Man on a Ledge

Do you know the feeling when you come home late in the evening and you are still so hyper (from whatever....harmless things) that you are not ready to go to bed. Happened to me two nights ago and I had to fill the void between hyper and eyes falling shut (experience has taught me this is a rather short period) with something to watch that didn't require too much thinking. So, I picked Man on a Ledge, because with a title like that....

It is about a man. He is on a ledge.

It is set in New York City, which is a plus in my book (pretty aerial views onto cabs and onlookers). The lead actor...Nick Cassidy/Sam Worthington...not so much. So he was a cop that ended up in prison for allegedly stealing a diamond, which he strongly denies. He escapes and the next thing we know he is on this ledge with a woman (Elizabeth Banks) left with the task to talk him back into the hotel room he was staying in. We also meet a few more characters/actors. Some of them we like - Jamie Bell (the brother), Kyra Sedgwick (a reporter), Edward Burns (a cop).

That was pretty much the end of my first sitting with Man on a Ledge. Bedtime.

Next sitting (last night) - there is of course much more to the story than we initially learned. Nick maintains that he did not steal the diamond off of the big bad wolf - in this case Ed Harris (David Englander) - and to prove his innocence/get him back he hogs all the media and police attention while his lil (hot) bro and his (equally hot) girlfriend break into Englander's vault to actually steal the diamond in question. After some nailbiting action (well, not really) and the discovery that most cops are dirty it turns out that the diamond is not there!

It was at this point that I once again called it quits for the night. So the burning questions (Did he or did he not steal the diamond originally? Where is the stupid diamond??? Is Edward Burns a good or bad guy?) will have to wait.

Third (and final) sitting: Happy end! Hurrah! Bad guys get taken down, Ed Burns is not one of them, former colleagues cheer Nick, a lot of shoulder patting, lil bro proposes and they all lived happily ever after. Way too neat, if you ask me.

2/10

Punishment Park

Punishment Park is a so-called pseudo-documentary that has been called one of the most controversial films ever made (this according to the official film poster) and it may well be. The plot is detailed on wikipedia (and many other resources, obviously).

There is no doubt about which side directer Peter Watkins is on and the film is as black and white as they come, with the obvious bad guys being the conservatives, here represented by a tribunal and law enforcement.

To balance it out a bit there is one person in either group that speaks out against his peers, but their voices are considerably more quiet than the yelling, judgmental tribunal members and the gung ho police and military guys. The court has a defense lawyer that speaks for the people on trial and is duly ignored. One young soldier gives a teary-eyed statement saying that he did not want to kill anyone but his gun went off.

The cinéma vérité style and the fact that Watkins let his actors improvise gives the film a very real feeling. If you didn't know better you could actually believe this to be a documentary, which makes it quite powerful.

5/10

Stake Land

We enter the film after the collapse of the country has already happened. There is no real explanation as to what exactly happened or why. The plain facts are that there are the humans - some fighting, some preaching, some hoping for protection - and then there are the 'vamps' - moving like zombies, but whatever.

We follow the story of Martin, told mostly in voice-over (which I am not a fan of, ever), who was saved by a guy called Mister (yes, I know). Poor thing had to watch his whole family get killed first, though. This Mister wants to get young Martin safely to 'New Eden' (=Canada) and they travel north together, killing vamps and fighting religious nuts along the way.

The scenery and the basic story of man trying to get boy to safe haven is basically the same as in The Road. Of course, Stake Land has more action and, well, non-humans in it but as a continuous narrative The Road is far superior. Stake Land is still more interesting than most standard vampire (or zombie) movies, though.

The film also features Kelly McGillis, whom I haven't seen in a long time. She dies (just FYI).

4/10

Pontypool

You may have noticed by now that I watch a lot of horror films. In recent years I came across quite a few interesting ones (as in: they do not follow the apparent standard formula many genre films do) and a lot of those are Canadian products.

Canada gave us some real gems in that regard. The Cube series, the Ginger Snaps series, The Brood, or the classic Black Christmas to name a few.

With Pontypool, we get a zombie flick in which you don't actually see much of the zombies. As an avid reader using my imaginagion to draw up pictures of people, places, scenes is not a new concept. In films, however, rarely anything is left to you. What a breath of fresh air to watch a film that does not present bite-sized pieces of familiar patterns.

Almost the entire film takes place inside a small town radio station, where talk show host Grant Mazzy and his crew of two get disturbing reports about mobs going rampant all over town. Throughout the whole film we, the viewers, know as much or little as the characters in the film. We learn what is happening outside from frantic phone calls.

Eventually, the zombies reach the station, as does one Dr. Mendez, who seams to have had an unknowing hand in starting the outbreak. Even the infection that produces the zombies is out of the horror movie norm. What we see of the outside crowd is mostly hands and, later, shapes through dirty, bloody glass. The epidemic does affect one of the women working for the radio station and we do get to see how the affected act. In full detail.

This film is very, very interesting.

8/10

Wolf Creek

If you ever consider going to Australia and doing the road trip/back packer thing - don't. If you don't get killed by some redneck hick in the middle of nowhere surely one of the ridiculously poisonous creatures will kill you. How do I know that? Through many, many Australian horror films, of course.

It all starts out nicely enough. You hang out on some beach or other, getting drunk and sleeping on the beach and it's all fun and games until your car just won't start again when it's all dark out and you're in an area called Wolf Creek. I mean, it could have stalled in Emu Creek, but that just doesn't sound creepy enough. Then you obviously run into some scary looking guy that pretends to be all helpful but turns out to be this serial killer that can merrily hack tourists into pieces because he lives at a place so remote that - even if you kinda sorta know the general area it is located in - cannot be pinpointed by authorities because the place is just so fucking big and empty. And, anyway, people disappear in Australia all the time (so, why again would you want to go there?).

Sure, you might be able to escape. But where do you go? What if you're on foot? Remember: you are miles and miles of deserted country roads from any civilization, because you did this wannabe hippie road trip thing. So even if you think you have escaped and by chance should meet another human being willing to help you, the bad guy is still out there hunting you and the good samaritan will be collateral damage.

Because bad guys in horror film simply do not die. Like, ever. Nevermind that you shot him and stabbed him. He will come after you. And he will find you.

True story.

4/10

Sleepaway Camp 1+2

Today you get two reviews for the price of one: Sleepaway Camp 1 + 2. Why bother splitting them up when the bad guy is the same one in both?

I'll tell you right away: Angela is the killer.

Sleepaway Camp

Ah, good old trash-y camp horror!

In the the final scene, when the killer's identity is revealed - it turns out to be little Angela. You can see it from a mile and the big surprise is not who the killer is but what the killer is.

Angela and her overly protective cousin are sent to camp by the weirdest aunt (to Angela) in horror film history. Angela is very, very shy and spends her days just staring at people, refusing to swim (hint!) and generally freaking people out by her mere presence.

So, anyway, kids die. And in the end we learn that Angela is a boy! See, back at the beginning of the film, a father is in the water with his son and daughter and gets killed in a freak boating accident. We were then led to believe that the girl survived, but really it was the boy.

Yes, it's bad.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers

Angela (played by Pamela Springsteen, as in "sister of...") is back at camp (another camp, but near enough to the original camp for kids to tell the grisly story of the previous murders by the campfire) - this time she works there. For some reason, the kids here are older than in the first part. Back then, the average age appeared to be 12, 13 years, now we have young adults with chesthair and breasts (that classy girls don't have to flaunt, mind you).

This time there is not even the slightest attempt to keep the killer's identity secret. Angela is now an actual woman, after having spent time in an institution and having had a sex change. Yes, I know...

Apparently, she just loves the camp life, crappy songs about happy campers and all. People die in various grisly ways, they get stabbed and cut with knives/Freddy Krueger gloves/drills, burned alive or even drowned in the outhouse (eww!).

In the end, she has killed off everyone and gets away scott free.

There are several more films in the series...
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland
Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor
Sleepaway Camp V: The Return (aka Return to Sleepaway Camp)
Memorial Valley Desaster (aka Son of Sleepaway Camp)
...and why not? The options are endless, apparently.

Angela's run lasts until part IV.

Sleepaway Camp: 1/10
Sleepaway Camp II: 1/10

Mil gritos tiene la noche (Pieces)

Let's talk about Pieces for a minute. Specifically, let us talk about the sheer crappiness of it.

What happens after the intro scene happens forty years after the incident pictured above. Now, here is a major spoiler, so if you really don't want to know who the grown-up bad guy is, stop reading now: The murderer of many a female college student still has the same hair color and a similar haircut.

For a while, however, pretty much everyone is a suspect. There is the gardener, who likes to wield his chainsaw and just generally looks suspicious. There is the smart, popular kid who is about to meet up with a naked blonde in the indoor pool - the very site of her untimely demise. There is the anatomy professor who is - OMG! - gay. There is also the dean, who speaks in a curious English accent (this is New England, mind you).

So, the police have their hands full. So full, in fact, that they recruit the aforementioned college kid (no, really) and a blonde, female tennis player (no, really) who will be undercover as the college's new tennis coach (no, really).

Everything about the film is so quintessentially 1980s, it is almost painful to watch.

*shakes-head-sadly*

1/10

Prometheus

My first post on a film-of-the-moment! One that is actually in theaters right now. I give you....Prometheus, the film that has been hyped and hyped and hyped some more over the last year or so (felt that long, didn't it). So, does it live up to the buzz?

Yes, it does. It has its flaws, no doubt, and quite a few of them. But it is what it is supposed to be - a sci-fi summer blockbuster that alternately awes you and freaks you out.

It starts with this guy killing himself. Or something.We do not know where he is (is it a he even?) and we do not know why he drinks that funny stuff he (she?) is drinking. But he (she?) is our ancestor. That much is clear.

So this team of scientists sets out to find a star constellation that has been discovered in many cave drawings by all kinds of different ancient civilizations. They take about 2 years to get there. While they sleep in their fancy futuristic beds, David is manning the ship by himself. David is an adroid without any emotions, that somehow still manages to be quite the douchebag (with an agenda, apparently). He spends his days watching old films (Lawrence of Arabia) and dyeing his roots.

As soon as all the scientist are woken, there follows a lot of exploring dark caves. Ominous lighting FTW!After some exciting discoveries that may or may not prove the initial theory of where all life comes from, the horror kicks in. Black liquids oozing out of vessels (vases), people disintegrating, quite the gross abortion (the horrific highlight in my book!), one big-ass face-hugger...well, more of a full-body-hugger, really.

Thankfully, the film has eye candy galore. There is David (the actual reason girls will watch this):

Despite the bad hair, Michael Fassbender is a welcome sight. There is the badass captain:

Even a character as unemotional and slick as Charlize Theron's succumbs to his rough charms. Sort of. And then there is the guy who looks like the cute brother of Tom Hardy:

Wait. Did she just sort of diss Tom Hardy? Yes, I believe she did. *gasp*

And all that in 3D! Which is totally wasted on this film. There is next to nothing that warrants the use of 3D, other than it looks pretty and sharp. Can we be done with 3D, please?

What was slightly annoying was the ending. We get no answers whatsoever. Because Elizabeth Shaw is "still searching". Uhm, ok. So, there's going to be a sequel, right?

5/10

Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces)

I don't claim to be Pedro Almodóvar's biggest fan. Some of his films don't work for me at all (Mujeres al borde du un ataque de nervios springs to mind), some leave me with a Meh! feeling (La mala educácion for one), but then there are a few that I embrace wholeheartedly - and Los abrazos rotos is one of them.

Granted, it is not as good as Todo sobre me madre (my favorite Almodóvar) and not as fascinating (in a shocking way) as La piel que habito, but it is a tragic love story, beautifully acted by Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar and shot in splendid colors.

Works for me.

7/10

Animals with the Tollkeeper

As far as I can tell, the tollkeeper has nothing to do with the rest of the film whatsoever. The intro film only features a trio of French filmmakers who end up in Henry's (Tim Roth) cab. That happens right after he gets mugged by John Torturro and a young man, who suffers from Down Syndrom.

Anyway, after driving the French people around for a while he ends up in the middle of nowhere all alone. That is when he falls desperately in love with Fatima who initially is not interested in his advances at all.

She lives together with her very strange family. Henry hangs around to be with her and eventually win her love. The woman's younger brother is not at all happy with him being around and attempts to attack him repeatedly - without much success - once by sending in his pigs to attack.

Of course, Henry does win her heart and the two set out to look for paradise, that he has a somewhat blurry vision of. And that is when it gets really weird.

3/10

Mørke Sjeler (Dark Souls)



When his daughter Johanna is attacked with a drill and turned into a zombie, Morten Ravn goes off on his own to find the culprit and bring him to justice. Given that the policeman leading the investigation of a number of similar attacks is a smug asshole (fear not, he will get what he deserves), he really has no choice.

The film borrows heavily from themes used in other films and TV shows. There is the black oil dripping onto faces (familiar to anyone who watched The X Files) and a woman crawling awkwardly (à la Ju-On) towards her victim. Not even the big bad oil company as the ultimate baddie is a new concept. People and companies threatening the environment have taken a lot of the fictional blame since western cinema lost its favorite scapegoat, the USSR, to brotherly capitalism.

The film is at its best when it doesn't take itself too seriously - like when men start going at each other with drills, or Mr. Ravn makes funny sounds and laughs hysterically over every bad guy biting the dust while hunting him.

Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between.

3/10

Voyage of the Damned

I have been giving you the impression that all I watch are crappy horror films, haven't I?

Well, I don't. I give you Voyage of the Damned.

This is a wonderfully made, very dense two-and-a-half drama starring, well, everyone. You have Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Malcolm McDowell, Max von Sydow, Maria Schell, Ben Gazzara, James Mason, and - in a minor role - Orson Fucking Welles.

The story is based on an actual (very lavish) journey of the SS St. Louis that carried more than 900 Jewish passengers to Cuba, visas and all, where they were hoping to escape the terror of the Nazis and WW II. When arriving at Havana, they were suddenly refused entry - seemingly on the president's whim. After hovering a few hundred feet off shore, the ship was instructed to leave and the passengers were subsequently also refused entry to the US and started to return towards Germany.

During what appeared to be a happy ending, a handful of other European countries agreed to take the refugees in. The sad truth of the individual stories were given in one of the classic "what happened to ---- after the film ended" we learned of a few survival stories. Ultimately, about 600 of them didn't make it through WW II.

Sad, so sad.

8/10

Blood Creek (aka Town Creek)

What did I just watch?

It starts off with a mysterious Nazi sent to the States to educate himself in the occult and through the help of one special stone achieve a more desireable state of being. All for the Führer, of course. And then it turns into a Zombie flick. Now, I am all for Nazi Zombies (Dead Snow FTW!), but this?

First, we get:

...for all of 10 (!) minutes. And then it turns into:

The fuck did you do to Michael Fassbender? He looks disgusting, he speaks in tongues, he sucks human blood and he tears the skin off his face frequently, which makes him slightly less despicable each time but doesn't get him back to looking pretty again by the end of the film - he gets poisoned, strangled with barbed wire, stabbed and burned.

And not once does he get naked.

3/10

Retreat

Woah! Billy Elliott grew up handsomely, didn't he?

In this, Jamie Bell is army private Jack that ends up on an island in rather rough seas (off the British coast). He is all bloody and unconcious when a married couple finds him and takes him in.

The wife, Kate, has recently had a miscarriage and she and her husband Martin are staying at the island to work through their marriage troubles, brought on not only by the loss of the child but also by the fact that Martin apparently didn't want it in the first place because he didn't feel ready for it.

As if the situation weren't bad enough, Jack tells them a horrific tale of a virus outbreak that affected, and virtually wiped out the population on the main land. He makes them board up all windows and doors to stay as safe from the airborne virus as possible. Kate and Martin are never quite sure about whether to believe Jack's story or not.

So we have a grieving couple locked inside a house on a remote island with a total stranger (armed, no less). So far so average.

What pulls Retreat onto an above-average level is undoubtedly that it features three of the finest British actors of their generation. You have Thandie Newton as Kate, Cillian Murphy as Martin and the aforementioned Jamie Bell as Jack. The latter has the most interesting role of the trio and is consequently the most impressive one to watch.

The film itself is ok, with some nasty splattering of blood (the disease makes you practically cough out your lungs if you've contracted it) and a couple of nice twists towards the end.

Not bad at all, despite its mediocre critical reaction.

5/10

Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield

This is only very loosely based on the real events and murders of Ed Gein and is actually more about country cop Bobby Mason than it is about the serial killer.

Gein is your standard loner that is locally only spoken off in hushed tones because his mother and brother died last year and he hasn’t been the same since. The scenes of attack usually involve poor Ed imagining his mother speaking to him rather than the women he picks out for killing. Surely, it is all mommy’s fault.

The town folk is portrayed as plain and almost cartoonish at times. The cop’s momma particularly overplays the matronly lady. She gets so annoying at times that you wish Ed Gein upon her – and sooner rather than later. Bobby is about as one-dimensional and stupid as they come (think Dewey from the Scream films without the humor angle). He is either staring in wide-eyed wonder when making any discovery of any significance or boldly making out with his girlfriend Erica (his boss’ daughter – never a good idea, and his mother may not approve either). This is 2007, so we can go a little steamy, no matter when the story is set.

There is even the inquisitive female (!) journalist hounding the sheriff for details of any crimes. An impromptu press conference brings out all the awful acting in full force. The only person that does  a halfway decent job is Kane Hodder, who plays Ed Gein. Hodder also played Jason Voorhees in the later parts of the Friday The 13th films. In his work as a stunt man he badly burned part of his body. This – as well as his stature – probably is part of the reason he seems to be stuck in murderous roles.

For some reason that I don’t quite understand, some of the really bad scenes are played out in slow motion, which feels totally out of place.

Fittingly, the dialogue falls flat through most of the film, like

“Erica! Erica! Erica! She was right here! Where did she go? Erica!”

or

“Now, we know for sure that you are somewhere on this property. We’d like you to kindly help us in this investigation by coming out and introducing yourself.” “I don’t think he’s home.” “Oh no, he’s home. I can smell him.”

or even,

“Bobby don’t do it. Don’t lower yourself to his level.”

The film has a score of 3,8/10 on imdb, which is too high for my liking.

1/10