Tremors 3: Return to Perfection

 The Tremors movies were always low-budget, but this second sequel was the first one to go straight to video (Aftershocks was intended to be DtV as well, but positive reactions on test screenings convinced Universal to give it a theatrical run.)

 And... well, this is where the magic fails. Maybe you can blame the script by newcomer John Whelpley, but the story is by the original Tremors team (S. S. Wilson, Brent Maddock plus Nancy Roberts, who helped with Tremors 2). Maddock also directs.

 Gun nut Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) is left to headline after the departures of Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and he is as likeable as ever, even if he's much better as a supporting character than a protagonist. I didn't hate the deuteragonists either: Shawn Christian as a grifter who takes out tourists on safaris to see "graboids" (or a shitty facsimile thereof), and a business-headed shop owner played by Susan Chuang are perfectly fine.

 But the story, which has a new batch of graboids/shriekers terrify the community of Perfection again, feels very tired and by-the-numbers. So does the introduction of yet a new stage of graboid development - it turns out shriekers, if left alone, turn into a sleeker version of a shrieker that can fly by... lighting its farts on fire, basically. These ass-blasters (official name!) look terrible and their method of locomotion never makes sense (they don't look like they could glide for a second); The whole thing reeks of desperation on the part of the creative team.

They got Dark Horse to do a decent cover... shame no one thought about running a spell checker.

 Squint, and you can see some traces of the trademark Tremors wit - but you have to squint a lot, and none of it is really memorable. Add to that crappier production values (although technically on a higher budget) and more reliance on bargain-bin CGI even for the standard first-stage graboids... yeah, this was a major disappointment.

 This is as far as I got originally with this series. It hasn't gotten any better with a rewatch and, to be honest It's not exactly making me want to persevere with the series; Especially as the relationship between the Tremors creative team and Universal, which never seems to have been good (Aftershocks' production was apparently nightmarish, which makes it even more amazing that it turned out so well) got markedly worse after this.

Inugami

Somewhere within the mountainous Shikoku Island lives Miki (Yûki Amami), a beautiful, reclusive middle-aged paper maker. She spends her days at her wooden mill crafting large sheets of paper and gathering the roots and herbs she needs to make it along the gorgeous surrounding mountainside forests; Her tools are the same her ancestors used going back centuries, but she wants for nothing more.

 Meanwhile a young teacher Akira (Atsuro Watabe) is assigned a new post in the nearby town of Onime. His arrival will change everything.

 Odd dreams spread like a plague, keeping everyone from getting a good night's sleep. A man comes from Tokyo, kills his family and then commits suicide. The local delivery girl falls over, dead in an instant, her tongue blackened. Meanwhile Miki suddenly finds she doesn't need glasses any more, and looks younger every day.

 Her family, the Bonomiyas, have ancient roots in the area. And an ancient obligation: As Miki learns from her mother, it is the burden of the women of the clan to bear an urn that contains the Inugami, ancient, spiteful dog spirits, that are apparently let loose when the urn bearer lets loose her emotions.

 And Miki, who doesn't wholly believe in faeries, is having a hard time keeping control of herself lately. A burgeoning romance looms with with Akira, for one. But the main problem is the Bonomiya patriarch Takanao (Kazuhiro Yamaji, as a wonderfully hateable douchebag), who's conspires to sell the land Miki's mill stands on, and starts dredging up some uncomfortable, decades-old secrets.

 The townsfolk are well aware of the Inugami curse, and react to their misfortunes in about a rational and sane a fashion as you'd expect in a situation that bears many parallels to witchcraft. As the Bonomiyas stage their annual ancestor festival, tensions come to a head.

 Inugami is a deeply odd movie. It was released at the height of the J-Horror phenomenon (the same year as Kairo) and its narrative is built around a curse; Technically, it more than qualifies as folk horror.
 But writer/director Masato Harada (whose filmography seems to consist mostly of stately dramas and love stories) downplays almost every genre element until the final stretch, and the end result reminded me more of the great South American magical realist family sagas of Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
 The result is a thoughtful, languid, deeply affecting film that judiciously dissects traditionalism and women's roles in traditional Japanese society from multiple angles.
 On the one hand, before Akira, before things went to shit, Miki was completely fulfilled as she was, even with the terrible hand she was dealt* - hell, for most of the movie, she fights to keep things as they are. On the other hand... well, everything. The Bonomiya women are also clear-eyed about their situation; One of them memorably summarizes it as the men treating them "like fleas on their ancestor's sides."
 And to drive home how far we've come as a society, part of the finale is shot in black and white.

 Harada's script (based on a novel by Masako Bando) takes its sweet time getting anywhere, but his characters are well written, the love story is affecting, and the film is full of warmth and low-key humour. The direction is sometimes cack-handed (particularly his subjective handling of a seizure), but for the most part this is a playful, gorgeous movie, with both him and cinematographer Jun'ichi Fujisawa working in concert to convey the beauty of the film's natural surroundings.
 There's a recurring transition technique that slowly turns on lights until the scene is set that is nothing short of beautiful. Harada also stages some truly memorable imagery, from a surrealist dream that repurposes Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson to a gaggle of Shinto priests congregating under a derelict bus stop. 

 The association with the J-Horror movement seems to have hurt the film, which flew under most radars To the point where it's rarely mentioned along with other examples of the genre, if at all. But for my money, it's right up there with the best (for those counting at home: Kairo, Audition, Black Water, this.) That's if you want to count it as horror at all. Which I do, personally, just don't expect it to even attempt to scare you.

*: And the fates really do have it in for the poor woman; She's got the luck of the hero in a classic Greek tragedy, right down to an (easy to foresee) twist regarding Akira.

The Others

 The Stewart family reside in a perennially fog-shrouded manor house in the middle of the Jersey island countryside. The matriarch, Grace (Nicole Kidman) looks after her two young children (Alakina Mann and James Bentley) alone ever since her husband failed to return from the just-ended second world war. The kids suffer from a rare condition where the sunlight is actually harmful to them; Their life is a succession of shuttered windows and candlelight.

 It's a rich setup for a traditional ghost story, in other words, even before three strangers (Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes and Elaine Cassidy) turn up at her door looking for employment as domestic help - and to turn the screws, as it were.

 What follows is a pretty well crafted gothic mystery as an initially sceptic Grace slowly comes to realize the ghosts her daughter keeps complaining about might not be just in her imagination.

 Director Alejandro Amenábar and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe nail the gothic atmosphere - lamp-lit jaunts through darkened, well-appointed hallways, mist clawing at the grounds, the works. Amenábar also provides a pleasingly old-school soundtrack (depressing reeds abound!) and a script that's more successful on its psychological aspects than on its attempts to be a metaphysical puzzlebox.

 It's not particularly scary, either. It drips with menace early on, but the nature of its central mystery robs it of the sort of visceral punch these stories excel at (consider El Orfanato, another Spanish gothic offer from the same decade). It didn't help at all that I managed to guess what was going on fairly early on, either. Here's an interesting tidbit: Apparently dialog lines were erased from the theatrical version on later releases, to make what's going on a little harder to figure out; I wonder if I would have liked it better had I watched it first in this later incarnation.

  The acting is excellent across the board. Kidman was born to play this sort of character - visually, she has the aristocratic air and porcelain pallor requisite for a gothic heroine, and more importantly the talent to portray her character's brittle, complex, fraying arc. The kids are excellent, too, especially Mann, and Flanagan is splendid as the housekeeper, adding a dollop of sorely needed humour.

 In the end I'm left with a movie I like but can't love - a strangely inert film that's all class but feels slightly lacking in substance. Even if I appreciate what it's trying to do, it doesn't do much for me.

 But it's good enough I don't begrudge it the high esteem in which it's generally regarded, and would recommend it in a heartbeat if you're in the market for this sort of thing.

Pootie Tang

 Spinoffs from sketch shows tend to be weird - and holy crap is this one a particularly weird confirmation of that rule. Mostly in a good way.

 The character Pootie Tang (Lance Crowther) originally appeared as a guest interviewee on the Chris Rock Show, a successful musician whose every other word is some silly-sounding made-up slang, but who's perfectly understood by everyone around him. The film is that amped up to eleven, plus a pretty funny origin story, a super-hero arc, and a buttload of ridiculous characters.

 Pootie is one of those Blaxploitation figures who's impossibly cool and competent: A world-class musician, consummate ladies man and crime fighter, but also a clean-cut Mister-T-style hero to kids everywhere. Trouble starts when he does a PSA commercial telling kids to be healthy; It's so popular it earns the wrath of Dick Lecter (Robert Vaughn), head of Corporate America - which markets to kids such products as cereals, fast-food burgers, crack, switchblades and rat poison... sales of which go down by as much as 20% immediately after the PSA airs.
 Dick sends his main squeeze Ireenie (Jennifer Coolidge) to seduce Pootie into selling his persona to Corporate America and to steal his belt, the source of his powers. She succeeds, and Pootie falls from grace until he gets his mojo back.

 As it usually goes in these type of movies, the plot is only an afterthought threaded in between ridiculous, story-free bits like a gloriously silly action scene where Pootie interrupts some criminals from tricking a dumb kid (the dumbest, the narration tells us) into trying their drugs. One of the villains in that scene - Dirty Dee (Reg E. Cathey) - is so literally dirty he trails a dust cloud like Pigpen from Peanuts, and Pootie bats away his bullets with the end of his pony tail. The movie constantly cuts away to have other characters comment on the action, particularly Pootie's friend Trucky (J.B. Smoove) and would-be-girlfriend Biggie Shorty (Wanda Sykes), who's often shown dancing with huge headphones on like the cheesiest, most cringe-worthy MTV interstitial ever.
 Speaking of MTV, a lot of the filmmaking takes its cues from then-current shoddy rap video filming tricks and MTV 'coolness', including very cheap-looking speed ramping and clipping. Zack Snyder has frequently gone on record to state that his style, as solidified on 300, was heavily influenced by Pootie Tang*.

 Chris Rock produces and plays multiple roles, and of course there's a ton of cameos from MTV and HBO people who were big at the time or would be soon afterward (Dave Atell, Missy Elliot, a teeny-tiny Kristen Bell, Jon Glaser and a lot more).

 I should probably mention this is written and directed by Louis C.K. (then a writer on the Chris Rock show), who's had a pretty public fall from grace since, and includes a bunch of instances of blackface - I wouldn't think that'd be a problem, since it's used here as a dick move by corporate stooges (including David Cross) to impersonate Pootie, but I'm not that clued up on this sort of thing.

 Even at eighty minutes it threatens to overstay its welcome - there's a lot of padding and stuff that just doesn't work. But a likeable tone, a surreal anything-goes sensibility and a buttload of goofy jokes carry it through; No one would ever confuse it with a good (or a non-deeply stupid) movie, but it's bright, chipper, and silly fun.

*: I've shown this sentence to world-class Snyder historians who have said it's amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is.

The Suicide Club (Jisatsu Sākuru)

  I've only seen two* movies from the ridiculously prolific Sion Sono, but his stuff seems to be designed to make people throw up their hands/roll their eyes and exclaim 'Japan!!!'. He's a good director, though, and works hard to give his movies their fucked up reputation.

 So I didn't know what to expect from the Suicide Club, but it begins by having fifty-four schoolgirls cheerfully join hands at a train station and throw themselves in the path of a speeding train. Despite some terrible CGI, it's one hell of a first scene.
 Two nurses soon join the suicide craze that's sweeping the capital, and the police is powerless to do anything. I mean, a lot of the time they're trying to discern if it's even a crime; There doesn't seem to be any connection, at first - the girls in that first scene, for example, came from eighteen different schools. But then a website pops up that keeps track of all the suicides before they're even reported, and the police start finding long rolls of stitched together skin cuts belonging to the dead. And we, the viewers, are aware that a shitty teenybopper band called Dessart probably have something to do with it as well.

 Yeah, there was never any chance this was ever going to arrive at a coherent explanation, but it's fun for a while to watch detective Kuroda (Ryō Ishibashi) make one gruesome discovery after another, or a bunch of teens playfully psyching each other before jumping off a school terrace. And the movie doesn't skimp on the gore; there's nasty chopping board scene which gets taken to an almost comical extreme, and use of a hand plane that's probably not been approved by any carpenter union.

 The film also seems to have a cogent point about the eternal disconnect between kids and their parents, but beyond that it's anyone's guess what all that open-ended weirdness at the end means. My guess is that there is no real message here and Sono is just trolling us; At least it's some inventive, ridiculous trolling.
 More worrying is the gratuitous sexual assault (Japaaaan!!!) and that we're forced to sit through several all-singing, all-dancing videos from a motherfucking J-pop band. Uncool.
 Guess that comes with the package; Despite all that, and that it sure as hell doesn't stick the landing, it gets by for a long while on batshit energy and daring. I don't often care for these extremely manga/anime-damaged movies, but I'll keep giving Sono a pass as long as he keeps them this entertaining.

*: I almost didn't count the excellent Cold Fish, which I didn't remember was by him, and I'm definitely not counting the terrible Prisoners of Ghostland.

 Also, while reading up on Sono after watching this I found out he's been credibly accused of sexual assault and pressuring actresses for sexual favours in exchange for roles. So... yeah, take that into account.