MicroCinema Reviews
Replay
Thursday, September 13, 2007
In the near future, two young girls goof around with a virtual reality game harboring sinister origins in Ramiro Hernandez’s Replay.
Numb
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Set in a post-apocalyptic future where, apparently, a disease has wiped out all emotion and people now live off a drug called “the drip.” Claire has been living in the outskirts of decimated Yerba City, reliving memories of her and Freddie Mercury (or a guy who looks like Freddie Mercury) before the disaster. Needing some sort of closure, Claire heads into the city, which is now one giant drug den, with hundreds of doped-up homeless-types being administered constant fixes, aided by “angels”, who are mindless drones whose only purpose is to serve without question.
Planetfall
Thursday, April 26, 2007
I probably need to rewatch Planetfall. I liked it as I was watching it, and I absolutely loved the concept — the spaghetti western as a sci-fi flick — but something just didn’t click with me that pushed me over the edge into “obsessive territory” about it. It should have been a fun movie, kind of like a really good Sci-Fi Channel Pictures Original that you catch late-night Friday night, but I just couldn’t get as into it as I wanted to.
Automatons
Friday, March 23, 2007
How far will this war we’re in now go? Will it ever end? Will it progress? What will the ultimate ramifications be? And, in the end, how many total will be dead? That’s what Automatons is all about.
Kometen (The Comet)
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Let me start describing the synopsis of this highly successful experiment: Sometime in the 1960s a comet approaches the earth and threatens to collide in what would result in the end of humanity. One man decides to chronicle the last days on earth with his Super 8mm camera. If that triggers a CGI epic in your imagination, you’ll be 100% wrong. The Comet is a monumental arrangement of random super 8mm documentary footage taken by amateur photographer Bror Jacques de Wærn between 1959 and 1971 in Stockholm.
Wisely put together, director Johan Löfstedt conveys a state of imminence, punctuated by a sad love story and nostalgia for a lost era. So, is The Comet Sci-Fi? Yes, as an excuse. The filmmakers do not alter any of the individual shots, but all of them are taken out of context. Footage that was once mundane (even if occasionally dark and abstract) is now placed at the service of the somber storyline, complemented tremendously by the evocative score by Leif Jordansson, which emerges as a powerful character in the otherwise almost silent piece.
People look at up at tabloids, reading the fatal news in the paper. The elderly pity the young (title cards are interspersed at strategic moments when characters talk). The story escalates as the countdown starts: People running, cars fleeing the city, red sunsets, empty streets, atmospheric skylines of sublime architecture appear weathered by the grainy, jittery, wonderful texture of the Super 8mm. There are some real images of dead people (used to simulate suicides after newspapers announce there are 24 hours until the catastrophe). Some of these segments invoke panic, but there seems to a consensus among the conceived narrative and its characters that the end is unavoidable, and this is quite interesting: People march to their doom drowned in sadness more than distress.
Great percentage of the effectiveness is due to the fact that the world depicted is a Stockholm that no longer exists, a metaphor for the comet crashing in, destroying the past. Note how many elderly characters appear throughout.
More than Sci-Fi, it is an ode to a city and people that no longer exist. Not documentary nor fiction in the strictest sense, The Comet is a triumph of manipulation towards the creation of a rare kind of hybrid. The result is extremely haunting: A true work of poetry in motion.
Four and a half stars.
Flesh Hunters
Sunday, February 06, 2005
The movie opens with a flashback to a home-invasion incident that leaves Deputy J.T. Williams beaten, emotionally scarred and his newlywed wife dead. Don Fisher, a veteran of numerous small roles in films such as Roswell, Species and Forrest Gump, takes the lead role as Deputy Williams. The film then flashes forward to the present day and Deputy Williams is back on the job but still under stress from the incident.
How many movies have you seen where a lawman is under duress and cops a bad attitude towards authority and his fellow officers? That tired cliché is played here yet again, and the Deputy snubs a partner when assigned to transport a petty criminal to another jurisdiction. Filmmakers should give up using the “lone wolf” lawman bit since it is unrealistic and has become almost a parody, especially when overacted, as in this film.
The transportation of the prisoner, Eddie (Nicolas Greene), to jail proves not to be as uneventful as planned. Williams and his prisoner have a close encounter with an alien craft that leaves them stranded on a lonely road through the forest. Lost and on foot, Eddie and the Deputy are soon on the run from the aliens who have landed nearby.
There are three campers in the same woods, and they are so irritating that you end up wanting the aliens to take them away. One of the campers, the “older woman” Karen, is played by Grammy award winner Shandra Sinnamon—remember the song “He’s A Dream” from the Flashdance soundtrack? (http://www.shandi.org/) Shandi manages her part rather handily and doesn’t look out of place among this more experienced cast.
Later, another young woman, played by the curvaceous Delaina Mitchell, is driving down the lonely backroad and crashes her car trying to avoid Deputy Mitchell who is jaywalking along the roadside. Once she is left on foot, it doesn’t take long before the aliens capture her and she is strung up nude on an alien apparatus displaying all of her curves.
The aliens have the humans on the run through most of the middle part of the film. Deputy Williams has a strange encounter with a group of hillbilly rednecks, and of course, he battles the aliens in the final reel. A final twist at the end is predictable by the time it comes to pass.
The acting is uneven in this sci-fi flick, even though many of the actors have experience in TV or bigger films. Fisher is just a bit over the top as the brusque lawman, Delaina Mitchell is better as the damsel-in-distress, and the remainder of the cast is more than adequate and certainly better than 99% of micro-budget casts.
This is a low low budget film by Hollywood standards but not a micro-budget feature. This shows in the production values that are put up on the screen, which gives it a boost above the amateur competition. The bottom line for me is: “Was the film enjoyable to watch?” Yes, it proved to be more entertaining than I expected from looking at the DVD cover.
Flesh Hunters has also been distributed under the title The Human Quality, which can be seen on the clapboard in several parts of the “Behind the Scenes” featurette on the disk.
Dead Alive Productions distributed this film but when I checked their web site, it was more dead than alive. A quick search on Amazon.com turned up several copies of the DVD available at discount prices.
Three stars.
Hope
Thursday, December 30, 2004
If nothing else, Hope proves that $250 partnered with today’s technological tools and buckets of effort can get you some pretty impressive production value. In this 25-minute prologue to a larger story called Heartland: An American Nightmare, we see the Golden Gate bridge submerged in San Francisco Bay, great plumes of smoke wafting over burning cities and an eroded Statue of Liberty still standing, through probably not for long.
All done on a $250 budget with After Effects and Photoshop. Whoa.
The story finds our heroine, a young college girl named Hope, on a road trip back from her West Coast College to her home town in the center of the Promised Land. While en route, the world goes to Hell in a handbasket, over-run by a red dust contagion that converts the masses into zombie hordes. Chaos and burning cities ensue, although we only see the aftermath.
Although many of the visual effects aren’t that convincing, the effort from jack of all trades Wade F. Stai on this movie is astounding. The writer/director/shooter/editor/effects guy/caterer pulls out every trick in the “post apocalypse” book that’s been laid out by Hollywood over the last 50 years, and while that’s commendable, it’s also oddly the movie’s failure. In Hope, Stai is trying to do an epic story on a shoestring, the exact opposite of what someone like M. Night Shyamalan did with a movie like Signs. Whereas Shyamalan worked at the intimacy and increasing dread seen in small spaces, Stai seems more compelled to show the larger scale, which isn’t nearly as nightmarish. Why? It’s not because Stai’s effects are limited by budget, but more because we’ve seen it all before. Most recently, The Day After Tomorrow wiped the world out with special effects, but before that there was Independence Day, The Stand, The Day After and plenty of others. Hell, even Escape from L.A. with its big California Quake sequence offered destruction on a massive scale. And why the Hell were there two moons in the sky in Hope? Perhaps I missed a voice over explanation, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. Wouldn’t the world have been wiped out by tidal waves before fire? It appears Stai just figured it’d look neat (which it did) but why include it when it needn’t be there?
All of this attention to post production, with super Dolby-fied sound effects, and ton of After Effects plug-ins contributes to a movie that’s largely style over substance – something that it desperately doesn’t want. As Hope walks through now desolate streets and parks, she looks somewhat bored and she speaks in baby-voiced narration about how much the world changed and how everyone and everything she’s loved is gone. This ponderous narration feels read off a page, lacking the pathos it wants to convey even though it’s written in pretty broad strokes. Sometimes it’s interrupted by shots of The End of the World as seen through poorly delivered television newscasts and slow tracking shots of a world in ruin. Another time, Hope’s ruminations are halted by a zombie attack when she, mistakenly, breaks an empty soda bottle. This sequence with the bottle is one of the only non-stylistically edited scenes in the movie, and it musters up a pretty fair degree of suspense. It’s a shame there isn’t more of this kind of storytelling at work. Instead, the movie is largely composed of assembled images that have no direct relation with one another, Stai tossing out traditional narrative cinema in exchange for the more non-linear approach largely favored by “artistes.” Whereas a normal movie has action within a scene and shots that lead logically from one to another, Hope is bound together by narration and clips of what’s going on, almost like a long trailer. The effect is numbing after awhile and works against the movie’s wish to be something heart-felt.
In the end, Hope is technically impressive but lacks soul, showing that even though a ton of effort can be spent making a movie, without good acting and a solid, original screenplay all you get are pretty pictures.
It should be mentioned that there are all kinds of nifty extras on the Hope DVD including behind the scenes interviews, deleted scenes, and outtakes, but do skip the embarassingly slapped together “slasher movie” homage called Homecoming that Stai would have been wise to have left off the DVD.
Two stars
Demons In My Head
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
A meteor crashes in an average joe’s backyard, cracking open to reveal a strange headset that channels another dimension. Before long, our nebbishy protagonist is using the headset to take sweet revenge, and other bad things, in Neil Johnson’s The Demons In My Head, a
head-scratching mix of Cthulhu mythos and pulpish Sci-Fi.
Matthew Mariconte is Travis, whose dead-end life--brimming with unrequited love and self-loathing--takes a troubling turn when he finds the unusual headset buried in the smoking meteor. Soon he is seeing into a dark and twisted version of our own dimension--and likes what he sees. The longer he wears the headset, the greater his power over it grows, and soon he has opened a doorway between the
dimensions--as one might suspect, a bad idea.
Caught in the crossfire are two roommates, a man and a woman (Jane Rowland and Greg Bowman-Miles); the former, who he has been in love with, and the latter, who has loved him from afar. A rival for his roommate’s affections, and a pair of missionaries, also fall under Travis’ increasingly cold and alien gaze, and are forced to team up to defeat Travis’ unholy power.
Director Neil Johnson has cooked up a lot of clever ideas in The Demons In My Head, though some of it is somewhat cryptically presented, as the plot takes a couple of sharp twists and turns. Despite the rather grim and often grisly subject matter, Johnson has a light touch and a wry sense of humor. Especially enjoyable is a dimension-hopping old scholar who tries to turn Travis back on the right course; this character, played by David Vallon, reminded me not unkindly of William Hartnell or Jon Pertwee of Doctor Who fame, as I suspect was the intention.
The “behind the scenes” features on the DVD reveal that a lot of work was put into the CGI elements of the project, and are admirably done; thus, I was surprised when some of the core elements of shooting/editing/sound recording seemed a bit uneven. But Johnson showed a pretty steady eye throughout, and his unique vision outweighs some fundamental technical flaws.
I enjoyed The Demons In My Head for its original scripting, unique FX work, and other unusual elements; and I hope director Neil Johnson can parlay these talents into greater works in the future.
Three stars.
Exhumed
Saturday, April 10, 2004
A samurai in feudal Japan. A dame playing P.I. in the hard-boiled 40s. Vampires and werewolves in an apocalyptic future. What ties these three things together? In Brian Clement’s horror anthology Exhumed, it’s the Undead.
“An epic anthology of the undead,” Exhumed pulls together three stories from three very different time periods. Each does an amazing job of capturing the look and feel of the different times, while still delivering some good scares and plenty of bloodshed that zombie fans demand.
After a brief introduction by our host Mr. Grey (who really isn’t much of a host, since he only appears at the beginning and near the end), we’re taken into the first tale: “Forest of the Dead.” A samurai heads into the forest in search of his brother and an ancient artifact that’s believed to have the ability to raise the dead. Along the way he encounters a monk who’s also in search of the artifact, and together they find themselves surrounded by an army of the damned.
Surprisingly enough the best part about this short for me is that it’s actually in Japanese, with English subtitles. It’s that extra something special that lets you know these filmmakers are serious about their work. The props are also excellent, even if the sword play leaves a little to be desired. There are some breathtaking shots here, and ultimately it’s the strongest of the shorts.
The second story is “Shadow of Tomorrow,” a 40s noir piece following a secretary who’s taken over the private detective business from her deceased boss. She’s hired to investigate a man’s ex-wife, which leads to a former Hollywood leading lady and a mad scientist. Clement and Company capture the look and feel of the movies from this period admirably, and the lighting alone makes it a must-see for aspiring micro producers.
“Last Rumble” is the third piece, and it starts off with a gang fight as the Werewolf Rockers and the Vampire Mods plan to square off. Before too long though the military arrives, and we discover that in this future one form of entertainment is a fight pit where the prisoners face off against the undead. The surviving members of the gangs, a female vampire and a female werewolf, decide to work together to escape - but not before a chainsaw comes in to play, along with some of the more traditional elements of a Clement zombie movie.
If the star ratings were based on ambition, Exhumed would easily earn five stars. Clement and Company have chosen to take the most popular of horror structures - the anthology - and tried to accomplish as much as possible on a microbudget. They’ve also done something I’ve been waiting for a micro producer to tackle - using the anthology structure to tell the different stories using different styles. “Forest” looks and feels like a 70s samurai epic, including some amazing sunset shots and costumes and props that make it look and feel like the real deal. “Shadow” is not only black and white, but the opening titles are just like the 40s noirs it’s based on - making sure to include everyone’s names before the short actually starts. Only “Rumble” really fails to achieve a distinct look and feel - it starts much like a 60s English action flick, but quickly takes on the air of Clement’s Meat Market movies (right down to including a cameo by the Santo-inspired Mexican wrestler - nice touch).
Technically, Exhumed has few peers. It’s simply that good. There are moments when the small budget shows, but for the most part the crew has taken the time to make every shot look good. This includes some fantastic lighting in the noir piece, and some appropriately over-the-top gore in the future short. Clement does a good job of capturing the various looks and feels he’s going for in the respective shorts, especially with the “so good they should be framed” images of learning how to wield a sword in “Forest” and the Ozone-like fight pit in “Rumble.”
That’s why it makes it so hard for me to admit that in the end, I didn’t really care for Exhumed all that much. Maybe it’s because I was so impressed by all the work that the crew went into creating the images that the stories didn’t seem to live up those same standards. Clement is fantastic at taking nothing and make it look like a really great something - make no bones about it. The way the shots are framed in “Shadow” - the long dark alleyways, the way every room looks like it’s one big shadow except for where the actors are seated - are as good as any arthouse film making the rounds.
But there are two areas where this anthology fell short for me. First is the acting. The actors do a decent enough job, but I think it’s something with the way they’re directed that keeps me from getting involved with their performances. The same thing troubled me in Meat Market - there are too many times when the characters just seem disinterested in what’s happening. This is most apparent in “Rumble,” and hidden pretty well in “Forest” (it actually works to their advantage in “Shadows” since it had the campy feel of those low budget private dick flicks of the time).
The other area that fell short for me was the script. Despite how great everything looked, the stories still relied on a lot of exposition from the cast members. Which is fine - if it’s easy to follow. But none of the stories have solid endings, and “Shadows” suffers from a bit of padding and some detours that don’t really add much to the story. I can appreciate the attempt at something more challenging than the typical zombie opus, but for me the whole wasn’t equal to the sum of its parts - which is a concern when it turns out that these stories aren’t only connected, they rely on each other to tell a bigger story. If you go in to Exhumed thinking you can watch these shorts as stand alones, think again - they’re all a part of a bigger story, which leads to some confusion and a feeling of being let down when two of the shorts just seem to end. (My apologies if this seems overly vague - I’m trying to avoid spoilers.)
The extras on the DVD are appreciated but somewhat limited. There are a couple of trailers, a nice pin-up gallery, and a short featurette. I was looking forward to the featurette, entitled, “Micro-Budget Horror Filmmaking Primer,” but it’s really just a bunch of behind the scenes footage with some humorous tips (like it’s a good idea to not set the cast or crew on fire). The outtakes are the only disappointment - since there are only two, and they last about a minute. I would have loved a director’s commentary, but no such luck with this release.
On the technical side, Exhumed should be the standard-bearer for microbudget features everywhere. It shows how much can be accomplished with plenty of ambition, the right props, and wanting to take the time to make every shot count. I just wish more could be said of the script, which deliveres the genre goodies but unfortunately doesn’t deliver stories worthy of the effort.
Three and a half stars.
Harvesters
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Veteran b-movie producer Don Dohler and novice director Joe Ripple bring you Harvesters, a blissfully-crazed, tongue-in-cheek movie that’s pretty high on body count and special effects, but which also seems dedicated to paying tribute to one of the more forgotten sub-genres of horror: the twisted family picture. (Think Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
Harvesters crosses the paths of a gang of criminals on the run with an apparently very normal family who have a very peculiar home-run business going on in their basement. The shooting and direction are pretty top-notch for this level of moviemaking, and minus one exploitative digression (involving a blood-filled bathtub and its gorgeous bather) and the introduction of two characters that appear only for the sake of being killed, the story stays on track. Additionally, the gore effects were largely computer-generated, so it’s interesting to see what can be done in no-budget post-production nowadays.
The acting, lighting and sound are handled very well overall, and the movie is a shining example of what can be done with a little effort and a fun storyline. It does have faulty moments – the strip club sequence comes to mind – but its worst sections are better than most b-movies’ best parts.
The DVD comes with a great behind-the-scenes piece during which no-budget moviemakers can see just what it takes to make something look this good with a Canon GL-1 MiniDV camera. Impressive!
Three Stars.
