The Monster Squad (1987)

1987
Directed by Fred Dekker
Starring Andre Gower, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht, Stan Shaw and Tom Noonan

Most kids in my age bracket know about this flick.  Released in 1987, some people actually consider The Monster Squad a better version of The Goonies then, well, The Goonies.  I can't say that I watched this movie a ton as a kid; I think I caught it once on TBS in the early '90s, liked the hell out of it and swore to the very heavens that I'd record it the next time it popped up.  Two weeks passed, and I forgot about it.  Now, here we are some 25-odd-years later and I'm a grouchy 32-year-old.  Does it hold up? 

The eagerly awaited answer to that question: Yeah, pretty well.  I don't think it's QUITE as good as The Goonies, myself.  But if I'd watched this movie constantly as a kid, I probably would have liked it better.  These were kids who were into all of the stuff that I was.  Comic books, movies, video games...you name it.  And they got to drop a lot of four-letter words, shoot guns, and kill stuff.  As such, this is still a movie that has a massive cult following after its initial box office disappointment.  In that vein, it's very similar to Night of the Creeps, which was also directed by Fred Dekker.  In addition to Dekker, we've also got Shane Black co-writing the screenplay - he of Predator, The Last Boy Scout and Iron Man 3 among other things.  Folks, remember the days when movies aimed at children weren't completely pussified and had an edge to them?  The Lick Ness Monster remembers.

This is yet another one of those movies that practices the "less is more" approach, and I love it.  82 minutes long, and that's including the ending credits, so we've got no time for bullshit.  Meet the Monster Club, led by wise guys Sean (Andre Gower) and Patrick (Robby Kiger), cool kids who spend their days debating how to kill werewolves and vampires and discussing the merits of old Universal monster movies.  In addition to that, the first time we see Sean he's wearing a shirt that reads "Stephen King rules."  Rounding out the group is Horace (Brent Chalem), a scaredy cat dubbed "Fat Kid" by everyone else in the movie; Eugene (Michael Faustino), a rather nondescript kid who brings his dog to all of the meetings; and new recruit Rudy (Ryan Lambert), junior high rebel who rocks the '50s retro thing like a boss.

Back when I first saw this movie, I thought Rudy was purely and simply the shit.  If I'd managed to commit The Monster Squad to VHS tape back then, I probably would have wanted to BE Rudy just like I wanted to be Corey Haim's character in Watchers.  Even these days, this guy is undoubtedly the coolest thing that the movie has going for it.  More importantly, Rudy gives the group a good balance of different personalities, which makes the action stuff pop better once it starts to hit.

When this movie came out, it was a much-ballyhooed renaissance for all of the classic Universal monsters together in one movie.  We've got Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Gill-Man and the Wolfman all on the bad guy side of things.  Well, mostly, but you'll have to watch the movie for yourself to find how that works out.  It seems that Abraham Van Helsing failed in his attempt to rein in evil at the conclusion of Bram Stoker's novel (which was a nonfiction book, I guess, according to this flick - it isn't really spelled out), as some sort of way-out-there ritual involving a virgin reading German incarnations must be utilized to throw the bad guys into a temporal vortex.  And it's...almost as confusing as that last sentence reads, but it doesn't matter.  At any rate, these guys are now in the present day of 1987 looking for an amulet that will let them take over the world, and only the Monster Club can stop them.

The flick doesn't exactly hit its three-act beats like a Spielberg movie; at times, it is a little all over the place, as we get some protracted bits of humor involving Rudy peeping on Patrick's hot sister and all of the stuff with Sean's policeman father that repeatedly goes nowhere.  I can't say that it matters much.  All of the child actors here do a pretty damn good job with their characters, so much that the batshit insane and occasionally illogical story is easily overlooked.  Once it comes time for them to take the amulet back, steal some wood stakes and arrows from shop class and go monster hunting, the movie is firing on all cylinders, and the climax is pretty damn thrilling.

And it's got Dracula openly calling a five-year-old girl "bitch."  The things we don't get in movies these days.

If there's only one other complaint that I have about this flick, it's that the dude playing Dracula didn't really hit a home run.  I personally think it would have been really cool if they'd managed to get Christopher Lee to play the role, but then again, that wasn't the Universal studios incantation of the character, it was Hammer, so what do I know?  Fortunately, the movie DOES have Tom Noonan as Frankenstein's monster.  Noonan is well-known (okay, by movie nerds like myself) as one of the all-time great creepy villain actors out there, and he's aces here once again.  Get this guy a gold-star for selling Francis Dolarhyde and the Last Action Hero Ripper like a motherf**ker, because he's dynamite.

That about sums it up.  I'll give The Monster Squad *** 1/2 out of ****.  This flick has cool kids, cool action sequences, and a pretty decent story backing it up.  And it's easily available via handy-dandy Netflix instant streaming.  You can't go wrong with 82 minutes of prime '80s goodness here, and it's well worth a watch.

Fire in the Sky (1993)

1993
Directed by Robert Lieberman
Starring D.B. Sweeney, Robert Patrick, Craig Sheffer, Peter Berg and James Garner

Funny story about this movie - it took me something like 20 years to watch it.

Sometime in 1994, I tuned in to an HBO showing of Fire in the Sky due to the fact that I was a bona fide UFO fanatic.  The ads for this movie were something else for a ten-year-old who had checked out every UFO and paranormal book that the public library (remember those?) had to offer, and this movie didn't disappoint...for about 90 minutes.  The movie's money sequence was ticking by, this insanely creepy alien abduction scene depicting the main character attempting to escape from an alien craft only to find another human onboard with his innards ripped out.  The conclusion of this epic tale is that the Lick Ness Monster's mommy told him to shut the movie off. 

Go ahead and laugh.  But don't f**k with mom.

I couldn't tell you why it took me all this time to track down a DVD copy of this movie, because this flick has more than stood the test of time.  I can also report that having finally seen the rest of that alien abduction scene, it has every bit of hype that it's built up as one of the creepiest alien-related things ever committed to film, which more than justifies my decision to put this movie in my horror movie blog.  Dammit.

For the uninitiated, this movie purports to be based on a true story.  More specifically, a book titled "The Walton Experience" by one Travis Walton, who allegedly endured this experience in 1975 while on a logging job.  Walton is played in the movie by D.B. Sweeney, who does an absolute slam-bang job.  Chalk Sweeney up into the "why didn't this guy make it bigger?" file, because I've liked him in just about everything I've seen him in.  At the very least, surely, this guy has more charisma and likability than, say, George Clooney.  Yeah, suck on it, Cheshire Cat.  Interestingly, while Walton gets a lot of screen time here, it's actually his best friend Mike Rogers (Robert "T-1000" Patrick) who is the star of the show.  A family man with two kids and a younger sister who happens to be dating Travis, it's Patrick who gets the unenviable task of making the emotional part of the story pop, and he's more than game for the task.  The script springs us right into the intrigue, as Rogers and his team of loggers speed back from the wilderness for reasons that we aren't aware of yet.  Before long, they are telling their incredible story to the town Sheriff and Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner), a cowboy-hat wearing scenery chewer who serves as the chief representative of law enforcement throughout. 

That story begins with scenes establishing Mike, Travis and the rest of the team.  There's bad seed Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer), sensitive guy David Whitlock (Peter Berg), Texas transplant Bobby Cogdill (Bradley Gregg) and 17-year-old Greg Hayes (Henry Thomas), all of whom instantly recognizable in their traits, and each actor fitting each one like a glove.  While the script gives a decent amount of time to each dude, it's Sheffer who shines the brightest whenever he's on screen; you totally buy him as this guy with a long rap sheet who totally despises nice guy Travis for no apparent reason, and the tension that they project is palpable through the screen.

And then, the abduction sequence.  On their way back from a cutting assignment, the guys see fiery red light in the forest sky.  Thus begins the strange odyssey of Travis Walton, who gets out of the truck to investigate a bizarre hovering craft overhead only to get jerked around (but not jerked off, as Jim Ross would say about a ladder match-interfering Lita) by an invisible force.  Believing him dead, Mike speeds away, a choice that he comes to regret dearly as the movie goes on.  The panic subsides, and eventually Mike drives back to look for Travis, only to find that he has disappeared from existence.

Of course, nobody in the town believes their story.  Even if you don't know anything about this real-life case, none of the stuff in Fire in the Sky will shock you.  A decent portion of the middle of the movie concerns the police investigation into Mike Rogers and his team, with Frank doing his best Jim Rockford routine as he sweats Mike.  Most of the townsfolk suspect Dallis, the guy with the criminal rap.  And never trust a white guy who wears a do-rag.  While none of this stuff is minty fresh, it really does hit hard just how much the disappearance eats away at Mike's soul.  The soft-spoken tough guy role is one that Patrick has done on more than one occasion, but I've never seen it done better than here.  There's a great "climax before the climax" bit as Mike and the boys agree to undergo a lie-detector test, which reveals that all of them are telling the truth. 

And then Travis shows up again, naked, traumatized, and suffering from frequent flashbacks that get shown to the audience.

Now, the movie really is a big build-up to the abduction scene.  Having seen that first bit, where Travis escapes from a cocoon-like pod and bumps into the aforementioned dead body was scary enough to me as an 11-year-old kid.  Now, at 32, I can wholeheartedly report that my mom made the right call back then, because the rest of the abduction scene would have absolutely f**kin' traumatized me as a kid.  Even now, it's some pretty disturbing stuff, although I do recommend that everyone track down either a copy of the book or the episode of Paranormal Witness that deals with this incident for Walton's actual version of what went down on the ship.  It might be slower-paced, but it actually might be a little MORE disturbing specifically for that reason. 

This is a movie that definitely qualifies as a cult film.  I'm actually surprised that it didn't do better in theaters in 1993, since this was smack dab in the middle of the UFO/conspiracy/paranormal gobbledygook boom.  But in the previous decade, a small but loyal fanbase has found this flick and come to admire it for all of the reasons outlined above.  It's slick, it has fantastic acting, and it's buildup to that one money scene is another one of those things that shows that no matter how many jump scares Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes team throw at you, nothing beats a protracted case of dead silence followed by disturbing imagery.  It beats goddamn explosions every time.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's a 20-year journey that was well worth the wait, and this is a flick that I highly recommend to all horror and sci-fi fans out there.

Visions (2015)

2015
Directed by Kevin Greutert
Starring Isla Fisher, Anson Mount, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Parsons, Joanna Cassidy and Eva Longoria

Time for everyone's favorite segment of this blog that has literally two dozen readers on a weekly basis - the boring life and times of Jon Lickness.

Now, there's a lot of things that I do to pass my time, but one of my recent favorites (as in, I just picked this up a couple of years ago) is coming up with murder mystery stories.  And when I say "coming up with," that's what I mean.  I don't actually write a full story; it's just a base framework, a cast, and a brief write-up.  You know, the kind of shit you'd find on the back of a DVD box.  Sometimes they're Joe Eszterhas-style potboilers (that I dub "Murderotica" - creative, I know), sometimes they're straight-up Sherlock Holes-esque detective stories, and sometimes they've got a whole lot of cops and forensic mumbo-jumbo.  You want volume?  I just counted, and I've done 288 of these in the last 18 months.  That's lots and lots of titles.  And since they all have somebody dead and a crime to be solved, it's a massive list of titles like "Dead Weight," "Cold Sweat," "Hidden in Sight."  You know, very by-the-book 1940s serial crap titles. 

But let me just say that if I ever come up with a title as lame and uninspired as "Visions," I'm quitting writing.  For good, forever.

That long-ass intro out of the way, here's the background info:  it's directed by Kevin Greutert (the editor of a lot of the Saw flicks), it's got some cast for a movie that went straight to Netflix, and it's just as by-the-numbers as its title.  For the most part.  Don't ask me how you make a movie with women as hot as Isla Fisher and Eva Longoria boring, but this flick manages to pull it off.  Hell, it has Jim Parsons in it and I didn't even hold this fact against the movie, so nobody can say that I didn't give Visions a shot.

I'm going to try to make this review as brief as possible, just to spare everyone else of the experience of sitting through something this tepid, so here goes.  The movie starts with a car accident involving Eveleigh Maddox (Fisher), a pretty horrific wreck where a baby is killed.  Flash forward a year, as Evie and her husband David (Mount) are now living in the country.  But it's better than the regular ol' country.  It's wine country, as Evie wants to make a go of it as a vineyard owner.  She's also expecting a baby, and that's essentially your setup.  We've also got a major guilt complex for Evie that is mentioned in the few scenes that she shares with her close friend Sadie, as she's wracked with pain over the accident and the death that she's connected to. 

And that's not just lip service - Fisher is really good in this movie, as are all of the other name actors attached to the marquee.  It's just a shame that the material is so vanilla that it pains me to type this. 

Anyway, the country house that Evie and David have moved into is a very old one, but this isn't your typical haunted house movie.  Evie starts having Visions (capitalized because title, dammit) at random intervals involving all kinds of creepy stuff happening.  Think glass breaking and mannequins.  It's horrifying.  David chalks this up to Evie going off depression medication after finding out she was pregnant; Evie isn't so sure.  See that last sentence?  That's like half an hour of Visions condensed.  Even at 82 minutes, this is a movie that doesn't have much to say.

This movie actually treaded into laugh out loud territory for me early, because I called who the villain would be within the first trimester, what the motivation and villain final speech would consist of, and how it would be revealed immediately after the character relationships were established.  Not to brag but...correct.  Umundo.  I might be zero-for-lifetime in guessing Dario Argento mystery killers, but my accuracy rating on Visions was spot-on.

And...that's pretty much it, folks.  Fisher is pregnant, starts seeing stuff, big final twist.  Now, this flick was filmed in 2013 and slated for a 2014 release, but apparently test screenings were so brutal that they held off on it.  I can see why.  There is nothing worse than a boring, by-the-numbers film, and it's why I will give almost any slasher movie - regardless of how cheaply filmed and technically worse they might be - better reviews than a film like this.  Those movies at least have a heart and soul to them (well, most of the time), and even at their worst are MEMORABLE.  This one is exiting my brain as we speak.  It's so barren of heart and soul that I haven't even mentioned Jim Parsons' character, because he contributes absolutely nothing to the movie and could have been played by a cardboard cutout holding an EKG meter.

Judgment time.  I award this movie * out of ****, only because the previously mentioned performances are actually pretty good.  But that's it.  Case closed.  It sucks.

P.S. - I actually like Jim Parsons.  I find him to be a good actor.  Having said that, I utterly hate The Big Bang Theory.  Not because it's a bad show or anything (from what I've seen of the 5 or so episodes I've caught, it's a'ight), but because I've heard this manifesto no fewer than ten times in my life: "You know, YOU should really watch that show.  Because I think YOU would really like it."  Which translates in my mind as "yeah, you're a nerd like those guys, so watch that show, you nerd."  Well, f**k you.  I ain't watching your stupid show with all the big words.

Last Shift (2014)

2014
Directed by Anthony DiBlasi
Starring Juliana Harkavy, Joshua Mikel, J. LaRose, Mary Lankford, Natalie Victoria and Sarah Sculco

Well, Netflix, it looks like you picked a winner for me this week.  Last Shift was one of the standouts of the 2014 London FrightFest film festival, and I've got to say that I agree with teh consensus.  For a change.  People know me as an annoying contrarian, but every once in a great while I reverse this trend and go along with the crowd.  In this case, it's well deserved, because this flick is a pretty damn good and pretty damn creepy time in front of the tube.

This is one of those movies that's all about atmosphere.  Director Anthony DiBlasi chose to set the entire thing in one single closed off setting, isolate one character, and fuck them all up to high heaven.  It's a plot device that I recently saw in the four-star (bah Gawd)-reviewed Oculus, for my money one of the best horror films I've seen in a good long while.  While it isn't QUITE as effective here, it's got the benefit of having one of the best horror movie performances in years, a really likable lead character, and one of those bummer endings that breaks your heart.  In the good way, I promise, not the "oh come on, you've gotta be kidding me" way that The Devil Inside pissed audiences off to high heaven.  Enough jibber jabber.  Let's get going.

The setup is incredibly simple.  Meet rookie cop Jessica Loren, played by Juliana Harkavy in one of those performances that immediately launches her into the Jamie Lee Curtis hot girl stratosphere of horror movie heroines.  While there are other people in the movie, she's on-camera for almost the entire thing, and you don't get bored of her - she's dynamite.  The character itself is fairly straightforward, as she's stuck on a curious assignment her first night on the job: guarding an abandoned police department for one 8 p.m. - 4 a.m. shift.  I always relate to characters who work similar hours to myself, because I know how messed up my life feels and how an entire work week feels like one gigantic day that never ends, so +2 cool points to the movie here as well.

Things start innocently enough.  Her mother doesn't want her to do the job, since her father died on duty.  The guy that she relieves is kind of a dick who likes playing tricks for no apparent reason.  And then there's the boredom once those doors close.  But after a while, the movie starts springing its bag of tricks on you.  And this bag of tricks is one that any white bunny would be damn proud of (/tomatoes).  She periodically gets calls from a young woman who says that she is in trouble in a farm outside of the city, only the station is no longer receiving 911 calls.  There's a homeless bum who invades the police station and urinates on the floor, only to sneak back in later for no apparent reason whatsoever.  And then there's all the ghosts and other assorted ghoulies that go bump in the night.

To be sure, the flick has a fair amount of "loud noise" stingers, but here...they're actually effective and get under your skin.  I think the reason is that we become really invested in Jessica and what she's going through.  Working your first day on a new job is one of those situations that we've all been in on numerous occasions, the nerves and apprehension you feel about fitting in and pleasing your bosses and all that.  Add some demons into the scenario, and we've got a recipe for some emotional investment.  (Lick Ness Monster cliche time) And that's the best thing that any movie can do!

There's a fair amount of demonology and ghost activity contained within Last Shift, and it's all based around a subject that isn't touched upon much in horror movies.  It seems as if a year prior to the events of this film, a bizarre, murderous Charles Manson-style cult was arrested and brought into this station for questioning.  Worshiping not Satan but "the King of Hell," the being said to inhabit hell before ol' Goatface himself arrived, the cult is/was primarily young woman following their Bray Wyatt-style leader John Michael Paymon (Joshua Mikel, who is dynamite for the few scenes that he gets).  All of them appear to have stuck around after their creepy mass suicide bit, and have every intention of taking out the daughter of one of their arresting officers.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  All things build up to a finale that admittedly shocked the hell out of me.  And if it shocked the hell out of me...it probably won't shock you, because most people are smarter than me.

That's where we're at with Last Shift.  It's slick, it has good acting, and it has execution better than almost any horror movie that you've seen in recent memory.  Meaning that when it feels like getting under your skin, it can do this with Guns N' Roses 1987-style aplomb.  If you've got Netflix, check this one out.  It's well worth 90 minutes of your time.  Also, here's hoping that Juliana Harkavy impressed a few people with her performance here, because she's got way more charisma than a good 75% of actresses whose names can be found on marquees these days.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Good scares and good shocks await.  Turn down the lights where applicable and have fun with this one.

Stir of Echoes (1999)

1999
Directed by David Koepp
Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Zachary David Cope, Illeana Douglas and Jennifer Morrison

The movie in question today is another one that, for whatever reason, escaped my radar until just now.  Count me in among the many, many people back in 1999 who were more enthralled by The Sixth Sense, directed by that guy that I once called the best director currently working.  Which was then immediately followed by his career dovetail into unimaginable shit...but I digress. 

Yup, Stir of Echoes came out September of 1999, somewhat of a hit with critics but more or less vanishing from multiplexes within a month.  Looking back, I can see why.  The flick has its moments, but that's all they are.  The script (by David Koepp of all people, who also directed) takes a novel from 1958 and does its damndest to modernize it.  While the material is there for some really awesome true-life horror stuff, it more often than not takes the easy route of flashy MTV-style editing and camera tricks.  Isn't it amazing to remember a time when stuff like this was only occasionally noticed instead of the norm?  Pepperidge Farm remembers.  Another thing I remember is watching the final 45 minutes or so on HBO back in the day, finding the movie forgettable and really cookie-cutter.  Now, I think it's definitely more than that, but not in the way that I can really recommend.  More on that later.

Folks, I read something disheartening when I was doing the Tremors franchise review.  Apparently, Kevin Bacon considers Tremors the low-point of his acting career, even crying to his wife during filming that he couldn't believe he was doing a movie about giant underground worms.  I can't say that I know what it's like to be a Hollywood actor, but I would MUCH rather be in an underground worm movie than a semi-generic ghost flick.  Chalk that up to the symptoms of my one-of-a-kind glandular condition.  Alas, concerned family man Bacon is what we get here, and truth be told, he does a fantastic job in this movie.  The character is Tom Witzky, phone linesman and family man extraordinaire.  His wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) is pregnant with their second child, and his existing (?) son Jake (Zachary David Cope) is one of those stereotypical horror movie creepy kids that I've harped about on here before.

Without bothering to look up any of the handy-dandy IMDB external reviews, I'm guessing that there were more than a few mentions by critics back then about how there was another movie released shortly before this one that also featured a kid who sees dead people.  Since this story was concocted in the late '50s, I'm guessing that this flick holds the trump card in the "who ripped off who?" category.  Amazingly, this plot convention isn't mentioned very much, because what REALLY sets the plot in motion is Jake's abrasive sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas, who kind of looks like Toni Collette).  A party-time pissing contest turns into Lisa hypnotizing Jake, which results in what's actually a pretty cool scene involving an empty theater and a white screen that I remembered well enough to write about just now.

From this point forward, Tom starts seeing weird visions of a dead teenager on his couch (don't ask), which prompts the mystery plot to move forward.  It turns out that this girl disappeared from the neighborhood six months prior, and Tom is obsessed with finding out what happened to her.  How obsessed?  Well, enough to never go to work again and seemingly never let the couch out of his vision.  Perfectly rational behavior, if I say so myself.  In this reporter's opinion, this is where the movie starts to wrong from a very sound setup, because it's all stuff we've seen before.  There IS the added wrinkle of the close-knit working class neighborhood that Tom calls home, complete with a best friend played by Kevin Dunn (no, not Kevin "Most Hated Man in the Internet Wrestling Community" Dunn, but rather the guy who played Jerry Seinfeld's dickhead childhood friend who didn't like turkey roll) who seems to care a whole lot about his football hero son.  Foreshadowing alert.

I'll give it to the movie for its opening half.  The setup was certainly there for some fantastically sick, creepy stuff to go on as Tom's visions of the past become more and more frequent.  Instead, it went the decidedly opposite route of The Sixth Sense.  That flick was all about the quiet; this one throws a lot of loud shit at you.  Sometimes it's effective, like the "less is more" faceoff that Tom has late in the movie after finding the dead body in the finale.  Sometimes it isn't, like the flashback sequence that shows how said dead body became...uh, dead.  While Bacon puts his heart and soul into the movie throughout the whole thing, he can't carry just how generic the whole thing becomes late in the game. 

Another big plus that the movie has is its acting, even in the non-Bacon roles.  Douglas is really good as the sister-in-law - she's sarcastic in a totally endearing way, and Dunn is always aces in anything he's in when he isn't purposefully trying to sabotage NXT call-ups.  The atmosphere is also pretty well-done; a tight-knit Chicago neighborhood is something that you generally don't see in a horror/suspense movie these days.  It's also got an interesting way to move the plot forward in the form of the couple hypnosis sessions that Tom undergoes; it's definitely more inventive than finding plot clues from goddamn library microfilm, for example.  It's pretty much everything else in between that falls a little flat, mainly due to familiarity. 

In short, everyone involved in this movie really tries, but it's material is something that's hard to make truly captivating with any amount of dressing up.  For that, I'll give this flick ** 1/2 out of ****.  It's worth a watch on Netflix, but don't track it down otherwise.

Darkness Falls (2003)

2003
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman
Starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield and Lee Cormie

Fun fact: I'm actually beginning to write this review with a good, solid 20 minutes to go in this movie.

Not-so-fun fact: I'm pretty sure that this might be the most by-the-book horror movie I've ever seen.  And I've seen something like 150 slasher flicks and 100 ghost movies, so that's saying something.

You know, had I seen this movie back when it was released in 2003, I probably would have really liked it.  It's got a lot of forward momentum, it wastes absolutely no time getting going, and it's stylish and slick.  In 2015, though...yeah, there's a reason why I'm passing judgment on it before it's already over.  Darkness Falls should be in the friggin' dictionary under "ghost thriller," although in some respects that's understandable.  It was released at a time when Japan-style ghost movies were all the rage, and flicks featuring vengeful spirits carrying out supernatural justice were as easy to sell then as found footage movies would be a few years down the road.  It follows all the beats without exception and without shame, and that's the problem.  I've seen this plot done so many other times, and so much BETTER in movies like Ringu, Ju-On, Kaidan, Dark Water...you name it.  That, and the characters are about the most milquetoast and occasionally dislikable bunch of rubes I've seen in quite some time.  With that out of the way and 10 minutes of running time left to go, let's get to it.

Opening narration drill:  Welcome to the town of Darkness Falls, which boasts an especially wicked back story.  The tragic tale of Matilda Dixon takes place sometime in the indeterminate past, as the children of the town present their lost tooth to her in exchange for gifts and gold coins.  A fire ends that practice, leaving her horribly disfigured and sensitive to light.  When two of the town's children go missing, the people of Darkness Falls immediately think that the sensible thing to do is to track Matilda down and lynch her.  Only the missing children soon show up in short order.  Cue South Park Mr. Derp musical stinger. 

Flash forward to the present(ish) day, as socially awkward early teen Kyle Walsh has just lost his last baby tooth.  We get some more good exposition as his crush Caitlin Greene enters his room at night, followed by some rather clunky and stilted romantic dialogue.  Anyway...skipping ahead, Matilda - now the town's vengeful spirit drawn by the Tooth Fairy ritual - appears to claim Kyle as its next victim, but instead winds up killing Kyle's mother.  Kyle is carted off, while Caitlin is left behind to wonder just what the hell happened.

Flash forward (again) 12 years down the road.  Caitlin's little brother Michael is now having all sorts of issues falling asleep at night, and showing a lot of the symptoms that Kyle himself showed as a youngster.  Take a few guesses as to where we're going from here.  It also means that we meet the actors playing the older versions of the characters.  For what it's worth, Chaney Kley is actually fairly decent as adult Kyle, managing to get you on his side with his "I'm hurt and scared yet brave" act.  But Emma Caulfield is just all kind sof bad as Caitlin, alternating between being totally terrified by everything that's happening to her little bro and being totally okay and all "scientific explanation" with it. 

And don't even get me started on the kid playing little bro.  From the awful "adorable" speech pattern to his bad fearful facial expressions, he's every reason why I strongly dislike kids in horror movies to the nth degree.

Amazingly, this movie is over already as I type this.  The running time is an INCREDIBLY brisk 75 minutes, leaving absolutely no room for bullshit once it establishes everything.  There's a BIT of extra drama in the form of childhood friend Larry trying to get into Caitlin's pants, but that repeatedly goes nowhere.  Once he's wiped off the screen by the Tooth Fairy, he's never mentioned again anyway.  That really is this movie's biggest problem:  Everything is so goddamned FAMILIAR that it's maddening, walking territory that we've seen dozens of times before, and done so much BETTER so many times before, that even though the story is competent and the execution of its second half stalk-and-kill sequences are shot well, it all just falls so incredibly flat.

Of course, I should also mention that Darkness Falls is rife with a lot of the conventions that are much derided in the Internet Horror Community (not to be confused with the terroristic Internet Sports Entertainment Community, or ISEC).  We get cat scares, "loud noise" stingers aplenty, dick cops, creepy kids...the works.  I'm not averse to horror movie cliches, per se.  In fact, a lot of the time, they comfort me.  But the way that it all unfolds here is just a thoroughly dislikable package.  It's kind of like a heaping helping of Adam Sandler's character from Funny People, only not quite as bad.

As previously mentioned, this movie is very short.  The final 30 minutes consists of pretty much nothing but Matilda/Tooth Fairy attempting to take out Kyle, Caitlin and Michael as they make their way to the town's lighthouse.  There's a reason why I wrote so much of this review while this sequence was going on, because there was no emotional investment whatsoever.  If you can tell that this was a bad movie...you're right.  And it's not bad in the way that's fun to watch, either.  There's no moronic dialogue, horrendous camera work or bizarre plot devices that make for good riffing material with friends; it's all just THERE, a kind of cinematic connect-the-dots exercise that you'll forget 90% of while you're watching it. 

* out of ****.  I award it that one star because it's at least a slick, well-polished movie.  Virtually EVERYTHING story- and horror-wise misses the mark, however.  Avoid this like death.

Mother of Tears (2007)

2007
Directed by Dario Argento
Starring Asia Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Moran Atias and Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni

Confession time:  Dario Argento is arguably my favorite horror movie director.  Added confession time:  There's a long stretch of his career that I think isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.  It begins almost immediately after his 1987 movie Opera and continues almost unabated to this very day.  The high points?  Parts of 1993's Trauma and the bit at the beginning of Do You Like Hitchcock? featuring an insanely hot Italian woman getting undressed in front of a window.  So in 2007, when the news filtered out that the final chapter of his "Three Mothers" trilogy was getting a release date, there were nonetheless many Argento freaks who rejoiced.  I can't say that I did, because I discovered the dude a little later...but rest assurred, had I known, there would have been much rejoicing.  Yay (/Monty Python).

Alas, the rejoicing was for naught, because Mother of Tears featured the Argento cold streak continuing.  You know all of those hallmarks of his earlier movies, like atmosphere, creepy music, genuinely disturbing kill scenes and shocks that genuinely shocked?  Yeah, all those are gone here.  I knew all of this pretty much within five minutes of inserting the DVD into the player sometime in 2008 shortly after watching Suspiria and Inferno - for you non-horror fans out there, two absolute must-see movies that set the table for supernatural horror moving forward.  ALSO for you non-horror fans out there, the general gist of the movies is this: Three ancient witches are buried in the cities of Munich, New York City and Rome, and attempting to break through into the modern world and f**k that shit up with a vengeance.  It's implied, trust me.  The witch contained in THIS movie is said to be the most powerful one, so there's your background information.  Time for the show.

You know, a big part of why a lot of the latter-day Argento movies kinda suck (in addition to the myriad of adjectives listed above) is his fascination with casting his daughter in his movies.  No doubt that Asia Argento has her fans out there, but personally, I've always found her to be somewhere between Christian Bale and Daniel Craig on the charisma scale.  And...she's your star character this time, as American art student Sarah Mandy.  The script actually does give us plenty of reasons to care about her, as she has a supposedly "quirky" personality, as well as her relationship to Michael Pierce, the curator of Rome's Museum of Ancient Art.  Whether or not that's a real thing...is up to the fine folks at Google.  Your setup for what is to come - a team has just uncovered an Urn containing the remains of the third titular "Witch" in this "Three Mothers" trilogy, and early on in the film, the casket containing that urn is opened and the Mother of Tears is released.

Now, Suspiria was about a group of devil worshippers making a German dance academy their home.  The witch in that film had been active ever since the 1800s.  Somehow, the idea of a school of dance being used as a front for Satanic activity is very unsettling.  Inferno was similar to this movie, as a character released the witch from some form of ancient sleep in the early goings, which is some kind of Keystone Cops-plot development, but in that movie it worked because we felt a lot more of a connection to the characters in question.  Not so here.  Asia Argento...she tries, but I just can't into her.  Call it glandular (Lick Ness Monster cliche #3).

So, after awakening the evil witch, her army of supernatural enforcers quickly go about raising hell quite literally and we get some glimpses of the villain this time around.  And she's...something else.  Played by Moran Atias, she's an incredibly hot, stacked witch seen in frequent states of undress (save for the magical cloak that was found along with the urn - don't ask about that particular plot detail, although it does PAY OFF at the end of the film. Spoiler alert).  A very different beast from the invisible witch in Suspiria and the "Wolf in sheep's clothing" witch in Inferno, I must say.  Atias is great to look at, but unfortunately the amusement ends there.  Her helpers aren't much better.  Can you tell that this movie was frustrating from a character standpoint?

Now for some actual story stuff.  The script (by no less than FOUR people, and it shows) starts off with a simple kidnapping convention, as the Mother of Tears and her cult of followers abduct Michael's (that's Argento's boyfriend, for those keeping score) son and won't return him to Michael and Sarah unless they stop their Scooby Doo-level of meddling into their evil Satanic world domination plan.  A fair tradeoff if there ever was one.  The script does its absolute damndest to shock us here as both Michael and his son are brutally murdered by the cult when they try to recruit an exorcist into their mission, but while the scene is brutal, it falls flat. 

The movie then attempts to give the first two movie some credence as it is explained that Sarah's mother was one of the characters in the first film - the shrieking woman who bit it in one of the two or three most brutal murder scenes in movie history, and also a powerful "white witch" lending this whole thing some semblance of continuity.  It's not the Star Wars trilogy, but it's there.  What IS worth mentioning here, also, is that this movie severely cranks up the gore quotient from the first two movies in the trilogy, and it's a stylistic shift that unfortunately bogs the movie down a bit and turns it into a geek show.  Suspiria in particular was a movie that combined its use of color and its amazing soundtrack and camerawork into something truly disquieting and disturbing.  This flick slathers on the fake blood and kill scenes, as Sarah and all of the various witches, priests, familiars and police detectives that she runs across go toe-to-toe with the cult.

I will give the movie some points when it comes to the final showdown, however.  Sure, there's some laughable stuff on the way there, like that weird coven of witches that Sarah conveniently follows to their hidden lair.  But the finale itself does redeem the movie somewhat.  It managed to lull me out of the half-stupor that I was in up until that point, not the least reason being yet another shot of Moran Atias' fantastic nude body in the process. 

Oh, and Udo Kier is in this movie.  Best known as Ronald Camp in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective here in the states, this veteran of Euro cinema had a really good cameo role in Suspiria, and he's once again aces here as an alchemist who helps our intrepid heroine on the way to saving the world.  This dude never disappoints.

I'll close this review with a little more history.  Dario Argento wanted to make all three parts of the Mothers triogy back-to-back-to-back, but the lukewarm reception to Inferno back in 1980 made him put the third movie on hold and go back to making the blood-soaked murder mysteries that brought him to the dance.  Completing the trilogy was the right move, and in some respects, this movie DOES deliver.  It brings closure to the whole story, giving us a true sense of good winning out over evil in the finale and giving audiences a ridiculously evil and ridiculously hot big bad.  The execution of everything else, however, is almost howlingly bad.  Still, it's better than, say, The Room.

Therefore, I award this movie ** out of ****.  End communication.