WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 03/19/08

When we were hanging out this weekend, my friend Lonnie wanted to watch Starship Troopers, which was fine for me as it’s an entertaining flic. I love how the first half of it is like an Aaron Spelling show in space, which is some goofy, silly fun, then once they get to the action the effects and CGI and design of the bugs are most excellent. It was an enjoyable way to flit away a lazy Saturday afternoon, eating junk food and hanging out.

I was also struck by a bit of a surprise at watching the film post 9/11. There’s a good deal of unplanned parallels to things going on today, even if we aren’t fighting giant bugs. First there’s a group of young adults who join up with the military during peacetime to better their lives. A vicious surprise attack by an enemy propels everybody into war, which is greatly underestimated at first.

Also, while it was satire and exaggeration, the media propaganda hit home in a few spots, including predicting having embedded reporters with the troops on the missions. Of course it’s missing the left half of the news machine, but except for a couple of throw-away lines there is no dissent among the population. Everybody agrees this is an enemy that needs to be fought and wiped out, but then it’s a battle drama, so the writing calls for that.

Anyway, it’s not a serious political treatise, it’s just something I noticed, that watching this goofy film from 1997 reads a little different in the paranoid 2000s. Damn I miss the late 90s, when the money flowed freely and the biggest thing we had to worry about was who the president was getting oral sex from.

Originally Written 03/14/08

I just watched a wonderfully entertaining film, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. One of his co-workers recommended it; he works with a bunch of cool younger engineers at Mitre, who are all into movies and video games, etc. I wish I could find an office like that again.

Anyway, the film was a treat to watch. It’s a bit silly at times, but overall it was very well done. It has some great dark comedy and ends up being a funny and clever deconstruction of slasher films, with a few nice surprises.

The actor who plays the wanna-be serial killer is wonderfully disarming and joyfully banal at first. His mentor, a retired man of the business and his wife, a former last-girl who fell in love with him, were also amusing characters. And Robert Englund has a fun role in this too.

If you enjoy horror films and dark comedy, this is a must see.

Originally Written 03/02/08

I saw Be Kind Rewind on Friday, which was a pretty fun film. It’s an absurd comedy where Jack Black gets magnetized in a mishap while trying to sabotage a power substation and accidentally erases all the videotapes in the movie rental store Mos Def works at.

So then in order not to lose the business, the two of them start re-making the movies to pawn off on their customers, and they become local sensations because of these home-brew movies.

It was a lot of fun to see them filming the movies, partly because it brought back all of the goofiness from when I made stupid movies with my friends from college, but it was also just fun to see all the movie references.

It was a great project for Michel Gondry too, since it played off his use of weird props, odd camera angles and optical effects. It most reminds me of his earlier work with music videos, though I haven’t seen The Science of Sleep yet.

It isn’t a perfect film, it’s uneven in parts and has some flaws, but it also has some heart, as well as lots of entertaining silliness. Plus the visuals from all the movie projects were a real treat to watch.

Originally Written 12/19/03

I’d been meaning to see Punch-Drunk Love for awhile, so I finally got around to seeing it last night. I’d heard a little about the film and was curious to see how Adam Sandler would be in it. While it didn’t totally work for me, I appreciated what it was doing.

It was a very interesting, quirky, dark-comedy love story. I wasn’t sure if it was kind of a light parody of a romance film, though it felt more genuine than that. I think it was meant to be two weird characters falling in love, with a bunch of other things happening, some of which were metaphorical, some of which were just there to show a complicated and bizarre world.

The movie got a little overboard with some of the artsy flourishes, such as random kaleidoscope bursts of colors between scenes, but I really liked other things it did. It used different lenses to distort the scene slightly, and lots of amplified ambient noise to give things an edgy feel and a look into the skewed world that the character inhabited.

There were a couple of visual flourishes that were really cute too, such as when Adam Sandler’s character is talking on the payphone to his love interest. When she says she’ll meet him for dinner, the whole phone booth lights up with this soft glow. There was a parade going on in the background, throughout the whole scene as well. The film had a very good sense ot layering things together to fill out the environment.

It was refreshing to see Adam Sandler play something different. He had traits from some of his other films, being an outcast, anger problems, etc, but he played them genuine here and not for laughs. There were no funny voices or his usual shtick too.

His character was both pathetic and endearing, and a little scary at times. His whole family (seven domineering sisters) is kind of disturbing, but you get angry at them and it engenders an empathy toward Adam Sandler’s character.

The movie’s kind of an odd mix, but I appreciated it. It had some interesting characters and it was very much character-driven too. A friend had seen it and I believe had similar feelings, but he did recommend me seeing it. I’m glad I did.

Originally Written 10/28/02

Once I’d heard of Blood Freak I knew I must see it. It’s a story of a bodybuilder/motorcylcist, Hirshel, who looks like a cross between Elvis and Mitchell (from another bad movie of the same name), who meets up with a woman on the Florida turnpike. She takes him back to her house where her younger sister is having a party with a bunch of druggies.

The older sister is into religion and doesn’t approve, and rambles out a bunch of random bible verses to demonstrate that.Hirshel is acting all straight-laced and interested in the “good” sister, but then gets seduced by the bad sister and after taking a few hits on one suped-up joint he’s instantly hooked and turns into a raging pot fiend.

He also gets a job at a local poultry farm and for a little extra cash agrees to be a test subject and eat turkey meat that’s been treated with experimental chemicals, it’s all for FDA testing of course, so how bad could it be? He has a bad reaction and after lying on the ground and shaking for what feels like 20 minutes of screen time, he mutates into a hideous half-turkey monster, well more actually a guy with a turkey mask on his head. He then rambles around the night, stalking junkies to kill and slurp up their blood to get his fix. He also goes after a pusher whose done his woman wrong and works him over with a band saw…

Now from the description the movie sounds deliciously bad, but unfortunately as the Huey Lewis song goes, “sometimes bad is bad.” The movie was one stinky turkey, litteraly. It reminded me a lot of an MST3K movie, Manos: The Hands of Fate, it had many of the same qualities, bad camera work, shaky footage, out-of-focus shots, poorly-lit images, muddy audio, incomprehensible, boring dialog, people reading off of cue cards, etc. The pacing of the film was really laborious too.

Okay, we get the fact that he’s on a bike, you don’t need to show us every mile he rides. Oh good, show him going through the toll booth, that’s good cinema. Yes, we understand he’s at the poultry farm, we saw the sign, you don’t need to film him turning off the main road and going all the way up the driveway. Then to further show us, the director proceeded to leave the camera running on shots of turkeys and cornish hens milling about for long stretches.

There was no music score either, so it got pretty painful. The gore sequences were kind of funny for how innept they were. There was one scene of a woman screaming and they just looped her scream so as Jeff put it, she sounded like a car alarm going off. Then in another shot a guy was attacking the turkey man, he stabbed the turkey in one of his eyes, then the turkey pulled out the knife and stabbed the guy. For both characters’ screams, the audio was the same.

The ultra layer of cheese on the film was how it was one of those scared-straight productions, a horror equivalent of Refer Madness. It was all done to show the evils of drugs and reckless living. As one reviewer described it on Amazon, “it’s the worlds only anti-pot, pro Jesus, monster movie.” Every few scenes the camera would cut to this narrator sitting in an audience who’d spout some philosophical tripe, obviously reading from a cue card of course.

What made things even more ironic was how he was going on against how bad drugs were all the while he was smoking a cigarrette. During his last preachy segment he kept on caughing, more and more, so that might have actually been some subtle irony on the director’s part, but given how bad the rest of the movie was, I hesitate to give the guy that much credit.I’m not sure if this was the absolutely worst movie I’ve ever seen, as I’ve seen a lot of stinkers, but this is up near the top of the list.

The rest of the disc had some amusing extra features, such as trailers for a bunch of other trashy films, and a few shorts as well. One of those was about a sleazy motel owenr who spied on pretty girls through a one-way mirror, filming them as they repeatedly put on and took off fancy underwear and rolled arojnd on the bed nude. We had to fast-forward through that one it was so painful.

Then there was another amusing little story about a guy who gets his frigid wife to get over her embarassment of being seen naked by going to a nudist friends’ backyard picnic, complete with nude tenis and twister. Heh, I couldn’t tell if the movie was actually trying to be genuine or was there for seedy peeping. Just plain goofy.