31 Days of Halloween: It Came from Tubi: Wan’s Killer Doll Film Fails to Impress

 Dead Silence - James Wan - 2007

 

★-Day 14 of the Nightmare on Film Street 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge. It came from Tubi. Should have stayed there. Yeesh. Went with Dead Silence by James Wan. I also watched a few others on Tubi, but this is the official pick. Spoiler, it’s fucking terrible. 

Not a huge director James Wan fan. Actually, I don’t think I’ve cared for any of his movies. Even the huge ones. Maybe especially the huge ones. This flick was extremely lame. There was an interesting twist at the end that I, for one, did not see coming. It’s up there with Sleepaway Camp in terms of shock and WTF, but I see a lot of complaints that it was obvious the whole time. Bullshit. 
 
Gist is one Jamie Ashen returns to his eerie hometown of Raven’s Fair to investigate the mysterious and brutal murder of his wife, Lisa. The investigation leads him to uncover the dark legend of Mary Shaw, a vengeful ventriloquist whose ghost, along with her creepy dolls, haunts the town. As Jamie delves deeper, he learns that Mary Shaw’s curse involves gruesome deaths where victims’ tongues are cut out, and he must confront this ghost lady and her toys to stop the killings. Lame. 
 

Acting is especially terrible, not that the dialogue gave them anything to work with. Main guy, Ryan Kwanten, can’t carry a movie. He appears to have a solid career in mostly television. He was one of the stars of True Blood and appeared in Them and the Creepshow revival. Donnie Wahlberg plays the detective investigating the wife’s murder and assumes Jamie did it. His “thing” is that he is constantly shaving with an electric razor. Even in public, which is gross. 
 
Others include Bob Gunton who plays the Ashen patriarch. He’ll always be the Warden in The Shawshank Redemption. Amber Valletta plays the hot stepmother boning old Warden Norton. Only other person I recognized was Laura Regan, the dead wife. She was one of the creepy psychic pod people in Minority Report and played Jennifer Crane in Mad Men. 
 
Style is that same digital crap that you see in all Wan’s work. Whether it is Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring, one of their many sequels, or his more recent flicks Aquaman/Malignant, all his movies have a look. I find most of them pretty blah. This movie, way worse though. 

30 Days of Night: A vampire's wet dream

 30 Days of Night - David Slade - 2007

★★--Remember the trailer for this film being great. Produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert of Evil Dead fame. Execution wasn’t really there. Kind of glad I waited 17 years to watch it. 
 
Gist is an isolated Alaskan town that experiences a 30-day-long polar night gets overrun with vampires. Hate when that shit happens. Pretty smart of the vampires though. 
 
Director David Slade has mostly done TV including the first three episodes of American Gods (which where great) and several early episode of Hannibal (also great). He did do a few movies though, like Hardy Candy about a young girl that tortures a child rapist/murderer, it’s pretty decent, and one of the Twilight movies (never saw it). 
 
Stars Josh Hartnett whose career was screeching to a halt (my man is back now though), Melissa George (whom I mostly think of as the mother of the kid that get the slap in the show The Slap [both the American and the Australian version]), Danny Huston of the Huston clan, Ben Foster who was who is always solid and is married to my former queen Laura Prepon,  and Mark Boone Junior, who always plays a crazy guy. Personally think of him as the pizza stealing FBI guy in Se7en. He is in most of Fincher’s movies though. 
 
Fantastic premise—vampires in Alaska during the longest period of darkness—but sort of waste it on non-traditional vampires. Should have stuck with the classic variety. These vampires have pointy shark teeth, have a military-based hierarchy, speak Aramaic or some other weird shit (Romulan, maybe), have a feral quality to them, but look and dress like Danny Huston. These are not fucking vampires. 
 
Early in the movie have an awkward Chekhov's scrap metal pulverizer. Speaking of, get a lot of gore, if you are into that thing. Decapitation is the preferred vampire killing method of this movie. Usually with an axe. Sometimes a shotgun. 
 
Again, it’s not the best, but the premise makes up for a lot. However, never lives up to its potential. Josh Hartnett is alright. Ben Foster is really good but not in the movie for very long. Huston is wasted. The end is lame. It also had potential. Overall, just sort of meh. 

There Will Be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson - 2007

★★★★★- I think about this movie almost daily. Can interpret the film in about five different ways: Daniel never loved anyone and what he says to HW is a revelation, that he really loves HW chose his fake brother because HW seemed dangerous and this is his big life mistake (which is why he kills his fake brother [also why he’s obsessed with Eli being a false prophet]), that he loved HW but his drinking and rage made him crazy, that he deals with pain by throwing himself into his work which just makes him angrier over time, or that he has always been miserable and wants others to be miserable because of his success. This is all Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in another league. Everyone else suffers from this performance. This is the best performance ever. No shit. 

This Jordan-esque Interpretation was how I saw it this time. “I have a competition in me. I want no one
else to succeed… I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.” Once his son becomes his competitor, he takes that shit personally. Never has there been a more complicated father-son relationship on screen. So good. 

We get glimpses of Plainview losing control several times up to the end when he completely fucking loses it in the greatest meltdown of all time. I have a little of that competition in me on my worst days. This isn’t comforting. 

Maybe my favorite scene is when Plainview runs HW in his arms after the accident. Then he runs to the well. “ What are you looking so miserable about,” he asks rhetorically. “There is a whole ocean of oil underneath our feet and I’m the only one that can get at it.” HW OK? “No he isn’t.” 

Less complicated is what’s going on with Daniel and Eli. These absolutely hate each other. Daniel treats Eli like an idiot who he has no respect for the beginning. Then he goes to that sermon, immediately realizes he’s full of shit, but also that he’s the one he’s gonna have to deal with. “And if I have no teeth I will gum you!”

If you don’t watch this masterpiece at least three times, you can’t even have a discussion about it. There is so much to take in through every second of the film. I love it. Truly. It is my favorite movie of all time maybe. 

Phenomenal soundtrack. When the music plays, it is on. It’s chilling. I listen to it often. The cinematography is crazy too. We are mostly distant and when we get closeups, it’s uncomfortable and ambiguous. 

Jesus fucking Christ. I rewatch it whenever I hear anyone mention it. Plainview goes through hell and he ends up a reflection of that. Absolutely profound. A goddamned masterpiece.

Death Proof is the greatest movie of all time

Death Proof. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. And I have promises to keep. Miles to go before I sleep... I'm the horniest motherfucker on the road! 2007. Part of the Greatest Years in Cinema Project I'm working on. One of my least favorite films by Quinton Tarantino. That being said. Still a huge fucking fan. Both of the movie and Tarantino. I mean, dude makes movies that I fucking love. When this came out, people who said Tarantino has lost his edge I thought were insane. Not instant classic like Inglourious Basterds. But still a goddamned solid picture.

Rotten Consensus: Death Proof may feel somewhat minor in the context of Tarantino's larger filmography, but on its own merits, it packs just enough of a wallop to deliver sufficiently high-octane grindhouse goods.

With Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, which was also solid and probably a movie I'm going to rewatch soonish, was part of the "Grindhouse" double feature. This confused the few people in the theater where I originally saw the pair. Supposed to recreate the experience he loved as a child of going to exploitation double features. Tarantino's portion follows Stuntman Mike played by Kurt Russell who gets off by killing young women by crashing into them with his stuntman, death proofed car. But first he likes to fuck with them.

The movie is split into two halves. The first set, whom he meets at a bar in Austin, Texas, he hits head-on, crushing one, ejecting another from the car, ripping off one's leg, and running over the other one's face. This is after he has killed a woman played by Rose McGowan whom he is "giving a ride home" by pinballing her around in the non-death proofed side of the vehicle. It is probably the most terrifying moment in any of Tarantino's movies when McGowan's character, after ignoring many red flags and is in the stuntman's car, when he asks which way she is going and she says "right" and Stuntman Mike explains that they are going "left" and if she had been going left too, it would have been a while before she had gotten scared. The girls in this section consist of pretty lady Vanessa Ferlito whom I've never seen in anything else before or since, Jordan Ladd who is the daughter of Charlie's Angels star Cheryl Ladd, and Sydney Tamiia Poitier who is the daughter of Academy Award winner Sidney Poitier. This was sort of the second movie, the first being Jackie Brown, where Tarantino started using the children of stars he admired but the first that he really started to go all in on it (he has since done this again with Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood). This portion of the movie also features Michael Parks who became sort of a Tarantino and Kevin Smith favorite late in life (he played the villain in both Red State and Tusk), Eli Roth who plays a frat boy type, and Tarantino playing the bartender.

Second part of the flick, spoilers, Stuntman Mike tries something similar, trying to run a group of women off the road, one of whom, stuntwoman Zoë Bell, Uma's Kill Bill stuntwoman, playing herself, has strapped herself to the hood of a car in some dangerous as fuck thrill seeking shit. Unfortunately for Stuntman Mike, the women he has decided to fuck with include a legendary stuntwoman (Bell), a fictional stunt driver played by one Tracie Thoms whom I don't know, and pissed off hair and makeup person played by Rosario Dawson who wears shit-kicking boots and throws a hell of a punch. After Bell is finally thrown from the front of the car, Stuntman Mike tells them that "that was fun" but he doesn't get to enjoy the moment as Thoms breaks out a gun, wounding him with a shot to the arm, and then the ladies go on the offensive, eventually running him off the road, pulling him from the car and beating him to death. This was Tarantino's chick/car movie, obviously.

Couple of things that stuck out. Tarantino and the feet thing. There are multiple scenes featuring woman's feet, per usual. Feel this is the first one where it is like a real joke, notably when Dawson's character is sleeping with an eye mask on in her friend's car with her feet out the window and Stuntman Mike comes up to her and is a huge disgusting creep. Sort of Tarantino being like, "you think I am creep with the feet stuff? Here is some real creepy shit." There is a lap dance scene where one of the girls that dies in the car crash. This is pretty unnecessary and just sort of weird. You definitely don't like it when you see what this asshole does to her sort of thing. Finally, has one of funniest scenes from any of Tarantino's movies. The girls in the second part are trying to test drive this classic car they are into owned by some hillbilly (whom I remember as the lazy eyed dude in a couple Adam Sandler movies). As collateral on the car, they leave this actress/model dressed as a cheerleader played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (she is extremely attractive) they are hanging out with. They imply that she will suck the guy's dick, unbeknownst to her. The guy asks Dawson's character how he knows her. "She is an actress," she says. "From porno movies?" he asks. "Yes, from porno movies," Dawson says. Funny shit but it gets scary as they take off and he walks up to the girl with a disturbing grin on his face. "Gulp," the cheerleader says. 

Hard to say who won the movie, really, but I'd probably go with Russell. He plays a pretty convincing maniac, and without this role, I don't think we get The Hateful Eight and possibly not Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (it is rumored that the Russell and his longtime stuntman were maybe the inspiration for the movie [or maybe Burt Reynolds and his stunt guy]). A case could also be made for Bell who went from stunt person to legitimate actress after this flick. Also, the minute or so that Parks is in the movie is an incredible heat check. That guy always made the most out of his 30 seconds or whatever of screen time. 

Greatest Years In Cinema Project: The Films

These are the movies I'm going to be watching for Hollywood's greatest years. Five years. Ten movies from each year. A few extras by request. Look forward to these in the coming months.

Some notes on the lists. I made sure to have the Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, a comedy, a horror movie, a kids(ish) movie, and a sports movie. If a big name director had a movie that year, I included it even if it wasn't a great flick (Bringing Out the Dead [Martin Scorsese] and Death Proof  [Quinton Tarantino] for example). There are several notable exceptions to this rule (Ghost Dog [Jim Jarmusch] and The Straight Story [David Lynch] in 1999). Otherwise, just picked better films from that year I want to watch and write about.

1939

Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, The Cat and the Canary, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Roaring Twenties, The Wizard of Oz, and Young Mr. Lincoln 

Missing the cut: Dark Victory, Golden Boy, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Gunga Din, Of Mice and Men, Son of Frankenstein, The Women, and Wuthering Heights

1976

All the Presidents Men, Assault on Precinct 13, Carrie, Logan's Run, Marathon Man, Network, Rocky, Silver Streak, Taxi Driver, and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

Missing the cut: Alice, Sweet Alice, Bad News Bears, Silent Movie, The Omen, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and The Tenant 

1994

Above the Rim, Cemetery Man, Forest Gump, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview with the Vampire, Leon: The Professional, Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites, Speed, and The Shawshank Redemption

Bonus by request: Beverly Hills Cop III and possibly The Santa Clause

Missing the cut: Blue Chips, Clerks, Ed Wood, Hoop Dreams, and True Lies

1999

American Beauty, Any Given Sunday, Bringing Out the Dead, Election, Fight Club, Go, Office Space, The Blair Witch Project, Three Kings, and Toy Story 2

Bonus by Request: Deep Blue Sea

Missing the cut: Being John Malkovich, Galaxy Quest, Ghost Dog, Magnolia, Man on the Moon, Sleepy Hollow, The Green Mile, The Insider, The Iron Giant, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Virgin Suicides, and Varsity Blues

2007

Death Proof, Hot Fuzz, Juno, No Country For Old Men, Ratatouille, Superbad, Talladega Nights, The Assassination of Jesse James, There Will Be Blood, and Zodiac

Missing the cut: 3:10 to Yuma, Atonement, Distubia, Eastern Promises, Gone Baby Gone, Knocked Up, I'm Not There, Into the Wild, Mr. Brooks, and The Simpsons Movie

Also, may end up revisiting some of those flicks in years with a bunch of films that didn't quite make the cut. Just gonna focus on these for now though. But feel free to make suggestions. Thanks for everyone that suggested a film. 

Trick 'r Treat (2007) is the greatest movie of all time

Trick 'r Treat. Catching up on a couple Halloween movies I didn't have the heart to write last week with being depressed about my dog's passing and all. Heart hasn't been in it, I guess you could say. So here is this, later than it should be. Night of the Demons 2 coming soon. So, yeah, Trick 'r Treat. Watch it every Halloween with a pumpkin beer in hand. This is sort of my It's a Wonderful Life. Winner of a bunch of niche genre awards, this beats out Creepshow and Tales from the Hood as the best anthology of all time, at least IMO. Is held in decently high esteem by critics, who generally aren't kind to horror, boasting an 83% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes when it was harder to get such things and has something of a cult status among genre enthusiasts. It's sort of a travesty that it didn't get a theatrical release which has been the stuff of mystery since its straight to DVD release in October of 2009. I bought this right when it came out without knowing anything about it and was completely blown away. You don't see a lot of new movies with big names which include an Academy Award winner, Anna Paquin, attached to them as well as such a well regarded producer/director in Bryan Singer (he's probably most known as the director of the good X-Men movies [in which Paquin played Rogue]) that get relegated to the bargain bin right off the bat. As such I've always been pretty curious about the film's history and why it took so long to come out and never actually hit theaters. Best I've heard is that it was supposed to come out October 2007 but distributer Warner Bros. pulled it with no explanation, sitting on it until it finally got the old we-don't-give-a-fuck-about-this-movie treatment. Speculation has that they didn't want to compete against the fucking garbage Saw IV and that this was sort of backlash from disappointing box office numbers from Superman Returns, a movie Singer produced (his production company Bad Hat Harry [a reference to Jaws] produced Trick 'r Treat), directed, and wrote with this film's director, Michael Dougherty, from the previous year. But here it is with a premier in my living room. This shit is a gem, though I'm not sure it would have actually made all that much money.  Regardless. Greatest movie of all time.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: A deftly crafted tribute to Halloween legends, Trick 'r' Treat hits all the genre marks with gusto and old fashioned suspense.

Pros: Probably the best Pulp Fiction type segmented movie that isn't Pulp Fiction. Each segment is about the perfect length. Even the weakest of them is solid and pays off later. Cast is a solid A with an  honest to god Oscar winner who is also a pretty lady. Has something for every type of horror aficionado. Looks great. Has great atmosphere. You can't watch this and not be stoked for Halloween. No shit, this is my go-to movie of the season.

Cons: Movie is basically perfect although the serial killer principal story is sort of weak.

Pretty lady

Gist here is pretty straight forward. Spoilers below if you want to watch it. (I recommend reading this and watching it anyway).  We have five interwoven Halloween tales, so of told in a Pulp Fiction type style--a couple where the dude is a holiday fanatic and the wife not so much who is punished by this little pumpkin creature for taking down the decorations too early (which sort of serves as the intro for the movie and is by far the shortest skit), a werewolf (Paquin) making her first kill (they play it like she is a virgin who has decided to give into her friends' peer pressure and have her first fling), a serial killer school principal (who ends up being a werewolf entree later in the flick) who is raising his son in an unconventional manner, a group of kids who play a prank on a semi-autistic girl and are punished by the murdered zombies who were too once outcasts when they were students, and an old bastard who steals kids' candy (and we find out was paid to kill the outcasts who come back as zombies from the earlier skit) who has to fend off this miniature, pumpkin-headed monster/demon intruder--all taking place in a medium sized Ohio city known for it's holiday celebration. Present in all of these stories is this little pumpkin headed demon thing, which is pretty cute and looks sort of like my little doggy Lu, that enforces Halloween traditions. Those who break these made up norms suffer his wrath.

Staring in the film are Dylan Baker (he was the pedo in that movie Happiness that don't recommend anyone watch) as the serial killer, Leslie Bibb who was Ricky Bobby's wife in Talladega Nights, Brian Cox as the old man, some kids and other randos from Dead Like Me, Paquin as the werewoof, Thurman Murman as this kid who gets killed, and mostly unknowns. There has been talk for at least five years about a sequel but that shit ain't never gonna happen.

Best line of the movie was "Charlie Brown is an asshole." As a crazy Peanuts fanatic, I feel you kid. Snoopy is my guy. As a writerly sort, I identify as that little pup.

So cute

The best of the segments, IMO, is the one featuring the kids who go out collecting jack-o-lanterns for this ritual involving the dead special needs kids. They have to collect one for every kid that died and this will summon them or something. It all ends up being this mean spirited prank on this girl that the kids call "Rhonda the Retard" who seems to have a mild case of Asperger's where the others dress up like zombie kids and come after her after she descends to the bottom of the quarry via this lift thing. When they do this she goes nuts and falls and hits her head, crying somewhat hysterically. As she makes her way over to the lift, the zombie kids really do come to life. She then gets on the lift, locks the door, and goes up as her tormentors are ripped apart just below. Don't fuck with this chick (or any chick or kid for that matter).

Favorite kill and MVP both involve Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter, among other things. We are sort of introduced to this character early on during the principal bit with Dylan Baker (who is also dope). He sort of creeps up on the principal as he is trying to shut up Thurman Murman whom he is burying in his back yard. We also, at one point, see him, Cox, yelling for help from his window and getting attacked. He obviously has some shit going on. Once we get to his bit, spoilers here by the by, we see this little demon kid, Sam whom is in all the skits, killing folk who break the Halloween rules and what not, who sets his sights on Cox for stealing kids candy. The way he does it is a pretty good gag, really, sort of subverting who gets the trick. He outfits his little doggy with a costume where all the kids see are these glowing eyes that make it look like a monster. So Sam comes to take his treat, basically. First he dongs and dashes him a couple of times, the last time planting a shit ton of jack-o-lanterns on his porch. Then, when he goes back in the house, Sam makes a bunch of noise and shit so that Cox knows someone is in there with him. At that point the dog runs up stairs, where the noise is coming from, we hear a yelp from the dog and then once Cox goes upstairs, "trick 'r treat" and various other incarnations of that are scrawled in blood on the walls. So it is implied that he kills the dog, which you know, hated it, but maybe not. I choose to think not. Anyway, the little Sam monster and Cox tussle for a while before finally Cox shoots it in the head with a shotgun. Instead of brain and shit blowing out the back of his cute little pumpkin monster head, we get pumpkin goo which is fucking cool. It doesn't actually kill Sam, we see as he comes back and attacks Cox before Cox finally gives him a piece of candy, saving his life. This reprieve, however, is short lived as we find out that Cox was the bus driver in the dead kids section. So when Cox goes and answers the door for the last time of the night, he is visited by the children that he murdered so many years before, ready to get their revenge. Fucking sick.

All of that is to say that Cox really sells the shit out of a scared old man with a life-long mean streak in him, not to mention justifiable paranoia. For this performance, he gets the MVP. Love that guy. And that was one of two of my Halloween movies this year. This one, of course, is an every year watch, much to my female companion's irritation. The other one, Night of the Demons 2, I'll get to soon.