Run for your lives! It’s October, the unofficial horror movie month! Horror is consistently one of the most popular genres in film, with even middling movies guaranteed to make money. Why? Because audiences want to feel emotion from their entertainment, and no emotion is easier to evoke than fear.

Fear comes in many forms, everything from being startled to deep psychological terror. Few movies reach that final level, but when they do they leave a scar on our culture. With that in mind, let’s talk about the twenty most significant horror films. These aren’t necessarily the best or the most scary or even my favorites, but when you die . . .  these will be on the test.

Father Merrin had come to save Regan from Satan’s fluorescent lightbulbs.

1. Night of the Living Dead (1968): The importance of this film cannot be overstated. This film brought horror movies to adult audiences. Before ‘Dead,’ horror was costumed monsters aimed at kids. The film also kick-started the zombie craze which continues unabated today in film and within the Democratic party, and it established all the conventions for the zombie subgenre. “Yes we can . . . yes we can.”

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I almost didn’t write this film up, not wanting to waste another minute of my life on it.  Moonraker is, regrettably, a misfire in almost every respect.  The film feels like a cynical attempt to cash in on Star Wars, a clumsy and clunky plot, delivered without any regard for reality.   It’s a mish-mash of scenes thrown together in an attempt to substitute substance for spectacle.

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James Bomb

We begin as we always do, with Roger Moore’s portrayal of 007.  There’s not much forward progress in his interpretation of the role, as it’s pretty much a reply of what he accomplished in The Spy Who Loved Me.  And yet, we must give Mr. Moore tremendous credit, for he is able to ground an absurd film.  His sophistication and British charm really does count for a lot, and is really the saving grace of the movie.  There is a throwaway line early on, after bedding one of Drax’s workers, where he says to her, “Take care of yourself.”  It’s a stupid line, and it’s played entirely on her, but what makes Roger Moore so wonderful is that he delivers it totally convincingly – as if he actually cares.  Other than that, I have little to add. (more…)

Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975. (more…)

Last week at CPAC I ran into liberal Hollywood icon Richard Dreyfuss. The rumor around CPAC was that Dreyfuss had seen that shining city on the hill and was “turning conservative.”  I wondered if I would see him because I have enjoyed some of his movies.

The opportunity arose when we both finished interviews on radio row.  I approached Dreyfuss, put out my hand, and said “Hi, I am David Bossie, President of Citizens United.”  Dreyfuss’ eyes lit up like he just saw Jaws and he said, “You’re going to have a hard time getting into heaven if you believe in that sort of stuff.”  I was taken aback and asked, “Why?” Dreyfuss then went on a diatribe equating the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision to the Khmer Rouge.  He compared me to Pol Pot “stacking skulls” back at my office.  He actually used his hands to seemingly act out the stacking of skulls.  I replied by saying, “I thought you would have been supportive of my First Amendment Supreme Court case because you are in the business of supporting the First Amendment.”  He did not have a clear response and looked like a frustrated, institution-bound Dr. Leo Marvin from his Oscar-worthy performance in What About Bob?

For someone who was at CPAC to promote a civics and civility campaign, calling me one of the worst mass murderers in history strikes me as awfully hypocritical. But this is not the first time Dreyfuss has used extreme and offensive language to make a political point.  He once compared former Vice President Dick Cheney to Adolf Hitler and agreed with comments that wished Cheney dead (though later apologized). 

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Clichés have to come from somewhere.  Believe it or not, there was a time when the by-the-book cop’s partner was not on the edge, where hordes of interchangeable henchmen packing high tech automatic weapons did not roam our cities, when the hero was neither on the verge of retirement or too old for this . . .  stuff.  Then, long ago, everything changed.

For the movie anthropologist, Lethal Weapon (1987) is the missing link.  It is the Big Bang of movies with big bangs.  It is the well-spring of a hundred lame imitations, a few good ones, and a lot of parodies.  It is where the most hackneyed of buddy-cop movie clichés were born.  At the time, they were awesome.

It is a movie about many things beyond the slam-bam action and witty banter, including about getting older and looking back, which is particularly apt here.  Looking back at the 1980’s, which I spent in high school, at UC San Diego (go whatever the hell your mascot is – I was too busy partying to care) and the Army, what is striking is how many definitive movies came along and how they led to Hollywood’s present – for better or for worse.  Lethal Weapon remains an archetypal specimen of the kind of movie only Hollywood can make well (despite how often it does it badly) – slick popcorn adventure/comedies with memorable action set-pieces paired with laugh-out-loud hilarity and featuring big stars and top shelf production values. (more…)

“Pulp Fiction” is the best movie ever. Let me explain. Actually. I don’t believe that there is a best movie ever, or even a best year ever. But when “Pulp Fiction” is on, and I watch, at some point during those 154 minutes it will dawn on me, “So, this…is the best movie ever”. I have been overheard saying this during viewings of “Jaws,” “High Plains Drifter,” “Bad News Bears,” “Casablanca,” “Goodfellas,” three different “Star Wars” movies (Yes, three — I cringe at the Ewoks, but love Luke’s ascent to badass), “Unforgiven,” “The King of Comedy,” and many others films.

“Pulp Fiction” had the feel of an event movie for college-aged kids. “Reservoir Dogs” and “True Romance” had developed cult followings in frat houses and dorm rooms everywhere, and the buzz surrounding “Pulp Fiction” strangely intensified after it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. There aren’t many mainstream hits to be found on the list of films to win the Palme D’Or between 1990 and 2009. Some great movies, but nothing approaching the level of fun Tarantino injects into three interwoven stories of L.A.’s criminal underbelly. I don’t recall, for example, midnight showings of Jane Campion’s previous films complete with party atmosphere and booze the weekend that “The Piano” opened, at least not in Athens, Georgia. But the weekend “Pulp Fiction” opened, the Georgia Theater unspooled “Reservoir Dogs” to a raucous crowd who cheered when Tarantino’s name danced across the screen. He was more than a director, he was a rock star. His movies have continued to be events, which sometimes works against him. (more…)

The political thriller Fair Game premiered at Cannes today. (Pause for giant, collective yawn from Big Hollywood readers…)

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair. (more…)

In 2006, while accepting the Academy Award for playing a husky, grizzled version of himself, George Clooney famously gushed, “…this Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I’m proud to be a part of this Academy. I’m proud to be part of this community. I’m proud to be out of touch.”

My apologies for bringing up old crap, but Clooney’s statement, especially the part about how he’s so proud to be out of touch, is one of the most bafflingly odd things I’ve ever heard coming from Clooney, who’s also famous for telling anyone who’ll listen that everybody tells him all the time how brave he was for making a black and white movie about the red scare. It’s very revealing that Clooney would say this, to cheers, a mere three years after a child-rapist was handed an award by that same Academy. (more…)

Ah, August.

Hot.  Muggy.  Sluggish. School approaches; summer vacations are over or nearly so. The new television season is weeks away. And even in a good movie year  – which 2009 has decidedly not been – all the best blockbusters have come and gone by now.

What to do?  You could watch that stupid cat video on YouTube for the 1,000th time, or…you could watch a surfer get a major bite down from a giant man-eating fish.  Sweet!

Yes friends, The Discovery Channel has the answer for our late-summer, entertainment withdrawal doldrums. For twenty-two years now, Discovery has devoted an entire week of August or July programming to real life sea monsters: They called it Shark Week, and lo, it was good.

Shark Week is always fun, but this year’s installment has been especially tasty. ”Blood In The Water” kicked it off, a terrific two-hour documentary about the real-life happenings that inspired Peter Benchley’s Jaws – the 1916 New Jersey shark massacre. (more…)

Even before “Star Trek” launches into the stratosphere this weekend, director JJ Abrams is taking a victory lap.

With the film hogging 81% of all ticket sales at Fandango.com as well as the covers of Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly and Wired (which Abrams guest edited), the director has just done a great sit down with Charlie Rose. 

Now Rose can be an enormous chucklehead when interviewing Hollywood types (especially pretty ones), but that doesn’t matter. Abrams is smart enough to make it interesting on his own.

He talks about the influence of Richard Donner’s “Superman,” which he says gave “a kind of legitimacy” to comic book subjects they’d never received before. Donner “respected the characters as much as the audience,” Abrams says. “They were funny. They were real.” (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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I hated the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. No, not the Citizen Kane homage rosebud scene at the end – I loved that – but the ending of the movie. I didn’t want it to end. I hadn’t enjoyed a film that much since, well, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, or Jaws. I wanted it to continue. I wanted more. 

I got more and I didn’t want it. 

Why don’t sequels do well? Obviously, I’m not alone in feeling the way I do about Raiders or Star Wars or Jaws or any other great character-rich, dynamically set film that pulls you in and doesn’t fully let go even after the end titles trail up and we see that film certification symbol fade out. So, why is it that more of what we love, we hate? Well, maybe not hate, but not love quite so much. What’s going on here?  (more…)