Critical Double Shot!

Silent Night, Deadly Night
and
Satanic

Critical is a series of examinations about media in popular culture. It's an explicit look, which means those who don't want key plot points revealed to you should likely avoid continuing. Critical does not even know what the word spoilers MEANS.

I have a pretty high tolerance for crap. I thrive on it, practically. Samurai Cop? Love it. No Holds Barred? Beats The Marine/See No Evil/The Condemned by a mile. Manos? I would gladly have paid $20 for this movie instead of the 9.98 or whatever I picked it up for. Crap, really, constitutes 90% of my movie diet. There have even been some crap lately that has not impressed me (Vacancy, Alone in the Dark) but didn't feel like a waste of a rental.

These two movies, however, were three hours of my life that could have been better spent any number of ways. Like, getting a root canal, or cleaning my bathroom toilet with my tongue.



Silent Night, Deadly Night was the first in a series of 5 movies (!!) that focused on a killer in a Santa Claus costume. According to the dvd bonuses included with the movie, a killer Santa Claus caused such a stir that the movie was banned in some places. I do think this movie should have been banned, but not because the idea of a killer Santa is sacrilege to me. I think it's a great idea and this kind of outside the box thinking should be encouraged. It should have been banned, however, because it's a piece of shit.

Billy is a creepy little kid that wears lipstick, for some reason. While visiting his Grandpa in the old folk's home, Grandpa springs to life and tells Billy that Santa punishes naughty children. Soon after this, Billy's father is shot to death by a burglar in a Santa suit and his mother is almost raped before having her throat slit so, needless to say, Billy is going to be a screwed up adult. Ending up in an orphanage with a hellfire and brimstone Mother Superior sure doesn't help him turn out to be a well adjusted adult, especially since her idea of helping Billy through his trauma is to beat him and then force him to sit on Santa's lap. An educated psychologist, she is not. Despite all this, Billy grows up and seems normal enough. He even gets a job...in a toy store. Where he has to see Santa on a daily basis. Oops. Naturally, Santa ends up breaking his ankle skating and Billy's boss needs someone to put on the suit on Christmas Eve. It goes without saying that Billy has a mental breakdown, believes he is Santa, and he goes around punishing people who fornicate, get drunk, and steal sleds. Punishing with an ax.

The movie's greatest crime is that everyone in the movie is just downright unlikable. You're left with nuns who are too stupid to realize that getting Billy a job working with Santa is unwise, a cop who shoots a deaf priest dressed as Santa in the back (oh yeah, he's going to hell for that one), a woman who gets mad at Billy for killing someone who was trying to rape her, and Mother Superior who is the definiton of a cliche. The fact that Billy ends up dead before chopping her head off is sad on multiple levels.



Satanic is in no way better. It's shot on what appear to be tv cameras and not movie cameras, which is the very hallmark of quality. Michelle is in a car accident and her face is ruined. The doctors are able to repair it, but because she is a minor she ends up in a crooked half-way home run by a pervert and a thief, and the other residents of the home either treat her like garbage, make lewd sexual advances toward her, or fall in love with her. It's a tough life, for sure. Then people start dying and Michelle starts thinking that she is a killer, because she has a ouijia board painted with blood and she seems to be having visions of herself performing Satanic rituals.

To explain why this movie makes no sense, you need to know the truth. The truth is not Michelle is not a Satanist. Michelle is not even Michelle, she is Kayla. You see, Michelle tried to kill Kayla in order to make a deal with the devil and gain immortality (riiiiiiiight). Only Michelle's Dad caught them and tried to get Kayla to the hospital, but there was a car accident and Michelle left the scene of the accident apparently unharmed. The hospital staff assumed that Kayla was Michelle since Kayla was mumbling Michelle's name over and over again while in the ambulance, and apparently checking DNA or dental records or anything like that is a foreign concept to the people in this movie. Kayla's plastic surgeon rebuilt her face so that she looked like Michelle, doing such a good job that Kayla looks exactly 100% like Michelle. Luckily, Kayla also had the exact same height, weight, body type, and voice that Michelle did, because when Kayla and Michelle meet, they look exactly the same except for their make-up. That, my friends, is nonsense.

Also nonsense? Michelle-Michelle wants to kill Michelle-Kayla because she belives her dark gods got confused and bestowed immortality on the wrong person. Now, obviously no such things occurred, but it helps to illustrate how brain dead Michelle-Michelle is. Honey, if your dark gods are so dumb they accidentally gave immortality to the wrong person just because they looked like you, I would find someone else to worship. If you have to worship a devil, maybe pick one that didn't ride the short bus on the way to the blood sacrifice?

The special effects in this movie are laughable and the fight scene at the end between Michelle-Michelle and Michelle-Kayla is the worst thing I have ever seen. That fight scene between Kirk and the Gorn? That is friggin' Neo vs Agent Smith in comparison. I could coreograph something more exciting while half-asleep than this. At first I thought the problem is that they had to shoot it in such a way that you never saw Michelle-Michelle and Michelle-Kayla's face on screen at the same time, as it was the same actress and they didn't want to give away the effect. But no, upon consulting IMDB Michelle and Kayla were played by identical twins (Annie Sorell and Alicia Loren, whose biggest claim to fame apparently is that they were in a shower scene in Cruel Intentions 2, and they made out with each other a bit, which just makes me glad I never bothered with any of those sequels). Apparently, the two girls just suck at play-fighting.

Jeffrey Combs and Angus Scrimm both take part in this debacle, and while I love me some Re-Animator and I've heard Scrimm does a really good job as The Tall Man, the two of them phoned this in so much that I hope they have a good long distance plan.

Both movies were wastes of my life and they should be avoided at all costs.



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Critical: Alone in the Dark (1982)

Critical is a series of examinations about media in popular culture. It's an explicit look, which means those who don't want key plot points revealed to you should likely avoid continuing. Critical does not even know what the word spoilers MEANS.

Writing these things more than a week after you watched a movie, especially as forgettable a movie as Alone in the Dark, is troublesome, if only because I've already forgotten most of my complaints about this movie. The fact that it's a pretty average movie to start with doesn't help this review at all.

But I haven't forgotten everything bad about this movie, oh no.

On the plus side, this is not Alone in the Dark from 2005. This, of course, is a big plus.

Also, Jack Palance and Martin Landau are great in this. Both play violent psycopaths, one a paranoid war vet and the other a preacher who likes to set fires, who escape from a mental hospital when the power goes out and the electric locks keeping them in stop working. A generator is mentioned only in passing, and that the generator obviously must have failed for the inmates to escape. You'd think this is pretty poor planning, on pretty much every level, but this is what happens when the doctor treating them is just as loony as they are. (Donald Pleasance unfortunately doesn't save that character from being a complete ass. True, you can only do so much with the script you're given, but his Dr Leo is so clearly insane that by the time Leo meets his end, you are not only not surprised but downright happy.) The people outside the asylum are just as crazy, as a simple power outage (hence the title) leads to a riot, complete with looting and FLAMING GARBAGE CANS, in the space of an hour. I don't know about you, but when my house loses electricity, I usually wait half a day before setting garbage aflame.

Palance and Landau have a lot of fun with the roles they are playing, as they are both absolutely nuts and enjoying every minute of it. Scenery is chewed without abandon and they both bring a good bit of menace to the parts they play. They are accompanied by two other pyscotics, one an overweight pedophile and the other a serial killer who hides his face and gets nose bleeds whenever he kills someone, and neither one of those is particularly memorable. The Bleeder, as he is called, is meant to be a shcoking surprise in the climax of the film, but the big reveal of what he looks like is just completely unbelievable. Once the riot begins, a stranger ends up hooking up with the main characters at an anti-nuclear rally and is invited into their home when the other 3 psychos begin their assault. The stranger helps them defend their home and it is clearly supposed to be shocking when he dispatches one of the psychopaths and his nose begins to bleed. If this made any sense, it might be shocking, but what are the chances that The Bleeder would end up at the same rally as the main characters, and that he would be invited home with them, and that he would suddenly turn on his former allies in order to protect the family, and that once his identity is revealed he snaps and tries to kill them? Sorry, it just makes no sense.

The ending proves to be the worst flaw in the movie. Dues ex machine is a generous way to put it, as Palance is talked down from his killing spree by a tv news report. Then, he proceeds to go to a bar that plays lousy music (the band is The Sick F*cks, and this movie was made in the 80's, so three guesses what type of music they play), kills the bouncer, and hits on a girl. And that is it, the movie ends. What the heck, movie?

At 85 minutes or so, it's not an awful movie, and Palance and Landau do their best to make this worth watching. I'd call it a rental, if you have nothing better at all in your Netflix queue.



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Critical: Vacancy

Critical is a series of examinations about media in popular culture. It's an explicit look, which means those who don't want key plot points revealed to you should likely avoid continuing. Critical does not even know what the word spoilers MEANS.

I liked The Strangers better.

I liked The Strangers better.

Vacancy came first and it has roots (however tenuous) in an urban legend that I have always been a bit amused by, but I do prefer The Strangers to Vacancy. It's a little hard to put my finger on why, exactly, as they are basically the same movie.

The premise is that a couple on the rocks is trapped in a single location by a pair of maniacs who are first trying to scare them and then trying to murder them. They employ a lot of the same tricks; the killers bang on walls to frighten their victims and freak out the audience, and both movies have scenes where one of the killers (both masked, of course) wander through the background of the scene unbeknownst to their victims, and they work well in both movies.

I think what it boils down to is that The Strangers succeeds in two places that Vacancy did not. Most noticeably, The Strangers had Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, neither one any great shakes as an actor, and Vacancy has Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale (ditto), but given the choice I'll pick Tyler and Speedman. Luke Wilson does an ok job, but having seen Beckinsale in Underworld and Van Helsing (ick), I really can't see her as a damsel in distress. You may disagree of course, as it's entirely possibly she has played plenty of damsels in distress in movies I haven't seen, but either way she's no Hilary Swank.

The Strangers also succeeds because it doesn't have a lame ending. Vacancy ends on a happy note, which I would be ok with if it wasn't an impossibly happy note. Luke Wilson should have bled out long before the final scene. One could argue Liv Tyler should have bled out, too, but Speedman was dead and it was clear that Tyler was seriously messed up. She also didn't take a knife to the gut, so I can totally get behind her managing to cling to life while Luke Wilson should have been pushing up daises.

Mildly recommended, as a rental.



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Critical: The Ruins

Critical is a series of examinations about media in popular culture. It's an explicit look, which means those who don't want key plot points revealed to you should likely avoid continuing. Critical does not even know what the word spoilers MEANS.

There are really only three moments in this movie that didn’t work for me. Three really annoying, glaring moments, but only three moments nonetheless. Barring that, I had a much better time with The Ruins than I expected.

The beginning is a bit slow. 4 Americans vacationing in Mexico hook up with some other travelers and make plans to visit a Mayan ruin that is so secret, it isn’t even on the map. Well, anyone with half a brain cell can what happens once they get to those ruins, and it’s not a picnic. Once they finally get to those ruins, twenty minutes in, the movie turns into a very satisfying experience. Did we really need a first act that shows Americans being lazy at their hotel, getting drunk ad making out with strangers, and implied sex off-camera? No, not really. Maybe if the obviously Final Girl wasn’t annoying in every way, you could excuse it, but she really is. She doesn’t want to leave the pool, doesn’t mind getting so drunk she almost cheats on her boyfriend, has no compunctions about almost blowing off her friends the next day just to stay in bed, and whines all the way to the ruins. Once there, she continues to do as many annoying things as possible, even going so far as to indirectly kill an innocent child while throwing a temper tantum. She’s just not likeable.

This leads me to the first moment that doesn’t work. At one point, one of the girls begins to lose her mind. You would, too, if you had sentient vines crawling around inside your body. You, too, might become obsessed with surgically removing those vines yourself. But imagining that your best friend (The Annoying Final Girl) is having sex with your boyfriend is a bit of a stretch. Yes, we know Final Girl has no compunctions about trying to hook up with other people when she’s drunk, but that entire sequence just rankled me. Conflict for no reason, and the film would be better off without it.

Next up, Vine Girl gives her boyfriend a handjob under the covers while in the same tent as Final Girl, and I’m sorry, but it comes out of nowhere and really makes no sense to me. Your mileage may vary on that one, though.

The final moment that didn’t work for me is when the girls descend into the ruins to try and retrieve a lost cell phone. It’s all perfectly good up to the point where all the vines on the walls come to life, and it just looks bad. The vines movement throughout the rest of the movie is excellent and believably, but here it looked like CGI and totally took me out of the moment.

Aside from those three moments, The Ruins was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes and I’d recommend it for general viewing.


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