jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the Alien is my favorite movie monster of all time, and I’ll go see the insectoid, double-jawed acid-for-blood chestbursting spawn of H.R. Giger in any incarnation — even this budget-bin junk, which wasn’t screened for critics and cost me $11 at the Queens midnight screening. I thought I was ready for anything, but you know you’re in trouble if you find yourself holding up the “original” AvP as any kind of standard.

AvP:R picks up at the exact moment the previous film ended: a “predalien,” product of gooey space miscegenation, causes a Predator UFO to crash in the Colorado woods, and a few exploding rib cages later, all of Gunnison is under Alien attack. What should have been a fanboy’s wet fantasy — Aliens on Main Street! — turns into a piss-poor attempt at the kind of 50s horror we’ve seen plundered, satirized, and bowdlerized a million times, from The Blob to Slither.

Instead of showing us the creatures battling it out in bright sunlight (which would have required a few fresh ideas), the entire movie takes place over the course of one rainy, moonless night, which means that you can’t see the monsters you came for. Instead, the “talent” behind this film (”the Brothers Strause”) cranked up the gore: victims usually considered taboo all become Alien fodder, including children, pregnant women (”I think my water just broke. Ahhhhhh!”), and the hot high school chick (Kristen Hager) who takes the pizza boy skinny dipping. The ostensible heroine — a poor man’s Ripley indeed — is a returning Iraq vet (Reiko Aylesworth) who brings her daughter — get this — a pair of infra red goggles as a homecoming present. Gee, I wonder if those will come in handy!

On a downward spiral ever since Fincher’s failed Alien 3, the series has now hit rock bottom. This is the Return of the Son of Dracula meets Jesse James vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter Unbound of Alien films, or whatever the classic equivalent would be. It’s been a long way down from the polished horror by Ridley Scott and James Cameron. Bad as it was, AvP was savvy enough to slyly quote from the original movies, but AvP:R doesn’t even bother with genre conventions like the pithy catchphrase. (The wittiest thing these people can think to say after killing an Alien is “Fuck you.”)

Too underlit to qualify as splatter, too bloodless to qualify as fun, too unaware of its own idiocy to be enjoyed Grindhouse-style, AvP:R is a real education in the finer stratifications of badness. A straight-out parody may be the only move left for the franchise, and then, perhaps, in another few years, the Gods governing the cycles of genre may just smile upon us again with another high-minded attempt at returning the monster to its former glories. Where there are sequels, there is hope.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Colin Strause and Greg Strause, 2007. *

• Rotten Tomatoes: 16%
• Official Site
• The trailer
• Alien vs. Predator

Robert Zemeckis’ high-tech “performance capture” adaptation of the Old English poem turns actors–Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich, Angelina Jolie–into rubbery action figures. Only Crispin Glover, covered in a disgusting, festering texture, manages to infuse some sort of twisted soul into his Grendel. I saw this in 3-D, which is sorta groovy if you’ve taken some preventive aspirin, but it also further increases the sense of artificiality. The action sequences have all the excitement of a video game cut scene.

Beowulf is only one of a slew of recent movies that wouldn’t have been possible without The Lord of the Rings, and Zemeckis lifts dozens of shots directly from Peter Jackson. Of course, Tolkien in turn would be unthinkable without the Anglo-Saxon poem — and so we come full circle.

Long ago, in the Age of Heroes, I wrote an essay about “hyperfiction” that used the cheap carnival effects of early 3-D movies as metaphor for the teething troubles of a new form. I was tickled to see that even at this late stage, 3-D still means “Poles in Your Face,” along with all manners of swords, naked torsos, dripping saliva, and flaming arrows. It’s true that Neil Gaiman’s script manages to put a somewhat interesting spin on the original epic, but first and foremost, Beowulf is self-satisfied spectacle. I’d rather play God of War. Opens Friday.

Beowulf. Robert Zemeckis, 2007. **

• 300
• Beowulf and Grendel
• Beowulf at Rotten Tomatoes
• Wikipedia
• The trailer:

It’s one of the profound mysteries of the movie year 2007: why, exactly, did critics embrace Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof the way they did while dismissing the far superior Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse out of hand? I could go on about this, but instead of expounding on the comparative joys of Planet Terror yet again, I’ve decided to join the Close-Up Blog-a-thon underway at The House Next Door and post a number of dramatic close-ups that perfectly illustrate just how much fun Rodriguez is having with the Grindhouse concept. The DVD of Planet Terror, severed from its insufferably pretentious twin, is available tomorrow.

Planet Terror. Robert Rodriguez, 2007. ****

From Spain comes an incredibly spooky ghost story by first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona. The Orphanage, produced by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) was just selected as the country’s entry for the foreign film Oscar. Belén Rueda and Fernando Cayo play a couple who move into an old mansion with their adopted son — who has imaginary friends who may be all too real….

Read my review of The Orphanage on About.com

El Orfanato. Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007. ***

The trailer:

A thriller about the horrors of parenthood, Joshua takes its cues from the tradition of The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, and Poltergeist. In a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park, a family celebrates the arrival of their second child. Brad and Abby Cairn (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga) are squabbling with her mother-in-law (Celia Weston) while Uncle Ned (Dallas Roberts) plays a piano duet with nine-year-old Joshua (Jacob Cogan). But when Ned launches into “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” Joshua throws up all over the fancy Fifth Avenue carpet. Projectile vomiting: check.

You see, Joshua prefers the melancholy music of Béla Bartók, and unlike his scruffy, affable dad, he wears his hair in a neat part. To his mother’s distress, he is fond of embalming his teddy bear, and at night he creeps around corners and pops up behind the closing doors of the stainless-steel refrigerator. Spooky children staring down darkened hallways and pressing their noses against TV screens showing static: check.

To build its oppressive atmosphere of dread, Joshua, directed by George Ratliff and written by Ratliff and David Gilbert, relies on borrowed imagery, but snappy dialogue and memorable acting help to update genre cliches to the present. The film offers apt observations about the fears and anxieties of upper-class parents circa 2007, and especially Farmiga (wasted in The Departed) puts a contemporary face on the fearful mother beset by a screaming baby, meddling in-laws, ever-present construction noise, and the alarmingly intelligent first child who appears to threaten her entire adult existence.

I’ll gladly confess that Joshua had me in its grip for most of its running time. The film provides an involving experience while it lasts, but the payoff is less than satisfying. Without spoiling it, all I can say is that Joshua doesn’t resolve so much as simply end, and the story does not hold up to much retrospection. What must have looked like a clever idea on paper turns brittle on screen, and our willing suspension of disbelief goes unrewarded. Little Joshua will never haunt our dreams like Damien or the lost child from Don’t Look Now.

Joshua. George Ratliff, 2007. **

Joshua is slated for release on July 6. Here’s the trailer:

Fox Searchlight somewhat helpfully included a defective DVD of the first movie with their schwag bag for Day Watch (along with small size t-shirts and an astronaut sew-on patch for Sunshine). Skippy or not, Night Watch was difficult to sit through. I expected more of Timur Bekmambetov’s flashy Matrix-in-Moscow stylings, but this first movie of the trilogy is a lot darker and duller than its sequel. Vampires, swirling clouds of crows, ancient battles, youngsters who face fateful choices and other stock fantasy elements meet in a Russian setting, but Night Watch has a first-act feel to: things are set up but nothing generates much heat. Day Watch is a significantly more exciting movie, but I doubt it would have made any more sense if I’d seen them in order.

Nochnoy dozor. Timur Bekmambetov, 2004. *

• Rotten Tomatoes: 57%
• Watch the entire movie:

The second installment of the horror-fantasy trilogy that famously outgrossed The Lord of the Rings in its native Russia, Day Watch stages a timeless war between good and evil in the snowed-in streets of contemporary Moscow.

Edited in the high ADD style of the commercials and music videos director Timur Bekmambetov cut his teeth on, Day Watch heaps on fantastic concepts: “Light” and “Dark” “Others” duck in and out of “second-level gloom” while they try to preserve the “Truce” and hunt for the “Chalk of Destiny” and evade the “Inquisition.” “Great Others” chase each other with modified flash lights, somebody drives a car along the facade of the Kosmos Hotel, and sex change magic leads to some mild humor and a hilariously gratuitous girl-on-girl shower scene.

Day Watch sports a fast and exciting surface, but none of it makes a lick of sense. Bekmambetov seems to be making up the contradictory rules of his supernatural universe as he goes along–cardboard characters with mysterious powers can turn around airplanes in midflight and are said to trigger the apocalypse at the drop of a magic rubber ball, but there is no apparent interior logic to the mayhem. It’s obvious why the Matrix-in-Moscow aesthetic pleased Russian audiences; it remains to be seen if the inventively animated subtitles are enough to keep the American mainstream interested. Opens July 11.

Dnevnoy dozor. Timur Bekmambetov, 2006. **

The trailer:

The grandchildren of Mengele and Coca-Cola run amok in old Heidelberg. I used to think I was too squeamish for this German horror flick that promises “terror, violence, gore, sexuality and language” on the warning label, but after Taxidermia, I was ready for anything. Franka Potente plays a medical student who uncovers nefarious goings-on in the anatomy department. Corpses on metal slabs, deadly hypodermic needles, slashing scalpels, and real-life Visible Men abound, but Anatomy isn’t nearly as bloody as the title suggests, and a lot more entertaining than you’d expect from a German slasher movie.

Anatomie. Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2000. ***