Half a monster movie on the cutting room floor

 BAD MOON (1996)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Bad Moon" opens with severely grisly violence inside a tent where Ted and his girlfriend make love and are attacked by a werewolf. This werewolf tears her apart, killing her almost instantly, and Ted shoots it with a shotgun blowing its head off. This is terrain very far from the days of Henry Hull, Lon Chaney Jr. and it is actually closer in tone to "The Howling." Is "Bad Moon" near the quality of "The Howling" or even "An American Werewolf in London"? Most definitely not. It is a howlingly bad movie but it has undercurrents of potential that are not exploited.

Intense Michael Pare is Ted, more appropriately Uncle Ted, and he is living out of his Silver Bullet camper in the middle of the Pacific Northwest. Quick question: can anyone just live out of a camper anywhere in the woods without paying rent? Never mind. Ted calls his sister, Janet, an allegedly high-profile attorney (Mariel Hemingway), who loves her brother and invites him to stay at her home. Ted has a nephew (Mason Gamble) who loves werewolf movies! There is also a smart, alert German Shepherd named Thor (easily the best performer in the movie) who senses something animalistic in Ted. Ted had been bitten in the opening sequence and transforms into a werewolf whenever a full moon approaches. People are killed and torn apart and the blame goes to, are you ready for it, the German Shepherd. As the town sheriff says to Janet, when a dog has a taste for human blood, all bets are off and it is time to head to the pound.

The issues are tenfold with "Bad Moon." The atmosphere is almost right (though nocturnal scenes in the forest and at Janet's home are too brightly lit) and Pare and Hemingway are game for some character exploration. There's none. Our sympathies are aligned with the family and Ted yet Ted grows increasingly unsympathetic especially towards his main adversary, the dog. It is hard to fathom why Ted becomes somewhat mean - he doesn't quite relish becoming a werewolf and has handcuffs in the hopes of restraining himself. I just found it impossible to be on his side at all - his attitude becomes one of a serial killer. I almost gave up on the film when he waves at the dog who is taken to the pound.

"Bad Moon" is like a test reel of a movie, never fully fleshed out or shaped into anything resembling a movie. The sole werewolf transformation scene starts out well with practical makeup effects and then becomes silly with poor CGI effects. It is a monster movie that feels like half of it ended up on the cutting room floor. 

Perpetual anxiety underground

 EXIT 8 (2025)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Most people carry on their daily routine without thinking much about it. You march forward to your daily job by driving a car or taking the subway. What if you are stuck in a subway station and can't get out? Even worse, what if you keep repeatedly seeing the same path without ever getting to your exit? That is the endless nightmare of "Exit 8," a frequently terrifying film experience that proves to be unnerving and leaves you in a state of perpetual anxiety. 

Kazunari Ninomiya is The Lost Man, a young guy who listens to Ravel's Bolero on his phone while riding the subway, canceling the noise of a crying baby and the sole male passenger who is yelling at the mother holding the baby. After declining a couple of calls from his ex-girlfriend, she hits him with the news that she's pregnant. Our Lost Man has asthma and starts coughing as she asks him what to do. As he is walking through the subway corridor to Exit 8, he loses the phone signal and finds that the corridor is endless as he walks the same section of a corridor with the same wall ads that keep repeating. He sometimes sees an older ponytailed man walk right past him who doesn't acknowledge our confused young asthmatic. Sometimes the older man, known in the credits as the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), appears and stands with a frozen smile looking at our Lost Man. As the Lost Man continues through the corridors, a set of instructions appear on the wall indicating that if there are any anomalies, he must turn back or he will never make it to Exit 8, the freedom exit from this nightmare.    

I cannot divulge much more about "Exit 8" (adapted from a Japanese video game by co-writer and director Genki Kawamura) because there are devilish surprises along the way. Sometimes the same corridor has unexplained anomalies like an upside down 8 on the exit sign, sometimes the lighting changes and, in one spookier-than-thou moment, the lights go out and slithering creatures can be heard and only barely seen. We also see a bunch of lockers and a photo booth along the same corridor and, in one of the scariest anomalies, a crying baby can be heard inside a locker! "Exit 8" is a sublimely thrilling exercise in terror, accentuated with humanity (a young boy frequently appears that leads to the Lost Man having benign visions of a potential future family enjoying the ocean) and with allusions to Japan's past real-life disasters (when you hear a siren at one point, you'll know immediately what it signifies). There is a fruitful morality to this tale that rises above just the frenetic experiment of pure anxiety. Make no mistake, though - if you already suffer from panic attacks or any deep anxiety, don't watch this powerful movie.  

Drive the fast car, chicks dig the car

 BLACK MOON RISING (1986)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I should be grateful that Tommy Lee Jones' gruff demeanor did not allow him to become one of our major 1980's action heroes. On the other hand, he was the opposite of the testosterone-fueled mechanics of Schwarzenegger and Stallone and closer to the brains of a Bruce Willis-type as in "Die Hard." "Black Moon Rising" is technically more a Michael Mann wannabe thriller like "Thief" except it is too silly and harebrained to be that. Still, Jones gives this semi-taciturn antihero a chance to be somewhat heroic and it is jolly good fun to see him try.

Tommy Lee Jones is Quint, a thief on the verge of retirement who's hired by the FBI to steal a computer disk containing vital information. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong as Quint faces some corporate minions led by Lee Ving - it is a performance that just screams EVIL with those arched eyebrows and you just know that this guy relishes violence for violence's sake. For some inexplicable reason that maybe co-writer John Carpenter is aware of, Quint is on the run from these guys and places the disk in the rear end of a supersonic car known as the Black Moon that runs at incredible speeds (a car that Buckaroo Banzai might have had a field day with)! This leads to Linda Hamilton as a master car thief working for a stolen car syndicate bigwig played with steely calmness by Robert Vaughn. The syndicate is of interest because it is inside one of two largely unoccupied skyscrapers. How will Quint get the disk when surveillance cameras are at every corner of the buildings? Will Hamilton's character who doesn't trust Vaughn assist Quint? Have you seen any movies before?

"Black Moon Rising" is an often thrilling muscle car movie with a fiery engine and a sheen to it - it is almost noirish in its deep shadows, and in some of its unsettling rooms and empty underground garages (Hamilton's home could use a little more lighting so she doesn't trip over anything). Although there were lost opportunities to explore some of the characters beyond cursory motivations, "Black Moon Rising" never stops for long before some high-grade action scene occurs. Quint gets into bloody bare knuckle fights, chases Hamilton who steals the Black Moon car, investigates the skyscraper's geography, climbs a suspended rope between the buildings. and always flashes his wide grin when he needs to. It is an unusual action entertainment that is nowhere near the level of  1981's "Thief" but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy it.

Dead and Buried plot with a delightful dinner party

 ANOTHER STAKEOUT (1993)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(Original review: 1993)

One of the few distinct pleasures of the original "Stakeout" was the finite comic timing and chemistry between Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez as cops more engaged in tomfoolery rather than gunfire. There were a lot of big laughs in the first film and some seriously violent business as well. "Another Stakeout" doesn't have enough fun with its premise of a stakeout, the Dreyfuss and Estevez chemistry is not fully exploited and the serious violent business of a a Mob witness on the run has been done to death.

Just watching the opening sequence involving an explosion filmed from a gazillion different angles (something directors Tony Scott or Michael Bay might have concocted) is enough to make one switch to another movie theater. Rosie O'Donnell always seemed miscast as a district attorney who is on a stakeout assignment with the two chatty Seattle cops, the white-haired Chris (Dreyfuss) and the mustachioed Bill (Estevez), at a lake house outside Seattle. It is breathtakingly beautiful scenery to be sure where everyone's homes have no curtains or shades (this should make for an easy stakeout). The house next door is where the Mob witness (thanklessly played by Cathy Moriarty) is hiding out. Meanwhile, we get unnecessary scenes of a cat chased by a dog (featuring an impossible point-of-view shot from the cat's anus!) and Miguel Ferrer as the most one-dimensional, generic hitman ever - why not just get any other actor to play the part instead of wasting Ferrer's time.

The dinner sequence involving Moriarty's friends, a handsome couple played by Marcia Strassman and Dennis Farina, is one for the books in terms of hilarious situations built out of bickering and bantering between O'Donnell and Dreyfuss. O'Donnell makes nauseating-looking hors d'oeuvres with penguin-shapes and an armadillo-shaped meatloaf with cereal flakes! Chris is supposed to pose as O'Donnell's husband and Bill is supposed to be their son. This whole sequence could've been built into a fiery comic engine with pratfalls and innuendoes galore. It doesn't last long until we are back to the old-hat, predictable to the core plot. There is also a scene involving Chris and Bill showing their badges to other police firing at them that is right out of "Beverly Hills Cop" and maybe even old episodes of "Car 54, Where Are You?"  

Less than 2/3 of "Another Stakeout" is enjoyable and sharply funny and the rest is mediocre claptrap. For devotees of the original "Stakeout," it is worth perusing. For others, been there one million times, done that two million more. 

The inflated Tube is the message

 VIDEODROME (1983)
A Look Back at one of the strangest, most provocative and original films of the 1980's 

By Jerry Saravia

"Videodrome" could be summed up as a series of nihilistic, paranoid hallucinations from a nihilistic, paranoid individual. Or it could be summed up as an actual reality that the paranoid individual can't shake. Director David Cronenberg might have created the original "Matrix," as mentioned by lead star James Woods, where real life and an alternate reality coexist or merge or neither. My sense is that this is a hallucination that has consumed the protagonist's life and he can't assume one reality or the other. 

The title refers to a Malaysian cable signal of an anonymous woman being tortured in a room by masked sadists. Max Renn (James Woods) is a hyperactive, anxious and determined CEO of a Toronto cable station, CIVIC-TV, who wants to broadcast something more than tacky softcore porn with phalluses. Videodrome has potential and Max's trusty engineer of CIVIC-TV's unauthorized satellite dish, Harlan (Tom Dvorsky), says that the grainy signal only lasts less than a minute. Max eventually finds out that Videodrome is about "philosophy" and quite dangerous. This leads to a strange affair with a talk radio personality, Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry), where she likes being scratched on her shoulders with sharp instruments and has no objection to getting her ears pierced by Max. This, coupled with watching Videodrome on his TV, leads to orgasmic pleasures. 

Max's addictive viewing of Videodrome leads to its own hallucinatory experiences such as a living, breathing television set with a cathode ray tube that expands. A major moment of unexpected violence is when Max slaps his secretary (Julie Khaner) in the face and then apologizes (we see a split second image of him slapping Nicki). The secretary says he didn't slap her in the face. So is Max hallucinating all the time or is he actually in the torturous world of Videodrome? Things only get more out-of-control when Max wears am enormous video headset that looks like it could take his head off. Then we get the moment that will make you protect your own belly when Max develops a uterine-like slit where videocassettes and guns can be pulled or pushed into! Back in 1983, I had to avert my eyes while watching that repeated moment and I still had to when I recently rewatched it.

"Videodrome" shows sex, pornography and hideous, atrocious acts as a unified whole - there is no separation of sex and violence here. Violence is connected through the physical body and mind and often demonstrates said actions on a TV screen. Spilled guts emerge from exploding televisions and when someone is killed, they either explode or have their guts and intestines emerge in truly nauseating ways. When you have a gun emerging as skin and muscle tissue from the TV's tube itself, you can see how we have all taken violence on that damn tube for granted for far too long. That and living breathing, pulsating VHS/Betamax tapes. Cronenberg suggests there is no escape from this technological monster except through death. "Videodrome" is entertaining and deliberately off-putting. For some, this may be the best of both worlds and for others, it may be too much to, um, stomach.

Stagecoach of the future

 NEON CITY (1991)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Dirty, messy, unfocused "Mad Max" rip-off are the first words that occurred to me while watching "Neon City." I still gave it a shot, even when we learn that some woman in a desolate, wintry landscape sells dog meat (yuck!) in some wooden shack. When you have a cast that includes the lovely Vanity, the tough-as-rusty-nails Michael Ironside and the late NFL defense lineman for the Cleveland Browns, Lyle Alzado, I wanted to be on board. After a practically worthless opening, the movie picks up a little speed and I sorta, kinda enjoyed it. 

It is the year 2053 and the world's climate has deteriorated due to the ozone layer thinning out completely. A scientist had screwed up with some scientific experiment and so a mutated group known as the Skins have become marauders who have seen "The Road Warrior" one too many times. A rough, no-holds-barred bounty hunter named Stark (convincingly played by Michael Ironside with a ponytail) has a prisoner with a red star tattoo in tow named Reno (Vanity) who torched her parents. He will turn her in and get his "credits" but unfortunately, he has take her to the safe haven of Neon City! This means getting on board a mobile transport with a motley crew of characters. They include a murderous doctor; a comedian who performs magic tricks; the aforementioned scientist who is trying to keep a low profile; Stark's ex who is getting married in Neon City and a socialite of sorts (Juliet Landau) who has presumably never been outside Neon City...except she has since she is in this vast wasteland. A few stops along the way to a bar/restaurant, a clinic littered with corpses, and deadly climate obstructions (Xander Clouds and Brights) eventually lead to that city!   

"Neon City" has a grungy, low-tech, micro-budget feel that is completely appropriate to this oft-old tale but it is nothing special or particularly memorable. You'll come away wishing there was more intimacy between Vanity and Michael Ironside (a most unlikely pair who have sex in a series of Hallmark dissolves) and some measure of camaraderie between all the other characters. It has been described as a futuristic variation on "Stagecoach" and, though it is not close to the same cinematic level, you will not feel like you wasted your time.

Pledge your love or die

 CHRISTINE (1983)

Remembering that darling '58 Plymouth Fury 

by Jerry Saravia

"Christine" is a wild gorilla of a movie. I compare it to a gorilla because it looks harmless yet, provoke it or make it jealous, it can turn fearsome and kill you. Based on Stephen King's supernatural novel, "Christine" unfolds with a leisurely pace and the brief excursions into supernatural horror tropes occurs in spades. The movie is a master class in making a horror film palatable to the audience, to reveal itself first and foremost through its characters and then scare us.

Set in late 1970's, nerdy, clumsy high school senior Arnold "Arnie" Cunningham (Keith Gordon who is exceptionally good) is threatened by bullies during shop class with a switchblade on his first day of school. Arnie's best friend, Dennis, a sweet-natured jock (John Stockwell), intervenes and is always there for his buddy no matter what. While driving through a deserted road, Arnie spots a dirty, seemingly broken-down 1958 Plymouth Fury car on someone's lawn and is instantly smitten. Arnie buys the car, despite Dennis's objections, and at a garage owned by a most repugnant man, Darnell (Robert Prosky, making us smell the oil and grease just by his mere appearance), the Plymouth Fury is worked on becomes a pristine car. It is in such pristine condition that you feel just grazing the classic car or touching it might kill you (and you would be right). The car has a supernatural bent to it and it feels emotions - jealousy may cause Christine to disrupt the ignition. Drop some cigarette ash on the seat or, in the film's most grueling moment, have the car's entire body frame, hood and headlights get smashed by those bullies and Christine will find you on those lonely city streets at night. Beware. 

Christine has an adverse effect on Arnie who changes his attitude, loses the glasses, wears fashionable clothes, struts like no one's business with confidence, and threatens his parents with obscene language. Arnie begins dating Leigh (Alexandra Paul), the new beguiling student at school, but their drive-in date turns into a disaster involving her getting locked in the car and almost choking to death. The romance soon turns sour and Arnie also stops seeing his best buddy, Dennis. Christine also begins her nightly rampage of chasing down those who hate her and Arnie. Comical moments develop before the violence erupts when Christine starts playing 1950's rock and roll tunes like "Pledging My Love" and "Little Bitty Pretty One." 

I've seen "Christine" many times and it is always been a mesmerizing, sometimes terrifying treat of a movie. From director John Carpenter, it is extra special for not containing an abundance of gore (the kills are practically off-screen including a scary gas station explosion scene). This could have been a slasher film with a car killing someone every few minutes. "Christine" plays by different rules and has a stylish veneer to it. "Christine" is beautiful, really, now please let me start the ignition.