NEW FEATURE! Throw Back Thursday: Critters.

Taken from:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Crittersposter.jpg

Ah, the month of October. The leaves are flinging themselves off the trees, the roads are clogged with rain, and I’m needing a hot cups of tea more often. It’s a great month!

Halloween is just around the corner, and you know what that means… Yep, Horror films galore! So to celebrate this beautiful time of year, I have decided to start a new (hopefully progressional) blog series where just like those totally hip and trendy people on that photo showing website (Instagram for those of you who don’t get my arty-farty language) where they throw back to past Thursdays. What film better to throw back to than my favourite film of all time, the first horror film I can vividly being terrified of, but needing to re-watch it like 832883 times… Critters!

Critters is a sci-fi horror that takes place in a secluded rural town in Kansas (we unfortunately don’t see any links to Dorothy here, though), where the residence look like butter wouldn’t melt and it’s strange to see that most of the town’s inhabitants pro-created.  We are introduced to the Brown family, consisting of a loving Mother, bowling mad handy man Father, and two teenage kids. The Brown residence is the normal TV stereotype family, where Brad teases April about a fancy guy she’s dating, and Harv, being the protective Father he is, scrunches his dusty face about it… My point being they are normal, have a huge farm and life is hunky-dory, until later in the evening the Brown family encounters creatures of a third kind (or something…) The Critters.

As most space monsters do, they eat the Brown’s cattle, make loud noises that startle the Mother, Helen, where we get our first glimpse at their blood red eyes. Terrifying. The Crites go on to half eat Aprils Jonny Depp looking man, and trap her in the barn. Meanwhile, Charlie, the resident town joker and alien believer repeatedly reports that space critters (get it) will be making their way down to our beloved planet anytime soon. Charlie, played by Don Opper, is the first to experience the Crites outside of the Brown residence and calls it into his local jail house.

From there we see that the Crites are pretty smart, can work as a team and will use their porcupine like hairs to send the wary recipient into a debilitating state. They become more scary than the feasible fluff balls they appear, and thus become really rather scary (well, they were to the 5 year old me.)

The end comes nye for the Crites as our great saviours, the bounty hunters, come to planet Earth’s rescue. They transform into pop stars and dead people (seriously, watch below for how cool they look transforming) and blow shit UPPP! After a huge explosion, and many tears the Brown family is save…. Or are they?

Re-watching the film that made me become a horror horder, I am still quite enamoured with Critters, without it being loved due to my childish lust for scary stuff and the turmoil it left me in for years to come, it does have a certain b-horror charm about it. The wonderful animatronics of the Crites powered by the ever amazing Chiodo Brothers is simply breath taking, and the writing of the film in general is pretty great too.

I love this film, and it’s sequels so much so, that when I took a trip to Seattle’s EMP Museum I took about 1,000 selfies with the Critter on display, and nearly cried (sort of…) when I had to leave it.

Love it or hate it, Critters is a great little film to show your young ones if you want them to catch the horror bug young, like my Father, or to just see if you want something cool looking without psychological plot twists blocking your brain’s eye. Long live the Crites!

Until next time,

Jessie.

The Warriors: A Coney Island special.

Original use of photo can be found here.

The Warriors, a cult 70’s film turn video game, that just happened to take up a chunk of my teenage years in both a digital form (video game) as well as in its original film form. The game was great, and was actually the first introduction that my nephew and I had to The Warrior World. After many months of playing the game, my older nephews decided to get the film so we could see the differences between the EA game and the cult classic. We were astounded, the game actually stuck to the plot rather well, (apart from one huge thing that happens at the beginning of the film, but it’s just like the screen adaptation of A Street Car Named Desire, it was changed for the audiences sanity… or something) and we loved both. Ever since then, I wanted to see Cony Island, and the wonderful touristy surroundings of New York.

As you all may have guessed, I have been gone for a few months… Mostly because writing was just not fulfilling for a time, and also I just happened to be on a life changing trip to America to work with kids at a Summer Camp. Camp is over now, and I had a chance to get on over to NY with some fantastically, wonderful friends I made there! (Do you see where this review is going?) The usual questions came up: Where would you like to go? After several suggestions, guess what huge wheel popped into my head? You guessed it.

Reliving the film’s steps through Manhattan to Coney, and back, let me tell you, was amazing. Being the film fan girl that I am, I had a huge lady boner over thinking about that close up map that happens in both the opening intro’s to the film and game when going past all the stations they would have to pass through to get home after the traumatic gang meeting. Approaching Coney Island/ Stillwell Ave on the subway, being greeted by the smell and sight of the crashing waves and that big, bulbous wheel…. I felt all the adrenaline that the fighters gave off in their magnificent roles before each fight.

My own photo, good annit?

After re-watching the film, I noticed a lot of interesting themes in the story. I never noticed how females were represented in the flick (Oh Jessie, not a feminist rant over the female role, the gaze* and how women were poorly represented in action films before the 80’s… Don’t worry readers, I am not doing a Tumblr rant!). Take for instance the wonderful genre of Blaxploitation, it showed in countless films the struggle of the Afro-caribbean woman. In The Warriors, we can see the struggle of one racially different woman, Mercy. 

*Read more about the gaze, here.

Mercy is a very complex character to me, she is a strong independent lady, that is very fragile and dainty at the same time. This mishmash of ‘roles’ may be an indication of the uprising of Women’s independence and the big ‘up yours’ to those stuffy men who think that ladies should just be there to look sexy, but not actually do anything in a film role, and the obvious favouritism of a strong lady fucking shit up (like Ms Pam Grier did in most of her Blaxploitation roles of her carrier.) This aspect might just be to keep the cinema goers happy, since it was a radical movement to make a female role like this one of the main antagonist features. However, the dainty-ness of Mercy may express those stereotypical roles of those women who are in a minority in the uptown Manhattan area (the Bronx) and downtown Brooklyn areas, who usually was dominated by ‘the man’ and who didn’t have much to do apart from look after kids and be good to her man. Yuck. Either or, Mercy’s role really makes you think about suburban life for a minority, and how cinema represented these young, fighting ladies through film.

I also realised the cultural differences between all the gangs more than I did whilst watching the film in my younger years. The Warrior gang just by itself shows you all different cultures from white to black, Italian to mixed, how they all work together, even when they have different outlooks on life. It really shows you the multicultural-ness of NYC as a whole, which I really dig. All the gangs in The Warriors show this to some extent too, especially in the first scene where all cultures, body types, ideals E.T.C are displayed. Although this shows us the union of cultures the 60’s and 70’s brought along, I just thought that this early expression of cultural bonding was just wonderful, and adds a timeless mark on the film.

Even though this is classed as a sort of b-movie, I really think it deserves to be clumped along with the likes of Leprechaun in the Hood, it is an outstanding film demonstrating the urban life of young, men of all races, their relationship with their surroundings and each other, and the fight between starting at the bottom, wanting something better, and the struggles that comes with this.  Even after about 10 years (god, I’m old) of knowing about the film and viewing it, I’m still in love with it. I am also so grateful that I was lucky enough to go on that big wheel, walk along that beach front, see those people and hear the sounds of Coney Island with a couple of the best people I know. Until we meet next time Coney, I will be fightin’ for ya. 

Until next time,

Jessiefer.

Into the Woods – The Dystopian Disney Story?

 

Being the totally mature 23 year old ‘adult’ I went to see Into the Woods this week just gone. Not being the usual suspect for a film of this nature, I can only imagine my readers are perplexed and crying out for humanity whilst reading the previous sentence. What can I say, I was suckered into it by the trailers because of how eerie and different it seemed to the rest of the recent barrage of kids films (Plus, Johnny Depp is always a winner).  The trailer I saw displayed a sort of Brothers Grimm sort of vibe, which is very different for kids films in general, and just generally seemed more interesting than a singing snowman with a buck tooth.

So I go into the picture house without any expectations, and I am greated with a full blown sing out, something I really did not expect! Maybe I should have researched before I decided this should be the film we saw, as I am really not one for musicals (My favourite one being Tenascious D and the Pick of destiny) but none the less I didn’t lose all hope in the film. The singing was good and bad in parts, of course the rhymes were pretty good, but sometimes it seemed so off key and just needless. I understand this is a kids film, and kids easily forget things, so singing (apparently?) may help them understand the message better as well as sell a fair few more pieces of merch, but really, monologues were being sung out, unfunny monologues at that! Maybe this is why musicals just don’t do it for me, in my mind if they don’t make you laugh or are silly, then it just turns me into a bitter lemon slice of a person who hates happiness. I just don’t see the point.

The cinematography was great for a CGI film, there were really funny points and the acting was phenomenal, but there was something missing from it which just made me miss the days of watching Snow White in my youth, guffawing at the turtle falling down the stairs, and admiring the story as well as the imagry it created. I think the subjects it brings up, like how it is okay for Mummy and Daddy not to be together now because Daddy is a serial kisser, was quite interesting to watch, and I did like how this could possibly make a child/children feel better if they are in the midst of a parental melt down. At one point, though, the story could have ended with the traditional ‘happy ending’ but decided to show how a utopian setting can go dystopian at the drop of a brick from a kingdom. This was something I was a little unsettled by mainly because I personally believe that kids should enjoy things without the burden of thinking ahead/worrying about the future (ohhh my deranged outlook on life!!! I blame Disney!).

All in all, I’m not sure if I liked Into the Woods, and I’m not really sure of why this is. Due to this, I’m not sure if I would recommend or not, and to whom. If I was a parent, I can only imagine I would be getting bombarded by questions that the child may have had due to the non-traditional story lines and themes, which depending on how old they are, may be a little bit hard to figure out how to answer. Thankfully I am not the birther of a little human, so I don’t have to worry about possible repercussions and possibly non stop medleys of the sometimes irritating songs displayed in the film. Due to this I recommend any parents that go/are forced to see Into the Woods to prepare their ears and souls for the next few weeks and pray that the DVD/BluRay release doesn’t come for a considerable time there after.

Until next time,

Jessiefer.

A New Year has dawned!

So a New Year is upon us, and my dear was it a year of film, excitement over watching and creating new film as well as seeing some movies that made me laugh with embarrassment. I thought I would right a little 'Happy New Year' post to all my readers (which is probably, at it's maximum, 5 people) so that you can all look forward to the year of an odd number and all the (hopefully) great stuff that it will bring along with it. Also, I would like to thank you for reading my here, there, and everywhere posts, and trying to understand my more than likely dodgy sentence structure and get over the bad punctuation and grammar that I probably use, you guys are well nice.

I hope to do my first video review of the new collectors edition version of Nekromantik by Arrow films some when in the next week or so, which will be an interesting adventure into the World of video reviews. Hopefully my first go at video reviewing will go well, and if not, any feed back (constructive would be best) would be muchly appreciated. 

Until then, have a great weekend of cool, chilling times, and don't forget to binge watch all the cool DVD's or Blu Rays that you got over Jesus' Birthday. 

Jessiefer.

Fresh Out the Kitchen: Gone Girl

This is a post that was written out as soon as I got home from the Cinema after watching Gone Girl, for this reason my thoughts may be a little scattered and also a little muddled due to me not fully digesting my thoughts and analysis of the film. None the less, you should still get a good.... decent.... okay... read out of it.

Gone Girl, directed by the talented Mr Fincher, who also directed the awe inspiring Fight Club (which was pretty much already a god sent novel), Se7en, The Social Network and many more beautifully cinematic pictures, is, simply put, a tale of two people and their changes after wedlock.

'Ohhh one of those flicks, eh? Better leave it to the missus...' I hear some of you cry. 'Hell no, brotha' I reply. If you get past the succulent, fleshy story, the juicy twists and turns of narrative and action, it is about marriage and how much that one action between two people who love each other can change the two people who said I do. However, I wouldn't say in particular that it is a love story at all, at least, not one like what we all usually think of when we hear the word love or marriage.

It is about the struggle of a flame burning low, the resentment that you feel towards another people that is stupidly perplexing because of the bewildering passion you once had for them, and most of all it's a look at the dumbfounding unraveling of the deep emotional and mental chaos/bliss that goes on inside ones brain due to, or over another person.

I cannot find a way of summarising the plot in a way that you will understand the outter levels of the film, and make you ravenous to devour the flesh that Gone Girl literally hands you on a plate, because, simply put, my brain doesn't function like that (Damn you art school! Damn you Freud!). But I will say this, if you love a plot twist (ohmigawd, Jessie you dun did a spoiler!), your subconscious subtexts to films, to be utterly distraught over how a person could possibly fathom an action and then suddenly laughing at a sick joke the next, then you NEED to see Gone Girl. It is like an unknown sibling of Fight Club, who is now willing and able to finally expose itself to a shocked but not entirely surprised family....

On another note, the cinematics of Gone Girl, like all of Fincher's pictures, are stunningly magnificent. The story never gets boring, which is a big, golden star for a 2hr 20 film in my book, the action is literally beautiful, and had made me truly realise that I really bleedin' like Ben Affleck as an actor.

So all in all, if you are a fan of Fincher, love films that well and truly baffle your mind with twists and turns that you never see coming, that has witty black humor and a frightingly believeable story, then Gone Girl is for you. P.s maybe reading the novel will be interesting too, I know that's what I will be doing next.

Until next time,
Jessiefer.

A Small Review: Lucy

Thanks to Cineworld for giving us unemployed tight arses a chance to go and see a film they think look half decent in the trailers (No sponsorship, I assure you). Because of the half price Tuesday deal I went along to the cinema with my best friend and her other BF's to see this  film as a late birthday treat for her. 

So the film began with a more than entertaining start of gunshots, scary men and Scarlett Johansson's erect nipples (the thing that put a cherry on top of the metaphorical ice cream of the beginning of the film)...  The plot was viable, the visuals were fucking stunning! Seeing Johansson turn from a mousy student to a bad ass father fu*ker was great and sort of inspiring. 

About half way though, the plot, visuals and action sort of... How can I put it? Goes kaput. It all actually disintegrates when half of Johansson's face slides around, which inturn started the roller coaster ride of trying not to laugh at random odd visuals in a packed out Cinema. 

This is sooo not a bad version of Johansson's eye falling action in the film. NOPE.

I can't say that the random visuals of her slidy face, slow motion killing and uncanny visual effects didn't keep me entertained, because it did, I just can't believe how the raring, action packed first half turned into such a surreal and almost boring end that it did. The weird but wonderful thing is that even though the plot/visual dwindle, unlike other half way bad films, the plot still makes sense! However, the ending really just leaves you wanting more, in fact it was such an anticlimax for me and my friends that I just had to laugh.I must also express that throughout the film the acting was brilliant, and just for that I think this film will no doubt be awarded at least one award then the film award season rolls around.

So if you love Johansson, Morgan Freeman, girls kicking male arses and sci-fi cinema you'll love Lucy, just remember to revel in action that is in the first 50 mins of the film, and change your action hats to science ones for the more brainy side of the last 40 mins of the film. Also, if you don't laugh at her eye socket falling down her face, then you are a better person than I am.

Until next time, 

Jessiefer.

BORING DISCLAIMER:

*I say this now, I put these reviews on here firstly for a log for my cinema outings/film watches so I can keep a visual bank of everything I have seen this year. Secondly, my reviews should only aid you and your choices when you decide to watch a film, and should not make you believe that a film will not be good or bad just because I say so (This disclaimer is here as I have been recently reading Kevin Smith's 'Tough Sh*t' and there is a bit in there that made me realise how much my words could potentially harm film/film makers/future film people.... Or something.) If you have a dream to make a film/direct/screenwrite, in the words of Arnie: DO EITTTTT!

Human Centipede 2 ; The Revenge of the Arseholes.

...Or so it should be called.

I'm not going to make this a long post, because I simply think the film isn't really worth it. It's a good film for those types of people that just want to watch something that will make them look 'hardc0re' in front of their easily terrified friends, but for us Horror/Exploitation/Fucked up film fans, it really is just a bad insight into what more established movie distributors think of these genres.

It seems like the whole basis for the film was to make more money off of the back of HC1, which in my opinion had much more story to it in 5 minutes than this film did in its entirety. It was a great assumption, as it made more money than the first and allowed every day people to pretend that they were heavily submerged into 'disturbing' cinema scene.

The one part I really got infuriated by, which I'm sure no one else cares about, was the part where the main character (who is so dull (obviously intended) I can't remember his name) gave each of the 'centipede' an injection of laxative so that he could see them defecate. Now, the film is shot all the way through in black and white (because colour is waaaayy to conformist now a days) yet when you see the explosion of excrement, it is IN COLOUR! WHY?! Why make the already 'disgusting' thing in colour? It doesn't make it any more gross or make the viewer want to hurl up their internal organs any more than they may already wish to do! It just seemed like such a stupid thing to do, almost like they needed to add in that extra exhibition of technical expertise (thank you iMovie) in order for the viewer to know that this film was the shit (no pun intended.... okay, it was!).

You said it Kermy. 

Anyway, see it if you must, just like I did. However, don't expect it to move you in any way. Just allow it to dwindle your time alive even further for a bit.

Until next time
Jessiefer.