Don't Look In The Basement (1973)

Also (though less widely) known as The Forgotten, this ultra-cheap indie horror film suffers from that common affliction of ultra-cheap indie horror films: one moderately good idea does not a movie script make.  You might work a 20 minute short out of it, but that still leaves 60 minutes of your feature to fill up, somehow.

And to be honest, the one moderately good idea in this film isn't a very original one.  The movie just does a good job of setting it up.  It's actually surprisingly effective, and I am left a little disappointed that the film's good elements - the execution of that idea, and the solid soundtrack - are so poorly supported by the rest of the script.

I mean, I can handle the uneven acting.  That's par for the course in cheapo-land.  And I can overlook the role that was included solely to squeeze some naked bosoms into the film.  That's how you get your movie into the Drive-Ins in the 70s (and this film as apparently a widely distributed Drive-In movie, often playing in a double feature with Last House on the Left).  It's the scene after scene of repetitive, uninteresting 'creepiness' that irks me.  "Hey look!  This is creepy and weird, right?  And this too!  And this!"

Well, no movie.  Not really.  Mostly it's just tedious.  Maybe if the creepy and weird was a lot more subtle and a less frequent early on, then a growing sense of unease might have been created.  Instead you get a situation where ten minutes in you're asking "why would anyone stay here?  It's clearly unsafe."

So overall: mehness.  I was bored for most of the film, perking up only when the one decent idea had its reveal, because the execution was well done.  Then I was bored again for the interminable ending.

You can avoid this one.

Pale Rider (1985)

One weakness of my three tier grading system is that the 'Not Recommended' movies range from "I would rather rewatch the Josh Kirby films than this piece of drek" to "eh, it wasn't bad, but there's nothing that I could point to as a reason to check it out".

The last Clint Eastwood film I reviewed fell into the former camp; this one falls into the latter.  It's an okay film, with generally solid performances and some nicely constructed visuals, but it's eminently bland and lacking in tension, like someone took a Sergio Leone western and sucked all the life out of it.

A group of small claims miners are panhandling for gold.  A wealthy businessman whose own mines are running dry is trying to force them out so he can take their claims for himself.  He's stopped short of lethal force so far, but shortly after the movie starts, four of his men are beating seven kinds out hell out of one of the miners he wants out.

Into this situation rides Clint Eastwood.  He beats up all four guys (mainly due to the fact that they wait around to take him on one at a time), then accepts an offer from the miner to come stay with them.

Well, you know that soon enough ol' Clint will be squinting down a gun barrel at the bad guys, and we'll get to that eventually, but first we have a rather drawn out section where he tests the miners resolve to fight, and when when they pass the test, he rides off to take on the enemy all by himself.  I guess he just wanted to know they were worth fighting for, maybe.

Anyway, as I said above, there's a total lack of tension in the film that really hurts it.  Eastwood faces off against a 7 foot man, and you know he's going to win.  Every woman seems to fall in love with him (for not very well justified reasons), including one who is literally young enough to be his grand-daughter.  He guns down men left and right without ever wasting a bullet.  The climactic bad guy never even looks like a threat.

It's just a bit empty, really.

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Sequels that are better than the original are pretty rare beasts, but this is definitely one of them.  Toy Story 2 has the same likeable characters, clever jokes, and infectious charm of the first film, but neatly side-steps the breaking of verisimilitude that (for me, at least) marred the earlier release.

It is six months or so after the end of the first film, and things are pretty sweet for the toys of Andy's room.  They've navigated the arrival of a puppy and Woody and Buzz - originally rivals for Andy's affection - are now the best of buddies.

Into every life a little rain must fall, however, and thus it is for the toys.  Andy's mother holds a yard sale.  Woody goes out to rescue a toy that is about to be sold, and ends up being stolen by an unethical toy collector who plans to sell him to a museum in Japan.

As Woody's friends set out to rescue him, the Sheriff himself is meeting new toys, who will also be going to Japan, and must come to terms with the fact that kids eventually grow out of their toys, and that one day Andy will no longer want him.

That makes this the first Pixar film to deal with issues of loss, and it does so with considerable pathos, though not quite to the gut punch levels of Up.  Or maybe I just had something in my eye when I watched the first ten minutes of Up.  Yeah, that must be it.

This is a touching story of the power of friendship and optimism.  That it manages to do this without being cloying, and while still packing in piles of jokes for audiences of all ages, is a testament to the skill of the people behind it.

Great stuff.

Toy Story (1995)

So yeah, this movie is nearly twenty years old, and practically everyone on the planet who is going to see it already has, but the purpose of this blog is for me to watch the DVDs I own and haven't actually watched, so you're getting a review of it anyway.

I'm not going to bother with a recap, because if you don't know the premise of Toy Story you probably live somewhere that doesn't have the internet.  Or possibly electricity.

So instead let's start by saying that this is a very good film: the voice cast is well chosen, the script has lots of great dialogue, and there are some very cool set pieces, sight gags, and other things to praise.  It is after all the film that really launched Pixar as a brand and set them on the path to becoming the colossus of computer generated animation they are today.  I've given very positive reviews to other films of theirs in the past, such as The Incredibles, and you can expect more in the future (probably Toy Story 2 tomorrow, for instance).

And yet, despite this film's many good qualities, its commercial success, and its being inducted into the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", I am giving it only a qualified recommendation.

Because here's the thing: Toy Story breaks its own rules.  It takes a fundamental law of its own setting and snaps it in half in order to resolve a situation, and in so doing it makes every scene that has relied on the law - which is pretty much all of them - completely nonsensical.

And let's give credit where it is due: the first time I saw this film I didn't care, I just went along with it.  Because the script does a really good job of making you care about the characters and wanting them to succeed.  So you'll overlook that they cheat to do it, right?

Well, probably.  The first time you see the film, at least.  But on the re-watch, if you're anything like me, it'll niggle at the back of your mind, making you wonder "why couldn't they have worked just a little harder on the script to get the right outcome without cheating?".

So: qualified recommendation it is.

Day Watch (2006)

Well, this is a hot mess.

After making the main plot of Night Watch about the coming of the Great Other, and their choice between Light and Dark, the second movie blithely kicks off by announcing that not only are there actually two Great Others, but that there's also something called the 'Chalk of Fate', which allows you to undo the mistakes of your past.

If that Chalk sounds like a big red reset button, well, that's because a big red reset button is exactly what it is.  Now having a film that's all about hitting reset can work.  I mean, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past recently.  It had exactly that premise, and it worked fine.

This is not one of those movies.

For one thing, we're again treated to some incredibly convoluted plan from the bad guy, but this time the plan kinda makes no sense since, you know, he won last time and just has to wait for the final victory.  Or, if that wasn't true, then it makes the first movie make no sense since everyone acted like it was a do or die moment.  When it apparently wasn't.

The film also managed to get me off side early on when it had a female character go all trembly lipped after her male superior scolded her.  In my younger days I would have been irritated at the character for that.  Now I get irritated at the writers.

Anyway, this film has lots and lots of running around, and a body-swap sequence that is actually reasonably good fun, even if the point of the body swap - tricking the bad guys - is immediately shown to have not worked.  That's symptomatic of the film, actually.  There is lots and lots of activity, but it all seems to be largely pointless.  Either it doesn't work, or it was never meant to work, or ... frankly it becomes hard to care about what's happening on screen when none of it seems to matter, you know?

The body swap antics, some cool action scenes, and even a creepy spider-doll aren't enough to save this film from being an incoherent and frankly rather boring viewing experience.

Night Watch (2004)

This film caused quite the splash in geek circles when it was brought to an English-speaking audience.  Riding high on the back of several effusive reviews, it was quite the buzz there for a while.

I never saw it at the time, but finally sat down to watch it.  So: does it live up to the hype?

Well, no.

I think this is a case where style - which the film does have - covered for a lack of substance.  The film has a strong visual aesthetic, and some well-staged action scenes.  There's a fight between the protagonist and a vampire, relatively early in the piece, that is tense and exciting stuff.

So anyway, the premise of the story is that long ago, one human cursed another, and the evil effects of this curse allowed 'Dark Others' to come into the world.  Vampires and the like.  This in turn caused 'Light Others' to rise to confront them.  The two sides fought each other to a bloody stalemate and then agreed a truce.  Each side would police the other's adherence to the truce, and every 'Other' (anyone born with special powers) must be allowed to freely choose between dark and light.

Anton accidentally stumbles into the world of the others when he goes to a witch in hopes of a spell that will bring back his wife, who has left him for another man.  The witch tells Anton his wife is pregnant, and the child is not his, and that for his wife to come back, the baby must miscarry.  He agrees to this.

Which is when the 'Night Watch', agents of the Light Others, burst in to prevent the witch from casting the spell.  The fact that Anton sees this happen reveals that he too is an Other, and 12 years later, he's (a) a member of the Night Watch himself and (b) very much single.

From there, the film follows two separate threads, both of which impact on Anton.  The first is the development of another curse, one which might end the truce and lead to open warfare between Light and Dark.  The second is the attempts of a neophyte vampire to feed for the first time, and Anton's efforts to thwart her.

How these plot threads are resolved is kind of where the movie falls down, for me.  One thread gets wrapped up with a whimper, not a bang, while the other's resolution is textbook "Tune in for the Sequel!" stuff.  The film also suffers from a lack of developed characters.  We get introduced to several agents on both sides of the Light/Dark divide, but never really get a chance to know them beyond the plot points they're there to fulfill.  And that's a best case scenario: one character is introduced to be Anton's bodyguard (and quite a big deal is made of it, too) and then never really actually does any guarding.

So overall, I can't recommend this.

Tomorrow, I'll be checking out that sequel they wanted us to tune in for.  It had a less positive reception when it came out.  Which either means it's really bad, or I'm actually going to enjoy it.  Or both!

Supernatural Season 1 (2005)

I've seen this show compared to the X-Files on a few occasion (not actually a positive association in my mind), but I think it is better approached as 'Buffy for boys'.  For one thing, it's a show explicitly about hunting and killing monsters.  That's much more Buffy's thing than Mulder and Scully's.  They were more about unresolved sexual tension and discovering the secret truth that is out there (whatever that secret truth is this week).

I say 'for boys' for a number of reasons.  First there is the use of dual male leads, as opposed to a female lead with an ensemble in support.  Second, because it eschews Buffy's "I cannot be with the one I love" angst for Batman-esque manpain.  "This thing killed my wife/mother/girlfriend, and I must soothe my soul with vengeance!".

Then there's the sound track.  My word, this show has a soundtrack that could have been chosen by a teenage boy.

Finally, and most blatantly, there's the way the camera - especially in the early episodes - frames so many shots around an attractive woman's ... attractive attributes.  It's not quite as bad as the way Miranda's butt became the centre of attention in almost every Mass Effect 2 cut scene she was in, but it's definitely noticeable.

So while the show can certainly be watched by women, I definitely think there was a deliberate attempt to make it appeal to young men.

I guess the question you really want me to answer though, is 'is it any good?'.  And the answer is that it's not bad.  Like any weekly show, there are good episodes and not-so-good ones, but on the whole there are more of the former than the latter.  I liked that (at least so far) the show hasn't seriously broken the consistency of its mythology, and I liked that they did a 'change of pace' episode or two in there.

There's nothing especially deep or innovative about Supernatural Season 1, and it definitely doesn't measure up to Buffy at its best, but it is solid enough light entertainment.