directed by renee daalder
evan company
Remember how you lived in fear of those kids at your high school who went, uh, hang gliding? You know – the ones who pushed everyone around and trashed the library. Oh, and tried to rape those weird hippie girls, and so forth. (Boy, that one kid had the grooviest custom van, though, didn’t he.) It was just such a shame about the poor kid, and the deaf one, and the fat one. Well, turns out what your school needed was a good allegory, as this excellent teensploitation film proves. A precursor to other films – scenes and characters herein must have served as inspiration for such celluloid classics as Heathers – and a predictor of symptoms of cultural decline (a kid in a TRENCH COAT perpetrates most of the mayhem in the latter half ), this production never fails to entertain. You may wonder how that’s possible at times, much as you may find the motivation of a few of the characters inscrutable, but ridiculous or not, it’ll hold your attention. Possibly its metaphorical qualities deserve the credit.
why did i watch this movie?
My brother texted me a link to an inordinately long trailer, which I took as a request.
should you watch this movie?
Have you enjoyed films such as Blackboard Jungle, Three O’Clock High, Class of 1984, the aforementioned Heathers, others of that ilk? If so, assuredly. (And if not, I can’t help you.)
highlight and low point
This picture features a bizarre scene at an alumni dance in which none of the characters appears to be dancing to the same music, leading me to wonder if any music was actually playing during the filming. Also, the focal character is chewing gum in almost every scene in which he appears. This does not appear to be germane to the plot.
Oh hey look, it’s an anthology film! You love those! The hook here is that all four segments are by female directors, and mainly are written by them as well. (The first is based on a story by our old pal Jack Ketchum.) If you are a familiar of the horror anthology film and have seen any of the roughly 2,000 or so that have been churned out over the past handful of years, you no doubt are well aware they are governed strictly by the law of diminishing returns. This one is no different. Of the four chapters, one is effective if burdened by a creaky concept (“The Box”); one is ridiculously derivative of stories in several other anthologies I can think of without much difficulty (“Don’t Fall”); another also sadly lacks in originality and calls to mind analogues in recent compilation films (“Her Only Living Son”); and one is pretty amusing if somewhat predictable (“The Birthday Party”). Each portion is introduced by 
After watching this feature, I think I can better understand the opprobrium I’ve often seen hurled at its director in discussions of his oeuvre. Not that this is a bad movie, mind you; it does what it does fairly well, but it has a … credibility issue. I mean, I found myself not buying the central premise. At all. Don’t get me wrong; I am not denying the possibility of traumatic onset of multiple personalities, or dissociative identity disorder. The theory involved in this picture, however, takes pseudoscience directly into the realm of the comic book, in my professional opinion. (Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.) Furthermore, I usually am not seeking stories concerning supernatural physical characteristics or characterizations, such as found in superhero or -villain flicks. In addition, I found the scant inserts providing backstory to be both clumsy and stereotyped. THEN it turns out it’s somehow part of a trilogy-of-sorts – or a tripartite narrative, maybe. And it’s also a little too long, if only because it gave me time to realize all this.
A movie with a well-nigh perfect setup for a drive-in, this throwback-styled picture concerns a woman who kills a guy in a motel room and calls her estranged husband for help, after which they become targets of a murder cult. See? That’s a hard premise to best, and while director Keating’s effort doesn’t quite deliver – there isn’t as much disturbing content as might be expected, nor as much emotional impact; some of the imagery is pretty cheesy and some sequences feel like no more than padding – it’s an impressive enough attempt that I almost immediately sought out a few more films with his stamp. (Those being Darling and Pod, which I’ll get to in due time.) As I’ve hinted before, a sliding scale is employed here, and Ritual is the right kind of endeavor in my book. You can’t fail if you don’t try, people. Trust me on that one.
I can’t judge a movie based on the marketplace opinion of its creator, especially when I’ve only seen one of his other movies (The Sixth Sense), so all I can say about The Visit is what I thought: It works. Quite well, in fact. Granted, the setup of the story is a bit questionable, and as that’s the only reason the developments that follow make any sense whatsoever, it invites a quibble. The SHOCKING twist is very effective, however, and the children are extremely believable in their performances, and the moments where it might be reasonable to entertain serious doubts about the enterprise are explained away with just the right dubious touch. True, it lacks for visceral thrills and seems more of a mild mystery for the bulk of its running time – when it doesn’t play like an out-and-out comedy, that is. Perhaps that abets the impact of the final punchline. Fun for the whole family!
All right, now this is more like it. This flick is completely nuts, sort of a lower-budget X Files set in the rural hinterlands, homemade recreational drug territory. Featuring flashbacks, hallucinations, drugs real and invented, the military, prostitution, mutations, questionable pregnancies, abductions, untrustworthy acquaintances, bad decisions, shady characters and probably some other stuff, the plot takes a loooong time to gain any coherence, and when Meg Tilly’s loonybin character shows up to try to clue in our protagonist, naturally she is disbelieved. The film justifies itself after a fashion, in what is not a sympathetic manner but is definitely a memorable one. Truth be told, Antibirth is kind of a mess and could have helped itself by cleaning up a few discursions or extraneous characters. Overall, however, it manages to be both funny and nauseating, and is generally well-written and acted, usually avoiding cliché despite itself. Its surrealism probably aids it in that regard.
The first time I tried to watch this film, I stopped after about 10 minutes, as it started off with what at the time seemed to be a hokey attempt at a period setting, in this case early 1600s New England. I kept seeing rave reviews for it, however, so I gave it another go. Turns out it was nothing that I had expected. Sure, it’s got the rustic isolation and the religious underpinning, but it focuses almost entirely on just one family, alone at the edge of the woods. Things proceed slowly for a while, with only some parent-child tension and sibling rivalries raising suspicion, but once the action begins, I had to hang on to my hat, figuratively speaking. Still, for most of the picture, it’s a fairly standard affair – so much so that before the final act or so begins, I was preparing to write it off entirely. That final act, however, earns the proceedings a different perspective by taking things to an unforeseen level. (One detail in particular surprised me.) Not perfect, and in places banal, but not bad at all for the first-time director.
While it technically may be true that I’ve never personally been assaulted after hours in a mausoleum by psychokinetically controlled corpses , I think I safely can say that it wouldn’t seem as threatening in person as it does to several of the characters in this ’80s trumpery. The reason I state this with such confidence is that the dead (which appear to be wax dummies) are not reactivated or anything, they’re just being propelled slowly across the floor. That they apparently somehow manage to kill two people – by, uh, falling on them? – is a special bonus. The preposterous tale of a proponent of “psychic vampirism” experimenting in the manipulation of “bio-energy – the electromagnetic force in all living things,” this picture would be a complete failure if it weren’t so utterly absurd. As it is, it’s passable as kitsch … barely. The presence of Adam West helps in that regard, as does the fact that the dramatis personae largely are supposed to be portraying high-school students, which is patently ridiculous.
This delight’s got a little bit of everything. It’s got a weird Satanist family cult, it’s got a teenage runaway from Troubles At Home, it’s got Lawrence Tierney, it’s got a road-trip film contained within it, it’s of a visual quality usually associated with home movies from the dawn of time, and it’s got a fabulous theme song that is completely out of place in its grim milieu and sounds as though it’s from the wrong decade besides. Midnight is also strangely paced and edited, and could be a Christian message movie in disguise. Let’s see, what else … travel montages, black characters that seem as misplaced as the title song, a blatant ripoff of Psycho, and an extremely abrupt and unlikely ending involving rescue, redemption and revenge. Oh, and more of the rebarbative laughter à la the goons from Death Weekend. All told, an entertaining exploitation picture – and based on a novel! Which I cannot WAIT to read. The auteur was a colleague of George Romero.
Whee! Hee hee! Yee-haw! This giddy space-station extravaganza is an FX-rich disaster film that shamelessly reminds one of numerous other similarly themed flicks (and actually is reminding this guy of 2011’s Apollo 18 right now as he’s thinking about it). You know the drill:
SPACE RATS From Outer Space 