Not tropical, just the afterlife

 BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE (2024)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Director Kevin Smith once joked that a sequel will hopefully not materialize to 1988's classic chill-to-the-bone ghost comedy, "Beetlejuice." That once-upon-a-time proposed sequel was something along the lines of "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" to which Smith quipped, "Must we go tropical?" Well, a sequel arrived and without Smith's involvement and I am happy to say, yes, this sequel is as good as the original and just as fun and diverting with a lot of unexpected turns and twists to make for a delirious ride into the afterlife. 

Winona Ryder reprises her Lydia Deetz role, a little older but still looking as Goth as ever. She's the host of "Ghost House" where paranormal events inside haunted houses are investigated. At the taping, she think she's spotted the funhouse demon Betelgeuse. Complications have arisen for Lydia. For one, her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, undeniably well cast) is at a private school and wants nothing to do with her mother ("You care more about ghosts than me.") This is all largely due to the unfortunate passing of Astrid's father, and Lydia's former husband, who died in the Amazon. Another death has now been reported, that of Lydia's father who almost died in a plane crash out to sea when he then got eaten by a shark. Lydia reunites with her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara, always wearing colorfully gaudy costumes) for the funeral, and Delia is sad and tries to fake scream in front of a camera to let out her frustrations (that is a good idea). Before long, there is the summoning of Beetlejuice or, more appropriately, Betelgeuse which Lydia's producer/boyfriend (Justin Theroux) thinks is important so that Lydia can deal with her past demons. Little does he know that they both have a ticket to the afterlife which includes shrunken headed desk clerks and gruesome ghosts.

Most of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" is engaging, darkly imaginative and wonky, as you might expect from director Tim Burton. Nothing here visually is all that different from the original, only the dialogue is sharper and funnier. There are too many characters, though most have sufficient screen time without bungling the narrative. I would have liked to have seen, however, more of Monica Bellucci as Betelgeuse's former girlfriend (a black-and-white flashback narrated in a different language by Betelgeuse is vintage, classic Burton and hilarious to boot). The one character that sticks out in my craw is Theroux's boyfriend character whose reasons for being with Lydia have nothing to do with love - he is a one-dimensional bore that takes time away from O'Hara and Ortega. Bellucci could have used more screen time, divulging her love for that pin-striped suited demon. A boyfriend for Astrid could've led to something darkly romantic, but it is quickly resolved in too abrupt a fashion 

Still between the ghoulish afterlife depictions (love that "Soul Train") and the sandworms and the practical stop-motion effects overall, Burton's demented and spirited sequel is some of the best work he has done in years (excepting "Big Eyes," a truly wonderful biopic). Kudos to Michael Keaton reprising his horny toad of a demon with relish and some good comical scenes (the reprise of the marriage scene is a hoot). Winona Ryder brings much needed sympathy to her Lydia - you keep wanting to reach out and comfort her (can you tell I was always a fan of Ryder's?) Jenna Ortega is fantastic as the daughter who doesn't believe in ghosts and eventually comes around. O'Hara's outrageous outfits brings back memories of the original film and TV's "Schitt's Creek." Hearing the song "MacArthur Park" brings memories back of the 1970's. "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" is a delightfully gleeful and joyous movie. It left me with a silly grin and a hope that when I meet my maker, it will look like the afterlife of this movie. 

A Mad Magazine movie

 TOP SECRET! (1984)
An Appreciation by Jerry Saravia

There are some comedies that make you laugh because of the intrinsic humor derived from its situations. Then there are some movies that offer nothing but belly laughs, the intent being just to poke fun and have fun. There is nothing more uproarious in the 1980's (other than the original "The Naked Gun") where you have an anything-goes comedy meaning, quite literally, anything goes than "Top Secret!" The ZAZ comedy team (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) hope that some of the jokes land and many do. It is nonstop joke movie.

Val Kilmer is Nick (his acting debut role), a 50's Elvis singer who is touring East Germany and becomes embroiled in an espionage plot involving French Resistance fighters and Nazis as bad guys! Just what year is this movie is supposed to be set in? Oh, yeah, that's right, who cares? When you have anachronistic references to TV classics like Mary Tyler Moore Show and Bonanza and Montgomery Ward, then it is clear the year is not anyone's concern. Nick tries painting the landscape as he's traveling by train! Another tries to catch a tree train! A Nazi, in one of my favorite forced perspective shots ever, picks up a giant phone receiver! Omar Sharif ends up, sort of alive, inside a crushed car! Nick gets to sing some Elvis tunes, and one by Little Richard! On a marquee, Linda Ronstadt is singing and, with time permitting, Frank Sinatra! An underwater fight takes place within an underwater saloon! And there is one of the most hilarious and craziest dance sequences I've ever seen that has to be seen to be believed! 

"Top Secret!" is the kind of crazy, anarchic movie that you can't wait to share with your friends. It is infectious and, though it is not as hilarious as ZAZ's other comedy-spoofs, primarily "The Naked Gun," it is still too damn funny to be ignored. When a movie starts off with a Nazi Germany meeting followed by a "Skeet Surfin" song (obviously parodying The Beach Boys), then you know you are in for a roller-coaster of laughs, puns and absurdity on the level of Mad Magazine. Pure anarchy.    

Smiling in disgust

 THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Tasteless, crass yet unevenly funny at times, "The Kentucky Fried Movie" scores points for wanting to offend and for being terminally offensive and gross. For those who love scatalogical humor, women's breasts are featured in ubiquity. It is a movie for those who love puerile junk food comedic segments delivered with some actual intelligence. 

This was the ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) comedy team's first movie with John Landis as director, himself making his second feature. "Kentucky Fried Movie" (based on the team's own improv theatre) is a comedy spoof movie featuring segments that can be alternately funny and cruel yet the overall laughs by my meter are hit-or-miss (less so with the ZAZ teams later features). The segments are not connected in any way, other than the reappearance of Big Jim Slade who is first shown as a man who can have sexual intercourse without premature ejaculation (slapsticky at best, the segment is titled "Sex Record"), and then later reappears in a hilarious and lengthy takeoff on "Enter the Dragon" with Evan Kim. A bit about the future of crude oil just feels blah, and the fake trailer (there are a few of those on hand) about Catholic girls in trouble features close-ups of breasts and some sexual thrusting in a shower and not much more. As I said, hit or miss.

I rewatch this movie once every few years and still find it despicable, that is despicably funny on occasion (though nowhere near the level of the ZAZ team's later spoofs). The best bits involve George Lazenby in an Irwin Allen-type disaster flick called "That's Armageddon" which is truly hysterical, and a final bit involving a Perry Mason send-up with a TV reporter narrating the proceedings. Sexual hijinks and sexual gags almost color the entire film, and the funniest involving such salaciousness has a couple who make out in front of the TV that's showing the news. The difference is that the TV anchorman and the crew are watching the couple having sex and they howl when she gets her orgasms! 

Many might not find this movie funny (and some gags are so dated and a little racist that they will inspire nothing but reactions of silence) but I found a little less than 2/3 of it fairly humorous with a less than a 1/4 of it being infectiously funny. Oh, I liked seeing Henry Gibson but his fake commercial bit about keeping a dead child around for family activities is just gross. A commercial promoting a new headache reliever with Bill Bixby made me smile. The "Feel-Around" moviegoing experience was terrifically timed and made me laugh-out-loud with the experience of the movie delivered by an usher replicating the movie's scenes in 4-D! "Kentucky Fried Movie" will make you smile...and sometimes smile in disgust. 

He already died in 1925

 EUREKA (1983)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Maybe the story of a gold prospector who strikes it rich and becomes the wealthiest man ever is not prime material for a director like Nicolas Roeg. Of course, if he had adhered to the idea of man vs. wilderness in search of gold, he might have made something out of this. I got excited when I heard Wagner's "Das Rhinegold" on the soundtrack suggesting something creepy and sinister this way comes, or so it seemed. If this had been the story of a wealthy man who has nothing but despair for the rest of his days, this might also have been worthy of consideration. It seems that Roeg gets sidetracked again and again.

The gold prospector searching for gold in the Yukon territory for 15 years, Jack McCann (Gene Hackman), finally finds it - his search for it is consumed by his need to find it himself. Once he finds it, well, eureka indeed! Years pass as Jack has become dismissive and finds no joy in anything - as his daughter tearfully states, "he already died in 1925." Jack lives with his wife (Jane Lapotaire) on a Caribbean island with an estate named nothing less than, you guessed it, Eureka. Jack finds no solace from anything or anyone, not even his wife. His beautiful, upbeat daughter (Theresa Russell) is seeing a suave French playboy, Claude (Rutger Hauer), whom Jack hates. The playboy is so suave that he can consume a gold nugget with some wine and not burp, which drives Jack mad. Meanwhile, there is a business deal involving a Meyer Lansky-type mob boss (played by none other than Joe Pesci) who wants to build a casino on the island. Jack will have nothing to do with such a lucrative deal so we know he's doomed.

"Eureka" has Roeg indulging in endless montage scenes with my favorite being quick cuts to a stitch of dress, a string of pearls or a tablecloth or some other item with a similar color (red is the dominant color in some scenes). A voodoo practice followed by slithering snakes and an orgy of naked women writhing in orgasmic pleasures is certainly as ostentatiously presented as you might think, but it does drag on for a while. Then there's a vicious murder that leads to an endless courtroom scene with the accused Claude pleading for his life to his wife. The main thrust of the story, Jack himself, is sort of left suspended in the air while the Mob conspirators, the alcoholic wife, the perplexed daughter, and Jack's long-suffering lawyer take center stage. None of it is nearly as strong as Hackman's Jack, a character who has very little depth other than the love of finding gold, and not actually enjoying the luxuries of it. 

"Eureka" is fascinating and troubling and, occasionally, too long-winded and frustrating to put up with. I will give Roeg credit for sticking to his whims about telling a story the way he wishes. He's an original but "Eureka" is more a series of strung-together, slovenly placed footnotes. 

Lord, have mercy, horror has found Eggers

THE WITCH (2015)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

There is something forbidden and otherworldly about the woods. You can never see far enough beyond the tall trees or the sunlight that peers through the leaves, or especially the moonlight. During the day, it seems like the woods rest on some eternal path with no end, past any clearing that the eye cannot see. At night, well, better not to travel at night unless you have flashlights. Robert Eggers' astonishing directorial debut, "The Witch," hints at something subversive about the forest and something more deeply troubling within a family unit that can't survive the harvest during the incoming winter months. Oh, and there's also some witch to make matters worse.

Set in the early 17th century in New England, a deep-voiced religious settler William (a magnificent Ralph Ineson) and his religiously devoted wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) move to a remote forest area and build a farm where they harvest corn. They also have in tow a blossoming, dutiful teenage daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy); the inquisitive younger son, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and two young twins Mercy and Jonas (winningly played by Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson). Their farm has goats and all the traditional trappings yet they are not able to grow much corn. The skies become more overcast, the inclement weather is steadily approaching, and Katherine is nursing a fifth child named Samuel who disappears from Thomasin's care. Did a witch snatch the child or a wolf? When William and Caleb examine the woodsy area, a hare appears and it's not a beguiling presence. Later on, Caleb decides to investigate the woods along with his trusty dog and a variation on the witch from "Snow White" makes its appearance. Suffice to say, a beautiful, busty woman is not all it is cracked up to be.

"The Witch" brings forth religious fervor with its close-knit family, yet suspicions abound without much discourse on whether Thomasin is a witch - it makes the living quarters a hellish experience. William tries to defend Thomasin to a very suspicious Katherine yet when Caleb's life is taken away after arriving naked at the farm, the father turns his suspicious eye to Thomasin (the twins become motionless after forgetting their prayers). Who needs a witch when evil makes its own appearance in the form of a family slowly becoming deviant with the mother harboring an occasional hallucination. 

Robert Eggers brings forth a sustained dread throughout much of "The Witch" and it becomes almost unbearable at times to watch (he also maintains a historical accuracy to the times that adds enormous credibility). The animal killings (watch out PETA lovers), the black goat (a Satanic symbol), the deeply unsettling sounds of the forest, the supple moves of the witch (seen fleetingly), the screams and agonies of Katharine and the twins not to mention Thomasin's ambiguous nature lead to a finale that is so blazingly intense, it might leave you gasping for air. What holds the movie together is the focus on the Puritan family and their religious ways - the horror comes second. If Eggers keeps focusing on the humanity within the horror, he might end up on the same modern list of horror directors such as John Carpenter and Wes Craven. Lord, have mercy, horror has found a new home.  

Recreating 1922 with green screens

 NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR (2023)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

There are so few versions of the original 1922 masterpiece in its wake, and yet so many "Dracula" versions that it is easy to lose count (billions and billions served since the beginning of the 20th century). David Lee Fisher's largely black-and-white recreation with the occasional solarized colors is not a farce but not exactly anything more than a devoted shot-by-shot remake delivering the barest of shudders.

Thomas Hutter (Emrhys Cooper) is the real-estate bloke who wants to be wealthy at the expense of his blonde, beautiful if unresponsive and unloved wife, Ellen (Sarah Carter). Hutter can't bring himself to say, "I love you," and is anxious to head to the Carpathian mountains for his inevitable meeting with Count Orlok (a menacing Doug Jones). Everything here is clockwork and obligatory with the slightest changes such as Hutter having sex with a gypsy and feeling guilty, and a blind man warning of the Count's blood lust. Otherwise, same old, same old. 

The movie is suitably watchable yet it has also been green-screened to death with everything clearly shot on a soundstage - the green screen is representative of the same locations from the 1922 original. It just seems like lazy filmmaking despite some probable sets of the inside of Orlok's castle. Nothing looks lived in and all the visuals look cramped and claustrophobic (not unlike Coppola's "Twixt" which also uses color and black-and-white with great abandon). 

Doug Jones gives the best performance in the film, and I found some sliver of originality and presence with Joely Fisher as a spinster who has possible romantic inclinations with Ellen. The ending rushes by with Ellen waiting for the Count to drain of her blood, though any psychic connection with the vampire is minimal. There is supposed to be a plague in this town but we see no rats unlike the previous versions. Hutter comes across as unsympathetic and the portrayal of Ellen is wanting. Worthwhile for Nosferatu completists - everyone else would be better off watching the 1922 original.  

Why did you kill those lovely flowers?

 NOSFERATU (2024)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Providence!," yells Herr Knock, owner of a brokerage firm where a certain Thomas Hutter is employed who has to deliver realty papers to be signed by a Transylvanian Count who is "infirmed." And so it begins in the newest remake of "Nosferatu," the original of which had the one and only Count Orlok as iconically played by Max Schreck in 1922 and later by Klaus Kinski in the truly masterful 1979 flick. How does director Robert Eggers' new version stand? It is powerful and illuminating in its own right and it can stand on its own two feet, though it is hardly the great film that the earlier incarnations were. 

The story of Count Orlok and Thomas Hutter is liberally borrowed from Bram Stoker's own "Dracula" so the plot is no different than any other Dracula retelling from the last century. Stiff and proper Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels by horse from Wisborg, Germany to the castle, stops by a gypsy village who warn him not to enter that nefarious castle, and then ventures forth to meet the old, decrepit Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). The set-up and the inevitable encounter is often frightening and what makes it doubly so is that we never quite get a good look at Orlok's face - he is mostly obscured by shadow though the prominent mustache is quite evident. 

Hutter's wife, Ellen (an incredibly transformative performance by Lily-Rose Depp), is mesmerized and terrified by the Count - they had some rendezvous years earlier (a noticeable addition to the Nosferatu film legacy) that resulted in a violent throat-grabbing by the vampire. Ellen seems to have been affected by this, often convulsing and having seizures. Is she possessed? She keeps saying "he's coming," and nobody knows what she means. Hutter's visit to the Count is a nightmare and he manages to escape Orlok's clutches. Only Ellen is the one who is anxious - she somehow wants the Count to come to her. Transfixed by him, she also sexually desires him yet pushes him away while also inviting him closer to her bosom (another new angle from previous versions). 

Bill Skarsgard's Count Orlok is menacing, threatening and ominous. This Count doesn't dread being a vampire like Kinski's version, nor is he rat-like in appearance like Schreck's version. He is a sexually carnivorous, ravenous animal who simply desires Ellen. Thomas Hutter is stiff competition (almost too stiff) next to a vampire that seems to liberate Ellen - these 1838 characters are all repressed and he brings out their sexual and violent impulses. It takes an ex-professor and Occult expert, Professor van Franz (Willem Dafoe), to seek out the Count and possibly destroy him and the rat-infested plague he has brought to Wisborg. If you hate seeing rats on screen, well, then you are no Nosferatu fan.

This version of "Nosferatu" is hypnotic, often scary and downright Gothic in every sense of the word. Every shot is frightful and shocking, and those lonely roads to the castle evoke a true sense of inevitable macabre. Still, Eggers' version is also a little too long and some supporting characters, the Harding family who are close to the Hutters, don't quite enrich the narrative. Dafoe's Franz can make the film come to a screeching halt, albeit in brief strokes. Still, the bleached-out, almost monochromatic look of it brings forth sublime memories of the 1979 version, which often felt like a Wagnerian riff on the original. A potent, unsettling, high-pitched vampire movie, using sexual innuendos and graphic sexuality as its main themes not unlike Coppola's "Dracula." And watch out for those rats.