WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 12/19/03

I’d been meaning to see Punch-Drunk Love for awhile, so I finally got around to seeing it last night. I’d heard a little about the film and was curious to see how Adam Sandler would be in it. While it didn’t totally work for me, I appreciated what it was doing.

It was a very interesting, quirky, dark-comedy love story. I wasn’t sure if it was kind of a light parody of a romance film, though it felt more genuine than that. I think it was meant to be two weird characters falling in love, with a bunch of other things happening, some of which were metaphorical, some of which were just there to show a complicated and bizarre world.

The movie got a little overboard with some of the artsy flourishes, such as random kaleidoscope bursts of colors between scenes, but I really liked other things it did. It used different lenses to distort the scene slightly, and lots of amplified ambient noise to give things an edgy feel and a look into the skewed world that the character inhabited.

There were a couple of visual flourishes that were really cute too, such as when Adam Sandler’s character is talking on the payphone to his love interest. When she says she’ll meet him for dinner, the whole phone booth lights up with this soft glow. There was a parade going on in the background, throughout the whole scene as well. The film had a very good sense ot layering things together to fill out the environment.

It was refreshing to see Adam Sandler play something different. He had traits from some of his other films, being an outcast, anger problems, etc, but he played them genuine here and not for laughs. There were no funny voices or his usual shtick too.

His character was both pathetic and endearing, and a little scary at times. His whole family (seven domineering sisters) is kind of disturbing, but you get angry at them and it engenders an empathy toward Adam Sandler’s character.

The movie’s kind of an odd mix, but I appreciated it. It had some interesting characters and it was very much character-driven too. A friend had seen it and I believe had similar feelings, but he did recommend me seeing it. I’m glad I did.

Originally Written 10/28/02

Once I’d heard of Blood Freak I knew I must see it. It’s a story of a bodybuilder/motorcylcist, Hirshel, who looks like a cross between Elvis and Mitchell (from another bad movie of the same name), who meets up with a woman on the Florida turnpike. She takes him back to her house where her younger sister is having a party with a bunch of druggies.

The older sister is into religion and doesn’t approve, and rambles out a bunch of random bible verses to demonstrate that.Hirshel is acting all straight-laced and interested in the “good” sister, but then gets seduced by the bad sister and after taking a few hits on one suped-up joint he’s instantly hooked and turns into a raging pot fiend.

He also gets a job at a local poultry farm and for a little extra cash agrees to be a test subject and eat turkey meat that’s been treated with experimental chemicals, it’s all for FDA testing of course, so how bad could it be? He has a bad reaction and after lying on the ground and shaking for what feels like 20 minutes of screen time, he mutates into a hideous half-turkey monster, well more actually a guy with a turkey mask on his head. He then rambles around the night, stalking junkies to kill and slurp up their blood to get his fix. He also goes after a pusher whose done his woman wrong and works him over with a band saw…

Now from the description the movie sounds deliciously bad, but unfortunately as the Huey Lewis song goes, “sometimes bad is bad.” The movie was one stinky turkey, litteraly. It reminded me a lot of an MST3K movie, Manos: The Hands of Fate, it had many of the same qualities, bad camera work, shaky footage, out-of-focus shots, poorly-lit images, muddy audio, incomprehensible, boring dialog, people reading off of cue cards, etc. The pacing of the film was really laborious too.

Okay, we get the fact that he’s on a bike, you don’t need to show us every mile he rides. Oh good, show him going through the toll booth, that’s good cinema. Yes, we understand he’s at the poultry farm, we saw the sign, you don’t need to film him turning off the main road and going all the way up the driveway. Then to further show us, the director proceeded to leave the camera running on shots of turkeys and cornish hens milling about for long stretches.

There was no music score either, so it got pretty painful. The gore sequences were kind of funny for how innept they were. There was one scene of a woman screaming and they just looped her scream so as Jeff put it, she sounded like a car alarm going off. Then in another shot a guy was attacking the turkey man, he stabbed the turkey in one of his eyes, then the turkey pulled out the knife and stabbed the guy. For both characters’ screams, the audio was the same.

The ultra layer of cheese on the film was how it was one of those scared-straight productions, a horror equivalent of Refer Madness. It was all done to show the evils of drugs and reckless living. As one reviewer described it on Amazon, “it’s the worlds only anti-pot, pro Jesus, monster movie.” Every few scenes the camera would cut to this narrator sitting in an audience who’d spout some philosophical tripe, obviously reading from a cue card of course.

What made things even more ironic was how he was going on against how bad drugs were all the while he was smoking a cigarrette. During his last preachy segment he kept on caughing, more and more, so that might have actually been some subtle irony on the director’s part, but given how bad the rest of the movie was, I hesitate to give the guy that much credit.I’m not sure if this was the absolutely worst movie I’ve ever seen, as I’ve seen a lot of stinkers, but this is up near the top of the list.

The rest of the disc had some amusing extra features, such as trailers for a bunch of other trashy films, and a few shorts as well. One of those was about a sleazy motel owenr who spied on pretty girls through a one-way mirror, filming them as they repeatedly put on and took off fancy underwear and rolled arojnd on the bed nude. We had to fast-forward through that one it was so painful.

Then there was another amusing little story about a guy who gets his frigid wife to get over her embarassment of being seen naked by going to a nudist friends’ backyard picnic, complete with nude tenis and twister. Heh, I couldn’t tell if the movie was actually trying to be genuine or was there for seedy peeping. Just plain goofy.

06/26/03

I checked out Bend it like Beckam tonight. I’d heard about it from a couple of people and it sounded like a good story, which it was. It’s about a teenage Indian girl in England, who’s obsessed with soccer/footbal (David Beckam is her idol, which gives the title of the movie.)

The plot concerns her playing soccer, joining the local girls team, behind her parents’ back, and how she’s caught between the outside world and their traditional family values. They want her to be a good Indian girl, to learn how to cook and to get engaged, and she just wants to play soccer.

The story was all about culture clash, but also about parents trying to reconcile differences with their children. That was also shown with an English girl she befriends, and how her parents don’t quite get her either.

The story was well balanced between drama and comedy, and the lighthearted moments complemented the serious parts well. There were also a lot of fun characters in the film, and it was just entertaining seeing them interact. I was reminded of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and also The Wedding Banquet in parts of the film. Also, it was neat hearing everyone talk with English accentsm having just been over there a few weeks ago. All in all the movie was quite cute and sweet.

Originally Written 10/07/03

I saw Confessions of a Dangerous Mind tonight, the surreal bio-pic based on Chuck Baris’ auto-biography. The story was damn near impossible to believe, but that’s beyond the point, true or not it made for an interesting tale.

I liked the juxtaposition of smaltzy, TV kitsch and the gritty underworld of the CIA. Chuck’s character was both amusing and tragic, and creepy too. I also appreciated the slightly non-linear narrative and surreal imagery of it. If you like offbeat films, it’s worth checking out as a rental.

Originally Written 03/28/04

I went to see the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The film was quite good. It updated Romero’s work, but stayed true to a lot of the source material, from what I could remember from it. The feel of the movie was also reminiscent to the recent film 28 Days Later. Romero’s zombies were slow and rambling. They were much easier to get away from but had some pathos to them. These new breed of zombies are much meaner, faster and more scary. A couple of scenes made you realize they were lost souls as well though.

What makes a zombie film interesting for me is not just the horror and the gore though. It’s a perfect setting to show how people handle the end of the world. It gives the filmmaker a chance to bring together a small group of people who are a microcosm of society. Yes the characters tend to be archetypes, but it still gives a chance for some interesting interaction.

This film was solid on that front. It’s not high drama, but it was still interesting and gave the writer a chance to deal with things like racism, classism, people fighting for control of the group, etc. The story was simple, but it kept my attention. There were some clever bits of dark humor too.

There were some failings with the film, like how the credits were amped up with MTV quick cuts that threatened to give you a seizure and how it seemed like there were two or three sets of credits at the end because they kept on showing more of the ending. However, they did choose some great music, like Johnny Cash’s recent song, “When the Man Comes Around” using Revelations imagery, and “People Who Have Died” by the Jim Carol band. Anyway, for fans of the genre, I’d say it’s definitely worth checking out.