The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Hunk (1987)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  If the films of that decade are any indication, Nerds were everywhere in 1980s America. Whether they were getting revenge in some movies, supplying comic relief in countless others, or just appearing as big-glasses-and-suspenders scene dressing, the Nerd was inescapable. Thanks to contemporary advances in technology, the concept of the Computer Nerd was quickly becoming a familiar stereotype for screenwriters to cash in on. Hunk is one such film, and it’s not hard to imagine what the pitch meeting was like: “It’s like Bedazzled meets Revenge of the Nerds!”

  Hunk Golden (John Allen Nelson) has a problem. He goes to see a therapist about it, although understandably she is confused when Hunk begins by informing her he is not the popular, handsome Hunk Golden, but is in fact Bradley Brinkman. As Hunk tells his story, the film goes back to introduce us to Bradley (Steve Levitt), a lonely, overworked Computer Nerd. His boss has given Bradley an ultimatum: come up with a best-selling computer program in record time, or get fired. Alone in the office and frustrated at his terminal case of programmers’ block, Bradley mutters those magic words: “I’d sell my soul for (x).” In this case, x = bestselling computer program. Immediately after the words leave his mouth, Bradley’s computer freaks out and a brilliant productivity program writes itself before his very eyes.

  Yes, Bradley has unwittingly traded his soul for a hot new computer program. But that’s just the start. He’s soon visited by O’Brien (Deborah Shelton), a seductive saleswoman who offers Bradley a limited-time offer: Bradley can cash in his nerd chips and become handsome, rich, and famous. Even better, there’s a trial period! If Bradley is not satisfied with his new life as a Hunk, he can change back to boring old Bradley with no strings attached. Bradley takes the offer and wakes up the next day in the body of Hunk Golden, and so the race is on for O’Brien to convince him to stay in Hunk’s body for the rest of his life so that Dr. D (James Coco) can claim Bradley’s soul when he dies.

  Hunk ‘s biggest problem is its pacing. At over 100 minutes, it’s at least 20 minutes too long. The setup takes what seems like ages, and the film doesn’t really get interesting until the point when Bradley finally turns into Hunk. It seems like the producers knew this was a problem, as the “Hunk goes to the therapist” part of the film feels awkwardly grafted on later, perhaps to reassure people that there would actually be a Hunk in the movie at some point. The film’s structure introduces Hunk right away, but leaves his face partially shadowed– do they think we don’t know who he is? It’s an awkward start, and it sets the tone for the rest of the film.

  Some of the blame for the dragging pace is no doubt due to James Coco’s appearance as Dr. D. It’s pretty rare for a Crown International film to feature a name actor of any stature, and they clearly wanted to get their money’s worth by putting him in the film as much as possible. This was one of the actor’s last roles, but sadly it doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself very much. The audience might very well feel the same way as they sit and watch the film drag along to its inevitable conclusion. Perhaps the best part of Hunk is the fact that Steve Levitt, the guy who plays Bradley, has a voice that is almost identical to that of David Wain. If you close your eyes for the scenes he’s in, you may be momentarily tricked into thinking this is a Wet Hot American Summer-style parody of awful 80′s computer nerd movies.

  Hypothermia (2010)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 2 October 2012

  Larry Fessenden has been a godsend to American independent horror. Through his work with Glass Eye Pix and Scareflix, he has helped many interesting new talents find a place in the crowded indie horror scene. One of the most interesting of these is James Felix McKenney, writer/director of the modern lo-fi sci-fi classic Automatons and the amazing Satan Hates You. The latest release from Scareflix is McKenney’s Hypothermia, which while not quite as unique as his last few films, is still an interesting take on some familiar material.

  Ray Pelletier (Michael Rooker) is on an ice fishing vacation with his wife Helen (Blanche Baker), their son David (Benjamin Forster) and David’s girlfriend Gina (Amy Chang). Their quiet vacation hits a couple of snags when Ray falls into a hole in the ice and then later when their fishing is interrupted by the appearance of Steve Cote (Don Wood) and his son Stevie Jr. (Greg Finley). The Pelletiers are fishing with a simple wooden wind blocker and old-fashioned tackle and equipment, but Steve and his son roll out onto the ice with a full trailer that looks more like a hotel room than a fishing shack. The Pelletiers strangely don’t have as much as a nibble on their lines all day, and Steve invites them over for a beer in his trailer.

  The possible reason for the lack of fish soon becomes apparent when a large animal is seen swimming under the ice near the Cotes’s snowmobiles, and Stevie Jr. drills a huge hole so he and his father can catch and kill whatever it is. Unfortunately for everyone, it’s not just a big fish, but a man-sized monster that is smart and deadly both above and below the ice. Soon the Pelletiers and Cotes are trapped out on the lake in the trailer while the creature waits outside. With their generator running out of energy and the injured running out of time, the chances of anyone making it to daylight begin to look grim.

  Hypothermia is mostly concerned with the relationships between its characters, and the natural chemistry between the actors playing the Pelletiers makes them a believable family. This is especially impressive as McKenney trims the action of the film down to the bone, with a running time of just over 72 minutes including opening and ending credits. As sympathetic as the Pelletiers are, Steve feels more like a cartoon character, although a very entertaining one as played by Don Wood (who turned in a spectacular lead performance in Satan Hates You). McKenney doesn’t skimp on the gore; the aftermath of the creature’s attacks is gruesome and convincing, even if the creature itself betrays the films low budget. Hypothermia is a lean, suspenseful horror show, and well worth a look.

  I Am a Ghost (2012)

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 28 May 2014

  Too often when independent filmmakers decide to make a horror film with a tiny budget, they turn to the old standards: the slasher and the zombie movie. Worthwhile zombie movies are actually extremely difficult to turn out on a small budget, although it is certainly possible. Slashers seem like they would be even easier to pull off, but again making a slasher movie worth watching is a lot harder than it looks. It’s always fun to see a filmmaker do something interesting with these old standbys, but it’s more exciting to see someone take a unique approach to something unexpected and/or create something genuinely original. It is exceptionally rare to find a film of any budget that really feels like something new, and so when a film comes along like I Am a Ghost, it is a special occasion indeed.

  Emily (Anna Ishida) goes through the same routine every day. She wakes up, makes breakfast, walks to the store to pick up groceries, cleans around the house, etc. One day she wanders into a room and is frightened by a disembodied voice speaking to her. This voice is Sylvia (Jeannie Barroga), a medium. Emily learns that she is a ghost haunting her home. Sylvia has been brought in by the family who currently owns the house to help Emily transition to “the next place,” but something is keeping Emily trapped in the house. Emily and Sylvia strike up a tentative rapport, with Sylvia trying to work with Emily to learn what it is that prevents her from leaving the house, but each time the communication between Emily and Sylvia is broken, Sylvia has to start all over again convincing Emily of her situation, and whatever dark secret is buried in Emily’s past is determined to stay hidden.

  This simple setup is ingenious for a micro budget feature: Emily is practically the only character the audience ever sees, and confining the action almost entirely to the interior of the house requires only one good location. This economical approach has its hazards, though, namely that it relies entirely on just a few actors to keep the audience engaged. Fortunately for writer/director H.P. Mendoza, Anna Ishida is more than capable
of carrying the film. She is excellent as Emily, a well drawn, compelling character who is in a terrifying situation. Her performance is especially impressive given the film’s fractured, disjointed structure. For a long stretch of the first section of the film, the audience watches Emily go through her daily routine with cuts to black and jumps through the timeline of the day with no explanation. We see her do the same things over and over again exactly the same way in short snippets of time until she is interrupted by Sylvia, which comes as a major shock both for Emily and for the audience, who have fallen into the rhythm of her strange situation.

  The other major concern in such a small production is the location, and this one does not disappoint. The rooms of the house are beautifully designed and decorated, but over time the house becomes increasingly claustrophobic (a feeling enforced by the black frame around the image) and oppressive. The camera’s lingering on the details of the house and the circular structure of Emily’s haunting recall Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, one of the greatest (often unacknowledged) “haunted house” films ever made. We watch Emily wander through this beautiful space, trapped, repeating her actions with no knowledge that she is running an endless loop. Ishida’s performance and the absolutely perfect location are the two foundations on which I Am a Ghost is built, and Mendoza’s willingness to explore what this experience must be like from the ghost’s perspective—even if that means the film’s structure is somewhat alienating at first—is exciting.

  As refreshing as the film is, it’s not quite perfect. Jeannie Barroga’s voiceover work as Sylvia is mostly fine, but it is sometimes the weak spot in some of the more emotionally difficult scenes. Ishida’s performance is great, but Emily occasionally feels a bit too modern for a character that supposedly lived well over a hundred years ago. There are a few effects near the end that don’t quite work the way they were probably meant to. Still, these are truly nitpicks in what is overall one of the most unique and artful independent films of any genre to come along in recent memory. I Am a Ghost is the kind of film that can only come from adventurous filmmakers working with limited means, and it instantly marks writer/director H.P. Mendoza as a talent to watch.

  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (2009)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 26 January 2010

  Thanks, Internet. If it weren’t for Tucker Max’s inexplicably popular blog, we never would have heard of him. And, in turn, thanks to that blog’s popularity, he never would have gotten a book deal to turn his blog into the New York Times Bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a handy print version of said blog for people who didn’t feel like having tuckermax.com show up in their browser histories. Of course, any film that’s a New York Times Bestseller is pretty much automatically up for a film adaptation, and this was no different. So thanks, Internet, for the worst movie of 2009. This is all your fault.

  For those of you lucky enough to have no idea who Tucker Max is, here’s a quick refresher: he’s a total ass who posts blog entries about drinking himself stupid and getting in wacky adventures, usually involving the opposite sex, poop, vomit, urine, the police, video cameras, and/or all of the above. Reading his endless posts is like getting a letter from some random frat guy you always hated– they never end with him dying or going to jail, so there’s no real satisfaction to be derived from them. I suppose any defense of the man would claim that he always comes out looking like a fool, which is true, but not in any meaningful way. The short version of his entire web site is basically “I got totally FUCKED UP and did SOME STUPID SHIT, isn’t that AWESOME?”

  Movies have certainly been built out of less, but in this case someone in the dark offices from whence this rough beast was conceived decided that the movie adaptation was going to need a stronger storyline. So instead of just a string of random adventures, the film puts Tucker and his bros in a prototypical bachelor party/last fling before one of them gets married. And then drags it out for an hour and forty-five minutes.

  Tucker (Matt Czuchry, perhaps best known as “Logan” from TV’s Gilmore Girls) decides that he wants to take his best friend Dan (Geoff Stults, perhaps best known as “Ben” from TV’s Seventh Heaven) to a strip club called Avarice for his bachelor party. The club is located three hours away, but Tucker claims it will be worth it because the strippers allow clients to touch them. In one particularly unbelievable scene, Tucker happily explains this reasoning to Dan’s fiancee Kristy (Keri Lynn Pratt). If the fact that Tucker has friends and is smarter than he acts (as depicted in a painfully unfunny classroom scene) hasn’t stretched your sense of disbelief yet, the fact that Kristy is not all that concerned that her husband-to-be is driving three hours away to touch some strippers should finish the job.

  Before they leave, though, Tucker and Dan have to pick up their other friend Drew (Jesse Bradford, aka Bizarro World Justin Theroux). Drew caught his last girlfriend giving oral sex to the rapper Grillionaire (played by Paul Wall), and now uses the word “whore” in almost every sentence he speaks. This is not the sort of guy anyone would bring along for a good time, and he proves it. In one scene, he tells one girl if she doesn’t leave him alone he’ll “gut you and grind you into pig slop,” and tells another that he’ll “carve another fuckhole in your torso.”

  Why aren’t you laughing?

  Seriously, this is all just too depressing to think about. “Hijinks” include Tucker having sex with a deaf woman and a “midget stripper,” Dan elbowing a stripper in the face and getting thrown in jail for public urination, and Drew somehow making a romantic connection with a stripper who has a little boy by teaching the kid plastic soldier military tactics and losing a Halo contest to her. There’s also a scene featuring possibly the most realistic violent diarrhea ever committed to film. That’s probably the nicest thing I can say about this movie: you’re never going to see a more realistic version of a guy spraying liquid shit out of the back of his tighty whities in a major motion picture. Take that, Avatar.

  The only solace is that the film was such a spectacular failure at the box office that no one would ever consider a sequel. How this sub-Comedy Central Original made its way into any theaters is utterly baffling. Stupid, ugly, misogynistic and just disgusting, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is one of the most jaw-droppingly misguided comedies in recent memory. God help us all.

  I, Madman (1989)

  Originally published on the Horror 101 with Dr. AC blog 22 July 2015

  This is a very good time to be a fan of genre/exploitation cinema, which is ironic considering how grim things looked even just a few years ago. DVD sales have been on the decline for years and Blu-ray hasn't fared any better, and it seemed the death of physical media would be upon us any day. But several home video imprints have appeared on the scene giving long-overdue releases to some fan favorites and lost gems alike. Scream Factory has particularly been on a winning streak with their slate of horror releases, and their latest Blu-ray offering finally brings cult favorite I, Madman home in the presentation it deserves.

  Virginia (Jenny Wright) works in a used bookstore, and when an estate comes in she picks up a curious old pulp horror novel titled Much of Madness, More of Sin by Malcolm Brand, an author she has never heard of before. The book scares her enough to call her new police detective boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) over to her apartment to keep her company, but despite its graphic violence and macabre story of mad science and murder, she finds herself drawn to Brand's passionate prose style. She discovers that Brand only published one other book entitled I, Madman, and after failing to find it in the books from the estate, a copy mysteriously appears at her apartment. Virginia starts reading but finds the book considerably more disturbing than Brand's previous novel, and soon she begins seeing the villainous monster from the book appearing in real life.

  Even worse, the monster murders a woman from Virginia's acting class in a manner lifted directly from the book. After a second grisly murder, Virginia realizes the killer is Brand himself (Randall William Cook, also
the film's visual effects supervisor), somehow brought back to life by her reading of the books and on a mission to re-enact the events of I, Madman. When Virginia tells Richard what she thinks is happening, he's naturally skeptical, but as the bodies pile up the police get desperate enough to pursue any possible leads. But how can the police catch a seemingly omniscient first-person narrator? Will Virginia be able to find a way to stop him before he gets to the end of the book, and consequently her life?

  Director Takács is probably best known as the director of the 1987 "Satanic panic" classic The Gate, in which a young Stephen Dorff and his friend accidentally open a portal to Hell, unleashing an army of pint-sized stop-motion demons on a quiet suburban neighborhood. Following the success of that film, Takács was approached to do numerous similar projects, but wisely chose to go in a completely different direction. Whereas The Gate was a goofy PG-13 teen horror film, I, Madman is decidedly R-rated and geared toward adults. It's still fun (and a very familiar-looking stop-motion monster makes a few appearances), but it trades in its cast of teenagers for adults and its Harryhausen-esque monsters for an adult menaced by a gruesome supernatural stalker. Unsurprisingly, the practical effects and makeup are mostly very effective, the best of which being the killer's patchwork features carved from his victims and grafted crudely onto his own head.