Mick Garris’ 1994 cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand is one half a great epic post apocalyptic tale of human endurance, and one half a preachy and overwrought religious tale about God, the Devil, and a lot of hokey sermonizing that falls flat. Which is not to say it bogs down the film, but as King is noted for, “The Stand” eventually devolves in to religious hokum that completely eliminates the appeal of the original story.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
The Road (2009)
I respect Cormac McCarthy for exploring the less stylish side of the apocalypse. While many modern fictional outlets have given a real sense of sensationalism to the end of the world, “The Road” is an often uncompromising, cruel, and disturbing look at the end of civilization. It’s a world full of cowards, a world where humans prey on one another out of desperation for food, and it’s a world where there’s literally no hope. The world is dying all around a man and his son, and the pair can do nothing but hold tighter together and spend every waking hour looking for food. Viggo Mortensen who plays the man known by his son as simply papa is a haggard shell with dirty nails, stained teeth, and a gradually fading health, while his son spends most of the story taking on the weight of the world. And yet, even when confronted with the worst of human cruelty, he can not find the worst in humanity. He wants to believe there’s still some good in the world.
Rapid Fire (1992)
After cameos in “Kung Fu,” a still laughable premiere in “Laser Mission,” and shifting out of the shadows of bigger names in “Showdown in Little Tokyo,” Brandon Lee finally garnered his own action vehicle in 1992. Whether you like, love, or hate the movie, there’s no denying Brandon Lee had what it took. With the fading mold of the action star becoming an antiquated concept in modern cinema, Brandon Lee had the chops to become a bonafide film star who could have built himself an empire in the same way Michael Douglas did by straying from the legacy of his father Kirk Douglas.
Phantoms (1998)
What if the blob was a sentient being with a massive ego? That’s basically the summation of “Phantoms,” a film that alternates from tedious, to goofy, to downright silly quite often. The tonal shifting often affects “Phantoms” turning it from a mediocre horror film to just a downright idiotic horror film with no semblance of common sense. Why does every single monster or being with a consciousness suddenly turn in to a comedian when they have the upper hand? Freddy Krueger turned from a specter in to a clown, Pinhead began spewing puns suddenly, and during the finale of “Phantoms,” the being begins spouting one-liners like it’s going out of style. In the midst of possessing Liev Schreiber’s character, the monster screeches with a half body “How low can you go?!” as it chases our heroines through a house slithering along the ground.
Pet Sematary Two (1992)
While Mary Lambert’s “Pet Sematary” was nothing but a melodramatic exercise in tedium that put the actual center of the film in the background in favor of endless moaning and groaning about inept parents, her follow-up puts the sematary front and center. And still pretty much misses the point of it all. The 1992 follow-up is ugly, mean-spirited and still lacks any dread or menace to it. Not to mention there’s an immense focus on animal cruelty that’s often tough to sit through. In the end, it also fails to recognize the lure of the sematary and why these idiots continue bringing their loved ones to it to revive the dead. Once again the sematary is still there.
Pet Sematary (1989)
Though considered something of a horror classic by many, I’ve never personally enjoyed “Pet Sematary.” For the simple fact that though the idea of the pet Sematary is good on paper, director Mary Lambert’s horror drama about a Sematary that revives the living is hell bent on melodrama and meandering back stories and never quite focuses on the allure of the Sematary. In the end the Sematary poses more of a plot device than anything, and spends much of its time on unlikable vapid characters we can never really feel empathy for.
Exit Humanity (2011)
I wanted to love “Exit Humanity,” but in the end I feel like there were just too many ideas for one film. “Exit Humanity” attempts to take a simply a period piece zombie movie and turn it in to a high concept art house film. So there’s narration (by the great Brian Cox), there’s an alleged journal chronicling the rise of the dead, there are animated wipes that progress to the next scene, there are animated sequences where our hero fights the walking dead, and there are an endless stream of flashbacks and nightmare sequences allegedly symbolizing the carnage of the situation at hand.