In short: Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1993)

Sean Braddock (a badly miscast Andrew Robinson) has just moved with his family to the little hamlet of Generic Horror Movie Small Town, to take on the job as Sheriff there. A a main reason for the move was to drag daughter Jenny (Ami Dolenz) away from the “bad influences” she had encountered in the Big City, and for Sean to get away from the traditional Big City malaise. The new sheriff will quickly learn that small towns are just as nasty as the big ones, and Ami falls in with the local teens of bad renown faster than you can say “obviously”.

The kids’ first big night out together turns very bad indeed when they harass the local witch (Lilyan Chauvin in the worst age make-up imaginable), knock down said witch, dig out a corpse, cast a magic spell on said corpse(!), and half-way accidentally set the old woman’s house - still with her in it - on fire before finally fleeing without trying to help her. Obviously, the corpse turns into Pumpkinhead and will soon go on a teen-killing rampage, but only after he has taken care of the men responsible for his own tragic backstory.

Because, yes, among one of many, many sins committed by Jeff Burr’s direct-to-video sequel to Stan Winston’s much, much superior Pumpkinhead is that it provides the thing with a backstory replacing its feeling of legendry, a backstory it then proceeds to use as a particularly dumb crutch to end the film on a note of bad melodrama to replace the ending of the original that felt perfectly in tune with characters and theme of the film.

Of course, characters or theme are not elements prominent or even just existing in Blood Wings. It’s just an exercise in putting one cliché after the other without even a single thought into actually making sense of them. Even the underwritten teens from the first film feel deep in comparison to the zeroes the sequel presents. But one shouldn’t expect a sequel to improve on the less successful elements of its predecessor when it can’t even cash in on the successful ones.

So Pumpkinhead has now turned from a creature of legend and tale, an unstoppable force of evil into a guy in a crappy rubber suit with a kitschy backstory who attacks his copious victims always in full-frontal view of the camera, all the better to show off how bad the monster suit is I assume, going by its killing by the numbers business like every shitty horror creature ever; fake-yet-real-Appalachia is replaced by a boring generic small town full of boring generic people with some added yokel clichés. Basically, everything that was great about the first film, Blood Wings turns into typical horror movie crap in a way that’s offensive to the first film, and boring to boot.


Worse, it’s not even a good or entertaining generic horror movie, with the usually dependable Jeff Burr directing without focus, style or taste, a bunch of actors who clearly can’t be arsed, bad effects, an uninventive plot, and a whole load of pitiable monster attack scenes. It’s enough to make one bitter, at least until one watches something better.

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The Wolverine (2013): After the apocalypse of crap that was the first Wolverine movie, I didn't expect anything at all from James Mangold's sequel, so it was a rather pleasant surprise to find it to be a highly entertaining mix of action movie tropes, good-natured Japan clichés, appropriate comic book silliness, and even half-way poignant moments. Add to these points the production's decision to cast the Japanese characters with actual Japanese actors instead of any Asian looking guy or girl they could grab from the street, and the (for contemporary blockbuster cinema) surprising amount of time The Wolverine has for its female characters. The film has reached the point where Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are actual female leads again, and not just the girls on screen to look pretty and motivate the lone hero.

And isn't it a fine thing too that the film's usually very lone hero actually needs a lot of help to get by, which the film treats as a strength and not as a weakness?

The World's End (2013): I think I've repeatedly gone on record as a big admirer of Edgar Wright, so it won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that I really, really like the last film in the thematic trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead. Having said that, I also think it’s fortunate the film at hand is the final film in the thematic trilogy because it's hard not to see that things begin repeating themselves now, and it's probably good Wright is doing something probably quite different next with Ant-Man (as he did, to be fair, with Scott Pilgrim, a film many sad people seem to hate for reasons inexplicable to me). At this point, The World's End repeats Wright's favourite themes and character types on a still highly entertaining and clever level. It's also at its core probably Wright's saddest movie, though this is the kind of film that really isn't out to make its audience sad; the sadness is just there if you're of the temperament to see it.

Children of the Night (1991): Tony Randel's vampire horror comedy is a bit of a strange egg. Tonally, it rather undecidedly jumps from broad small town satire to gore to really stupid comedy to slightly less stupid comedy to grotesque semi body horror to dark fairy-tale and back again, putting quite a few moments of actual magic in between triteness, annoying stupidity and stupid fun. The permanent tonal shifts make it impossible to a) get a very good grip on the movie as a whole and b) to ever be as much drawn into the film's very weird world as one would wish. Still, there's as much to like as to hate in here, and this is the sort of small town horror movie whose true hero isn't one of its theoretical leads (Peter DeLuise and Ami Dolenz), nor Karen Black chewing scenery, but Garrett Morris as said small town's black town drunk. Which is to say, a film worth fighting through the unfunny moments for the actual surprises it contains.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,superheroes,sf,horror,comedy,in short,edgar wright,simon pegg,nick frost,peter deluise,karen black,ami dolenz,garrett morris,hugh jackman,james mangold,tao okamoto,rila fukushima

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Kick Ass 2 (2013): Despite my general loathing for the works of Mark Millar (with some exceptions) I actually thought the first Kick Ass was a pretty successful mixture of sledgehammer satire, American toilet humour, and more actual human warmth than you'd expect given the source material's boring cynicism. Alas, someone must have drugged director Matthew Vaughn before he made the sequel or something, because this one's just a pale imitation of the first one, with at best two or three good moments. The rest of the film feels worn out, as if nobody involved had actually understood what worked in the first film, and now proceeded to copy the most obvious parts of it in the most obvious ways while suffering from a horrible hangover.

On the plus side, Millar-typical self-congratulatory cynicism still doesn't make an appearance; very much in the minus side, it's replaced with a treacly sentimentality that isn't made more interesting by jokes about vomiting.

Witchboard (1986): Just because I never liked his Night of the Demons all that much, i tend to underestimate Kevin (S.) Tenney quite unfairly. In truth, Tenney is probably one of the unsung heroes of 80s/90s horror, a guy who added a degree of subtlety to the expected excesses while also being rather good at the excesses themselves. Witchboard doesn't come down on the side of the excesses much anyway but gives Tenney opportunity to show off his skill on a more suspense than gore-based set-up. He also adds somewhat complex characterization (even of the kind that doesn't always feel the need to explain everything to the last detail) to a mix that wouldn't necessarily need it, earning actual audience interest in what happens to the characters.

There is also some choice silly dialogue, and a bit of 80s horror cheese to enjoy, so really, there's little here that doesn't provide a fun time. Plus, from today's perspective, I can't help but see the film as a main influence on Paranormal Activity, just made with verve.

Witchboard 2 (1993): Seven years later, Tenney's own sequel to the film is still a really fun and interesting effort, though the crazier parts of the original have been toned down a bit in favour of a kind of supernatural murder mystery. Tenney's still pretty good at that whole "suspense" stuff, and his script rather cleverly plays with some of the expectations built by the first film, as well as with the audience's knowledge of noirish mystery tropes. Even better, the characters are still more interesting than usual in this type of 90s horror, the film tends to show rather more complex relationships than typical in this context, and then there's the never stated but quite obviously implied fact that the ouija board's evil interest actually helps the film's heroine Ami Dolenz to become an independent person. Which, really, is all and more than one can expect from a 90s horror sequel.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,matthew vaughn,kevin tenney,ami dolenz,superheroes,horror

In short: Ticks (1993)

aka Infested

To say that Tony Randel's Ticks is probably the best film about a group of Troubled Teens™ (among them a Seth Green actually moving his facial muscles) bonding via the ways of survival while fighting pretty large, hallucinogenic ticks mutated by steroids used by marihuana farmers is selling the film short a bit, though it certainly is that. For beyond the gloriously silly basic idea, Randel's film also does a lot of things rather well in practice.

There is the fact that Randel manages to start his characters off as absolute clichés but for the most part then goes on to provide them with enough personality to put them a little above your usual horror movie victims, and takes care to never let any one of them become so annoying for you to actually want them to die; which is always good to heighten the stakes in a movie. Then there's how low the film's body count actually is, without the film ever feeling too harmless (and don't you worry, the black character dies and births a monster tick, because the film isn't that clever). It is, Ticks demonstrates again, not necessarily the number of victims that makes the fun in this sort of monster movie but rather the way the monstrous threat is presented.

Said monstrous threat is obviously one of the strong points of the film, seeing as it comes in form of slimy, skittering practical effects inspired by Alien's face-hugger and the true horrors of mother nature, which in their turn produce all kind of icky things, bodily fluids and some wonderfully gruesome and silly body part explosions. Tonally, it's all in good fun, demonstrating a sardonic sense of humour and a love of the grotesque that adds giggles (how appropriate to the film's back story) to the mild shudders and the highly entertaining carnage.

Plus, if you ever wanted to see Seth Green fight off a bunch of rude, over-large ticks with a burning broom, this is your film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,tony randel,rosalind allen,seth green,ami dolenz