Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Every so often, I watch a movie that reminds me of the decade in which I came of age: the 90s.  While not as sleazy as the 70s, and not as absolutely stupid as the 80s, American pop culture in the 90s was still fairly ridiculous.  I don't often watch movies that are defined by their decade, but I made an exception for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"Ridiculous"how?  Two words: Butterfly Vagina

Before I continue, I have to admit that I am a fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show.  I'm not much of a TV fan, but I have been sucked into that teen melodrama and found it surprisingly entertaining.  I am not going to compare the two, though; I believe that serial storytelling is vastly different than filmmaking.  I just want to acknowledge ahead of time that I might have a soft spot in my heart for Joss Whedon, who created the TV show and wrote the screenplay to the film.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the story of (not surprisingly) Buffy (Kristy Swanson), your average, run-of-the-mill Valley Girl stereotype, circa-1992.  Basically, she cares about fashion, shopping, boys, and using "like" at least three times in every sentence.  Like, gag me with a cliche.  Buffy's life would be normal, if not for the intervention of Merrick (a slumming --- even by his low standards --- Donald Sutherland).

Sutherland, contemplating seppuku

Merrick finds and trains the Chosen One in each generation (he's old) to battle the vampire master, Lothos (Rutger Hauer).  The Chosen One is always a teenage girl, and she always loses to Lothos; this time, it's Buffy's turn.  On a side note, though, Merrick has a worse losing record than my beloved Chicago Cubs; if this were professional sports, he would have been fired at least a hundred years ago.  Anyway, in a bit of plot convenience, Lothos likes to treat his only viable opposition as sport, so he and his vampire minions set up shop in Buffy's hometown of Los Angeles.  Can Buffy defeat the dastardly vampire leader?  What effect will Merrick have on this Valley Girl?  What the hell is an Oscar winner doing in this movie?  All this, and more, can be answered by watching this movie. 

But who would want to do that?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not, by any imaginable definition, a good movie.  You can blame many people for that, but I think the first targets should be the actors.  Kristy Swanson is, quite simply, not much of an actress.  Unfortunately, her character goes through a pretty typical story arc, so her performance seems even more bland and predictable than usual.  Donald Sutherland is pretty decent as a creepy old man, but he does make me wonder exactly what his acting standards are; does he look for choice roles, decent money, or just someone who will offer to buy him Funyuns?  Rutger Hauer had swelled to his current size by this point, so he wasn't as physically intimidating as Blade Runner-era Rutger would have been.  Hauer is only a little subpar in this role, primarily because his character is stupid (he deliberately allows his enemy to get stronger) and his costumes and makeup were occasionally laughably bad. 

Smirkingly bad, at the very least

Surprisingly, the supporting cast is pretty solid.  Luke Perry played Buffy's love interest, and he managed to have some reasonable reactions --- when weird stuff starts happening, he tries to leave town --- as well as some of the better lines in the movie.  David Arquette has a small role, but the banter between him and Perry was one of the better aspects of the film.  Paul Reubens doesn't make for a very fearsome vampire, but his comic timing provides some of the movie's best jokes, particularly with his death scene.  You might also recognize Stephen Root and Hilary Swank in fairly boring character roles, as well as Ben Affleck, Ricki Lake, and Thomas Jane in bit parts.  None of them are particularly interesting to watch here, but it can be fun to spot them before they were famous.

Vampire or extra from Wayne's World?

This is the only feature film directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui and I think I know why.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a story that, probably, shouldn't work.  The premise alone guarantees a fairly cheesy movie experience.  Kuzui doesn't go much further with the idea than that; in fact, I believe that the Wisconsin-ish levels of cheesiness present in the movie are due to Kuzui making lazy choices and settling for stereotypes and easy jokes.

Thankfully, no stakes-for-dildos jokes

I suppose you can blame a lot of that on Joss Whedon's script, too.  This is an odd script, though; while there are a lot of lame jokes and gags, there are also a few genuinely funny and clever moments.  For every Valley Girl-ism, there's a line like, "He ruined my new jacket...!  Kill him a lot."  I hesitate to say that the filmmakers butchered his script, but...this screenplay draft is a lot cooler than what ended up on-screen.

For example, Luke Perry's friend didn't look or sound like an Arquette

That's not to say that the movie is awful...it's just not very good.  There are some clever lines and it managed to blend comedy and horror together --- unfortunately, it was neither scary or funny enough to truly work.  Still, it's kind of cute for what it is: a stupid comedy-horror hybrid.

Hobo With a Shotgun

As you might imagine from the title, Hobo With a Shotgun is damned lucky it ever got made into a movie.  Sure, I like movie titles that give you the gist of the story, but this...it's a little on the nose, don't you think?  To help promote his Grindhouse project back in 2007, director Robert Rodriguez held a contest at the annual South by Southwest festival; contestants had to make fake movie trailers, along the same lines as the ones featured in Grindhouse.  If you missed Grindhouse in theaters, or have only seen its two movies (Death Proof and Planet Terror) separately, there were a string of hilarious retro fake movie trailers between the two feature films, usually in the style of 1970s horror movie trailers.  Not to discredit the actual movies, but the trailers were the highlight of that movie-going experience for me.  Here's Jason Eisener's SXSW contest-winning entry:

Regardless of your taste in movies, that trailer is awesomely funny.  Well, enough buzz grew around this trailer that they actually went ahead and made a feature-length version, only this one had a budget and Rutger Hauer, of all people, starring.  This isn't the first feature film to have been made from a Grindhouse trailer --- Machete was a surprise hit --- but Hobo With a Shotgun doesn't have the star power or the long-running buzz of its kin.  Is it possible that this practically straight-to-DVD affair is worth watching? 

Answer carefully.

Not surprisingly, Hobo With a Shotgun is the story of a hobo (Rutger Hauer).  He has been hobo-ing around the country for a good long time and has finally ridden the rails (as hobos are wont to do) to Hope Town, whose sign has been graffiti-ed to read "Scum Town."  Here, the hobo hopes to save enough money to buy a lawnmower and build a new life for himself.  Unfortunately, the town is ruled by the iron fist of The Drake (Brian Downey).  Under his rule, normal citizens are useless cannon fodder.  If you cross him, he will murder you in public as creatively as possible and get away with it.  He owns the town.  He owns the drug trade.  He owns the police.  He seems to own everything and everybody of importance in Hope Town.  This is obviously a town in need of justice, but who will be the hero that steps up?  And what will he use as his weapon of choice?  I won't spoil the plot twist for you.

I don't know if you can recycle those legs, but I guess a shotgun makes a convincing argument.

The acting in Hobo With a Shotgun should probably be taken with a grain of salt.  After all, the actors are acting in a movie about a hobo with a shotgun; this isn't exactly a British period piece.  Is the acting good?  No, but it suits the material perfectly.  Rutger Hauer has a lot of fun and his talent makes watching this movie one hell of a lot easier than it could have been.  He is smart enough to not over-complicate his character, and that helps keep this movie fun.  I thought Brian Downey was perfect as the MWA-HA-HA evil crime boss, and I liked how ridiculously over-the-top he and his sons (played by Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman) were.  I can understand some people who found them annoying, but they were the perfect foils (a businessman and frat boys) to a hobo on a vigilante mission.

A villain designed to make you want to hit him.  Perfect!

Molly Dunsworth played the hobo's only friend, a stripper with a heart made of...um...pewter?  She's nice enough, but I was looking for something less valuable than gold.  I think pewter works fine.

But really, what were you expecting from the acting in this film?  If you are curious about Hobo With a Shotgun, your main question should be "Is it watchable?"  Any movie with a title and premise as dumb as this one should be absolutely wretched, unless it is handled just right.  And I am happy to say that Hobo With a Shotgun was handled perfectly.  The best description I can give you of this movie is a blend of the better Troma movies and the first Robocop.  Yes, the acting is ridiculous.  As for violence and gore, well...there's some.

...and her day only gets worse.

Actually, there's a hell of a lot.  Lots of shotgun blasts, heads exploding, decapitations, and loss of limbs.  This is, at the very least, not a dull movie.  More importantly, this is a movie that knows how stupid it is, and is willing to play up to that idea.  So you think it's a little weird that a hobo decides to fight a corrupt town with a shotgun?  Well, what if he witnesses criminals threatening to shoot a baby in the face?  When your bad guys are that evil, it makes shotgun vigilantism both more plausible and more reasonable.

Manhole covers are underused in most movies.  Not here.

Is this a movie for everyone?  Definitely not.  It's dumb and it's gory.  It's also nearly perfect for what it is.  I loved what director/creator Jason Eisener was able to do with this kernel of an idea and hope to see a bright future for him.  Maybe he won't make great films, but he could definitely reboot The Toxic Avenger.  I can't really judge Eisener's direction because the film is so deliberately funny-bad, but I will say that he crafted a genre masterpiece.

The filmmakers decided to hold a fake movie trailer contest to celebrate the way their film got made.  Here's the winner:

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

It has been pointed out by my friends at No Bulljive that I have not reviewed a whole lot of science fiction movies yet, so I figured that I should begin to amend that with one of the greats.  Sure, I could ridicule Battlefield Earth (which is in my bottom 3 movies of all time) or Alien: Resurrection (which might join that elite company if I can ever sit through it again), but I want to start the New Year off right, or at least happily.

Blade Runner is based on a Philip K. Dick novel, the first of many of Dick works to be adapted for the big screen.  In 2019 Los Angeles, the world (or LA, at least) is a very different place.  For starters, American culture in Los Angeles appears on the verge of being consumed by Japanese culture.  There are other little things, too, like flying cars and space colonies, but the big difference between here and now and 2019 is the existence of replicants.  Replicants are genetically engineered beings that look like fully grown humans, but can have superior intelligence, strength, or appearances; since they are potentially so powerful and nearly indistinguishable from humans, replicants are outlawed on Earth, and can only live in the space colonies.  When some replicants steal a spaceship (killing every human aboard) and head to Los Angeles, what are the local police to do?

Yeeeah!

That's where Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) steps in.  Deckard is a retired police officer that is cajoled/politely blackmailed into service by his former boss, Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh).  Deckard is the best around and the only man to rival his skill as a Blade Runner (replicant identifier/hunter) was murdered by one of the replicants.  Deckard decides to go to the source of the replicants, the Tyrell Corporation, and speak to Tyrell himself (Joe Turkel).  To give Deckard an idea of what he is dealing with, Tyrell has him perform the standard "are you a replicant?" test on his assistant, Rachael (Sean Young); the test is supposed to determine how empathetic, and therefore human, the subject is.  It usually takes only a couple dozen questions to identify a replicant, but it took almost a hundred before Deckard was sure that Rachael was a replicant...and that she thought she was human.  Tricky!  The rest of the film follows Deckard on the trail of the replicants as they track down whatever it is they are in town for. 

Blade Runner is, in a very literal way, a detective story, but there's a lot more depth to it than you might expect from a typical crime and capture tale.  First off, Blade Runner is an excellent example of modern noir; the story is plot-driven, the characters are unemotional, and the film is full of shadows.  There is also a healthy dose of paranoia in the movie, as the other characters all seem to know something Deckard does not.  I think that the film's strength lies in its storytelling; the plot is pretty clear and the story has a satisfactory ending, but there are subtleties to the script that add ambiguity to certain issues and raise questions about others.  The obvious question (that I don't want to spoil for you), "Is Deckard a replicant?" can be argued convincingly from both sides, and I think that's pretty cool.  It's nice to see a science fiction movie that is not about a dystopian future, but is instead a story merely set in the future.  After all, the future can't always suck.

The performances in this film are generally pretty good.  Harrison Ford is a likable tough guy and I enjoy watching him play intelligent characters.  Rutger Hauer definitely had the meatiest supporting role; he was genuinely unsettling, playing such a calm and collected character with such rage inside him.  Most of the other actors served their purpose, but some of them had just a little touch of something special.  Sean Young had a bizarre hairstyle and made the most of her character's subtle, but complicated emotions; Edward James Olmos could have been a stereotypical cop, but they gave him a bizarre 2019 language to speak, a blend of English, Japanese, and (I think) a Slavic language; William Sanderson was surrounded by a creepy assortment of "living" toys; even Daryl "I'm a better actress when I don't speak" Hannah had some very interesting makeup.  The rest of the cast is noteworthy, but James Hong, Brion James, and Joe Turkel didn't add anything special to their roles.

Ridley Scott did a fantastic job coming up with this futuristic world.  Sure, he handled the actors well enough (particularly Hauer and Young), but the details that went into this movie are most impressive.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly what details stand out, though.  The weird Olmos language is certainly one, as is the Japanification of LA (if they really have street-side Asian noodle stands in 2019, I'm moving West!), but even the building designs are noticeably out-of-time, but still plausible.  I also liked the use of space to convey tone; busy streets sometimes helped develop a feeling of confusion or panic, but empty streets or rooms could imply danger, loneliness, or power.  Scott has an excellent eye for cinematography, so it shouldn't be surprising that the film looks great.

I should point out that this version of Blade Runner is the most recent version to be released; all in all, there are four cuts of the film available on DVD (all in the same package, too), with three or four other cuttings floating around somewhere.  The Final Cut makes some pretty significant changes to the original theatrical film, and many of the changes are noticeable from the Director's Cut, too.  I will tell you right now, though, not to waste your first viewing of Blade Runner on anything but The Final Cut.  The picture is far clearer than the previous versions, many technical problems are cleaned up, and several previously ambiguous moments are given clearer direction.  Each version of the movie is interesting, but The Final Cut is clearly the best of the bunch. 

It's difficult for me to explain exactly why Blade Runner impresses me so much.  It's well-shot, well-acted, and well-produced, it has depth and subtlety and a few "what the hell?" moments that make sense only if you choose to put some thought into the movie.  Plus, it inspired some of the lyrics to White Zombie's "More Human Than Human."  Yeah, that must be why this is a classic.  Yeeeeah!

Surviving the Game

Some actors bring a quality assurance to whatever film projects they choose to pursue.  They are the actors you know, the ones that entertain you and turn in good performances in good movies, time after time.  Ice-T does not have that credibility.  This rapper/actor's movie career highlights include Breakin', Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Johnny Mnemonic, and Leprechaun in the Hood.  To say that Surviving the Game has a good chance of being craptacular is understating the obvious.

To be fair, though, this movie actually has a chance.  It is loosely based on a famous short story, "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell.  The supporting cast is fairly respectable at first glance; there is an Oscar winner for Best Actor, an Oscar nominee, a Golden Globe winner, and an Emmy winner, in addition to a dependable character actor.  Sure, you have a rapper-turned-actor in the lead role, but it's an action movie, so you know his lines will sound something like "Ice to see you...bee-yatch."  The acting load was always going to be on the supporting cast, and the casting sounded promising on paper.

So, where does it all go wrong?  Well, the first indication that this will not be a great movie is that the screenwriting credits do not even acknowledge Connell's story.  That means that they changed enough of the story that they could not be sued by Connell's estate.  So, they took a famous, recognizable idea, and essentially made this the Go-Bots to Connell's Transformers. Try to picture the face of a child hoping for a six foot-tall, fully articulated metal Optimus Prime figure on Christmas morning instead opening up a four dollar plastic Go-Bot.  Hilarious, right?  Well, that wasn't quite my reaction to the de-Connelling of this film, but it was darn close.

Despite the award-caliber supporting cast, the casting was another obstacle for this movie.  When the  highest-profile actor in your action movie is F. Murray Abraham, you have a problem.  Sure, he's a good actor (with astonishingly few good movies under his belt), but he's the wrong choice for a dumb action movie.  Oh, and Gary Busey plays a psychiatrist.  Busey telling people that they're crazy is the ballsiest casting I can remember that didn't include the words "Denise Richards" and "nuclear scientist."  Rutger Hauer isn't a bad choice; he's played crazy before, but here he's a lot older and fatter, with a pretty dubious ponytail.  Rounding out the supporting cast, there is Charles S. Dutton, whose voice is always nice to hear in a movie, although his movies are usually pretty bad.  There is also a pre-Scrubs John C. McGinley, which means that he plays a sniffling wuss.  Now that you know who the award-winning cast is, it seems a whole lot less impressive, doesn't it?

With that in mind, let's review the plot.  The movie opens with a montage of life on the street with Mason (Ice-T), interrupted by periodic clips of a raggedy-looking guy being hunted in the wild and dying by crossbow.  We spend a little bit of time with Mason, learning precious little except that he is alone and homeless, with his only friend and his dog both dying in the film's first five minutes.  We also see Mason get into a scuffle with a security guard, where he doesn't actually beat up the guard, but acts pretty crazy; there is a shadowy figure watching the scene from a conveniently parked car, who is never referred to again.  Mason is prevented from committing suicide by a homeless shelter volunteer (Charles S. Dutton), who gives Mason a business card for a job opportunity.  The job is to be a wilderness guide for a group of rich men on a hunting trip.  Leading them are Burns (Rutger Hauer) and Cole (Dutton), but they will be joined by Doc Hawkins (Busey), a wealthy oilman (McGinley), a businessman (Abraham) and his son.  Once they have all traveled and met in the remote Canadian woods at their cabin, the group has a meal together and, in the morning, wakes up Mason at gunpoint.  They inform Mason of their intent to hunt and kill him for sport, and they give him a small head start.  The game begins.

For reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, it takes over forty minutes to get to the start of the hunt.  It's not like the filmmakers wasted any script on character development, they just took their sweet time getting to the only part of the movie anybody cares about.  This isn't a movie that is pandering to critics, so there is no excuse for this waste of my (admittedly worthless) time.  What were they expecting?  The audience to say, "Aww...Ice-T named his dog Mango, and now Mango is dead!  Why do the good die young?!?"  No, the audience was undoubtedly thinking "Mango?  That's the best dog name you could come up with?"  The forty minutes wasn't even spent building up a mystery, either.  If the plot made you wonder why outdoorsmen would hire a homeless guy to lead them into the wilderness, that's one thing.  But you know that homeless people will be hunted in the woods because it's shown in the opening scenes.  Not only is there no suspense, there is not even the pretense of suspense.  There is, however, the question of what the hell Mason was thinking when he took the job.  Far be it from me to be cynical, but a street rat (to borrow a Disney term) being hired to lead veteran hunters in the wild is enough to make my alarm bells go off.  Add in way too much money ($500 a week plus room and board in 1994) for the work being done, and you have a definite sucker punch coming.  Of course, that's just me.  Perhaps Ice-T is one of those guys that sends his social security number and bank account info to that African prince who keeps emailing me about a profitable deal that requires no work from me.  What could possibly go wrong?

The rest of the movie is much better than the first half.  Mason is hunted for a bit, but the hunters are very clever; they only always travel by loud ATVs and shout Mason's name when they're chasing him.  You see, that will throw Mason off, because he is going to expect them to be sneaky.  Surprisingly, Mason doesn't do most of the killing in this movie.  Two die by accident, another by Dutton, and one by Hauer.  Mason manages to kill one person with his hands.  The other dies when Mason throws him into the hunting group's cabin (now on fire), specifically in the trophy room, with a couple dozen severed human heads in mason jars.  Get it?  Ice-T's name is Mason!  What a great script.  Anyway, pickled heads are apparently very explosive, so as soon as Mason thrown the guy into the room, the whole place blows.

I'll skip most of the action scenes and just cut to the end.  Not surprisingly, the two headlining actors survive the game hunting trip.  When it comes down to just Ice-T and Hauer, Ice-T races off on an ATV (after sustaining a badly injured knee and a bullet in his gut) toward the plane that will take the hunting group home.  Only, when T arrives, he realizes that something is wrong.  The airplane explodes.  Brilliantly, Hauer anticipated the need for a fully functional airplane, stocked with explosives that could be set off remotely.  Hauer then goes to the real airplane and flies back to the city.  Ice-T, though, survived the game plane explosion and is apparently able to get back to the United States with a bullet-perforated stomach (never mind what the explosion did to him) within three days.  I assume he made it by ATV, because he would have been hospitalized by anyone who gave him a ride anywhere. Nothing promises fun like a severe abdominal wound and off-roading in an ATV for a few hundred miles.  Three days later, Hauer is preparing to skip town under an assumed identity.  He apparently has dozens of soldier identities lined up with false passports, but he chooses his foreign priest outfit.  Eschewing the easy way to disguise his identity (shaving his beard off and cutting his hair), Hauer carefully dyes both hair and beard black, ties his hair into a single braid, and dons a small hat with a big yarn puff on the top and a long robe.  If it wasn't for the priest collar and the rosary (seriously, what denomination wears this?), I would have mistaken the outfit for that of a railroad-era Chinese immigrant.  Anyway, Hauer soon finds himself face-to-face with an inexplicably healthy Ice-T, only this time, they're on his turf.  The game is over.

My biggest gripe about this film is that they never --- not even once! --- say anything along the line of "we hunt the most dangerous game of all...MAN."  What a letdown!  Aside from that, this movie is about what you would expect.  The acting is pretty terrible.  Ernest R. Dickerson's direction is horrible.  The pacing is god awful.  The decisions are inexplicable (Hey, Ice-T, you just got a job...want to clean up your look?  Well, I guess cutting your dreads to only shoulder length and shaving your beard into a fu manchu is pretty office-friendly).  The hair choices are astounding --- Ice-T's fake dreads stick out more than even Bob Marley's kids' hair and Rutger Hauer sports an ineffectual ponytail.  It isn't surprising that this movie is filled with moments that make absolutely no sense (a cabbie picks a fistfight with a homeless guy?  A night security guard is willing to murder a different homeless guy for no reason?), but it is surprising that these moments are the most entertaining in the film.

On the plus side, the action isn't bad and the movie avoids racist undertones by casting Charles S. Dutton as one of the hunters.  Instead, the movie is just classist, which isn't offensive at all.

As a film, this movie fails in almost every way.  It's not unwatchable, but it's the sort of thing you would be proud of only if your kid made it.  Unfortunately, this is not nearly dumb enough to entertain me as a funny-bad movie.  Well, parts of it are certainly funny-bad, but there are long stretches where the movie is just boring.  If someone cut the first half hour of the movie, this could be a poorly made finger-quotes classic.  As it is, it's just a bad movie that hunts the most valuable game of all...your time.  Seriously, it pisses me off that they don't use that line in the movie.