Netflix Roulette: The Conference (2023)

It's been a while since I spun the Netflix Roulette wheel. Back in the day, it was a good way to generate ideas for blogging. The downside is the amount of sheer crap Netflix has traditionally packed onto its platform. My will to write anything has been at a low ebb this summer, so I gave it a spin this week. Imagine my surprise when it landed on The Conference (2023, directed by Patrik Eklund), a film I watched last year and which greatly exceeded my admittedly low expectations for it. I neglected to write about it last year. It's a mistake I'll rectify right here.

The Conference is one of those films that makes me question whether it's the slasher film that I dislike or if it's the incompetence of most slasher films I dislike. The Conference is a wickedly smart, mercilessly creative bloodbath that weaves a few wrinkles into the fabric of the slasher formula that result in something that's more than just a bunch of elaborate gore scenes. Fans of elaborate gore scenes should not despair, however. It has those, too. It has those in great abundance. The Conference is not blazingly original. The idea of a slasher rampaging through a group of co-workers on a team-building retreat is at least as old as Severance (2006) and probably much older. This story construction removes the slasher movie from its usual moral universe where punishment is dispensed for the moral transgressions disapproved of by puritans and other assorted blue-noses. It places it instead in an even more political/economic context at the other end of the spectrum. This is the kind of wish fantasy in which the entitled rich assholes get the most gruesome death scenes rather than the sluttiest teenagers because predatory capitalism and its attendant corruption must be punished. In a film at least. I'm not so naive as to believe something like this would happen in our own world. In our own world, the bad sleep well. In any event, The Conference adds some flavor of its own to this kind of fantasy, but it is still very much a film in which feckless characters are picked off one by one by a lunatic with a flair for elaborate murders. What matters here, if you'll pardon the pun, is the execution...

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Netflix Roulette: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

It's been a while since I gave the ol' Netflix Roulette Wheel a go. Spinning the wheel this weekend gave me The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010, directed by Luc Besson). Color me surprised. I'm a fan of the Jacques Tardi comics, but I had no idea that this film even existed. My surprise was tempered a bit by director Luc Besson. I'm not a fan. Be that as it may...

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Netflix Roulette: Firestarter Rekindled

Anyone who goes in for genre films has to have a streak of masochism. Genre movies are so rarely good that if you can't take the punishment, you won't survive long enough to find that perfect rose at the top of the mountain of dung. Most genre films lack the ambition to be good even when they have the talent for it. They don't push the envelope because challenging the audience will reduce the box office in the short run even if it creates long term hits or cult items. Audiences don't like to be challenged. I understand that. I do. Sometimes genre films are comfort food, something to put on the TV while you unwind after work, to be consumed when your brain needs to rest.

I've been avoiding very challenging films for the last couple of weeks. For various reasons, my attention span and my general headspace haven't been up to the task. True, there are legitimately great films that don't require the level of concentration that a film by, say, Hou or Kairostami or Wong Kar Wai require, but I just haven't been in the mood. Instead, I've been using media as a kind of Hagen Das for the brain. When I haven't been watching old favorites, I've been watching movies that don't require much in the way of deep analysis and that certainly don't plumb the deeper recesses of my emotions. Most such movies are crap. That's fine. I can own that.

Spinning the roulette wheel has never been kind to me, but it usually offers me up unchallenging movies that I can approach at a cruising altitude of consciousness. One doesn't need to watch very much of this week's offering, Firestarter Rekindled (2002, directed by Robert Iscove), to realize that it is damaged goods. It takes even less time to identify where it goes wrong. The main problem? It has too little story for its running time. That it's nearly three hours long is a foolish gamble even considering that this was conceived as a cable miniseries-slash-series pilot.

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The Curse of Netflix Roulette: Starship Troopers 3

A friend of mine asked me when I was going to do another Netflix Roulette post. He seemed disappointed when I told him that I was likely going to retire the roulette posts. Not because I don't enjoy doing them--nothing of the sort. The problem is Netflix itself. Some time last year, they changed the interface on their streaming pages to a kind of infinite scroll, the kind so popular with social applications. This makes it kind of difficult to determine the range of numbers for the random number generator. Deliberately picking films from the streaming array seems like cheating. The randomness is the point. Somewhere along the line I had the bright idea of playing roulette with my Roku interface. That's a standard list of fifty movies per category. This is manageable. So this morning, I gave it a try. I used the science fiction and fantasy row rather than the horror row to reduce the chances that I'd get a result that I've already seen, and the randomizer gave me Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008, directed by Edward Neumeier). Oof.

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Netflix Roulette: Snow White: A Tale of Terror

I'm kind of in a dull spot for my moviegoing year. There's not much playing in easy reach right now that I want to see, let alone write about (I'll pass on the Seth McFarland teddy bear atrocity, thank you very much) and my attention at home has been diverted by the fact that Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations showed up on Netflix. So please pardon my occasional silence right now. In the mean time, I dusted off the ol' roulette wheel and hauled it down from the attic. Wheel of fortune, spin, spin, spin, tell me the movie I shall win...

Well, nothing so baroque as all that. The movie my algorithm gave me was Snow White: A Tale of Terror (directed by Michael Cohn), which went direct to video back in 1997 in spite of having Sigourney Weaver as the evil queen. (The roulette wheel apparently has a sense of humor, given that its first spin of this year gives me yet another version of Snow White, a story lately duking it out in dueling versions at the multiplexes.) This version of the story re-frames the Grimm's story as a Gothic horror story. It's an interpretation not entirely out of keeping with the original, though this film really only has a passing acquaintance with the Brothers Grimm.

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Lost Girls

I wasn't feeling either of the movies I rented from my local video store last night, so I decided to give the ol' roulette wheel a spin. I sort of quailed when the result came up as We Are the Night (2011, directed by Dennis Gansel), a German vampire movie. I thought: "Vampires. Crap." Vampires are probably the most played out, most annoying archetype in the horror tarot these day, whether from the proliferation of paranormal romance novels or the vampire-themed soaps all over television or the goddamn sparklers in the Twilight movies. I really do try to leave my preconceptions behind when watching movies I haven't seen, but sometimes, it's really, really hard.

Anyway, We Are the Night opens well with a scene on an airplane, where the pilot and all of the passengers have had their throats ripped out by a trio of lady vampires. The plane is approaching Berlin, and with no one to fly the plane ("You shouldn't have killed the pilot," one of our vampiresses deadpans), the three jump ship and let the plane crash. I warmed up to the movie a little with this scene, because it's a neat modern reworking of the arrival of the Demeter in Dracula. I thought: "Okay, maybe this isn't going to suck."

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Netflix Roulette: The Hazing

It's been a while since I spun the Netflix roulette wheel. I'd forgotten what a crapshoot it is. The first spin gave me a Masters of Horror episode that I've already written about. "No repeats" is in the rules, so another spin gave me The Hazing, a Tiffany Shepsis vehicle from 2004, directed by one Rolfe Kanefsky. The version on Netflix looks like crap. It looks like it was sourced from VHS and Netflix's transfer has more artifacts than I usually find acceptable. Great whacks of the movie look like they're projected on a tile wall, if you know what I mean. This isn't the movie's fault, but it doesn't speak well of either its distributor or Netflix that this movie looks this bad, because 2004 isn't that long ago. This ISN'T a movie that was ever on VHS, it's just one that was mastered by a careless film company.

The movie itself? It's kind of a fun throwback.

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Netflix Roulette: Night of the Comet (1984)

I'm not ashamed to admit that when I saw the movie the roulette wheel spun up for me this week, I couldn't resist smiling. Thom Eberhardt's ebullient Night of the Comet (1984) is a film I remember fondly. I remember seeing it when it was in theaters in a crackerbox twin theater in a town in podunk, Missouri, back when independent movies were still likely to be interesting genre efforts like The Terminator or The Hidden or crap product from Cannon Films like Tomboy and Avenging Angel. That's all gone now, and movies like Night of the Comet don't show up at the multiplexes anymore. Or if they do, they show up as bloated remakes. Blech.

Night of the Comet is the living end of the "last man on earth" subgenre, what you might get if I Am Legend were filtered through a John Hughes movie. Instead of hardboiled survivor types getting on with the business of, well, surviving, the heroines of this movie are a couple of self-reliant teenage girls whose first instinct upon arriving at the end of the world is to go shopping at the mall. Their main story conflict isn't survival, but who gets to "make it" with the last guy on earth. It's not a film that takes its subgenre seriously, though it never really mocks the subgenre, either. It's a lot more fun than many another more stomach-churning zombie film.

At the very least, it's a time capsule, an effect heightened by the film's long absence from home video during the 1990s and early 2000s. The cultural signifiers of the Reagan era are all in the foreground, from the big hair and shoulder-padded fashions to the hints of illegal wars in Central America to the conspicuous consumption to the empty synth pop of the post-New Wave to an emphasis on video games. Having played second fiddle to the master gamer Lance Guest in The Last Starfighter, Catherine Mary Stewart graduates to the role herself. The whole thing has an ersatz feel to it appropriate to its time. Lending the film some gravitas--if you want to call it that--is Mary Woronov, whose character suggests a different kind of survivor: a survivor of the B-movies of the 1970s. She projects a kind of tired decadence the likes of which is completely alien to our duo of Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney. It's a nice contrast.

The film's not without its faults, of course. After a while, the fact that the lights are all still on and that the roads are clear starts to strain the audience's credibility. For that matter, the degeneration of the partially exposed victims of the comet creates some convenient plot turns (as well as an excuse for some zombies). On the whole, though, it makes the best of its modest resources. Its portrait of an abandoned Los Angeles is certainly creepy and indelible, while its hand-crafted make-up effects are as convincing as they have to be.

This is a movie that doesn't think too hard about the nuts and bolts of the Apocalypse. In this film's universe, the machine still works even after people are removed. It would be interesting to see what these characters do once the machine stops, but the film elides this at the end, when our sister heroines argue about crossing against the light. Civilization, the movie says, is in their hands and rather than be cynical about it, it's kind of hopeful. As the last line of the movie suggests: "Bitchin' isn't it."

Baboons and Ninjas

So I did the Twitter bad movie live event last night, and it was fun. I had to bow out of the third movie because my dogs needed walking and I was nodding off during the second film of the trio. The first two, however, are all kinds of bad movie awesome.

The first film of the night was a James Bond rip-off from 1987 called The Order of the Black Eagle, directed by Worth Keeter. Keeter, it should be noted, has made a career out of directing Power Rangers projects, and this movie is a harbinger of that career. As a bad movie, this one doesn't offer the usual bad movie pleasures of excessive blood and boobs, which is vaguely disappointing, but this offers up a variety of batshit that's all uniquely its own.

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Blogorama Part V

Short notice on this one, but I'm doing the Netflix Instant Bad Movie Marathon on Twitter tomorrow night, hosted by Mr. Gable over at Mr. Gable's Reality. The movies we'll be liveblogging are The Order of the Black Eagle, Mafia vs. Ninja, and Trespassers. This one promises to bring the pain. If you want to follow along, or, god help you, participate, the hashtag will be #badnetflix. I'm @doctor_morbius, but y'all knew that already, right?

Netflix Roulette: Bloody Mallory

The title character of Bloody Mallory (2002, directed by Julian Magnat) is a gothy anime-ish asskicking supernatural superhero whose team takes on demons and monsters. Assisting her are a statuesque transsexual named Vena Cava and a telepathic girl genius named Talking Tina. The team drives around in a hot pink hearse and dress like a cadre of cosplayers. The whole thing plays like a kids movie gone 'round the bend, or more probably like a post-modern update of a silent serial, though Mallory ain't got nothing on Irma Vep. Or Buffy, for that matter. From the description of our heroes, you can probably surmise that this is one of those "supposed to be campy" films. It's French, too, so it's shot through with a fair amount of Gallic theater of the absurd.

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Netflix Roulette: Hellraiser: Bloodline

I gave up on the Hellraiser movies after the third installment. The fourth installment, Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996, directed by Alan Smithee) was not promising and I never got back to it until now. For one thing, it was directed by "Alan Smithee," in reality special effects man Kevin Yagher. When you have a director making his first film, a director promoted from the special effects department, and he hides behind the DGA's pseudonym for directors who are disowning their work, that bodes ill. For another, it was one of the first horror franchise installments to take its characters into a science fictional setting, usually a sign of a property that has gone way past its sell-by date. And for all that, it was a Dimension project, and before there was Platinum Dunes, there was Dimension and its anti-Midas effect: everything they touched turned to shit and ashes. With all that in mind, I still had the idea in my head that it couldn't possibly be worse than Hellraiser III. Could it?

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Netflix Roulette: The Funhouse (1981)

During the summer between my senior year of high school and my first year of college, I had a temporary gig assembling and disassembling a carnival. I got the job through my dad, who had a line on it through his connections on the military base where he worked. The carnival was set-up right outside the boundaries of the base--a shrewd location given the paucity of things for bored young servicemen to do in the vicinity. They raked in a ton of G.I. cash. I had an interesting view of it. I wasn't a carny, per se, but I got to move among them. The day workers they had working the joint were paid out of a trailer that doubled as an armored truck, and inside that trailer was an arsenal. There was also a drug concession, of course, and a fair amount of prostitution. There wasn't a freak show, but it was the sort of operation that would have HAD a freak show even five years earlier. It was pretty seedy, actually. After assembling and dismantling the various attractions at this carnival, I vowed that I would never, ever ride another carnival ride again. Ever. You know the cars at the end of the arms of The Octopus? They're held on by a single cotter pin. Or were at this particular carnival, anyway. The guns and the drugs made me uncomfortable, too. It's no wonder that Tod Browning set so many of his movies in a carnival. WhenI saw David Skal describe the horror genre as "Tod Browning's America" in The Monster Show, I realized that I had lived in that America for a week.

This was all in my head as I watched Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981), a film that gets the ambiance of the carnival exactly right. This is something that I didn't know when I first saw the movie way back when it was first on cable. I hadn't worked the carnival yet. I remember disliking the grottiness of its setting, which turns out to have been a stupid opinion on my part. A horror movie is not obliged to polish off its rough edges to make its audience comfortable, after all, and if it knows what it's doing--and this one does--it can use that discomfort to its advantage. It's the same kind of trick that Hooper pulled in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the mood is everything.

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Netflix Roulette: Heartstopper (2006)

I sometimes think that making horror movies is like growing cotton. If you grow your cotton in the same soil again and again and again, it leeches the nutrients from the ground and leaves it barren. I couldn't get this idea out of my mind while I was watching Heartstopper (2006, directed by Bob Keen), a film that springs from a long since depleted plot, watered by a poisoned well.

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Netflix Roulette: Zombies, Zombies, Zombies

This is the description Netflix offers for Zombies, Zombies, Zombies (2008, directed by Jason Murphy):

"When an unorthodox drug experiment conducted by a mad scientist transforms the residents of a small town into flesh-eating zombies, a motley crew of exotic dancers, pimps, hookers and johns are forced to take refuge inside a seedy strip club. Helmed by first-time filmmaker Jason Murphy, this zany, tongue-in-cheek horror-thriller stars FHM model Jessica Barton and Playboy Playmate Hollie Winnard."

Yeah. It's another one of those movies. No Jenna Jameson in this one, though, and a slightly higher-quality veneer of professionalism. I should probably own up right now to the fact that I don't have a lot of patience for these kinds of intentionally campy movies, and when this came up on the random movie generator, I was dreading the experience of watching it. I was tempted to bounce it and generate another movie, but that would be cheating. The things I do in the name of blogging.

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Netflix Roulette: Necrosis

I'll tell you what, if the random movie generator doesn't take pity on me soon, I might be chucking the whole "roulette" concept and going back to watching obscure art movies. Movies like Necrosis (2009, directed by Jason Robert Stephens) are demoralizing. It's the kind of movie that reminds me of those leech branches that grow around the trunks of large trees, leeching the vitality of the tree, only the tree is the horror genre.

The story here is your standard young people in a cabin Evil Dead rip-off, only our trio of bickering couples are haunted by the ghosts of the Donner Party, who, having turned on each other with axes, opened the gates of hell. (Those of you familiar with the tragic history of the Donner Party are probably saying "wait...what?" And you would be right. This would have been better off inventing a fictional history). Having framed this story, for good or for ill, it then loses the plot and veers off into Alfred Packer territory, or, more to the point, The Shining territory. It also occasionally loses track of where its characters are within the geography of the frame.

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Netflix Roulette: The Swarm (1978)

My stomach did a little bit of a roll when The Swarm (1978, directed by Irwin Allen) came up for review. I saw The Swarm in theaters when I was a kid, and even then, I knew it pretty much sucked. It's the epitome of the "box" movie, in which the producers, having assembled an all-star cast, put a row of headshots of their actors along the bottom of the poster, with the name of the actor annotated with the name of their character or role (George Kennedy as The Cop! Maximillian Schell as The Commandant!). The more "names" the producers assemble, the more likely it is that the movie is going to cut corners on everything else. The Swarm has a once in a lifetime cast: Michael Caine, Richard Widmark, Bradford Dillman, Olivia De Haviland, Katherine Ross, Richard Chamberlain, Slim Pickens, and Henry Fonda, to name just a few. And I'll admit, there's a certain amount of cheap fun to be had watching the cast abase themselves in this, but that's only good for about an hour. All-star disaster movies tended to bloat, after all, because, having paid for the stars, they need to showcase them. The Swarm runs something like 160 minutes.

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Netflix Roulette: Dead End (2003)

2003's Twilight Zone-y Dead End (directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa) is an unassuming little thriller in the mode of Carnival of Souls. I don't think I'm giving anything away by stating this up front, because it's so damned obvious to the viewer what's going on, even if it's not obvious to the characters in the film. This is the afterlife as an unpleasant car trip with your family. Hell, in other words.

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Netflix Roulette: Dracula (1979)

This post was originally published on the Wild Claw Blood Radio blog.

Movie adaptations of Dracula almost never shed the influence of John Balderston and Hamilton Deane's stage play, almost always to their detriment. Virtually alone of Dracula adaptations, the one that I wish had hewed closer to the play than to the book is John Badham's 1979 version. Langella was just coming off a successful, and now legendary production of the play. You may have heard of it. It's the one with the sets and costumes designed by the late Edward Gorey in black, white, and red. The producers of the 1979 movies brought Langella to the screen, but left Gorey on the stage. I can imagine a movie version that includes both as a kind of ur-Tim Burton movie. Or maybe not. The existing photographs suggest a weird kind of silent film. Sadly, it was not to be.

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Netflix Roulette: Beast Within (2008)

This post was originally published on the Wild Claw Blood Radio blog.

The best thing about Beast Within (2008, directed by Wolf Wolff and Ohmuthi, AKA ) is that it's NOT a remake of the rapey 1982 Philippe Mora movie of the same name. That doesn't mean that it's not derivative, because it is. This is what I call a "one from column A" movie. Its great flash of insight is to wonder what would happen if the birds in Hitchcock's movie were carrying the pathogen for a zombie epidemic. At least it's not so shamelessly unimaginative that it leans on the crutch of a familiar name, but you've seen this all before.

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