"Accomplishments"
In theaters: There's absolutely no question that The Wild Robot is a gorgeous-looking film. The paint-on-3D technique that's been in vogue lately (in other Dreamworks projects like the most recent Puss n Boots, for example) is really very beautiful, especially at rendering nature. In this story, a service robot is accidentally activated on a small, woodland island and ends up having a gosling imprint upon it. It must rewrite its programming to accomplish the "task" of motherhood, which is the underlying metaphor, though in the way that other animals are used, the film is also about how "othering" is ultimately self-defeating and community-building a better, sounder approach. I don't know how much of this is on the children's book it's based on, but that sounds very 2024 to me. We're largely in Bambi/Lion King Land here, with the circle of life, a small animal growing up, and maybe a fire at the end, but mostly through the mother's eyes. It does get schmaltzy at times, but sometimes you want schmaltzy, you want the music to manipulate you into a state, you want to cry your eyes out. A lot of delighted sounds from children in the audience, but it perhaps hit their parents hardest.
At home: On the face of it, it may be difficult to imagine there's much excitement in a fictionalization of an actual legal contract case based around the funeral home industry, but The Burial manages it with the help of dynamic actors doing a great job with the material. Tommy Lee Jones is the funeral director outraged at how a big Canadian corporation - Canadians being rare movie villains as a result - tries to fleece him, and Jamie Foxx is the slick, charismatic lawyer who takes on the case (no surprise here, he's a lot of fun). I'm also happy to see Mamoudou Athie as the young lawyer with innovative ideas, as he's been doing good work for a good while here and is always a nice presence. The rest of the cast is up to par. What makes the film feel current despite its 1990s setting is that the case exposes how corporations have stacked the deck against not the plaintiff, but minorities, lower income families, and so on. Late-stage capitalism is a pariah on society, able to parasitically attack from multiple, and often invisible, directions. If anything, corporations are more unassailable now, so this is a well-made reminder of their amorality.
What gives The Lost Boys its staying power isn't the "80s vibes" or the sexy hot stars of the moment (as my girlfriends seem to think), nor, for Nerds Like Us(TM), the comic book store scenes (truth be told, the dialog about comics is total hogwash, especially in how it relates to the props handled). No, it's that Joel Schumacher and the writers are going completely off-book with their vampire lore. At times, it feels like this will instead be revealed as a werewolf story. It's rather bloodless and dustless, using weird goo instead. The "Lost Boys" are essentially hooligans with super-powers, killing "Surf Nazis" that probably deserve it, and creating nasty gusts of wind and "half-vampires" in a Californian holiday town. Unfortunately for them, tween comic book readers rather hilariously set themselves up to be vampire hunters - I'm sure the movie must have been a vague inspiration for Buffy. The idiosyncrasies extend well out side the horror tropes and bleed into almost everything - the jazz guy is internet famous today, but Corey Haim's fashions, the Texas Massacre house, the persnickety grandpa, the crazy action scenes, the dogs, the weird vampire lair, the soundtrack... Everything in the film is eccentric and very specific. And THAT, I think, is why people keep returning to this oddball.
The Evil Dead, cheap as it is, has some memorably terrifying moments. The stopmotion-tastic Evil Dead II will never, to my mind, is a great showcase for gore gags and weird effects, but it will never replace the original. It's not that I don't accept the comedic take (I like Army of Darkness fine), it's that Sam Raimi is in such a rush to get to the good stuff that he skips over what makes a horror show engaging. I'd almost argue that, remake or not, you need to see the first one just to get context, DESPITE the clunky opening exposition. The first 15 minutes are the most frenetic, trying to essentially get Ash to where he would have been at the start of a first film. Eventually, we'll add more cannon fodder, at least, but Bruce Campbell is alone in that cabin for a long time fighting Deadites. It's relentless and semi-plotless in the same way a Road Runner cartoon is. And there's some joy in that, but it's a little too silly for my tastes, a weird shortcut to Army of Darkness. But the horror effects are impeccably demented, so I still respect it on a technical basis.
I can't see why U.S. markets would want to sell Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much as "The Evil Eye", seeing as it plays like a Hitchcock thriller. Letícia Román is a beautiful American tourist on a Roman holiday until she witnesses a murder that may or may not have happened years before at the hands on a serial killer. Yeah, that'll spoil things. She isn't believed, which turns her into a detective and therefore places her in further danger. Many clever misdirects hide the solution from the audience, and while this proto-giallo doesn't yet have the garish colors of what we think of as "giallo", Bava is inventive, atmospheric and playful. I don't think it ever gets better than the old woman's death at the top of the film, but there are some shots I'm sure inspired some more modern films (Blood Simple, for example), and Rome is very well used as a location.
Bava's Bay of Blood really prefigures the slasher genre that's about to hit American cinema, especially the sequence where young people get gorily murdered in a lake-side (the bay is so inland, it looks like a lake anyway) holiday camp. The watchful eye common in giallo evokes Black Christmas too. The only real difference between this and a proper slasher, perhaps, is that there are motivations for the killings, or at least, some of them. Bava seems to be doing a parody of the murder mystery/inheritance scheme, with murders getting murdered within minutes of their own kills, and a completely absurd ending that would pull you out of the movie if it wasn't already over. Probably requires repeated viewings to really parse what's happening and why some people had to die (at a whose hands), but it can't be denied that Bava knows how to stage a death so that you'll feel it. You'll wince more than once.
It's almost too obvious to say that All the Colors of the Dark (with the crazy AKAs Day of the Maniac and They're Coming to Get You!) has a dream-like quality seeing as we start on the fetching Edwige Fenech's literal nightmare. Her character Jane has been having these vivid dreams and perhaps some hallucinations as well ("perhaps" allowing for some gaslighting here) since she lost her baby in a car accident. As a disturbing psychological piece, the film effectively combines resentment for the driver (her fiancé), for herself as a bad mother, for her own mother, too. As a horror film, it's got the requisite sex and violence - indeed, even when the ladies are dressed, it's often as if they were naked - and a satanic cult, and maybe even supernatural powers. As a giallo (that is to say, based on murder mystery fiction), it requires a solution at the end that's, in this case, a bit heavy on the exposition, and we wake up from the nightmare. Or almost. It's easy to get a little lost in this one. Just accept it as a mood piece.
Lucio Fulci isn't as much of a stylist as other giallo directors, usually relying on shocking subject matter more than extreme camera or lighting work. Don't Torture a Duckling definitely looks like a normal movie, which is perhaps part of its power. A rural Italian town is rocked by a rash of child murders. The police are kind of useless. The Church (or at least Faith) wants you to believe this is a pure horror film without a reasonable "detective" explanation. And there's just something so casual about the scapegoating that even the audience does it. The juxtaposition of sex and violence around children is disturbing - how dare you make a shot of Barbara Bouchet in the buff so off-putting, Mr. Fulci?! - even without showing too much as to be unbearable (adults are fair game though). I can't really talk about the social commentary made by the film without spoiling its frankly solvable mystery, but it's there, and from the director of lurid material like The New York Ripper, it's an unexpected boon.
While Torso's actual Italian title promises sexual assault triggers aplenty, it doesn't deliver on that - which would make it unbearable. It's a line from the movie, but the events don't directly bear it out. It feels like because the university students who become the victims of a masked slasher (predating many such figures in horror cinema) are sexually liberated, the cops are mistaking signs of sexual activity for assault by the killer. And yet there's a psychosexual component to all this, since promiscuity seems to "warrant" killing, an anxiety about the sexual revolution - what dangers are we opening ourselves to? Except that's not really where the film goes. As in the other Martino film I've seen, the ladies get naked at the drop of a hat. Suzy Kendall doesn't (final girl material) and is an engaging presence. There's an extended sequence of suspense near the end that's absolutely terrific. But this is definitely a case of an ending letting the whole enterprise down. The info-dump that's supposed to explain everything is a mess, never connecting with the art history themes at the top of the film, and combining a traditional mystery solution with psychosis in a very clunky way. Shame.
What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, asks the English title of what should have been translated as The Police Need Help, a giallo with two completely separate identities. On the one hand, it's a procedural crime picture, held aloft by Giovanna Ralli, playing the female district attorney working with the detectives in the case of a sex trafficking ring. On the other, it's a slashery suspense thriller, with some effective gore and some not so effective (the use of mannequins for dead bodies is a giallo thing, but there's one instance of it being silly/confusing here). Regardless of which film you're watching in the moment, it's absorbing. The mystery is strong and well paced, with very cool music for when the police are "on the case", and actual chase and action scenes. The thriller is tense and the attacks by a motorcyclist with a cleaver are shocking and bloody. It also has a little to say about corruption - the real monster.
Books: You can always count on Blum and Orman for a cracking, clever and literate Doctor Who story, but I didn't expect them to get to play with Faction Paradox and deliver a sequel to both the TV Movie AND Alien Bodies. Unnatural History reads like a catalog of idea that will be picked up in the Davies/Moffat era of the show (still 6 years away!) with such concepts as the Time War, the Doctor's naked timestream/biodata, cracks in the universe, an impossible girl, "spoilers", and a lot of timey-wimeyness besides. But what this frenetic novel, bursting with ideas, is really about is Doctor Who continuity. DC Comics fans may recognize the villain as a Superboy-Prime type, a super-fan who wants to make sense of the Doctor's conflicting histories (both in strict canon and outside it), fighting the authors contention that "it all counts" and their explanation of how it could. I'm into it. I also think this should have been the last word on Sam Jones. The use of "Dark Sam" here makes the somewhat generic companion much more interesting, and gives us an explanation for the generic-ness (if we needed one). I suppose it's part of being a "standard modern companion" that she should get a perfectly good "final story", only for it NOT to be so final. Rose, Martha, Amy & Rory, Ruby probably, they all got more than one goodbye, and the FINAL final one wasn't as good as the first. We'll see.
Things Doctor Who writer David McIntee is usually good at: Pseudo-historical adventures. Genre emulation. Describing action set pieces. Autumn Mist (EDA #24) takes place within actual events that occurred during World War II, in 1944, and it certainly has those great action beats, and therefore might be called war film emulation. To make it a PSEUDO-historical, you need a fantastical or alien element, and I'm intrigued by his bringing the land of faerie into it, as a world out of phase with ours, reacting to the destruction of the natural world in Europe at this time. And as a Shakespeare fan, I do find it cool for the Doctor to interact with the likes of Oberon and Titania. Unfortunately, the novel is too short to really give this idea room to breathe, and McIntee is perhaps strapped with other elements by editorial. Elements like looping back to an earlier EDA (but NOT the EDA that really needs closure, Revolution Man), but it not really having much of an effect on the story. Elements like catering to Sam Jones' incipient departure, which comes out of nowhere, frankly (I will continue to maintains he should have exited in the previous book). In the rush to get to the end and pay everything off, the wide cast introduced in the first 100 pages gets sort of lost and missed opportunities (like having the Sidhe actually make good on their promise to the Doctor re: some of the characters) look very obvious. I rate McIntee, but he's been known to disappoint me. Mildly, in this case.
With the aptly-named Almost Silent, Fantagraphics collects four of Norwegian cartoonist Jason's (mostly) black and white books, with The Living and the Dead - a love story set in the zombie apocalypse - my favorite. Like the crime melodrama Tell Me Something, it uses silent film dialog cards (sparingly), but its narrative is clearer and more entertaining. The Frankenstein romance You Can't Get There From Here funnier, but it's always shocking to me when Jason goes for full-on word balloons. The book prefaces these three "novellas" with Meow, Baby!, a collection of shorter strips (between a few pages and newspaper strips) and shows the wider breadth of his character work - dog and bird versions of mummies, werewolves, aliens, skeletons, cavemen, Elvis still alive... This is fun October fare. I used to draw strips for my school newspapers - nothing so polished as Jason's - so I can appreciate the short-form storytelling and the cartooning syntax of repeated gags. These could have been in your local newspaper, give or take the occasional nudity. These is fairly early material - between 2004 and 2007 - so I'm keen to discover his more mature work in the future.
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