You mean, we’re all going to turn into Johnny Depp? No thanks.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching a bunch of SF movies dealing with the next step in humanity’s evolution. What surprised me the most was how upbeat and apocalyptic the response seemed to be to this. There’s nothing to be frightened of because it will be something truly incredible: the tipping point where we become as gods in the Singularity or digital rapture. I wanted to include my thoughts on Demon Seed just to provide an example of what an earlier generation (my own) thought about the wedding of humanity with our technology. In any event, I once again got more political than I probably should have, but that’s the fun part of having a blog. Here are the films I looked at.

Demon Seed (1977)
Limitless (2011)
Her (2013)
Lucy (2014)
Transcendence (2014)
Morgan (2016)

Another neighbourhood gone straight to hell.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve added reviews of a couple of horror movies about youth run wild: Them (2006) and Citadel (2012). Ciarán Foy, the writer-director of Citadel refers to this genre as “hoodie horror,” but this doesn’t seem to be a label that has achieved a lot of traction yet. I suspect it goes back to films like Don’t Look Now and The Brood, though in Don’t Look Now it’s a hooded raincoat and in The Brood the little monsters are wearing hooded snowsuits and pyjamas. Today, the hoodie is a class marker, and the movies are more about juvenile delinquency than the supernatural. The hood is short for a ‘hood full of hoodlums. But either way, the hood retains a power to threaten. Personally, I just hate to see kids driving with their hoods pulled up over their heads. What is this doing to their peripheral vision?

This never ends the way you want it to.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching the Taken trilogy: Taken (2008), Taken 2 (2012), and Taken 3 (2014). This was a surprise franchise hit for which I have no good explanation, since I don’t think any one of them is worth watching. That said, I did think the third was the best, which I believe is a minority critical opinion. Not that I thought the third one was good, just that the first two were both crap.

Melt, motherfucker, melt!

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching a bunch of movies dealing with the theme of the mad artist who makes wax sculptures out of his victims. The ball got rolling with Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), which was a bit of a studio pot-boiler released without any great expectations. The source story had never even been published. With House of Wax (1953), however, the idea received its classic expression. They couldn’t really miss casting Vincent Price as the demented and disfigured sculptor. I then have some notes on a couple of cheap quickies — Nightmare in Wax (1969) and Crucible of Terror (1971) — that are nevertheless of some interest, with Crucible of Terror being well worth checking out just as a curiosity. Finally, I look at House of Wax (2005), probably best known today for being the one with Paris Hilton in it. She gets a pipe driven through her head. Though not a great movie, I was actually pleasantly surprised by this one, especially with the melting museum at the end. Apparently this caused some problems during production, with a big part of the Australian studio burning down and a subsequent lawsuit. That’s unfortunate, but I have to say it looks great.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching three adaptations (I use the word loosely) of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers.” Of course, I just watched them together because they’re all included in Criterion’s DVD package. Robert Siodmak’s 1946 version is classic noir, and very good. For some reason Andrei Tarkovsky’s student film is the closest to the source. I’m not sure if he’d seen Siodmak’s movie. Finally, Don Siegel’s 1964 version, originally planned as a TV movie, has some interesting credits but struck me as a pretty lousy flick. It gave Lee Marvin a nice warm-up for Point Blank though.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been looking at a couple of movies about guys who experience some excessive shrinkage. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), based on Richard Matheson’s classic novel The Shrinking Man, is a fun adventure story but also a surprisingly serious meditation on man’s place in the universe. I’m still not sure how they got away with that ending. Ant-Man (2015), on the other hand, is the usual Marvel fare, only sillier.

Holmes, getting some help from Poe.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve added notes on a couple of adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.” First up is Le Trésor de Musgrave (1912), which is, surprisingly, the most faithful to Conan Doyle’s story, despite being a silent short. Then we have Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), which is a much freer interpretation but still a great movie in its own right.

It’s more complicated than you think, Larry.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching a bunch of werewolf movies lately. The werewolf, or wolf man, has proven to be a durable movie monster, in large part due to his plasticity. He can be mostly wolf or mostly man, sympathetic or wholly evil, as the case requires. The basic idea is that there’s something violent and predatory latent within all of us (or at lest all men, since it’s mostly a male phenomenon). Under the right circumstances the beast will out. Haven’t we all felt that way, every once in a full moon?

Anyway, here’s the list:

Werewolf of London (1935)
The Wolf Man (1941)
The Undying Monster (1942)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
House of Frankenstein (1944)
House of Dracula (1945)
She-Wolf of London (1946)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
The Beast Must Die (1974)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
The Howling (1981)
Wolfen (1981)
Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)
Silver Bullet (1985)
Bad Moon (1996)
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)
Ginger Snaps (2000)
Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)
Dog Soldiers (2002)
Underworld (2003)
Underworld: Evolution (2006)
The Wolfman (2010)
Wer (2013)
Late Phases (2014)
WolfCop (2014)
Howl (2015)

Sometimes a banana is just a banana. But not in this case.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve posted my notes on Behind the Green Door (1972), which finishes up my take on the trilogy of films that all came out within a year of each other and defined the short-lived phenomenon of “porno chic.” (The other two films, both directed by Gerard Damiano, are Deep Throat (1972) and Devil in Miss Jones (1973).)

At the time it was thought that porno chic heralded the coming mainstreaming of porn, which is something that didn’t happen. In part because the movies themselves just weren’t very good. Deep Throat in particular is dreadful. Devil in Miss Jones, however, is still worth watching and Behind the Green Door, while no longer a cult film, has some historical interest.

Not as much fun as it looks. And it doesn’t look like fun.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve finished posting my notes on Tom Six’s three Human Centipede movies: First Sequence, Full Sequence, and Final Sequence. These movies are notorious for being among the most tasteless and disgusting ever made, though that’s a distinction we can expect will fade with time. I thought it was interesting that Six did at least try to make three very different movies, not just in terms of subject matter but also in tone, linked in a meta-cinema way. Unfortunately, I also thought the series went downhill (or, to mix metaphors, off the rails entirely), and that the third instalment deserves its reputation as one of the worst movies of the decade. Where do we go from here?