Mike's Memorial Day Movie Weekend (now with 33% gratuitous rape!)

Memorial Day weekend gave me an opportunity to watch a bunch of shit I had on my DVR for the past year.

Citizen Kane - caught this on TV a few years back, never watched it "properly" from the beginning to the end. It is considered one of the best movies of all time and for good reason. I can't wait until Michael Bay remakes it - WITH EXPLOSIONS.

Shivers - David Cronenberg's take on the zombie movie genre, but instead of eating you, these zombies want to rape you! It's all the result of a synthetic parasite that looks like the offspring of a turd and a penis that was overcooked in the microwave. This movie does not flinch from its subject matter, instead exploring the full perverted range of its implications. Add in some gross out moments involving an insurance agent who essentially plays mother hen to a brood of newborn parasites and you got something that can only be described as Cronentastic!!!

Calvaire - Weird French movie I taped off of Sundance, the description went something along the lines of "A cabaret singer breaks down in rural Belgium and comes across the town's deranged peasants. A mix of gory violence and black humor." For some reason, I thought cannibals. I was wrong. One - the cabaret singer is a guy who sings for old folks homes - not cabarets. Okay. Two, the peasants are Deliverance-inspired man-rapists. Oh noes! This movie has a dreadful atmosphere and great cinematography/photography and might have been okay except it has a really shitty, half-assed ending.


The Gate - Two 10-year-old boys somehow manage to accidentally perform an elaborate ritual that creates a gate between their world and that of ancient demons that predate light itself. I saw this movie in theaters back in 1987 - meaning I was only 6 years old!!! Two things in it scared the shit out of me back then - a demonic apparition of one of the main characters dad's face melting off and a phone melting on the wall. Apparently as a kid I was bothered by melting, but not by little claymation dudes running around. Or big gigantic anti-climatic claymation dudes. This movie is a bit too day-glo and 80's to really hold up these days, and it has a super sappy sugary sweet happy ending. They should've gone with an ending more akin to Time Bandits - sorry kid, your house is gone, everyone you love is dead and you're all alone in the world. Oh, and it's your fault. Now THAT'S an ending!!!

The House on Haunted Hill (1999 remake) - Some remakes I refuse to watch, some remakes I can't help myself. I love the original House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, and this movie seemed to have the right look that I was willing to at least give it a chance. It's actually pretty decent up until the final 20 minutes. Enough things are changed in this movie so that it's not an outright regurgitation - in this version the "house" was a 1930's era asylum where the evil doctor, played by Jeffrey Combs, was performing grisly experiments and vivisections on his patients. One day they broke free, so the doctor put the place in a (technologically unlikely) lock down mode and 135 people burned to death with no way to escape. The set up provides a great atmosphere for the movie to work with, and Geoffrey Rush plays the part analogous to Vincent Price's - not a bad choice of casting. Unfortunately, they have Chris Kattan playing the wienie comic relief, but it doesn't ruin the movie - the ending does. Gemma called me about 20 minutes before this movie ended and I told her, "the movie's been pretty good up until this point, but I think it's about to take a huge shit on me." And shit it did. They ruin a pretty decent movie with a horrible CGI anti-climax that is about as goofy as the giant claymation dude from The Gate.

Touch of Evil - So I began and ended the weekend with an Orson Welles movie. Touch of Evil is a film noir with Charlton Heston as prominent Mexican law enforcement officer Mike Vargas, and Orson Wells as the racist American police captain Hank Quinlan who uses questionable methods to get arrests and convictions. Vargas is the idealist do-gooder, and when he and Quinlan cross paths, Quinlan decides the only course of action is to make Vargas and his wife out to be drug addicts themselves so that Vargas's accusations hold no weight - with the side effect of possibly letting a prominent drug cartel leader, whose conviction depends upon Vargas's testimony, go free. It's great stuff with some truly tense atmosphere as Quinlan teams up with local crime lord Uncle Joe Grandi and his thugs to go after Vargas's innocent wife - there's some serious knot-in-your-stomach moments to be had there.