31 Days of Halloween

Now everybody get back to the film club, all of you.  Oh so you can rewatch a bunch of slasher movies for this thread but don't have the cajones to get a recommendation from Drac or Coop?  Get with it!

RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT (1987)




Gen X adores the original Salem’s Lot (although it was boring shit) and detest this sequel/soft-reboot. Foreshadowing of things to come? I actually didn’t mind this one at all. It wasn’t particularly scary (not that it needed to be) or thrilling, but I did find myself invested in the story. This guy and his son move into a small town that’s almost fully populated by vampires. Instead of attacking them, they welcome them into their society. They want to move away from human blood because of AIDS and the crack epidemic (I’m serious) and have moved to animal blood. So they want to form a truce with the humans. That’s all fine and dandy until the dad realizes that there’s other ulterior motives. As I said, the movie is pretty good. It has an interesting take on vampires. There is one glaring flaw, however, and that’s the acting. It’s atrocious. But oh well. Some may find that amusing.

Yuppie Horror Installment 3: While The Stepfather predated Fatal Attraction and Dead Calm was different enough that it didn’t really need to live in its shadow, Pacific Heights is the first of the yuppie horror films to be pretty obviously inspired by the success of that Adrian Lynne film in 1987. Here we are once again treated to a pair of upper middle class people (albeit a little younger this time) who find their lives turned upside down when a crazy person shows up in it. This time we look at a young couple (Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) are the new owners of an apartment building that they have purchased at great risk by taking out a mortgage that they can only pay if they collect all their rent payments promptly. The plan is upended when a man named Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) becomes one of their first tenants and promptly begins acting strangely. He makes noise all through the night but never answers the door and his rent payments haven’t shown up either and when these inexperienced landlords try to evict him he finds a number of ways to dodge the orders.

The film is in certain ways a 1990s answer to Cape Fear (it was made a year before Martin Scorsese’s remake) in that it’s about a psychopath who terrorizes a family without ever really breaking any laws and occasionally making them look like the bad guy. Unlike Cape Fear, Carter Hayes’ motivations are never entirely clear. Sometimes he comes off like he’s merely a con man who hopes to profit from what he’s doing, other times he seems like he just gets off on causing mischief, and sometimes he seems like a straight-up psycho. The goal of the movie is to put you in the shoes of these landlords who suddenly find themselves in the middle of this kafka-esque spiral of trouble. However, the movie sort of undercuts this by making its protagonists (but particularly the Matthew Modine character) almost impossible to relate to or sympathize with. The Modine character is a flat out impulsive moron who brings most of his problems on himself by getting ridiculously aggressive and making mind-bogglingly stupid decisions at every turn and never fucking learns. He makes the boyfriend in Paranormal Activity look calm and collected by comparison. The Melanie Griffith character is a bit more likable and proves to be more capable than she looks by the end, but she’s also under-developed and Griggith’s performance isn’t much better than Modine’s.

Michael Keaton obviously gives the standout performance here, but I still don’t know that I’d really call Carter Hayes a particularly good villain. In fact I strongly suspect that earlier versions of the script (or perhaps early cuts of the film even) had Hayes being less of a dangerous psychopath and more of a jackass trying to rip people off and that this was changed at the last minute by a studio note that demanded that the film play more like a thriller and that a bunch of shots of Keaton behaving like a sinister creep be added which don’t really get followed through on. There’s a really bizarre scene with Hayes right at the very beginning of the film that seems to be completely incongruous with everything that comes after and I can’t help but wonder if this is a residual piece of that alternate version of the film. Who knows, at the end of the day this just isn’t nearly as good of a film as it could have been. It’s certainly beneath the dignity of director John Schlesinger (who seemed to have fallen off in a big way during the 80s) and is generally just kind of forgettable.
** out of Four

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

PACIFIC HEIGHTS (1990)


Life after The Joker wasn't too kind to Bob the Goon.

I'm a sucker for a good 1990's thriller and Pacific Heights is no except. It stars Michael Keaton, in his post-Batman role, as a mysterious rich guy who moves into an apartment in San Francisco and turns his landlord's lives into a living nightmare. They're played by Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith. These type of movies usually involve characters that make stupid decisions and Pacific Heights is no exception. First, they let this guy move into the apartment without making a deposit. Then, they start a pissing contest when he begins to annoy his neighbors. And finally, the Matthew Modine character gets so enraged that he beats up the Michael Keaton character and gets a restraining order. Can you imagine being kicked out of your own property - by your tenant? Crazy! But that's what makes the movie so much fun to watch. It's like an absurd version of real life. Or at least it's supposed to be. If you go to the IMDb boards for Pacific Heights, you'll see a thread with landlords sharing their own horror stories.

That sounds... incredibly bad. Really, that's the plot? I always thought it was like Cape Fear but in an apartment... which also is a shitty concept. But yeah, I'd totally rent to Michael Keaton as long as he stays in Birdman character at all times.

I do like the Jennifer Lawrence gifs though. It's making it very difficult to concentrate at work.

THE FLY (1958)



The Fly has a clever concept. It's about a scientist who invents a teleportation device, but while testing the machine, a fly gets in and their DNA's combine. His human body ends up with the fly's head and the fly's body ends up with his head. Unfortunately, the execution is very boring. All the characters are forgettable and poorly acted. The story is awkwardly told through flashback as his wife is in danger of being locked up in a mental institute. And the movie looks like a play. It's very UN-cinematic. I say skip this version and stick to the David Cronenberg remake.


THE FLY (1986)



The Fly is David Cronenberg's masterpiece. It tells the story of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), a scientist experimenting on a machine that can teleport people, animals, and objects. But one night, a fly gets into the machine while Seth is testing it and the computer struggles to tell the difference between the two of them so it ends up merging their DNA. Then overtime, Seth slowly turns into a monster. But instead of running around the city and causing trouble like in a cheap exploitation movie, Cronenberg focuses on how the transformation has affected Seth's relationship with his girlfriend (Geena Davis). So even though The Fly features Oscar-winning make-up effects and a few entertaining action set-pieces, it is ultimately a tragic drama with characters that the audience can get emotionally invested in. And that's why it's such a brilliant cinematic achievement.


THE FLY II (1989)



There's an episode of Rick & Morty where they create a Cronenberg world. It's debatably a reference to The Fly II even though Cronenberg had nothing to do with this lousy sequel. An overly paid executive at Fox decided it was a good idea to follow Cronenberg's masterpiece with a bland monster movie directed by the guy who did the special effects for the first one. The story follows an evil corporation trying to replicate Jeff Goldblum's science to hilarious results. There's various Cronenberg-esque creatures that are fun to look at but add very little to this very boring movie that was somehow co-written by Frank Darabont. We can add The Fly II to the list of movies we can forget existed.

Best part of this video is the revelation that Police Academy and The Fly were shot in the same location. Now we know what PG Cooper and IanTheCool do on their Friday nights.