing more on this until the end if the movie, when it seems Haysbert has simply decided to stop looking for his child and retire to play golf! This would be an outrage in real life as much as it is in a story, but the clueless filmmakers don't seem to realize this at all!
The action stays at a regular clip in this, though. People are repeatedly knocking people out and tying people up and throwing people in freezers. Early on, a hospital just basically and unrealistically takes the creep's word for it that he's Song's husband, week after week as she recovers from physical injuries. But then again if they didn't there wouldn't be a movie to follow!
All in all this is passable if you like dramatic Lifetime-like stuff or like to laugh at it. But you won't likely have any secret obsessions for it afterward.
Vengeance: A Love Story (2017)
Okay For Cage Fans - Not Much Else
Nicholas Cage is somewhat more toned down than usual here as a Niagara Falls, NY cop who watches four rapists of a young single mother preparing to walk free with minimum punishment thanks to high-profile lawyer Don Johnson. So Cage decides to get revenge as the victim and her family try to pull their lives back together.
Aside from Cage and Johnson, the acting is dubious here by almost everyone concerned. But it's hard to tell if it's their acting, or if poor direction is actually to blame.
The rape victim's acting is already questionable before the crime against her character, and does not improve after. Debra Kara Unger as her mother seems to be in a state of somnolence. And the actress playing the young daughter tries her best, but may be dealing with material that doesn't give her anything to work with.
For one thing, if you want to create sympathy for a rape victim, it's probably not best to portray her character as hanging out in bars flirting with men, drinking and petting with a guy at a 4th of July party before the rape, and wearing tight short shorts that leave nothing to the imagination. Granted that she gets swooped down upon by four punks from out of nowhere. But that is all the more reason not to portray her as "loose" to begin with.
The courtroom scenes here come across as terribly melodramatic and unbelievable. Only Johnson's presence lends them a modicum of sanity. And he's supposed to be a bad guy!
The judge is pointlessly hostile toward the victim and protective of the accused, who are obvious lowlives even by how they look and act in his courtroom. As a result, the movie tries to create out of whole cloth a sense of Cage "having to" go vigilante. But this flops, and only his acting continues to be interesting.
SPOILER ALERT The first revenge killing is pretty well done, after I suffered through the rapist's overacted scene in a bar. But the second, which dispatches two rapists near Niagara Falls, was actually done with bad CGI!
And the last one is just a dud. END SPOILER ALERT
This movie also takes a shot at the Catholic Church from out of nowhere, having a priest recommend Johnson to a defendant family's shrill mother "because he's represented the Church." Ha-ha. Funny how movies never connect liberal public school teachers and employees to sex crimes, even though statistics show that they commit them far more often than priests.
All in all this comes across as an awkwardly directed dud with only its well-known leads keeping it watchable. Then again, I'm one of that relatively small number of people who have seen the original "I Spit On Your Grave," that ultimate rape and revenge film, so any other movie dealing with rape is likely to look inferior anyway.
Seed (2006)
Another Boll Atrocity, Of Some Interest
"Seed" is yet another Uwe Boll act of dubiousness that is meant to be taken as having a serious message of some kind about something. Yet the "serious message" is meant to be conveyed by a movie full of Boll's usual nonsense.
Let me praise the good points of this movie first. It is somewhat unusually shot and Boll might (I stress "might") be said to have a "style" of his own, even if it's accidental and more akin to the "style" of Ed Wood than anyone else.
There is also one original-looking scene of brutal violence in the uncut version of this movie involving the slow slashing death of a woman tied to a chair, albeit that the scene uses CGI.
Some of the acting is okay here and Boll seems to be going for a 70s-era look, hardly surprising around a time when numerous other directors were doing the same.
That's it for the positives. The negatives start right at the beginning, when the audience is subjected to scene after scene of what are apparently real-life films of cruelty to animals. Personally, on the very rare occasion that I look at real violence videos in order to write about them, I prepare myself for them in advance. So do I need real violence videos popping up in my face at the beginning of what I thought was going to be a fictional horror film? As a vegetarian animal lover, do I need to suddenly see animals being really slaughtered and suffering right before my eyes? No!!
Nonetheless, I was willing to continue watching, even though Boll would predictably fail to connect his opening salvo of realism with anything that would follow.
What happens next is that we get a confusing series of scenes of videos that were apparently made by the serial killer "Seed," who seems to be a silent, dull-minded, mask-wearing sort in the Leatherface vein. That is, when he is not playing out diabolical scenarios of videotaped murder worthy of an evil mastermind. These include speeded-up versions of the starvation and decay of numerous victims including a baby.
Boll seems to want to be very "edgy" here, and may be for viewers who know nothing of the extreme horror that long preceded him and nothing of the low-budget horror underground. For those of us who do, there is not going to be anything "edgy" about Boll. His shoving real-life animal cruelty at us at the beginning of his movie is to us annoying rather than edgy.
We then go through a series of flashbacks confusingly combined with the present prison milieu of Seed, who inexplicably is allowed to wear his mask at all times including while being prepped for execution. I am not giving anything away by telling you that Seed survives his execution and goes on another killing spree. We are apparently supposed to be supportive of him on some level, since we are meant to believe that his execution is "cruel." This about someone who allowed a baby to starve to death in a dungeon!
The absurdity is everywhere here. For example, though his heart is weakly beating after his "execution," they decide to bury Seed alive. Because they think it would be "cruel" to simply put a bullet in his head and finish him!
After "coming back from the dead" Seed simply waltzes into the prison and wanders wherever he pleases, finding and killing just the people he wants with no interference of any kind. Even the ending makes no sense as everyone, not just one cop, would be out looking for Seed at the familiar place of "the big climax," which thinks it's more shocking than it even comes close to being thanks to Boll's inept handling of the storyline.
To sum up, "Seed" features a few things of strange interest that are worth sitting through it for. But one should be warned that it is enough of a usual Uwe Boll disaster that the sitting will not always be easy!
Only Mine (2019)
Good In A Bad Way
There are movies that play themselves out with such weird uncertainty that I just have to find them compelling in their own oddball ways. "Only Mine," which has been playing on Netflix, is one if these.
A young small-town American Indian woman waits tables in her mixed-race village and pores over her college applications. Then one day a somewhat older white cop she finds attractive takes her out, and things go downhill from there. Too quickly downhill, before an audience can even see what went wrong!
One minute everyone's happy at dinner with frozen smiles as the cop meets the girl's mother. The next the girl is taking the cop's fairly ordinary concern for her as "too much." One moment our girl is swooning and starry-eyed over the cop, and the next she's in fear for her life because he seems a bit over-protective. He turns out to have a bad history and to be a violently jealous psycho. But we know none of that early in the movie and the production's incompetence does not properly transition him from grinning nice guy to obsessive freak, or properly move the girl from doe-eyed love-seeker to terrified victim.
The acting here appears uniformly unstable and awful. APPEARS, that is. I soon realized that no one movie, made with a standard budget, could have THAT many bad actors, so that the problem isn't the acting but the directing and editing.
Michael Civille directs like a first-timer, and for his sake I hope that the industry that backs these Lifetime channel-type movies overlooks this effort and gives him a chance to improve.
Which doesn't mean that this movie is an all-negative experience. On the contrary, I found much of it amusing and entertaining via the Ed Wood "aesthetic."
People talk dramatically into each other's faces with grim, tight expressions. Cameras practically go into people's pores with close-ups. People deliver lines as though casually rehearsing them, which they probably were, only to have the director think they were brilliant and finalize the takes. Still other people leap from one character type to another for the slightest of reasons, such as the friendly old diner customer lady who goes from our Indian girl's warm advice-giver to a wretched shrew, just because the evil cop talks some smack around town about the girl and the old biddy immediately believes him.
There is actually a bit of blood and violence in the end, and you will get to see someone stabbed dead with the short barrel of an old hunting rifle. That's right, not shot with the hunting rifle. But stabbed to death with its barrel. And the rest of the gun remains just sticking up in the air out of their body after they are. If that isn't enough to convince you that this is a 100% strange movie that needs a look from strange movie fans, then nothing is.
One thing that I thought was legitimately interesting here was the setting, which seemed like an actually pleasant little green summery town somewhere out West. So, I look on IMDB and where was the movie shot? Hollywood, California. So much for the "nice little town," then, but chalk this one up as a good night-owl viewing experience when you're in a "B movie by way of the Oxygen channel" frame of mind.
Bloody Wednesday (1987)
This 80s Misfire Is Still Interesting
I am nostalgic for the 80s and the days of going to neighborhood video stores, or even to neighborhood 7-11s, to rent VHS tapes for home viewing. One way of appeasing this nostalgia is to watch 80s movies now that I didn't catch back then, and "Bloody Wednesday" was one of these so I found it on You Tube.
A California mechanic begins acting very weird and "can no longer work." After walking naked and singing into a church, he gets hospitalized, but is released to his brother's custody. His brother puts him up in an old empty hotel he's in charge of, and things get weirder and weirder until the final acts of violence.
This movie tells you what's going to happen from its opening scene so there can be no "spoilers" here. But it really has nothing to do with the "McDonald's Massacre" in southern California in the early 80s. Repeated online descriptions say it does, but these are simply wrong. The character here bears zero resemblance to James Huberty of the real-life massacre, and this movie is more a low-budget, urban aping of "The Shining" than it is about any real-life massacre.
The guy's hallucinations here are unrealistic and deeply involved in a way that I've never heard of hallucinations being with real patients. They are much more detailed fantasies than hallucinations, and most people know what their private fantasies are and do not believe them to be real. Our character here does, and this does not always make for a plausible viewing experience.
Confusing matters further is the fact that there are apparent REAL threats against our character in the form of three punks with a stupid grudge against him. In a sequence more bizarre than any of his fantasies, our guy ends up in an extended conversation with one punk about everything including the meaning of life!
All this may have worked better if done in a different style. As it is, with our guy fumbling between fantasy and reality while distracting action sequences are thrown in, it seems a muddle.
I think the guy's talking teddy bear is a good character and should have been developed more. Instead, there are distractions with hallucinated butlers and possibly hallucinated private eyes looking for long-stashed treasures and such. Most of the stuff with the punks is another snooze, and endless sequences of our guy trying to seduce his female psychiatrist (!!) just go nowhere as well.
Even the final massacre is done oddly, with several people conveniently jumping out on cue to get shot. The end that our shooter comes to is different from real-life Huberty's. The general racial make-up of the victims is different. Huberty's was an attack on a popular fast-food joint. Here we have an attack on a small family restaurant. Huberty called for psychiatric help before his crimes but was put on a callers' waiting list. Our man here has steady psychiatric attention that does him no good. Huberty never separated from his family and was living with them the day of the McDonald's Massacre. Our man here is long abandoned by his wife. Huberty let legitimate concerns about the government become driving obsessions. Our guy here is totally apolitical. And on and on go the complete differences.
Our guy here is hard to sympathize with as he acts child-like and confused one moment, but arrogantly sure of his sanity and dismissive of others the next. Hey, he just forgot to put his clothes on before going to church, what's the big deal?! Such is a guy who is not exactly going to pull at your heartstrings.
Nonetheless, this movie succeeds in some ways as an 80s oddity complete with a Casio-driven score. It is worth a look for 80s video fans in spite of its flaws, and enjoyable in some ways for fans of the strange, especially fans of the low-budget strange. All others need not apply.
V/H/S (2012)
Well-Done Low-Budget Horror
"VHS" is a somewhat roughly made low budget horror anthology movie including contributions from Bloody Disgusting.com type of people and others. Each short film in it has the notion of being shot with a character's handheld video camera.
The roughness of this production I would assume is supposed to be part of the horror fun, and for me it was. So too with the inconsistencies regarding who's holding the cameras and how does the filming seem to go on in the midst of all kinds of chaos. If you're not going to suspend some disbelief when watching such movies, then you probably shouldn't bother with them. On the other hand such movies should not make such a great big deal out of the video angle that it becomes a distraction in itself, so that disbelief suspension is near impossible. "VHS" strikes the balance well enough between these factors in my view.
The stories here include a group of drunken guys out on the town looking for girls on a summer night of partying. They take some chicks to a motel room, including a rather strange big-eyed girl who talks oddly. Then there's one about a couple driving to Vegas who appear to be being eerily stalked in the towns they stop in. Then there's another bunch of party guys who end up in a big spooky house on Halloween. A girl being haunted in her home who talks via video link with her boyfriend. And a group of dopey friends going swimming at a lake but finding horror in the woods.
The wraparound story has to do with yet more wastrels who have been paid to break into a house and steal a VHS tape. The videos they watch make up the movies we see.
The gore is fairly good here and is present in each episode. There are standout moments with a throat-cutting, a monstrous person butchering folks on-camera, a person digging skin-crawlingly into their own strangely wounded arm, a character having horrific things removed from their gut, and on and on.
Some complain that this movie "should have been shorter," but I think the way it takes its time is fine and builds tension in a slow, creeping manner.
This is viewable on Hulu and possibly on You Tube and is recommended for those low budget horror fans like me who will enjoy it most.
Between Worlds (2018)
Not So Bad If Watched In Right Frame Of Mind
"Between Worlds" is yet another crazy Nicholas Cage movie in which he pulls out all the stops on his deliberate overacting, and manages to score some points.
This has something to do with a mother played by Franka Potente who can briefly visit and alter things in the afterlife while being strangled (!). Cage plays a substance-abusing trucker grieving the tragic loss of his family. He stumbles upon Potente while she's being choked by a bruiser in order to "save" her comatose daughter. Cage "rescues" her only to become part of her life, and ends up asked to choke her himself. He begins a torrid affair with her and moves in with her and the daughter when the young woman comes home from the hospital. Since he's just had his truck seized by bill collectors, this couldn't come at a better time. But alas - the daughter has somehow become possessed by the spirit of Cage's dead wife! And also wants to sleep with him!
If this sounds ridiculous, be assured that it is. And it gets even more so. But the cast and especially Cage play it in a rough, gutteral working class way that makes it interesting. All the way to the explosion of stupid violence and melodrama that is the ending. And somewhere in all this there's a message about how one should not mess around with the supernatural.
If this were played straight with middle class or higher characters it would be just another dullish ghost movie. But since it is played manic with working poor ones, it remains watchable and different. Sort of like if Charles Bukowski wrote a ghost movie. It's terrible with its totally out-of-control ending, but, intentionally or not, is a funny watch a good deal of the way through.
One reviewer here makes fun of Potente's "on and off" German accent as if he thinks she's trying to hide it. But her German nationality is mentioned during the film's dialogue, and the reviewer obviously wasn't paying attention. As a German acting in a nutty movie made in Spain that is portraying a setting in the American South, she does a good job.
This is viewable on Netflix and is recommended for viewers looking for something flawed but somewhat creative in its own strange, perhaps accidental way.
211 (2018)
A Not Too Bad Cage-Driven Action-Crimer
"211," the numbers being code for a police robbery call in some places, is one of countless modest-budget Nicholas Cage movies, this one filmed in Bulgaria as made to look like Massachusetts.
Cage plays a soon-retiring patrol cop who ends up caught in an extended exchange of gunfire with military-trained, hostage-holding bank robbers. Accompanying him are his young, new-father partner who happens to be married to Cage's estranged daughter who refuses to talk to her father. And an innocent black kid falsely accused by bullies at school, who is being made to ride along with the cops as punishment.
There are what seem to be unnecessary other storylines at the beginning and during the movie, perhaps to stretch it to a certain length. Those stories are not too bad either, I just wanted it to focus more on Cage and his usual eccentric acting. As is his custom, he goes all-out here to deliver lines that would have been flat coming from most other actors, deliberately pouring extra emotion, body language and facial expression into them in a manner that is risky, but works in some odd Cageian way.
While most everyone knows that Cage makes one often low-budget movie after another to pay off his extensive tax-related debts, he never seems to choose a total turkey and always tries to give whatever character he's playing his all.
As far as American action movies made in Bulgaria go this one isn't too bad and kept my interest all the way through. Besides Cage everyone else is at least competent which is all you need be in an action movie. The movie unabashedly maintains a melodramatic flair and doesn't go for winking or jokiness. It manages to pull this off pretty well in low-budget action terms.
The ending here has been criticized as too sudden and simple by some, but I liked it, finding it to be a refreshing bit of semi-realism that most action movies these days don't have the courage to go for as they insult everyone's intelligence with giant explosions and such.
A big flaw comes in the closing scene which may have literally been the last thing filmed and seems rushed, like it gets cut off prematurely before the last shot is established! This is followed by end credits which roll in odd silence for a bit before the closing soundtrack finally kicks in. But in my view these sorts of peccadilloes only add to a modest movie's enjoyment and are all part of the fun.
This is currently showing on Netflix, which I believe has 30-day free trial runs for people who want to watch this and as many other movies as they can in a month.