MOONSTALKER (1989) ** ½

An old coot goes camping and makes the acquaintance of a vacationing family.  Mom doesn’t like him, but dad assures her, “He’s just a harmless old guy!”  (If you play a drinking game where you take a shot every time the father says a variation on this line, you’ll be drunk off your ass before the second act.)  As it turns out, mom’s instincts were right.  The old fart just busted his deranged son, Bernie out of the booby hatch and before long, he goes to town on the family with an axe.  Only the daughter survives, and he chases her to a nearby camp where some counselors are taking a training course.  It isn’t long before our axe-happy killer starts piling up counselor bodies like cordwood. 

Moonstalker gives us a little bit of a Psycho situation where our heroes are killed off early on before we are introduced to another set of characters.  It’s also interesting in that our killer, though quite mad, still has enough wits about him to steal the clothing and identity of one of his victims.  Although he’s not quite as menacing while wearing oversized sunglasses and a cowboy hat (he kind of looks like Joe Don Baker) as he was when he was in his Slipknot mask and straitjacket, his appearance is at least different enough from the usual slasher fare to be memorable. 

In fact, the movie is a little bit better than average the whole way down the line.  I’m a fan of this sort of thing, so I appreciated some of the novel touches.  It’s probably not novel enough to win over any non-slasher fanatics, but it’s also not too far off the beaten path that fans wanting more of the same will be disappointed.  

For example, there’s the scene where the character of Marcie (Ingrid Vold, who has a Linnea Quigley-type quality to her) prepares for a lovemaking session with her boyfriend.  In most of these movies, the girl would simply disrobe and hop in a sleeping bag.  This is not the case with Moonstalker.  Marcie’s boyfriend is a military fetishist, so that means she dresses up in a camouflage bikini, cracks a whip, and cranks Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as a form of foreplay.  You just don’t get that in your average Friday the 13^th sequel.

The third act is a little plodding though.  Despite the draggy pace, it does have a few cool bits like the campfire sing-along with a bunch of dead bodies.  We also get a nice little twist at the end.  It’s not enough to put it over the top or anything, but I kind of wish the set-up for a sequel happened.  I wouldn’t have minded another go-round with Bernie.

AKA:  Camper Stamper.

GREMLOIDS (1984) *

Most movies wear their inspirations on their sleeve.  This one wears them on its pajamas.  And by that, I mean the opening scene features two kids having a close encounter with aliens while wearing Star Wars and E.T. P.J.’s. 

The evil Lord Buckethead (Robert Bloodworth) accidentally winds up on Earth.  Refusing to own up to his mistake, he plows forward, and along with his band of pint-sized aliens in black robes they scour a small hick town looking for stolen transmissions.  When he realizes AAMCO transmissions aren’t the plans he’s looking for, he kidnaps a grease monkey named Karen (Paula Poundstone) thinking she’s a princess.  It’s then up to a wimpy exterminator named Max (Alan Marx) to rescue her and save the planet.

Gremloids resembles what Star Wars might’ve looked like if George Lucas opted for the “let’s have it take place on Earth” approach of the Masters of the Universe movie.  As bad as the film is, the Star Wars-inspired opening crawl is very well done.  Lord Buckethead, who looks like a cross between Darth Vader and the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, could’ve been a fun villain, but his repetitive shtick wears out its welcome quickly. 

You know you’re in trouble when you’re watching a Star Wars spoof that came so late in the cycle that its title was changed to cash in on Gremlins.

The film ultimately tries way too hard to be like Star Wars that it fails to do anything original.  It tries even harder to make the unfunny gags work.  The jokes are repeated ad nauseum, the action sequences are lame (like the chase scene involving grocery carts in a supermarket), and the special effects aren’t so special.  The filmmakers had the right idea by casting then-up and coming comedians like Paula Poundstone and Chris Elliott in sizable roles, but they were just too early in their career to really pull the weak material off.

Ultimately, Gremloids feels like a Mad magazine Star Wars spoof stretched out to ninety minutes.  In case you’re wondering, ninety minutes is way too long for this sort of thing.  Heck, it would’ve been a painful nine-minute short.  I mean the opening crawl gag is OK and the first appearance of Lord Buckethead is good for a chuckle, but the movie grinds to a halt shortly thereafter and becomes a tiresome chore to get through. 

AKA:  Hyperspace. 

THE HUMANOID (1979) ** ½

Was Message from Space too sophisticated for your tastes?  Did you find Starcrash to be needlessly intellectual?  Did the philosophical underpinnings of The Ice Pirates grind your gears?  Well then, try The Humanoid!   It’s one of the cheapest, weirdest, WTF Star Wars rip-offs ever! 

Richard Kiel stars as a space pirate named Golob who has a cute pet robot dog.  His Moonraker co-star, Corrine Clery plays Barbara, a woman marked for death by the evil Lord Graal (Ivan Rassimov).  Luckily for her, she’s the caretaker of a psychic kid named Tom Tom (Marco Yeh) who uses his powers to get her out of one jam after the other.  Kiel’s The Spy Who Loved Me co-star Barbara Bach is Lady Agatha, a diabolical space queen who is in league with Lord Graal and in her spare time, puts naked virgins into a futuristic iron maiden and drains their blood to keep herself looking eternally young.  Graal’s chief scientist (Arthur Kennedy) uses an experimental formula that turns Golob into a mindless “humanoid” (it basically just shaves his beard off) with the intention of creating an entire race of humanoids that Graal can use as his own personal army.  Tom Tom uses his powers to turn Golob friendly again and they join forces with a space renegade (Leonard Mann) to rescue Barbara from the clutches of Graal.

The Humanoid is dumber than a donut, but it is pretty entertaining from start to finish.  That is mostly due to the incredible talent behind the camera.  Aldo (Short Night of Glass Dolls) Lado directed the heck out of this thing in collaboration with Enzo G. (The Last Shark) Castelleri, who filmed the opening sequence and served as assistant director.  The laughable (but fun) special effects were handled by director Antonio (Yor, Hunter from the Future) Margheriti (the spaceships alternately look like LEGOs, model kits, and smoke detectors), and the score was done by none other than the maestro himself, Ennio Morricone. 

The Humanoid rips off Star Wars way too much to properly catalogue.  (For example, Graal looks like a Darth Vader cosplayer who forgot his mask at home and wore a black jock strap over his face instead.)  What makes it interesting is when it does its own thing… and by that, I mean it rips off movies other than Star Wars.  (Ennio’s score is closer to the classical music found in 2001 than John Williams’ space opera themes.)  I mean how many films have you seen that feature Countess Bathory reimagined as a space queen? 

The casting alone will ensure that James Bond fans will want to check it out.  Let’s face it:  Starcrash just had one Bond alum.  This one has three!

Is The Humanoid a good movie?  No.  Absolutely not.  Is it fun?  Yeah, kinda.  Any fan of ‘70s Grade Z Star Wars rip-offs worth their salt needs to see it at least once.

THE DEATH TRAIN (1978) ***

An insurance investigator named Morrow (Hugh Keays-Byrne) travels to the small Australian hamlet of Clematis to get to the bottom of a mysterious death before his company will shill out a payoff and close the case.  He quickly realizes nearly everyone in town is a quirky old fart as he has bizarre encounter after bizarre encounter with the citizens of Clematis.  To make matters worse, everybody Morrow talks to seems convinced the death was caused by the local superstition, a ghost train.  Surely, a loco locomotive can’t be the reason behind all this… can it?

This set-up is similar to The Wicker Man with an outsider making his way around a small, strange community.  It’s also a bit like Twin Peaks and/or U-Turn as just about everyone in town is a weirdie.  Are they acting odd because they’re hiding something, or are they just naturally nutty? 

If you only know Hugh Keayes-Byrne from his villainous roles in the Mad Max movies, you might be taken aback by his comedic chops here.  He has a Chaplinesque quality to him as he bumbles and stumbles around town having strange interludes with the wacky locals.  While the film sometimes strains a bit to be off-the-wall and quirky, Keayes-Byrne takes to the Monty Python-style gags like a duck to water.  (I liked the bit where he rents an apartment that has an oversized bathroom.)

This was made for Australian TV, and it suffers from some pacing issues that are inherent in the medium.  Your mileage may vary when it comes to some of the townsfolk’s loopy behavior, but the atmosphere is genuinely bizarre and memorable.  The premise is solid, the mystery is engaging, and it’s lots of fun, which means you should definitely grab a ticket and climb aboard The Death Train!

RINGU 0 (2000) * ½

Ringu 0 is a prequel to The Ring that shows the origin of the ghostly girl Sadako.  If you’re hoping to find the typical Ring shit, you might be disappointed as there is very little of the usual Sadako shenanigans.   In fact, the origins were covered pretty well in the original movie, so what we are left with feels a lot like an entirely different story that was retrofitted to be a Ring prequel. 

The meek and shy Sadako (Yukie Nakama) attends a drama school as a form of therapy.  Shortly after her arrival, she becomes an understudy for the star actress in the school’s play.  When she dies from mysterious circumstances, Sadako becomes the new leading lady.  This immediately makes her classmates suspicious of her, especially since she already acts so weird and introverted.  When their director is killed, the cast members rise up to get rid of Sadako once and for all. 

The stuff at the drama school plays like Fame meets The Sixth Sense, with a bit of Carrie thrown in there.  That is to say, it doesn’t feel like a Ring movie.  At all. 

Although the origin story isn’t all that great, it’s certainly more watchable than the Ring sequels or the American versions.  That’s mostly because it does its own thing for much of the running time.  That said, it’s rather slight, unmemorable, and low on atmosphere and scary imagery.  Things get even worse once they start trying to connect the plot back to the first Ring.  The unnecessary additions of ludicrous subplots such as Sadako’s Christ-like powers and the appearance of an evil doppelganger just makes the whole thing feel like it’s grasping at straws.  It’s a shame too because the set-up had potential.  By the time the climax rolls around, Ringu 0 is already circling the drain.

AKA:  Ring 0:  Birthday.  AKA:  The Ring 0.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: SHIRLEY (2020) ** ½

Right from the opening scene you can tell Shirley won’t be just another ordinary biopic.  When Rose (Odessa Young, from the new TV version of The Stand) reads Shirley Jackson’s macabre short story “The Lottery” on a train, it gets her so hot and bothered that she just has to bang her boyfriend (Logan Lerman) in an empty car.  Now, if you’ve ever read “The Lottery”, you know that it isn’t exactly a Harlequin romance novel. 

Anyway, the couple go to stay with Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her snobby intellectual husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the condition Rose becomes their housemaid.  At first, they get on like oil and water, but eventually Shirley takes a shine to Rose, slowly letting her in on her darker nature that she hides from the world.  However, not only is Shirley using her for the model of the main character in her first novel; she is also making her the target of psychological warfare, which her husband is all too eager to engage in as well. 

Moss is locked in.  She’s much more effective here than she was in grossly overrated The Invisible Man as she dials down her usual hysterics and turns in an unpredictable and edgy performance.  Imagine a crazy cat lady meets Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that sort of paints the picture.  She makes for a good foil for Young, whose character is tempted by Shirley’s outsider qualities.  The scene where Shirley gleefully invites her to eat possibly poisonous mushrooms is especially memorable. 

Produced by Martin Scorsese, Shirley is ultimately one of those movies that is more marinade than meat.  It offers a snapshot of Jackson’s life and shows that she probably had a screw or two loose.  It also spends as much time glorifying her eccentricities as it does pointing out her contradictions. 

The problem is the movie runs in all sorts of directions at once and never really settles on one approach.  The forbidden love story angle between Rose and Shirley works the best.  The scenes where the screenplay tries to infuse the picture with the same gothic horror touch Jackson gave her work are less effective.  The blurring of fact and fiction is a good idea, but it’s just another narrative trick for the film to juggle, and it’s frankly one it can’t quite handle. 

There’s also an intriguing subplot of Jackson treating her new housekeeper and lover as a character in her own book, bending her and breaking her just because she can.  However, it never truly commits to making Shirley an out-and-out villain, and because of that, the final act winds up being sort of muddled.  The performances are strong enough to keep you watching, but the film itself is far from haunting.

HOT PURSUIT (2015) **

Reese Witherspoon stars as an enthusiastic but dim-witted cop who gets the plum job of escorting a drug dealer’s wife (Sofia Vergara) into the Witness Protection Program.  Naturally, it’s all a set-up and the two barely escape with their lives.  Now, the dirty cops frame them for murder and the duo have to hit the road in order to clear their names. 

On paper, this should’ve been just as bad, if not worse than The Spy Who Dumped Me.  On the plus side, the filmmakers waste no time getting the show on the road.  There is also very little fat on the movie either as Witherspoon and Vergara find themselves in a shootout, chase scene, compromising situation, or sitcom scenario every five minutes or so.  There’s even an occasional laugh or two sprinkled throughout.  I thought it was funny when the usually squeaky-clean Witherspoon inadvertently inhaled a mess of cocaine.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as funny as the similar scene in the legendary Corky Romano, but then again, what could compete with that masterclass of comedic gold? 

The big stumbling block is the two leading ladies are playing essentially shrill and annoying characters.  That doesn’t necessarily prevent them from being likeable, but their grating characterizations keep them at arm’s length from the audience much of the time.  I mean usually when you do these kind of mismatched buddy pictures (even with two women in the leads), they should be… you know… mismatched.  Having both of them being loud and obnoxious borders on overkill.

However, there are a few moments that save it from being totally forgettable.  My favorite bit comes when the ladies have to engage in an impromptu lesbian lovemaking session to distract a farmer brandishing a shotgun.  Even if it is played for laughs, this moment at least helps elevate Hot Pursuit from being merely tepid.