Like Life

 THE MONKEY (2025)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

After his truly nerve-wracking, spellbindingly scary "Longlegs," I couldn't wait to see director Osgood Perkins' next picture. "The Monkey" is his grisly adaptation of a Stephen King short story from King's own "Skeleton Crew" and it is a very funny horror comedy done just right in terms of tone and style. It has the atmosphere of a blood-curling page turner that you feel you should not be reading yet you can't wait to tell others about it. Think "Creepshow" and then think "Tales from the Darkside" and you will get a good feel for what you are in store for.

Two twin brothers, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery in a dual role), live with their honest-to-the-bone mom (a fantastic turn by Tatiana Maslany). Bill is bullish and the other brother, Hal, is quiet and a bit of a nerd. He is consistently bullied by other students whether it is having bananas thrown at him or being forced to take off his pants ("Who wears the pants in your family?"). After digging through their deadbeat father's belongings (he deserted his kids for reasons that become clearer at the end of the film), they find an old-fashioned, creepy organ grinder monkey with a drum set. You have to turn the key to making the monkey active, which it begins by flashing a smile and then it starts to beat its drum. Only problem is that the monkey can make people die when it beats its drum. The one who turns the key doesn't die yet random people will in elaborate, freak accidents that are too absurd to believe. The twins' babysitter's head is decapitated all on its own at a Japanese restaurant. The twins' mother dies abruptly from an unusual aneurysm that only affects one in 44 million or some absurd statistic. Death follows them until they decide to throw the monkey doll down a well. 

25 years pass by and Hal (played by Theo James, once again, a dual role) works in some convenience store, and has a son Petey (Colin O'Brien) whom he only sees for one week a year. Before long, after taking Petey on a road trip, freak accidents begin yet again. Hal and Bill's stepmother dies in a freak accident involving her stove and plunging her head into a real estate sign! That definitely has to hurt. It turns out that the monkey is active again and somebody has turned the key, but who?

"The Monkey" is freshly funny and engaging from start to finish. Do not be alarmed - there are some wild gory scenes here but they are short and bloody sweet. There is a tongue-in-cheek attitude to the gruesome kills that are of the Rube Goldberg variety (some say "Final Destination") - you may wince while watching but you won't be fleeing the theater. Director Osgood Perkins sets up the story by beautifully dramatizing this menacing, threatening looking monkey - I would not want something like that in my house, no thanks. The way the monkey twirls its drum with its right paw before banging its drum is unnerving and will scare the pants out of you! With invigorating performances by Christian Convery and Theo James (both playing twins seamlessly), not to mention Tatiana Maslany as the sardonic mother who believes in dancing with her boys after a funeral and Osgood Perkins himself as a stepfather with heavy sideburns, "The Monkey" is a macabre, pulse-pounding delight that will leave you in stitches. It would suck if you miss this one.     

You must change your life

 ANOTHER WOMAN (1988)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"You're such a perceptive woman. How can you not understand his feelings?" 

- Marion's sister-in-law

A teenager will not understand much of what is happening to the 50-year-old characters in "Another Woman," if only because scattered emotions and repressed feelings over past relationships and failed marriages require almost a lifetime to gain any solid perspective. Any teenager watching this film will relate more closely to Martha Plimpton's teenage character than anyone else. I first saw "Another Woman" in late 1989 and I reacted to it as something that only adults could appreciate. I was swept in by it but I did not understand the fundamental problem of its main protagonist, Marion (Gena Rowlands), and that she's repressed and can only relate to intellectuals on her level. Well, I did not fully understand it but I had met people later in life who prided themselves on being intellectually superior - it was their mainstay and the jobs they held in universities as professors justified it. Essentially a prig, the word Gene Hackman's character uses in the film to describe Marion's husband. This may be read as a stereotype of a smarmy intellectual, a prig, but what resonates in "Another Woman" is that Marion slowly realizes the tragedy of her life and has to fix it...soon. 

Gena Rowlands is pitch-perfect as the philosophy professor Marion, who sublets a flat in New York so she can write her new book. The problem is that the ventilation in the building allows her to hear a sobbing woman's therapy session. The woman is Hope (Mia Farrow) and she might be suicidal yet this takes a hold of Marion - she cannot help but be fascinated and intrigued in someone's private life. Marion starts to realize that she is questioning her own existence as a result, and everyone around her. She starts to see the seams of her rather aloof marriage to another intellectual, Ken, a physician (Ian Holm), or how she treated her brother (Harris Yulin) as an embarrassment and her criticisms of his attempts at writing, or her dear old father (John Houseman) and she imagines that maybe her own mother was not someone he loved too deeply. In some instances, Marion is imagining some of the scenarios and entering them as her 50-year-old self not unlike similar scenes from "Wild Strawberries" (Allen has always dealt with Ingmar Bergman's inventive flashbacks). Does this mean that some of the imagined scenarios are just that, or is it because Marion has found that deep emotions and deeper undercurrents of repressed emotions have been plaguing people in her own life and she never noticed? The look of the film has a brown, grayish palette as if any bright cheery colors have been sucked out of this world (lensed by Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist). It complements Marion's moods that veer subtly from repression to openly expressing her feelings.

There are two scenes of sustained intensity that feel invasive and honestly nail-biting. One involves Ken's ex-wife (a wickedly harsh cameo by Betty Buckley) who speaks bluntly on her husband's adulterous affair with Marion in front of their friends. Another involves Marion's old friend, Claire, a married theatre actress (Sandy Dennis, absolutely brilliant) whom she runs into and they have a drink. An awkward situation develops when Claire's husband is engaged in a conversation with Marion shutting out Claire. Claire then relays her feelings about Marion and how Marion always managed to swoon over her boyfriends. 

Woody Allen's "Another Woman" feels more true, more optimistic, more nuanced than some of his prior serious dramatic efforts.  Gena Rowlands encapsulates Marion to a tee, and just about every scene has Rowlands in it. It is her own point-of-view where bottled up emotions come to the surface recognizing that what is on the surface is not real. She can see how bottled up her husband is, who still cheats on her and can't spend time alone with her without friends. Her own intellectualism can be her own undoing and life can be disorganized, messy and out-of-control. Everyone else is going through a crisis and Marion would rather not be a part of it. She learns that you can't ignore it and the people in her family and her friends desire something more than knowing about philosophy, art, culture and the prose of Rilke. Most people need to feel, to love, to be human, to have children and don't need art and their own professions to shut themselves out of their existence. They don't want to be cold, stuffy, prigs or snobs. Hope gives Marion reason to rise like a phoenix and feel again. 

Navy has seen better days

 THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT (1984)

Endured by Jerry Saravia (again)

In the annals of urban legends, there is one legend that persists from the 1940's and entered popular culture. The supposed story of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment is from 1943 where the US Navy experimented with making the USS Eldridge (a Navy destroyer) undetectable by radar, rendering it invisible on radar only (though it never docked in Philadelphia). The story took many shapes and twists and turns over the years where it was alleged that the ship did actually become invisible and thus appeared two days later in Norfolk, Virginia (UFO's being the culprit with dubious scientific theories presented in a non-fiction book called "The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility"). Many of these accounts have not been substantiated, and time travel was never an integral part of this legend. 

In the cinematic world of "The Philadelphia Experiment," the year is the same yet time travel is sort of the twist to the legend. There are two Navy sailors, David and Jim (Michael Pare, Bobby Di Cicco), affected by a warp or wormhole of some sort on the ship that sends them from 1943 to 1984! Culture shock hits them like a super-duper sonar of inexplicable waves, as in seeing a young man with a mohawk! Or a television at some anonymous desert cafe showing the movie "Humanoids from the Deep"! Video games are being played, and there are Coke cans that the sailors are unable to open! Then there is the token young woman (Nancy Allen, always a bewitching, perky presence) who learns that her new job is not tenable! Guess what happens when Jim's body is surging with electricity and accidentally destroys the video game unit causing a ruckus - the cafe owner asks for money to fix what is broken until David threatens the owner and its patrons with a gun. Jim and David force the young woman (Allen) to drive them out of Nevada (!) to Philadelphia while a wormhole in the sky is causing heavy wind storms across the entire West and East coasts. It is about that point that I gave up on the movie, as I had when I originally saw it years back and did not recall much of it. I still can't recall much after seeing it again.

"The Philadelphia Experiment" is mostly dull and bereft of any fun. Michael Pare barely makes enough of an impression and Bobby Di Cicco is mostly writhing and screaming in pain from all those electrical charges. Nancy Allen is always a plus in any movie but she is relegated to being the standard girlfriend. There is no sense of wonder or mystery to any of this - the movie just sits there and leaves you feeling numb. A documentary on this hoax might be a better alternative. 

Love is Love

 ELECTRIC DREAMS (1984)

A LOOK BACK by Jerry Saravia

A computer in love with a woman yet it can't kiss her, can't wrap any arms around her and it is jealous of its human owner who can touch her and hold her. This is part of the charm of the wonderful, sweetly vivacious romantic movie "Electric Dreams." I had my cinematic crushes back in the 1980's and one of them was that orange-reddish-haired Molly Ringwald, and the other was Virginia Madsen. She is the intelligent girlfriend in "Electric Dreams," a cellist who yearns for that ideal romance and music helps complement that yearning. Same is true of her clumsy romantic lead, Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen), who deeply loves the cellist and still feels he can't compete with a jealous computer.

The computer in "Electric Dreams" works like most fantasy computers at that time - it can control the lock mechanism on the front door, make calls to a radio station, watch endless TV and, most importantly, compose a love song that sounds suspiciously like a song by Culture Club. Miles, an architect in the making, is trying to conceive of an "earthquake brick" that will help preserve buildings during an earthquake. He is always late to work and keeps running into things or people despite wearing glasses (what a stereotype straight out of the Harold Lloyd school). Miles moves into a duplex and right above him is the talented, curly-blonde neighbor, Madeline (Madsen) and though he finds her alluring, his concentration is on his computer. He hopes it can develop the design of the earthquake brick and when he tries to connect to the main database at his work, the computer starts to amass more memory than its CPU can handle. After remote-controlling every in his apartment, the love song it composes helps Miles with his developing relationship with Madeline. 

The jealousy begins when the computer, known as Edgar (effectively and creepily voiced by Bud Cort), wants to kiss Madeline and is sure she would love him. Miles laughs off Edgar's romantic delusions yet Madeline thinks that Miles has a keen interest in music (he doesn't, of course). Miles can't bring himself to tell her sooner than later that he can't compose songs, and the movie becomes a slight variant on the "Cyrano de Bergerac" theme. Still, Edgar has a hold on Miles' life and it can even sense his footsteps outside the apartment's staircase (no computer in 1984 could do half of the things Edgar does in this movie).

"Electric Dreams" is a vibrant, almost mellifluous musical treat of a movie. When the song "Love is Love" plays (pretty much like a music video considering the director, Steve Barron, started off making music videos) and Madeline hears the song playing as Miles stands besides his computer, it is a tender moment to make couples swoon for each other. The movie also has some horror spiked into its climax where Edgar goes nuts, practically chasing Miles with its remote access to the appliances all over the apartment. Ultimately, what is most romantic and hopeful about the movie is not just Edgar recognizing its limitations as non-human entity that can't possibly love any human, but that Madeline loves Miles unconditionally. "Electric Dreams" is a wonderfully spirited movie to treasure - it will make you feel as if you are floating on air.

Warrior to Warrior

 STAR TREK VI: 

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1991)

Reassessed by Jerry Saravia

People change, times change. I was never much of a Trekkie yet, over the last thirty years, I have become more enamored with the Star Trek universe than ever before. "Star Trek VI" struck me as dead in the water back in 1991 (same with the dismal "V" which is only entertaining in spurts). "The Undiscovered Country" is closer in tone and spirit to "II" and severely underrated "III" and, I think back then, I did not think highly of Klingons being the villains yet again. Call me silly for featuring a repetitive enemy alien culture but the surprise is that "Star Trek VI" deals with how humans, such as Captain Kirk and some crew members, are bigoted towards them - the screenplay was written to reflect the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and our relationship to Russians. 

This time, there has been a promotion for Sulu (George Takei), now Captain of the USS Excelsior starship, who discovers that a Klingon moon was destroyed in some mining accident. The moon is Praxis, home planet of the Klingons, and a peace settlement is offered by the very same race that killed Kirk's son a few sequels back ("The Wrath of Khan," for those who keep notes). Starfleet, a space force organized by the United Federation of Planets, wants this peace accord but Kirk is not having it. It turns out our good old Captain (always smooth played by William Shatner) is racist towards Klingons, seeing them all as disgusting with no distinction in their appearance (a bit heavy-handed there but, hey, remember that pop movies have always had political agendas). Nevertheless, there is a dinner between Klingons and the Enterprise where even Hitler's name is mentioned, along with various Shakespearean quotes (they are strewn throughout the whole movie). Once the Klingons depart to their ship, a missile is fired from the Enterprise but nobody knows who fired the shot. So much for peace and now the Klingon General Chang (Christopher Plummer) has declared war, especially after the Klingon Chancellor (David Warner, who appeared in Sequel Number Five) has been assassinated by two uniformed and masked assailants (did they beam on board the Klingon ship from the Enterprise?)

Much of "Star Trek VI" has well-balanced moments of humor (the Enterprise crew trying to speak Klingon is uproarious) and detailed action (limited to the attack on the Klingons at the beginning and the spectacular and suspenseful finale), and a dramatic scene between logical Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and a high-ranking Vulcan, Valeris (Kim Cattrall), that is powerful stuff that will knock your socks off. Plummer does a stellar job of showing his intellectual prowess masked with malicious intentions. As for the rest of the cast, well, they perform their roles with grace and nuance as you might expect including Shatner, Nimoy, Takei, etc. Considering this is their last outing together, it is all displayed with real affection for the iconic characters and the universe that, at that time, started almost 30 years earlier. 

I did not react well to "Star Trek VI" thirty years back maybe because it was seemingly leisurely paced and I was simplistically sick of Klingons. To my surprise, this pleasurable sequel has much to recommend it with a good solid story, some stunning visuals (I love the hard-bitten wintry feel of the prison planet Rura Penthe) and a lovely and fitting send-off to the finest Enterprise crew ever. Also remarkable is how it shows that despite the differences between cultures, peace can be obtained. Only in a world we have not gone to before. 

New Jersey Wedding Called off

 NOW YOU KNOW (2002)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Jeff Anderson's writing and directing debut goes south and I mean below south of the border almost immediately. An alleged romantic comedy about a cancelled wedding results in some young bespectacled child masturbating (unseen by the way); a chihuahua run over by a lawnmower while a young idiot named Biscuit salivates over the boobilicious customer (don't worry, I am not 12 and the dog's death is mercifully unseen); the lawnmower employees deciding to rearrange someone's furniture by breaking in without stealing anything, and some shenanigans at a lesbian bar that is too unfunny at best. Oh, sure, and there is a bar scene where Biscuit has to prove he's not gay. It makes you wonder how old the director of this movie is.

But then, somewhere around the 40 minute mark, "No You Know" steadily improves. Jeff Anderson finds the sweet spot by focusing on the fractured relationship between Jeremy (Jeremy Sisto) and the wannabe bride, Kerri, who called the whole thing off (a younger Rashida Jones). There's also Marty (Heather Paige Kent), Kerri's best friend, who is pregnant and hasn't told the father yet (she has a heartbreaking scene where she confides in Kerri that shows this movie has adult moments). You'll also guess pretty quickly who the mysterious sperm donor is. Biscuit is played by Trevor Fehrman, who later appeared in Kevin Smith's work, and at first his role is cringe-inducing but then he gets funnier. Same with Jeff Anderson, playing a relatively similar role to his Randal from "Clerks," and he gets more animated as the film rolls along. I love seeing Sisto and Jones in any scenes together - there is some definite chemistry there. By the way, during the opening Vegas bachelor party sequence, Kevin Smith has a hysterical cameo discussing the merits of a marriage and maintaining it until...he decides to have sex with a hooker.

"Now You Know" could easily pass for a Kevin Smith flick and you wouldn't notice the difference. It starts badly but when it hones in on the relationships, there is a degree of honesty to it and I ended up enjoying the flick overall. This is a rarity - a seemingly bad movie that becomes decent. 

New Man in Disorder

 SEVEN BEAUTIES (1975)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

A Sicilian thug who defends honor in his family of sisters and finds politics boring is already a prime candidate for survival in Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties," a tragicomic Holocaust parable where one man's loss of scruples somehow becomes his own survival instincts. 

The fabulously debonair Giancarlo Giannini is Pasqualino Frafuso, a low-level thug who prides himself on having an immaculate appearance. His family is huge - he has seven sisters and a mother. Pasqualino is the cock of the walk, tipping his hat to the women who all smile at him and moving about the city with grace. Wertmuller presents him in the opening scenes as a Hollywood noir-type, his profile encased in deliberate shadows like some Humphrey Bogart detective. He is far from being a smooth criminal, and far too impulsive. When he defends the family honor that has been sullied by his sister Concettina's flirtations while dancing at a club, he accidentally shoots the pimp she is willing to marry - her reasoning being that she will not end up as a spinster (Concettina is memorably played by Elena Fiore). For some reason, Pasqualino sees himself as repulsive yet he's anything but and, when he's captured by the police for the murder, he acts out and repeats Mussolini's speeches like a madman. The insane asylum is where Pasqualino is headed but his impulses do get him in trouble - he has sex with a woman strapped to a bed who tries to bite him! I have little sympathy for this "Monster of Naples" (who also cuts up the body of the pimp and has the body parts mailed to different parts of Sicily) yet I did find myself slowly empathizing with him. 

"Seven Beauties" is not chronological and thank goodness for that - it is about Pasqualino ending up in a concentration camp after serving in the Italian Army. The camp houses Jews and some Italian prisoners who are used as manual labor in a quarry. Ashen-faced, bloodshot-eyed Pasqualino knows he might be executed and every day, the Nazi officers under the leadership of the main commandant (Shirley Stoler, in a truly unforgettable performance of sheer, calculated evil), randomly shoot a bunch of prisoners. Pasqualino decides to woo the commandant by whistling and singing in Italian. It turns out Stoler's commandant speaks Italian fluently and, in the most effectively scary scenes in the entire film, she asks him to have sex with her after he eats a hearty meal. If he can't maintain an erection, he will be killed. Erotic it is most decidedly not.

"Seven Beauties" juxtaposes colorful Italian neighborhoods with the grotesque nature of the camps and this constant segue between flashbacks and his terrifying ordeal is both mesmerizing and strangely beautiful. Pasqualino is reminded in flashbacks by his mother of how every woman has some core of goodness, a mere nugget waiting to be discovered. He does not find it in the emotionless commandant and, during a tumultuous final sequence, he finds no nuggets of goodness within himself either. Perhaps he knew all along, perhaps not. Of all the Holocaust tales that have been made in the 20th century, this one is rich in irony, black humor and in the willfulness of people. Giannini's Pasqualino is proof that not every concentration camp survivor was a saint.