Charlie Brown's an ass*&$%!

 TRICK 'R TREAT (2007)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Trick 'r Treat" is goofy, tongue-in-cheek, excitingly-paced horror comedy that all snaps together after you finish watching it. It has a purposely non-linear narrative and resembles a horror anthology like "Tales From the Darkside" only the tales are not told individually but rather as episodes that flow in and out of each other. There are many scary, gross and nasty nails-in-your-tongue moments, enough to titillate most jaded horror fans. The aim is to make you jump from your seat and to provide goosebumps in that time-honored horror tradition. Don't see it expecting anything else.

It is Halloween night in Ohio and boy do the town residents love to celebrate this day of the dead. The active celebrating includes the wicked school principal Wilkins (Dylan Baker, exuding some "Happiness" attributes) who not only poisons, buries and decapitates children, he also pretends to be a vampire dressed in a shadowy black-masked costume who goes around town killing women! Then there are four flirtatious women who dress in coy costumes such as Snow White and the Little Red Riding Hood and plan to attend a party in the woods, asking random men to be their dates. One of the women is a "virgin" (Anna Paquin) and the shock is they are anything but normal and I'll leave it at that. Then there are a group of curious young kids who collect jack o'lanterns and proceed to place them at a rock quarry - the graveyard of a horrific school bus massacre from years back. They try to prank a special-needs girl and let's say it all goes horribly wrong. We can't leave out Brian Cox as a socially inept neighbor who harbors some dark secrets. 

"Trick r' Treat" is semi-grisly, macabre, goose-pimply fun that has the joy of discovery in every scene - nothing in it is really telegraphed and you can't guess where it is going from start to finish. There is also a creepy kid wearing a burlap mask that evokes some real terror in the climax and is more than miffed if a jack o'lantern is blown out before midnight - you know he is anything but human. My only real complaint is the runtime which is only 1 hour and 17 minutes (not including opening and closing credits) and that seems too preciously short. But that is minor and what we get during its tight running time is ample (with thankfully not much blood and gore). I have seen it twice in the last couple of years and I think it will be my annual Halloween treat. Just remember not to blow out those jack o'lantern lights before midnight. 

Black Gold and Death Rising

 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

America has always been the place where one could accumulate wealth and riches beyond their wildest dreams. When the Osage nation found oil on their Oklahoma tribal land spewing from the ground, they inherited wealth and became the richest people in America per capita in the 1920's. So rich that the greediest of all white men had to come and collect because, you know, how dare these Native Americans mine their land for their own livelihood. But this is not the story of sharing the wealth, which would have been irksome enough, but rather killing the natives to collect it all and, most troubling, within their inner circle. "Killers of the Flower Moon" is a riveting, disquieting, indignant film about a forgotten historical event that deserves full attention and introspection. 

Right from the powerful and moving opening sequence of the ceremonial burial of a peace pipe, a thunderous sound emerges from under the ground. It is oil as it springs like a fountain and the Osage members, who witness this, dance around it in one of Scorsese's most poetic scenes ever. Of course such celebration will come to a standstill. A WWI vet named Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the most weak-willed character of his career) arrives in Oklahoma to live and work for his uncle, cattle rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro). Hale tells Ernest about the wealth of the region he lives in, that money has come to their land and the "Reds" have become wealthy. Meanwhile, Ernest takes a job as a driver for an Osage tribe member, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), who lives with her largely silent and ill mother (Tantoo Cardinal). Mollie's three sisters live nearby, married to white men and all of them have become wealthy thanks to oil. But there is more than oil brewing in the settlement Oklahoma town of Gray Horse. Practically all the women suffer from a "wasting illness" known of course as sugar diabetes. They need insulin which they don't have immediate access to. Money is not accessible unless managed by white guardians. When Mollie decides at one point to go on a train trip to D.C., she needs to ask for travel money from a white guardian.  

Ernest falls in love with Mollie and their love scenes are some of the loveliest Scorsese has ever filmed - these two lovebirds go at it in a car like teenagers. Hale wants Ernest to marry an Osage, and Mollie is something of a jackpot. Unfortunately, the murder rate has been rising fast in this land as Osage natives are killed left and right. Some are declared suicides, others are poisoned. Hale is orchestrating a Murder Inc. in this town, 30 murders and counting. That also includes Mollie's sisters such as the drunk and blunt as a whistle Anna (Cara Jade Myers) who is shot in the head. The other sister, Reta, dies in a house explosion! Why are these murders committed? The murders are committed for Hale and company to acquire the headrights to the oil earnings and become fabulously wealthy themselves. This is greed on a scale almost unheard of in as far as Native American history is concerned.

"Killers of the Flower Moon" flows like a fluid tone poem with peaks and valleys, though there is a somber undercurrent that is further magnified by the incessant slow drum beat of a score by the late Robbie Robertson. It is a feeling of not just inevitability yet also bearing witness to a massacre that has no end in sight. Both the cold manipulations of Hale and the struggling conscience of Ernest Burkhart form the immoral fabric of greedy, powerful white men who more than likely would be jailed for killing a dog than an Osage. Punitive measures lead to limited jail sentences that make you want to scream. Based on the excellent non-fiction book by David Grann, I wanted to scream with every page I read prior to seeing this adaptation. Though the book mainly focuses on the FBI's investigations of these murders (FBI was known, at the time, as simply the Bureau of Investigation spearheaded by J. Edgar Hoover) and Grann's own intuitive investigations as well, the movie instead circles in on Ernest's relationship to Mollie and Hale. Seeing this intimacy between these three characters brings us as close as anybody would want to be to this Reign of Terror.   

"Killers of the Flower Moon" runs at 3.5 hours yet I never felt the length as it could have run on longer. What I did feel was the momentous desperation of watching this Reign of Terror unfold helplessly. Not unlike Scorsese's depiction of cold-blooded executions in "The Irishman," murder has no meaning in these blood-soaked prairie lands and, in this chilling case, these white men think nothing of killing since their only passion is money. Hale is the most frigid villain I have seen in some time whereas Ernest is a weasel who feels love for Mollie and their children yet also a love for that money. Lily Gladstone (a surefire winner for an Oscar) shows us a Mollie who wants to believe that her husband is a good man yet knows that darkness envelops and corrupts everyone. She doesn't easily forgive and, judging by the last scene of this amazing, surreal epic, neither does Scorsese. 

Brilliant Junk Food Double Feature

 GRINDHOUSE (2007)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Originally viewed in 2008

"Grindhouse" is a reminder of the low-budget flicks of the late 60's
and early to mid-late 70's - the kind of genre pictures that had an
anything goes mentality. From everything like "Mondo Trasho" and its
infinite kin of bizarre "Mondo" titles to those Pam Grier
blaxploitation flicks to everything else in between, "Grindhouse" aims
to remind us of those double features, that is two features for the
price of one. In 1978, I recall seeing a martial-arts double feature
with Bruce Lee in "Enter the Dragon" preceded by "Five Fingers From
Death." There were the usual trailers followed by those colorful,
rainbowesque signs that read "Coming Attractions" or "Your Feature
Presentation." And naturally, these movies were delivered from one
theatre to another without much care, thus bad splices, hair scratches on the frame

or bad sound were a part of the experience. Not only is "Grindhouse" a fitting
reminder of all that, it is also far more entertaining than most
recent, supposed grade-Z material that is given the A or B treatment.

The first feature is "Planet Terror," directed by Robert Rodriguez, a
truly nasty, disgusting pile of drivel that is as dirty and violent as
one might expect, in addition to dementedly funny and frantically
deranged. Rose McGowan is a stripper named Cherry Darling, who quits
her job since she gets too emotional on stage and really wants to be a
comedian! Before you can say Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls"-mode, 

there are flesh-eating zombies running amok in this movie, thanks to some military
experiment gone wrong, presumably. Oh, who cares about a plot when you
have an evil doctor (Josh Brolin, who acts and sounds just like his
father) who has a way with thermometers; his wife who has a way with
syringes; Tarantino as a serial rapist who gets one of the best
comeuppances in movie history; Bruce Willis as some colonel or
sergeant who holds a secret about Bin Laden; a crazy chemist who has a
fixation on collecting severed testicles; Jeff Fahey as J.T., with the
best barbecue sauce in town (this actor has improved with age), and
Michael Biehn as a sheriff who has almost seen it all. Oh, yes, and
let's not forget the deliberately drawn-out syllables of Michael Parks

in his recurring role as Sheriff Earl McGraw, future Texas Ranger.

We then get some deliciously funny trailers after "Planet Terror" is
over, which are better seen than described. The second feature begins
as Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" (also known as "Thunderbolt" if
you look closely), a less deranged and far more talky exploitation
picture that exceeds anything anyone might have expected. Kurt Russell
is the "Stroker Ace" former stunt car driver, Stuntman Mike, who has
an obsession with women, their feet, and killing them with his deadly
car that comes emblazoned with a skull on its hood. I have reviewed
the film "Death Proof" in its extended cut, so what we miss in this
slightly abbreviated version is a hell-on-fire, hypnotic lapdance that
is almost as good as the one in "Femme Fatale" and perhaps more
refined than the laughable one in "Showgirls" (the latter, a favorite
of Tarantino's).

The rest of the film is a demonic ride chock full of the usual
Tarantino flourishes, including pop-culture referential talk about
"Vanishing Point," lapdances, the TV series "The Virginian," foreign
fashion magazines, relationships, etc. All this builds some tension
before Stuntman Mike pounces on his latest female victims, including a
celebrity hairdresser (Rosario Dawson); two stuntwomen (Zoe Bell,
playing herself, and Tracie Thoms, from TV's "Cold Case") who speak
adoringly of the cult classic "Vanishing Point"; and an actress (Mary
Elizabeth Winstead) who loves John Hughes movies. Rose McGowan also
appears, albeit as a different character, a blonde who takes a liking
to the daredevil stuntman. Big mistake.

Some critics have lashed out at Tarantino's film for having too much
dialogue and little of the pleasures that one might expect from
"Planet Terror." I see "Planet Terror" as a more conscious,
straightforward homage to exploitation pictures and zombie classics
like "Dawn of the Dead," whereas "Death Proof" is closer to what some
horror/serial killer movies such as "Deranged" and even "Last House
on the Left" offered - dialogue and some character exposition before
settling in to the violence and a slasher mentality. Though Tarantino
and Rodriguez have done their conscious homages to their favorite
movies of the 60's and 70's for well over decade now, this is the
first time they have truly approximated the look of those films. If I
nitpick at all, it is that this double feature movie-movie, over three
hours long, might prove to be exhausting but it is clever and it will
give you a major adrenalized high that you don't get from a lot of

Hollywood product.

Some audiences have never lived through the grindhouse experience to
know what it felt like to watch such movies on a double bill in a run-
down theatre, with audiences hooting and hollering. "Grindhouse" may
be the first and last time we get to experience it in retro-style. The
audience didn't turn out for this pure entertainment in theatres, but
I have a feeling it will be a cult classic.

Claustrophobic up to a point

PANIC ROOM (2002)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Originally viewed on April 1st, 2002

David Fincher's "Panic Room" is an intense, sweat-inducing, claustrophobic
thriller. It moves with the ease of a craftsman who ably pulls one visual
stunt after another, keeping us on the edge of our seats as the situations
grow more and more haywire. Like last year's "Joyride," it is remarkably
tense but it is also dramatically hollow at its core.

Jodie Foster plays Meg, a rich divorcee who has just bought a three-floor
brownstone with her teenage daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), in New York City. It
is a remarkable apartment, spacious yet eerie in its openness. It even has a
secure safe room, or panic room, in one bedroom. This safe room is secure
indeed, designed to make rich people safe from harm in case intruders break
in. It also has a surveillance system that keeps track of every single room
in the house. Meg likes it but suffers from claustrophobia, and chooses not
to finish securing it with its passcodes and installed phone line.

Meg does not have a cheery life and keeps mum with her daughter about her
ex-husband, an owner of a pharmaceutical company. She drinks wine swiftly in
major gulps, and cries in her bathtub. She is definitely not a happy camper.
Even her daughter, Sarah, a hypoglycemic, seems adrift and aloof.
One night, three intruders break into the house. They include Burnham (Forest
Whitaker), a builder of safe rooms; Junior (Jared Leto), a slow-witted guy
with dreadlocks, and the psychopathic Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) who has brought
a gun to a situation that is a simple robbery. They are looking for a safe
that contains millions in bonds, and it is of course located in the panic
room. When Meg discovers her house is being invaded, she hides in the panic
room with her daughter. The room is impossible to penetrate unless it is
opened by the occupants in the room.

"Panic Room" takes place entirely in the house, that is its only setting.
These are usually my favorite kinds of films - think of the enclosed settings
of films like "Assault on Precinct 13" or "Reservoir Dogs" and you will get
an idea of what this film is like. Fincher keeps the pace swinging at a
swift, bloodcurling speed involving us with Meg's plight and with the three
intruders who conspire, bicker, argue and finally come apart in their endless
attempts to get the money. It is all about survival, and Fincher is brilliant
at keeping us scared as well as exploring the house itself through crevices,
phone wiring, outlets, keyholes, etc. In other words, everything we take for
granted is used as a means of survival, on both sides of this cat and mouse
game.

As thrilling as all of this is, "Panic Room" never stops to make observations
on who these people are. For one, Meg is barely given much character
development at all, and her scene in the bathtub ilustrates a side of her
that is never tapped into again. We must also not forget she is
claustrophobic, yet the movie carelessly avoids making that point again since
she is after all in the confined panic room through the whole film. I
expected more from her character than merely reactions and physical activity,
especially since she is played by Jodie Foster who turned down "Hannibal"
because the Clarice Starling role was severely truncated and she did not
agree with the character's behavior. Meg is no doubt the most physically
demanding role Foster has ever played, but it is a two-dimensional character
or did Jodie not notice.

The three burglars have interesting personalities, and the movies spends its
time studying their interaction. Forest Whitaker is the ambiguous antihero,
Jared Leto is the overcaffeinated, extremely dumb wise ass, and Dwight Yoakam
is the chillingly laconic psycho ready to kill anyone.

"Panic Room" is quite a wild ride and, on that basis, I give it high marks.
It is a well-oiled thrill machine, expertly directed and acted. I just
expected something more of a psychological thriller than a standard issue one
coming from the combined forces of David Fincher and Jodie Foster.

Nobody has improved the 1973 classic

 THE POPE'S EXORCIST (2023)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"The Pope's Exorcist" is hardly an original piece of work and nothing, not one iota or drop of narrative thread, is new or exciting or remotely scary about this movie. It is also unintentionally funny and essentially rips-off all the iconic imagery and some William Peter Blatty lines of dialogue from "The Exorcist" - of course, demonic possession movies have done this forever in the last 50 years. This one is just louder than most.

This is based on a true story of the late Father Amorth, a chief exorcist who may have believed in exorcisms and the presence of evil yet also knew mental illness and trauma could be contributing factors in any alleged possession. Such thoughts from Amorth are quickly abandoned when a young male child is the latest possession case. The bony, sickly looking child is Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) and is the son of Julia Vasquez (Alex Essoe - looking merely distraught through all this). There is the also the terminally annoyed older sister (Laurel Marsden) who flips her mother the bird! Incidentally, both kids listen to their walkmans and have no interest in moving in to a creepy, inhospitable Spanish abbey passed on to them by their late father. Naturally all the action is inside the abbey and literally fireworks go off rather prematurely in this movie when a fireball nearly consumes two construction workers! I would say in the fine, disreputable tradition of creepy houses, abbeys or apartments in the "Amityville Horror" vein, "GET OUT!"   

Russell Crowe plays the bearded Father Amorth in pretty much the way you expect - humorous, wicked and completely over-the-top. He's the saving grace of this overwrought, overdone and hysterical movie that bears little resemblance to the Father Amorth as seen in William Friedkin's chilling documentary, "The Devil and Father Amorth." This movie may as well be about any priest and the family in crisis demon mode lack any measurable depth or identity - they are in trouble before we have had any time to get to know them. As a late-night potboiler horror/possession movie, "The Pope's Exorcist" will satisfy anyone who loves twisting necks, kids hurling obscenities, blood gushing out of mouths, levitations and pigs blown away by shotguns with a slight touch of theology. In 50 years, though, nobody has yet to improve on that 1973 classic. 

Exciting and familiar visual tonic of a movie

 THE VAST OF NIGHT (2019)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I have seen my share of films about aliens in the sky in small, remote towns and I never tire of seeing them. There is something about the remoteness of a small town, a small community, that feels germane to the oft-told concept of otherworldly visitors. "The Vast of Night" works wonders with imagination and skillful direction and it is a crackerjack story that could have lead anywhere, other than where it leads. Maybe I was hoping for some other entity, maybe something more mysterious and ancient and its lead up to an alien mothership just made me feel a tad cheated. 

Set in the fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico during the late 1950's era, we are introduced to a quick-witted radio DJ for WOTW station, Everett (Jake Horowitz), and a loquacious and excited 16-year-old switchboard operator, Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick). They both walk to their jobs from the school gym late at night, discussing his tape recorder and she talks it up with reference to magazine stories of future technologies like having a phone with a video signal! Once they start their work for the night, Fay starts receiving a call with an ominous, clickety tone. No one knows what it is and as she calls various people in the community, they have no idea (other than one nervous caller) and then they are cut off. When Fay reaches out to Everett, he is nonplussed to learn that his news broadcast was cut off by this unknown signal. Later, Fay gets a call from a man who is aware what that signal is. An interview takes place as this mysterious man's call is played live on the air. 

A striking, often mesmerizing feature debut by director Andrew Patterson, "The Vast of Night" is sort of a grainy, low-key, dimly lit movie that somebody found in their VHS collection and hadn't played it in years. In that sense, there is something foreboding about the whole movie as it is wrapped in a deluge of paranoia and wonder. Both Horowitz, who exhibits a beatnik cool factor about himself, and McCormick's Fay stand out and their banter and tech-trivia conversations are a joy to listen to. Yet, despite the expected factor that it's all about aliens (as I said, I am a fan of those stories), I was still hoping for something more, something more cataclysmic that did not revolve around the typical otherworldly presence. "The Vast of Night" has three or four standout sequences that have everything to do with an active mobile camera in endless tracking shots such as roaming around town at a breakneck speed, or when a shot is held for 10 minutes as it focuses on Fay switching calls trying to decipher that odd sound, or when Everett and Fay walk in an early opening sequence. Such tell-tale, tantalizing moments seem to lead to an ending that could have been a supernova of thrills and surprises. We see an alien mothership and it is quite a sight...but not an unfamiliar one. Still, such a gripe doesn't take away from its overall hook on me. "The Vast of Night" is often quite a visual tonic of a movie and I'll take it over the middling repetitions of "Midnight Special."

Precious and Mercifully Short

 THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR (2023)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Wes Anderson has an uncanny ability to hook us in to his whimsical stories, and then they sometimes come up short with whimsy slowly overwhelming everything. This isn't always true of Anderson's formal, symmetrical plots and strategic camera placements - only "Asteroid City" and "The Darjeeling Limited" are tedious exercises ("The French Dispatch" is 2/3 wonderful and then 1/3 of flagging interest). Anderson has now crafted something that feels akin to his whimsical, cartoonish look at the world and it is Roald Dahl's short story, "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar." Wes Anderson has adapted one of the author's works before ("The Fantastic Mr. Fox," unseen by me) but this one is light on its feet and has a hilarious, breakneck and consistently buoyant tone. It is precious and mercifully short.

The story begins with Roald Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes) telling the story from his book about the wealthy Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch, who has a tremendous voice that can rattle your cage) who spots an unusual book in his friend's library. The thin book is written by Dr Chatterjee (Dev Patel) and it is his patient who can see without his eyes. Say what? That man is Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley) who proves to his doctors his magical ability by having his face completely bandaged and walking through hospital corridors and riding a bike with ease. How is that possible? Khan claims it is a part of the body he has trained for years to manage such an unfounded ability, but what part? We never find out.

Most of "Henry Sugar" is wonderfully adroit and seamlessly edited - it is a near-perfect little film. My objections are the sliding of sets revealing one different setting after another (something which I also found annoying in "Asteroid City"). I was also a bit miffed to watch the actors breaking the fourth wall and read the full Dahl text by including the descriptive prose. Not everything has to be word for word, but then again it is marvelous to watch a film based on a book using such deliciously pronounced words.