Writing "Ask FlickChick" has always been one of the most enjoyable parts of my job, and you're a big part of the reason: Your questions are always great and I love research. So thanks for being such great readers, and I hope you'll stop by my personal website – I'm in the process of expanding it, so expect to see several new areas added in the next few weeks.
I'll be focusing on the kind of movies I love: Horror, offbeat vintage films, documentaries, neglected and overlooked classics, foreign films and exploitation. And I plan to write about books, television and pretty much anything weird and wonderful that crosses my path.
Thanks again for helping to make my time at TVGuide.com so much fun.
Maitland McDonagh
Ask FlickChick: Is The Dark Knight Cursed, and More Movie Questions
Ask FlickChick: Is The Dark Knight a cursed production? Plus, the celebrity name game, name that movie and more movie questions answered
Question: Do you believe that some movies are cursed? I know it sounds ridiculous, but there's been some talk about a curse of The Dark Knight and it seems as though a lot of bad things have happened to people who were involved, starting with Heath Ledger. -- Kara
FlickChick: In a word, no.
In a few more words, I think the twin curses of recklessness and cutting corners to save money have caused more grief than any malevolent supernatural forces.
In the case of The Dark Knight, a visual effects technician named Conway Wickliffe died during a test run of a car stunt on September 25, 2007, before principal shooting started. By all accounts, that was simply a very unfortunate accident -- Wycliffe was on a camera truck, which ran into a tree -- he wasn't even in the stunt car, which was unmanned.
Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription medication long after production wrapped; technically speaking, if he died because of a curse it would be the curse of Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the Dark Knight follow up Ledger had already started shooting. God knows, Gilliam's bad luck is notorious -- the curious should take a look at the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2003), which started out as a behind the scenes feature about the making of his The Man Who Killed Quixote and wound up the chronicle of a film that never was.
And Morgan Freeman was involved in a non-fatal car accident on August 4th, a good week after The Dark Knight opened. The accident had nothing to do with any movie: Freeman was driving in Tennessee and reportedly told the first medical personnel on the scene that he may have fallen asleep at the wheel.
All that said, The Dark Knight is hardly the first movie associated with a so-called "curse," and I think part of that is that the human mind is designed to look for patterns: It's how we make sense of the world.
There's always been talk about the curse of Poltergeist (1982), for example, though it boils down to two awful incidents: 22-year-old Dominique Dunne, who played the older sister of the Freeling family, who had the misfortune to move into a house built on top of a ancient Indian graveyard, was murdered by her boyfriend some five months after the movie opened and 12-year-old Heather O'Rourke, who played younger sister Carol Anne -- she uttered the immortal words "They're he-eeere" -- died horribly young of septic shock in 1988 after making two Poltergeist sequels. Dreadfully sad, but more indicative of life's casual cruelty than the evil eye.
Actor Julian Beck, who played the evil Reverend Kane in 1986's Poltergeist II (and co-founded of the Living Theatre in 1947 with his wife, Judith Malina) died in 1985, but he was 60 and fought a long battle against stomach cancer. And Will Sampson, also of Poltergeist II but best known as the silent Indian in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), died in 1987. He was only 53, but he had also just received a heart-lung transplant, which is about as serious a medical procedure as there is.
Similar rumors surround The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976) and The Crow (1994), but when you look at the "mysterious incidents" they come down to bad luck, the usual accidents and delays that plague all film sets and the fact that you can die of the flu (54-year-old Jack MacGowran of The Exorcist), fall victim to special effects mishaps (Brandon Lee of The Crow) or narrowly escape death a laGregory Peck of The Omen, who cancelled his reservation on a chartered flight that subsequently crashed and killed everyone aboard. As the Book of Common Prayer says, "In the midst of life, we are in death."
Question: I'm probably the last person to know, but when I read that golden-age Hollywood actresses Joan Fontaine and Olivia De Havilland were sisters I was totally surprised. Was it just the way things were done back then that relatives took totally different names? I mean, today it seems pretty normal for actors to keep their family names when they have close relatives who are also in the business. Or am I inferring too much from one example? -- Ames
FlickChick: I think then, as now, it was a matter of choice. The pros and cons come down to having a name that can open doors vs. having people think you're getting gigs you don't deserve because of family connections.
In the case of older actors and actresses, you should also remember that people habitually changed their names then in a way that they don't now: Anything foreign-sounding was a no-no, as were names that sounded Jewish or were just too ordinary or unglamorous for a movie star.
As far back as the silent era, there were siblings who proudly shared their family name, witness the Bennett sisters Constance -- who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame -- Barbara, the mother of 1980s TV shock-jock Morton Downey, Jr., and Joan, whose lengthy career included at least two film noir classics (Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window) and the 1960s and '70s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.
And there were Barrymores everywhere: Born into a famous/notorious theatrical family, John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore started making films in the silent era and enjoyed careers that lasted well into the sound period. John's son and daughter, John Drew Barrymore and Diana Barrymore, carried on the family tradition (including a tendency to alcoholism), and John Drew's daughter, Drew Barrymore, has ensured that the family is still a movie force with which to be reckoned. Despite a rocky start, she seems to have outrun the family demons and become a formidable filmmaker who acts, produces and is about to make her directing debut. Legendary Western director John Ford and his brother, actor- director Francis Ford, never hid their kinship.
At the same time, sisters and lifelong rivals Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland established themselves under dramatically different names. So did brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway (whose looks and mannerisms were so similar that they could have passed as twins), siblings Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, sisters June Havoc and Gypsy Rose Lee and brothers James Arness (Gunsmoke) and Peter Graves (Mission: Impossible).
Today we 're familiar with, to name only a few examples, the multitudinous Arquettes, Clint and Ron Howard, siblings Tim and Tyne Daly and brothers Matt and Kevin Dillon and Owen and Luke Wilson. Natasha Gregson Wagner is the daughter of Natalie (Natasha) Wood and Robert Wagner, Amber Tamblyn is the daughter of West Side Story star Russ Tamblyn, Josh Brolin, Cole Hauser, Campbell Scott and Jake Busey are the sons of James Brolin, Wings Hauser, George C. Scott and Gary Busey. Maggie And Jake Gyllenhaal are siblings, as are Ben and Casey Affleck, Julia and Eric Roberts (up-and-comer Emma is Eric's daughter) and Donnie and Mark Wahlberg.
On the other hand, Judy Garland's daughters took their dads' last names -- Liza Minelli and Lorna Luft -- and Nicolas Cage's surname (borrowed from a comic book character) doesn't exactly scream that Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle. But director Sophia Coppola wears her dad's name proudly. And who could have guessed that Fox reality show phenomenon Darva Conger, of the 2000 Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, was the daughter of actress Susan Harrison, of the classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957)?
As to Fontaine and de Havilland, Joan changed her last name when she followed her older sister into acting, supposedly on the advice of a fortune teller. But the fact that the two of them fought tooth and nail from the time they were small children may have had something to do with her wanting to carve out a separate identity for herself. Not that it worked -- the entertainment press of the day found out quickly enough and sold plenty of fan magazines with tales of the feuding sisters. Fontaine and de Havilland did nothing to defang the stories, and their frosty moment on stage during the 1946 Oscars -- Joan presented Olivia with her best actress statuette for To Each His Own and Olivia gave Joan the cold shoulder -- ensured that their personal and professional rivalry went down in history.
Question: When I recently saw the Michael Mann movie Collateral (2004) it dredged up a memory of seeing a movie on TV -- maybe a made-for TV picture, maybe a real movie playing on TV -- that kind of reminded me of it. There was a black actor driving a cab and a passenger who'd committed some kind of crime. I know this isn't much to go on, but can you help me? -- Maya
FlickChick: You saw Jack Starrett's made-for-television Night Chase (1970), shot as "The Man in the Back Seat" and starring David Janssen of The Fugitive (1963-1967) and Yaphet Kotto, probably best known today for his portrayal of a working stiff in space in Alien (1979). Like Collateral, which stars Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, this character-driven thriller, is rooted in the relationship that develops between the driver and his passenger over the course of a long night.
But that's where the similarities end: Where Collateral is about a driver who's dreaming his life away and a professional hit man, in Night Chase the cabbie is street smart and tough and his passenger is an ordinary businessman who shot his wife's lover in a moment of impulsive rage and, thinking he's now a murderer, is fleeing to Mexico.
When Night Chase came out on video in the mid 1980s it was retitled L.A. Cab, presumably in hopes of making renters think it was something along the lines of the popular comedy D.C. Cab (1983), starring Mr. T and directed by Joel Schumacher.
Though this is slightly off topic, you might be interested to know that Michael Mann actually did a made-for-TV movie called L.A. Takedown (1989) that was essentially a run through for his own Heat (1995), with Scott Plank and Alex McArthur in the roles taken over by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. And here's the best part: There's a new movie called L.A. Takedown that isn't a remake of the Mann film, but is about an Indian cabbie forced to drive a pair of killers around Los Angeles. Weird.
Question: I just saw a movie called Frailty, directed by Bill Paxton from Big Love and I thought it was pretty amazing: Paxton plays a small town dad who thinks God is telling him to kill "demons" and makes his two little boys help. Anyway, my question is this: When Paxton's character starts having visions, is the angel played by Matthew McConnaughey, who's in the movie as one of the sons grown up? I've looked and looked and it would be really cool if it were McConnaughey in both roles, but I really can't tell. I hope you can clear this up for me -- thanks! -- GMS
FlickChick: You know, I thought the same thing when I first saw Frailty (2001), but the angel is actually played by one of the movie's prop men, Edmond Ratliff. The resemblance is striking. I rewatched Frailty a couple of weeks ago in preparation for talking about it on an upcoming Bravo ...Scariest Movie Moments documentary (the third, for anyone who's counting) and it's as good as I remember -- even Matthew McConaughey is teriffic. I highly recommend it.
Ask FlickChick: Dual Directors, Different Subtitles & More Questions
Ask FlickChick: Why did Murder Inc. need two directors, how does a movie like OSS 117 wind up with different subtitles on different prints and more movie questions answered!
Question: This morning, I finally saw the 1960 true-life crime drama Murder, Inc. and found it to be quite compelling. My question is: why did the film have two directors (Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg)? Was there some behind-the-scenes drama you can share with us? I read every column and miss it terribly when it doesn't appear. Best wishes --Jay
FlickChick: There is a story, though it's less juicy drama than a tale of bad timing. Stuart Rosenberg, who's best know for directing Cool Hand Luke(1967), with Paul Newman, began his career in television. His credits included episodes of the New York-based crime dramas Decoy and Naked City, which I'm sure is why he was offered Murder Inc. as his feature directing debut.
But Rosenberg left during production in support of back-to-back strikes by Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America. Burt Balaban, the film's producer (and one of the Balaban movie dynasty; he's Bob's cousin), took over and finished the film.
Question: I recall seeing a movie possibly made in the seventies which was based on the Philadelphia Experiment. It wasn't the 1984 version although the plot was similiar especially when the sailor meets his friend who had gone back to the past and was now much older than him. Regards -- Max
FlickChick: I'm wondering if you're thinking of The Final Countdown, which also involves time travel and a naval ship -- the USS Nimitz, which was actually used for the film – except that in The Phildalphia Experiment, the ship is thrown forward from 1943 to the present, while in The Final Countdown it's thrown back from the present to 1941. The Final Countdown was released in 1980, but that's barely out of the 1970s. Does anyone have another suggestion?
Question: Hi, Maitland! Add my name to the list of people who miss the weekly podcast. I looked forward to listening to it on the treadmill every Friday.
I recently saw OSS 117, which I loved. I saw it a second time at a different theatre and there were noticeable differences in the subtitles, such as misspelled words, gaps in translation and poor punctuation. How does this happen? Are there different companies that put together the films for distribution? Thanks! – Dale
FlickChick: I called a friend who books films, and he was as baffled as I was; he called the distributor of OSS 117, who in turn suggested I call the lab where the American subtitling was done – that’s how curious your question made me, along with everyone I spoke to along the way.
Two possibilities kept coming up: That the prints represented different print runs and that adjustments to the subtitles were made between them, or that there were multiple source prints and the subtitles were done from different translations.
Nick Pinkerton from LVT Laser Subtitling very kindly applied himself to figuring out what happened in the case of OSS 117, and here's what he came up with: "I think the difference in this case was between a print, probably engraved at our Paris office from files prepared in the UK by a speaker of British English, and a print that we engraved here, on which the subtitles would have been 'Americanized' for spelling and, in some cases, the translations revised. I remember that there were some alterations of the original translator's revisions of puns and other little linguistic plays."
Question: I don't know too much about movies, but I recently saw interviews on the TV Guide channel to with some of the people who were in The Dark Knight with Heath Ledger, who say that his net worth – or maybe what he had in property; I don't remember the words – was only Is he only worth $145,000. Geeze, even I, a single gal down in Texas, have more than $145,000 in "estimated assets!" Is that true? I guess it might be, but just thought I would ask! -- Sam
FlickChick: I've read new reports that mention the sum of $145,000, but they're only referring to Heath Ledger's US assets; the number comes from legal documents that were filed in New York after his death. But apparently the bulk of Ledger's estate is in his native Australia and I've read estimates in the area of $20 million, all of which he left to his parents and three sisters.
I would imagine the exact sum will come out at some point in the future, because Michelle Williams, the mother of Ledger's two-year-old daughter, will have to file a court claim in order for the child to inherit any portion of the estate. Ledger's will was drawn up before the child was born and never updated. Which, frankly, isn't all that surprising: I'm sure Ledger's lawyers advised him to redo his will after his child was born, but at 29 it's easy to procrastinate.
DVD Tuesday: Drag queens, road trip, The Adventures of Priscilla...
DVD Tuesday: Drag queens hit the road in the surprising Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert!
True confession: Until last weekend, I only knew The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert from the musical Drew Carey Show episode in which Drew and arch-rival Mimi stage competing dance-offs, pitting Rocky Horror Picture Show lovers against Priscilla fans. My loss.
My excuse: I assumed it was a middle-of-the-road drag show like Victor/Victoria or La Cages aux Folles, and I was wrong. The plot is (ahem) straightforwaword: Sydney-based Tick (Hugo Weaving -- yes, Agent Smith of The Matrix trilogy), who does a caberet act under the name "Mitzi," gets a gig at an upscale casino in Alice Springs. He recruits dishy, relentlessly provocative Adam (Guy Pearce, of L.A. Confidential and The Time Machine), who performs as "Felicia," and his old friend Bernadette (Terence Stamp), a middle-aged transsexual who just lost her much-younger boyfriend to a freak accident.
Adam buys an ancient school bus -- the titular "Priscilla" -- for the lengthy drive across the outback, and the three hit the road, squabbling, dealing with mechanical difficulties and crossing paths with a cross-section of rural Australians, some of whom are more sanguine about men in ladies' frocks than others -- many of the movie's more offbeat twists are predicated on who is and who's not.
Most of the rest involve various secrets Tick has been keeping from the others, and their reactions when the truth comes to life.
The great thing about Priscilla is that Tick and Adam aren't the kind of female impersonators who turn themselves into passable facsimiles of Barbra, Liza-with-a-Z and Cher: They're the products of a particualrly Australian drag scene that emphasizes outsized, kabuki-esque theater rather than common or garden variety cross-dressing (anyone who's familiar with the late-scene maker Leigh Bowery will recognize the look), and the sight of the trio in their bizarre, candy-colored get ups against the barren red desert is arresting.
Sequences like the one in which an aboriginal man invites them to join a late-night tribal party are weirdly magical, and the sound of a digeridoo mixed into an '80s disco song is as bizarre as it is oddly evocative... especially when it's backing three giant drag queens dancing in the flickering shadows of a campfire beneath a vast Australian sky.
The banter is snappy, but it's never just a string of "ooh, Miss Thing" quips. Tick, Adam and Bernadette are real characters with real lives; they're all funny, but they're not funny in the same way. Tick is a goofball with more going on under the surface than he'd like people to think, Adam is a full-fledged brat who doesn't know when to dial it down and Bernadette know better that the two of them put together that the only thing you can count on is that if you live long enough, life will throw you some ugly curves. But even that beats the alternative.
The performances are remarkable, the scenery is breathtaking and the relationships that develop on and off the road are thoroughly engaging. Trust me, it's no To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
Question: I really miss the podcast -- cheer me up by answering this question, please. How did they finish The Dark Knight? I thought Heath Ledger died in the middle of filming. Thanks – Shannon
FlickChick: Thanks for missing the podcast – I miss doing it.
Unlike 1994's The Crow, which was in the middle of principle photography when star Brandon Lee died in an on-set accident, The Dark Knight was in post production at the time of Heath Ledger's sad and premature death.
So the filmmakers had all the footage they needed of Ledger's performance as the Joker – in fact, the actor already well into shooting his next project, Terry Gilliam's dark fantasy The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Ledger was playing the role of Tony, a performer in a travelling show whose proprietor (Christopher Plummer) sold his daughter's soul to the devil (Tom Waits) in return for magical powers. Ledger's demise threw that film's future into doubt -- production was suspended while the filmmakers tried to figure out what to do.
Writer-director Gilliam opted not to fake footage of Ledger, which is how The Crow was completed; he instead took advantage of the story's fantastic nature and recast the role with three other actors -- Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell – each of whom apparently plays a different aspect of the character.
Plummer has told interviewers that Gilliam is dedicating dedicate the film, which is scheduled for a 2009 release, to Ledger.
Question: I’m mailing from the Netherlands with a question. There is a movie that I can’t find anywhere and I’m hoping that you can help me out. I saw a movie a few years ago but can't figure out what it was called or how to find it. It's a Spanish-language love drama with a Benicio del Toro-type main character. He's a doctor that has all -- nice car, big house, good job, wife -- but falls in love with a woman who helps him when he's stranded with his car.
This movie is a mind-twister: All that is white in the beginning turns black and the other way around -- love as the reason you have to undergo and accept it, which is hard because it runs into the normality’s of life. Can you tell me the title of this movie? Thanks! With kind regards -- Gerko
FlickChick: I'm pretty sure you're describing Don't Move (2004), with Sergio Castellitto (most recently seenas the wicked uncle in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) as the doctor and Penelope Cruz, who was given a major-league ugly makeover for her role, as the woman who turns his life upside down.
Question: How could the American Film Institute air a three hour show about their top ten films in several genres but omit the horror genre? I guess movie like Psycho, Dracula and The Exorcist aren't considered worthy by the AFI. -- John
FlickChick: Beats me, especially when AFI's 10 Top Ten genres did include "Courtroom Drama."
Horror movies in general traditionally get short shrift from "serious" film critics and historians, but there are plenty of classic horror films, including the three you mention, that are pretty universally acknowledged as masterpieces of the cinema, period. In fact, Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973) and Dracula (1931) all made AFI's 2001 100 Years… 100 Thrills list.
That list, by the way, wasn't limited to horror – it includes movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Deliverance (1972) and The Deer Hunter (1978) -- so it's not as though AFI figured they'd already given the genre its due.
Question: I know this is kind of a geeky question, but do you know what kind of car Mel Gibson drives in Mad Max? – Mike
FlickChick: As someone who grew up in Manhattan and didn't learn to drive until I was… well, let's not get into how old I was. Suffice it to say that I can't tell one car from another. But the experts at Car Stars say that "the last of the V8 interceptors" was a 1973 Ford Falcon XB Coupe. I'll take their word for it.
DVD Tuesday: Looking for more smart, emotionally resonant animation like Wall-E? Try Hayao Miyazaki's stunning Spirited Away!
As I've said in past columns, I'm not a huge fan of mainstream American animated features – overall, they're too frenetic and five-second-attention-span oriented for my taste. But Pixar's Wall-E is a reminder of how richly imagined animated films can be -- and that makes me think of Hayao Miyazaki's Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001), a fable about family and friendship whose marvelous sights, from flying dragons to traditional Japanese radish spirits, should keep the most restless child enthralled.
And at the same time, its emotional truths are sophisticated enough to engage adults -- it's a real film for the whole family, as opposed to a juvenile romp studded with in-jokes and pop-culture references designed to keep grown ups awake.
Spoiled little Chihiro doesn't want to move to a new town and dedicates herself to making the drive there a misery for her parents. The family takes a wrong turn into a forbidding forest, and then impulsively decide to explore a hillside tunnel which, to their delighted surprise, opens into a theme park modeled after a traditional Japanese village. Though the place looks abandoned, the concession stands are fully stocked, and while Chihiro explores, her parents indulge.
Chihiro runs into a slightly older boy named Haru, who warns her to get out before it gets dark, but she's never listened to anyone and isn't about to start. Come nightfall, she realizes that she's trapped and that her parents have been turned into pigs.
The theme park, it turns out, is actually part of a spirit-world spa resort run by a sorceress. Given a new name and forced to work as a maid, pampered Chihiro must find her place in a strange, frightening environment if she's going to figure out a way to rescue her parents and return to her own world.
For all the grotesque creatures and visual inventiveness, Spirited Away is about Chihiro's emotional maturation: She starts out a sulky brat and becomes a resourceful young woman who realizes she isn't the center of the universe, and that real friendship is precious and worth sacrificing for.
Miyazaki is never preachy – Chihiro's growth seems completely organic. And she's a remarkably subtle character: Cute, selfish, clever, irritating, loyal, capricious and capable of more than she herself ever imagined – not like an adult's idealized image of a child, but like a real little girl.
Question: I have a question about a horror movie I saw during the early 1990s that I think was geared to kids or family audiences.
A family moves into a haunted house, and I think they find some magic spell book. At the end, they vacuum up a boogeyman. I've been trying to track it down and keep coming across Saturday the 14th, but I don't think that's it and can't get a copy movie to check. Thanks for helping me out -- Evan
FlickChick: I'm pretty sure you're looking for Mr. Boogedy, a Disney Channel movie first broadcast in 1986. Novelty-shop entrepreneur Carlton Davis transplants his wife and three kids (Married With Children's David Faustino, Benji Gregory and original Buffy Kristy Swanson) to a small New England town -- portentously named Lucifer Falls -- where he'll be running "the only Gag City franchise for hundreds of miles" and can afford to install his family in their first house.
The kids aren't thrilled about the move, so when they start complaining about spooky sights and sounds he assumes they're just acting out. When he begins experiencing weird things, Carlton figures they're using the tricks of his trade against him -- clever!
Here's a sample of Boogedy antics:
But the house really is haunted by Mr. Boogedy, the unquiet ghost of a man who lived there centuries earlier; his signature scare phrase is "boogedy boogedy boo!" and they eventually "exorcise" him with a vacuum cleaner.
As you remember, Mr. Boogedy was geared for a family audience: The scares are gentle but apparently quite memorable. I've never seen it -- I had way aged out of the Disney demographic by the '80s -- but many of my readers remember it vividly. It was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Bride of Boogedy (1987), the following year.
Mr. Boogedy and Bride of Boogedy were both released on Walt Disney Home Video, but are long out of print -- used copies occasionally turn up for sale online. Neither has ever been commercially available on DVD, and given that there are clearly plenty of people who'd be delighted to buy it -- you have to figure there are hundreds of fans for every one who writes to me -- I couldn't begin to tell you why. No-one I've ever spoken to at Disney can give me an answer.
Question: I've been trying to track down the title of what I believe was a made-for-TV movie about werewolves.
Here's what I remember: The lead was a Barbara Stanwyck type and in one of the final scenes, the werewolf is chasing her through a big house; she closes expandable louvered doors as she leaves each room. I know it's not much to go on, but I'd appreciate your insight as to the title. -- Tim
FlickChick: This is more an educated guess than an insight, but here goes: I think you may be looking for Moon of the Wolf (1972), a made-for-TV werewolf tale based on the novel by Leslie H. Whitten and set in Marsh Island, Louisiana. It starred David Janssen (of The Fugitive fame) as the local sheriff and Barbara Rush (if not what I'd called a Barbara Stanwyck type per se, certainly an old-Hollywood veteran) as Louise Rodanthe, one of two descendents of the wealthy family who own half the town. She's just returned, somewhat mysteriously, from a stint in big bad New York City and moved back into the family mansion with her brother.
I saw Moon of the Wolf when it first aired and haven't seen it since; my memories are pretty hazy and mostly involve the steamy, backwater bayou atmosphere and the fact that it was the first place I encountered the term loup garou -- the French term for "werewolf." But the Rodanthes live in a mansion and I can easily imagine that the film's climax involves Louise being pursued through the Rodanthe mansion.
Question: I'm hoping you can help me track down a movie I saw on TV as a child in the 1980s; it may have been made for TV, but I'm not sure. It was about a boy who encounters the ghost of a girl and the only things I remember are a creepy scene where he sees a little glow in the barn's attic window and the climax, which takes place in a mausoleum.
The song "Frere Jacques" was played throughout the movie, I think sung by the little girl ghost(creepy!!). I loved this movie as a child and would love to see it again. Do you have any idea what it might be? -- Susan
FlickChick: I do: Child of Glass (1978). Coincidentally it, like Mr. Boogedy, was a Disney TV production.
The Armsworth family moves into a Louisiana mansion (another coincidence -- bayou creepiness a laMoon of the Wolf) and young Alex (future Knots Landing regular Steve Shaw) begins seeing the ghost of a young creole girl named Inez (Olivia Barash), who sings "Frere Jacques" and is looking for her "child of glass."
Here's a Child of Glass clip featuring Inez singing "Frere Jacques:"
Alex and local girl Blossom Culp discover that Inez was murdered by pirates and cursed to remain trapped at the place of her death; Alex and Blossom race to figure out how to free her spirit, which involves, among other things, finding the child of glass -- Inez's beloved doll.
Based on young-adult novel The Ghost Belonged to Me -- first in a series featuring Blossom Culp -- by Newbery Medal-winner Richard Peck, Child of Glass made a lasting impression on a generation of Disney-raised kids. Like the Boogedy movies, it came out on VHS from Walt Disney Home Video and is out of print (it was issued in 1987!), but has never been on DVD.
Question: I watched a movie a couple of weeks ago and can't remember the title or figure out what channel I saw it on.
It was about a supermodel who meets a taxi driver and ends up having an affair with him. That's the best I can do -- I don't even remember the names of the actors. Can you help me? Thank you for your time -- Rick
FlickChick: That sounds to me like Fall (1997), written, directed by and starring Eric Schaeffer -- he played the cab driver, Michael. Supermodel Sarah is UK-born Amanda De Cadenet, best known for marrying Duran Duran bass player John Taylor and hanging around with Courtney Love.
The complication is that Sarah is already married to hunky fellow model Phillipe (Rudolf Martin, probably best know for playing Dracula on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who's in Madrid for a couple of months. Will Sarah choose the schlubby but soulful cabbie or her smoking-hot hubbie?
DVD Tuesday: Idiocracy — If You Don't Laugh, You'll Cry
DVD Tuesday: There's dumb, there's dumber, and then there's Idiocracy... Mike Judge has seen the future and it really doesn't work!
I mentioned Idiocracy in an earlier column, but now I think it's time to give it its due: Mike Judge's dystopian-future comedy is flawed, but I find myself quoting it all the time.
Worried that it's a waste to let America's best soldiers idle when there's no war for them to wage, the military initiates a top-secret program to put them on ice – literally – until they're needed. Naturally, the top brass isn't about to try out an experimental technology on the cream of the fighting crop, so they choose low-level GI Joe (Luke Wilson) and smart-mouthed hooker Rita (Maya Rudolph) as guinea pigs.
The plan is to freeze them for a year, but things happen, regimes change, and next thing you know, no-one who knew about the hush-hush experiment is around to keep tabs on it.
500 years later, Rita and Joe wake up in an America in which everyone with the brains God gave geese has been bred out of the gene pool. The president is a professional wrestler/porn star, the nation's top-rated TV show is "Ow, My Balls!" – all whacked in the 'nads gags, all the time -- and the country is facing an agricultural crisis because centuries of hard-sell advertising has convinced the morons of the future that crops should be watered with sports drinks, not water.
Rita and Joe are geniuses by comparison, but their future countrymen are too dumb to know it. Rita adapts – she knows a fresh market when she sees one – but Joe persists in trying to explain that water is not just for toilets, despite the fact that all talking sense does is get him called a fag.
I won't ruin the rest of the jokes, but some are so funny they hurt and Judge's reckless use of real brand names is refreshing. I can't say I know for sure that 20th-Century Fox buried the film in regional release before sending it to DVD was Judge's vicious skewering of Fox News, but it's hard not to think that may have played a part.
Idiocracy is uneven, but at its best it's brilliant, and the opening sequence sets the bar high: Prepare to squirm as it explains how the world's best and brightest thought their way out of reproducing while the dumbest of the dumb blithely insured their genetic place in the brave new world.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the multiple award-winning Movie Talkvodcast.
Things to Consider:
Favorite movies about the future, comic or serious?
Can futuristic fiction actually make people reconsider the way they think and act in light of the possible consequences for future generations? Writers like George Orwell certainly thought so, but is it futile to hope that a book (or movie) like 1984 can actually make a difference?
Ask FlickChick: An Oscar for Sarah Jessica Parker? And More Questions
Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City courtesy New Line Cinema
Ask FlickChick: Oscar chances for Sarah Jessica Parker, what's that movie and more…
Question: I think Sarah Jessica Parker will be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Sex and the City, but my dad doesn't think so. What do you think? -- Lisa M
FlickChick: I'm with your dad. I don't expect to see much Oscar love generally for Sex and the City. I think it's perceived as a very TV project, which rarely translates into support from the feature-film community, and I can't say I've heard anyone talking about how wowed they were by any of the film's performances. I think that by the time the nominating process begins, the movie will be forgotten by everyone except the fans for whom it was made.
Question: How did actor David Dukes, who played Dr. Miller in Rose Red, die? Was he scared and had a heart attack or what? – Scot
FlickChick: Veteran actor David Dukes did die of a heart attack, but while playing tennis on one of his days off from shooting the Steven King mini-series Rose Red (2002) in Washington State. He was 50, and had apparently had a previous heart attack, something his wife discovered when she hired her own pathologist because she was so deeply dissatisfied with the autopsy report prepared by the medical examiner of Pierce County, where Dukes died.
Question: There's a movie I'd really like to see, but I don't know the title. I just remember the previews from when it was in movie theaters: There was a boy unconscious in a sewer drain who's trying to somehow reach contact a girl he knows before he dies. I hope this is enough of a description. Thanks – Killer B
FlickChick: It is: You're looking for The Invisible (2007), which is a remake of the 2002 Swedish film Den Osynlige, which means "the invisible." The basic premise is that a teenaged boy is beaten almost to death and his soul is trapped between two worlds – he's invisible to the living but not one o fthe dead.
The story revolves around his efforts to make someone see or hear him, in the ever-slimmer hope that he can lead them to his dying body in time to be saved.
I know this sounds all movie elitist, but the original -- a tough little movie that uses a fantasy twist to tell a gritty story about bad choices and lingering consequences -- is the much better version. The US version was softened and made more formulaic throughout, but the worst change is to the bittersweet ending.
Question: I would have had more luck finding the title of this movie if I could remember either the lead actor or actress, but I can't! It was B&W and felt like a 1940s picture. The story, as I remember, is that a wealthy woman dies under mysterious circumstances and two beloved pets, a dog and a horse, return from the dead in human form to investigate.
I particularly remember the man, who was the dog in his previous life, occasionally playing with a ball the way a dog would and eating doggy snacks! I would love to watch this movie again as I remember being thoroughly charmed by it the first time around. Any help much appreciated! – Lesley
FlickChick: This is one of those movies I can count on getting an email about a couple of times a year: It's very low profile but seems to have made a lasting impression on the folks who stumbled across it.
You've got the story a little jumbled, But the horse and dog in human form are the giveaway: It's You Never Can Tell (1951), starring Dick Powell, Peggy Dow and Joyce Holden. Powell is the human reincarnation of King, a German Shepherd who inherits a fortune from an eccentric millionaire and is promptly poisoned for his money (a cautionary tale indeed for Trouble, the Maltese to which hotel magnate Leona Helmsley left $12 million).
The police suspect the late millionaire's pretty, animal-loving secretary, Ellen Hathaway (Dow), whom he named as King's guardian. But King doesn't believe she killed him, so he gets a special dispensation to return from animal heaven ("Beastatory") as detective Rex Shepherd and find his own killer. A dead palomino named Golden Harvest returns as Goldie (Holden), Rex's fleet-footed sidekick.
You Never Can Tell – a title that has to rank among the most useless and instantly forgettable of all time – has never been released on commercial VHS or DVD, but there are bootlegs kicking around online.
Times Square was never what it used to be: There was always someone around to tell you that you should have seen it when. Cue some nostalgic tale that starts, "it was so sleazy that…." Trust me, back in the 1970s it was plenty sleazy, and today it's like the Las Vegas casino version of its bad old self. But what a place to see low-budget American horror, yakuza pictures, spaghetti Westerns, Eurotrash thrillers and sexploitation, martial arts epics, mondo movies and assorted weirdness, all of which (and more) go into the Kill Bill mix.
The plot is simple, if digressive: A professional assassin code named "Black Mamba" (Uma Thurman) is murdered on her wedding on her wedding day. Except that she doesn't die: After four years in a coma, she wakes up and begins plotting her revenge against everyone who had a hand in destroying her life: Her four partners in crime (Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu and Michael Madsen) and big boss Bill (David Carradine).
Volume one focuses on the present day, while volume two delves more deeply into the blood-spattered bride's background, both are filled with images, characters, music, actors and themes guaranteed to plunge a die-hard exploitation buff into a feature length Proustian reverie.
Which isn't to say you can't enjoy the hell out of it even if you can't name all (or even any of) the references: Kill Bill is a flawlessly crafted piece of pulp entertainment.
And ultimately, that's why I prefer it to Grindhouse, a flawless crafted homage to the pulp entertainment experience. Grindhouse plays for me because I have vivid memories of that experience -- most of those trailers, for example -- including Rodriguez's Machete, Eli Roth's Thanksgiving and Edgar Wright's Don't -- are dead on the money, and trailers were the only way you ever knew what was coming to a pit near you.
Movies that played grindhouses rarely advertised; if they did it was with tiny ads that ran the day of opening and almost never mentioned the second (or third) feature. The best way to know what was opening on 42nd Street on any given Friday was to walk up one side of the street and down the other checking the marquees. But without those memories on which to draw, I think Grindhouse feels mannered, artificial and long.
Kill Bill, by contrast, moves like a freight train -- even if you watch both halves back to back; that's a combined four-hour running time – and repays multiple viewings. There's just too much detail to catch it all the first time out. And that's a movie to love.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the multiple award-winning Movie Talkvodcast.
Things to Consider:
How would you define "exploitation movie?" A Hollywood producer once said that all movies are exploitation movies, because they're designed to make money by exploiting something moviegoers want, from thought-provoking drama to cheap thrills.
For you, what's the difference between homage and a rip-off?
Do you distinguish between movies you're happy to admit you like and so-called "guilty pleasures?" (My feeling is if you like it, own up to it.)
What are some of your favorite of, let's say, the kind you'd only recommend to certain friends?
Do you remember grindhouses or drive-ins and, if so, do you have a story to tell?
Ask FlickChick: Why can't I get the 1994 Fantastic Four and more...
Ask FlickChick: Why you can't find the 1994 version of Fantastic Four, and more movie questions answered!
Question: I know there's a Roger Corman version of the Fantastic Four floating out there. Do you know if it ever is going to be released on DVD? – John
FlickChick: Legitimate DVD? Don't hold your breath – there are various versions of exactly why the low-budget, 1994 version of The Fantastic Four, executive produced by Roger Corman and Bernd Eichinger and directed by Canadian TV specialist Oley Sassone, isn't available. But it boils down to movie rights to the source material, which Eichinger has apparently had for years.
Movie rights to material based on existing sources aren't acquired in perpetuity: If you buy the right to make a movie from a book, an play, or whatever, you have a certain period of time within which to do it. If you don't the rights revert to the original rights holder, usually the original author but sometimes an estate or a corporate entity.
It's widely believed that the '94 Fantastic Four was done on the cheap to fulfill the requirement that a film be produced, but was never meant to be released. It was an investment in keeping the rights so they could be developed into a big budget picture.
Tim Burton's Batman (1989) blazed the trail for big budget, state-of-the-art effects heavy versions of classic comic book properties, and once comic book fans had seen Batman, it seems like a real gamble to think they'd be willing to go back to the kind of low-rent production values and b-list actors associated with Corman-produced properties.
While Corman has always been a raffish gambler, Eichinger was by then focusing on prestige pictures for the international market (Body of Evidence being a conspicuous exception, but even it was a high profile and expensive project) and less expensive theatrical and TV films for the German market. An English-language, low-budget Fantastic Four doesn't fit into either category.
That said, some actors involved with the production have said in interviews that the film was intended for release and was shelved later. But if you were the executive producer, would you tell the talent that no-one was ever going to see their work? Probably not.
The direct-to-DVD My Name is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure (2004), with New Amsterdam's Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, was the product of a similar situation: Miramax needed to make a film in order to hold onto the rights to Peter O'Donnell's female superspy character, a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's.
There's a longstanding rumor that he wants to make a big-budget version, but in the meantime, Miramax made a modest one as a kind of place holder and released it to the home market with no fanfare. And just by the way, it's not a bad little movie given the limitations imposed by a low budget.
If you want to see the 1994 Fantastic Four, you're going to have to buy a bootleg – believe me, they're not hard to find. And while I don't advocate buying bootlegs of movies that are commercially available, because it cuts the legitimate rights holders out of the picture, I will admit to having bought them when films I want to see just aren't available in any form.
Question: Several years ago my mother watched a WWII movie that had soldiers skiing and shooting (bi-athletes). We know that the movie was not titled Heroes of Telemark because we have already seen that film. She believes that the movie was made sometime between 1940-1950 and that it was a black and white film. Any suggestions? -- Maria
FlickChick: You don't mention whether or not the movie was subtitled; if so, the Russian Ski Battalion (1938) is a possibility, or perhaps the Norwegian Kampen om Tungtvannet (1948), of which The Heroes of Telemark (1965) was a remake.
If not, the US Ski Patrol (1940) seems like a good bet. The Roger Corman produced Ski Troop Attack (1960) is an outside possibility; it was produced later than your mother thinks, but was in B&W and is set, obviously, during WWII, which could have made it seem older.
Question: I'm looking for the name of a movie that aired last week, but didn't get to see but a small bit . It was about two sisters who were left with a lady who had other children, and one of the sisters was torched until death. Can you help me find the title? Thanks -- Bugs
FlickChick: I'm thinking you mean "tortured" rather than "torched," and if so, you're looking for American Crime (2007), starring Catherine Keener and Ellen Page.
It's based on the true case of teenager Sylvia Likens, who was tortured to death in 1965 by a group of youngsters encouraged by Gertrude Baniszewski, the woman who was being paid to look after Sylvia and her sister. An American Crime was intended for theatrical release, but wound up going direct to cable – it was picked up by Showtime.
The same case also inspired The Girl Next Door – also 2007 -- based on a novel by Jack Ketchum.
Question: As a child growing up in late 1950s, early '60s, I was entranced by two movies I remember to this day. I don't think either has ever been on TV and I'm not sure why -- perhaps they're available somewhere on DVD?
I think both were English. One was about faith: A little Jewish girl named Rachel was best friends with a little Catholic boy -- I think title was "Hand in Hand?" Something happened to the little girl and the village Rabbi and Catholic priest banded together.
The other was a comedy about a small European country which, I believe, had a nuclear bomb. I think Peter Sellers starred in it, possibly in multiple roles -- one being the Queen of the country. Can you help? Thanks -- Emily H
FlickChick: The first film is indeed called Hand in Hand; it was made in the UK in 1960 and starred child actors Philip Needs and Loretta Parry as the children. It was released in the US by Columbia Pictures and won a special Golden Globe award for "Promoting International Understanding."
It has never been released commercially on VHS or DVD; there are bootlegs available online, if you really look for them.
The other film is the satirical The Mouse That Roared (1959), based on Leonard Wibberley's satirical 1955 novel in which the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick (the "mouse"), its economy in ruins, declares war on the United States in hopes of being immediately defeated and then receiving generous foreign aid to rebuild (remember that in 1955, memories of the Marshall Plan were still fresh).
Peter Sellers played three roles, including the country's ruler, the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII. It's available on DVD from Sony.
Wibberley wrote three more mouse novels, all tied to topical concerns: 1962's The Mouse on the Moon (the US-Soviet space race), 1969's The Mouse on Wall Street (inflation and stock market speculation) and 1981's The Mouse that Saved the West (the oil crisis). Only The Mouse on the Moon was filmed, in 1962, but Sellers bowed out. Margaret Rutherford took over the role of the Grand Duchess and Ron Moody assumed the part of Prime Minister Monutjoy. The third Sellers character isn't part of the story.
Ask FlickChick: Alien 3 web mystery solved! And more
Alien 3 courtesy 20th Century Fox
Ask FlickChick: Alien 3, Chloe Webb and the web – what's the truth behind the online rumor that she "participates" in the making of this movie?
Question: I've seen several references online to actress Chloe Webb (China Beach, Sid and Nancy) and the movie Alien 3; some say she "participated" in the movie, others have cast lists that include her name but no character name. But she isn't credited on either the theatrical version of the movie or the assembly cut released as part of the Alien Quadrilogy, and I don't see her in the movie either.
So is this an internet-wide mistake (there was an actor named Daniel Webb in the movie, maybe that's where the confusion arises?) or was Chloe Webb really involved with the making of Alien 3, and if so, how exactly did she "participate?" -- Pete H.
FlickChick: This is an interesting question, in part because of the larger issue it raises. The glory of the web is that it's a one-stop shop for information about all things everything -- information that might otherwise be buried in libraries or archives or in the heads of specialists, expert and amateur alike, is free and just a mouse click away.
But there's just as much misinformation floating around and many users -- and I don't mean you, because you're questioning -- assign equal value to everything they read online. And misinformation metastasizes – one reference on one site can get picked up by hundreds of others, and all those citations make some people think it must be true.
I'm willing to bet that a dedicated researcher with lots of time on his/her hands could source every Chloe Webb/Alien 3 reference to one place.
Which leads to the answer to your question. I put in a call to Webb's management and they went to source: Chloe Webb says that she did not participate in the making of Alien 3 in any way. Who knows how the rumor got started? But it's not true.
Question: I’m trying to remember the name of a film that's maybe five years old. I’m pretty sure it was a romantic comedy in which the main character has a friend who's looking for perfection in a woman, but meanwhile he himself has a small tail. Any ideas? – Dave
FlickChick: The Bobby and Peter Farrelly comedy Shallow Hal (2001), about two less-than-perfect men – Jack Black and Jason Alexander – who only want to date physically flawless women. Alexander's character, Mauricio, is the one with the tail.
Question: I need help with movie quote, please! The quote is "Nobody calls me chicken," and I know I've heard it before. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks -- Jennifer
FlickChick: My money is on Back to the Future Part II (1989), in which Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) says to Needles (the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea), who's proposing a shady financial deal, "Nobody calls me chicken, Needles… nobody."
I'm sure there are variations on the theme that predate this citation, but I'm willing to bet that this is where you and a lot of other people first heard it.
Question: I'm 37 and a horror movie as a child that's still on my mind. It was probabky between 1974 and 1978, around the same time Suspiria was out.
All I really remember was that the killer put each victim's eyes in a glass of water, and at the end of the movie there was a dead woman lying in a bed in a basement and her eye sockets were filled with maggots. It might have even been one of those European horror flicks. Can you help me out? Thanks! – Al
I'm thinking that you saw Umberto Lenzi's giallo Gatti Rossi in un Labirinto di Vetro, which was made in 1975 and released in the US as Eyeball. Suspiria opened here in 1977, and it took three years for Eyeball to get US distribution, which brings us to 1978.
Ironically, I saw Eyeball in a theater and don't remember a thing about it except a bunch of tourists in Barcelona getting picked off by a psycho who kills women and keeps one an eye from each victim. But the eye connection sounds good and God knows, Italian genre filmmakers never missed an opportunity to work a maggoty corpse into the mix.
DVD Tuesday: Cult movie Detour and the Highway to Hell
DVD Tuesday: A Detour into existential misery – Edgar G. Ulmer's noir road movie is a trip down the highway to hell.
The danger in shining a spotlight on a movie like Detour (1945) is that people will expect too much of the wrong things from it. Which isn't to say I think Edgar G. Ulmer's nightmarish story of a cross-country drive into the heart of darkness is anything short of great: It's haunted me for years and I can watch it over and over.
But I've heard people complain that they couldn't get past the studio-bound sets and rear projection: They never really bought into it because it didn't look real. I'd argue, however, that its air of unreality – of disconnection from normal life – is part of its greatness: Ulmer took the liabilities of no money and a six-day shooting schedule, and figured out a way to make them assets. Detour has the feverish logic of a nightmare, and features both a strikingly unlikable "hero" and a femme fatale who's nothing short of demonic.
Classically trained pianist Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a classic glass-half-empty guy, plays jazz at a Greenwich Village dive called Break o' Dawn; he hates everyone and everything except his girlfriend, Sue, and he's furious at her when she decides to go to Hollywood and try to make it big as a singer. He stays behind, sulking and seething, but eventually realizes that letting Sue go was a terrible mistake. Too broke to travel any other way, he starts hitching and eventually scores a ride with businessman Charlie Haskell, who's going all the way from Arizona to Los Angeles.
Haskell, a hopped-up blowhard in a flashy convertible, oozes creepiness – you just know whatever business he's in is shady, and the story he tells Roberts about tussling with a hitchhiker he picked up earlier in the trip – the woman who scratched the hell out of his hand – just begs the question 'so, what did he do first?'
But Roberts figures Haskell is the one piece of luck he's had the entire trip – the guy even buys him dinner – so he sticks around and even offers to share driving duties. While Roberts is behind the wheel, he decides to pull over and put the top up; he opens the door on Haskell's side and Haskell falls to the ground, dead. Afraid that he'll be accused of murdering Haskell, Roberts takes Haskell's wallet, hides the body and gets back on the road.
The next day, he imprudently picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage) who is, of course, the woman who previously rode with Haskell and knows damned well that Roberts isn't him. It's clear that nothing good is going to come of this, but the bleak quagmire that awaits Roberts must be seen to be believed.
Even Ulmer, a master of making something out very little, couldn't make something out of nothing So credit must also go to writer Martin M. Goldsmith, who adapted his own novel into a screenplay. And all the clever filmmaking in the world can't overcome bad casting.
Tom Neal wasn't a great actor, and he certainly wasn't a great person: He was a hell raiser and a brawler – the tabloid press loved him -- who eventually went to prison for killing his wife. All of which happened years after Detour but suggests that he didn't have to dig deep to find the made-at-the-world Roberts, who winds up lamenting that "fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all" despite the active part he plays in his own downfall. In fact, since the story is told entirely from his point of view -- complete with extensive voice over – it's entirely possible that he's lying about the whole series of unfortunate events. No wonder everything feels vaguely unreal.
As to Ann Savage, she makes Ace in the Hole's hardboiled Jan Sterling seem like a purring little kitten: Just when you think Vera has exhausted her reserves of viciousness, she pulls another cruel ploy out of her apparently bottomless bag of tricks.
And finally, a word of warning: Don't be fooled into thinking the 1992 Detour remake must be at least a little bit cool, given that is stars Tom Neal Jr. and Lea Lavish, a name almost as good as Ann Savage. It's not.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on theMovie Talkvodcast.
Things to Consider:
Detour was an ultra-cheap movie produced by a company that was in it for the bucks: Can you think of other movies that transcend such inauspicious circumstances to achieve some measure of greatness?
Do you like stories with unreliable narrators, or does that strike you as a cheap stunt?
Do you think critics and movie buffs overrate certain movies just to be contrary?
DVD Tuesday: And the corpse came back, the very next day... George Romero's Diary of the Dead puts a nasty new spin on old living dead cliches.
Zombies have always given me nightmares, and Night of the Living Dead terrified me before I'd even seen it -- Roger Ebert's piece about seeing it at a kiddie matinee in a neighborhood theater gave my imagination plenty to work with.
I've seen a lot of zombie movies since then and I'm pretty inured to them, which is why I was pleasantly suprised by George Romero's new Diary of the Dead, if pleasantly is the word. I was afraid that the conceit -- essentially rebooting the Dead franchise by going back to the beginning and telling the story on digital video, as though it had been made by student filmmakers (a la Blair Witch Project) -- would seem hokey and tired, like the efforts of an aging filmmaker to appeal to the young folks.
But I was wrong: It actually get Romero back to the raw immediacy of Night of the Living Dead -- which was shot on the fly by a bunch of filmmakers with no feature experience -- and, better still, smoothed over Romero's tendency to overstate the metaphor. You know: The dead, they're the nightmare us, a permanent underclass literally rising up to bite the power.
When those ideas -- along with some newer ones about media-mediated experience in the internet age -- spill from the mouths of pretentious film students, they sound exactly right.
And I have to say, Diary's zombies are nasty. The special effects are far more elaborate than the ones in Night, but they lack the "check this out!" polish of most contemporary effects. It always pulls me out of the horror when I'm admiring the latex work.
I recommend checking it out. And if you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead -- or haven't seen it recently -- it's coming out next week in a 40th anniversary special edition. The film looks great -- in its grainy, B&W way, and the extras include an audio interview with Duane Jones, who played Ben, and new featurette featuring much of the original cast.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on theMovie Talkvodcast.
Things to Consider:
Where do you stand on zombie movies -- do you find other monsters more interesting?
What do you think is behind the current spate of zombie books and movies, including the Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later and Max Brooks' novel World War Z, which Eli Roth is adapting for the screen.
DVD Tuesday: Long Live the New Flesh in Cronenberg's Vidoedrome
DVD Tuesday: Videodrome, reality TV and the temple of the new flesh -- David Cronenberg saw it all!
All hail Mike Judge's Idiocracy(2006): Every time my mind is boggled by the depths to which some new reality TV show has sunk, I can't help but remember the most popular show of Judge's dystopian future: "Ow, My Balls!"
Really says it all, doesn't it?
But much though I'm amused by Idiocracy, David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) really blows my mind (pace Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home, a Heartache"):. The first time I saw it I was in college, the product of a world in which there were no PCs, no cell phones, no IM, no PDAs, no social networking sites, no games more sophisticated than Space Invaders and Pong… and yet I knew that Videodrome wasn't just a freaky kick.
I'd been following Cronenberg since his experimental shorts Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) and it was clear to me that he was on to something: In some visceral way, he got both the seductiveness and the lurking horror of a future in which we're all connected: We watch TV, TV watches us, the video signal merges with our brains and the new flesh is born from the cathode ray graveyard.
Videodrome has a permanent niche in my psyche, but I found myself thinking about it all over again when I reviewed Signal (2007), a short, sharp, shocking little parable about the pervasive power of, well, the signal -- the connection with a larger world of order and procedure and control. In the end it's little more than a gloss on George Romero's 1973 The Crazies, but that's not a criticism: People keep writing The Crazies (Eli Roth's upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's novel Cell is the newest) because it keeps speaking to us: How willing are we to surrender to groupthink and how ready are we to fight?
