Hudson Hawk

There are two types of awful movies: the ones you remember with laughter and the ones you forget entirely.  Hudson Hawk is in the latter category.  When I first screened it on tape several months after its ill-fated theatrical run in 1991, I deplored it.  Before screening it again 26 years later it was difficult to recall much of its story.  During the screening, I now understand why.  And yes, I still hate it.

A supremely smug Bruce Willis smirks his way through numerous situations as the title character, the world’s greatest cat burglar.  He’s so good at the job he’s been doing a dime in the clink.  Upon being released he reconnects with his good buddy Tommy (an overly cheerful Danny Aiello).  Despite vowing to stay clean The Hawk is roped into a labyrinthian scheme involving three precious artifacts of Leonardo Da Vinci.

500 years ago, the Italian inventor was commissioned to make a bronze horse statue.  But a massive bronze shortage forced him to create a machine that would allow him to manufacture his own.  By accident, he creates gold instead.  (That bar is too tiny.)  Da Vinci has hidden three parts of his invention, one apiece in each of those aforementioned artifacts spread out all over the world.  (Why?)  The Hawk is threatened by a mobster (Frank Stallone, if you can believe it) into snatching the first one, a miniature bronze horse, which is hidden in a safe in an auction house.

Hawk, a cappuccino-lovin’ jerk who knows the running times of every pop standard you throw at him, is so cocky during the job he has time to do a lame duet with Tommy.  (They do another one during a rescue mission in the final act.)  They can afford to do this because the guards at this place are a little slow.  After barely escaping with their lives Hawk belatedly realizes he stole a forgery.

He then attends an auction where he meets a Vatican representative (the beautiful Andie MacDowell) who authenticates the real bronze horse.  But before it’s sold the place blows up.  The horse ends up getting stolen by a kinky couple (overly hammy Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard), the real architects of all this bullshit.

James Coburn plays a corrupt CIA guy who ships The Hawk in a box to Italy where he’s supposed to steal Da Vinci’s famous codex from the Vatican museum.  To make sure he plays ball Coburn has his “candy bar” agents (their earlier code names were venereal diseases) follow him and accommodate his cat burglar needs.  (A pre-stardom David Caruso, who plays Kit Kat, should be thankful he got paid for not saying a single word.  All his dialogue is printed out on business cards.)  After a quick scouting of the place and its high tech security system Hawk easily accomplishes his mission.  Yep, the guards in the Vatican are just as inept.

Not realizing MacDowell is a nun (and a Vatican spy) Hawk keeps trying to put the moves on her.  Of course, she’s only pretending to like him at first because she knows he has eyes on the codex.  And of course, she starts to really like him when she finally realizes he’s just a patsy.  From the very start this romance is extremely forced.  Bruce Willis just isn’t charming enough to make this woman question her faith.

Refusing to go through with the third and final robbery The Hawk hatches a last-minute plan to get out of it.  But Coburn and company aren’t completely stupid.  Along with the candy bars, he manages to do the job himself.  However, CIA guy is too much like a James Bond villain when it comes to disposing of his enemies.  And you know what that means.

All of this leads to the inevitable finale where it looks like the heels are going to get their way but they make a bad decision and everything falls apart.

Hudson Hawk was originally a song co-written by Willis and musician Robert Kraft who came up with the original concept for the story back in the early 80s.  It was also the name of the production company that made Blake Edwards’ Sunset, a western comedy Willis starred in with James Garner.  (A trailer appears on the DVD.)  How unfortunate that the name has forever been associated with this remarkable disaster.

Despite being marketed as an action flick (“Catch The Excitement. Catch The Adventure. Catch The Hawk.”), Hudson Hawk is really a comedy, a completely unfunny one.  Come to think of it, the action pieces aren’t that great, either.  (Admittedly, Da Vinci’s flying contraption is pretty cool.)  Consider the ambulance scene.  The Hawk is lying on a gurney.  At one point, it goes crashing out the back doors.  It’s only able to keep up with the traffic because of a sheet attached to the vehicle.  Someone flings a cigarette.  The Hawk catches it and takes a puff.  Then, he throws it away disgustedly because it’s menthol.

The ambulance and the gurney eventually get separated.  There’s a toll ahead.  The Hawk manages to throw the correct amount of change into the bin so he won’t go crashing into the barrier.  The ambulance catches up to him but then inevitably flips over and explodes.  At no point during this sequence is there any suspense.  God knows there aren’t any laughs.

You have to feel for Andie MacDowell.  In one excruciating scene, she’s reduced to making dolphin noises.  Really bad dolphin noises.  She would thankfully redeem herself by appearing in Groundhog Day & Four Weddings And A Funeral, two of the funniest romantic comedies of the 90s.

The rest of the cast don’t fare much better.  In the right role, Sandra Bernhard can be very funny.  (She was great on Roseanne.)  But here, as the racist, hat-wearing Minerva, she’s given absolutely nothing to work with, which explains why she’s so over the top like Grant.  (Can we retire ball-lickin’ dog jokes, please?)  James Coburn more or less plays his mysterious CIA guy straight but the result is depressingly the same.  The less said about the other candy bars, the better.  (That rape joke is appalling.)

Perhaps to keep from crying (and not just as scripted in one scene), Danny Aiello laughs more than any other performer in the film.  (Denial is a hell of a drug.)  As for Bruce Willis, this has to be his worst performance.  From the very start, The Hawk is an obnoxious, fat-shaming homophobe who doesn’t live up to his reputation.  The only reason he’s able to get away with these brazen thefts is because of the lackadaisical security.  I find it hard to believe that the real Vatican would leave itself so vulnerable like this.

The ridiculous plot is overly complicated to the point where you wonder how the characters themselves can even follow along.  God knows they can’t trust each other.  Furthermore, when Minerva, the Bernhard character, explains her reasoning for seeking all these missing gold machine parts, you question her logic.  The Bre-X scam and the sobering realities of today’s gold market itself make this look like a complete waste of time.  And because the cartoonish villains (there are way too many of them in this movie) are overly dependent on the heroes to get the long dormant machine working again in the first place, it’s no wonder the whole thing blows up in their faces.

No laughs, no thrills, no point.  That’s how Hudson Hawk should’ve been marketed.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, November 26, 2017
6:22 p.m.

Over The Top

In the very funny documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films, there is much deserved mockery for the often low-brow, low budget hokum that became the production company’s infamous trademark.  Near the end of its life in the late 1980s, Cannon, led by the enthusiastic but often out-of-touch Menahem Golan & Yorum Globus, was running on fumes.  Its last batch of cinematic offerings did Warner Bros., the distributor of many of them, no favours.

Their Superman sequel, The Quest For Peace, killed the Christopher Reeve franchise.  Masters Of The Universe did not launch its own, despite a closing credit tease for one.  And although Bloodsport thrusted Jean-Claude Van Damme’s flexible physicality into the mainstream, it also unleashed his pitiful acting.

But no late 80s Cannon Film epitomizes the deteriorated state of the company more perfectly than Over The Top, the most honestly titled movie they ever made.  As humourously noted in Electric Boogaloo, Director Golan legitimately believed that young movie fans would flock to a thoroughly predictable story about arm wrestling.  He somehow managed to throw a lot of money at star Sylvester Stallone who not only foolishly accepted the lead, he also co-wrote the script.  Having finally seen it 30 years after its underwhelming theatrical stint, I’m amazed he didn’t have it removed.

Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a truck driver who abandoned his wife and child for reasons that are hinted at but never fully explained.  His son, Mike (David Mendenhall), has just graduated from a military prep school.  When he’s summoned to the colonel’s office after the ceremony, he’s not happy to see Linc.  In fact, because he’s never met him before, his dad has to show him an old wedding photo of him and his mom before he reluctantly agrees to climb into his battered old truck.

Shocked to see so many posted photos of himself on the interior, the spoiled Mike, who initially refers to Linc as “sir”, can’t contain his bitterness or his obnoxiousness about his absent father and his poor eating habits.  (He never got all those letters Linc sent to him as he was growing up.)  At one point, he feigns being sick in order to jump out and literally run out into oncoming traffic.  After declaring his hatred for Linc, ever the optimist, his father says this is fine, at least it’s a starting point.

It doesn’t take long before Mike starts warming to Linc especially when he lets him drive his truck.  (He’s not exactly 16.  Or licensed.)  But he’s soon all weepy again after he’s forced to partake in a best two-out-of-three arm wrestling contest with some punk they meet in a restaurant arcade.  Of course, Mike loses round one.  But after an obligatory pep talk from pops (he’s no Burgess Meredith), he takes the next two and all is well again.

Then, he’s temporarily kidnapped by his grandfather’s goons.  An overly tanned and mysteriously wealthy Robert Loggia wants custody which can only truly happen if Linc is completely out of the picture.  (Grandparents don’t have automatic parental rights.)  Linc’s wife (Susan Blakely) is hospitalized awaiting heart surgery and is the real reason Linc & Mike are being forced to belatedly bond.  After retrieving him from grandpa’s goon squad, by the time they make it to the hospital, unsurprisingly, it’s too late.  Why she needed the surgery in the first place is never explained, nor why it went wrong.

Blaming his dad for driving him here instead of taking a flight (shouldn’t he blame his dead mother since this was her idea?), Mike turns into an angry cry-baby again and cabs it back to grandpa’s estate.  After hilariously ramming his already battered truck through the gate (the guards won’t let him through) and front door of his property, Loggia’s personal secretary convinces him to sign away his paternal rights while he’s in lock up.  Linc can’t sell his temporarily-back-to-being-skeptical son that he’s fit to raise him into adulthood.

But then the kid inevitably finds those elusive letters Linc sent him and all is forgiven.  Stealing one of his grandfather’s vehicles, he joyrides to the airport, hides on a plane with the luggage and joyrides the rest of the way to Vegas where his dad has entered the world arm wrestling championships at the Hilton.  Having sold his truck for 7000 smackers, Linc is somehow able to legally bet it all on himself.  (What about entrance fees?)  But no worries, a brand new truck, along with a lot of dough, is offered to the winner.

Because he has an earlier encounter with five-time world champion “Bull” Hurley (the hilariously bugged-eyed Rick Zumwalt who resembles Big Show during his Fu Manchu period) at a local dive, we know who the two finalists of this supremely silly competition will be.  And despite Bull being undefeated in five years, there is zero doubt about the outcome.

Made for 25 million, Over The Top couldn’t even make back its budget.  But it was able to win Razzie Awards.  It’s not hard to understand why.  There are more laughs here than in most comedies.  Watching these enormous men grunt and groan their way through suspenseless arm wrestling matches, in between some of them cutting promos on each other, almost all of which end in mere seconds, cannot be taken seriously at all.

The soulless music certainly doesn’t help.  Despite the contributions of Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander, Sammy Hagar and Eddie Money, there’s not a single good song on the soundtrack.  While they’re riding in Linc’s truck, one such misfire is heard on his radio.  Linc likes it so when Mike keeps turning it off, he keeps turning it back on again.  His son eventually gives up.

As it turns out, so did the filmmakers.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
5:06 p.m.

Fifty Shades Darker

How do you know you have too much money?  You can pay people to do your stalking for you.

In Fifty Shades Darker, Anastasia Steele (a breathy-voiced Dakota Johnson) learns this awkward fact firsthand from her still abusive paramour Christian Grey (a never charming Jamie Dornan).  While discussing his troubled ex, a jealous submissive mourning the death of her husband who recently died in a car crash, he pulls out a rather detailed file on her.  Naturally, Ana asks for hers.  It covers so much minutiae she’s shocked his people didn’t keep track of her bathroom breaks at her old job at the hardware store.

And yet, this is not a dealbreaker for her.

If you recall the original Fifty Shades Of Grey, Ana filled in for her sick roommate to interview Christian in his corporate office.  Despite having absolutely no chemistry whatsoever, a spark was lit.  After drawing up a contract, he eventually introduced her to The Red Room, a private area in his lavish apartment where he sexually punishes his victims.  Belatedly realizing he’s overly controlling and would remain closed off emotionally through their not-so-steamy kink sessions, she walked back into his penthouse elevator and left his abusive ass.

But you knew they wouldn’t stay apart for long.  At a friend’s photo exhibit at the beginning of Fifty Shades Darker, she runs right into him.  Because her friend is secretly in love with her, much to her shock, she’s featured prominently in six of his blown-up pics.  Christian buys them all because he doesn’t want anyone “gawking” at her.  Yep, he’s still an asshole.

Inevitably, they go to dinner where he tries to order for her.  Inevitably, he convinces her things will be different this time.  Inevitably, she wants to reconnect slowly.  Inevitably, they fuck almost immediately.

But it’s also inevitable that she will be presented again and again with uncomfortable revelations that temporarily force her to step back but never break off the relationship for good.  At a salon, for the first time she sees the woman that molded Christian into the dull maniac he has become.  The always elegant Kim Basinger (so great to see her again after so many absent years) plays the bitter cougar who runs the place.  (They only have a platonic business arrangement now.)  She’s the one that seduced the corporate takeover artist as a teen and introduced him to whips and adjustable ankle locks.

Despite being very upset about being taken here, the relationship continues.

At another point, she learns the ugly truth about his rough bedroom demeanour.  He deliberately finds women who resemble his biological mother.  (Paging Dr. Phil.)  He finally admits he’s no dominant but rather a sadist.  When Christian invites Ana to live with him, incredibly, she doesn’t say no.

No longer slumming it at the hardware store, Ana now works for Seattle Independent Publishing.  She’s an assistant to her transparently sleazy editor boss Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson) who clearly studied the harassment techniques of Harvey Weinstein.  A concerned Christian warns her he goes through assistants very quickly.  After he inevitably makes his move Ana knees him in the balls and, thanks to one phone call to SIP’s CEO, she gets a promotion.  Good thing she’s read all those incoming manuscripts.

Like its predecessor, Fifty Shades Darker fails in its brief, lazy attempts to make the dickish Christian Grey more sympathetic by giving him a sad backstory.  He has recurring nightmares about his traumatic childhood where we learn his father slapped his real mom around and put out his lit cigarettes on his little chest.  This explains why Christian greatly restricts Ana’s hand movements but inevitably, because he’s desperate to keep her in his life, she’s eventually allowed to go past the lipstick boundary she draws on him.

When she asks about his real mom (MILFy Marcia Gay Harden reprises her role as his adopted guardian), he claims she was a crackhead who died of an overdose.  Is he telling the truth?  Curious how he doesn’t mention the domestic violence.

As the second chapter of this planned trilogy concludes, a weird, random near-tragedy convinces Christian to do something he never thought he would ever do and a new enemy quietly plots his revenge.

After watching two of these films now it’s hard not to notice the similiarites with the otherwise more chaste Twilight series.  Like Bella Swan, Ana Steele is a virgin who gets deflowered by a creepy domineering man with whom she has an unhealthy on-again, off-again relationship.  Like Edward Cullen, Christian Grey is tortured, often emotionally detached and deeply paranoid about romantic rivals.

And like the Twilight series in general, the Fifty Shades films are not terribly exciting nor emotionally involving, especially during the love scenes which are astoundingly unsexy.  Dakota Johnson is a good-lookin’ dame with a hot bod but because we have such contempt for the chiselled Christian we feel nothing as he surreptiously fingers her in a crowded elevator, puts a couple of stringed silver balls in her pussy and spanks her in his old childhood bedroom, not to mention all the other steamless boning that takes place.

At least he has good taste in music.  (He works out to The Police but sadly, not Every Breath You Take.)

Basinger’s character is convinced Ana is all wrong for him, that she doesn’t understand his needs, that she’s just the latest in a long line of discarded would-be subs.  To the contrary, Ana has felt she can soften his edges enough so he can open up to her more which annoyingly already appears to be happening.  And yet, he hasn’t completely evolved.  Before the fallout with Jack, she’s supposed to go on a business trip with him to New York (red flag) which Christian forbids.

Make no mistake about it, Christian has never seen Ana as an independent, autonomous person with the right to say no.  He has always viewed her as a prized possession, one he covets more than anything else he has ever acquired in his life.  The more she resists and contemplates, albeit halfheartedly, escaping for good, the more panicked and needy he becomes as he unconvincingly lures her back in with what she truly wants:  deeper intimacy.

But how do you achieve true intimacy with a wealthy jerk-off who has so much baggage that he has never made peace with?  How do you maintain monogamy when the remnants of his past are still very much a part of his present?  I’d like to say the answer is you can’t.  But Fifty Shades Freed, the upcoming final installment in this heatless franchise, will most likely disagree.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, November 17, 2017
12:22 a.m.

Neon Maniacs

“When the world is ruled by violence and the soul of mankind fades, the children’s path shall be darkened by the shadows of the Neon Maniacs.”

So begins this extremely cheesy, not so scary regurgitation of tired horror clichés.

Who are the Neon Maniacs?  They’re monster archetypes who only come out at night to kill cops, birds and teens for reasons that are never ever properly explained.  This is for those who thought Friday The 13th was too cerebral.

After the super serious narrator utters those pretentious opening lines to a black screen, we fade in as a fisherman gives up trying to catch something.  As he walks back home, he spots an animal skull, flips it over and finds a pack of trading cards featuring, you guessed it, the Neon Maniacs.  When he looks at one featuring a demon with an axe, guess what happens.  I don’t think I was supposed to laugh that hard.

During the day, the monsters hide in a locked, abandoned storage space under the Golden Gate Bridge. When night falls, they start to roam looking for new victims.  It just so happens that a bunch of drunken, horny teenagers are hanging out in a nearby park.

Only one, a virgin, survives.  Yeah, I didn’t see that comin’.

When she gives a statement to the police, because this is a very dumb horror film, they don’t believe her. They think it’s a terrible prank.  When virgin girl returns to school, the sister of one of her missing friends angrily confronts her in the cafeteria.  Shortly thereafter, the principal sends her home for a while.  It’s hardly a punishment.  Her parents are on a European vacation and she gets to lounge around in her swimwear by the family pool.

While making one of his deliveries for his father’s grocery store, an aspiring musician with a big ol’ crush on her (he intervenes on her appreciative behalf during the lunchtime fracas) refuses a tip in exchange for a movie date.  But on their way to the theatre, the monsters catch up with them on the subway.  Unlike the way they immediately confront virgin girl’s friends at the park, these now suddenly hesitant villains corner the burgeoning couple…and do nothing else which eventually allows them to get away unscathed.  There’s another predictable incident on a bus with a similar outcome.  That special effect has not aged well.

Meanwhile, a horror-lovin’ tomboy, an aspiring filmmaker, keeps bugging virgin girl for intel on the Neon Maniacs, thanks to an informative call from one of her gossipy collaborators.  (The only evidence of their existence is some green goo left behind in the park.  The cops can’t determine what it is exactly.  Where’s Grissom when you need him?)  She’s tight-lipped so one night, tomboy takes her giant camcorder with her on a surveillance mission and makes an important discovery.  Water is their weakness.  Good God.

Near the end of the film, there’s a really terrible battle of the bands event at their high school.  Virgin girl’s new boyfriend turns out to be a wimpier Rick Springfield as his pitiful group competes with an even worse glam metal foursome.  (I owe Krokus an apology.)  Cut in the middle of these bad performances are scenes of the surviving Maniacs secretly infiltrating the school.  (Guys, breaking glass seems unnecessary when you can just walk right in through the open door.)  Because everybody on the dance floor is in costume, they blend in until tomboy spots one.

Out comes the squirtgun.

Although Neon Maniacs has a couple of genuine laughs (tomboy burns a nervy cop for riding her bike without permission, for instance), this hopeless, derivative mess produces more unintentional moments of amusement than actual frights.  (The easy listening synth-pop soundtrack doesn’t help matters.)  The cops take forever to actually infiltrate the monsters’ secret lair and they’re not exactly thorough, either.  The pacing is rather sluggish, as well.

Looking back, the timing of the film’s original release felt off considering how unpopular most slasher films had gotten by the middle of the 80s.  (In contrast, monster movies never go out of style which is probably why the heels aren’t human.)  There is zero interest in offering any kind of backstory for these one-note nocturnal demon killers.  (Where did they come from?  Why do they live in San Francisco?  What do they do when they’re not homicidal?  Why are they homicidal?)  And it’s hard to fear them when they can be easily defeated by a basic necessity.

As for the ending, yes, it’s most unsatisfying but what would you expect from a threadbare plot that uses mystery as a cover for its complete and utter lack of cohesion?  Put simply, there is no resolution and it’s completely ridiculous.

Neon Maniacs had a very brief theatrical run in 1986.  Is anybody surprised?

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, November 13, 2017
9:13 p.m.

31

Can we stop pretending that Rob Zombie is a legitimate filmmaker?  At this point, with six theatrical features under his belt, there’s no escaping this undeniable truth.  The man is a hack, an overwrought schlockmeister who is so bereft of original ideas he’s now recycling his own.

Set on Halloween 1976, 31 is a derivative cross between his debut House Of 1000 Corpses and The Running Man.  A van full of travelling circus freaks get sneak attacked by another group of circus freaks.  The five survivors are kidnapped (three get stabbed to death) and informed by Roddy McDowell (who looks like an extra from Amadeus for some unknown reason) that for the next 12 hours, it’s kill or be killed.  (He makes random announcements over a loudspeaker while one of his colleagues makes periodic countdown updates.)  The action takes place in what looks like an abandoned prison.

Each is given a number and odds on how long they’ll last which ultimately get adjusted throughout the course of the film.  McDowell and two other powdered-wigged old ladies (one of whom is Jane Carr, the sex-obsessed divorce counsellor from Dear John) place their bets accordingly.

First, they have to survive Tiny Latino Hitler.  Then, a couple of Leatherface wannabes, a tall German man in a tutu, his much shorter girlfriend and the big boss, as it were, Doom-Head (Richard Brake), a chatty freelance murderer.  Imagine if Jack Nicholson played The Joker while looking like Heath Ledger from The Dark Knight but without the wit and actual terror.  Considering how much of a raging misogynist he is, it’s amazing he has a girlfriend.  Fun fact:  he likes banging while watching Nosferatu.

Speaking of that, hardly a moment goes by without a female character being referred to as a bitch, a cunt or a whore, and almost everybody is obsessed with sex but in repeatedly gross and annoying ways, both tired Rob Zombie trademarks.  (We could be spared the cake joke and the baby joke.)  Not content enough to fail solely as a director, he once again bombs as a writer offering some of the clunkiest, overwritten dialogue you’ll ever hear.  (One character makes up a terrible song while on the toilet.  And yes, because this is a Zombie production, you hear the plop near the end of it.)

We spend way too much time in the beginning of the film getting to know the victims who we immediately don’t like and don’t care about.  Zombie’s charismatic wife, Shari Moon Zombie (the only one to appear in all of his terrible movies), is an oversexed pothead with a lion bandanna for a top who teases a grumpy old man at a gas station.  (Yep, she gets “slut” shamed for it.)  Former Sweathog Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs employs a very bad Jamaican accent.  Meg Foster (who played a witch in The Lords Of Salem), Jeff Daniel Phillips (Moon’s fellow DJ in the same film) and Kevin Jackson round out the cast of unsympathetic victims.

As the game of death drags on, it’s not a surprise who the final survivor will be.  But did they actually survive?  31 ends rather inconclusively for reasons I suspect involve yet another unnecessary sequel.  Instead of finishing off the last “contestant” in an instant, Doom-Head gets gabby.  In between a punch to the head and a brief but not fatal strangulation, he wastes time by quoting a famous revolutionary and declaring his intentions.  Just as he’s about to finish the job he just got paid double to do, time runs out.  The sole survivor, bloodied and bleary-eyed, staggers out on the street walking nowhere in particular.  Then, a van pulls up behind her and a man steps out.

You guessed it.  It’s Doom-Head.  (The name Joker was already taken.)  They stare each other down, he pulls out his trusty switchblades…

And that’s it.  Fake home movie footage of our doomed heroes in happier times plays (did we just get Thelma & Louised?) and a van with a devil head on the back doors rides down the road as a cool acoustic instrumental plays and the end credits roll.

Rob Zombie had such a difficult time raising money the traditional way for 31 he had to resort to crowdsourcing.  Maybe the industry is finally acknowledging what I have believed since the beginning.  The man can neither write nor direct.  He doesn’t know how to scare you.  He only knows how to irritate and disgust you.  That being said, 31 is not his worst film.  (At least no one gets raped this time.)

Zombie appears incapable of making an effective thriller but he knows a good pop song when he hears one.  And every once in a while, in between pretentious 70s-style freeze frames and hard-to-follow shakiness, there’s a decent camera shot (like the one that introduces Doom-Head who at first resembles a shadowy, stick-figured alien as he walks towards his first victim) and a somewhat successful attempt at Tarantino-like small talk.  You have to admit the cockroach bit in the opening scene is fascinating.

But his lack of a terrifying imagination is undeniable at this point.  He just doesn’t possess the professional polish of a John Carpenter or the clever, philosophical underpinnings of a Wes Craven.  He has no love for his characters, especially women.  And he doesn’t know how to suck in an audience like Alfred Hitchcock.  He traffics in bloody mediocrity by the truckload because he can’t produce original, suspenseful scenarios.

Put simply, when a Zombie production begins, you just want it to end already.  But like franchise horror villains who won’t stay dead, you know he’ll be back to bore us once more.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, November 5, 2017
3:09 p.m.