The Lost Boys

"Sleep all day.  Party all night.  Never grow old.  Never die.  It's fun to be a vampire."

That's a great tagline.  For as many vampire films as there have been over the years, surprisingly few spend any time on the allure of the vampire existence.  "Sleep all day.  Party all night"?  Who wouldn't want to do that forever?  I mean, aside from adults.  But that's the point, isn't it?  The Lost Boys doesn't focus on vampires as monsters, and it doesn't spend a whole lot of time on eroticism.  This movie argues that teens would want to become vampires because being a vampire is cool.  And that is more than enough reason to be an emotionally stunted asshat for eternity, right?

Michael (Jason Patric) and his little brother, Sam (Corey Haim), have just moved to a new town with their mother (Dianne Wiest).  Santa Carla is not a particularly fun place to be a teen, despite the fact that it is a scenic California beach town.  In fact, local graffiti claims the town to be the murder capital of the world; if you can't trust graffiti for the facts, who can you trust?  Michael quickly becomes infatuated with Star (Jami Gertz), a mysterious and frequently blank-looking young woman with the name of a horse.  Sam has a slightly more difficult time finding his place in the community, probably because he dresses like a jackass.

Sam does, however, meet Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan Frog (Jamison Newlander) at the local comic shop.  The brothers give Sam some not-so-subtle hints that Santa Carla is crawling with vampires, but he doesn't take them seriously because...well, because they're obviously morons.  Unfortunately, the morons are right.  Michael's lust for Star leads to him spending a lot of time with her and her guy friends.  That would be awkward enough in most social contexts, but these dudes are all full-fledged vampires.  Of course, Michael doesn't realize that, despite a lot of weird stuff happening.  Sure, the weird stuff (hallucinations, excessive fog, death-defying stunts, etc.) don't necessarily spell out "vampire," but I probably wouldn't have wanted to hang out with those guys for long.  Michael, though, gives in to peer pressure and unwittingly starts becoming a vampire.  Of course, you can argue that everything he does in this story is "unwitting" because he's not a terribly bright fellow.

You can sulk, or you can prove me wrong.  And Speed 2 doesn't help your case.

So what does Michael do?  Does he give in to his vampire hunger?  Does he try to hold on to his humanity?  Will Sam help him or hunt him?  And what about Star?  Was she really named after a horse?

I remember seeing The Lost Boys, both as a teenager and a preteen, and I remembered it being pretty cool.  It wasn't mind-blowingly awesome and it didn't drive me to wear plastic fangs, but I was certainly entertained.  The adult Brian has a little more experience, though, and I am able to recognize that The Lost Boys is pretty ridiculous.  For starters, a group of teenagers gathers on the beach to fist-pump to Tim Capello rocking out with a saxophone.

I'll ignore the obvious questions of how likely fist-pumping is to synthesizer-heavy music and instead point out that greasy muscleheads with accessory fetishes are probably as irresistible to vampires as fried food is to Americans.  It looks like he drizzled himself in butter, doesn't it?  I don't believe that any vampire could resist murdering him.  There are other examples, like the unnaturally deep voices of the Frog Brothers, the remarkable amount of punk and goth kids in a small town, and the prevalence of male belly shirts (Sam even has a Rob Lowe belly shirt poster on his wall!), but this video clip made it hard for me to focus on anything else in detail.

So...vampires wax their body hair?

The acting in the film isn't bad, but it's definitely in tune to the silliness of the movie.  Corey Haim was actually pretty good as the non-vampire brother and Jason Patric was decent, if you can get past how stupid his character was.  Really?  You expect me to believe that you can't tell the difference between wine and blood?  If the iron and salt didn't clue you in, the coagulated chunks probably should have.  Idiot.  The real star of the movie, though, is Kiefer Sutherland as David, the teenvamp leader.  It's not that he turned in a fabulous performance, but he did seem like a pretty cool rebel.  He was a little too needy for my taste, with all the "join us, Michael," but he fits the teenage appeal of this movie perfectly.  The rest of the cast is relatively unimportant.  Alex Winter and the other vampires offer some campy fun, Diane Wiest is the stereotypically clueless parent, and Corey Feldman is kind of amusing as an amateur vampire hunter.  Edward Herrmann is probably the most convincing actor in the supporting cast, but that might be because he's playing a variation of his typical square characters.  For what this movie is --- a vampire movie aimed at teens --- I think the acting is more than adequate.

"We're not up to anything, mom...we just have to hide this corpse upstairs"

There is an awful lot of camp in this movie, though.  Director Joel Schumacher doesn't know how to manufacture convincing emotions from his actors, so he often resorts to having them overact.  Normally, this annoys me, but I think it fits this script fairly well.  This was Schumacher's first special effects-driven movie, though, and he handled those scenes terribly.  Never mind the random way each vampire reacted when they died and the sometimes awful makeup jobs.

I'm referring to the less demanding scenes that should have been handled better.  For instance, when the vampires fly, we get POV shots...showing where they've been.  Unless vampires fly backwards, that's pretty hard to explain.  Speaking of which, what was going on with the motorcycle headlights that caused wind gusts...and then vanished?  Were the vampires on their scooters, huffing and puffing until they flew their bikes into the night sky?  And where did the Frog Brothers manage to find so much garlic?  That had to have been around forty pounds.  What about the I-have-a-flashlight-shining-up-at-my-face lighting for Kiefer Sutherland in the climactic sequence? 

None of these, on its own, is too awful.  When you see that many silly things in one movie, though, they do start to become more noticeable.

All in all, though, The Lost Boys is good enough.  It could have been a lot darker and creepier if it kept the R-rating and stayed closer to the concept of Peter Pan as a vampire, but it does a pretty good job of making vampires seem cool.

"Let's go cause some anemia!"

It is certainly not a great film, but it's enjoyable and frequently unintentionally funny.  As a mainstream film, I think The Lost Boys has the right tone and attitude, but the last third of the movie is too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

Blood Creek

Blood Creek sounds like a can't-miss horror movie.  It features up-and-coming actors Michael Fassbender and the next Superman, Henry Cavill.  Young, hot actors are usually a good sign, right?  The story manages to fit in Nazis, the occult, zombie horses, and rural West Virginia (state motto: "The Inspiration for Deliverance").  Even if it's not genuinely good...it has zombie horses!  How can this movie go wrong?

When we first meet Evan (Henry Cavill), his life sucks.  He has a stressful job (paramedic) and no social life, because he spends his free time taking care of his father, who hates him.  Why?  It seems that Evan went fishing in the West Virginia wilderness with his war hero brother, Victor (Dominic Purcell), and managed to lose him.  Victor hasn't been seen in the few years since, and Evan blames himself.  So does his dad and maybe Victor's wife and child do, too.  One night, Victor returns.  Hooray!  Time to tell the family, right?  Not so fast.  Victor makes Evan promise not to ask any questions and --- after a quick shower, shave, and haircut --- the two grab some guns and head back to the wilderness.

Sometimes, brotherly love is distributed one barrel at a time

It seems that Victor has spent the last couple of years as prisoner on a farm; he shows off some nasty scars on his back, but he doesn't explain anything more to Evan.  Torturing and killing a family, including a mother and daughter, doesn't sit well with Evan, but he shouldn't worry.  You see, the family in question was featured in a short prologue, set back in the 1930s; the family members were visited by a Nazi scientist, Herr Wirth (Michael Fassbender), and they don't appear to have aged a day since.  Why did Victor come back?  Who is he looking for?  Here's a hint: if the family hasn't aged, I wonder what Wirth is up to...?

Answer: not exfoliating

You might have noticed a complete lack of the occult and zombies in that brief synopsis.  It turns out that the Nazi, Wirth, that visited the farm in the 30s was studying ancient Nordic runes.  By studying them, he had gained the power to raise the dead.  Fast forward seventy or eighty years, and the family apparently keeps Wirth locked in their cellar, which he doesn't like, and I suppose is a reasonable reaction.  He's fairly super-powered (and ugly) at this point, so you would think he could just tear the family apart, right?  Well, the farmhouse is covered in rune markings that protect the family from Wirth.  That is, until some brothers intrude, leave a few dead bodies in their wake and let Wirth free.  Now, Wirth is on the loose, with the dead bodies of people, a dog, and some horses to play with.  Oh, and tonight just happens to be a very important night for occult blood rituals.  Hey, Victor, maybe you should have just gone home to your wife and kid, eh?

I don't necessarily expect the greatest acting in films that feature zombies, but I was let down by Blood Creek.  The acting wasn't wretched, but I wanted more than I was given.  Michael Fassbender spends most of his time on the film shrouded in shadow, with the majority of his dialogue being guttural whispers.  In other words, he wasn't used very well.  Dominic Purcell is as monosyllabic as ever and the interactions between him and Cavill are generally just shouting matches.  I did find his I've-been-gone-for-a-few-years long hair and hobo beard to be pretty funny and obviously fake; I'm still baffled by his choice to shave his head and trim his beard down to stubble, but not actually shaving his face.  Who does that?  Henry Cavill doesn't impress here, either, although his character is pretty nonsensical, so that might just be the weakness of the writing showing through.  Emma Booth was mediocre as the character that explains everything to Cavill, Purcell, and the audience, but it was a thankless role.

His X-ray vision looks deep into your soul

My biggest problem with Blood Creek has to be the direction of Joel Schumacher.  I suppose I still hold a grudge against the man for ruining Batman for the better part of a decade, but he has made a few good horror movies in his time, so I was expecting this to be better than it was.  The premise is cool enough, but Schumacher makes some odd choices throughout.  My main gripe is that we don't get a clear glimpse of Herr Wirth for about an hour.  We see his shadowy figure, wearing a surprisingly nice leather duster, sprinting across the farm in the darkness, and we get a few quick looks at his face, covered in black bandages, but there are so many questions left unanswered.  Why does he need bandages if he's an undead occult Nazi?  For that matter, why does he need a groovy jacket?  Exactly why have Wirth's looks been so drastically affected by his magic, but the family, who benefit from his spells, look normal?  How did Wirth get those rune symbols legibly carved into the back of his skull?  Sure, he looks cool, but that appearance is wasted in the darkness. 

The only time you see Fassbender's actual face

There are a lot of dumb moments in the film that should have been caught by the director, but were not.  Why does the undying farm family have only one picture on display in their house, and it happens to have a date written on it?  That's ridiculously stupid.  It's even stupider than the weaknesses in the script, like the concept of Evan promising to not ask questions, and yet that's all he does.  Or the fact that Wirth's zombies can enter the farmhouse, but are not under instructions to break the runes that keep him outside.  Ugh.  So much stupid.

There are some good things going on in Blood Creek.  I really liked the basic idea of Nazi occult beliefs.
As other movies (the first and third Indiana Jones series, for starters) have shown, having Nazis and occult themes in the same picture can make for great films, and it is an idea that is terribly underused.  I also liked that the zombies created by Wirth weren't the flesh-eating variety, but the voodoo type, raised by a master and doing his bidding.  The special effects were pretty good and the gore was solid in both quality and quantity.  I'm still divided on whether or not the zombie horse was hilariously awesome or just plain bad, but I'll put it in the "win" column for now. 

For being a more-or-less direct-to-DVD release, Blood Creek is pretty good.  I don't grade on a curve, though.  There are some solid ideas here, but too many stupid moments and poor choices for me to recommend this.  There was some promise in the premise, but promises are made to be broken.

8MM

You never can tell which Nicolas Cage is going to show up in his movies.  Will it be the Academy Award-winning actor?  Usually not.  Will it be the dead-eyed action hero?  You've got a decent chance of that, but Vegas odds are always on Nicolas Cage, the ridiculous over-actor.  When you combine those odds with the chances of a post-Batman and Robin Joel Schumacher directing a good movie, you get 8MM.  Of course, Cage and Schumacher could have theoretically teamed up for an over-the-top action romp, full of ridiculous explosions and tough guy dialogue; it wouldn't have been very good, but it would have been watchable.  Instead, this is a movie about snuff films, which are by definition not full of hilarity.

Yeah, that's how I react to Nicolas Cage movies, too.

Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is a private detective that specializes in seedy cases in which his photos and research frequently end up as evidence in divorce proceedings.  I bet his wife loves his job.  One day, he gets a call to visit a new widow.  Her late husband left her a vast fortune, but she found something odd in his safe: an 8MM film that depicted a rape culminating in what appears to be murder.  The widow wants Welles to find out whether the murder was real or staged, no matter the cost.  After assuring her that snuff films are just an urban legend, Welles agrees to take the case, expecting to uncover a privately-financed movie with some fancy special effects.  What he finds does not support that theory.  Welles does some boring grunt work and manages to stumble across a missing persons photo that resembles the girl from the movie.  As odds-defying as that it, Welles manages to track down her family, discover evidence in her bedroom that neither her family nor the police found, and learn that she went to Hollywood.  As earth-shaking as that concept may be --- a runaway girl who starred in a porn film went to California?  Gasp! --- Welles quickly realized that he did not know how to dig any deeper into this case without help.  Enter Max California (Joaquin Phoenix).

...and he works in a porn shop?  Chick magnet!

Max is a failed musician and belly shirt aficionado who works the counter in a dingy sex shop.  Welles hires Max to help him enter the pornography underworld and the two begin to piece together who could have made a snuff film and who would have acted in it.  Hint: if you see a recognizable actor being questioned by Nicolas Cage in this movie, he's probably involved in the snuff film.

I'd be sweating bullets, too, if this was the best role I could get.

The acting in 8MM is definitely not for fans of subtlety.  Nicolas Cage spends a lot of time grimacing and looking tired.  I don't blame him.  His character had to watch hours and hours of low-budget weird porn before he found enough clues to track down the killers.  Joaquin Phoenix was a little better, but that's just by comparison, and his character's costumes were pretty ridiculous.  I'm not saying that people in California don't wear baggy leather pants every day with their proto-Ed Hardy T-shirts, but there isn't a scene in this movie where I don't want to smack Phoenix just on general principles.  James Gandolfini was fine as a low-life porn producer and Peter Stormare was his typically slimy self as a high-end low-life porn producer, but this is a film that relied heavily on Cage and Phoenix.

Creepy: a new fragrance by Peter Stormare

There are a few other actors in small roles, but none of them have any great impact on the quality of the film.  Anthony Heald is unsympathetic (surprise, surprise), Catherine Keener is kind of bitchy, Norman Reedus is a loser with a bad haircut, and Chris Bauer wears a gimp outfit.  It is worth noting that Bauer's character, The Machine, has occasionally popped up in the sports world.  San Francisco Giants closer --- and professional sports' most entertaining personality, since the retirement of Shaquille O'Neal --- Brian Wilson is apparently a fan.  You can spot Chris "The Machine" Bauer's likeness at around the 4:20 mark.


So...that's kind of weird.  Anyway...

There's really not much that goes right with 8MM.  Director Joel Schumacher placed himself in a tough spot.  The obvious trapping that comes with making a movie about snuff films is that the movie winds up being as exploitative as the snuff films themselves.  I will give Schumacher credit for not falling into that trap.  However, to avoid seeming exploitative, I think 8MM loses its teeth. 

If this isn't a movie that is meant to shock you, then what is it?  A ludicrously tangled mystery?  An expose on pornography's seedy underbelly?  An argument for the banality of evil?  You could choose any of those, but none make this a satisfying movie.  The mystery is too easily untangled, possibly because the mystery focused on "Who made this snuff film?" instead of "Why was this snuff film made?"  The dark side of porn is a potentially disturbing focus, but 8MM just has Cage wander through a couple creepy basement VHS flea markets; nothing is really said or done about anything but this one particular snuff film.  Perhaps sensing that this movie is neither shocking nor captivating, Schumacher changes the tone of the film, transforming Cage from an investigator to an avenger in the final act.  It is here that the bad guys explain themselves, and that explanation --- which is meant to be chilling --- is simply underwhelming.

Less sensual than it looks.

Personally, I can't think of a story that involved snuff films that I would have enjoyed.  Maybe that's just me, though.  I assumed that 8MM would try to be disturbing and maybe take a stand on the issue (murder is bad, perhaps?).  It doesn't.  It's a detective story where the audience is only allowed to see snippets of what Nic Cage is reacting to; that means that Cage's acting needs to convey our disgust for us, and he turns in a very melodramatic performance that undermines that notion.  I'm not saying that I need to see the damn titular movie --- not seeing a prized object can work wonders, as in The Maltese Falcon and Pulp Fiction.  The script and the acting weren't anywhere near where they needed to be to pull that off, though.  Hell, Cage's character lost his private detective credibility in the beginning of the film, when he hides his smoking habit from his wife by spraying air freshener, just like a fifteen year-old.  Hint: change your clothes and hide your ashtrays, too, dumbass.  If he can't do that convincingly, how is the audience supposed to buy into anything else he does in this film?

This movie just plain sucks.  There is nothing quite like a film that is trying to be edgy and watching it fail.  I would have enjoyed laughing at 8MM, but it is a joyless train wreck that is at least thirty minutes too long.  Nicolas Cage does a poor job acting, which is not terribly surprising, and he appears to have no fun doing it.  His character is stupid and without charm.  The script is surprisingly dull and the supporting cast is mostly unmemorable.  This is a surprisingly bad movie with a surprisingly bad story, and I went in with low expectations.  The only redeeming quality this film has --- aside from a surprising second life in sports interviews --- is that it was too draining and incompetent to earn my hatred.