FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II

It's funny - back in my horror-movie-devouring heyday, I managed to see Friday The 13th Part and parts 3 through 6 but somehow managed to miss out on Part II. I caught up with it tonight and - silly me - I had already seen it... because it's the exact same frickin' movie as the first one.

Friday The 13th Part II is truly one of the ultimate examples of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of sequelizing. Steve Miner takes over the directing chores here and his approach is superficially slicker, with some nice steadicam shots, but otherwise he follows the original film's beats note for note. You got a gaggle of post-teens training for camp counseling gigs up the lake from old Camp Blood. Once they settle in, Jason comes out (wearing a flour-bag on his head cuz this was pre-hockey mask) and starts bumping them off before the inevitable face-off with the Good girl. You even get the same slo-mo 'heroine strikes back' and 'final knee-jerk shock' moments.

Unfortunately, this installment is dull, dull, dull. The script offers up the same kind of non-entity characters and the same arid stretches of non-plot between killings. Even worse, the handful of kills in the film are bloodless because the MPAA came down hard on this film. Thus, it's like listening to a series of jokes without the punchlines. The one bright spot is Amy Steel as the good girl/final survivor: she actually has a bit of personality and fights back. However, Friday The 13th Part II still claims the title for Most Boring Of The Series.

DRACULA'S WIDOW

A good premise alone isn't enough to make a movie work - it takes a good script, the right cast and so much more. No matter how promising the central idea might be, if these other elements aren't carefully worked out than the film will fall apart in short order.

One of the ultimate examples of this flaw is Dracula's Widow. This film had a few things going for it: the presence of a name star (Emmanuelle herself, Sylvia Kristel) and the intriguing premise of Dracula's wife on the loose in modern-day Los Angeles. The film starts with a clean setup - Raymond (Lenny Von Dohlen) is the proprietor of the Hollywood House Of Wax. He recieves an extra crate while accepting a shipment of antiques and said crate contains the coffin of Vanessa (Kristel), the wife of Count Dracula.

Unfortunately, that's where all the promise of Dracula's Widow ends because the advancement of the plot stops cold. Vanessa puts the bite on Raymond and then wanders around aimlessly, taking out the occasional victim then disappearing so the plot can focus on Raymond - who is similarly indecisive about what he should be doing. There's also a cop (Josef Sommer) who indulges in some cliched noir-isms and a descendent of Van Helsing (Stefan Schnabel) who carries on in an eastern European accent, but neither adds much to the thrust of the story.

Dracula's Widow is also derailed by two genuinely terrible lead performances. Von Dohlen indulges in the kind of wide-eyed camp mannerisms that suggest he thought he was in a Mel Brooks film. Even worse, Kristel looks like she doesn't want to be there and her interpretation of gothic horror mannerisms is stunningly off-the-mark: the sight of her stomping around with arms extended at 45-degree angles while wearing a distractingly phony wig is unintentionally hilarious.

Finally, there's the non-direction of Christopher Coppola. Dracula's Widow plays like the work of someone who knew the visual style he wanted but nothing else. It often looks quite lovely, with well-crafted 'vintage'-look production values and often striking photography that favors some Argento-ish primary color schemes. However, Coppola lacks any sense of pacing, gets overly affected performances from his actors and has zero flair for the staging of the horrific setpieces. These problems all make themselves felt in an awkward scene where Vanessa wipes out a coven of devil worshippers: it stumbles past the viewer without rhyme or reason before collapsing in a barrage of sub-MTV editing.

In the end, good intentions just aren't enough. Dracula's Widow is cinematic proof.

XTRO

Ooh, this is one grotty little cocktail of sci-fi/horror exploitation. Smartly capitalizing on public interest in E.T., the makers of Xtro assembled a black-hearted, smutty drive-in variation on the 'alien visits earth' concept. It all begins with Sam (Philip Sayer) being abducted by a U.F.O. while playing with his son Tony (Simon Nash). Three years later, an alien returns to the area, impregnates the women and - in the first of the film's many dazzlingly tasteless setpiece - causes her to give birth to full-grown man. Said man is the alien but he has taken the shape of Sam.

Alien/Sam quickly tracks down Tony and his wife Rachel (Bernice Steger). Tony is thrilled but Rachel is confused, since she assumed that Sam just ran off and has since taken up with a photographer (Danny Brainin). Nevertheless, Alien/Sam works on insinuating his way back into the family unit so he can carry out his extraterrestrial agenda. Said agenda dominates the remainder of the film and basically involves a series of latex-laden setpieces as peripheral characters are bumped off in creative ways or fall prey to Alien/Sam's plans, which generally involve allowing his species to procreate on Earth...

Still, one need not worry about following the plot with Xtro. It's basically a rollercoaster of latex-slinging setpieces, supported by a few nice lashings of sleaze. The aforementioned "man-sized birth" is the most notorious but there are high/lowlights to spare - a memorably creepy and unexpectedly Cronenbergian one arrives when Alien/Sam puts his mouth on Tony's neck to pass alien eggs from his body into Tony's system. This allows both of them to have the power to summon anything from their imagination, a skill that pays off when Tony brings a midget clown to life(!) and also sending a lifesize version of an action figure to kill a neighbor he doesn't like. A young, pre-Bond movie Maryam D'Abo is also on hand to provide topless shots and to suffer a memorably gruesome living-death fate.

The finished film lacks the consistent inspiration or manic style to qualify as an exploitation classic but Xtro is surprisingly watchable. Director/co-writer Harry Bromley Davenport covers for the rough edges of his material (bad optical effects, weak supporting performances) by keeping the film taut in pace and focused on delivering the sleazy goods. He also gets unexpectedly good perfomances from Sayers and Steger, both of whom play their roles straight and thus add the occasional human moment between the mayhem. As a result, Xtro serves as good fare for the b-half of a trash movie double bill and a fond memory of when this kind of stuff used to play mainstream theaters.

THE BEING

This is an impressive (but not entirely watchable) example of the exploitation impulse driven into weird territory by filmmakers free of Hollywood's marketing-driven mindset. The Being is essentially a drive-in version of Alien, only the alien is replaced with a toxic-waste-mutated human. Also, the spaceship setting is replaced with the scenic, small town locale of Pottsville, Idaho. The mutated beastie goes on the loose, severing and impaling the townsfolk, and the fate of the town lies in the hands of local cop Mortimer Lutz (Rexx Coltrane, who is actually producer Bill Osco hiding behind a pseudonym).

That's not all there is to The Being. The viewer is also greeted with a subplot about the town leaders protesting the arrival of a massage parlor in their fine hamlet, a sad single mom (Dorothy Malone) who is looking for her long-lost son and a shifty health inspector (Martin Landau) who is most likely acting as a front to protect a company dumping toxic waste near the local water supply. Malone and Landau ham it up quite nicely and their efforts are aided by the presence of Jose Ferrer as the town's alkie mayor and Ruth Buzzi as his obnoxious, porn-hating society wife. The presence of all these faded names often gives The Being the feeling of a vintage Aaron Spelling t.v. production - with the occasional lashing of gore thrown in, of course.

Unfortunately, The Being doesn't live to the schlocky promise of these elements. The main problems lie with writer/director Jackie Kong: her sloppy script loses track of all the subplots and her slack direction botches many potential suspense scenes. Even worse is Bill Osco's performance as the hero - his monotone delivery and lack of chemistry with all the other actors suggests that he might be a sleepwalker and we might be watching his waking dream.

MUNICH

Steven Spielberg's been trying to be a 'serious filmmaker' ever since The Color Purple. The merits of that film and the other movies in the Oscar-minded vein he's made since that time have been hotly debated but he's continued to plug away at this goal between his more commercial ventures. In this viewer's opinion, Munich is the movie he's been working towards - serious, unsentimentalized and free of melodramatic excess or easy answers to tough questions.

Interestingly, Munich doesn't focus on the tragic kidnap/murder scenario that marred the 1972 Olympics. Instead, it focus on the aftermath: mid-level Mossad agent Avner (Eric Bana) is tapped by the Israeli government to head a squad of assassins. They are sent out to various points in Europe to assassinate men the government considers responsible for the massacre in Munich (although they will not give any reasons). The agents' only contact with the government comes through Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), a bureaucrat whose easy smile hides a penchant for Machiavellian manipulation and power-mongering tantrums.

This seems like the perfect setup for an action thriller - and Munich does indeed have a number of nerve-jangling setpieces where the heroes carry out their hit-squad missions - but Munich genuinely deglamorizes the process. The heroes are not killing the actual assassins responsible - instead, they are sent after a series of mostly older men, some with families. The hits also rarely go as planned, due to malfunctioning bombs or interference from external elements. Things get worse as the assassins start to question the nature of their mission - are they getting the men responsible for the tragedy or merely cleaning house for their government? - and the work begins to breed paranoia.

The end results are surprisingly downbeat, criticizing people on both sides of the conflict. Munich ultimately comes off as a cinematic lament over the poisonous, morally/psychologically corrosive nature of revenge. Fittingly, Spielberg keeps his penchant for schmaltz in check and gives the film a tough, icy feel, with brutal violence and many uneasy moments as the heroes accidentally do the wrong thing or unexpectedly die in mid-mission. The script avoids preachiness or audience manipulation, presenting the events in a mostly detached style and presenting the humanity on both sides (no one is entirely evil - or entirely angelic). It also thankfully avoids the 'heartfelt' speechifying that usually mars message-oriented Hollywood fare.

The subtlety also extends to the performances, which never give way to overt emotional gestures. Eric Bana nicely underplays his role, conveying the tension and internal struggles of Avner without any unnecessary mugging or method-actor indulgences. His work is supported nicely by Rush, who is supremely slimy in a white collar sort of way, and Ciaran Hinds as a collaborator with a dark sense of humor and an ambivalent attitude towards their missions. Mathieu Almaric also steals many a scene as sly, mercenary informant who sells information to both sides.

However, Munich still retains some Spielberg-isms that might annoy his detractors. For one thing, the film runs an indulgent two hours and forty-five minutes. Most of it is time well-spent but the third act has trouble finding where its ending should be (a common malady in latter-day Spielberg films). Also, despite the subtlety in dialogue and characterization, Spielberg still goes for some grand visual gestures that go a little over-the-top: without revealing too much, there's a sequence near the end where a flashback is intercut with a present-day scene in a very heavy-handed style (you'll know it when you see it).

Still, Munich remains a powerful and memorable film despite its excesses. It might not be perfect but it is a stark, adult-minded affair that shows Spielberg growing towards his 'serious filmmaker' goal in an impressive manner.

PHANTASM II

This film had a lot of strikes going against it: it featured a new lead actor, had the backing of a Hollywood studio and came several years after the original. However, Phantasm II manages to beat the odds by retaining the original film's distinctive feel while also expanding its mythology (and putting that bigger budget to good use).

Phantasm II literally begins where the first film ended, finding an interesting way out of the prior film's "was it all a dream" coda by having Reggie (Reggie Bannister) take on the Tall Man and his jawa-esque minions to rescue Mike. Years later, Mike (now played by James LeGros) gets out of a mental institution and tags Reggie to join him on a mission to wipe out the Tall Man. Mike is also searching for Liz (Paula Irvine), a girl who has a psychic connection with him and who is also endangered by the Tall Man's plans. It goes without saying that mayhem ensues but it also worth noting that with a studio-funded budget the mayhem happens on a grand scale: explosions, multiple silver spheres and tons of latex creations are flung at the viewer.

The nicest thing about Phantasm II is that Don Coscarelli didn't let the film's major studio origins alter his style. Instead, he's used the money to develop the mythology of the alternative reality his film portrays. The first half of the film is surprisingly subdued and offers up a lot of spooky imagery as Coscarelli brings the viewer into a world where the rural areas of the country are quietly being bled dry by the Tall Man. Once the inevitable confrontation kicks in during the second half, the menace of the Tall Man is fleshed out with new floating spheres that offer up even more lethal functions.

Elsewhere, Coscarelli maintains the deadpan feel of the original Phantasm through the unaffected performances from the cast: Bannister is still his amusingly non-actor-ish self and newcomers LeGros and Irvine deliver subtle performances that fit the film's dreamlike feel. Coscarelli also works in some bits of the weird humor that popped up in Phantasm, the best moment here being a memorably comic bedroom scene between Bannister and weird hitchhiker he picks up.

The latter part of the film offers up a greater orientation toward action that reflects its late 1980's origins: the scenes of the heroes wielding self-modified weaponry offers a cheeky nod to the Rambo films and the battles between the heroes and the Tall man's minions hit a blend of chills and slapstick that echo Sam Raimi's work (specifically Evil Dead II). Some viewers might dislike the shift from gothic horror to action during the finale but it does fit nicely with Coscarelli's intentions of making an imaginative, spooky rollercoaster for the fans. The ending it comes to might be a little too pat and self-referential for its own good but Phantasm II ultimately lives up to its promise and thankfully does so on its own terms.

PHANTASM

Although he had two features under his belt by this time, Don Coscarelli's career really began with this surreal, horrific classic. Phantasm not only made the young filmmaker's career, its uniquely stylized blend of dreamlike atmosphere, odd humor and gruesome shocks set a template that would later be followed by films like The Evil Dead and A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Phantasm isn't easy to summarize, but here goes: Mike (Michael Baldwin) is an inquisitive young teen struggling to come to terms with the death of his parents and the fact that his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) might be moving on without him. His burden soon increases when he notices strange goings-on at nearby Morningside Cemetery and decides to investigate. This leads to many a confrontation between Mike and the place's proprietor, the grim-faced Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), and the discovery of his sinister, otherworldly agenda. There's also mysterious Jawa-like midget beasties to be dealt with, not to mention a flying silver sphere that can drain all the blood out of a victim through via a cranial drill...

If that synopsis sounds a bit jumbled and chaotic, this is merely because no plot description could begin to encapsulate the wonderful weirdness that is Phantasm. Coscarelli has often said he designed the film as a rollercoaster ride but it is so much more. The story veers back and forth between surrealism and shocks, occasionally adding in the odd bit of humor to keep the viewer on his/her toes. It never makes literal sense, yet it so well-crafted that all the stylistic about-faces feel not only deliberate but oddly natural. The end result comes off like a cinematic translation of a nightmare a horror fan would have had around age 13, nonsensical yet driven by its own unspoken, fear-based internal logic - and very, very creepy.

If one wants to pick apart Phantasm, it isn't difficult: the plotting is chaotic, the characterizations are slim and the performances of Thornbury and co-star Reggie Bannister, while enthusiastic, are more than a little wooden. Still, such flaws only enhance the film's oddly personalized feel and just enhance the film's bizarre, surrealist tone. Few films have ever captured the nightmarish fears of the early teenage years the way Phantasm did and it totally earns its place in the classic horror pantheon as a result.

KING KONG (2005 version)

It seems there is no middle ground for this one. Viewers and critics alike are either praising King Kong to the heavens or putting the boot in, with a notable divide between the younger viewers (who love it) and the older ones (who dump much snark on it). In an odd development, I find myself standing in the middle - maybe a step or two closer to those who liked it but close enough to those who disliked it to see the many flaws.

If you saw the original King Kong, you know the story - cosmetic changes have been made but it sticks closely to the original's mythic structure. A film crew led by blowhard filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) travels to a mysterious island. They run into angry natives harboring a giant ape they worship as a god. The natives try to sacrifice lovely actress Ann (Naomi Watts) to the beast but he takes a liking to her and protects her from the many other giant beasties tromping around the island. Of course, Carl manages to capture the ape and takes him back to New York to make him a Broadway attraction. Kong breaks loose, Ann reunites with him and their tragic friendship is played out to its bitter, shoot-em-down ending atop the Empire State Building.

As for this viewer, I found King Kong mark 2005 watchable and mostly enjoyable - and also a bit too much. It is possible to have too much of a good thing and this is one of those cases. This version of King Kong is the kind of movie that happens when a filmmaker is too close to something they love to have any perspective on it.

Peter Jackson has no problem bringing the spectacle of 1930's New York or a giant beast-filled tropical island to life: indeed, few directors today can create old-fashioned spectacle the way he can. Unfortunately, he loses the little details amid the big picture. For instance, the nominal romantic lead/hero Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) becomes a fifth wheel to the story, never doing much of anything after making his initial impression and essentially ending up as a featured spectator. There's also a whole subplot involving a mysterious stowaway that gets abruptly thrown out once the action begins.

Even more problematic is the film's overall structure. The first act ends up taking the first hour of the film's running time: it's skillfully made but it also puts the film at a disadvantage by starting so leisurely. The middle hour of the film is practically non-stop effects setpieces. They're all handsomely designed, with great effects and thunderous sound, but they become numbing after a while. The final hour is the messiest of all, jumping abruptly to New York and yanking the viewer through the final beats of the tragic tale in a disjointed, hurried style that fails to bring the story of the human characters to any kind of meaningful endpoint.

However, there is plenty to enjoy in King Kong despite these crucial flaws. The creation of Kong, a combination of artful CGI and believably enacted physical emotions by actor Andy Serkis, is one of the better digital creations in recent memory. The creature's believability is enhanced by a nice performance from Naomi Watts, who shows the depth of her acting skills by convincingly creating a relationship with an intangible effect. It's also worth noting that Peter Jackson's writing and direction shine during the moments between Ann and Kong, handling the evolution of their relationship in a style that is as believable as it is magical.

Beyond this relationship, the scope of the production design is dazzling and the other actors acquit themselves well: Brody is good despite getting little to do and Jack Black serves his role well, despite the stunt-casting nature of his appearance here. Unfortunately, the overall package these quality elements are wrapped in lacks the careful touch and disciplined storytelling necessary to make it the great tragic fantasy it so badly wants to be.

In the end, there simply isn't a reason this film needed to be three hours (and it still feels incomplete and underdeveloped at that length). The story seems to serve the bombast instead of the other way around. As a result, the new King Kong comes off as a noble misfire.

THE MANITOU

"As I said, everything has a manitou. Not only trees but man-made things as well. Now, the police will come with guns. Their guns have manitous. Misquamacus will turn the guns against the police and kill them with their own weapons!

That little monologue neatly sums up the bizarre appeal of The Manitou. Like that goofball verbal exchange, The Manitou puts forth tantalizingly bizarre ideas in a campy, goofball manner. It's one of those films that could have only been made in the 1970's.

The wacked-out storyline begins with Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg) noticing a fast-growing tumor on her neck. Before doctors try an operation, she calls on her ex, a con-man psychic named Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis) to confess her fears. The operation fails due to some otherworldly interference and Harry turns to the occult world to find answers.

He soon discovers the tumor is the physical manifestation of Misquamacus, an ancient Indian medicine man trying to re-enter the physical world. Harry enlists the help of a living medicine man, one John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara), to take on the evil spirit. It all culminates in a surreal battle between science and mysticism, complete with all the psychedelic opticals and makeup effects that can be shoehorned into a limited budget.

The plot may sound tantalizingly crazy but that's only the beginning of the schizoid experience that is The Manitou. The plot deals out some rather unconventional plot hooks - like basing itself around American Indian concepts of religion and the idea that all things living and inanimate have spirits - yet these concepts are delivered via some clubfooted t.v.-style plotting and exposition. The film is full of disturbing sights and creepy setpieces but each of these moments is counterbalanced with moments of forced sitcom-style humor and unintentional campiness. By the end, it leaps headlong into bizarro-land with an ending that can't be described - it can only be experienced in slack-jawed awe.

Unfortunately, the film isn't always as compelling as it is strange. This problem stems mainly from William Girdler's direction. This b-movie vet had learned a lot about making a movie look professional by this point and puts it all to good use here - the movie only cost about $3 million and easily looks like it cost two or three times that amount. However, he still had basic problems with how to smoothly construct and pace a story and that makes the middle act of The Manitou wildly uneven. He also allows the running time to become padded because he feels the need to squeeze every cent out of his resources - for instance, there's a gratuitous romantic montage obviously designed to show off the film's San Francisco locations.

Still, the movie's dizzying and totally unself-conscious sense of eccentricity can be charming if the viewer is in the right mood. It further benefits from an excellent cast. Tony Curtis and Michael Ansara both deliver surprisingly good performances given the circumstances: neither condescends to the material, with Curtis adding plenty of old-Hollywood charm and Ansara playing it straight in the manner of a true character-actor pro.

The Manitou also has a supporting cast to die for: among the guest stars are Stella Stevens (in weird gypsy-wig and tan makeup), Ann Sothern and an extremely hammy Burgess Meredith. The combination of familiar faces, schlocky plotting and slick production values gives the film the feel of a vintage Irwin Allen project gone occult-crazy.

Sadly, this was Girdler's last film - he died in a helicopter crash before The Manitou was released. It was a tragedy for b-movie fans because Girdler was truly one of a kind (check out Grizzly or Asylum Of Satan for further proof). One can only dream of the outlandish sights and sounds he might have unleashed had he been given the time to keep going.

KISS KISS BANG BANG

For my money, this is the best popcorn movie of the year.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang marks the directing debut of Shane Black, the legendary screenwriter who shot the spec-script market through the roof in the late 1980's/early 1990's with cheerfully deranged action hits like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. Thankfully, his schtick has aged well and stepping behind the camera allows him to add some new wrinkles to it.

This film is partially based on the Brett Halliday novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them, uses the film noir format as a way to skewer the mood and sensibilities of Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr. toplines as Harry Lockhart, a New York crook who bumbles his way into an audition while escaping a botched robbery. He is whisked off to Hollywood and the producer (an amusingly slimy Larry Miller) prepares him for a screentest by having him study the art of detective work under the tutelage of his personal P.I., a fellow he has dubbed Gay Perry (Val Kilmer).

Soon enough, Lockhart finds himself crossing paths with Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monagan), an old, unrequited crush from his high school days who is working her way up the acting ladder. When the daughter of well-to-do actor Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen) dies under mysterious circumstances, Harry begins to investigate in his own awkward style and drags Gay Perry and Harmony along for the ride. Much quippery and gunplay ensues - and a bit of torture - before the story culminates in a over-the-top finale that brings back found memories of the excess Black pioneered in his late 1980's/early 1990's heyday.

If you want to pick apart this film, it's easy to: the central mystery is deliberately obscure and never really coheres and sensitive, artsy types are likely to bristle at the film's mix of in-joke Hollywood cynicism and casual brutality. However, these aren't likely to be concerns for anyone who loves a good cult movie because Kiss Kiss Bang Bang delivers all the trashy fun one would hope for from a popcorn flick and does with a charming, smart-alecky sense of humor.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is primarily a style ride. The fact that mystery never quite adds up doesn't matter - it is merely the pretext for Black to unleash his imagination through a series of virtuoso dialogue scenes and bizarro action sequences. He gives the whole shebang a tremendous sense of forward drive likely to leave the viewer giddy. The crazed finale is the biggest highlight in terms of visual inventiveness - without saying too much, it moves like a finely-calibrated Rube Goldberg contraption fueled by gunplay and car-stunts that uses a unique, morbid prop at the center of its chaos.

More importantly, Black's faster/louder style is firmly anchored by some dazzling performances that keep the energy level up. Robert Downey gets the kind of fast-talking, sarcastic role that suits his frenzied energy level perfectly, Val Kilmer acts as a more dryly humorous (but no less verbose) foil. Finally, Michelle Monaghan is a true find - she's easy on the eyes but every bit as funny and quick-witted as her co-stars (which is saying a lot).

Try and see this one at a theater if you can. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang manages to make 'good, dumb fun' smart again and seeing it on the big screen really brings its glorious sense of excess to life.