In 1922, during the German Expressionist movement of early silent cinema, director F.W. Murnau released the horror film Nosferatu onto an unsuspecting audience. The film’s image of the Dracula fill-in Count Orlock, portrayed by actor Max Schreck, became an iconic staple of horror movie history. Almost eight decades later, director E. Elias Merhige brings a secret history of the classic film’s creation to the screen in Shadow of the Vampire. The film opens with an intertitle card explaining how Marnau (John Malkovich) was unable to secure the rights for Dracula from Bram Stoker’s estate, but went on with the production under a different name. On a sound stage in Berlin, Marnau is filming the first scenes of his production Nosferatu with German actors Gustav von Wangenheim (Eddie Izzard) and Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack). After the shoot, the movie’s producer Albin (Udo Kier) discusses the crew’s plan to film much of the picture on location in a castle in Slovakia. There is also talk of the actor that Farnau has found to play their vampire. Max Schreck is apparently a method actor that will only appear in character, in full costume and make-up, and at night. Once the cast and crew has moved to their new location, they film the first scene in the castle where Count Orlock (Willem Dafoe) slides forth from the shadows much to everyone’s horror. All are impressed by the actor’s look and commitment to his character, but after the scene has finished, the camera man wanders off, then is found ill.
It turns out that Marnau is a stickler for making the film as real as possible. To this effect, he has secretly made a deal with a real ancient vampire to play Count Orlock in his picture. While many of the shots go quite well, with actors and crew alike finding Orlock’s performance to be very effective, the vampire is picking of members of Marnau’s production staff and draining them of blood between takes. Marnau confronts Orlock on this matter, reminding the Count that he had promised not to harm his people. It turns out that the only person that Orlock really wants is the star actress Greta Shroeder, whom Marnau is willing to sacrifice to finish his film. This movie adds another layer of fear, insanity, and off-beat humor onto the classic film from which it is derived. I would consider both Marnau and Orlock monsters in this picture. Marnau is driven mad by his own production, trying to wrangle his actors, crew, and an undead being which he finds out, much too late, that he cannot control. It seems that Orlock tries to keep his own vampire impulses in check, for a while, but eventually realizes that the person with whom he as made his deal holds little to no sway over his actions. Marnau turns a blind eye to death after death, so long as he can still make his masterpiece.
Few films have explored the terrifying notion of a possessed appendage. The Crawling Hand was entirely centered around the disembodied hand of a dead astronaut being controlled by an alien consciousness. In Evil Dead 2, Ash dueled with his own hand that had been infected by evil spirits. And, in 1999, audiences were introduced to the next evolution of the demonic limb in the horror comedy Idle Hands. Devon Sawa plays the improbably named Anton Tobias, the epitome of the stoned, high-school slacker that were so very prevalent throughout the nineties. The local news is buzzing with unsolved murders, but this is the least of Anton’s worries, as he is out of weed. He visits his friends Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) who convince him to smoke a mixture of oregano and nutmeg. Anyway, after all this dumb-fuckery, Anton discovers the bodies of his own parents, then murders Mick with a broken bottle and Pnub with a circular saw blade. Anton is horrified that his own right hand is commuting the acts of its own volition. As he tries to calm himself down with some television, he flings his pet cat out the window and across the street. While trying to locate his frazzled feline, he runs into his neighbor and long time crush Molly (Jessica Alba) and somehow manages to strike up a romance with her in spite of his murderous hand trying to attack her. He agrees to go to their school’s Halloween dance as her date, but first Anton must clean up the mess of corpses he has at home.
During all of this, Vivica A. Fox as the druidic priestess Debi LeCure has been investigating murder cases that she believes are related to demonic possession. While marking out locations on a map, she finds the murders have been in places that form a giant pentagram over the area. She heads to Anton’s neighborhood, where she hypothesizes that this evil spirit will choose a soul to take back to hell with it. Meanwhile, Anton had spent the rest of the day burying his mother, father, and two stoner buddies in the back yard. But, it would appear that Mick and Pnub are not finished quite ready to leave, as their bodies rise from the dead. They both explain that passing into the afterlife was simply too much work, and they would rather hang around Anton’s house and get high. Anton decides that he no longer wants to be host to a killer limb, and cuts his own hand off. Unfortunately, the hand is still possessed, and now much harder to keep track of. Horror comedy is probably one of the hardest genres for a writer and director to balance correctly. In the case this film, the comedy is pretty good with our pot-head three amigos of Sawa, Green, and Henson. They play off of each other pretty well and have a genuine chemistry that is fun to watch. The problem comes in the horror elements of the movie. Early on, when the evil hand is still attached to Anton, the notion of his character committing grizzly acts of violence and not having any way to stop himself is a fairly disturbing idea. The monster is part of him, so anything it does, Anton is also partly responsible. Once the hand is removed, however, it becomes a much less interesting concept. It’s hard to make such a small monster threatening in any believable way without it being part of a swarm. I have the same problem with Chucky from the Child’s Play movies. Any healthy adult could take such a small attacker and punt it across the yard with little effort.
This film starts with a little educational text stating that the South China Sea hides deep chasms that have never been explored by man, and that numerous ships have mysteriously vanished in those areas of the ocean for decades. If only we could find a way to surrender this movie to the depths of the ocean for all eternity. If I had to pick only a few words to describe the plot of Deep Rising, those words would be derivative and over-written. One piece of the story starts on a small boat captained by John Finnegan (Treat Williams) who is not out crab fishing but shuttling a band of black ops mercenary types to some obscure point in the middle of the ocean. The mercenary group is led by Hanover (Wes Studi) and is composed of half a dozen or so soldiers too bland to be memorable, although I did see Jason Flemyng and that guy that played Kano in Mortal Kombat in the mix. The black ops team turns hostile on Finnegan’s crew when the ship’s wormy mechanic Joel (Kevin J. O’Conner) finds live torpedoes amongst the weapons. Another part of the plot involves the massive luxury cruise ship Argonautica (which is a titanically stupid name for a boat) and a foxy thief named Trillian (Famke Janssen). She tries to break into the Captain’s quarters to get at his safe, but is caught by the ship’s owner Simon Canton (Anthony Heald) and locked in the galley freezer. Someone on board the ship disables several vital systems including, of course, communications, then a large something attacks the cruise liner. All of the passengers start to stampede in an attempt to escape, and we are treated to a scene where a terrified woman is violently pulled down a toilet.
Finnegan damages his own boat by colliding with one of Argonautica’s speed boats, that was made entirely of C-4 judging by how it exploded. Plot A meets up with plot B as the damaged little boat find the disabled cruise ship in the middle of the stormy seas. Hanover’s commando unit deploys on board the Argonautica, taking Finnegan and Joel with them to gather engine parts. Hanover had intended to rob the wealthy passengers then sink the ship, but all of the passengers have disappeared, except for Trillian, whom they find locked safely away in the freezer. The team also locates Simon as well, who it turns out had disabled his own ship and hired Hanover and company to sink his multi-million dollar cruise ship so he could collect the insurance money. You see what I mean about this being over-written? We don’t need all this forced subterfuge and intrigue just to get all the characters stranded on a boat for a monster to attack. When the monster, a giant mollusk of some sort finally does show up, it makes short work of most of the remaining cast, usually picking them off one-by-one a la Alien or Predator, two much better movies that I wish I were watching instead. While the awful writing effectively torpedoes the good ship Deep Rising before it leaves port, some entertaining bits can still be salvaged from the wreckage. The cinematography employed here is consistently much better than this movie deserves, like an amazing part near the beginning that zooms in from a wide shot of the cruise ship and follows a man through a door to the ballroom. Famke Janssen’s and Kevin J. O’Conner’s performances are also enjoyable, even if O’Conner’s screaming gets a little grating near the end. The monster is an original idea as well, as it only appears as tentacles with gnarly teeth and hooks when first seen. It isn’t until the end of the film that we get to see the full and somewhat badly rendered giant demon-octopus-thing in all its glory.
Remember when we had movies about museums that didn’t involve Ben Stiller? I do. The Relic, a techno-thriller from the late nineties is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs. Some critics described the film as Alien in a museum, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Directed by Peter Hyams, probably best known for Timecop, the film largely takes place, unofficially, in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Dr. Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) is an evolutionary biologist who is developing a new method of mapping genetic codes, but is in danger of loosing her funding to a rival scientist, Greg Li (Chi Muoi Lo). As such, Dr. Green spends most of the movie either pissed-off or terrified. In order to stay afloat, she must prepare herself for the museum’s opening of their “Superstition” exhibit. Her office receives a package from Dr. Whitney, another researcher whom Margo does not like, who has been studying tribal practices and rituals in Brazil. All the crates contain are a ton of plant leaves with a peculiar fungus on them, and a stone idol of a god or spirit called the Kothoga. Before disposing of the leaves, Margo uses the fungus to test her DNA mapping device. That night, one of the museum’s security personnel is violently decapitated while he was smoking weed in the bathroom. This brings in local homicide detective Vincent D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) who sees a connection between this murder and several bodies that were recently found on a freighter that just returned from Brazil.
Vincent pleads with the museum’s curator Dr. Cuthbert (Linda Hunt) to postpone the the upcoming Superstition Gala until he can solve the case, but it’s simply to important for the museum’s continued funding to reschedule. Vincent continues his investigation, even after police arrest a potential suspect, and begins to question Margo on the recent activities of Dr. Whitney and the nature of his research. Vincent is a very superstitious guy, so there is very little that he isn’t likely to believe. After running her test on the strange fungus, Margo discovers a beetle that ingested some of the fungus and mutated into a feral super-beetle as a result. At the exhibit opening, with all of Chicago’s wealthy and elite making appearances, the thing that used to be Dr. Whitney reveals itself, and goes on a bloody rampage. It may be cheesy, it may be predictable, but I like this movie anyway. It has a classic set-up that starts with a mystery about a few deaths or disappearances, and ends with a motley group of survivors, isolated and helpless, that have to face down a big-ass monster. A big, empty museum feels like a perfect horror setting in which to have this story unfold. The Kothoga creature has a unique design, being a combination of insect and reptile, and is brought to life through a combination of practical and computer generated effect. The CG stuff looks pretty dated, but they keep the monster in the shadows enough so that it’s not a deal breaker. This is a surprisingly well made monster flick, perfect to watch late at night while munching on some popcorn.
Is it Full Moon Studios time again? Already? Yep. This is another film from the not-so-proud direct to DVD tradition. But I have to warn everybody, this one makes Subspecies look like an Oscar winner. While the box art shows Zarkorr the invader, a giant dragon-like monster that shoots lasers from his eyes and wrecks cities for kicks, we rarely ever get to see it in the film. A giant monster wrecking stuff is not in and of itself a bad premise for a movie, but we soon move on to introduce this film’s worst element, the plot. Earth has been chosen by a collection of intelligent alien races, which we never actually see, to undergo a test. The aliens release a massive, planet crushing monster, Zarkorr, and contact one representative of the human race that they choose based on being the most average human specimen they can find. That average human is Tommy Ward (Rhys Pugh) a postal worker who likes to watch old cartoons that are probably in the public domain. The aliens pick a bizarre method of contacting Tommy using a mental projection that he sees as a tiny teenage girl. She tells Tommy that no weapon on Earth can harm Zarkorr and he must find a way to defeat the monster, or all life on the planet will be destroyed. Obviously, the alien conglomerate that devised this test is composed entirely of huge douche bags, as even if Tommy is manages to solve this test, Earth will have already suffered many casualties and millions of dollars in property damage.
Tommy, being the quintessential average-joe, has no idea how to fight or defeat this creature. On the local news, he sees an interview with Doctor Stephanie Martin (De’Prise Grossman) an expert in cryptozoology. How one can be an expert in an unofficial field largely considered to be pseudoscience is anybody’s guess. Tommy drives down to the T.V. station and tries to tell Dr. Martin about the monster being a test that the aliens told him he needs to defeat to save the world, and when she refuses to help him, Tommy kidnaps her at gun point. Tommy barricades himself in the women’s bathroom with the doctor, who still refuses to answer his questions, and the police show up to defuse the situation. When Tommy explains the alien test and how he must defeat Zarkorr, one of the officers, George (Mark Hamilton) actually believes his story makes perfect sense and turns his gun on the other officer to aid Tommy in his mission. As you can see, the writing for this film is a completely convoluted nightmare that writer Benjamin Carr probably hammered out in one drug-fueled weekend. The plot occupies this strange paradoxical state of being completely convoluted and hard to follow, but at the same time is so thin and contrived that it might as well not exist at all. The only thing the plot does is waste time between the scenes of Zarkorr trashing model cities, and while that is fun to see, it does not justify the 80 minutes you will throw away watching this thing.
In 1922, during the German Expressionist movement of early silent cinema, director F.W. Murnau released the horror film Nosferatu onto an unsuspecting audience. The film’s image of the Dracula fill-in Count Orlock, portrayed by actor Max Schreck, became an iconic staple of horror movie history. Almost eight decades later, director E. Elias Merhige brings a secret history of the classic film’s creation to the screen in Shadow of the Vampire. The film opens with an intertitle card explaining how Marnau (John Malkovich) was unable to secure the rights for Dracula from Bram Stoker’s estate, but went on with the production under a different name. On a sound stage in Berlin, Marnau is filming the first scenes of his production Nosferatu with German actors Gustav von Wangenheim (Eddie Izzard) and Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack). After the shoot, the movie’s producer Albin (Udo Kier) discusses the crew’s plan to film much of the picture on location in a castle in Slovakia. There is also talk of the actor that Farnau has found to play their vampire. Max Schreck is apparently a method actor that will only appear in character, in full costume and make-up, and at night. Once the cast and crew has moved to their new location, they film the first scene in the castle where Count Orlock (Willem Dafoe) slides forth from the shadows much to everyone’s horror. All are impressed by the actor’s look and commitment to his character, but after the scene has finished, the camera man wanders off, then is found ill.
