Fright Lite

 GOOSEBUMPS (2015)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Just like "Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark" (one of many reasons back in my day to go to the library and read them voraciously), "Goosebumps" stories were mainly for kids about kids involved in none too perilous situations with ghouls, giant insect creatures, werewolves and so on. I don't have any particularly vivid memories of the R.L. Stein's books, some of which I checked out back in the 1990's (possibly a lot to do with my younger brother) but I am sure their thrills, chills and spills came close to this 2015 feature film version. "Goosebumps" the movie is successful at creating humor and mining it out of these creatures that run havoc on a small town and the teen characters doing their best to avoid them.  

A new kid on the block named Zach (Dylan Minnette), living specifically in a small Delaware town, has just moved in with his single mother (Amy Ryan - diverting in every way) who is the new vice principal of her son's high school. Awwkkkward. Meanwhile, there is a mysterious neighbor who is none other than a fictionalized version of R.L. Stine (played with real zeal and perfect pitch by Jack Black). Stine has a 16-year-old daughter, Hannah (Odeya Rush), who is lovestruck by Zach and there is a fairly romantic bit where they visit an abandoned funhouse. Trouble is nigh as Zach assumes Hannah is being held prisoner in her house and he finds out more than he bargained for. There are dozens of locked books written by Stine that once they are unlocked, every monster created in the books, including the Abominable Snowman and Slappy the Dummy, are unleashed and ready to eviscerate the entire town.

"Goosebumps" works best with its appealing, colorfully drawn characters including Jack Black's Stein, who knows his monsters could disrupt and destroy everything in their path; Dylan Minnette's Zach who can't begin to understand what is happening and is a bit of a scaredy cat; Odeya Rush's sweet Hannah who has a secret that may come as a surprise to Stein fans, and the rollicking comic relief of Ryan Lee ("Super 8") as Champ, who scares very easily. 

The monsters in "Goosebumps" are fun for a while yet they are CGI creations and there might be too much time devoted to them. Some of the special-effects in the climax are so overwhelming that you temporarily lose sight or focus of what you are seeing. Still, for Jack Black's fussy and determined RL Stein and its engaging cast, "Goosebumps" will do as an "Evil Dead" for kids. 

Chuck Norris's Best Picture Ever

 CODE OF SILENCE (1985)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

It is hard to fathom how many wooden Chuck Norris performances there have been throughout the 1980's. I can't say for sure if he was far more animated in the late 1970's in his karate action pictures but he always possessed some measure of charisma by being resolutely steely-eyed. Norris is not wooden in "Code of Silence" but he isn't very animated either, yet his lack of nuance or facial expressions beyond a steely-eyed look work to his advantage in this entertaining Windy City police actioner. 

Norris is a tough, no-nonsense righteous cop, Sgt. Eddie Cusack, who has not a single blemish on his record. His record is not being put to the test yet his loyalty to the police department and its numerous detectives is. After a disastrous sting operation involving drug dealers from a gang called the Comachos and a rival mob that unexpectedly show up to mow down them down, there is an unfortunate killing of an innocent kid by a grizzled, alcoholic cop, Detective Cragie (Ralph Foody) who plants a gun in the kid's hand. Cragie's younger partner, Kopalas (Joseph Guzaldo), witnesses it and later lies about the incident at a hearing. Meanwhile, Cusack is determined to find the rival mob members - one who skips town has a daughter (Molly Hagan) who might be in danger. The Comachos have their drug lord, Luis Comacho (Henry Silva) whose smile is almost enough to kill you. 

"Code of Silence" refers to the code that cops have - don't sell anyone out for any criminal negligence or unethical violations. At first, I couldn't really buy that Sgt. Cusack would have an unblemished record and not been in the police force long enough to know that sometimes you do take the law into your own hands, ethics be damned. Aside from the hearing and the investigation subplot, nothing in "Code of Silence" is unfamiliar turf. Drug dealers and cop and drug lords, oh my; they had been a staple of dozens of police action thrillers of the 1980's (we won't even get into the ones that went into direct-to-video release). Norris gives it oomph and gets to kick ass with his stunning back kick (the scene at the bar shows him getting pummelled after kicking a few minions, which is far more realistic than most other Norris action pics or Steven Seagal pics). There is also the terrific debut of Dennis Farina as a wounded cop (who was an actual cop at the time) and some nice solid work from Mike Genovese as an angry mafia drug lord named Tony Luna (he looks more like a construction worker but he is still effective). Let's not forget the unsung, authentic Chicagoan Ron Dean as another tough cop who has appeared in "The Package" and "The Fugitive," which were all directed by the same guy, Andrew Davis.  

"Code of Silence" has a rousing finish involving Chuck Norris as a one-man army and the climactic buildup in this standard plot is captivating in its own way. He doesn't perform as many martial-arts fight scenes as in previous films yet he can still make you root for him regardless. I can't forget the inclusion of an armored, computer-voiced police tank called the Prowler that can shoot with great aim and barrel through anything. It just adds more oomph to an already colorful, ably acted if familiar action picture. Easily Chuck Norris' best picture ever. 

Restless L.A. anomie

 FLOUNDERING (1994)

An Appreciation by Jerry Saravia

I was a twentysomething fool, a Generation X-er from the early 90's. X meant the unknown and addressed slackerdom, if that is the word for it. I myself felt aimless and sought something real but had no idea where to look for it. There were various Generation X films during the early 90's from "Bodies, Rest and Motion" to the far-too-polished though diverting "Reality Bites" to the diverting and somehow more mature "Singles" to Kevin Smith's slackers and retail clerks-for-life in the comical "Clerks." Yet it is really Peter McCarthy's "Floundering" that really hit the nail on the head. The search for one's self and some measure of spirituality that is forsaken for just getting it together is the heart and soul of "Floundering" and no better actor captured the 90's X-ers better than James Le Gros. Slacker, possibly, but it clearly draws more insight than expected into such an X-er.  

Le Gros is John Boyz, a single, 30-ish guy living on unemployment and alone in his Venice apartment. The 1992 L.A. riots are in the background, mostly playing on his TV as he fantasizes about the crooked police chief who talks to him through the TV. John fantasizes and daydreams a lot, especially about the woman collecting soda cans for recycling (he imagines that she could run a recycling business and his ideas are fairly sound and practical though forming a business costs money). He has a cheating girlfriend (Lisa Zane, never better) who is nonplussed by John's disapproval especially after catching her having sex with her boss ("We will have dinner...in 3 hours!") John has a paranoid brother (Ethan Hawke, who is spectacularly good) who is in and out of rehab. However, soon John's life gets out of control when the IRS seizes his bank account for unpaid taxes and his unemployment starts to run dry. 

John spends more time fantasizing and he has trouble sleeping, waking up every day at 3 am with doom on his mind. He imagines getting shot in the head. He starts to casually ingest cocaine with an ex-girlfriend (Olivia Barash, who contributes a song to the soundtrack) and smoke crack with neighbors who believe a revolution is imminent. John can shoot the shit with a philosophical buddy (John Cusack) while smoking pot and discussing the steps to actualize spirituality rather than just thinking about it. 

"Floundering" literally flounders from daily episodes of John's life, absorbing the drenching anomie, and again searching for something within himself - to understand himself and move forward. The statewide news is depressing, the people in his life offer support through their own understanding of L.A. and crime and the draining of life itself in this big city, but what can a guy do living his life day to day with no real direction?  Le Gros gets there eventually and I felt a kinship with this nice, nonviolent guy - the 90's archetype of a sensitive, selfless man. "Floundering" has it all and embodies the anomie of society without relishing it or explaining it - it just is. John Boyz knows that too well.   

It Couldn't Be Any More Ordinary

 LASERBLAST (1978)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Roger Corman could knock out a low-budget efficient B-picture in three days and make it a diverting enough romp to warrant a viewing. I am thinking of Corman's "The Raven" with Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, or "The Terror" with a young Jack Nicholson. The makers of this atrocious, numbingly dull trash called "Laserblast" could have taken a cue from Corman. "Laserblast" has no sense of fun or danger about it - a nonsensical non-movie.

Shot in three weekends, "Laserblast" is about a mind-numbingly dull young man, Billy (Kim Milford) from California, who hates when his mother goes away for several weeks at a time to Acapulco. He drives around in a van barechested and tries to pick up his girlfriend at her house but her grandad (Keenan Wynn), a former military general, will not allow it. I can see why because Billy is completely uninteresting and has nothing of value to say about himself or anyone else (Sample dialogue from Billy's girlfriend: "Gee, Billy... why can't you be more ordinary.") There is a pool party scene which looks about as much as fun as watching somebody watching this movie - the extras look bored. 

Meanwhile, Billy flounders in the desert and finds an alien laser weapon which can be activated by wearing a metal necklace. Pretty soon we see Billy transforming into some green-skinned demented creature who fires the weapon and destroys cars, mailboxes, occasionally people and a Coming Soon billboard for the original "Star Wars"! Maybe for our generation, it should have been a billboard for "Star Wars: The Holiday Special" but never mind. When Billy is not destroying property and people, he is a simple dullard who either has sex with his girlfriend or drives aimlessly around the same California stretch of road. Other than the annoying presence of Eddie Deezen (his film debut) and one-day filming a piece for actors Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall as a small-town doctor, nothing in "Laserblast" will merit the slightest interest and that includes the brief appearance of stop-motion animated aliens looking like rejected models for that whining deformed baby in "Eraserhead." A sleep-inducing dud.   

Attica, Attica, and Wyoming

 DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon" is one of the most peculiar, most offbeat and deeply involving crime pictures I've ever seen. Most bank robbery pictures since the 1970's revelled in the criminal element and the extreme violence, though usually the bank robbery was often a mere glimpse, a brief passage. Not so with "Dog Day Afternoon" where the robbery itself is mostly an afterthought - the robbers figure into the action and the whole film takes place in the bank on one especially humid summer day. 

Anxiety-ridden Sonny Wortzik (a spry Al Pacino) is ready to rob a Brooklyn bank with the help of the sinister, deadly quiet Salvatore "Sal" Naturile (John Cazale), though one other robber during the robbery in progress gets cold feet and flees. Trouble brews right from the start as they find that the bank vault only carries $1,100 rather than the huge amounts of cash they were expecting. Sonny has knowledge of the bank and their registers and what may trigger any alarms yet a small fire in a trash can where he burns the register brings the cops to the scene quickly (the vents show the smoke from the outside). This has now developed into a hostage situation with the bank tellers, the diabetic manager and the asthmatic security guard as the hostages. The air-conditioning doesn't work, the tactical police units are ready to barrel through the back entrance, and Sonny and Sal are left with their pants down. All they can do is ask for pizza, sodas (no beer) and a jet plane to take them to Algeria! 

The purpose behind this robbery is not for Sonny to have extra bucks to live on but to pay for a sex change operation for his lover and new wife, Leon Shermer (Chris Sarandon). The remarkable thing about "Dog Day Afternoon" is that the screenplay by Frank Pierson doesn't revolve around this robbery motive or the specifics of the robbery alone but rather the environment of this chaotic situation. Eventually Leon is brought in to this crisis from Bellevue hospital and what occurs is a phone conversation between Sonny and Leon, though they are literally right next door to each other. It is both dramatic and sad since Leon doesn't want to continue a relationship with the temperamental Sonny - such a scene could occur inside their own home. The fact that this is during a failed bank robbery is not central to the film's effectiveness - "Dog Day Afternoon" is not really a crime picture but rather about the distilled humanity of a group of people who have nothing in common with each other. Sonny knows the ins and out of banks but otherwise he is just an average guy who becomes a celebrity with the spectators after yelling "Attica, Attica!" - you have to have some knowledge of Attica as a deadly prison massacre from years earlier. And after being shown on television, Sonny's marriage to Leon becomes public and he gets support from the gay community. As for the bank tellers, they grow accustomed to Sonny seeing him less as a threat and more of a misunderstood soul. Only Sal proves to still be a quiet threat.  

"Dog Day Afternoon" is not a rudimentary thriller nor a violent action piece. In fact, the only violence occurs at the end and it is very brief. The movie thrives on the mounting tension between the cops, the hostage negotiations and Sonny and Sal. In today's world of violent cinema, you know some hostages would've been killed and there would have been a Mexican standoff of some sort in its finale. "Dog Day Afternoon" is surprisingly chaste and all the better for it (check out 1973's "Friends of Eddie Coyle" for similarly less violent, anarchic situations). Lumet places us the viewer squarely in the bank, and everything else is seen from Sonny's point-of-view. Infrequently we see other points of view such as the hundreds of cops getting ready to fire, and we get the frustrated Sergeant Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning) who just wants this extremely volatile situation to end. Pacino in particular conveys so much without overacting - one of his finest, most emotionally centered roles ever. Sonny's like a puppy dog with big brown eyes lost in the confusion of his own life - his other wife, Angie (Susan Peretz), who is quite loquacious, is lost in this mess as well. I can't begin to describe my effusive praise for "Dog Day Afternoon" other than saying I did not want it to end - a day of chaos that is both exhausting and exhilarating. 

Destroyer of Worlds

 THE DAY AFTER TRINITY (1981)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Los Alamos. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Atomic bomb tests. Those three singular sentences should have never have coalesced yet, nevertheless, they did. Watching Jon Else's powerful, intrinsically fascinating and terrifying documentary "The Day After Trinity," it all hinges on how everyone involved in the infamous Trinity atomic bomb test thought that maybe the atomic bomb shouldn't have happened.  

Oppenheimer was not a man cultured in world news or politics, at least not in the beginning of his youth. He was principally a man of physics and mathematics that yielded a discovery by way of Albert Einstein and led to Oppenheimer's vision of an atomic bomb. After the horrific Pearl Harbor tragedy of 1941 and the worsening Nazi holocaust, it was rumored that Germany was building an atomic bomb so this ignited a patriotic charge in Oppenheimer. The rumor proved false since Germany failed to build that weapon yet the determined physicist took the best minds in the field of physics from around the world to the desolate desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico to build this bomb. It was in this expansive area that they were test the force of the bomb and to see just how destructive it could be. To say they were nonplussed and amazed by its sheer power would be an understatement; Oppenheimer himself was pleased it was not a "dud."

The rest is history as the bomb was tested on human lives, destroying two Japanese cities - Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The human toll was astronomical yet it led the Japanese forces to surrender and it is a historic chapter in World War II that either you bemoan or celebrate - the last war that America won otherwise known as the Great War. 

I am not sure "The Day After Trinity" is an anti-nuclear weapons film or anti-nuclear arms race film - Oppenheimer struggled with the government to end this race which he opined should never have proliferated the day after the Trinity atomic bomb test. It was too little and too late and Oppenheimer was attacked by Senator Joseph McCarthy at the time for being a possible Soviet spy and for his past Communist leanings. Oppenheimer's Atomic Energy Commission security clearance was expunged and he was never the same person ever since. (Note: As of December 16, 2022, United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm vacated the 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance.) Robert's brother Frank Oppenheimer, a particle physicist, feels quite a bit of sorrow through his constant body language of seemingly covering his head in shame - he feels what his famous brother might have felt. That sense of regret is carried over to interviews of other scientists and collaborators leading to and during the days of the Trinity test. 

"The Day After Trinity" is scary and at times pulsates with a nervous energy, as it truly opens one's eyes to the enormity and scale of destruction of such a weapon. Oppenheimer might have seen the awesome destruction and beauty of such a "marvelous" weapon yet he felt that a discussion of war as a principle measure of destruction and violence could have carried something meaningful in the future. It didn't yet, ironically, he was still the destroyer of worlds.

I am the Walrus Goo goo g'joob

 TUSK (2014)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I was plainly sickened to my stomach by "Tusk," Kevin Smith's foray into body horror with a wink. The wink makes the palpable horror even worse and it becomes a geek show reducing its tension to that of an elongated farce with bloody body parts. I'll give it points for originality but it reminded me to completely avoid "The Human Centipede" for obvious reasons.

Justin Long is a narcissistic, obscene podcaster named Wallace who, partnered with Teddy (Haley Joel Osment), run a podcast called the "Not See Party" (a stupid idea considering the homophonic comparison to you know what). Wallace has a girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) whom he cheats on and has little else to offer in life (he considers his old self to be a loser). Yes, let's see just how narcissistic the prick really is with his newfound fame and his merch celebrating someone who belittles others. The newest target is the "Kill Bill Kid" who accidentally chops off his leg with a real sword in a viral video. Wallace and Teddy find the video funny and, thus, Wallace is ready to interview the Canuck kid whose video has more hits than his podcast. It is off to Canada and when he finds out that the Kill Bill Kid killed himself, Wallace is left dumbfounded rather than remorseful. Someone else needs to be his next target of ridicule and it turns out to be an old geezer named Howard (Michael Parks), who is wheelchair-bound and has left a notice at some bar that he wishes for companionship at his remote home in Bifrost. Wallace sees the note, visits the guy and the walrus becomes more than a topic of conversation.

"Tusk" is unsettling for the first third of the movie and the tension is tightly coiled. This does not surprise me coming from director Kevin Smith who maintained tension and suspense in equal droves in "Red State." The problems arise when too much happens too soon in "Tusk," and it becomes a practically barf-inducing and sickening joke. Michael Parks underplays beautifully and Justin Long is fantastic at playing an obnoxious jerk yet whatever sympathy we develop for Wallace is lost and introduced too late in the game by way of flashbacks. The connections, however minute by narrative design, occurred to me between the Kill Bill Kid's amputation and some of the body modifications that Wallace has to suffer. Suffice to say, once you see the body modification and melding of...eh, I can't even say; well, just be prepared to avert your eyes. Yet the movie opts for some humor with the introduction of an investigator (the surprise of who's playing him is more fun in the discovery) and that breaks the tension, though it felt necessary for me. Still, once we arrive at the conclusion, it felt like Kevin Smith was just trying to make us laugh at all this. I will not give away the final scene but it rang false for me, inducing more chuckles that seem to come from a horror parody. So did Howard's obsession with walruses and what Frankenstein-like experiments he wishes to do with Wallace. Michael Parks is an excellent, seasoned actor but he couldn't convince me of these unholy practices, unlike his Elmer-Gantry preacher in "Red State."  

"Tusk" is effective at times and I was not bored for a second but it is more of a sickening joke, a geek show with pretensions of horror laced with humor, than a genuine horror picture.