Showgirls (1995)

Showgirls is surely the best bad movie ever made. It doesn’t matter which way you look at it, it’s a really shit movie, but it is sooooo shit that it is humiliatingly enjoyable. I advise from experience that anybody watching Showgirls with a partner or group do so from the outset: I have been driven mad by the many idiot friends I had squatting in my house in the past, who would wander in halfway through and say, ‘What’s this fucking porn you’re watching?’ I guess writers Verhoeven and Eszterhas would be thrilled at the prospect, but it wore my patience thin.
Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley from Saved by the Bell) hitches her way to Las Vegas to be a ‘dancer’, and gets her suitcase stolen. Somehow, by vandalising a car and almost getting mowed down by another car, she attracts the affection of seamstress Molly, even when she is breathing vomit breath like….right into her fucking face. Molly’s a good friend. A few weeks later, the girls are best friends. Molly works on the show Goddess sewing costumes, while Nomi has found gainful employment at the gentlemen’s club The Cheetah (ref: Roger Ebert’s definition of a gentlemen’s club). Nomi dances like a hot epileptic on amphetamines. But she gets naked and I guess that’s what the johns pay to see, so she somehow makes a living this way.

Gross

Meanwhile, she naturally dreams of rising to the top, and becoming the headline star of Goddess. Obnoxious glamorous redneck Crystal Connors (Gina Gerschon) is top of the bill, in the bosses’ high esteem, and the squeeze of sleazy hotel promoter Zach (Kyle MacLachlan). Nomi’s sociopathic attitude makes her a perfect fit in Vegas and a perfect match for the slimeballs she has to audition for to wiggle her way to the top. But her outrageous behaviour, which must surely place her somewhere high on the autistic spectrum, is good for laugh-a-minute comedy. Consider the fate of the poor French fries, having found their way into Nomi’s cardboard tray outside a diner. She is angry at being questioned by Molly, and having practically disembowelled a bottle of ketchup with a single thrust, she sets about the poor innocent fries and shoves them all over the table in a frustrated jerk. This must be some new trendy kind of eating disorder. Everything she orders hits the deck before she even unwraps it!

Showgirls is bad, like I’m bad, chamone, you know it. And almost every line makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons. When it’s not dialogue that’s making you bite your tongue, it’s usually one or another factor of Berkley’s frenetic physical delivery. The infamous pool sex scene between Nomi and Zack leaves us all wondering how she escaped the debacle without either a broken back or water on the lungs; while her licking the strip pole of the Cheetah club leaves us all wondering if she escaped the debacle without several venereal diseases.

I have long wondered to what extent Showgirls portrays the true Vegas underground. I mean, who could resist auditioning for a guy whose opening line is ‘A lot of people say that I’m a prick – I AM a prick!’? What fat slobbery male in the rabid audience of the Cheetah could fail to spunk his pants over the riddle ‘Ya know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!’? That is apparently meant to be a joke, but quite frankly, I have heard funnier things during biopsies. At some point you have to ask yourself how Ezsterhas ended up being the highest paid writer in Hollywood in the mid-‘90s, when his most rousing one-liners were the likes of ‘Dancing ain’t fucking’ and ‘You ain’t just a pain in my head and a pain in my dick, you also a pain in my ass!’ I am of the educated assumption that his status has slipped somewhat in the years since.

However, some of the characters and their whole beings are caricatures created entirely for the LOLs. Al, the slimy cigar-chewing manager of the Cheetah club was born to be in the business, and beautifully describes his profession to new girl Penny in the elevator pitch of the century. ‘He pays, you take him in the back. You can touch him, he cannot touch you. Unless he gives ya a big tip. If he cums, it’s OK. If he takes it out and cums all over ya, call the bouncer. Unless he pays ya. You wanna last a week, you gimme a blow job. First I get ya used to the money, then I make ya swallow.’ Don’t call us Al, we’ll call you.

Nomi, bless her dumb liplined little heart, is an unwitting source of comedy in her idiocy. From her now-legendary mispronunciation of Versace, to her hideously OTT reactions to most situations, she is comedy gold. Of course, in real life, she would have no friends and considerably more mutilations. She talks to people like shit, throws and smashes things continually, and is in the habit of making men feel instantly uncomfortable by talking about her period. Take that Al – your misogynist shit is no match for period talk!

She also has the oddest ideas about what turns people on. Her dance routines are absurd, her boning technique probably the cause of many a fractured penis over the years, and her stripteases are more like paid face-rapings. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Zach having been humped to within an inch of his life in a strip club, who now had to try and enjoy the rest of his night out with cum in his pants. I mean, is that what his girlfriend paid $500 for? The logistics of this could have been better planned, methinks.

Showgirls has to be seen to be believed, and loved. It stands as a favourite of many cult figures such as Elvira and Michelle Visage, and enjoys the same sort of midnight cult following that Rocky has embodied for decades. It is the sort of movie that should be enjoyed responsibly with a crate of beer and some pizza – while you sit back and secretly thank your stars for Nomi not being there… that pizza would be under the wheels of the nearest pick-up truck before the box was even opened.

1408 (2007)

The movie 1408 came out at a pivotal time in my adolescence: my sister and I went to see it in our crappy two-screen local town cinema with our boyfriends, and it was one of the most terrifying cinematic experiences we had ever experienced, or have since. We were both avid Stephen King enthusiasts and were just blown away with this adaptation of his short story. It was not only a movie that made you jump, but gave you chills right to the core.


Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a paranormal investigator/writer/skeptic/world's sloppiest envelope-opener, who once had a career as a legitimate author. He makes his living visiting supposedly haunted hotels and houses and officially debunking all attached theories. One day he finds a mysterious postcard from the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, warning him not to enter room 1408. His manager (Tony Shalhoub) uses a lawyer to bend the hotel's resistance to Mike's demand for the room, and when he arrives, Mike faces further defensiveness from the hotel manager Mr Olin (Samuel L Jackson). Eventually, Mike gets into the room, and his mental and physical undoing commences.

Olin describes Mike as 'an intelligent man who doesn't believe in anyone or anything but himself',

and the writer's skepticism lasts a surprisingly short period, after which Olin's guarantee that 'nobody has ever lasted more than an hour in that room' will be fulfilled, as visualised by a ghostly digital bedside clock. For as long as a logical cynically-atheist man possibly can, Mike tries to apply the laws of physics to his ordeal, and his theory that Olin gifted him spiked whiskey seemingly holds up throughout. In the midst of his wildest nightmare scenarios, there are periodic shots portraying Mike in a perfectly untouched hotel room in hysterics.

Although the entire movie is your average decent-budget-with-several-big-names-attached in terms of style, it serves the space-bending narrative perfectly, and makes good use of perspective in the form of both newspaper articles and 1408 room paintings, all looking back at Mike as he examines them. As his ordeal (I apologise for my frequent use of this word; only I can think of no effective alternative) intensifies, there are some particularly wonderful works by the set designers and constructors, in a movie which, generally, I think was probably pretty cheap to make as the majority of the action takes place in a moderately-sized hotel suite that could be easily replicated on sound stages.

One thing I did not expect this evening was to end up crying at a horror movie I had seen a few times before. But I suppose every other time I had seen it, I was not the mother of an eight-year-old daughter like I am now. The central trauma that underpins Mike's ordeal in 1408 is the death of his young daughter Katie, and the child's implied resignation to her illness as a result of belief in God and Heaven. A sequence in which Mike is approached by a vision of his dead child - one he knows is not real - and holds her, crying hysterically and assuring her of his unending love. Cusack is an incredible actor, and both his sorrow and his terror are so tangible from the beginning of the movie to the very end.

1408 is mainly a one-man show by Cusack, and he is perfect. The role allows him to have fun with many emotions and attitudes in the same character, while Jackson's (sadly) minimal role allows him to oppose Cusack's determined disbelief... and deliver at least one joyously gratuitous 'fuckin'. It's a really good, tense and scary movie.

Grave Encounters (2011)

Found Footage is often snubbed by a certain faction of the movie-going world, considered dull, unoriginal and unwatchable due to the 'shakey camera' cliche; I maintain that it is the same as basically any other subgenre, in that there are a few really good examples and many bad ones, but the subgenre itself does not inherently make a movie bad - or good, for that matter. I have quite a few post-Blair Witch favourites of FF, which include Crowsnest, Apollo 18 and the Grave Encounters movies. The duology is unprecedented proof of that rare wonder: the sequel that lives up to its original. Writers/directors The Vicious Brothers are very much my kind of filmmakers: my generation, grungy as fuck, and worshippers of all good horror. They are the sort of dedicated and learned auteurs that you would be happy to see succeed, and they did exactly that with the Grave Encounters films.

"It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"

In a throwback to the format of the very first FF movie Cannibal Holocaust, the footage that constitutes the main narrative of the movie is set to a realistic framework, in which a TV producer explains to a documentary camera that the following picture was compiled from 76 hours of footage found after the disappearance of his crew on a job at an abandoned and supposedly haunted asylum. The show is Grave Encounters, and it is basically Ghost Hunters, as depicted by South Park ("It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"). Host Lance Preston and his colleagues pout at the camera, desperately try to look hard, and contrive non-existant ghostly experience, while we see their many outtakes in which their disbelief in the paranormal and generally unprofessional attitude is made evident.

They have arranged to spend the night - eight hours - locked in Collingwood Asylum, with the cooperation of the building's caretaker, who chains the door from the outside, and promises to return for them in the morning (how is this very notion somehow unsettling?). For a while they go about their media-whore jobs, but they inevitably soon come to realise that the ghosts they have spent five previous episodes simulating do actually exist, and they are none too satisfied with this revelation.

If you can't figure what happens in the next two seconds, you
have not seen a movie this side of the millennium.

I have yet to investigate any special features on my DVD, but have previously watched behind-the-scenes featurettes on the sequel, and it is very insightful. One of the main objectives that the Vicious Brothers had was that the many old horror tropes would be null and void in their line of narrative.

Like a souped up 1408, the asylum is an entity in itself, and shifts its shape to fuck with its captives. Every supposed escape and exit leads to another dark corridor. When 'rules' no longer apply, we the audience are unable to judge the characters' choices, because there is basically no way out and no way to fight. It is an inescapable nightmare, and this makes for a brilliantly tense viewing experience.

Jaws 2 (1978)

After I had discovered Jaws, my Pop told me and my sister about Jaws 2 and Jaws 3. A good seven or

eight years later, he and his wife were at the beginning of an unprecedented divorce, and Pop took us to HMV to buy some DVDs to keep us occupied while he and his wife had terrible post-marital discussions (true story). We chose Jaws 2, Jaws 3 and Billy Elliot. I watched Jaws 2 a lot as an adolescent, and finally got a cheap copy of it this weekend, having burnt out the old copy years ago, and watched it for the first time with actual attention. You see, as a kid, I watched all of the Jaws movies, and pretty much zoned out during all of the long boring talky bits, and came back when the shark appeared. As I matured, I came to appreciate all the discreet details that made Jaws what it was, and in a lot of important ways, made Jaws 2 an almost worthy sequel.

Jeannot Szwarc directs this sequel (Spielberg's resistance to sequels of his own work, excepted only with The Lost World: Jurassic Park II, is famous), and his employment on this picture went down as somewhat controversial; Roy Scheider, forced into reprising Martin Brody by his five-picture contract with Universal, had an infamously aggressive working relationship with Szwarc, who comes across as a rather stubborn director to work with. But in the face of it all, Szwarc does a pretty sterling job of crafting a movie that feels like a natural extension of Spielberg's, with similar visuals, themes and a great musical contribution, again, by John Williams.

Four years after the ordeal on Amity Island, two divers are expired by an unseen aquatic evil, while their huge underwater camera spontaneously clicks its own shutter multiple times. Martin Brody is past his glory days as the hero of Amity, and doing his best to be a good chief to the Island, and a good husband to Ellen (Lorraine Gary), who is now on the town council and trying to sell the place to tourists. When several cool gory killings take place, and photos from that magic diver camera get developed, Brody becomes convinced that a shark is terrorising the Island once again, much to the repetitive and monumentally unwise denial of the incorrigible Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who apparently didn't learn his lesson back in 1975.

Meanwhile, Brody's son Michael is now a high schooler, and the local teens enjoy a cruising culture in boats the way most kids do in cars, making them the perfect bait for the latest great white lined up to feast upon some New England chowder. As with Jaws, Szwarc allows a good half of the movie to be allocated to setting scene and establishing characters, making both adults and teens surprisingly well-rounded characters. There are a good dozen teenagers who set out on doomed boat journeys, all of whom are very realistic, both in looks and in performances. Ann Dusenberry and Donna Wilkes, as Tina and Jackie respectively, are particular standouts in conveying histeria.

In spite of some silly moments - including the one in which the hydraulic innards of the pursuing

shark are very obviously visible - Jaws 2 is a solid picture, and marks the finish line of the success of the franchise. Joe Alves, who served as production designer on the first two Jaws movies and did an excellent job both times, went on to helm Jaws 3 as director, and somehow turned out one of the stupidest, most laughable pictures in movie history. Watching Jaws 2 and being reminded of Alves' involvement, I wonder where the hell it all went wrong for him. I must review Jaws 3 sometime in order to elaborate on exactly why it is such a dumb movie. I knew it when I was 13, and I definitely know it now.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

REVIEW
THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2

Any reader of my stuff knows of my love for Wes Craven’s work, in particular his directorial debut Last House on the Left, which is my favourite horror ever. Any reader of my stuff also knows that the ‘70s are my time, and how many articles of that decade are very much up my street. Craven’s second horror The Hills Have Eyes (1977) came after an unsuccessful attempt to break out of the indie horror genre, and established him in the genre, at least until A Nightmare on Elm Street. People seem to completely forget my beloved Last House, which stings so much as it still comes across as Craven’s strongest movie ever. The remake of The Hills Have Eyes was a very passable noughties horror, made stronger by the likes of Ted Levine (AKA Buffalo Bill), but a patch on the original, which boasted teenage boys in short-shorts doing somersaults and Michael Berryman’s establishment into the horror genre, making the most of his genetic disorder.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a mediocre effort, particularly by Craven’s standard. Funny thing is, this one has major Craven power, with Wes and his son Jonathan (the kid whose balloon Krug pops with his cigar in Last House), concocting the script within a month. Unfortunately, this boast is evident. Wes wrote Last House in a similar timeframe, and allowing all of the admitted ad-lib that went on on-set, it was a far stronger script, and picture in general, back in 1971, with no permits, a meagre drip-fed budget, and no professional credentials. This isn’t to say, though, that The Hills 2 isn’t enjoyable.

I first saw this movie on late night TV years ago, and recently bought it in a cheap DVD shop. I suppose I spoiled the viewing pleasure a little by watching the Making Of featurette (a pathetic 12-odd-minute thing) before the actual film, thereby revealing all of the best jump scares. But this is a good starting point in a horror review – this movie relies a lot on jump scares, far more than the subgenre generally dictates. Hillbilly cannibals were practically invented by Craven, and have gone on to enjoy a prolific, decades-long career in horror, but the FX and utter grossness that they usually entail relieve the need for jump scares: being hunted down by super-strong beings who are also fuck-ugly is enough to put anybody’s teeth on edge.

A synopsis: National Guard recruits are training in the desert of New Mexico where they come across an abandoned camp that was supposed to have people in it, and a mysterious mirror reflecting SOS signals from the mountaintop. The original remake already detailed in its admittedly effective credit sequence the reckless nuclear testing that took place in this area and the devastating effect it had on the remaining occupants of the vicinity, but of course, these are horror characters who have never even heard of a horror movie, so clichés of the field are water off a duck’s back. I needn’t elaborate on the plot from here.

What I will say is that this is a very modern and diluted version of the Hills Have Eyes concept, and I guess Wes knew that when he volunteered his services to a studio in need of a lucrative movie franchise. Money makes the world go round, mein herr. The original movie, and even the remake, did not jump ship for the phoney paranormal technique, but built a tangible atmosphere of dread and fear. This remake should have done the same.

“Oh, my son and I could write that in a month,” quoth Wes to the production studio in need of a cash cow. I regret to say that this movie is unworthy of Craven. True, my like for his work grew lesser as his budget and mainstream acclaim grew, but The Hills 2 is so generic that it could have been one of those many debuts by an ‘80s kid filmmaker that grew up on Freddy.

Effects and make-up are good, as are sets when you find out what is real and what isn’t. The cast and crew alike endured unpleasant conditions to churn out a movie that is, to quote Lita Ford, ‘middle of the road, pansy-ass shit’. It is just one of those movies that teenagers for years to come will say, ‘Oh, how about this?’ to. A sleepover cult favourite for the future perhaps, but a blip on the modern horror landscape for now, it certainly is.

Jaws 3 (1983)

Where did it all go wrong for Joe Alves? His visual work was central to the success of Jaws and, to a considerable extent, Jaws 2. When Jaws 3 came around he landed the director's chair, and turned out a movie that is still hailed as one of the worst ever. It's questionable how much of this is his fault: the plot is silly, the script is terrible, and the visuals are some of the worst I have seen in any movie, but as director, it is all 'his' ideal, so officially he must take some of the heat for this.

SeaWorld's Worst Dolphin Feeder 1983

Michael Brody, son of Chief Martin and Ellen, and his little brother Sean, are the two common threads that run through the entire franchise, and despite all their collective trauma at the fins of killer sharks, only one of them seems to show any signs of wear and tear. Michael (this time Dennis Quaid) works in some senior role or other at SeaWorld, but seems to know nothing of even basic aquatic science, and can't even drop a fish right. His girlfriend Katherine is a marine biologist at the park, and when he lands a dream job, he implores Kat to 'give up your life and follow me'. Cute guy!

For whatever reason, Sean comes to visit, and the three get on like a house on fire, hanging in a local bar and indulging in plenty of 'champagne of the working classes' (i.e. beer). I'm not sure just how 'working class' being a doctor of marine biology is, but it's a fun analogy nonetheless! Sean meets a girl, Kelly (Lea Thompson), a water-skiier at Seaworld, and they hit it off.

Meanwhile, SeaWorld has been madeover since being taken over by business moghul Calvin Bouchard (Lou Gossett Jr.) and is now being reopened to the public to much media attention, following once again the classic Jaws theme of mass hysteria under high public scrutiny. SeaWorld is on the ocean, with pretty flimsy metal gates keeping the open water off-limits...or so we think! For whatever reason, a shark slips through the gate one night and finds itself locked in an all-you-can-eat buffet!

But this isn't any great white shark - this is a naturally-reared, wild North Atlantic great white shark...and it's up the duff! ('Oh, she was such a nice shark - how does that happen?!') First she takes out some SeaWorld operative who is charged with closing that damn gate, and then two rascals who sneak onto the property and venture out in the pissiest little rubber dinghy you ever saw! Credit to the fish, it takes out said dinghy in record time.

As one might imagine, all hell breaks loose when it becomes evident to SeaWorld guests that a killer shark is after them, causing Michael to crash no fewer than three vehicles, ruin a perfectly good picnic, and punch a man to carjack his quadbike - all in an effort to help! The second half's many underwater sequences pick all the stitches on the first half. Any veterans will recall that Jaws 3 was released as Jaws 3D, and the early-'80s film technology that went into achieving that brought overall production quality back several decades. Consider, for example, this CGI shot of a mini submersible turning in the water, with half of the craft dissolving as it goes:

Sadly for Alves, most of the live-action above-surface footage scrubs up into an almost-passable movie. Monster movies don't often require the laws of science to apply, but Jaws 3 takes the cake. As any good shark fan knows from Deep Blue Sea, sharks cannot swim backwards as it causes water to flood their gills and drown them. This young hussy of a shark, however, butt-slams her way through a bolted cage and proceeds to escape it backwards. She then goes on to roar underwater (an inaccuracy Jaws the Revenge took to another level by roaring out of water). Physical bloopers are scattered throughout the movie, while bad dialogue and puzzling theories throw us further off course.

Back when I first saw Jaws 3, at the age of 13, I thought it was a shit movie, and enjoyed taking the piss out of it with my family. As with Jaws 2, my DVD copy from back in the day got burned out many moons ago, so I bought a new copy the other day. I still think it is a shit movie, and it is not often that I have come to this conclusion after twelve-odd years of film education. I am often able to identify redeeming features in bad movies, but Jaws 3 has so very few, and if nothing else, it is good for the movie's long-term health for me to promote it as a shit movie that is worth seeing. It is a good laugh, but it is no Jaws.