September Films Catch Up 1

10 films from earlier in the year.

****

1. Without Warning (1980)

A father and son, mismatched and arguing, are going hunting in the mountains; they are attacked by weird flying jellyfish creatures. Later four teens go hiking in the area, So do a cub scout group. Two of the teens go missing; they are found by the other pair, Sandy and Greg, dead and hung up in a shack. Escaping in their van they’re attacked by one of the jellyfish. They go for help at a local bar, but the only one who believes them is Sarge. Sarge is a veteran with mental illness.

Sandy is attacked by a human-shaped figure and flees; Greg is stopped from going after her into the woods. They try to call the sheriff, but he’s already out in the woods looking for the missing scouts. Sandy is brought back, the power cuts out, they suggest that the jellyfish are aliens, and also can impersonate people. The sheriff arrives, and paranoid, Sarge shoots him. Without proof they go to look for it, events becoming more dangerous and strange.

Not especially well made as a film, it relies a lot on the characters making wild speculations, then trying to act on them and it going wrong. Which I guess makes some sense.

Watch This: Alien horror, with some genuinely unsettling touches
Don’t Watch This: Shoddily made and mental illness treated crassly

2. Serpent’s Lair

Tom and Alex move into a spooky apartment in Los Angeles*. The previous owner died and there is a room full of his occult stuff waiting to be dealt with. In the courtyard is a serpent statue. Their neighbour recognises the occult stuff, commiserates about the owner.

Cats appear, and Tom and Alex adopt one. Then the cat trips Alex on the stairs and she has to go to hospital. The cat vanishes; the previous owner’s sister Lilith arrives and asks to look at the stuff. She seduces Tom, moves in, has sex with him at work, he is obsessed with her.

As an erotic, occult thriller the film convinces; indeed with the casting of model Lisa B as Lilith Tom’s beguilement hardly seems uncanny at all. And his desperation and descent are well done.

Watch This: Man is seduced magically
Don’t Watch This: Just some shagging and vampiric draining

* Filmed in Bucharest

3. The Wiz

Dorothy Gale (Diana Ross) is a schoolteacher in Harlem; on thanksgiving her dog Toto runs out into a storm. They are swept up in a whirlwind and arrive in the land of Oz, an alternative New York, smashing through the big electric sign so it lands on Evermean the Wicked Witch Of The East. Miss One, the Good Witch Of The North gives her Evermean’s slippers and tells her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.

What if the Land of Oz was New York City in the 70s. What if the entire cast was black. What if Quincy Jones did the music, and they had Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Richard Pryor as The Wiz. This film, that’s what.

It draws from the book rather than the 1939 film (or any of the other films); that’s why the slippers are silver. The songs are pretty good. In an age where we’ve seen darker re-imaginings of The Wizard Of Oz, this holds it’s own with sweatshops, cruel crows and prostitutes. But the book and the 1939 film were pretty dark anyway, that’s what kid’s stuff did, still does sometimes.

Watch This: Fun musical adaption of The Wizard Of Oz with some good songs and magnificent design
Don’t Watch This: An early entry in the taking kid’s stuff and turning it dark

4. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment

The Scullions, a criminal gang led by Zeb (Bobcat Goldthwait) are terrorising the part of the city covered by the 16^th Precinct, though as this is a comedy film they’re mostly conducting weirdly affable robberies and bullying people. Police Captain Pete Lassard asks for more help; his brother Commandant Lassard of the Police Academy sends over six characters from the previous film; Mahoney (pranks), Hightower (huge), Jones (makes noises), Tackleberry (guns), Hooks (small, weedy voice) and Fackler (accident prone). Captain Lassard’s deputy, Lieutenant Mauser, wants to make him fail, as then he will get promoted. There’s a thirty day deadline so Mauser and his dim sidekick Proctor attempt to sabotage them.

They go through various police comic sketches, occasionally confronting the gang but being thwarted by Mauser. Mahoney and Jones play various pranks on Mauser as his efforts to stop them become clear. Tackleberry having been assigned another gun-mad partner, falls in love with her. They hold a street fair and the gang trash it; Lassard resigns and Mauser fires Mahoney.

Mahoney, his slobby partner, and Lassard decide on one last ditch effort; Mahoney goes undercover. He is taken to their hideout, an abandoned zoo, where he’s discovered as his wire goes wrong, broadcasting. Mauser tries and fails to lead a raid; he’s captured after Fackler knocks him down an air vent. The other officers then stage their own raid in a high energy action sequence.

Just as in Police Academy the greatest threat is the ambitious deputy to the police’s leader, and although pranking him (and his reactions) make up the major part of the film, that’s not sufficient. Only when Mahoney gets fired (again) are the officers motivated to actually pull together and do their job. This one is lifted though by Zed, the gang leader, ridiculous, almost child-like, it’s as though he’s decided to have a criminal gang because he thinks that’s a cool thing to do.

Watch This: Amusing 80s comedy sequel
Don’t Watch This: Many dubious unamusing scenes

5. Barbie (2023)

In Barbieland, a dimension within which Barbie dolls etc live, everything is perfect. Except one day Barbie (Margot Robbie) has thoughts of mortality, cellulite, flat feet and bad breath. She consults Weird Barbie and learns the strange feedback that exists between Barbieland and the Real World; she sets off there to find out what’s wrong.

Ken (Ryan Gosling) goes with her. As Barbie tracks down her owner, a teen called Sasha, she discovers that in the Real World Barbies have not solved sexism as she believed, or indeed any other problems. Sasha is the daughter of Gloria, who works for Mattel, the company that makes Barbie. Mattel are concerned about this intrusion to the Real World and make half-hearted attempts to get Barbie to go back in her box.

Meanwhile Ken has returned to Barbieland where he introduces the idea of Patriarchy and plans to change Barbieland to Kenland. Barbie finds that she has to reconcile Mattel, the Kens and Sasha and Gloria, which is not exactly simple thanks to her being a giant doll with a very cursory relationship with reality.

All this in a film that asks and discusses the basic questions. Who made Barbie and why, what is the relationship between Barbie and Mattel. Isn’t all this very surface level feminism, also Mattel is run by a bunch of child-like men, while Gloria is the one with any real ideas. If Barbieland is so ripe for takeover by outside ideologies, how strong was it to start with? Anyway it’s a fun film that is happy to consider the implications of it’s own premise, and the premise of Barbie in the Real World (our world). In a bright fun happy way!

Watch This: Clever self aware doll tie in film
Don’t Watch This: No interest in Barbie talking about itself

6. The House On Sorority Row (1983)

Seven members of a sorority will be graduating and intend to hold a party. Unfortunately for them the house mother, Mrs Slater, closes the house before the weekend (as she does for that date every year). When she discovers them drinking, she tells them off, and finding one of them in a water bed with her boyfriend she cuts the bed, flooding them out.

They play a prank on her, but it goes wrong and Mrs Slater dies. They decide to cover it up and go ahead with the party, hiding the body in the pool. However someone is stabbed with Mrs Slater’s cane, and guests try to use the pool. Realising that if the pool lights come on the body will be visible one of the girls goes down to the basement to turn off the breakers and is stabbed. Meanwhile Mrs Slater’s body has vanished.

There’s a mystery killer and the girls keep finding more bodies they need to deal with. As the film moves into the end game with the mysteries of Mrs Slater and the house being revealed it gets more off the wall, but manages to maintain it’s tension. If there’s a problem with it, it’s that the girls are self-centred idiots. Not that that excuses the murders. Though on the other hand they did attempt a cruel prank and killed a woman, so who can say?

Watch This: Classic, tense slasher as events spiral out of control
Don’t Watch This: Vapid young women unleash murderous events

7. Offerings

As a child John is bullied by the neighbourhood kids, who ride around on their bikes causing trouble. His only friend is Gretchen. One day, while dared to walk around a dry well by the bullies, he falls in and is hospitalised.

Ten years later, now an adult, he comes to himself in the mental hospital. Or perhaps better to say he’s learns focus. Killing a nurse he escapes. He has many enemies, his childhood bullies, who he mutilates. And he has one friend, Gretchen. What can he offer her?

A slasher-movie reminiscent of Halloween, though with its own twist.

Watch This: Scary and gory man gets revenge on his bullies
Don’t Watch This: Mutiliations

8. The Black Hole

The starship Palomino is in deep space, returning to Earth. The crew is Captain Dan Holland, Lieutenant Charlie Pizer, journalist Harry Booth, and scientists Dr Alex Durant and Dr Kate McCrea, who has a psychic link to the ship’s robot VINCent (Vital Information Necessary CENTralised). They spot the starship Cygnus, missing for 20 years with the whole crew, including McCrea’a father and go to investigate. The Cygnus is in orbit around a black hole so it gets very tricky and they take damage thanks to gravitational currents, until they get close to the Cygnus. In the calm they dock to try and repair the ship.

On board the crew is mostly silent robots, a scary red floating one called Maximilian, a lot of humanoid ones with blank faces and one battered one similar to VINCent called BOB (BiO-sanitation Battalion). Eventually they encounter the one surviving human, Dr Hans Reinhart, who offers the sad news that the crew left when they got trapped in the black hole’s field except McCrea’s father who died. He has built the robots and has plans to investigate the black hole.

Obviously there’s more to it, a mystery or set of mysteries that Reinhart is keeping. This was produced by Disney and influenced by Star Wars in design; indeed we might consider it Disney’s contemporary answer to Star Wars (as opposed to their eventual answer of buying Lucasfilm to own it). This is especially notable in the robots, with VINCent and BOB very cute. It has it’s own spin, and being psychicly linked to a robot is good. Yet they miss a trick; there aren’t any young characters for the kids in the audience to identify with, or have the basics of the setting explained to. The cast and plot feels a bit more like an extended episode of a science fiction TV series. Might we also consider this Disney’s answer to Star Trek?

Watch This: Interesting 1970s space adventure
Don’t Watch This: A little tired

9. They Nest

Dr Ben Cahill is separated from his wife and a recovering alcoholic; after he freezes at the operating table he’s ordered to take a holiday. He goes to Orr Island, a remote fishing community off the coast of Maine. He and his wife bought a house that needs renovating there before things went wrong. Unfortunately the house belonged to the father of Jack Wald, the island electrician, and they get off on the wrong foot.

Ben tries to fix things at the house, though the man running the store is of little use; he has to track down Nell who has jobs at everywhere else in town. The two of them hit it off. This annoys not only Jack but his cronies, including his brother Eamon.

Unfortunately for all of them a body has washed ashore, a body infested with flesh eating cockroaches. By the time the sheriff starts to figure out what’s going on and Ben has identified them, the locals have turned against him and blame him for the first on island death. This comes to an end when a swarm of cockroaches bursts out.

A film that starts with a part-gritty, part-romantic story of a guy going to a small isolated town and finding enemies and maybe love, and ends with swarms of flesh eating insects. Is this the perfect movie? No, no it isn’t.

Watch This: Competent bug horror film
Don’t Watch This: The way things spiral out of control seems very contrived

10. Disappearance

The Henley family (father Jim, mother Patty, son Matt, daughter Kate and Matt’s friend Ethan) are on a road trip; passing through Arizona they decide to visit a ghost town. However locals claim not to know about it and suggest they stay on the pavement. Still they turn off and head thirty miles down the dirt road, find it and look around. It seems to have been abandoned in a hurry in 1948. They discover a video camera with a weird tape, of previous visitors who vanish and the last one is running. When they attempt to leave the car battery is dead.

After staying overnight they find the car has gone. They split the party, Jim and Ethan heading across country back to the gas station, the others staying behind. Strange things happen in the town, Patty falls through some boards into the mine and is attacked by something, shooting it to get away. Jim and Ethan discover a plaque in the middle of a glass crater commemorating a neutron bomb test. Then Ethan vanishes over a ridge and Jim can’t find him; he does find a car graveyard with their car in and heads back to town. The sheriff doesn’t admit that there’s a ghost town and things continue to be weird.

A film that offers several explanations for what is going on and has a creepy if ambiguous ending. The ghost town and mines are fine, but the desert, with the unexpected neutron bomb memorial and car graveyard is pretty good.

Watch This: Creepy horror that hints at terror
Don’t Watch This: Refuses to commit to a particular weirdness