The tagline for this is “The antisocial son of an alcoholic father and a bipolar mother grows up in 1960s Ireland”, so forgive me if that and the colour grade on the promo photos meant I went in thinking this would be some overly earnest misery-porn. What we have here is some high-quality bait-and-switch weirdness that simply has to be explored. And, yes, a bit of 60s Ireland misery-porn. Continue reading
For those who don’t know it, ALF was a mid-80s sitcom about and Alien Life Form living with a suburban middle-class family in a generically affluent part of mid-80s California. Other than ALF’s propensity for eating cats, it was mild mannered family entertainment hinging on culture shock and mild ill-mannered behaviour. As a series it touched on nothing of any real importance, other than being based on a flagrant disregard for immigration laws, and it go through it’s 102 episodes on the principle that anyone will laugh at a 3-foot-tall fury humanoid with a Connecticut accent. So whilst I knew the series ended on ALF being captured by the US Air Force I wasn’t expecting the movie to be an unrelenting nightmare.
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There is a lot in common between my blog and the filmography of Richard Stanley. They’re both essentially uncommercial works, they are based on a love of cinema and belief in the scope of what movies can be, and they both rely on introspection interspersed with brutal violence. But whilst I do quick reads about other people’s work for free, he convinces people to give him millions of dollars to make two-hour gothic epics set in random deserts. Also; he once got driven crazy by Val Kilmer, but that’s a whole other story.
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If you’re worried about this 1999 Louis Morneau directed movie being a low-budget creepy-crawly-horror cash-in for Lou Diamond Phillips, then don’t panic. This is actually a disaster movie, starring Dina Meyer with Lou Diamond Phillips as the bit of totty that the hero wins at the end. It just looks like it’s an attempt to milk the last scrap of Arachnophobia money still on the table because that’s the only way it could sell its radical feminist agenda.
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According to Dave Grohl, this movie happened because whilst recording the Foo Fighter’s tenth album he had an idea to do a very cheap slasher video about the band and the studio, like a little youtube home movie, and then suddenly there were millions of dollars in production money and John Carpenter doing the soundtrack. I’ve got no way of knowing if it’s true or marketing hype, but I imagine that kind of thing happens a lot in his world and it probably explains why this film exists. It also explains why it can only exist because the Foo Fighters are in it, and why this ends up being “A Hard Days Night” done by Hooper and Craven.
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I’m going to keep this review short and to the point, mostly as the director/writer Jon Jacobs didn’t with the film. It was based on a late 50s Fritz Langer short story, and somewhere in it is the basis of a pretty decent entry into the mid-90s supernatural goth-horror canon. Unfortunately, that gets crowded out due to either a lack of narrative focus or a need to hit the promised run time.
Back in the distant past of the mid 90s, there were exactly two film posters that ruled the walls amongst the heady intellectualists of A-level and first year university students. One was the classic Uma Thurman-fronted pastiche of Pulp Fiction, displayed to signify that you were sophisticated, with a touch of the retro-chic charm and danger of a 70s heroin overdose about you, and imply the student could more than likely quote all the movies that Quentin Tarantino errantly used the word “inspired” about. The other poster, normally positioned with far less lighting, was any of the myriad of designs for the 1994 Brandon Lee movie The Crow – they signified that you were serious, sensitive, and had a wardrobe that was 90% various shades of fading black. It also aligned you with the nebulous tribe of “alternatives” that found common ground and shared symbolism in one of the greatest movies about a comic book… one that everyone swore they had read the first time it was released.
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Trash or Treasure 