Watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one sitting is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, almost since the third movie came out. It makes sense because it is basically one epic, split into three parts due to length, so putting them back together again seems like the best way to appreciate the trilogy as a whole. However, the gap between theory and practice proved difficult to bridge, for a number of reasons. I almost did get there at Thanksgiving 2009, but technical issues involving our new Blu-Ray DVD player meant it had to wait until we got a new TV set too. However, on Boxing Day, the stars aligned, the decks were cleared, and an intravenous drip of caffeinated beverages installed.

I must confess to wondering  how I’d cope. Even though we had skipped the extended version of The Two Towers, we were still looking at 640 minutes from one source in a single day, which would easily smash the previous record of about 350 minutes [set back in Christmas 2002, when we watched eight episodes of 24, for three consecutive days]. However, I hoped that the unarguable quality of the works in question would ease their consumption – it should be easier to watch eleven hours of the greatest trilogy ever than, say, 11 hours of American Idol. Well, so went the theory, anyway.

This is therefore not so much a review as a live blogging of the event. If you want “reviews”, you should go here, here and here for the three parts respectively. This will be more of a stream of consciousness, and will likely not make a great deal of sense, unless you have already seen the films. [And if not, how was Mars?] Because of this, I will not be exercising any caution in the spoiler area. Time stamps given are straight off the DVD timer, and as noted, are based on the extended editions, except for Part Two – we’ll get into the reasons for this in due course. And with that…

The Fellowship of the Ring

Disk One

• 0:00 Rated PG-13 for epic battle scenes and some scary images. They should have used that on the poster: “Epic battle scenes! Scary images!” — MPAA
• 0:01 So, there were actually twenty rings in total. The other 19 are kinda irrelevant, given the whole “One ring to bind them” thing
• 0:02 I’m with the MPAA. Epic battle scene #1. This one features Mr. Anderson. How many people have been in *two* trilogies to gross more than $1.5 billion?
• 0:05 Oh, Prince Isildur. If only you hadn’t been such a plonker. It’d have saved me about 10 1/2 hours.
• 0:07 That’s enough voice-over, I was beginning to wonder if I was watching the DVD with a commentary-track by Galadriel.
• 0:09 “Pipeweed”. Yeah, sure… Explains the hobbit apathy and apparently-perpetual munchies, shall we say.
• 0:22 Elijah Wood Looks Concerned. #1 in a series of… quite a lot. Collect the set!
• 0:31 Wikipedia can be so distracting. I thought I recognized Andy Serkis playing a hobbit, and somehow ended up reading about the Moors Murderers.
• 0:35 “Is it safe?” demands Gandalf. Laurence Olivier’s estate gets a shiny new penny.
• 0:39 Asks Frodo, “No-one knows it’s here, do they?” Gandalf’s stunned silence is very reassuring.
• 0:44 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely Landscapes.
• 0:45 There go the elves. Splitters!
• 0:47 Remember I asked “How many people have been in *two* trilogies to gross more than $1.5 billion?” Well, here’s Christopher Lee of LotR and the Star Wars prequels.
• 0:48 He and Ian McKellen have a Facial Hair Face-Off for the ages.
• 0:50 And then fight. Their combined age is more than 140, but it still works.
• 0:53 Hobbits entranced by mushrooms. Yep, I see why hippies like the book.
• 0:58 Peter Jackson cameo!
• 1:01 And one ring to fit them all, it appears – Sauron, Isildur, Gollum and now Frodo’s little stubby finger.
• 1:04 The Nazgul are loaded with mystical power, but apparently unable to tell the difference between a Hobbit and a pillow.
• 1:10 Orcs are ugly.
• 1:14 Aragorn proves Ring Wraiths are vastly over-rated.
• 1:17 Uruk-hai are even uglier. This seems to be the way Middle-earth works. Ugly = bad. Pretty = good.
• 1:23 Arwen tells the Ring Wraiths to come and have a go, if they think they’re hard enough. Elf-powered tidal wave 1, Ring Wraiths 0.
• 1:27 Come to Beautiful Rivendell and See Our Lovely Landscapes.
• 1:30 Ah, turns out Ian McKellen joins Weaving and Lee in the $1.5 billion club, for LotR and X-Men.
• 1:34 The Arwen-Aragorn romance kicks into gear. “I would rather share one lifetime with you, than face all the ages of this world alone.” Sniff.
• 1:40 OMG! Strider is Aragorn! This revelation might have had more effect if a) I knew they explained why that was important, and b) if I hadn’t been calling him that for the past 1:40.

Disk Two

• 0:00 I thought changing discs in the middle of a movie went out with LD. Apparently not.
• 0:05 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely (360-degree) Landscapes.
• 0:07 You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you? You know, for a second there, yeah, I kinda did.
• 0:16 I have to say, the way of getting into the mines of Moria appears to come from a poor D&D adventure.
• 0:17 A tentacle not-so languidly breaks the surface.
• 0:26 Nice city. Shame about the dead dwarfs littering it.
• 0:27 “We have barred the gates…but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes. Drums…drums…in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow moves in the dark.” Never a good sign.
• 0:31 Legolas running up the troll’s chain onto its head, and firing an arrow down into the skull. Cool.
• 0:32 But otherwise, the troll does look a bit Playstation-y. There’s no doubt WETA’s work improved as the series went on.
• 0:37 Now, that’s what I call a yawning chasm.
• 0:38 “Nobody tosses a dwarf.”
• 0:39 Ah, that’s why the orcs ran. Don’t blame them.
• 0:42 And “Fly” is only a 3rd-level AD&D spell too. Guess Gandalf must have gone with “Fireball” instead.
• 0:51 I imagine when you’re an elf and so near-immortal, you don’t… need… to… speak… with… any… urgency.
• 0:57 Or blink, apparently.
• 1:04 Galadriel turns into Santa Claus, handing out gifts like Halloween candy.
• 1:07 Gimli the hair-fetishist. Who knew?
• 1:11 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely Rivers [But not our giant statues, for they are CGI]
• 1:15 Chris adds Orlando Bloom to the $1.5 billion club: LotR and Pirates of the Caribbean.
• 1:21 Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Legolas unleashes the semi-automatic bow and arrow.
• 1:25 Uruk-hai decapitation. PG-13 rating. Hmmm. Lack of resulting arterial spray, I assume.
• 1:32 Hobbits hugging. The film must almost be over.
• 1:34 “I don’t suppose we’ll ever see them again,” says Frodo. Not for about another eight hours, no.
• 1:42 The official fan club credits start.
• 2:02 The official fan club credits end. I notice the list include Sir Ian McKellen, plus an Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd and Christopher Lee, but not Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom or Liv Tyler.

The Two Towers

• 0:00 What? No ‘Previously, on Lord of the Rings“?
• 0:01 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely Snowy Mountainscapes
• 0:03 Now, that’s “falling with style”
• 0:07 Gollum! Hooray! A great gift to celebrity impersonators everywhere, just like Christopher Walken.
• 0:08 I hope Sam had his rabies shots.
• 0:10 Andy Serkis should have won the Oscar.
• 0:13 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely Expanses of Plains
• 0:15 Saruman: “The old world will burn in the fires of industry. The forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fists of the Orc. We have only to remove those who oppose us.” I imagine Lee’s operatic version of Tomorrow Belongs to Me is in the extended version.
• 0:23 Rated PG-13 for brief scenes of orcish cannibalism, I suppose.
• 0:25 Why, yes, Chris – that is Dr. McCoy from the new Star Trek playing Eomer..
• 0:28 Orc head on a stick! Get your orc head on a stick!
• 0:32 Here comes the talking tree. Well, that’s ent-ertainment.
• 0:35 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Not-so Lovely Bogs, Marshes and Swamps.
• 0:38 Elijah Wood has been biting his nails. Maybe that’s method acting.
• 0:44 Gandalf 1, Balrog 0.
• 0:46 Shadowfax arrives. The extended cut also includes his younger brothers, Shadowemail and Shadowtwitter.
• 0:47 Now this is what I call an evil fortress.
• 0:54 Personally, I would think twice before appointing any adviser called Grima Wormtongue.
• 1:00 Another great facial-hair face-off, this time between Gandalf and Theoden.
• 1:09 Eowyn – clearly not just a wallflower princess, who replies to the question “What do you fear?” with “To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.” You go girl…

• 1:13 Sam and Frodo bickering like a married couple. I wonder if there’s LotR slash ficton?
• 1:14 Oh, god. “Results 1 – 20 of about 469,000 for lord of the rings slash”
• 1:15 Yep: Andy Serkis really should have won the Oscar.
• 1:19 Those oliphaunts are quite large. They are, however, not as big as the F-sized ones in Return.
• 1:25 Eowyn vs. Arwen. Now that’s the kind of slash fiction I could cope with.
• 1:28 Legolas swings from the ground to a galloping horse. Never mind Aragorn, I think Legolas may be even cooler in battle.
• 1:35 I guess Grima somehow missed the forces of darkness massing outside the tower in their tens of thousands, on his way in.
• 1:36 More than an hour since we last heard from Pippin and Merry. Still with the ent. No change there, then.
• 1:43 It’s not exactly looking good for the forces of light, is it?
• 1:48 David Wenham does look like he could be Sean Bean’s brother.
• 1:52 Serkis chews the scenery to great effect: “MY PRECIOUSSSSSS!” Marvellous.
• 1:56 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely Lands… What? Did we do that already?
• 2:01 Pippin and Merry. Still with the ent.
• 2:09 The elves show up. Must be part of the National Elf Service. Thank you: I’ll be here all week.
• 2:11 The enemy shows up. There’s a lot of them.
• 2:12 And they appear to be upset.
• 2:15 One of those shots, panning along the battlements of Helm’s Deep, that still makes you go “Wow.”
• 2:16 The ents continue to debate. This would be a good part of why we decided an extended version of this one was not worthwhile.
• 2:18 Is that Uruk-Hai carrying an Olympic Torch?
• 2:21 After careful consideration, the ents decide to…do absolutely nothing,
• 2:24 I think there was a Peter Jackson cameo here, third spear-chucker from the left or something.
• 2:26 Somehow, the words “epic battle scenes” don’t quite do this justice.
• 2:31 The ents experiences a change of…sap, or something, I guess, and charge into battle. Run, forest, run!
• 2:40 I’m sorry. My jaw has just been slack for the past ten minutes.
• 2:42 Had to laugh at the ent, its head on fire, running into the advancing waters to put it out.
• 2:49 “Samwise the Brave” – “Samwise the Gay, more like” snorts Chris.

The Return of the King

Disk One

• 0:04 Hobbiticide! I’d forgotten Gollum was a hobbit, before the ring got to him.
• 0:05 No fish were harme… Oh, well – never mind.
• 0:09 Do you think they are actually barefoot, or just wearing shoes that look like hairy hobbit feet?
• 0:15 Saruman does some very good taunting for altitude, like the French castle on Holy Grail.
• 0:16 Saruman and his Magic 8-Ball (TM) fall from grace onto a conveniently-pointy waterwheel.
• 0:21 Dwarf flatulence. Oh, hold my aching sides.
• 0:23 Serkis vs. Serkis again. In a film of great performances, I’m ever more convinced this one was the best.
• 0:29 Wizards sleep with their eyes open. Which makes sense, when you think about it.
• 0:41 It’s gone a bit low-key for the moment. I get the sense of pieces being moved into place for the final battle.
• 0:42 Minas Tirith. Ok. I’m impressed. But why does it need a helipad on the roof?
• 0:44 It’s Dr. Walter Bishop! Ok, it’s John Noble, but I’m so used to seeing him spout non sequiturs on Fringe, that seeing him as a broken steward of a kingdom is… interesting.
• 0:52 Nice to see Billy Boyd actually get to do a scene with some dramatic oomph to it, and he does quite well.
• 0:58 The Witch-King is deeply peeved. I know I said the Uruk-Hai were, but they barely count as miffed. Which isn’t bad given he doesn’t actually have a face.
• 1:03 Is it just me, or does the subplot involving Osgliath and Faramir, not add much to the storyline overall.
• 1:05 Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Pippin! He has been setting alight to our beacon, which, I just remembered, is grail-shaped.  It’s not the first time we’ve had this problem.
• 1:06 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely Lines of Beacons
• 1:15 No, I’m sorry – I’m still seeing Dr. Bishop
• 1:19 “I will break him”, mutters the Witch King about Gandalf. Didn’t realize Dolph Lundgren was in the series.
• 1:30 “Your father’s will has turned to madness!” says Gandalf of Denethor. Well, he does have something in common with Dr. Noble then.
• 1:32 I’m sure charging headlong into the forces of darkness seemed like a good idea at the time.
• 1:33 Come to Beautiful New Zealand and See Our Lovely War-Machines Being Pushed by Hideous Trolls.
• 1:40 “You ride to war, but not to victory.” Aren’t you a little bundle of joy, Elron?
• 1:46 Yeah, it’s all turning into a bit of a gloomfest at the moment.
• 1:47 If I recall correctly, these chasms are the same ones used at the start of Brain Dead.
• 1:50 Eowyn gets a dashboard ornament for her war-horse, in the shape of Merry.
• 1:56 Skullvalanche! In a movie of Very Cool Things, that has to be one of the coolest.
• 1:59 “Release the prisoners.” And who said monsters had no sense of humour?
• 2:02 Duelling catapults. And let battle commence.
• 2:06 It’s a good job no-one thought to get the gunpowder recipe off Saruman.

Disk Two

• 0:00 Peter Jackson cameo. And possibly the best reponse to “You and whose army?” ever.
• 0:07 In which Frodo gets coated in white, sticky stuff. Slash fiction hysteria ensues.
• 0:12 Gandalf looks all surprised when the Wolf’s Head battering ram begins to assault the gates. Guess he missed it rolling up to the main entrance. And it wasn’t quick – they started moving it in broad daylight, and it’s now after dark.
• 0:16 In which Frodo gets all bukkaked by Shelob. Slash fiction meltdown ensues.
• 0:25 and twenty seconds And THAT is the money shot.
• 0:29 and zero seconds No, that is.
• 0:31 Crap. I’ve just remembered this battle isn’t even close to the climax.
• 0:32 For example, here come the F-size mumakil.
• 0:40 Witch King: “You fool, No man can kill me. Die now.” Eowyn (removing her helmet): “I am no man.” Loud, sustained applause.
• 0:42 Legolas enters ultimate cool mode, taking down a mumakil and its passengers. “That still only counts as one,” grumbles Gimli.
• 0:43 Eowyn says goodbye to her dying father. For me, the most emotionally-intense moment of the whole trilogy.
• 0:55 Sam and Frodo escape. I must confess to not having really paid attention.
• 1:03 Orc brawl. And am increasingly convinced that Frodo is a wuss.
• 1:11 Decapitation of the Mouth of Sauron. I will say this, the agents of evil lose their heads quite easily. Hohoho.
• 1:20 One last epic battle scene? Oh, go on then…
• 1:24 Frodo gives Gollum the finger.
• 1:27 Now, why exactly does the destruction of the Ring cause Mordor to collapse into a gaping chasm?
• 1:33 And now the hobbit-hugging starts in earnest.
• 1:39 “My friends. You bow to no-one,” And that’s where the film should have ended, but noooooooo…
• 1:46 Still going. Elves shipping off and taking Bilbo.
• 1:50 Chris think Billy Boyd could be a future Doctor Who.
• 1:51 Elijah Wood looks concerned, for the last time, and sails off with the elves. Surely that’s the end now?
• 1:52 No. Not yet.
• 1:54 The End. Finally.

Conclusion? It’s only when you watch all three movies back to back, that you can appreciate how Jackson managed to tell so many interweaving stories. I felt that the trilogy was more even in quality on this viewing: Towers didn’t drag as much as I felt it did originally, while Return wasn’t quite as astonishingly good. All told, it stands as an epic (there’s that word again!) feat of imagination, one that is certainly worthy of its position on top of the decade’s movies.

Dir: James Cameron
Star: Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver

We saw Avatar on Tuesday night, in IMAX 3-D. Well, I did, anyway – the relentless camera motion made Chris’s motion-sickness kick in, and she spent much of the moving trying to fight back her nausea. I know how she feels: as the storyline unfolded, I had to restrain my own rising tide of vomit – though in my case, this was triggered by the yawning chasm between the stunning technical aspects, and the storyline that was not only a cobbled together hodgepodge, it was a two-hour forty-minute anti-technology, anti-human, screeching polemic, which we will forever refer to as, Dances With Blue Things.

Before getting into the pitiful excuse for a plot, let me first say, as a technical achievement in whizzbangery, it’s quite magnificent. The alien world of Pandora is realized in an incredible way, populated with alien creatures and a landscape that, from the ground up, makes it clear, to quote one character, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” [a line that, like much of the movie itself, was cynically lifted from another, superior film] If you’re going to see the film, make sure you see it on the biggest screen possible. Because, then, there’s a chance the visuals might help distract you from the story-line.

Quick summary.  Humanity, having screwed up Earth, has now moved on to Pandora, a lush, forested moon in the Alpha Centauri system. Arriving there is Jake Sully (Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine who is taking over for his deceased brother as an avatar pilot. These avatars are vat-grown hybrids between humans and the native Na’vi population and are used to explore the planet, in the hopes of fostering peaceful interaction with the somewhat combative Na’vi. The pilots are linked remotely to the avatars during their waking hours, experiencing what they do and controlling their bodies. On his first mission, Jake becomes separated from his team and is rescued by Neytiri (Saldaña, left).

Which is where the wheels fall off the plot, and it becomes mired in a combination of painful predictability and pretentious pomposity. As Jake learns more about the Na’vi – who resemble eight-foot tall Smurfs with USB connectors in their pigtails – he inevitably grows to love and appreciate their native culture. His original mission was, in part, to find a way to get the tribe of Na’vi to move so we could use the valuable mineral on which they are sitting. When he realizes this will never happen, it triggers an attack by the industial-corporate forces under Colonel Quaritch (Lang), and Jake completely rejects his humanity, becoming the leader of the Na’vi forces in his avatar body, and taking them into battle against the invaders.

Even Sully at one pont calls the philosophy of the Na’vi “tree-hugger crap,” and it’s a rare moment of honesty, because that’s exactly what it is, propagating the myth of the noble savage. For example, one core aspect of the Na’vi lifestyle appears to be that it’s okay to slaughter other animals in the forest – as long as you apologize to them afterwards. Well, I bet that makes feel alien Bambi, whose twin hearts you just stabbed with your large knife, feel a lot better as their life ebbs away. The Na’vi come across as the kind of smug, hypocritically pious jerks who insist that everyone has not only to respect their way of life, but bend over backwards to fit in with it – yet still need a human to solve their “time of great sorrow”. Add in the fact that it looks like all the CPU cycles went on the landscapes, with the Na’vi looking less than convincingly alive than the local lichen, and you have a gaping hole at the heart of the movie.

It’s almost as if Cameron is trying to make up for Aliens, a film which, if you think about it, basically had the somewhat questionable moral that genocide is sometimes a pretty good idea. There, the humans were the good guys and the alien creatures the villains, with no shades of grey. Here, the roles are completely reversed, and the problem is, it’s a much harder task trying to get me to empathize with blue, cat-like alien hippies, who would be really good in the NBA. I’m sure it’d bring audiences around Alpha Centauri to their feet though. At the end, Quantich asks Sully, “How does it feel to be a traitor to your race?” and he’s right, as Sully abandons his body entirely, in favour of the avater. However, it’s a question that should probably also be posed to James Cameron, whose opinion of the bulk of humanity is clearly that of a Hollywood liberal, isolated from everyday reality.

It doesn’t help that the rest of the storyline is equally ham-handed. Clunky metaphors for Iraq abound – or maybe for the colonization of North America, it’s hard to be sure – with characters such as the one played by Giovanni Ribisi, who could be directly channeling Paul Reiser’s corporate drone from Aliens. Other films more or less shamelessly strip-mined include Dances With Wolves, The Matrix, Braveheart, The Emerald Forest and, most obviously of all, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The last-named covers much the same ecologically-conscious territory, pitting technology against nature, without making the audience feel like a baby Harp seal, or pissing on us, collectively as a species.

Can I also  that the material for which we are plundering Pandora is called – and I kid you not – unobtainium. While this has been a joke name applied by scientists for decades, its conversion into an apparently serious use here provoked a derisive snort. It’s like Cameron thought when writing the script, “Well, I’ll come up with a proper name for the stuff later,”  then promptly forgot all about it. One can imagine him slapping his forehead and going, “Dammit! I knew there was something I meant to do!” at the premiere. It should have been on the list – right below stopping James Horner from writing another crappy song for the end-credits.

There is a definite moral to be drawn from the film. But I should warn you, it probably isn’t the one Cameron wanted. In future, if we find another planet, with resources which we want to have, the human race should not bother trying to negotiate with any local inhabitants – because according to Avatar, this will lead to us getting our butts kicked by the local insurgents. A better, less painful (for us) approach can be found in another Cameron movie. What we should do in order to secure the mineral rights is simple: “Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.”

After all, it’s the only way to be sure.

C

Dir: George Lekovic
Star: Michael Paré, Beverly Lynne, Brooke Lewis, Mark Belasco

I can only imagine the conversation which took place in the distribution company’s office, with regard to this movie and its original title:

“I think we can use the film, but Polycarp? What’s that again?
“He was a second-century bishop. In Greece.”
[Long Pause]
“Yeah. Well, actually, no. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”
[Reaches for black marker]
“Oh, and I hope you weren’t attached to the DVD sleeve either…”

Hey, presto: say what you like about the quality of the actual movie – and we will have plenty to say there before long, trust us on that – whoever was involved with the marketing was a frickin’ genius. We stumbled across this on cable, so the cover (right) wasn’t even a factor. Frankly, if we had, it might have been a warning, because it would have been one of those cases where the sleeve is clearly trying way too hard. As is, the title was sufficient, along with the presence of veteran character actor Charles Durning. He won three Purple Hearts in World War II, taking part in both the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, and shows up here in one location, to no real purpose. One can only surmise some kind of gambling debt was involved.

This is not impossible: there have been gangster/movie connections elsewhere, and this feels like the same sort of thing, an ill-conceived vanity project, though this has far less sense of any connection to reality. Bodies – mostly of blonde strippers – are turning up in the streets of New Jersey, with parts missing and tattoos on them the victims didn’t have when they were alive, including the mysterious word, “Polycarp”. The police are baffled. What does it mean? I guess the NJPD do not have access to, oh, Google? Detectives Paré and Belasco are “investigating”; quotes used advisedly, since their methodology is not quite straight from the police manual.

Still, it gets them into the right area: that inhabited by Dr. Jill Kessey (Lynne), a psychiatrist who has been giving therapy to a number of the victims. Yeah, because strippers can regularly afford $200/hour therapists, right? Kessey has an ‘open’ relationship with her boyfriend (and his bad case of back acne), and it turns out he slept with the victims. The cops suspect him. Which means they break into their room, interrogate him in the shower, take him away in his underwear then dump him under a bridge in what looks like Brooklyn, according to Chris. That drooling sound you hear is civil rights lawyers thinking about the possibilities. The trail leads from there to another psychiatrist, Dr. Grace Sario (Lewis), who also has an unconventional approach to therapy, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Ok, so far, it’s been dull in an erotic thriller kind of way, much as you’d expect from Ms. Lynne, the veteran of movies with titles such as The Bikini Escort Company, and the Black Tie Nights series. To describe her as “unconvincing” as a psychiatrist would be putting it mildly, and I needed to convince Chris at the half-way mark to persevere, and had to compromise by re-locating with her from the living-room to the bedroom. I’m glad I did, for it’s only after that point that full-blown religious looniness breaks out. Oh, it had been hinted at, with Pare’s cop found of quoting religious scripture to suspects [probably adding another count to that lawsuit], and if we’d been bothered enough to Google “polycarp,” could have found out its origins before the movie divulged them to us. However, it’s not until the final reel that we discover the truth.

[Spoiler alert, I guess. Though as usual, if you go ahead and watch this one, you should be doing so purely for amusement, rather than the plot.]  The murders are actually being committed by a coven of witches, led by Doctor Sario and Kessey, as part of a ritual with the eventual aim of putting the (very clearly plastic) pieces together, and triggering the coming of Lucifer. As you do. This is all explained in great detail by the perpetrators after they have captured three of the male actors: this is probably necessary, though it has the feeling more of a theology lecture than anything else – if the subjects are tied up, it’s likely to avoid them being bored into unconsciousness by the exposition and toppling off their chairs. Throw in some entirely gratuitous sex scenes before we get to that point, and the movie makes a late surge into incredibly-bad territory.

The entire exercise seems to have been churned out with amazingly little thought, from the basic concept – those with a fondness for T+A will be put off by the religion and vice-versa – all the way through to the casting, where I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold off all the roles at auction, not just this one. In Durning’s long career, which has gained him nine Emmy noms plus a pair of Oscar nods, it’s unquestionably a low-water mark. Even on the considerably less-distinguished resumes of Paré and Lynne, this is something which will be buried and forgotten as nothing but lurid nonsense with few redeeming merits.

D

If you’ve been wondering where we’ve been of late, and why there’s been no reviews posted for three weeks, we’re heading towards the 3rd Phoenix Fear Film Festival on January 23rd. So, our spare time has been spent filtering through the various shorts an features sent in for the consideration of the viewing panel. Submissions came from a variety of sources: we had films directly from the makers, got others passed on to us for consideration by our friends at Brain Damage, and we also reached out to some creators whose work looked like it might be interesting. [You can spend, literally, days trawling round Youtube, watching trailers of all shapes, sizes and qualities of horror!]

This year, I think the quality of the submissions was the highest it’s ever been. I know it sounds like a patronizing cliche, but the decision of what to show was genuinely a difficult one, and we could easily have run the event over two days rather than one. Writing the rejections is not the funnest part of the endeavor, though much credit due to Devi Snively, whose email in reply was surprisingly upbeat and quite made our day [her film, Trippin’, is currently first alternate, in the event that a movie Brain Damage have promised us does not complete post-production in time. Update: and as that proved the case, Trippin’ made it in!].

We have now just about finalized the list of features to be screened there – details of those can be found on the festival site. But I’d like to pay deserved tribute to some of those that didn’t quite make the final cut [as it were], and give them a bit of publicity for their efforts. Hence, the reviews below, which cover some of the contenders in the feature category – please note, these are my opinions alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of the entire festival panel, blah, blah. You know how it works. We’ll be covering the shorts separately, since we’re trying to squeeze as many of those into the festival as possible.

It’s somewhat amusing how some film-makers subtly (or not-so subtly) hint that if we pick their movie, all their friends will show up at the festival. We treat such assurances with skepticism, after years of promoting bands and other shows. Now, we pretty much knock a zero off any predicted claims of attendance – and deduct a further 50%, for those who do show up, and claim they should be ‘on the list.’ From a pragmatic viewpoint, it’d be only a short-term gain, even if their friends did turn up, and pay to get in. Showing crappy films might get a few more arses on seats this year,  but the rest of the crowd will not come back next year.

For some reason, we got an awful lot of late entries this year too – in September, we were wondering if we’d have enough features submitted to fill up the event, hence our decision to see if Brain Damage had any suggestions. However, the last couple of weeks saw a tidal-wave of features and shorts arrive, on almost a daily basis. Which, of course, means that the viewing panel has had to convene on almost a daily basis to watch them. While this has been more of a pleasure than a chore, now we have got the line-up finalized, I think we will likely be taking a break from watching inde horror by choice for a while. So, look forward to our review of The Ugly Truth in next week’s update.

We’re joking. Of course.

Meanwhile, other preparations continue for the event: we did look at the possibilities of bringing in a “big name” star to headline the event, but the finances didn’t quite work themselves out there. I have to say, some do seem to have a rather inflated idea of their own worth, demanding more money for their appearance than we’d take in, if the entire event sold out. And we’re not even talking icons like Bruce Campbell, but fairly minor stars. Perhaps they’re under the impression the PFFF is some kind of commercial event such as Fango’s Weekend of Horrors, when it’s really just Chris and I, doing the work entirely because we love the genre – if we break even, we’ll be happy. However, we are delighted to have inked scream queen Tiffany Shepis, one of the leading horror movie actresses of recent years: she’s been a pleasure to work with.

Stay tuned for a full report on the event, with reviews of the five chosen features, towards the end of January – after we’ve recovered from the event itself!

Reviews

• Basement Jack
• The Boneyard Collection
• Caesar and Otto’s Summer Camp Massacre
• Clownstrophobia
• Don’t Look in the Cellar
• Evilution
• God of Vampires
• The Green Monster
• The Hiking Trip
• The Inherited

Dir: Joshua Michael Stern
Star: Kevin Costner, Madeline Carroll, Paula Patton, Dennis Hopper

What makes Swing Vote an Incredibly Bad Film is not the acting – no film with Mare Winningham in it will ever get less than glowing reviews in that area from us. No, it’s a story which combines relentless implausibility and extremely dubious morality, that had me wanting to assemble a mob with torches and storm the home of writers Stern and Jason Richman – just as soon as I finish vomiting at the heartfelt sincerity of it all.

The ‘hero’ – quotes used advisedly – is Bud Johnson (Costner), an alcoholic layabout who just got fired from his job at an egg-packing plant, and who barely functions on any level above survival. He relies mostly on the needling of precocious moppet Molly (Carroll) to get him through the day. She is the brightest in her class and wants to grow up to a vet “or chairman of the Fed.” Never mind the fact that given her parents and environment, she’s a more plausible candidate for an “I’m twelve and pregnant” edition of The Jerry Springer Show. Election day rolls around, and Molly convinces Bud to do his civic duty and vote. He instead, gets drunk and falls asleep, so Molly decides to exercise her father’s democratic right and vote for him.

It’s a massive burst of hypocrisy right there: why would someone so intelligent, yet clearly smitten with the divinity of the electoral process, choose to commit voter fraud? There’s another hole in the film’s philosophy too: while it may be a duty to vote. it’s not an obligation. If you choose not to vote, that’s perfectly fine too; if you’d rather collapse into alcoholic unconsciousness, that is absolutely your right. Go for it. Frankly, it would probably be best for the country if people like Bud are kept out of the process: what we see here is electoral evolution in action. The fewer dumb people that get to vote, the greater weight given to the ballots of those capable of completing the apparently-complex task.

Anyway, back in the polling station, the worker on duty, guarding the previous flame of democratic freedom has, conveniently fallen asleep, allowing Molly to swipe a ballot and enter the booth. In another remarkable coincidence, a rogue vacuum-cleaner knocks out the plug to the voting machine in the middle of the process. A startled Molly pauses only long enough to tear carefully the stub from the ballot, before escaping, her father’s vote now lost in electronic limbo [that sound you hear is the British electoral system sniggering, as we still use the sturdy “X on the ballot paper” method].

Naturally, in a third strike which doesn’t so much require the suspension of disbelief, as its garroting with piano-wire, that vote turns out to be the deciding one in the deciding count in the deciding state, and because Johnson was ‘robbed’ of his vote, he is given another chance. In ten days, he’ll get to cast the deciding vote. In the meantime, of course, both the Republican and Democratic contenders (Kelsey Grammer and Hopper) are falling over themselves to court Bud. I’ll pause for a moment to enjoy the irony of one of actor behind one of the most iconic rebel performances of all time in Easy Rider (or even Blue Velvet), now playing an establishment lackey.

From here, the film should have gone for dark satire – how far are the parties prepared to prostitute themselves for one man, especially a smart one who knows how to manipulate them? And there are moments when the film does take that route, most notably a lovely ad with the Democrat going pro-life in a playground of exploding kids. It would then have concluded with Bud deciding neither candidate was worthy of his vote – or even more subversively, casting his vote for a candidate outside the two-party system. This alone is something the film steadfastly refuses to acknowledge, even though almost 1.7 million voters selected someone outside the Rep-Dem duopoly in the 2008 election.

Instead, it goes for the sentimental jugular, with Bud undergoing a crash course in everything he needs to know, the night before he hosts a presidential debate. This allows him to deliver, at great length, the sort of heartfelt nonsense he must have insisted on plugging into the script [he helped bankroll this production], in the belief he was still playing Ray Kinsella, rather than a piece of alcoholic trailer-trash who can’t string ten words together.  It feels almost as out of place as the turd-shaped musical number Kevin Bud drops in the middle of a political banquet, though allows him to regain the respect of his daughter. Where the hell are Child Protective Services in all this?

The film is nothing if not neutral, even-handedly portraying Democrats and Republicans. In the hands of Stern, this comes across more as bland, commercial-minded cowardice than anything – oh my goodness, let’s not say anything which might potentially offend either side of the cinema-going audience [showing remarkable good taste, the public voted with their wallets, and Swing Vote failed to crack the top five, even on its opening weekend, earning a paltry worldwide total of $17.6m]. Both parties are shown as honest, compassionate politicians who just go a little overboard in their pursuit of victory – let’s hear it for completely toothless satire (Jonathan Swift is spinning in his grave like a Vegas slot-machine reel). At the end, we don’t even find out who Bud picks: for a film all about the importance of exercising your right to choose, this is a complete cop-out.

To summarize, we have a film which glorifies the kind of man most of us would actively cross the street to avoid, proclaims that defrauding the electoral process is noble, condones the media’s collusion in the fraud – a local TV journalist (Patton) discovers what’s going on, but opts to stay silent – and emphasizes the abject failure of democracy in America. The concept that every vote counts is a laudable one, though strained somewhat, say, here in Arizona, which has been Republican every Presidential election bar one for the past sixty years. However, when the vote that really counts belongs to a supposed “everyman” like Bud, it makes me want to break out into a rousing chorus of Tomorrow Belongs to Me.

D-