Aliens (1986)

1986
Directed by James Cameron
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, William Hope and Bill Paxton

Regardless of anything that anybody wants to say about James Cameron now, he can go to his grave knowing that he has done two of the absolute best goddamn sequels of all time - Terminator 2 and the movie in question today.  Given what's on tap for his career, I am dead certain that this statement will hold true in its original form, because there's no way that the next 17 Avatar movies are going to come close to doing what these two flicks did.  Namely, what a sequel is SUPPOSED to do.  They raise the stakes, but also manage to carve out their own little identity at the same time.  Back in the '80s and '90s, Cameron was just a guy who knew the ins and outs of how to write an action movie screenplay, and this movie is a textbook example.  The end result is a flick that's still a damn fun watch 31 years after its initial release.  It's not quite as good as the first from a horror standpoint, but in terms of explosions and excitement, look no further daddy.

First off, a little background.  Seven years passed between the original Alien and the sequel Aliens, a very unique concept given the current climate of Hollywood cinema.  Back then, they actually used to let a movie sink in, digest and age before they planned out a sequel.  These days, it seems like the powers-that-be already have the sequel and the subsequent four films (complete with a wholly masturbatory two-part "final" film) planned out.  By the time 1985 rolled around, the original movie was already considered a classic, and this James Cameron guy had spent much of the interim time turning all kinds of heads.  He directed a movie about flying monster fish (seriously - Google it), wrote and directed a low-budget sci-fi flick featuring a bodybuilding champ from Austria that effectively blew up any and all expectations that it might have had, and wrote one of the early spec scripts for the insanely popular Rambo: First Blood Part II.  Aliens would be his first foray into the big budget, and if I haven't given this dude enough nerdgasm yet, he delivered on all counts.  Raise the stakes, bring stuff back, but make it important in different ways.  Sequels 101. 

As the movie starts, Ripley is being awoken from stasis.  For those keeping score, she placed herself in suspended animation after surviving the final encounter with the vicious, heat-seeking, xenomorphic creature from that film...and 57 years have passed.  Bummer.  She is debriefed by her employers, and the remainder of the first act is spent with the set-up for everything to come.  As you can imagine, Ripley - again with Sigourney Weaver playing the role, and once again she is 100% sliced awesome - is feeding her employers an incredible story about what she faced aboard the USS Nostromo.  One that would be hard to believe.  Hell, I'll admit, I would probably make a few jokes about how the tall woman who was frozen for half a century is full of crap.  But as she gets the news that there is now a human colony on the moon that her crew investigated in the first movie, we can quickly gleam where the story is going.

Lo and behold, it doesn't take long for word to reach the crew on Earth that communication has been cut off to the settlers on LV-246.  It's admittedly a pretty big script convenience that this happened JUST as Ripley came to, but bear with us for the sake of the movie.  Because of her experience on the planet, Ripley is asked to accompany the space marines (not THE space marine from the video game "Doom," but again, bear with me) on a search and potential rescue mission.  And this is where the film really gets cool.  The thing about James Cameron up until the colossal fail train that was Avatar was that he was AMAZING at creating memorable tough guy supporting characters, and this movie is full of 'em.  Michael Biehn as Corporal Hicks, the incredible Bill Paxton as sleazy Private Hudson, Lance Henriksen as the android Bishop (whom Ripley distrusts immediately for reasons that were clear if you watched the first movie), and Jenette Goldstein as tough chick Private Vasquez are all people that I remember by name, and their characters and traits are established from that first scene as they suit up for battle.  Great stuff.

Time for the "fun and games" act.  Of course, the marines find a derelict, demolished colony completely bereft of survivors, save a small child named Newt (Carrie Henn, who Cameron chose for the role over something like 500 professional child commercial actors because all of them smiled after saying their lines) who doesn't say much outside of things like "They mostly come at night.  Mostly."  If you've seen the 1950s creature feature Them! about giant killer ants, there's a character in that film very similar to this one who is horrified by the things she has seen and is initially mute.  So +2 for Cameron for making these references.  Cue the discovery of a baby alien that is subsequently killed by the marines, a big mistake since it awakens the hordes of xenomorphs that have overrun the place, killing off several of the lesser marines and leaving us with what's nothing short of a solid 45 minutes of really well-sustained tension-packed action sequences.

See, kids, these days I'm pretty damn sick of action movies.  In the last, oh, 15 years or so, they've essentially dropped any and anything resembling building characters or arcs and have pretty much been boiled down to "event cinema."  Not so here.  We got to know those characters, so there are things at stake once the guns start blazing.  The movie's central plot cog is the relationship between Ripley and Newt; the director's cut, which is widely available now in pretty much every home video format, lets us know that Ripley had a daughter on Earth who has since passed away, and the surrogate mother-daughter relationship between the pair gives the movie a genuine power.  But anytime that emotion starts to overpower everything, boom, here's Bill Paxton to make another one of his trademark jerkass quips and we're back to reality.

Another thing the movie has is a really good human villain.  Paul Reiser of all people plays the movie's representative of the big, bad evil company in charge of a similar "alien salvage operation" that the first movie swerved us with.  This time around, it's not much of a swerve, but Reiser pulls off the slimy executive thing really well.  Yet more Grade-A film criticism courtesy of the Lick Ness Monster.  It's also another pretty big screenplay leap, as we're meant to suspend disbelief and buy that this same damn company has been keeping up with the "we have to get a xenomorph all to ourselves!" mission for the past 57 freakin' years and has made attempt #2 just as Ripley re-awakens from stasis, but just roll with it, baby.

While Aliens is a damn fun action movie and one of the best that the genre has to offer, there's something about it that keeps me from enjoying it quite as much as the first film.  There was something about that one that stuck with me long after watching it for the first time.  This one lacks the sense of discovery that the initial one had; we already know all of the tricks of the trade when it comes to the alien creature, so a bit of the scariness was lost.  Which is just fine, since Cameron was going for more gunplay anyway, but it's just part of the nature of the beast with sequels.  There's a law of diminishing return no matter what.  Well, save for one BIG surprise that the movie has for us in the epic climax.  That part was all new.  So new that I won't even spoil it.

Having said all that, let's assign a rating.  Aliens gets a *** 1/2 out of ****.  It's one of the best sequels of all time with the same badass heroine, a ragtag group of supporting characters, and that middle 45-minute action sequence that's effectively one of the coolest things ever.  Unfortunately, it's also the last truly good movie in the Alien franchise, but we'll get to those in due time.

Alien (1979)

1979
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto

Time for another franchise review, and this one is going to be good.  The Alien and Predator series were things that I grew up on; the movie in question today, which we'll get to in due time, is one of the first movies that I actively started to seek out once I got a little bit more into horror than the fourth-grade dabbling phase.  I taped that bitch off HBO ('memba doing that?) and it rocked my world.  The Predator films, on the other hand, was probably my favorite two-movie combo during my early middle school years, and to this day I can quote the original film from front to back.  Because I'm a winner.  Woo.  While there were brief dips here and there, by and large, both of these series are just FUN incarnate.  Except for, ironically, the AvP movies that should have been my wet dream.  Screw them.

There's only one place to start, though, and we're going to be jumping all the way back to 1979.  Crazy to think that the first movie was released in the '70s, isn't it?  There were plenty of movies before it that made aliens scary, but nothing could have quite prepared viewers of countless 1950s creature features for what they were about to see when this beast hit theaters.  Director Ridley Scott gave those people an alien that was malevolent, savage, and really, really pissed off, and all of the bad stuff was shown to you in glorious close-ups.  It also introduced audiences to Sigourney Weaver and the Ellen Ripley character, a mainstay in this franchise all the way up until the aforementioned crappy AvP flicks.  A whole slew of like-styled ripoffs followed in its wake...not to mention the video game inspirations, as early NES classics Metroid and Contra borrowed heavily from its lore.  In short, kids, if you haven't seen this one, plunk down whatever a copy is going for on Amazon and sit down.

Most horror movies in space that people may or may not have seen feature characters that are government professionals in some way, be they astronauts or scientists.  This one had a stroke of genius, as the crew of the Nostromo is essentially a group of space truckers.  As the movie starts, the bunch is awaken from stasis by a curious message being relayed to them, and the law dictates that they have to investigate it.  The first act of scripting according to people who know about such things dictates that a person or persons' lives are about to change in a big way, and the setup here is fantastic.  Also, interestingly enough, the Ripley character isn't given much focus early on.  Don't get me wrong; we get to know her, and Weaver is already awesome in the role that would grow to define her, but the main character fairly early on is Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt).  This results in one of the more effective kill scenes in any horror movie later on.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.

What follows is one of the longest, slowest builds for any horror film you've ever seen, as the crew lands on a distant planet and finds a wrecked ship.  There is also a derelict alien body on board the ship, presumably after being overpowered by something on board.  Cue the discovery of the pod-like eggs and that immortal scene where one of the crew members eats a face hugger to the...um...face, and the rest is history.

The script of Alien was written by Charles O'Bannon, a guy who would later go on to direct the minor '80s classic Return of the Living Dead, and I don't think enough praise can be leveled on this guy for the antagonist alien creature that he created.  There's no way that I would have ever came up with it, that's for sure, and not just because this thing has an ecosystem that's more complicated than your average member of the amphibian family.  See, the thing that just attacked this character is called a "face hugger" because that's exactly what it does.  Unbeknownst to everyone else, however, it's also laying an egg in the unfortunate host's stomach that quickly incubates, resulting in a later twisted birth sequence and the baby alien (now a miniature version of its later adult counterpart) rapidly grows and develops a need to kill everything it sees.  What's more, the damn thing's blood is like pH 1-level acid that eats through anything it touches.  As one character flawlessly puts it, you don't dare kill the thing.  That whole concept is simply TERRIFYING.  So kudos to Mr. O'Bannon, because this is some of the best scripting you'll ever see.  Not just in horror, either.  Anywhere.

John Hurt is the actor who got the call to play the cursed crew member who found the alien egg, and he's quite simply fantastic in the role.  He would also get the opportunity to make fun of himself a few years later in that awesome Spaceballs diner scene that pays credit to his death scene here.  Really, though, ALL of the actors here are awesome.  Just read that list on the marquee above.  If you're a horror fan or grew up on '80s movies and Roger Ebert film companions like I did, you're no doubt familiar with pretty much all of them.  Even if you're not, you've probably seen all of them in a few other flicks before.  But here, as the game of "Ten Little Indians" begins and the crew starts getting picked off by the now adult, giant and really, really fast and angry xenomorph, the death scenes actually have impact because the actors were good enough to get us invested.

In that way, this movie was a product of its time.  Halloween had just been released in the prior year, and Alien definitely was a slasher flick set in space, minus all the gratuitous nudity.  It's a body count film, with one slam-bang death scene right after the other, set in a confined area with no place to hide not unlike the device that Friday the 13th would make popular the following year.  There's also a really great plot twist involved as one of the crew members is revealed to be something that you would never, ever guess, a plot mechanism that was mined further in the sequels.  There's an ungodly scene set in the ship's ventilation shafts that managed to get a good jump out of me re-watching it for the first time in ten years. 

Eventually, it gets down to Ripley vs. the Alien, and this is where the movie especially shines.  The best thing about Ripley in this film is that she's a badass female character that they actually, you know, don't shove down your throat that she's a badass female character, a fatal mistake that a lot of film and TV properties these days tend to make.  She's tough, but she's also vulnerable, and the audience is firmly behind this "final girl" as she faces off with the ultimate threat (with the benefit of some well-timed explosions and a flamethrower, of course).  And she also looks fantastic in underwear during the film's climax. /record scratch

I mentioned before that the first act in the screenplay is the one where someone's life changes.  This movie has that.  The second act is the "fun and games" act, and this movie also has that...well, at least as "fun and games" as watching the giant alien pick off one person after another can be.  The visual effects here are still really good...again, mostly because they're done in a conventional way, but I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me beat on that dead horse by now.  While the xenomorph itself would be onscreen more in the sequel, I don't think the thing was ever as SCARY as it was here, mostly because there was just a certain level of tension that the sequels couldn't replicate due to the audience going through the "discovery" phase along with the characters.  How the thing grows, feeds, and operates was a mystery then.  But eventually it gets solved, and once the script hits the third act "insurmountable problem" section, that mystery is a big fucking problem.

It goes without saying that most horror films are a dime a dozen, and I say that as no indictment of the genre as a whole.  I love horror more than life itself.  I've spent much of my life seeking out as many horror-related films, TV shows, books, etc., all in the pursuit of getting scared.  Every once in a while, though, there is a horror story that truly is special, and in the world of movies, it tends to be the special ones that get blessed with that holiest of gifts from the Hollywood Gods - the big budget.  Alien had that golden gift, and thus, it also had a top-notch cast, set, makeup, kill scenes, you name it, this flick fires on all cylinders. 

**** out of ****.  The flick is an essential watch and a classic start to a pretty damn iconic series...but we're just getting started.  /thundercrash

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

2015
Directed by Gregory Plotkin
Starring Chris J. Murray, Brit Shaw, Dan Gill, Ivy George and Olivia Taylor Dudley

The time has come to finish this series off.  And let me tell you something, people, found footage movies viewed the way that I just looked at them get old fast.  Many years ago when I started to actively collect horror movies and started off with slasher flicks, I could watch a whole lot of those back-to-back without even batting an eye.  When a lot of idiots talk about how all horror movie are the "same," odds are they're talking about slasher flicks and the stuff they heard from Randy's rules in Scream.  Slasher movies, though...they tend to differ quite a bit in terms of origin story and script and execution and what killer angle they take.  These movies?  The level of sameness really is pretty jarring, if such a thing can be "jarring."  Chalk that up to bad writing skills on my part.  Alas, I have now watched every movie in the Paranormal Activity series, and I'm not going to lie, I feel free.

Six movies in, and much like the Saw franchise before it, the direction that the powers-that-be decided to take this time out was the 3D one.  Looking back, I'm actually a little surprised that they hadn't done this already, but 3D tends to raise a film's budget substantially.  According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this particular movie cost $10 million to produce.  That's still a dead mosquito on your windshield in the grand scope of Hollywood, but it's double the price tag of any other movie in this series.  I can't report just how big of a different this aspect of it made on the story, since I never saw this flick in theaters and watched it on another lonely Saturday night at my own damn house.  Maybe some of the luster was lost?  At any rate, let's get to the show.

The first thing that I need to mention that this movie actually has in its favor that the previous few films haven't is not just one but TWO fairly likable characters.  The first guy that we meet in this movie is Mike (Dan Gill), boasting of one of the world's most foremost 1970s porn star mustaches but all things told actually a pretty well-played and affable dude.  He has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend and needs a place to stay, and that place is the home of his brother Ryan (Chris J. Murray).  Of course, Ryan has a family of his own - wife Emily (Brit Shaw) and young daughter Leila (Ivy George), and unfortunately, these characters become the focus of the movie as it goes along and Mike kind of vanishes to the back.  Why?  I don't know.  The central family also has a friend named Skylar (Olivia Taylor Dudley) who is into new-agey Yoga stuff (God, I'm cool), and this would be likable character #2.  The early scenes in this movie establish a little bit of romantic tension between Mike and Skylar, a.k.a. something RADICALLY different from what we've seen in this series so far, and the two actors actually have really good chemistry.  It's a shame that it gets wasted in a found footage flick that Jon Lickness watched all alone two years after its release.

Setup time.  The two brothers are setting up Christmas decorations when they find a mysterious box containing an old-school video camera and a stack of VHS tapes.  I suppose this would be a good time to mention that the first scene in this movie was the ending of Paranormal Activity 3 and all of the creepy stuff that follows, because it's kind of central to the plot of this film.  Yup, it turns out that the house that Ryan resides in now was built over the top of cult leader granny's house from that movie, and the tapes just sort of arrived at the house via osmosis.  Ryan and Mike begin watching the tapes, containing footage of the young Kristi and Katie conducting strange psychic rituals...and they seem to be describing Leila's bedroom word-for-word.  Ruh-roh.

The gimmick this time around is that the camera left behind by that dude from Part 3 whom I can't even be bothered to check what his name was is somehow able to see all of the demonic activity in the house.  What this means for you, good reader and watcher, is a lot of cheesy 3D black swirly effects.  In theaters, who knows, maybe they looked better.  But in this series, a series that has been all about what you don't see (a plus even in films that I didn't like as much), it really sticks out like a sore thumb.  And when I start throwing around cliches like that, you know it's time to move on to another topic. 

And that topic would be...Leila, the family daughter who becomes the epicenter of the haunting.  Creepy kids in horror movies are one of my major dicey propositions.  I can count on something like two hands the number of times that I've seen this trope played well, and this would not be one of them.  I'll give it to Ivy George; the young actress did her best, but the evil little girl being slowly possessed plot is a difficult one to make entertaining after we've seen it happen so many times in so many better stories.  And if you noticed that connection to The Exorcist, you are one astute reader.  This movie takes a page out of it in another way as the family calls a Priest in to see Leila, a first for this series and actually a rather welcome change.  Father Todd doesn't get much airtime, but he's likable, so that's another plus in this movie's basket.  It's not original in the least bit, but again, it's welcome.

All of this builds to a finale, with the demon "Tobi" (that has been mentioned in almost every movie in this series, by the way) trying to use Leila as a springboard to finally taking human form in the real world on one side and the family led by Father Todd on the other.  I'll admit it, this movie actually has a pretty damn impressive last 10 minutes that had me legitimately tense on a few occasions.  It makes up slightly for the terminally boring middle section consisting largely of watching those Sharknado-esque black swirlies swish around in the darkness.

It should be apparent that I liked this one a little better than the previous two films.  For starters, I get the sense that this one had a script that the writers actually took a conscious effort to flesh out.  And seriously, this movie had FOUR writers.  They don't make 'em like they used to.  You know how many people wrote Chinatown?  One.  You know how many people wrote the groundbreaking lyrical masterpiece that is "Run the World (Girls)"?  Six.  I rest my case.  The aforementioned likable characters were also a big boost.  And if I still did the Skeevy Paragraph, rest assured that Olivia Taylor Dudley would have gotten her just due there.  The major problem with the film, though, is that it still just isn't very scary, at least not until the very tail end of the proceedings.  Thus, I award this film ** out of ****.

Lastly, a few words about the Paranormal Activity series in total.  Looking back, I actually think that I would bump up my rating of the third film another half-star to that *** "thumbs-up" range.  Part of that could be rose-colored glasses for when I started this project, and part of that could be that I'm just feeling generous, but it IS a better movie than everything that came after.  It can't be denied that this series has been infinitely profitable, and while press materials seemed to indicate that the movie in this review is indeed the last one, I have difficulty believing that.  It's hard to say no to a big return on such minor investments.  Personally, though...I'm just over this whole subgenre of horror, and it's a little sad to say since the first movie is the one that kicked off the whole craze.  For those who don't remember, I gave that movie *** 1/2, and I actually think it still stands the test of time as a modern classic.  What say you, loyal readers?  Would I feel different if I saw the sequels in the same way, after a 40-minute drive through the countryside with a storm brewing that never quite hit storm status and with maybe nine other people in that dark, quiet theater?  Would these movies be more effective?  Unfortunately, I can't say.

And now, the Xenomorphs and the Predators are about to do their very, very violent thing in a multi-part Mega-Review...

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

2014
Directed by Christopher B. Landon
Starring Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz and Gabrielle Walsh

Never underestimate the power of low budgets combined with the power of horror fans hungry for anything new.  Yes, folks, we're up to Paranormal Activity 5, a.k.a The Marked Ones.  While the overaching plot of the series was wrapped up in the last one, the massive amounts of profit that these flicks continued to pull in meant that it was too much to ask that the series end there.  Thus, it's time for the spinoff, baby.  Or, more accurately, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Brace yourself.

While I saw the first two films in theaters, I was at least aware of the release of the third and fourth movies during their original theatrical runs.  Not so with this one.  Maybe I was just in some sort of boredom-induced coma in January of 2014.  Maybe I was still reeling from reviewing all of those godawful Leprechaun films.  But for whatever reason, the last two movies in this franchise completely slipped my radar.  Apparently I was in the minority, since it once again grossed a king's ransom on a budget of only $5 million.  The important thing that you need to know is that the folks at Blum House still had a legitimate cash cow on their hands, and even though this film is pretty bad all things considered, I can't fault them in the least bit for keeping the gravy train going.  And while it is technically a spinoff, it also links up with the original series at the end in a way that I promise not to spoil.  Once again, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Ch ch ch ch.

I'll be the first person to admit that I knew nothing about this movie going on and had no idea what I was in store for, but I certainly didn't plan on what we got, and that's a story set in a Latin neighborhood in California.  The switch in locales actually was a very fresh idea that gave the story all kinds of new possibilities.  Maybe.  But the characters that inhabit this story...oh man.  Broken record, I know.

The main duo consists of Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and his best friend Hector (Jorge Diaz).  The former is a good student/good brother/good son/all-around good guy.  Hector is just kind of...there.  I don't know.  He's there to be Jesse's slightly more irresponsible best friend, and if you put a propeller on this guy's cap I wouldn't bat an eye.  These two are just criminally uninteresting, and since the main crux of what is to come places one of them under consistent eternal damnation, that's a problem.  We DO get the character of Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh), the two guys' female friend who actually does command the screen with something other than apathy.  She's also pretty hot.  The three have just graduated high school and are ready to have fun throughout the summer until the ghost dimension comes a-calling.  There's also a few side characters like Jesse's dad and grandmother, but they're not important.  And there is your Paranormal Activity character wrap-up.

If you've been reading these reviews, you know what comes next:  The Set Up, and this time around it's actually pretty nifty.  Hector has a new camera and carries it around everywhere, providing all of the convenient first-person perspective that by this point I had just accepted.  One night at Jesse's apartment they hear strange chanting coming from the apartment below them.  They use some MacGyver-esque cunning to look at what's going on, catching a naked woman standing utterly still while the crazy neighbor lady draws a symbol on her stomach.  Not soon after, crazy neighbor lady is found murdered by one of their classmates.  And not soon after that, the three best friends (Jesse, Hector and Marisol) invade murdered crazy lady's apartment and find a demon book, quickly perform one of the rituals inside, and then funny stuff starts to happen.

In many ways, this flick kind of reminds me of your typical Twilight Zone episode.  Regular Guy gets Amazing Power.  Regular Guy reacts to getting Amazing Power, usually in very irresponsible and greedy ways.  Regular Guy then gets comeuppance in the end for his arrogance in the face of using Amazing Power for evil.  That's what we get here, as the ritual seems to result in Jesse being impervious to being hurt.  It first manifests itself at a pickup basketball game where the local hoods intervene and start to shove Jesse around, only to be shoved something like 357 feet away by an unseen force.  It seems that whatever Jesse does, there is some invisible force protecting him.  But since this is a scary movie, it also starts to control him and make him do bad, bad things.  Slowly, I assure you.

This is one slow movie.  Sometimes, that can be good, as there's nothing quite as satisfying as a good scary slow burn.  By this point, though, the whole concept of these movies had worn thin on me and I was just waiting for the whole thing to be over.  Having said that, there is one NIGHTMARISH sequence that actually did frighten me as it happened, with Jesse waking up in the middle of the night, heading down to the cursed apartment, finding the trap door in said cursed apartment (in a sequence involving a hot girl that Jesse almost hooked up with earlier in the movie, no less)...and, yeah.  Watch for yourself.  To me, there are few things scarier than being trapped in a confined space, trying to escape, and then watching in terror as you're locked inside.  So A+++ to the movie for this sequence.  And...it has a final scene that actually works despite its clunkiness.  If you just watched all of these movies back-to-back like I did, I suspect that it probably was a little more effective than if you'd seen them all in theaters months and years apart.

Out of all five films thus far, this is easily the most cringey when it comes to the subject of realism.  We're asked to believe quite a bit when it comes to Hector's camera that everyone always seems to have at all of the best moments, but you're probably sick of me beating that dead horse.  But some of the things that camera CAPTURES...like Jesse going full rampage mode in the middle of a convenience store.  Or that bit right before the finale with the two gangsters arriving at this movie's Cult Compound (Trademark Sign) and blowing a couple murderous cultists away with shotguns...yeah, it was comedic gold, but not in the way the movie would have liked.

Oh, and there's a recurring bit involving an old Simon game that serves a a stand-in for a Ouija board.  Yeah.  It happens.

The biggest strike against this movie is that the story itself just is not very interesting.  Jesse gets a demon friend.  Bad things happen to people.  A mystery is unraveled about a worldwide cult using firstborn sons as some sort of possessed killer army.  It's actually an interesting idea that could be FANTASTIC if this movie weren't a found footage film, but the way it's portrayed here on such a small scale is terminally boring.  And the characters that we take the ride along with don't make the ride any smoother, believe me.  Well, except for Marisol.  She's captivating for any reason that you want to interpret.

* 1/2 out of ****.  I didn't think it was any worse than the last installment, but boy is this series starting to show its age.  Again, however, this movie grossed $90 million dollars.  We horror fans...we're a loyal bunch.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

2012
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Kathryn Newton, Matt Shiveley, Aiden Lovekamp, Brady Allen and Katie Featherston

Folks...just because it's there doesn't mean you have to watch it.  I posted an entire rant on this very subject several months back, and it's required reading for everyone in the entire world.  For everyone who missed it, the gist of it is this: I continue to be amazed (literally, it boggles my brain) how many people continue to force themselves to watch every movie franchise or TV series that they no longer enjoy with the rationale being "well, I've watched everything up until this point, so I guess I have to watch the rest."  Um...no, you don't.  Unless there is some law on the books that says that once you see the first film or episode of something that a man hides out in your closet with a gun trained at your head unless you follow said thing to completion, you're perfectly free to, you know, skip out once it starts to suck.  The Law of Diminshing Returns tends to hit like a motherfucker, and I present Paranormal Activity 4 as the proof.

Oh boy, this film.  'Memba how I said that I gave up on this series in theaters after the second one because it wasn't as good as the first?  Well, the twenty bucks I spent on this box set is going to have to motivate me to keep going forward, because this one just wasn't good.  The first, again, was a legitimately scary flick.  The second had its fair share of shocks, and the third at least had that great sequence with the sheet and the rotating fan cam.  In this one, there's a whole lot of nothing.  It does have a few redeeming factors that I'll get to a few paragraphs from here, but overall it's just a very tepid and borderline BORING time.  The market seemed to agree; while this movie still made a massive profit off of its $5 million budget, the gross was significantly lower than the first three films.  There really is only so much you can do with this formula, but let's see how much more I can pull out of my ass in explaining it.  THE MOVIE!

For those keeping score, Paranormal Activity 3 was a prequel film that gives us the back story and motivation behind everything that has happened so far.  I threw a little spoiler alert in the last review before I mentioned exactly what it was, but hell, these movies are already old by this point, so what does it matter?  Think lots of witches' covens, first-born son sacrifices and other assorted demonic debauchery.  That one handled the back story, and this one is actually a sequel to the second movie, which ended with cursed Katie from the original film killing her sister and taking her infant son away.  Five years later, and here we are.

The setup:  This time around, your main character is a teenage girl.  Named Alex, she's played by Kathryn Newton, and the character is unfortunate.  See, this isn't just a teenage girl; it's a 2010s teenage girl brought to life on the screen, which means Converse sneakers, skinny jeans and constant phone browsing every time there is a dull moment.  I don't know if a single paragraph has ever made me feel older typing it, but here we are.  Can't close that Pandora's Box.  She has a boyfriend named Ben (Matt Shiveley), and during the course of their Titanic-esque courtship Ben records their Skype sessions and begins seeing weird stuff happening in the house.  There's your recording motif, as computers are what captures everything this time.

The meat:  The rest of the family consists of a pretty nondescript mother and father, along with Alex's little brother Wyatt.  The ghostly visitations come once a weird neighbor kid named Robbie starts hanging around the house, with the movie springing its first effective jump scare on us as Alex and Ben go up to the tree house in the middle of the night only to find Robbie there staring into a corner.  Fairly normal behavior, if you ask me.  Robbie just moved into the neighborhood, and his mother is soon revealed to be in the hospital for some unknown reason.  I'll give you one guess as to who said mother figure is.  At any rate, Robbie is now staying with the family for a few days, which means that the plot can jump start.

There are two long-running motifs in this series.  I've brought one of them up, which is that every movie seems to have a "signature" camera shot.  This time around, it's the family living room with the lights off, dots of light illuminating the surroundings.  It's creepy and leads to a few good ghost reveals, but it's nowhere near as effective as that "oscillating fan camera" from the last one, or even the overhead kitchen shot from the second.  The other motif is that whenever the movie wants to spring a surprise on us, we have this guttural, bass-filled "rumble" that fills the soundtrack.  I remember sitting in the dark theater when I saw the first film and thinking that it really added to the atmosphere.  By this point, the shine was off and I just found it annoying.  Yet more A+ film criticism from this reporter.

What more is there to expound upon?  Well, Katie eventually reappears from the "hospital," and I have to admit that it was good to see her in a fairly regular role again.  Featherston is actually a pretty good actress, and I would certainly have liked to see her in more horror films because she has a very good, relatable quality when she's not possessed by demons.  Spoiler alert.  All throughout the film, the entity appears to have been targeting Wyatt, and I will also give it to the movie in this regard as it sprung a surprise on me when it comes to this kid that I genuinely did not see coming.  But it's kind of a sprinkle in the shit sandwich.

The reason?  This movie just isn't scary.  At all.  Maybe I'm just jaded, but I was able to call every jump, every time that a door would slowly creak open, every time a shadow would run past the camera, etc.  I'd seen this three times before.  The thrill was gone.  Without spoiling everything that happens, I'll also say that I felt extremely let down by the ending.  These days, it almost takes incredible balls for a horror movie to NOT have an open-ended final sequence, and given that this flick had the tagline "All the Activity Has Led to This," this would have been a good opportunity for the good guys to actually pull one out for a change.  Nope.  But...that probably would have led to no additional sequels, so we can't have nice things.

That's what we get with Paranormal Activity 4.  It's competent and well-produced, but with pretty much every specific it just feels there.  The acting is by and large bad, with the exception of Featherston in her brief scenes.  The kid who plays Wyatt in particular is grating to the core.  The camera gimmick feels even less believable in this one than it does in previous installments, especially in the finale.  And the plot springs that one good surprise on us, but even that isn't enough to barely lull us out of submission.  Suffice to say, I can't recommend this one.

* 1/2 out of ****.  And I realize that there are two more of these things to cover before I'm done.  But if anyone wants to call me a hypocrite for breaking my own Golden Rule of Entertainment, I say...screw it.  I spent $20 on six movies and that's a pretty damn good ratio in my book.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

2011
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Lauren Bittner, Chris Smith, Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown

So it's come to this - back to the Paranormal Activity films.

A preface:  I saw the first two films in theaters, and liked the hell out of both.  I'll never forget watching the first movie and then driving 40 miles back home in a rain storm through the middle of nowhere in rural Minnesota, my mind playing tricks on me the whole time because I'm a giant wuss.  The second one didn't have any experience that memorable, but I still enjoyed it.  The ironic thing (did I properly use the word "ironic" there?) is that if you go back to the the handy-dandy October 2010 section of this here blog and read my original review, I was already hoping that the series was over because I didn't know what else you could do with the concept.  Well, lo and behold, there's been something like 19 additional films since then.  And I kept my word and totally ignored all of them.  And there they stayed buried in my subconscious for five years...until I saw a box set of all six movies last Halloween for the low-low price of twenty bucks.  It's hard to say no to that kind of horror collection padding.  I'm just now getting around to watching them, which means...buckle up.  There is a good chance that this series of reviews is going to suck.

I say that because reviewing movies like this are a challenge.  Found footage...yeah, it's a genre that is VERY easy to get some cheap scares, but it's one of the hardest things on the planet to make feel authentic.  The $10 million question in all of these films is always the following:  WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE STILL FILMING??!?  While The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first movie done in this vein, it actually did make an attempt to explain this question and feel as authentic as possible.  The PA movies and a lot of what came after have a tendency to feel like traditional horror films shot in the first-person.  These movies also tend to be very short and minimalist, so there's only so much padding out that I can do with my writing.  I've often been accused of having diarrhea of the keyboard, but what you're about to witness is someone attempting to pull off some kind of minor miracle the likes of which Jesus himself would be damn proud of.  Is that enough introduction?  Probably too much.  Let's go.

Upon re-watching the first two films, my opinion of them is confirmed.  The first is still a damn scary time with only one dopey plot move (the demonologist who conveniently has to disappear just as the movie approaches its final trimester), and the second is a fun enough time that has the weakness of the husband character.  For the uninitiated, the two films are the stories of sisters Katie and Kristi, each of whom finding themselves dealing with a demonic presence in their house.  At the end of the first, Katie is possessed by said demon and kills her boyfriend, leading to this really nifty sequence in the second where the events sync up.  This movie explores the events where it all began...which means we're heading back to the past like the Angry Video Game Nerd.  The second movie was also a prequel.  We'll be back to horse and buggy days by the time this series is over, even though cameras hadn't been invented yet.  I'm 47% positive that this wouldn't stop any screenwriter.

So the film opens with Katie (the older sister, for those keeping score) delivering a box of old VHS tapes from their childhood to Kristi, currently pregnant with the kid who would serve as the plot lynchpin in the second movie.  This would be your epic set-up, as we're looking at the old tapes from their childhood.  Flashback to 1988, where we meet young Katie, young Kristi, and their mother Julie.  Julie is living with her boyfriend Dennis, a confirmed slacker whose job is videotaping weddings.  Oh-so-convenient for the plot, I know.  Early on in the film, Dennis talks Julie into making a sex tape, only for them to be interrupted mid-coitus by an EARTHQUAKE and the camera to catch dust falling onto an invisible person.  It actually is kind of creepy, I must admit.

Well, Dennis sees this and immediately sets up surveillance all around the house to catch the invisible intruder.  This enables Dennis to discover that Kristi's relationship with her invisible friend Toby is deeper than he initially thought; she gets up in the middle of the night and talks to him, for starters.  Seems normal to me. 

If there is one thing that the Paranormal Activity movies do well, it is set up at least one true money sequence that builds and builds and eventually explodes.  This one is no diferent, as Julie and Dennis head out for a night on the town and leave the kids in care of a babysitter.  Cue a really creepy sequence that takes the concept of the classic "sheet with two cut-out eyes" ghost and brings it to the 21st century.  I'll admit that I was biting my nails during this stuff, and it's unfortunate that the next attempted trademark scare sequence involving Dennis' Shaggy-from-Scooby Doo work partner and more earthquakes isn't anywhere near as cool.

Believe it or not, we're already something like fifty minutes into this movie, which means that it's time to wrap things up.  Dennis eventually finds a Pagan symbol in the girls' bedroom, and once the disbelieving mother has something happen directly to her, it's off to the home of the adoring grandmother.  Everything that happens from this point on is entirely predictable, and it's also where the movie feels its LEAST authentic.  Particularly in the final five minutes or so, when I was left to perform mental gymnastics at the thoughts of how and why Dennis was still recording all of this stuff.

SPOILER ALERT for anyone who doesn't want such things, so skip this paragraph if you don't want key surprising-but-not-really twists revealed.  Julie's mother, and the kids' grandmother, is actually the leader of an honest-to-goodness COVEN that has been causing all of this demonic activity.  It's probably spelled out more in further sequels, but I think the idea is that they sacrifice each family member's first-born son, which explains why the grandmother was so adamant about Julie trying for more kids and so disappointed when she announced that she was done.  It actually is kind of an interesting idea, but the second that the family shows up at grandma's house, it's projected from a mile away.

Is this movie any good?  Kind of.  For starters, the actors playing the young versions of Katie and Kristi are pretty bad.  Chris Smith is also pretty grating as Dennis.  Emotional stakes just aren't there in this movie, and it's the nature of the beast when you're dealing with prequels.  We already know how the story ends, so a lot of the suspense is kneecapped before the story even starts.  The concept had already been stretched almost as far as it could be at this point, and we're only on movie #3.  Thus, the only thing that this flick could do was craft some shocks.  There are more than a few things in this flick that will make you jump, but you know my stance on those.  You jump, you recover, and you forget aout it approximately 2.7 seconds later.  Thus, this movie wasn't my thing once the end credits rolled, but once those end credits roll it doesn't matter.  The proof?  This movie set records for highest-grossing midnight showings and opening days for a horror film.  And what that ultimately means for you saps is the aforementioned upcoming reviews.

** 1/2 out of ****.  I actually did enjoy this film while I was watching it, but not in the way that I would ever want to watch it again.  That prequel thing really does kill it.  Supposedly, though, the next film is actually a sequel to Paranormal Activity 2, and given the explanation that we get in this one, I would be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued by that prospect.  Stay tuned.  /thundercrash

Alligator (1980)

1980
Directed by Lewis Teague
Starring Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger and Henry Silva

Before I get going with this review, I'm going to pull back the curtain once again in regards to how these things are written.  I have a lot of down time at my job, and during that dead time I tend to dig out a few sheets of paper and jot down ideas for films and/or subjects to be covered here.  I was all ready to go this week with a rare non-movie review post about things that legit frighten me in real life.  Spoiler alert: I'm a huge wuss with no less than 1,478 irrational fears, many of them due to watching a lot of Unsolved Mysteries as a kid.  But I quickly noticed that there was one recurring theme on that list.  Namely, big scary animals.  I've said this before, but film-makers, take note - when you make things like spiders, snakes and large predators scary, you'll get me almost every damn time.  Except for those abominations on the SyFy channel.  F**k them.

Which brings me to alligators, crocodiles and the movie in question today.  I first saw Alligator some Saturday afternoon on one of my local channels many, many years ago, and it scared the crap out of me then.  It actually inspired me to do a lot of research into the ACTUAL subject of the urban legend that it's based on - the story of alligators living in the New York City sewers - and the truth is no less fascinating.  Google it.  The movie definitely isn't perfect, but it still holds up very well today for one simple reason: giant reptiles are friggin' scary.  I don't know exactly WHERE being eaten by a huge creature with giant teeth that can rip you to shreds within seconds ranks on the "bad death" list, but it has to be pretty high.  And the creative team behind this film - director Lewis Teague and screenwriter John Sayles - understood that and then some.  I really didn't intend this, but Sayles ALSO wrote last week's four-star classic Piranha.  He's been nominatd for Oscars since then, but to me he'll always be the king of aquatic horror, baby.  It's brie time.

While the plot of Alligator eventually does tread into some dirty territory, the thing about the presentation is that it's deadly serious and occasionally dingy.  This is readily apparent from the prologue, as a young girl buys a baby alligator while on vacation in Florida and brings it back to her home in Chicago.  The alligator is promptly flushed down the toilet by her snarling dad...and I think you know where we're going from here.  What you might NOT think is just how the baby alligator becomes the monster of this creature feature, as it spends the next several years feasting on animal carcasses deposited in the sewers by a super-mega-evil company experimenting on animals with growth formulas.  This would be the classic "derp" moment that brings us our Mrs. Deagle-esque human villain character, but we'll get to him later.  In short order, the alligator - now fully grown to Brobdingnagian proportions and boasting an insatiable appetite to go with its size - starts attacking sewer workers, and we get to meet our truly Shakespeare-worthy characters in charge of tracking it down.

And boy, what a hero character this movie has.  Folks, Alligator has Robert Forster.  I've been a huge fan of this guy ever since seeing him in Jackie Brown, and yeah, I know that it wasn't his first movie, but at the very least you can see his face and know that he's bringing the goods.  In this film, he's police officer David Madison.  John Sayles must have a real hard-on for hero characters who don't give no f**ks, because Piranha had the drunk outdoorsman guy, and David Madison is the same type of dude.  With all of the dead bodies piling up, it means that our investigator is going to need a plucky partner.  Said partner is reptile expert Marisa Kendall, played by Robin Riker.  The "derp" makes a return when we realize a very important thing - this is the same person who bought the alligator all those years ago.  Coincidence, thy name is Alligator.

So far, I'm sure that you've noticed that this film is very similar to Piranha.  Not that that's a bad thing; there's certainly not many low-budget creature features that you can choose to crib from, especially when you have the same guy behind the writer's desk.  The movie compensates by giving us - I s**t you not - a QUIRKY ROMANCE between Madison and Kendall.  This includes a scene where they visit Kendall's house, and Madison butters up to his new love interest's abrasive mother.  No joke, there's like a ten-minute subplot in the middle of this movie where it turns into your average Julia Roberts crappy rom-com flick.  Amazed, but not in the good way.

Now let's get to the creature itself.  It definitely looks cool, and the body count has already more than reached its government minimum, so we've seen it in action.  From what I can tell, the big gator was brought to life mainly through the arts of puppetry, forced-perspective photography and stop-motion animation, and there's only a couple scenes that look truly dated by today's standards.  From a "monster" standpoint, it definitely fits the bill, so three cheers for conventional special effects!

Alright, back to the show.  Thus far, all of the victims have been nameless sewer workers and other scrubs, but we need some truly sweeping emotional stakes for the second half of the film.  The first guy that we get is Slade (Dean Jagger), the businessman who was the guy in charge of all the illegal animal experiments that created the beast.  Dr. Frankenstein, this guy ain't, although it does give us a pretty satisfying kill scene later on.  There's also a lab scientist providing the injections who hilariously has his wedding invaded by the gator (not kidding, folks, it happens).  Last but certainly not least, we get the intervention of a grizzled monster hunter played by Henry Silva who is about as effective as Creighton Duke on his best day.  Not his worst day, but his best day, although that's still pretty bad.

When holding this movie side-by-side with Piranha, this one definitely treads a lot more into hokey territory.  And while that film definitely had its humorous moments, I think this one is just generally a lot more goofy in tone.  Sometimes, that works, as the movie definitely has its laughs.  But sometimes it also takes away from what should be a very freaky story.  There are few things on Earth that scare me more than these animals; I've had no less than two nightmares in the past year where I suddenly find myself in a muddy river in some remote location and know - just know - that there's a giant saltwater croc on my tail.  Then I wake up and cry.  Well, maybe not, but that 25% exaggeration serves a purpose (I think) - this movie could have been really, really scary.  And while the movie has good performances, good effects and an all-around fun pace, I can't say that I was frightened by it on this re-watch.  So, yeah, the flaws are there, but it really is hard to go too wrong with this formula.  Current film-makers, more aquatic horror, please!

As for a rating, let's give the flick *** out of ****.  Good, but not great, but it also served as the precursor to Lewis Teague's next film - the certifiably terrifying Cujo, truly one of the best movies EVER in terms of taking something ordinary and making it freaky as all get out.  But I've reviewed enough Stephen King movies on this here blog, so that one won't be coming for a while.