Prequels usually mean studios can hire a younger, more demographically friendly cast to extend a popular franchise. Fans, in turn, get to see how a beloved story began. But audiences need something else – a credible reason to turn back the clock. That’s where the otherwise perfunctory prequel ‘The Thing’ comes up short.

The new ‘Thing,’ which takes places days before the events in John Carpenter’s 1982 classic of the same name, merely replicates that film’s tactics with less panache.

‘The Thing’ churns out the kind of slick special effects Carpenter would have killed for at the time. But the 1982 model teased out the story’s paranoia with crude but effective tools. The new ‘Thing’ feels like an artificial attempt at bringing a monster franchise back from the dead.

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In light of the devastation to our civilization directly resulting from the collectivist policies of our ruling elite, there’s probably never been a better time to look at one of Hollywood’s best-loved genres – the end-of-the-world movie.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what films qualify for this category – one list of doomsday movies includes dozens of very different films, with plots ranging from the world blowing up to society suddenly changing dramatically into something unfamiliar, dystopian, and creepy.  A documentary about the last two-and-a-half years would qualify as the latter.

From the Cold War nuke paranoia of Fail Safe (1964) to the “Oh s***, it’s a comet” catastrophes envisioned by flicks like Deep Impact (1998), they run the gamut.  Sometimes society is teetering – think California – and sometimes it has fallen completely into the abyss – think Detroit.

But at their best, these movies show us something about ourselves and about enduring truths, challenging our intellects and asking vital questions about the nature of man.  But mostly they’re just cool and fun to watch.

And sometimes they are Zardoz (1974).  This is an utterly insane 70’s freakshow starring Sean Connery that can best be described as what it must be like to party with Anthony Weiner and Eric Massa in Thailand with an endless supply of bad Woodstock acid and a substantial NEA performance art grant.  Gotta respect any movie that offers the straight-faced line, “The gun is good, the penis is evil.”   (more…)

#6: Halloween (1978)

I hate a guy with a car and no sense of humor.

A nothing budget, very little blood, and no gore – but what we do have are three sympathetic lead performances, a perfectly structured screenplay, and a young, hungry filmmaker who knew exactly where to place his camera and how to stage a scene.  Those are and always have been the perfect ingredients to create lightning in a bottle.

In the entire world, Rob Zombie was the least qualified director to helm Hollywood’s least necessary remake. To anyone paying attention, it’s very simple. What makes Michael Myers Michael Myers is that he personifies True Evil; he is as remorseless as he is unstoppable. Worse, he is the six year-old next door who snapped for no good reason, the cute little nephew whose eyes suddenly went forever dead, and that sweet kid who sat next to your son in the first grade who one day decided he would hack his sister to pieces. But more important than any of that, Mr. Zombie, is that there’s no explanation for Michael Myers – no back-story, no pseudo psycho-sexual analysis, no politically correct trailer trash trauma, and every second that that ill-conceived (and over-directed) remake spent explaining Michael Myers not only drained away the very thing that made him the immortal stuff of nightmares, but reaffirmed just what a masterpiece co-writer/director John Carpenter delivered into the world late in the fall of 1978.

The year is 1963; the place, the fictional town Haddonfield, Illinois — a quiet, leafy, idyllic suburb that probably hasn’t seen a real crime in years. Through the eyes of … someone, we watch the stalking of a couple of randy teenagers, the grabbing of a butcher knife, and the slicing to death of a teen aged girl whose last word, “Michael!”, comes in the form of a scream mixed with recognition, disbelief and terror. A few beats later, and to our great horror and astonishment, Michael is unmasked by his parents and revealed to be nothing more than a normal-looking six year-old boy. (more…)

What is horror?

The word comes down to us from the Old Roman, horrere, which means literally “to stand on end” (as in hair) or “to shiver,” whether from fear or cold – Ovid refers to the “chill-bearing breath” of the North Wind (Metamorphosis, I.65).

Halloween is a unique holiday, marked for the celebration of the chill bearing, when demons and witches are allowed to come out to play and scare the bejezzus out of us – or at least, that’s how it used to be.

Over the last decade or so, Halloween has become less about creep and more about camp; Dracula and Frankenstein costumes replaced by Octomom and Obama masks (OK, those are more scary). What I want to do here is help those who would like go old school this year, and have a truly frightful All Hallows’ Eve.

(First suggestion – avoid bars. Like St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s, Halloween brings out the amateur drinkers, a more loathsome species than any undead thing you may encounter. No, Halloween is best spent alone with someone special to snack on in the dark, with something scary to read, listen to, or watch.) (more…)

Director Rob Zombie’s biggest mistake in 2007’s remake of “Halloween“ was in his desire to “explain” Michael Myers. Most of the narrative was spent building an unimaginative trailer trash mythology, which in turn drained off what made Myers so uniquely terrifying: the fact that he was just some suburban kid who snapped one night. The sequel takes this bad idea a step further, digging into the psyche of our Michael to explain why he’s so determined to kill his sister Laurie. Hint: He wants to bring the family together.

The original “Halloween II” (1981) picked up right where John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece left off. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is in the hospital after the previous night’s attack and Michael returns for another 90 minutes of mayhem. In a nod to the predecessor, Zombie wants us thinking things will go that way until he twists the plot forward a year, but the result is that he just kind of remakes the first one … again. (more…)

The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)