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What with the new DVD release of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 *King Kong* and the anticipation over Peter Jackson’s about-to-be-released homage, the eternal question is renewed: Just why the hell did the natives on Skull Island build an anti-Kong wall… and then put a Kong-size door in it?
It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.
It’s easy to forget today how close global nuclear annihilation genuinely seemed in the 1980s.
How do you solve a problem like Marie? We haven’t seen a horror-movie heroine like her since perhaps *Alien*’s Ripley, ardently independent and fiercely determined not to be a victim… but with a twist to her psyche that will, I suspect, be a greater source of fascinated, can’t-look-away terror to male audiences than the nonstop gore. For there is an aggressively sexual element to Marie’s intensity that ends up being the most vivid thing about *High Tension* — sublimated female rage and passion are given full, furious expression here, and… wow, does it make for a shocking, provocative, unforgettable movie about how women are too often overlooked, ignored, underestimated, and misunderstood.
With its clear and obvious choices — think Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake? or death?’ bit — *Unleashed* really is a fairy tale next to *Crash,* where half the time when you think you’ve got a grasp on what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and the ‘right’ way to live, you turn out to be wrong, even if the other guy is wrong, too.
Fifteen years ago Bill and Ted took a seriously silly journey to the underworld, and this one is seriously freakishly disturbing. Imagine if Bosch and Dante were 21st-century geeks and they collaborated on a graphic novel (and maybe that’s a good description of Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis’s book *Hellblazer,* upon which this is based, but I don’t know cuz I’ve never seen it).
Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.
I tell ya, if ‘reality TV’ was like this, I’d actually watch it. Let’s put some real bite into *Survivor.* If some unknown, untalented schmuck wants to be an instant celebrity *and* take home a million bucks, he should have to gnaw his own foot off and put a bullet in some other fame-whore first.
Horror films have their own special guidelines when it comes to plausibility: basically, there aren’t any. And the Japanese flick *Ju-on: The Grudge,* which had a limited American release earlier this year, takes even greater liberties in the credibility area than most. Fortunately, writer/director Takashi Shimizu has enough tricks up his sleeve to make you forget that he’s not making one whit of sense. Logic is never a strong deciding factor, anyway, when you’re looking for a flick to give you goosebumps, which this one does, if only in moderate measure. Plus, creepy as it sporadically is, you can poke fun at it, too: The rage is coming from inside the house!
I mean, who, precisely, said you couldn’t have a zombie romantic comedy? Why can’t the male lead express his undying devotion for his ladylove by bashing dead people in the head with a cricket bat?
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