Reviews

  • Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

    Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Canada will have to apologize for a long time for what it did during the residential school era. To recap for anyone unfamiliar with our national shame: For a long time, Canada promoted a policy in which First Nation children were forcibly taken to boarding schools away from their families in order to pursue a policy of cultural assimilation. This policy produced horrifying results with widespread child abuse by adult staff—the stories emerging from that era are still stomach-churning and the schools have had an incredibly damaging impact on Canada’s First Nation population. Rhymes for Young Ghouls takes us deep into that horror, but be warned that the film’s treatment of the topic is not the one you expect. Focusing on a teenage girl growing up without parents in the early 1970s, it’s a film that takes us into the drug-fuelled underworld of the reserve, delves into a healthy dose of magical realism and provides some hard-hitting catharsis for the oppressed heroine, as played by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs in a terrific performance. Writer-director Jeff Barnaby is writing from the heart with modern idioms—hearing the 1970s characters talk about zombies in the modern sense may not be historically correct, but it makes the film accessible and clearly prefigures his follow-up Blood Quantum (even sharing some character names, suggesting that it’s a sequel). The result is a surprisingly high-energy take on a famously depressing topic, and one that is surprisingly lively and up-to-the moment. I’m keeping an eye out for Barnaby’s next project, because in two feature films he has established himself as having one of the strongest voices in Canadian cinema at this time. Rhymes for Young Ghouls is not the film you’re expecting from its description—it’s significantly better.

  • The Video Dead (1987)

    The Video Dead (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) The 1980s were a wild time for horror movies, and you only have to make it through the barely controlled craziness of films such as The Video Dead to see how the genre was feeding upon itself at the time. A bizarre mixture of zombie movies with just enough complications to make it a bit more memorable than the norm, it starts with an unsuspecting writer receiving a cursed television that allows zombies to emerge from the screen. When the house’s new owners move in, they too have to contend with the rampaging zombie squad, especially when a kindly Texan shows up at their door to explain the rules of the game: treat these zombies nicely and they won’t realize they’re dead. Then kill them over the ground so that they can be reabsorbed by the Earth, or lock them in a place they can’t get out of. Or something like that. By the time The Video Dead ends, it’s really an excuse to get gory. While some sources describe the film as a horror comedy, there aren’t that many laughs here, as nearly the entire cast dies and the rotting undead seem unstoppable. As a horror film, I’ve seen worse even this week, but let’s not pretend that this is a hidden gem or an overlooked guilty pleasure: it’s about as good an example of what the 1980s made possible through VHS cassette distribution, and what fans of the genre could expect to rent on any given Friday. I remained amazed at how cheap CGI hasn’t led to a resurgence of the 1980s creature features equal to the special practical effects that were routinely achieved back then, but after watching The Video Dead, I’m not exactly complaining too loudly.

  • Il fantasma dell’opera [The Phantom of the Opera] (1998)

    Il fantasma dell’opera [The Phantom of the Opera] (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but—with Dario Argento writing and directing an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera with Julian Sands and Asia Argento in the lead roles, I expected a lot more. This should be familiar material for Argento, who made the stage a centrepiece of his 1987 film Opera—alas, without much improvement. Argento-the-writer’s decision to change the Phantom from disfigured romantic to rat-friendly misanthrope is a crucial false note, while Argento-the-director to go full-gore on material that doesn’t necessarily call for it is another misfire. Julian Sands disappoints as the Phantom, although Asia Argento more or less performs at her level. Much of the same can be said about Dario Argento himself—if you were expecting much from 1998 Argento, then you hadn’t been paying attention for years at this point: the director was a shadow of his own self by that time in his career, and while fans could hope for 1970s Argento to handle the promising material, what they got instead was 1990s Argento and his substantial limitations. All of this to say that, unfortunately, Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera is closer to comedy than romantic horror: overly gory, not particularly attuned to the possibility of the material and decidedly showcasing the director near his worst, it’s perhaps most entertaining by being ridiculed.

  • The Razor’s Edge (1946)

    The Razor’s Edge (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Despite its sharp title, The Razor’s Edge is not a thriller, not a film noir, not a crime movie—it’s a soul-searching literary drama adapted from Somerset Maugham’s novel and whose contemporary impact may not be immediately understandable by twenty-first century audiences. What a bit of historical investigation reminds us is that the story was written during WW2 and, upon release in 1944, gradually found a public receptive to its themes of aimlessness after a great trauma, then-unusual transcendental themes and resistance to the increasing materiality of American culture. Even elements such as casting Tyrone Power (then more akin to a matinee idol) were playing into that zeitgeist. (Gene Tierney looks nice, though.) Those may not be readily apparent many decades later, but they certainly feed the film’s thematic concerns. Whether the result is successful is up for debate—one of the dangers in adapting a novel heavy in unconventional themes is the double-flattening effects of material being handled by people who didn’t come up with it, and tailored to an audience even further removed from what the original work was trying to say. Then there’s the real danger of ending up with a dull clunker incapable of properly conveying the point—and at 145 minutes, The Razor’s Edge is clearly vulnerable to that statement. All of this to say—sit down and prepare yourself for a long sit because this isn’t some genre piece with regular action beats to keep you awake.

  • The Mod Squad (1999)

    The Mod Squad (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) The biggest occupational hazard for TV shows move adaptations it getting over the inane high-premises often built into serial TV. In The Mod Squad’s case, the problem is magnified by its origin in a TV show thirty years earlier, down to the dated “Mod” in the title. (If you thought, “What, we some kinda… Suicide Squad?” was bad, wait until you hear its 17-year precedent “So you kids are, what? Some kind of mod squad or something?”) Here, Claire Danes, Giovanni Ribisi and Omar Epps do their best to convince them that they’re delinquent hoodlums while working undercover for the police. While the best-case scenario for The Mod Squad would have been a middle-of-the-road crime action thriller (or a 21 Jump Street-style parody), this reboot struggles under the dated nature of its inspiration, and can barely be bothered to deliver the essentials of the film it’s supposed to be. With twenty years’ hindsight, it’s also easy to see that the film is far too deliberate in its appeal to 1999 young adults (I was part of that cohort, so I can say that the film’s soundtrack feels like a nostalgic throwback to that time’s dance music) and simply feels like a fifty-year-old producer’s attempt to imagine what young people would like. There are some interesting names in the cast (notably Dennis Farina and Richard Jenkins as adult supervision), but The Mod Squad itself is too gimmicky, too badly handled, too unintentionally funny to be effective.

  • Plane Dead aka Flight of the Living Dead (2007)

    Plane Dead aka Flight of the Living Dead (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) I am slightly, but pleasantly surprised: While I wasn’t expecting much more from Flight of the Living Dead than an average zombie film set aboard the claustrophobic confines of a plane, the result is sufficiently well-executed to be effective rather than perfunctory. This isn’t the first film to blend horror and commercial aviation, but its in-your-face title is likely to make it one of the most memorable. As a gigantic 747 takes off from Los Angeles to Paris with a near-empty passenger compartment and a dangerous cargo in the hold, it doesn’t take much time for the zombie to wake up and start wreaking havoc around the plane. The character work isn’t anything special, but it’s serviceable enough to take us to the end. The special effects are proportional to the film’s low budget, but they’re executed with enough energy that they manage to make us forgive their low quality. The script gets wild toward the end of the film with zombies being sucked outside the 747 and hitting a pursuing jet—and that’s exactly the kind of go-for-broke zaniness that more films of this type could use. By the end (somehow landing near Las Vegas despite nearing the Canadian border at some point), Flight of the Living Dead has completed its assignment: a decently entertaining take on fulfilling the titular zombie-on-a-plane premise, effective enough for fans of the genre. It’s not good enough to break out of its genre, but it’s decent enough to scratch an itch for horror fans.

  • Dracula 3000 (2004)

    Dracula 3000 (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) The notion of a bad movie is elastic—some will nominate big-budget Hollywood studio movies for “worst movie of the year” Razzies, even though there are several lower levels of hell on the way down to truly abominable movies. Dracula 3000 is fairly down on that ladder—wretched but not wretched enough to be completely unwatchable. Taking the Dracula story to set it aboard a spaceship in a premise clearly cribbed from Alien, it’s clearly from screenwriters who don’t understand science fiction, failed remedial physics and couldn’t be bothered writing more than a simplified third-generation copy of the Dracula story. Everything takes place in the year 3000, albeit with early-2000s movie clichés. The tin-eared dialogue seems almost parodic at times with its precise references to the 2950s, and I hope it was the French dub that introduced nonsense such as “Transylvania is a planet in the Carpathian Galaxy” (upon checking: no, that’s in the original) (Actually, looking over some quotes in their original version, it’s obvious that I missed much of the film’s charm by watching it in French—the dub may make a bit more sense, but it’s lacking the joyous inanity of the original). The writers use the same names as the public-domain Stoker novel, but other than having a character named van Helsing trace his genealogy all the way to 1800s Earth, don’t get your hopes up for anything as clever as even a remake of the original story. The villain is ridiculous, the story doesn’t make any sense and the staging is terrible—there’s really not much left to watch. The cast, however, is a surprising blend of C-grade celebrities, from Coolio to Casper Van Dien to Erika Eleniak and Tommy Tiny Lister. But as bad as the film is, there’s a specific kind of entertainment in watching it unfold. The raunchy dialogue (in a nudity-free film!) is in a class of its own, and the ending is essentially a big sex joke, certainly the most upbeat everybody-dies ending I’ve seen in a long while. Do I recommend Dracula 3000? Not to you, not in general, not to any unsuspecting soul—but I may share it with a few bad-movie enthusiasts and see what they think about it.

  • Spare Parts (2020)

    Spare Parts (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The spirit of grindhouse exploitation is alive and well in Spare Parts, a Canadian horror movie that feels like a fever dream of extreme gore horror components bolted together. Our protagonists are a punk grrl band stuck in the middle of nowhere after a bad show and a flat tire—their troubles get increasingly worse as they are kidnapped by a cult, mutilated so that their limbs are replaced by weapons, and forced to fight in an arena built inside a junkyard. One of their boyfriends eventually shows up to investigate, but don’t put too much hope on him: this is the kind of film where the final girl gets to win on her own, with an extra nihilistic twist that can be seen well in advance. Surprisingly not played for laughs, Spare Parts never misses an opportunity to spray blood and expose the innards of a human body. (And that’s not even getting into the even more disturbing sequences—this film doesn’t play nice.) While I usually don’t like that kind of extreme horror, Spare Parts at least has a consistent and appropriate tone throughout: this is a nightmare, and it doesn’t try to soften the blow through juvenile humour or a happy ending. Director Andrew Thomas Hunt uses his low budget effectively, and there’s an earnestness to the production that shows how clearly the film is made by gore fans for gore fans. As a result, I don’t exactly like Spare Parts, but I don’t hate it either—which is not bad for that kind of film. The target audience will get a lot more out of it than I did.

  • Blood Quantum (2019)

    Blood Quantum (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’ve been burnt out on so many zombie movies over the past few years that it takes a lot to get me interested in any new one, but Blood Quantum has just the right angle to grab my attention. A Canadian movie written and directed by Mi’kmaqi Jeff Barnaby, featuring a cast largely made up of indigenous actors, it’s a horror film that revisits a zombie apocalypse with a twist: indigenous people are immune to the “zed” virus, whereas white people aren’t. (This great idea is somewhat undermined by fish and dogs also being turned into zombies, but the rule of cool applies here, as it leads to an intriguing prologue.) Set during the zombie outbreak and then skipping forward six months later, Blood Quantum does master the basic elements of the zombie movie: it’s almost inconceivably gory, with chainsaws and snowblowers being put to good use. The cinematography is much better than average for low-budget horror films, and the film does get its dark zombie-killing gags right. The extra layer on top is the integral critique of white colonialism baked into the premise—there’s a clear sense of us-versus-them here, with all white people being time-bombs liable to explode into undead killing machines at any moment. There are clever touches all over the place, from post-mortem one-liners being delivered in subtitled Mi’kmaqi to the indigenous characters immediately burning a blanket brought in by a white refugee—there’s clearly a sociopolitical critique here that cuts deep for Canadian audiences. The action is brutal, and the ending doesn’t pull any punches in killing off most of its cast. Cast-wise, the standout performance here is from Stonehorse Lone Goeman as a grizzled old man who proves a terrific action hero. The result is probably my favourite zombie film in recent memory, even if I don’t quite think that it’s as good as it could be. For instance, I would have liked to hear a bit of French considering the location of the film in Québec. Burnaby has a good eye for images and composition, but his handling of the actors is a bit inconsistent—some lines of dialogue are delivered awkwardly, even as other line readings are quite good. The low budget of the film is most obvious in the frustrating time skip one third of the way in the film. Other elements of the script had me thinking that the film had picked the wrong genre: In sticking close to horror tropes, Blood Quantum steadily kills off its cast in a spiral of nihilism, whereas a more unsettling story could have been within reach if it had gone for more expansive science fiction—I’m specifically thinking about portraying white genocide through viral infection, and indigenous nations taking back Turtle Island. But I won’t fault Barnaby for delivering the film he wanted to produce—Blood Quantum is about as provocative a zombie film as has been released recently, its gore effects are top-notch and it has just enough political material to make it interesting. [September 2020: Also have a look at Barnaby’s previous Rhymes for Young Ghouls—the thematic and stylistic links between the two movies are profound, with Blood Quantum arguably being a sequel for some of the first film’s characters.]

  • El hoyo [The Platform] (2019)

    El hoyo [The Platform] (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, September 2020) To its credit, it doesn’t take a long time for The Platform to hit us on the head with its blunt metaphor for capitalism. Our characters are stuck in a multi-storey prison, and once every day a platform slowly makes it way down the hundreds of cells to allow them to eat. But the sadistic part of it is that all the food is on the platform at once. No refills. You can’t hoard food, but there’s no way to stop people on the upper floor to eat all they want, leaving increasingly little food as the platform goes down, leaving those lower-floor prisoners to fend off for themselves. This is one of those movies where the metaphor takes over credibility—It’s impossible to treat this as something plausible, leaving only the parable. But this isn’t the problem that you may expect—for one thing, The Platform makes no attempt at softening the nightmarish nature of its story. Murder, cannibalism and meanness are essential graphic elements of the plot, and those with sensitive nature are almost assured to quit halfway through. But for those who stick around, the blunt-force symbolism will find a tight, mean Science Fiction fable à la Cube that keeps on exploring the implications and possibilities of its premise. Sociopolitical commentary is an essential part of the result, and it’s the kind of thing to make viewers think about the film long after they’ve seen it. It’s notable that the film, first shown at TIFF’s Midnight Madness and then bought for distribution by Netflix, has steadily grown in recognition through word-of-mouth, earning a wide audience during the great pandemic lockdown of 2020. It’s actually worth the hype: directed with sober realism by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, it benefits from strong acting performance by a surprisingly large cast (considering its premise) anchored by Iván Massagué and Zorion Eguileor. It also, surprisingly enough for me to say (because I’d rather have things spelled out and over-explained), benefits from an ending that cuts early, leaving just enough to the imagination. This being a metaphor, it would have been reduced and possibly nullified by any kind of explanation or definitive conclusion. (As a metaphor for current society, it also managed to imply that we can only make changes for the better without necessarily knowing for sure how they’re going to turn out—we can only hope that the children will be better off.) For a film that was nowhere near my radar until I saw it climb up the viewing charts of 2019 movies, I’m surprised, pleased and unsettled by The Platform: Despite the lack of plausibility, it’s a nice example of what’s possible even for low-budget films with an imaginative script and some pointed social commentary. That it happens to be on Netflix alongside the not-dissimilar Circle is just extra icing on the cake in the middle of the (streaming) platform.

  • The Money Pit (1986)

    The Money Pit (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2020) I remember seeing bits and pieces of The Money Pit as a kid, but seeing it now from beginning to end as a middle-aged man who has owned three houses and paid for two major renovation efforts is the kind of different perspective that I couldn’t have imagined back then. Very reminiscent of Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, this is a comedy from Tom Hank’s younger, sillier period—Here he plays a young entertainment lawyer who must buy a house quickly to avoid homelessness and soon discovers that a slab-to-ceiling renovation is required. Beyond the wacky situations, funny dialogue and oversized characters, The Money Pit is comically distinctive in that it has many set-pieces of elaborate physical comedy as the house falls apart on its new owners, or the renovation crew comes knocking holes in the walls. Hanks is his usual comic 1980s self here, although Shelley Long gets more and more interesting as the film advances and has her become a foil for Hanks’ character’s increasingly maniacal portrayal. It’s quite a bit of fun, although my approval is somewhat tempered by having seen Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House not too long ago: The original film has a better portrayal of the universal process of buying and (re)building a house, far better dialogue and Cary Grant as a bonus. This one often skips over material that could have been interesting, stops caring about the money issue midway through, and goes too often for slapstick when it could have used a more dialogue-heavy approach. It’s still funny enough to warrant a look, although new homeowners may want to pay down a chunk of their line of credit before being retraumatized by the material here.

  • The Lord of the Rings (1978)

    The Lord of the Rings (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, September 2020) Considering the epochal pop-culture thunderbolt that was Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001–2003, it’s inevitable that Ralph Bakshi’s prior take on the material would be relegated to the rank of a footnote. Not fair to the effort invested in the production, perhaps, but understandable. Nearly everyone watching the 1978 film after 2003 will be comparing it to Jackson’s trilogy, despite the fundamental differences in budgeting, special effects and creative intention between the two versions. This earlier version had to do what it could with a middle-range budget, nonexistent special effects and the limitation of working with one film rather than three—while a sequel was planned, the 1978 film’s modest success and bad relationship between Bakshi and other producers prevented Tolkien’s vision from being fully realized at that time. Bakshi also tried speeding up production by rotoscoping a lot of material, and while some of this can be justified as an artistic choice (giving an unsettling realistic appearance to the evil characters, specifically), the result feels like an awkward blend of hand-tinted villains and cartoonish heroes—perhaps impressive at the time, but outdated today. Story-wise, it almost goes without saying that the singular film is a speedrun of Tolkien’s story all the way to Helm’s Deep, skipping many details along the way. I didn’t get much enjoyment out of the result, but then again, I wasn’t really expecting to—Bakshi’s film was famous as a flawed adaptation even when I was a young SF&F fan in the 1990s, and the availability of a near-perfect take on the same material has now solidified its place as a curiosity.

  • The Anderson Tapes (1971)

    The Anderson Tapes (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) At its core, The Anderson Tapes can be summarized as a heist film—during the course of the story, an ex-con recruits a team to plan a large-scale robbery of an upper-class Manhattan apartment adjacent to Central Park. It takes us through the conception, the planning, the execution of the robbery, as well as its bloody aftermath. But as the computer-fond opening credits title font suggests, there’s a whole new wrapping around this noirish kind of plot: The presence of surveillance cameras, TV screens, computers and consumer electronics. Throughout the film (supported by beepeetee-doo computer noises), our protagonists are watched, recorded and itemized by various law enforcement and surveillance outfits. The Anderson Tapes’ big irony, of course, is that none of this surveillance actually works to prevent the robbery—each unit being concentrated on their own purposes, they completely miss the pieces being assembled in front of their eyes. Ultimately, it’s not surveillance that defeats the robbers but a ham radio and the power of concerted citizens half a world away. In the hand of directory Sidney Lumet, this proto-technothriller adapted from the Lawrence Sanders novel also offers plenty of touches that round out a suspense film: laughs, chills, thrills and action are dolled out in careful fashion, with surprisingly strong character work (including a very funny turn by veteran actress Judith Lowry) and a dependably likable turn by Sean Connery as the lead. The other big casting surprise here is a tall but very young-looking Christopher Walken in his first film role. What was a solid film upon release is now greatly enhanced for modern viewers by seeing then-primitive but scary technology being lavished with attention, and well-observed details to make it all credible. In that, The Anderson Tapes is clearly from the same director who later did Dog Day Afternoon and similarly raised a generic premise into something far more interesting.

  • The Big Picture (1989)

    The Big Picture (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The premise of The Big Picture will be intensely familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Hollywood satire: Smart Midwestern student filmmaker earns the attention of Hollywood producers, is gradually coopted by the studio system until he’s no longer himself, loses it all and fights to get to do it his way. That plot outline could be written on a napkin, but it’s not the point of the film. The point of it is the visual humour that writer-director Christopher Guest injects in his narrative, as our protagonist (a very likable Kevin Bacon) can’t help but supplement what’s happening to him with imagined spots heavily inspired by Hollywood classic movies. Tons of small visual jokes pepper the story, challenging viewers to pay attention. The cast can be surprising at times, especially when it comes to smaller roles: Teri Hatcher looks amazing as an opportunistic actress, John Cleese (sans moustache) plays an American bartender, Elliott Gould has a few moments as an imaginary prosecutor, Jennifer Jason Leigh is a wacky artistic type, Martin Short gets to play the stereotype of a talent agent, and Fran Drescher shows up as a trophy wife. Clearly produced as a satire of Hollywood for Hollywood people rather than the general public, The Big Picture is noteworthy in Guest’s filmography for not being a mockumentary, but rather a full narrative film, with plenty of imaginary asides. It’s quite a bit of fun, and probably ranks as one of those Hollywood satires that not enough people have seen. It’s well worth a look, and not solely as a filler for Guest completionists.

  • The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

    The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Nearly every actor has a few regrets in the hungry days of their filmography, and some movies benefit from being those regrets—raising their profile far above what they would have been without those subsequently big-name actors. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had no less than two of them, enough so that it would, within two years, be re-edited, retitled and re-released as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation to capitalize on the sudden stardom of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger. Nothing but regional luck explains this dual pairing: The film was a low-production affair that scoured the Austin acting scene to find its actors, and both were newcomers looking for any kind of work. Zellweger does look cute in glasses as a young woman preyed upon by a family of killers on Texas backwoods roads. McConaughey plays against type as a younger member of that family that also includes include a deceptively normal-looking realtor as bait (the attractive Tonie Perensky). What could have been just a forgettable and generic plot soon turns bizarre (and worse) when the usual teenager-versus-hillbilly-psychos dynamic somehow comes to include links to a secret society (???) involved in the JFK assassination (!!!) as represented by a snappily dressed man in a limousine (?!!) who just drops by the house to have a look around (??!) Even the legacy of the Texas Chainsaw series (and I use the expression lightly, not being a fan of it) is severely undermined by Leatherface being an incredibly inept opponent reduced to being in drag and screaming helplessly. Thankfully, this family eats pizza rather than humans, but that’s just one more thing that comes to confound those expecting a continuation to the series. I, personally, don’t care about the Texas Chainsaw premise at all, so I’m enjoying a reaction to the film similar to that of Halloween III—the more they desecrate the series’ mythos, the more I’m enjoying the put-down. Still, subverting expectations isn’t a virtue by itself, and much of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is just tedious. Occasionally interesting for watching McConaughey and baby-faced Zellweger in such schlock, intermittently intriguing for undermining the entire series, but otherwise not really worth the effort.