Reviews

  • Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018)

    Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) So there’s a boarding school and then monsters attack the boarding school and that’s all you really need to know about Slaughterhouse Rulez, isn’t it? Sure, you can add complications and plot justifications such as fracking causing the monsters to rise to the surface and attack a school where misfit protagonists are bullied by upper-crust antagonists, but we all know where it’s going to end: With most of our heroes alive, all the bullies dead, and the school spectacularly blown up. I’m really not spoiling anything here, so closely does the film follow the usual arc of just about any comparable B-movie. Of course, the devil is in the detail and this is where Slaughterhouse Rulez does a bit better: small character touches and the presence of three capable adult actors (Michael Sheen as a tyrannical headmaster, but also Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in likable supporting roles) round out a young cast. The stereotypes are rampant (of course, the head bully is a rich blond guy) and the sequences are familiar, but it’s part of the charm of the film to go through the expected paces at a predictable speed. Of course, this means that there’s little left to discover once you’ve figured out where it’s going. Whether this is good or bad for Slaughterhouse Rulez will depend on your mood at the time: there’s a time and place even for a lighthearted monster movie that does everything by the numbers, and that may be this evening. I’ve seen much worse … but then again, I’ve seen much better as well.

  • The Hoard (2018)

    The Hoard (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) As someone whose deadpan style of humour is often mistaken for sincerity, I feel particularly uneasy at criticizing The Hoard for being far too restrained in its comedy. A low-budget Canadian mockumentary depicting a reality show going horribly wrong, it’s inanely successful at replicating the overdramatic aesthetics of cable reality TV. Mashing together three kinds of shows, The Hoard posits a fictional “Extremely Haunted Hoarders” show that features paranormal investigators, hoarding counselling experts and a good old home renovation crew. They all come to a small Midwestern town recognized as the hoarding capital of the United States in order to clean out three houses belonging to a man with an affinity for buying stuff at estate sales. The muddled TV Show premise somehow blends that with paranormal mysteries and “renovate or demolish” decisions, but the point here is to blend subgenres to provide enough plot for 90 minutes. It does take a long time for The Hoard to get anywhere close to cruising altitude and feel as if it’s finally paying off for viewers: The first half feels like a bizarre half-committed pastiche of cable TV shows without much in terms of laughs or horror. The premise doesn’t make sense, the spooky patter is overdone and even being familiar with the way reality TV is constructed and shown (pretty much a prerequisite for watching this film) doesn’t quite make it more approachable. The third quarter of the film does get unexpectedly funnier, though, as the three plot strands of the film go off flying in increasingly stupid directions, the implied horror of the first quarter finally shifting into territory where the horrific is explained into comedy. But The Hoard remains sold as a horror film, and perhaps unfortunately the last fifteen minutes finally rush to provide the blood, gore and senseless deaths that justify the label but don’t exactly improve the results. Having gone from conceptual satire to humour to horror, The Hoard ends with a lot of messy, unrealized potential. There are plenty of paths either not taken or not left alone, with a few intriguing ideas mentioned but not used effectively. There’s even an entire facet of reality TV show left unexplored: the production, with cameramen curiously sticking around from multiple angles even when there’s a murderous psycho swinging an axe around. The Hoard isn’t a complete waste of time (writer-director Jesse Thomas Cook is clearly improving upon his previous Monster Brawl) but it’s a disappointment nonetheless. Even the deadpan humour often proves to be, well, not funny.

  • Glass (2019)

    Glass (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Movie reviewers have been saying for decades that you can never know what to expect from writer/direct M. Night Shyamalan, but that statement circa-2019 means something very different than what it did back in the early-2000s. It was about plot twists back then, but it’s about overall film quality right now: While Shyamalan’s work is now generally better than his 2002–2014 nosedive, his last few movies have been sharply uneven even within themselves, with his clever direction often fighting against his own exasperating writing. Glass is the latest case study—a disappointing third entry in a trilogy that should have been left as two disconnected first instalments. Here the main characters of Unbreakable and Split are brought together by shadowy operatives trying to prove that they’re mistaken about thinking of themselves as super-powered. The good news, I suppose, is that Shyamalan’s direction is usually effective, that Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy deliver good performances, and that the first hour of the film has its moments even if it appears to be wasting everyone’s time by trying to prove that a superhero film isn’t about superheroes. By trying to ground itself in psychological thrills, Glass almost becomes a bore until it gets down to business. Then the last third of the film starts and viewers must buckle down for a climax that throws away three films’ worth of built-up credibility. Not only does Shyamalan make sure to double underline every belated clever idea he may have had about comic books (perhaps he hasn’t noticed that, in the meantime, nearly everyone in the entire moviegoing universe has become a comic-book expert), he squanders away a lot of goodwill (for instance by killing a major character by drowning him in a puddle) and concludes on a self-satisfied note that will feel jejune to many viewers. Glass does have a few good ideas, but the way it gets at them is either wasteful or ineffective. Sarah Paulson holds her own against the established actors of the series, but the biggest problem here is once again Shyamalan-the-writer undermining anything that Shyamalan-the-director can do. Frankly, Glass isn’t nearly as innovative as it thinks in bringing back superheroes in the real world through psychobabble, skepticism, and dull colours: there are several handfuls of other movies having attempted the same since Unbreakable, and often in a way that doesn’t have viewers feeling as if they’re the chumps.

  • Trick or Treat (1986)

    Trick or Treat (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, On Cable TV, October 2019) I first saw bits and pieces of Trick or Treat in the mid-eighties at a party at a friend’s house, but I say “bits and pieces” because I was a young teenager at the time, and I had no tolerance for horror movies at all — the entire thing felt too horrifying to watch (I peeked in between other things and remember the shop class scene fakeout to this day) except for the part where the girl gets undressed by the demonic music which was like the best thing ever for a twelve-year-old. Middle-aged me remembered exactly two things about the film (the shop class and the girl), which is not too bad over three decades. Of course, middle-aged me is incredibly jaded toward the horror genre, and my main takeaway from Trick or Treat now is that it’s not funny enough. Let me explain: Made following the rock music moral panic of the 1980s, it’s a film that sort-of-tried to lampoon the cultural obsession of the time (as the bullied protagonist gathers the help of a dead rock star through playing his last album backwards) but at the same time fully going all-in on the idea of a rock star being brought back to life to commit murderous mayhem. (And also, not to forget the finer things, to undress girls.) It feels a bit uncommitted in between the humour and the horror, eventually deciding to invest more in the horror. Which, being jaded, I’ve seen countless times. It doesn’t help that Trick or Treat has very few rules to follow for itself, bouncing around from one weird thing to another. Gene Simmons has a small role (so does Ozzy Osborne, apparently, but not in the French-language version I watched) in between many unknowns. Still, the film is at its best when it gives us a glimpse into the high school experience of eighties metalheads, often bullied and misunderstood by people around them. It does remain a very 1980s movie for better or for worse, although the musical aspect does make it a bit more memorable than other movies of the time. As I can testify.

  • Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)

    Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) There are Oscar-nominated movies that age so poorly that it’s a wonder why they were ever nominated, and then there are those where it’s still obvious, decades later, why they were. Anne of the Thousand Days belongs to the second category, give how lavishly it portrays one of the high points of any High School history curriculum. Here we are, once again, in King Henry VIII’s court as he throws a hissy fit about his right to divorce whoever he wants. This being said, Richard Burton ably plays him, and he gets to face off with a very young and fiery Genevieve Bujold as the titular Anne (Elizabeth I’s mom, if you’re keeping track). It’s not just a costume drama: it’s one of the ultimate examples of the form. The colours and cinematography still impress fifty years later, with more camera movements than we could expect from a film of that period. Alas, my interest for such subject matter is near an all-time low (I blame High School), and I found myself more bored than intrigued by the result even if I can recognize that it’s a superior example of such. Even I ended up appreciating some of the touches of high drama, humour or romance in the middle of a very well-known story. It liked it quite a bit better than A Man for All Seasons, for instance. But at least I can now take it out of my list of Oscar nominees I still hadn’t seen.

  • Gong fu yu jia [Kung Fu Yoga] (2017)

    Gong fu yu jia [Kung Fu Yoga] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) I chose to watch Kung Fu Yoga based on its rather silly title, but an equally effective way to get me to watch would have been to describe it as Jackie Chan meets Bollywood, because this is as close to a fusion of two beloved genres as I’ve seen so far. The premise isn’t that complicated, with a Chinese archeologist (Jackie Chan, older but still as willing to get into action scenes) teaming up with an Indian heiress (Disha Patani, superb) to find a thousand-year-old treasure. This is an excuse for a lighthearted globetrotting action/adventure film, taking us from glaciers to ancient temples as various treasures are pursued. As an excuse to string actions sequences along a plot threat it’s not bad, but not all segments are equal: There is a lot of CGI here and it’s rarely invisible. While this allows the filmmakers to go as wild as they can (the best sequence is a car chase through Dubai with a mixture of supercars and oversized SUVs, with Jackie Chan hijacking one of the later to find that it has a lion in the back seat), it also gives an unrealistic feel to much of Kung Fu Yoga. (Even as standard-definition broadcast on regular TV, it often looked like a blurry mess.)  The script itself isn’t quite as polished as it could be: While the ending features a classic-style Chan fight sequence followed by nothing else than a classic Bollywood dance number featuring the main cast, what’s in-between is a disappointing anticlimax in which the fighters simply agree to stop as a colourful religious group walks in. Some segments are duller than others when measured against the highlights (such as the Indian Festival sequence featuring Indian rope trick, cobras, and a levitating fakir). The direction feels limited, while the inclusion of subplots featuring younger assistants distracts from Chan’s own character arc—a bit of focus would have helped, even in a film barely more than an hour and a half. Then there’s the quasi-mystical nature of Yoga in this film’s universe, which I’m not going to get into. But even Kung Fu Yoga’s imperfections can’t quite erase the sheer fascinating nature of a Chinese/Indian collaboration with its own geopolitical overtones. (This may be the first silly adventure film to explicitly mention the Chinese government’s grandiose “One Way One Road” policy.) As for me, I’ve always been a Jackie Chan fan and I have an interest in Indian cinema, so Kung Fu Yoga hits two right spots at once.

  • Bikini Beach (1964)

    Bikini Beach (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) Considering that Bikini Beach is the third of the Beach Party series films that I’ve seen, it’s fair to say that I’ve developed not only a slight fascination for these films, but also a better sense of what they share (Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, beach parties, surfing, dancing, teenage antics, and the least threatening biker in film history) and what they don’t. In Bikini Beach, we have a millionaire aiming to close the beach, a British rock star that could have been played by Mike Myers, some drag racing and a chimpanzee who’s not as smart as the teenagers as much as the teenagers are as dumb as it is. As with other films in the series, it’s meant to be dumb fun rather than high art and it succeeds reasonably well at giving us a taste of this very particular variation of the 1960s atmosphere. There are a few decent set-pieces here and there despite (or sometimes because) of the low budget and straightforward style. Avalon has fun portraying the British pop star (the influence of The Beatles isn’t subtle), drag racing is actually kind of interesting, and Harvey Lembeck once again gets a few smiles as Eric Von Zipper (a character that actually grew on me throughout the series). Bikini Beach isn’t the finest film of the series nor a particularly enlightened choice by itself, but it’s amusing enough in a time-capsule kind of way to be worth a look if that’s your kind of thing.

  • Indecent Proposal (1993)

    Indecent Proposal (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) I thought I would enjoy Indecent Proposal. The subject matter is off-putting by design, but who could imagine that a film with Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore and Robert Redford could go wrong? To its credit, the film tells you almost from its first thirty seconds that it’s not going to be fun, as a couple reflects on what they had together. One flashback later and we’re quickly off to the celebrated premise of the film as our young couple struggles with money problems and Redford steps in as a billionaire playboy so smitten with her that he offers them a million dollars for a night with her. (In the mid-nineties, this became a popular party question.)  But for such a saucy premise, Indecent Proposal soon sinks in preposterousness and boredom. Directed without much energy nor precision by Adrian Lyne (from a script that reportedly toned down much of the novel’s ambiguity), it’s a film that quickly becomes a feat of endurance as we move from one obvious set-piece to another, the resolution never in doubt even despite the misleading prologue. The longer it goes on after delivering on its premise, Indecent Proposal multiplies the double standards, attempts to make heroes out of obnoxious characters and showcases retrograde ideas about, well, just about everything linked to sex and women. Harrelson is miscast as an intellectual, Moore’s beauty isn’t equalled by an equivalent acting talent, and Redford himself can’t use his charisma to hide the smarminess of his character. It’s all a bit sad, and most fatally, interminable. It took me only a few minutes to lower my expectations, and they stayed there for the rest of the film.

  • The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954)

    The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) British film history is rife with movies with a very peculiar sense of humour, turning dramatic subjects in excuses for unusual comedy and oddball characters. The first iteration of The Belles of St. Trinian’s wasn’t an original movie concept (it was based on a series of comic drawings), but it certainly embraces the counter-intuitive appeal of the concept: A finishing school for girls where, in the series’ most defining quote, “At most schools, girls are sent out quite unprepared for a merciless world but, when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared.”  Our mildly delinquent fourth-form girls here have to fight against the overly delinquent sixth-form girls as their actions threaten the school. Horse kidnapping, nitroglycerin-making and overall mischief are involved. It’s all delightfully amoral, testing the boundaries of conventional boarding school movies and leaving plenty of space for solid British deadpan comedy. While the formula is a bit unformed (later St. Trinian’s movies would pit the school against outside opponents), it’s a good one and there’s little wonder why the film series was rebooted in 2004.

  • Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966)

    Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) There are movies that you must see merely because of their titles, and Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! certainly qualifies. Can anything measure up to the promises of the title? Well, maybe. In this case, we get Bob Hope as a middle-aged married man who accidentally gets his phone call connected (back in the time of operators who could mess up the cabling) to a runaway Hollywood bombshell desperate to stay away from the limelight. Many hijinks ensue, all the way to the police thinking he murdered the woman. It’s all complicated by the meddling of his maid, played as performance art by the irrepressible exploded-haired Phillis Diller. Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! is not what we’d call a refined or subtle comedy: The reactions are all exaggerated as if this was an extended sitcom episode, and the film barely makes an attempt to smooth in Hope’s usual one-liners or Diller’s over-the-top antics. Both of them easily outshine Elke Sommer, playing the bombshell and filmed as provocatively (in a bubble bath) as a 1960s film could get away with. The plotting is elementary, but the film strikes a chuckle every few minutes, and it’s amiable enough to be charming in its own way. (I’ve seen the film mentioned a few times as the “worst” of this-or-that category and that seems an exaggeration—perhaps the title was too imposing for those reviewers.)  All in all, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! is a happy discovery—and it does live up to its magnificently silly title.

  • 42nd Street (1933)

    42nd Street (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Backstage musicals have been a part of movie history DNA since the invention of sound, and 42nd Street was part of the genetic mutation that made it so. Adapted from a forgotten (and much racier) novel, it’s a film that codifies several of the clichés we associate with movies about putting on a show, including the last-minute replacement, dying director, casting couch shenanigans and other assorted gags. (Including the writer quibbling about insignificant line readings choices.)  It’s a bit technically rough but still quite watchable, although for much of its sprightly 90-minute duration you could be forgiven for thinking that 42nd Street is a well made but not exceptional comedy. Then the “show” begins and we get three Busby Berkley numbers in rapid succession that blow the doors off the film. Suddenly, we’re deep in Berkley’s impossible-to-stage-without-movie-editing numbers, with exploding stages in “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” kaleidoscope imagery in which humans become mere abstract figures in “Young and Healthy,” and a dizzying “42nd Street” number making stunning use on an expansive set and a rapid-fire succession of comedy and tragedy. That’s when the film becomes and remains an absolute classic. To riff on the film’s best-known line, 42nd Street began the show as a young example of the musical form and finished as an all-time favourite. The Pre-Code status of the film can be seen in subtle but pleasant touches: the risqué costumes, allusions to casting couch, daring cynical lyrics (“Shuffle off to Buffalo” is particularly funny) and suggestive subplots. Fans of musicals shouldn’t miss it.

  • Malaya (1949)

    Malaya (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Sometimes, casting is enough to make a film interesting. So it is that Malaya, now an obscure 1940s adventure film, is now worth a look simply because it features both Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy in fine form as the protagonists of the story. Set in the early days of WW2, the story is fuelled by the rubber shortages of the time, and the desperate efforts of American officials to build up the national supply. Suddenly, a journalist (Stewart) walks in with a hot tip: a vast deposit of rubber in Malaya, available to the highest bidder. But it’s not an entirely above-board transaction and so a convicted felon (Spencer Tracy, playing a harder character than usual) is asked to help out. Many adventures follow, especially once the urbane Stewart is out of his element in dangerous Japanese-controlled territory. Malaya isn’t a great movie, but it does have two great actors interacting in ways you wouldn’t necessarily predict from their screen persona, and enough eventful scenes to keep things interesting. The atmosphere of a United States newly embroiled in war is interesting in the film’s first act, then it’s off to a Hollywood-studio’s idea of what Malaysia felt at the time, complete with what we’d euphemistically call a folkloric depiction of the local population. It does end with a bang, and perhaps a plot point that we wouldn’t expect from those actors. Malaya won’t necessarily be interesting to anyone who’s not a fan of Stewart, Tracy or near-contemporary WW2 movies, but it’s serviceable enough as it is.

  • Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991)

    Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2019) For posterity, let us note that the French title of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead is Faut pas dire à maman que la gardienne mange les pissenlits par la racine (“Don’t tell Mom that the babysitter is eating dandelions by the roots”) which adds all sorts of added hilarity to it. Still, the title is probably funnier than the film itself—which isn’t as harsh a judgment as you’d think considering that its plot springs from the titular macabre situation to deliver an amusing coming-of-age story with more heart than dark humour. The first few minutes quickly set up the frame: A single mom leaving for Australia for the entire summer, leaving her four kids under the supervision of an elderly babysitter. Two or three scenes designed not to make us sorry for the babysitter’s titular death follow. But then what? The kids don’t want to admit to their mom that the babysitter’s, well, you know—and the babysitter took a summer’s worth of money with her in the grave. With an admirable lack of sense only found in 1990s movies made for teenagers, the kids have no one to call for help and so resolve to get jobs in order to pay for their groceries. One magnificent bluff and a trick of luck later, our protagonist (Christina Applegate, then at the height of her Married with Children fame) finds herself hired as an executive assistant with no idea on how to actually do the job. But the paycheck, and access to the petty cash, is more important. It all predictably explodes, but not without a late 1980s-style take on the corporate world, some mistaken-identity material and a climax that brings all facets of the protagonist identities imploding on themselves. There’s a rather heartwarming lesson at the end. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead is not great art but it’s decently entertaining … even if it doesn’t have any intention of living up to its very specific title.

  • The Young Stranger (1957)

    The Young Stranger (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) I only watched The Young Stranger because it was legendary director John Frankenheimer’s debut feature film, and at times it felt as this remained the only reason to watch the film. Completed shortly after Rebel Without a Cause’s success, it’s about the listless ennui of a teenager ignored by his father, which leads him to a scuffle at a movie theatre and then to further issues at the police station and the family home where he seems intent on not accepting a shred of humility or contrition. It quickly leads to a confrontation between the stern father and the rebellious son. (I’m more disturbed than anyone else by the idea that I now identify far more firmly with the father than the teenager.)  The teenage protagonist does his best throughout the film to act in an intensely unlikable fashion, compounding one exasperating display of attitude by another. And yet The Young Stranger somehow ends up taking a curious milquetoast position that everybody should learn to understand each other through the curious device of the teenager assaulting an older man a second time. The film is clearly aimed at the teenage audience, and the ways it champions its adolescent agenda is off-putting—it jumps far too quickly to redemption. Still, the film’s technical qualities are better than its muddled message: Frankenheimer keeps control over his tone, and the result is a bit less melodramatic than the James Dean classic, a bit more grounded than other teenager movies of the time, and not a bad watch as long as you can get over the protagonist’s crummy behaviour. Which, admittedly, can be a high bar to clear.

  • Children of a Lesser God (1986)

    Children of a Lesser God (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) I’m not entirely convinced that romance has anything new to tell us, but sometimes it’s all in the context and that’s where Children of a Lesser God succeeds brilliantly. Romantic dramas about mismatched lovers trying to work out their differences are a dime a dozen, but even thirty-five years later the setting of this film still stands out: taking place at a school for deaf children, it follows a young energetic teacher as he meets his students and develops feelings for the antisocial janitor, an attractive alumnus of the school who refuses to talk out of past trauma. Setting can be a character of its own, and the fascination exerted by Children of a Lesser God quickly develops from learning about an entirely different world set alongside our own. As our guide in this world, John Hurt has the ingrate task of explaining to hearing audiences what’s going on (through his constant audible translation of signed language), even during intensely intimate moments. Opposite him, however, is the formidable Marlee Matlin, who steals the entire film in a ferocious, layered, compelling performance. Far from being merely a love interest, she plays a fully formed character defined by far many other things than her deafness. She deservedly walked away with an Oscar for her role, and it’s easy to see why even today: this is a performance that, for many, still redefines the frame that we use to evaluate good acting. In between the subject matter and Maltin’s performance, it’s easy to see why Children of a Lesser God remains a striking film even today.