While searching for new and better components for his machine, Cody is referred to Tom (Matthew Feeney), an electrician who builds solar power convertors as a side business. Tom, as it happens, is slowly coming to terms with his own loss. His wife Elizabeth (Katrina Hawley) passed away six years ago, and now he is tentatively entering into a relationship with Becca (Ellen Karsten). After some unsettling experiences, Tom uses an EMF meter to discover the source of energy he has discovered is being put back into the power lines, leading him directly to Cody and his machine. Which, the men discover, works much better than Cody could have imagined.
Phasma Ex Machina is a fascinating hybrid of science fiction, low-key indie relationship drama, and subtle horror. The film builds slowly toward its creepy third act, and director Osterman wisely understates most of the scares. Further, the fact that some of the most unsettling moments in the film happen in broad daylight only adds to their power and poignancy. Perhaps the film’s greatest strength is in its portrayal of what ordinary people might do under inexplicable circumstances (helped tremendously by excellent lead performances by Andreev and Feeney), and its heartbreaking observation that sometimes getting what we most want may be the worst thing that can happen to us. Phasma Ex Machinais one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and is the best filmmaking debut I’ve seen in quite some time.
Pick-Up (1975)
Originally published on Criticplanet.org
If you don’t already have a violent hatred for hippies, watching Pick-Up should fix that problem for you. Despite the fact that it is easily one of the worst of the Crown International Pictures films I have watched so far, I actually own four copies of it. For some reason, this damned movie finds its way onto more sets than seemingly any other film in the Crown International catalog. It’s in the Drive-in Cult Classics Volume 1 set, the After Dark Thrillers set, and most recently the Big Screen Bombshells collection. Why are the people who compile these sets so insistent on inflicting Pick-Up on audiences? Not cool at all, you guys.
Setting the tone for the film, the very first image on the screen is an out-of-focus extreme close-up of a man’s belt buckle. The image comes into focus, the man unbuttons his fly, and the camera cuts to a medium shot of our hero Chuck (Alan Long) taking a piss on the side of an RV. He finishes up, turns around, and spots a couple of hippie girls in the tall grass. Carol (Jill Senter) is the excitable, social one who carries around a stuffed animal to denote her childlike innocence. Maureen (Gini Eastwood) is the quiet weirdo who informs Carol they can’t hitch a ride with Chuck because he’s an Aries. Carol insists because she “digs” Chuck, and Maureen reluctantly agrees, although she warns Carol that it will be “a bad trip.”
Chuck has the RV because he is delivering it to someone, so of course he decides to take a shortcut through some Florida swampland after picking up Carol and Maureen, and in short order they’re lost and the RV is stuck. Unfortunately, because this is before the age of cell phones and because they’re stupid hippies, the three of them decide to just hang out in the van instead of trying to go find help and get the RV out of the swamp and back on its way to its rightful owner. Carol jumps Chuck’s bones in short order, but Maureen is more interested in wandering around the swamp and tripping. She finds (or hallucinates) a weird altar where she relives some trauma while Carol has flashbacks while baring her soul to Chuck. A politician somehow finds his way to the van and lightens the mood for a couple of minutes, then it’s back to the tripping and crazy junk, including an evil clown, because why not.
Pick-Up ends the only sensible way it possibly could: (SPOILER!) Maureen finally gets over her sexual hang-ups and has sex with Chuck while Carol is hunted down, gang-raped and murdered in the swamp. Maureen sees Carol’s hand sticking out of the water, holding her stuffed animal, and screams. The echoes of her screams fade into Maureen opening her eyes at the beginning of the movie, warning Carol that they can’t go with Chuck because it will be “a bad trip.” They get in the RV again. The end. This, of course, means that working out her sexual issues means more to Maureen than keeping her friend Carol alive, since that is the apparent trade-off involved in hitching the ride with Chuck. Too bad for Carol, I guess, and even worse for anyone who just sat through that whole movie. Stupid hippies.
Pineapple Express (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 7 August 2008
On paper, Pineapple Express sounds like an iffy proposition: a Judd Apatow-produced stoner action comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco and directed by David Gordon Green. David Gordon Green, as in the George Washington David Gordon Green. It’s a weird, unexpected choice of directors, a huge gamble, but it absolutely works. With a great cast and excellent writing, Pineapple Express continually flirts with and subverts action comedy clichés and is all the better for it. It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year.
Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, a perpetually-stoned Process Server dating Angie (Amber Heard), a high-school senior. Angie is pressing for Dale to meet her parents, but Dale is unsurprisingly commitment-phobic, more interested in dreaming of being a talk radio host and trying not to spend too much time with his pot dealer Saul (James Franco). One night while waiting to serve papers, Dale sees his target Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and female police officer Carol (Rosie Perez) execute a man in front of a picture window. Panicked, Dale runs to the only person he can think of who might be able to help: Saul. Ted and Carol think that Denton and Saul are working for a rival Asian gang, and so send a couple of thugs (Craig Robinson and Kevin Corrigan) to track them down. The film plays out in a series of hilarious and unexpected scenes, including a nature walk with Dale and Saul and some truly ingenious dialogue between the two thugs chasing them down. In a film about mostly despicable characters, just about everyone is actually very likeable. This is no doubt due to Green’s loose direction, allowing for a lot of great character moments for which a standard action comedy wouldn’t have time.
The fact that the cast is fantastic across the board also helps. Rogen and Franco have great comic chemistry together, reunited on-screen for the first time since Freaks and Geeks. Craig Robinson and Kevin Corrigan are both great as longtime coworkers who seem to be getting tired of each other rather than falling into a comfortable routine, and Gary Cole is amazing but (as usual) doesn’t get nearly enough screen time. Danny McBride deserves special mention as Red, Saul’s drug supplier and the link between him and Jones. Hell, even Rosie Perez is watchable in this film!
The action scenes follow the dialogue scenes: generally, these are not characters who are used to dealing with car chases and guns, and they mostly act like it. They’re clumsy and awkward, and they often tend to hurt themselves more than anyone else. The violence is mostly kept at action-comedy remove, except for a few bits where some graphic effects are played for slapstick. For the most part, though, the violence is about on par with the ’80s buddy comedies the film is clearly emulating and paying tribute. A few scenes end with freeze-frames and wipes that are perfectly complemented by the ’70s-inspired electronics in the score by Graeme Revell.
And so, even though Pineapple Express might seem like a strange proposal on paper, the finished product is one of the best major-studio films of the year. God only knows what Apatow and company might come up with next, but if they’re willing to gamble to come up with something this great, I know I’ll be looking forward to it.
The Pink Hotel (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 28 November 2010
The feature debuts of many filmmakers often bear the stamp of their primary influences, from both their personal lives and their favorite filmmakers. The former is most obvious when the filmmaker takes the old advice to “write (or, perhaps, direct) what you know,” leading many first-time writer/directors to tackle a story based on their own experiences– a look at the programming of Sundance festivals past bears this out. These low-key indie relationship dramas have done much to define the mainstream’s concept of “independent”
film for ages now. The relatively low entry point into super low-budget filmmaking today theoretically should lead to an explosion of shot-on-DV films of this type. While we brace for this coming tidal wave, it’s refreshing to find an independent filmmaker whose feature debut completely eschews the relative ease of digital video shooting and personal anecdotes adapted into a screenplay and reaches for something a bit more ambitious.
Chris Hefner’s debut feature, The Pink Hotel, is exactly this sort of debut. Shot entirely on black & white Super 8mm film, The Pink Hotel is a strange puzzle box. Hefner’s primary influences (at least for this film) appear to be Guy Maddin’s obsession with primitive film technology and absurdist humor and the thick atmosphere of nightmarish dread that largely defined David Lynch’s early works. In The Pink Hotel, Hefner seamlessly integrates these influences into a very unique film.
The film opens with an animated sequence (by illustrator and animator Lilli Carré) explaining the bizarre manner in which the Ortolan bird, a French delicacy, is prepared and eaten. These strange, cruel rituals lead up to the eating of the tiny bird in one bite, feathers, bones and all. The diner must also drape a linen over their head before eating the Ortolan, supposedly to capture the aromas of the cooked bird but also, it is suspected, to hide the glutton’s identity from the eyes of angry gods. If the viewer is uncertain as to whether or not this elaborate preparation is true or not, the fact that it seems just inside the realm of possibility helps establish the film’s tone of faded decadence.
Following this opening, title cards explain that the story is taking place on New Year’s Eve, “During the war.” The film then introduces its odd cast of characters: the harried Concierge (Dan Sutherland) takes phone calls and receives constant abuse from a stream of guests and potential guests at the hotel’s front desk. These include some very unpleasant people from Hollywood, whose profanity and rudeness send the Concierge off on a mission to end the decline of formerly glorious hotel by destroying it. In one of the rooms of the hotel, a Movie Star (Stephanie Wyatt) constantly chats on the phone while her daughter, the Young Lady (Elita Ernsteen) peels the wallpaper away from a grate where she hears strange noises. In another room, a Man (Peter Hoffman) finds strange things falling out of his grate that may be sent to him from The Lady of the Hotel (Lynnette Kucharski). Meanwhile, a Zeppelin of uncertain origin ominously makes its way toward the city.
As you may have guessed, a plot synopsis of The Pink Hotel is not particularly helpful in explaining anything about the film. The way in which the different characters and stories overlap and run parallel to each other is the film’s appeal, and much of this is not immediately apparent on a first viewing. The grainy black and white of the film and the careful sound design lend the film’s darkest moments a deep sense of unease, and Hefner’s knack for unexpected imagery keeps the viewer from becoming too comfortable in their knowledge of just what is going on. The Pink Hotel is an ambitious debut feature, one that defies immediate accessibility and demands multiple viewings.
Piranha 3DD (2012)
Originally published on Film Monthly September 6, 2012
Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D managed to be one of the few remakes of recent years to stand on its own merits as a great new take on the original film’s premise, mostly by ditching everything but the basic concept of Joe Dante’s original film and applying it to a modern-day college spring break setting. Aja also kept the film’s comic but ruthless tone, staging a final-act piranha attack that applied the gruesomely explicit gore of Saving Private Ryan‘s opening sequence to a brightly-colored, sunny day that turns impressively bloody. The concept of a sequel seemed like a foregone conclusion, even if Piranha 3D didn’t quite hit “blockbuster” status; it was cheap enough that it made money anyway, so why not do it again?
Piranha 3DD takes place a year after the slaughter at Lake Victoria. That lake has been quarantined and the town has died along with all the life in the lake. A sleazy water park called “The Big Wet”– featuring an “adult pool” where swimmers can lounge around naked, and all the lifeguards are strippers– is opening in a nearby town. Chet (David Koechner), the park’s boorish owner, has decided to drill his own well to supply the park’s water. Too bad his well is an underwater lake connected to Lake Victoria, which means the ravenous man-eating piranha from the first film can swim their way directly into the park’s water supply.
The park’s only hope is Chet’s marine biology major stepdaughter Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) and her friend Barry (Matt Bush) and ex-boyfriend deputy Kyle (Chris Zylka). They learn that the piranha that terrorized Lake Victoria may be back after a couple of their friends disappear and a very unpleasant (and completely physically impossible) accident befalls their other friends Shelby (Katrina Bowden) and Josh (Jean-Luc Bilodeau). After consulting with Mr. Goodman (Christopher Lloyd, reprising his role from the first film), Maddy and her friends realize that opening day of The Big Wet is shaping up to be an all-you-can-eat buffet for the rapidly evolving piranha.
Unsurprisingly, Piranha 3DD lacks the first film’s strong characters and cast: in place of Elisabeth Shue and Adam Scott, we mostly have a standard-issue group of horror-movie teenagers. Also, pretty much all the time spent with characters is mostly traded in the sequel for slow-motion shots of large-breasted women running toward the camera. Written by hired guns Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (aka “the guys who wrote Saw 4-7“), Piranha 3DD hits some of the superficial notes that people enjoyed about the first film– bright colors, naked ladies, gore– but misses the characters that made Piranha 3D worth watching.
It also inexplicably brings in David Hasselhoff for an extended cameo playing himself, which is sort of fun (it’s great that Hasselhoff has a sense of humor about himself) but wears thin after a while. It’s telling that the film’s most outrageous joke (well, the most outrageous joke that doesn’t depend on a complete fundamental lack of knowledge of female human anatomy) is saved for the last seconds of the film; it’s perhaps even more telling that the joke is repeated several times under the start of the end credits, and the fact that the end credits drag on for well over ten minutes. It seems obvious that making Piranha 3DD was really, really fun. Unfortunately, watching the film isn’t nearly as enjoyable. It’s not as terrible as it could have been, but Piranha 3DD isn’t nearly as good as it should have been.
Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 27 January 2009
Porn “remakes” or “parodies” of popular films and TV series are nothing new, but 2005′s Pirates was considerably more ambitious than most of its ilk. The film was a popular crossover success, with an R-rated version finding its way into (*cough*) reputable video stores. Apparently both versions raked in enough money for producers Digital Playground to justify a sequel that (according to the press materials) is made with “ten times the budget” of the last one. However, the unavoidable question remains: who exactly is the target audience for an R-rated version of a hardcore film?
Well, from the looks of it, the audience is: people who liked the idea of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but who don’t want to sit through nearly three hours of pirate hijinks at a time. Also, more sex would be nice.
Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge opens with a brief introduction of its chief villainess Xifeng (Katsuni) before launching into ten minutes or so of exposition explaining how its main characters came to be where they are today. Evan Stone reprises his role as dim-bulb sea captain Edward Reynolds, ably assisted by first mate Jules Steel (Jesse Jane). One of their cohorts, a former colleague of evil pirate Victor Stagnetti (Tommy Gunn), has been marked for death by the King for her pirate ways. Reynolds and Steel, urged on by Olivia (Belladonna), seek her pardon, but learn they must retrieve a magical pearl stolen from the Church in order to do so. Naturally, the pearl was used to return Stagnetti from the dead, so that works out nicely for everyone.
The producers of Pirates 2 clearly understood that it would be to their benefit t
o make a coherent film even without the sex scenes, so the film moves along at a decent clip while packing in various wacky characters and some Playstation-era cut scene CGI that’s at least as effective as anything in the latest Asylum mockbuster. In this respect, it’s actually better than the cumbersome, overlong Pirates of the Caribbean sequels– it knows what the audience wants (buckling swashes, etc.) and it wastes very little time in serving up exactly that. There might be an extra character or two whose presence is barely explained, but oh well. For the most part it all makes sense, although I have no idea why some of these people have any stake in anything that’s going on. They’re mostly nice to look at, though, so I guess that makes up for any confusion.
One aspect of the film that wasn’t cut was its humor. Adult film is not known for its delicate, politically correct humor– after all, who’s going to be offended by what these characters say given what they’re usually doing? However, cut out the sex scenes and you end up with some dialogue that you don’t usually hear in an R-rated film. Even the most dire of Wayans Brothers projects wouldn’t have a character blurt out “I fucked my retarded cousin” for a quick laugh, but that’s the sort of dialogue on display here. Additionally, anyone sensitive about racial stereotypes should give the film a wide berth, or turn the sound off any time Chinese cook Wu Chow and/or his sister Ai (Shay Jordan) are on the screen. Yikes.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 56