I found Barry Adamson’s work shortly after the release of David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Some of you will remember that Lost Highway was the first of Lynch’s films to have a soundtrack supervised by someone other than musical genius Angelo Badalamenti – then blowing up artist Trent Reznor was hand-picked by Mr. Lynch to put together his film’s soundtrack. Reznor was of course on my (and everyone else’s) radar big-time: I’d been a fan since Pretty Hate Machine but was having something of a spat with his music after the release of The Downward Spiral, an album I still, though I vehemently count myself as a NIN fan, do not care for all that much. Anyway, Reznor had supervised Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers a few years prior to Highway and being a little familiar with that I had high hopes, even if I was a little let down at Badalamenti not getting the job.
One of the artists Reznor highlighted, and introduced to a wider audience was then-Mute Records recording artist Barry Adamson. Adamson’s biggest bump was probably the song Something Wicked This Way Comes – you know, the catchy as hell party mix in the background of the scene where Robert Blake, sans eyebrows, approaches Bill Pullman and tells him to ‘call him’ at his house right now. A truly marvelous scene and it is bolstered all the more by Adamson’s track and its deft sampling and re-working of the song ‘Spooky’ originally made famous by, I think, the oddly named 60’s group Classics IV*.
Shortly after Lost Highway I tracked down the Barry Adamson album from whence that song came – 1996’s Oedipus Schmoedipus and found it to be a veritable masterpiece; a schizoprenic thriller in its own right that blends jazz to hip hop, cinematic atmosphere and full out Pulp Noir goodness.
From here a love affair began.
Moving backwards I quickly hunted down Moss Side Story, Adamson’s 1988 debut on Mute and the score to a Crime Noir film that does not exist. In subsequently hunting down several of Mr. Adamson’s other earlier albums I found this to be the man’s M.O. – writing movies in his mind and then recording their soundtracks and scores. And as I listened to and grew to love his albums I dreamed along with him of the day when Barry Adamson might make his own film.
Now it’s here.
Being on Mr. Adamson’s mailing list I received word several weeks ago that indeed the time had come, as his website, here, now had in stock autographed editions of the DVD of Adamson’s first cinematic offering, Therapist, for sale. In short order I snapped up a copy and finally found the opportunity to watch it the other night.
Then I watched it again the following night. Then again. I became immediately enamored.
Therapist is a 40 minute taut, psychological thriller. Heavily influenced by the films of David Lynch, Therapist is a story within a story; multiple lives that coalesce and splinter as reality waivers beneath the characters’ attempts to gain control in a fiercely uncontrollable world. I don’t want to get too into the plot, for one because it is wonderfully abstract, and for two I believe to discuss such a thing will remove an element of the story itself. Suffice itto say that this is a dark, British thriller heavy on the psychological end of things and soaked through with wonderful imagery and razor-taut suspense.
So here’s to hoping that Mr. Adamson will make many more films, his talent for the visual growing in the same leaps-and-bounds proportions his music has.
Oh, the cozy amber-tinted memories of youth. A simpler time of simpler tastes. As the cynical, crushing weight of adulthood often sends us nostalgically yearning to revisit the things we once held dear, we tend to find that those special things are not quite how we left them. Like a favorite climbing tree’s branches that we once had to leap for, now boringly coming up waist-high, the films we adored as children and tweens typically do not measure up the same now. Sometimes old favorites are best left to our memory. Yet now and then they miraculously hold up, or even prove to have hidden subtext we never realized. They say you can’t go home again, but I think it is high time that I tried.
The Artifact:Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
What Is It: Theatrical feature film.
The Backstory: John Patrick Shanley won a Pulitzer Prize, a Drama Desk Award, and a Tony for his play Doubt: A Parable, which he later adapted into the film Doubt, with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. But in the 80’s he was just a sub-moderately successful playwright. So he wrote a screenplay, the quirky rom-com Moonstruck, which ended up starring Cher and Nic Cage, being a big hit, and winning Shanley an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Now he was hot shit. This afforded him the opportunity to direct, and to attract two popular actors for another quirky rom-com. That project was Joe Versus the Volcano, and the two popular actors were Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, pairing for the first of several times. Though not wildly expensive and though garnering a very positive review from Roger Ebert, the film was largely dismissed by critics and audiences alike and was considered something of a flop. This may explain why Shanely didn’t sit in the director’s chair again for nearly 20 years; his directing filmography contains two credits, Doubt and this.
The Memory: Joe Versus the Volcano played a seminal role in my creative/academic development, as concerns cinema. It was the first film in which I noticed subtextual themes while I was watching it. This made the film incredibly exciting to me. I knew movies had layers. I watched Siskel and Ebert and as much of the Academy Awards’ telecast as I could tolerate at my parents’ Oscar party every year. By 1990 I had a solid (if abstract) concept that there was more happening in some movies than was explicitly brought to my attention by the movies themselves. So JJV felt like a big deal to me. For this reason – despite not remembering many particulars of the plot – I have extremely strong memories of certain aspects of the film.
The fancy artistic subtext that I picked up on – my big breakthrough moment as a film buff – was a re-occurring image of a very specific jagged line, which if I am remembering correctly served as the path to Joe’s work [seen above], as a crack in the plaster on Joe’s apartment wall, as the lightning bolt that sinks Joe’s boat, and as the path leading up to the volcano. Story-wise all I really remember is that Joe works at a visually expressionistic and terrible job, and then for some reason he decides to go jump in a volcano. He gets a bunch of money (lottery?), which allows him to buy a bunch of fancy shit, including a set of water-tight suitcases. These suitcases come in handy when his boat sinks on the way to the volcano and he ties the suitcases together to make a raft. For whatever reason I vividly remember Joe retrieving a cordless radio from one of his suitcases and picking up The Del-Vikings 1956 doo-wop hit “Come Go with Me,” and then dancing around like a goon. I loved this scene and became obsessed enough with the song that I tracked it down and bought it on CD (much harder to do in those dark pre-Internet days). I remember that Meg Ryan played three characters. And I remember that the natives on the island with the volcano are obsessed with orange soda and that their outfits are decorated with a lot of empty orange soda cans.
That’s right, I remember more about the particulars of that jagged line than I do about the movie’s actual plot.
How Long Has It Been: 18 or 19 years.
The Reality: Wow, I can’t believe how entirely I forgot the basic concept of this film. Which is that Joe discovers he has a bizarre and fatal malady known as a “brain cloud,” and will die in a few months. Then an eccentric billionaire industrialist played by Lloyd Bridges offers Joe a bunch of money and a free trip to the tropics if he agrees to jump into a volcano. The purpose of this is to appease the island’s natives, the Waponis, and thus grant Bridges the exclusive rights to a mineral found only on the island; unobtainium or something. Joe has nothing to live for and decides to go out like a badass, so he accepts the crazy proposition.
Despite the pivotal role JVV had played in my youth, as so often happens in that awkward stage of late adolescence, I shunned the film when I found out that “people” thought the movie was “stupid.” Tragically, as also so often happens, as time went by I lost sight of precisely why I viewed JVV as stupid and began to just assume such was the accepted reality. Well, fuck my ass — to quote Tenacious D. While not brilliant by any means, JVV is a damn fun film, and above all else, it is interestingly weird. It is also one of the few films I can think of that qualifies as an “existential romantic comedy.”
Unsurprisingly the “subtext” of that re-occurring jagged line is so conspicuous that, well, even a little kid could notice it. Viewing now, as an adult, the film hits you over the head with its themes of existentialism versus destiny (ie, Joe versus that volcano; which actually proves to be more Man Vs Self than Man Vs Destiny). We get moments where a character asks Joe what is wrong with his shoe and Joe replies, “I’m losing my soul.” And the gimmick of Ryan playing various women in Joe’s life isn’t really saying as much as it seems like it should be. Joe tells the respective women that he feels like he has met them before, and has had this feeling all his life. But two of the characters are sisters, so their resemblance isn’t actually unusual in any way. And at the end of the film Joe really lays out the symbolism of that jagged line when he says his life has been a “long time coming here on a crooked road.” None of this adds up to anything other than vague romanticism; this isn’t provocative Eternal Sunshine-level depth. But it is fun. It’s generally poor form to quote another film critic’s review in your review of the same movie, but this isn’t a review, and I think Roger Ebert summed up JVV quite succinctly when he said: “It is not an entirely successful movie, but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances.”
JJV extroverted themes and ideas, combined with the stylized presentation of the film, not to mention the presence of a nightmarish corporation, reminded me a lot of The Hudsucker Proxy. Hanks and Tim Robbins easily could have starred with equal effectiveness in either film. JVV‘s flair is not quite as grandiose and ingenious as Proxy‘s (I like Shanley, but he’s no Coen Bros), but both films share a kinship. They both have a style-over-substance approach that I think turned a lot of people off, but for those who are into cinema for its own sake – or simply aren’t too snotty – there is a vibrancy to be found in JVV. Like Proxy, this film is light, funny and oddly clever.
But the film has a rocky first couple minutes. First off, we open with a dreadful white-boy-blues rendition of the country classic tune-of-woe “Sixteen Tons” as Joe arrives at the baroquely terrible factory where he works, which is just as expressionistically designed as I remembered. The scene is littered with a series of corny jokes in the form of signs bragging that the company is the “Home of the Rectal Probe” and other juvenile things (no wonder I loved this in 1990). But the moment the awful “Sixteen Tons” cover ends, things suddenly pick up. I love the art direction of Joe’s office, utilizing the soul-sucking color pallet of concrete and florescent lighting, and some slight forced-perspective set design to make things feel off. The scene also features the great Dan Hedaya, who perfectly sets the tone of Joe’s work-life with an inane and repetitive monologue. This:
..
What does it say about me that of Meg Ryan’s three characters in the film, I found DeDe, Joe’s neurotic inhaler-using coworker, the most attractive? I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Shanley surrounds Joe with a host of excellent supporting characters. It is a treat to see Robert Stack as Joe’s doctor, informing Joe that he is a hypochondriac, yet, ironically, if it had not been for Joe’s insistence that he be given so many tests they never would’ve discovered the symptomless brain cloud. Joe: “So I’m not sick? Except for this terminal disease?” Lloyd Bridges chews the scenery in his one and only scene with gluttonous amiable energy — frankly one of Bridges best performances. And Ossie Davis plays the small role of Joe’s limo driver who helps him spend his money, and starts Joe off on the right foot towards self-discovery: “I’m not hear to tell you who you are.” And the whole Waponi civilization is something straight out of Carl Barks by way of Mel Brooks. I love the look of the natives, constantly drinking their orange soda, and for utterly no reason Shanley gives them a bonkers backstory. Long, long ago and Roman ship carrying some Scots and some Jews got lost in a storm and wound up on the island. Their two defining characteristics are: they love orange soda and they have no sense of direction. Why this nonsense? I don’t know. Possibly just so Shanely could cast Abe Vigoda as the Chief; plus Nathan Lane as the other main speaking role. Abe Vigoda is hilarious as the Chief, I should add.
Hanks is Hanks, lovable and solid as always. Ryan of course has the showier role, or rather roles, pulling an Eddie Murphy minus the fat suits. Though the only character that proves outside her normal box of tricks is Angelica, a spoiled wannabe poet who looks after Joe in LA before he heads out to sea. Ryan plays Angelica with extreme hamminess, but it works for the ridiculous character Shanley has constructed:
Angelica: Would you like to hear one of my poems?
Joe: Sure.
Angelica: Long ago, the delicate tangles of his hair… covered the emptiness of my hand. (beat) Would you like to hear it again?
Joe: (confused) Ok.
Angelica: Long ago, the delicate tangles of his hair… covered the emptiness of my hand.
JVV‘s secret weapon is the dialogue. Which isn’t too surprising considering that Shanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. He weaves from Moonstruck-esque flamboyant romance: “I bribed him to sing us a song that would drive us insane and make our hearts swell and burst.” To Coen Bros-esque heightened weirdness, like the luggage salesman who earnestly asks Joe, “Have you thought much about luggage, Mr Banks?” To sillier Mel Brooks-esque exchanges, like when Joe learns it is time to climb the volcano and he asks the island Chief, “Is there any ceremony or anything?” And the Chief apathetically replies, “No you just jump in.”
The film features so much music it is almost a musical, and indeed Shanley wrote a couple tunes for the film — one of which Hanks sings on a ukelele during the suitcase-raft section of the film. But the film does get a bit carried away sometimes, such as a pretty stupid musical montage in which Joe is fishing with Patricia (Ryan’s third and most important character) and catches a hammerhead shark. But when you’re aiming over the top like Shanley is, not everything is going to work. He does have some big stylistic flourishes that are either going to land for you or seem excessive, like that giant moon on the horizon shot pictured above (what is it with Shanley and the moon?).
This is a silly movie, especially considering it is existential and, you know, about a guy who is going to jump into a volcano because he is dying. There is really only one human moment in the whole film, which is a scene on the boat where Patricia talks with Joe about betraying her ideals by agreeing to carry Joe to the island (her father is Bridges, and she’d previously vowed never to work for him). Beyond this, there isn’t a lot of real relatable humanity on display. After his big spending spree in the city, Joe is forced to wine and dine and go to sleep alone. And he is lonely. Though this worked perfectly for the story (Joe also turns down an offer of sex from Angelica later), it didn’t ring very true. I’ve never gotten a prostitute before, but if I suddenly had limitless cash and only one night in the city before I embarked on a journey that was to end with me jumping into a fucking volcano… I think I might give it a go. Just sayin’. This is a total nitpick though.
Paradise Lost or Magic Reborn: Magic reborn. I wouldn’t say the film is so amazing that people need to seek it out, but those who might be thinking of revisiting it should definitely do so. Vintage Hanks. Vintage Ryan. Bridges hamming it up. Good times.
The Principals: Director: Lawrence Kasdan. William Hurt, Geena Davis, Kathleen Turner, Bill Pullman
The Premise: Macon Leary (Hurt) has always been a strange, shrink-wrapped sort of man. He specializes in writing travel books that minimize any contact with foreign culture or unpleasantness. But the unexpected and violent death of his son causes him to retreat even further into his shell. His distance causes his wife to file for divorce. Alone with his angry dog, Macon ends up burrowing into his childhood home, and plans to remain there. But then he meets Muriel (Davis), a quirky, financially-strapped woman who offers to train his dog. She forces herself into his life, and Macon finds his world upended. And he kind of likes it.
Is It Good: It is. It’s not the film I remember, though. I remember it being funny and adorable. But it’s actually a fairly miserable film, and a bit flabby in parts. It’s less about the relationship between Muriel and Macon, and more about Macon being a truly bizarre man, bred of even stranger stock, and how he sort of blunders in and out of every circumstance. (The description Kathleen Turner gives of him — of a man being muffled in cotton wool or something like that — seems an apt description of Hurt as well.)
I wanted to wax more intelligently on Lawrence Kasdan’s career … but you know, glancing over his filmography, I can’t think of a single defining factor beyond Kevin Kline. I’d like to say this film fits into his themes and obsessions, but it really doesn’t from what I can see. Thoughts on that would be appreciated.
Is It Worth A Look: It is, and for one reason — this is like the proto-Wes Anderson film. Every one in it is decidedly odd, and the film luxuriates in the sheer quirkiness of everyone. Macon’s entire family (a sister and two brothers) remain coddled in their childhood home, unable to even leave their own neighborhood without getting lost. They refuse to answer the phone. Even when the world comes intruding in (Macon losing his child, one of the siblings getting married), they continue along their bizarre way, alphabetizing soup cans and sipping up endless cups of coffee. We think of those sorts of characters as being something so new and postmodern, but here they are, happily living in the 1980s.
Muriel is actually the most normal character of the film, and here too is Tourist’s quietest contribution to pop culture: She’s the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It’s a cute performance, but not super Oscar worthy in retrospect.
Random Cinematic Anecdotes: Geena Davis read this book to Jeff Goldblum while he had his Fly make-up applied. Cute!
I’ve been going back and forth about posting this all day. We live in such a saturated world where movies are spelled out to the last cameo before we ever hit the theater. I know a good story doesn’t rely on surprise…but goddammit, it feels so good to go into something cold.
But, I finally broke down and actually read the possible-but-maybe-not-but-probably plot of Prometheus. The stuff from Ridley Scott is ok, and not too spoilerish, just intriguing. It’s a nice companion to Damon Lindelof’s comments earlier this week.
The Hollywood Reporter has some quotes from Ridley Scott, who talked about the project at CineEurope. He confirmed the title refers to the name of a spaceship sent from Earth by an all-too familiar corporation. The name, however, is no accident. “The (space) journey, metaphorically, is about a challenge to the gods. NASA and the Vatican agree that is almost mathematically impossible that we can be where we are today without there being a little help along the way. That’s what we’re looking at (in the film), at some of Eric van Daniken’s ideas of how did we humans come about.”
Now, mysteriously a submission over at io9 claims to reveal the exact plot of Prometheus from beginning to end. It may not be legitimate, but it does fit really well with all the whispers of space jockeys, challenges to the gods, and the xenomorph itself. However, a clever fan fic person could probably churn that out just as easily. It’s really rather detailed, so I’ll just link to it and let you decide for yourself. Scott doesn’t want the plot leaked out, so let’s just play along, shall we?
World War Z is currently shooting in Malta (I know this, because I like to gaze at the clan known as Brangelina), but it’s doing so without two of its reported cast members.
According to Vulture, both Matthew Fox and Ed Harris (who were just announced) have dropped out of the film.
The reason is allegedly schedule conflicts. Fox can’t do it because of his prior commitment to I, Alex Cross, and Harris is getting ready to star in an L.A. stage production of The Jacksonian. If you want to get gossipy though, The Jacksonian doesn’t start rehearsals until February, so ohmygodtroubleonsetdisasterousproduction.
Or, you know, maybe talks never actually equaled signage, though it’s said the production is “scrambling” to fill the roles.
Another Marvel director departs for adventures unknown. According to Deadline, Kenneth Branagh won’t be returning to the director’s chair for Thor 2. He may stay on in a producer capacity, though, and the official story is that the split was “amicable and mutual.”
It’s a shame (and a troubling post-Disney sign) that Marvel isn’t holding onto their directors for more than one or two installments. Thor had a few issues, but I thought they had more to do with Marvel’s need to world build with SHIELD and Hawkeye than Branagh’s direction. I thought he brought a good deal of the right amount of bombast in. (ETA: Sources tell me that Branagh just wanted to do a smaller film after the long haul of Thor. More power to him.)
But, there’s also something to be said for switching up the talent. The best and brightest Marvel storylines come along when someone else tackles the character. Hopefully, the Marvel movies show the same kind of growth.
Thor 2 does have a release date though: July 26, 2013. Chris Hemsworth, not surprisingly, will be reprising the hammer wielding god. Don Payne is also returning to write the script.
What is this? Every single day of the week (almost), a new Graboid, a single moment grabbed from a random movie, appears on this site for you to guess the name of the film, share with your officemates, or discuss on our message boards. Sometimes the Graboid will be very easy and sometimes it’ll be as obscure as obscure gets. So read the news, read the reviews, and enjoy a screencap each and every day for your guessing pleasure.
I’ve been dying to get a peek at Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy since the day the trades announced its posh line-up. And here it is!
Spy is based on John le Carre’s novel of the same name, and is Tomas Alfredson’s first film since Let the Right One In. It stars Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch. (It very nearly boasted Michael Fassbender, but he did X-Men First Class instead.)
It’s a pretty basic spy plot — the Russians have planted a mole at the highest levels of British intelligence — but with the cast and director, it ought to be a lot more. The trailer is a nice blend of James Bond sleekness and the rundown, dodgy Britain of the 1960s/1970s. And menace. So much menace.
I’m embedding a version below, but if YouTube yanks it or you prefer HD, you can watch it on The Guardian’s website.
There are moments in our lives that define who we will become. These moments become forever etched in our memories as a pivotal point in our lives where something changed.
I have mentioned in previous blogs that I can remember the first time I heard Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer and how it made me a life long fan, well on Monday, 24 odd years after hearing it I finally got to see the band live. Without hyperbole it was well worth the wait.
It is not that I haven’t wanted to see them before now, far from it but something has always got in the way, so even as the day approached I suspected something would go wrong, but this time nothing did and my wife and I arrived at Aston Gate Stadium to take our place in the standing area in front of the stage. Now in fairness I haven’t been to a concert in about 10 years so the excitement and build up to the start of the gig was new to me again, it was a great feeling and reminded me just how awesome live music is.
At just after 7:30pm the band came on stage and launched straight into a set made up of old and new songs. Hits including a lot of my personal favorites like Bad Medicine, Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen from Mars, Keep the Faith, Raise your Hands and It’s my Life* to name a few. Mercifully there was very little from the latest album which even as a fan of the band I am not overly keen on.
The band themselves were on form, Jon Bon Jovi having the crowd in the palm of his hand and working the stage like a madman, dispite having his leg in a brace and wincing in pain from time to time**, Richie Sambora was his usual genuis self along with Tico Torres, who may have aged the most but now looks like a bit of a bad-ass. As for David Bryan i mas very impressed as he spent the whole concert playing two keyboards at a time in that 80’s rock band style.
The gig ended around 9:30 ish but of course the band came back for an encore, throughout all this time they had failed to play “Living on a Prayer” and i had my suspicions that it would be the last song , and i was right. Let me tell you now there is nothing as awesome as 25,000 people singing your favorite song along with the band who wrote it.
One final word on the band themselves, they clearly love their fans and it showed throughout the gig, so whatever else you may think of them you cannot say they are in it for the money alone.
So yeah I enjoyed this gig a hell of a lot, as did my wife who is now talking about replacing me with Bon Jovi himself. But if i’m honest if she is going to replace me then picking the only person in the world more awesome than me is not a bad way to do it.***
*Where the title of this blog comes from
**No idea what he had done but fair play for still doing the gig.
BUY FROM AMAZON:CLICK HERE! STUDIO: MPI Home Video MSRP:$18.99 RATED: Unrated RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes SPECIAL FEATURES:
Making of Exorcismus
Trailer
The Pitch
The Last Exorcism made money, right?
The Humans
Written by David Munoz. Directed by Manuel Carballo. Acted by Sophie Vavasseur, Stephen Billington, Jo-Anne Stockham, Richard Felix, Tommy Bastow and Doug “Pinhead” Bradley.
The Nutshell
A teenage goth\emo chick summons the Devil after cutting her hand and painting a demonic sigil on the floor with her blood. He possesses her and causes her to do bad things like almost drowning her little brother and asserting her sexuality on bewildered friends. Luckily, her Uncle is a Catholic priest with some previous exorcism experience, so he moves in and starts getting all Father Merrin on her. That’s… pretty much it.
Dude, we get it. You ate at Long John Silver's. Get over yourself.
The Lowdown
I mean, Exorcismus isn’t that bad by any means, but it’s not that great either. It just kind of sits there without adding anything new to the genre or even being that scary, really. But it’s competently directed and acted with only one genuinely stupid moment that I noticed. The problem is that it’s all very safe in regards to the crazy shit they have the poor possessed actress do; safe in how anything truly dark and disturbing tends to take place off camera or it cuts away before the good stuff is about to happen and safe in how it’s scripted, with not one original beat in the film’s entire running time. I know I sound like I’m being really hard on the film, but it kept me interested and entertained for the entire running time, but I was never fully invested in the characters or the fact that they were all about to be molested by Satan’s thorny cock. Or so I assumed.
Sophie Vavasseur is perfectly fine as Emma, the poor girl possessed by the Devil. She vomits blood very well and looks good while rolling her eyes and talking with an over-dubbed Satany voice. The problem is that she comes across in the script as too much of a victim from the start, so we never get a sense of her strength or purpose as a character. She is just a device for things to happen through instead of a fully formed, three dimensional person to empathize and sympathize with. Her parents (well played by Jo-Anne Stockham and Richard Felix) are intensely unlikable science folk who at some points seem more interested in debating the theological implications of what’s happening instead of worrying about their evil little girl. The fact that she had to be raised by them makes her more sympathetic for sure, but it’s just not enough. Uncle Christopher the Catholic priest (Billington) is another cipher added to the story that seems more cut and pasted from exorcism genre cliches than an actual character with motivations and desires. Again, all the actors are fine, but the script gives them next to nothing to do. Oh, and Doug “Pinhead” Bradley is in it for literally 30 seconds in order to drop some exposition and bounce. Don’t waste Doug Bradley, lest ye be wasted yourself Exorcismus. You’ve been warned.
"Dead by Dawn."
The thing I found myself laughing at the most was when the Mom and Dad decide that shit has gotten too ill to handle, they send Emma’s younger brother to their Aunt’s house to stay until all the demonic shenanigans pass. They do it fairly quickly so I was pretty excited to see horror movie parents acting rationally and smartly, but in the next scene you find out that the Aunt lives NEXT DOOR TO THEM. They sent their son away (fearing for his safety) a whopping 30 feet across the yard. Do you think this comes around to bite them on the ass? If you answered yes then you have seen a horror movie before and I congratulate you. If you answered no then I recommend starting with The Exorcist and working your way down from there.
Exorcismus (named that because it’s original title, The Possession of Emma Evans, was just a little too shitty) is a strange little hybrid of a movie, production wise, as the filmmakers are from Spain, the setting is in England and the actors are British, Spanish and Irish. It’s like a smorgasbord of culture without any cultural touchstones at the forefront. Most of the actors have British accents but there’s really nothing inherently British about the film at all. The film could have had a more worldly feel to it if the scope had been expanded on just a bit but it all comes off as so claustrophobic and small that any lingering memories of the film begin to fade fairly quickly after the credits begin.
There you have it. It’s okay, nothing more and nothing less. If it had a few more scares and the “twist” ending wasn’t telegraphed in the first 15 minutes I could see this becoming a minor sleeper hit, but there’s not and it is so you’re left with a slightly below average addition to the exorcism genre that won’t catch too much attention before being relegated to Best Buy dollar bins. I feel bad spending so much time talking shit because it’s very obvious that everyone is trying hard to make a decent horror flick, but they’e ultimately let down by the pedestrian script and lack of any innovation. Watch Session 9 or The Last Exorcism instead.
"The power of Christ compels you... to check out the wonderful beard trimming job I got at Fantastic Sam's. Only three extra bucks with a haircut.
The Package
It’s got a crisp and clean transfer and some pretty wicked surround sound going for it. The special features include a trailer that sells exactly the movie they made and a behind the scenes look at the making of the film which goes to prove that everyone involved is talented but this just wasn’t their breakthrough project. You’ll get ’em next time, guys.
The Artifact:
I’ve been going back and forth about posting this all day. We live in such a saturated world where movies are spelled out to the last cameo before we ever hit the theater. I know a good story doesn’t rely on surprise…but goddammit, it feels so good to go into something cold.
World War Z is currently shooting in Malta (I know this, because I like to gaze at the clan known as Brangelina), but it’s doing so without two of its reported cast members.
Another Marvel director departs for adventures unknown. According to 
I’ve been dying to get a peek at Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy since the day the trades announced its posh line-up. And here it is!
