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[mybabysmomma]

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[random axe]

Just saw Link, a strange horror film from 1986.  About 90% of it is Elisabeth Shue, Terence Stamp, two chimps, and an orang.  It's . . . uneven.

A lot of reviews go on about how great the score is.  It's good for awhile, but it gets more incongruous as the film goes on -- it's a sort of Early Elfman kind of thing (actually by Jerry Goldsmith, who might bristle at the comparison), and it gets more bombastic and cartoonish as the film is getting more violent.  Odd, that.  The movie starts off all suspense and forboding and weird menace, but the last third or so is all conventional When Animals Attack.  It kind of peters out.

For awhile, though, it's downright disturbing on several levels.  The orang is the title character and supposed to be a 45-year-old male, although it looks like an adolescent female was used, unsurprisingly.  Violence against animals is usually harder to take on film than violence against humans, and the Uncanny Valley capacity of primates is used pretty well in this.  The orang wants to watch Shue take a bath in a scene that definitely succeeds at being creepy.  

Interestingly, Australian cult director Richard Franklin (who did Roadgames, the psychic-coma-patient horror film Patrick, and the infamous True Story of Eskimo Nell) made this one just a few years after directing Psycho II, which also has a creepy bath voyeur scene.  That scene had Meg Tilly, so you certainly can't complain about his casting.  

Anyway, Link.  Shue's character has to spend a lot of time just talking to the apes, much of it wheedling, so it's not her best performance ever, although several wags have said it was still a step up from working with Nicholas Cage.  (Her major nude scene in this may have used a body double.  I didn't rewind and squint to try to be certain.)  Stamp's fine in an unsympathetic role.  The orang is pretty impressive in that uncomfortable trained-ape-in-clothes sort of way, and unfairly isn't named in the credits.  Well, no wonder these creatures go nuts in movies and wreak havoc.

[random axe]

The Avengers is often a bit slight by modern standards, perhaps a trifle padded, and the plots verge on children's fare at times, as many of BBC adventure shows did -- Dr Who is still widely considered a kid's show over there, with a bit of humor and T&A to get your dad to watch with you.  And so sometimes I'll put an episode on and then think, well, I don't really need to watch more of these, I get the idea.

But the guest cast is often wonderful, and then I'll see an episode with a young Charlotte Rampling dressed as a cowboy, and then an 'Emma' episode where Mrs Peel goes around in outstanding scarlet silk pajamas the whole time.

Hrm.  Yes, well, that'll do.  That'll do.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

!

Charlotte Rampling dressed as a cowboy!

I've had that fantasy dream

[random axe]

It's worth it.  1967, "The Superlative Seven".  It's a 'Tweed' episode, though, so you get Rampled but not so much Rigged.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

Damn.

the possibility of being Rampled and Rigged at the same time is ...

[random axe]

There's some of that toward the end, which I guess prevents an anticlimax.


/entendre

[random axe]

Last night, Ballad of Cable Hogue, reputedly Peckinpah's favorite of his own works, a Western about a guy who finds water in the desert and yadda yadda.

To be honest, it's pretty aimless, mostly a collection of fairly random things that happen to some guy and the people he bumps into.  (He bumps into Stella Stevens a lot, which was kind of weird for me since coincidentally I just saw her in that closet-monster movie.)  The cast is great, and there are a lot of great moments, but the overall plot is surprisingly not so much, and it has some really contrived and lame tear-jerking bits.  At the end, I was mostly just aware of how much untapped potential the film still had when it was over.

Actually, now that I think of it, it's like Peckinpah was channeling Joss Whedon.

[random axe]

Some damn Netflix or IMDb review of some movie that I liked in the last year or so specifically recommended a film called The Draughtsman's Contract.  As per my usual, I decided to see it mostly on a whim, preferring not to know too much about it before I saw it.  The DVD arrived yesterday.

Sometimes, at a party or something, you'll meet someone who's definitely attractive, quite attractice, and also quite distinctive.  Not generically attractive, certainly, but quite compelling.  And even brief conversation will reveal that they're intriguing, too.  But also that they're crazy.  And at some point you have to decide if they're worth the effort to get to know better.  How deep is that craziness, and how tiresome?  How interesting will they actually turn out to be if you make the extra effort, and how much extra effort will it take? 

Peter Greenaway movies are like that.  The Draughtsman's Contract is a Greenaway movie.  It's easy to describe it so that it sounds intiguing.  Staged like a play, it's a decameronish tale of a cast of Jacobean characters, mostly nobility, who dress like Monty Python caricatures and talk like they fell out of Moliere.  A draughtsman is hired to make several drawings of an estate; his price is an equal number of sexual favors from the lady of the house.  The woman's daughter has a devilish plan of her own.  There's also a living statue that most of the characters apparently can't see, and so on.  A car is visible at one point.  Yadda yadda.

Thing is, this film didn't seem to me worth more than maybe twenty minutes' conversation at the party.  The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, OK, worth more trouble, possibly mostly because of Helen Mirren and my inability to tell how seriously I was meant to take it.  I've seen pieces of Prospero's Books, which I'm not sure really pays off but is pretty damned hypnotic, and 8.5 Women, which did nothing for me, and most of The Pillow Book, which has Vivian Wu naked (nice) and also a full-on hog shot of Young Kenobi (which I didn't need but it doesn't kill me, either).

Greenaway is probably too clever for his own good.  Still, he seems to like what he does, and unlike a lot of artistes he manages to make a lot of movies, which for some reason I feel is a point in his favor.  To me, Draughtsman's Contract was like an incredibly dull episode of Serie Rose (aka Softly, From Paris) with pretty much all the sex scenes cut out.

AND of course now I have no idea WTF film I saw and liked that had the review that likened it to this film.  Seriously, it's making me slightly crazy, but I looked through my own reviews and Netflix history, and I have not the slightest idea.

[random axe]

So . . . late last night I started watching The Girl Next Door, a 2007 film Netflix lists as a horror film.  It's a horror film, to be sure, but not like monsters-under-the-bed.  More like a fictionalized Escape From Sobibor -- that sort of horror, the kind that's all too real.  I thought it was going to be a monster or slasher film, so it wasn't what I was expecting.

It's based on a novel by Jack Ketchum, a horror author I didn't think I'd read (maybe a short story here or there?) until I checked Wikipedia and remembered that I read She Wakes a few years ago.  That wasn't my kind of thing.  The Girl Next Door is a completely serious and realistic movie about people doing horrible things.  One of these people is crazy, in a very realistic and unhappy way.  The others are all children who are trained to be crazy and sadistic.  The victims are children, too.

The film starts off by saying that it's based on a true story.  After a bit, I began to wonder if I knew the true story in question, and it turns out that I do, and I really don't want or need to see a fictionalized account of it.  If you crossed Flowers in the Attic with Misery, cranked the child abuse up to about a 9, and held it there until you realize there's no happy ending, that's about right.  I watched about 40 minutes and had had enough.  I probably would've quit earlier, but it's really well done, with a compelling cast.  I'd really like to see the lead actress, Blythe Auffarth, in something else.  Something really different.

Ketchum was criticized for using the real-life case as the springboard for a horror novel, but I can't comment on that without reading the novel -- which some people feel takes advantage of what happened and some people feel brings needed attention to it.  Another movie that came out the same year, An American Crime, is a much more direct version of the story, using the actual names and dates.  That one stars Catherine Keener as the psychotic woman and Ellen Page as the girl who fares the worst.  Yeesh.  It's apparently really well done, too.

Personally, I've seen enough stuff detailing child abuse in realistic narrative, and I'm not looking to be disturbed in that particular way.  The movie's well done, like I said, and not really sensationalistic.  The girl is a little sexualized, without question, but it is absolutely integral to the story and certainly serves a purpose.  I think the character is about 15, and the actress was apparently over 20 at the time.  But this isn't a movie going for entertainment.  It's sober as the grave and looking to make you uncomfortable -- and extremely likely to succeed.

Flat-out depressing.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

I rewatched "Tron" the other night. It's better than I remembered.

[random axe]

It's a little slow until he breaks into the lab, and then it's silly but awesome.  The door into the lab always kills me. 

I do wish there was a re-release with an added scene where Sark hits Neo in the face with a light-up Frisbee, though.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

It's worth it.  1967, "The Superlative Seven".  It's a 'Tweed' episode, though, so you get Rampled but not so much Rigged.

You did not mention Donald Sutherland ... !

ETA: NOR BRIAN BLESSED! hHAHAHAHAHAHA this is AWESOME

[random axe]

Yeah, the awesome episodes are fully awesome. 

[pdrake]

you need a rating system.

stars are overdone, thumbs is dumb . . . maybe swords . .