Review: Beetlejuice (1988)

I lament the loss of the 90 minute comedy. Back in the day, most comedic films were around 90 minutes long to keep the scenes tight and the budgets low. These days, most movies breeze past the 120 minute mark without a pause - even comedies!

I mention that because Beetlejuice is a sparse 92 minutes in length. In that short time, so many great story ideas and visuals are presented that I’m sure modern directors would adopt the more is more approach were they making the film today. We’ll see when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is released later this year. But back in 1988, this lean comedy really fired on all cylinders. Surprisingly, Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice character was restricted to just a bit more than 17 minutes of that run time. His bravura performance was used as the spice, just as it should have been.

Restraint isn’t a word I’d have thought I’d ever applied to Beetlejuice, but it comes to mind when I consider just how amazing the screenplay is. Moments speed by, prompting rewatch after rewatch to absorb the details. Those details aren’t really important, but they help to make Beetlejuice into much more than the sum of its parts.

While it’s clear that the Maitlands are the main protagonists here, the antagonists are much harder to pin down. It’s a shifting sea of characters, all of whom work both for and against the Maitlands as they try and negotiate the afterlife. In the end, the only real antagonist is Beetlejuice himself, but it doesn’t take much of a squint to see him as the protagonist in his own tale. He is the title character, after all.

Tim Burton has always sucked as a film director. His best films are the one where he hardly directs at all (see Ed Wood). However, he’s an amazing scenographer. It really took a leader with an affinity for the gothic, a talent for design, and the ability to sit back and let the cast take charge in order to make this movie work. His direction here is sound because the script really doesn’t require a lot of intricate camera work or articulate shots. It’s much better if the film is shot like a traditional comedy so we can enjoy the performances without getting distracted by too much meddling from the director.

And what performances they are. There’s not a single weak link in this cast. Every single actor holds their own in every scene, and that’s no simple feat when you have Michael Keaton milking every shot like his life depends on getting laughs from the crew. I’d list the other standouts but there are none - they all standout in their roles. Sadly, there’s a pall cast on the production by the sexual misconduct of Jeffrey Jones (Charles Deetz) later in his life, but that doesn’t change the fact that his performance here is top shelf.

I should also mention Danny Elfman’s music. It’s the perfect set of sounds for this film despite the fact that he reprises his trademark bouncy motifs from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. His addition of the violin-played theme for the character of Beetlejuice really helps to root the character in the distant past while some gently magical melodies expound on the wonders experienced by Lydia and the Maitlands.

Beetlejuice is one of Burton’s best films, alongside the aforementioned Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands. In it, he played to his strengths with the help of an amazing cast and crew. Highly recommended.

Will Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire be Another Family Feature?

By now, you’ve probably seen the teaser trailer for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Maybe you put it on repeat and watched it over and over again, wondering where you might get one of those red, GB parkas. It’s a decent enough trailer that doesn’t give too much away, so that’s good. And I’m happy that they appear to be moving away from legacy villains and existing ghost designs. I mean, seriously, the only new design elements in Afterlife were the pseudo-Slimer, the Ecto-1 gunner’s seat and Bill Murray’s jowls. However, my fear is that this will just be another kids movie.

When GB was made in the 80s, it was a raunchy comedy because that’s what those guys did back then. Sure, it was toned down a bit to get it out of R-rating territory for Columbia pictures, but it has a ghostly blowjob scene in it for crying out loud! Ghostbusters wasn’t made for children back then. But now, it is.

Afterlife was a fairly successful merging of the 80s kid movie aesthetic (think Goonies and ET) with the Ghostbusters IP because, in the years since 1984, GB loomed large for kids. I blame The Real Ghostbusters, that substandard animated series that came up with some flimsy excuse for none of the guys looking or sounding like the characters we knew. Most adults completely ignored it, but as it turns out, it was highly successful with kids. In fact, it was a gateway for them to get into Ghostbusters, and it remains a nostalgia trip for many millennials.

Now, we’re full on in the world of family-friendly Ghostbusters. In my opinion, despite the best efforts of Paul Rudd, the new GB isn’t very funny and it should be. I forgot that when watching Afterlife the first time because I was just so relieved it wasn’t as bad as the 2016 Paul Feig dumpster fire. I guess we’ll all see what we get next year when the new film’s released, but I’m not holding my frozen breath thinking we’ll ever get another GB movie that’s anything like the original film.

Review: The Haunted Mansion (2023)

I’d really like to tell you that this year’s Haunted Mansion film is much better than the one starring Eddie Murphy that came out twenty years ago, but, alas, I cannot. It seems that the folks at Disney haven’t learned a single thing in the twenty years that passed between the two productions. They’ve delivered yet another vapid and poorly crafted take on the greatest dark ride of all time, and as an avid fan of the ride, I’m disappointed once again.

I don’t know why I even entertained the idea that they might have actually mad a decent movie this time around. They’ve only had 54 years to think about it. While I’m no fan of the Pirates films, at least the first one (Curse of the Black Pearl) used the ride as a jumping off point and not a destination. That’s alluded to in the presence of a subtitle despite the fact that it was the first film in the series. You could chop the “Pirates of the Caribbean” IP out of the film completely and still have pretty much the same movie.

The Haunted Mansion should be so lucky. The ride really has no story at all. It’s a series of vignettes that’s strung together almost entirely by the Ghost Host narrator who follows you through the ride. Like the Pirates ride before it, it’s the ride’s audio track - more specifically it’s music - that’s the through line for the attraction. Sadly, this music is almost entirely absent in the new film.

Screenwriter Katie Dippold fails to follow even the most basic tenets of storytelling. This refugee from bad TV writing on Parks and Recreation (sorry, not a fan) has driven one bus load of characters into another busload of vague stories but they don’t collide in any meaningful or entertaining way. It’s like she was writing five or six individual episodes of a Haunted Mansion anthology series instead of a feature. I defy you to figure out who the protagonist of this mess is. I genuinely disliked the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion movie, but even I’ll admit that I knew who the protagonist was from frame one.

When the foundation is weak, the mansion is likely to fall and oh boy this one falls like the house of Usher. Its junky mess of stories and characters are further thwarted by what feels like a very rushed production. Tone varies wildly, not only from scene to scene, but from shot to shot. A character who’s real-world morose one minute, is running around like Wile E. Coyote the next. It’s frankly stupifying that this edit made it out the door.

I liked some of the production design choices, but even they pale in comparison to that of the Eddie Murphy movie. The sets are okay-ish in that they reference the ride but they never take that next step into reality.

I couldn’t quite figure out why there were so many bad wigs on display. Couldn’t the producers of the film see that they never look real on camera? It’s distracting, especially on Rosario Dawson. Her wig should get screen credit as her sidekick.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Madame Leota seems like an interesting bit of stunt casting until you realize that Curtis isn’t exactly great at broad comedy. Her accent comes and goes at random despite the fact that she’s a head in a ball and all of her work had to have been done in post anyway. Besides, since when does Leota have a vaguely eastern European accent?

I kept asking myself why Danny Devito and Owen Wilson were even in this. I suppose it must have been a pretty decent payday for them both. They’re not utilized onscreen except as plot points. The casting of the whole film is a scattershot attempt at getting all ages and ethnicities interested in attending. The film appears to have been cast by the Disney marketing department.

I could go on, but I think you get my drift. This movie is one “zoinks” shy of being a Scooby Doo episode, and not a particularly good one. NOT recommended.

Why Saw II-III-IV is the Saw Trilogy to Watch

Let’s face it - the Saw movie franchise has always been hit and miss. While it has an interesting story at its core, it’s always been the victim of low budgets and rushed production schedules. It’s never lived up to its potential. The closest it ever came was in Saw II, III and IV.

I appreciated the clever setting and scripting in the first Saw movie, but I didn’t particularly enjoy the film itself. Yes, there was one spectacular moment (mostly spoiled for noobs these days) that made me leap out of my seat, but the truly awful performances of Cary Elwes and co-writer Leigh Whannell left a lot to be desired. I chalk that up, not to bad perfromances per se, but to the lack of takes. For those who may not know, most performances are sculpted in the editing room, The more takes you get on the day, the better the chance that one of the variations will fit perfectly into the overall (jig)Saw puzzle. When features have shooting budgets this low ($700,000 vs. SAW II’s $4 mil), they really have to rush. That means fewer takes and less variety to choose from when editing.

At any rate, Saw was a big enough hit to spawn sequel after sequel, most of which are kind of boring displays of bad lighting and blood spattered prosthetics. Saw II, III and IV, all directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, still hold up fairly well as a lo-fi trilogy that explores the back story of Jigsaw and his MO for building all of his grisly Rube Goldberg devices.

Later, the series veered away from Jigsaw as the main antagonist and found itself off the tracks again. But for those few moments between 2005 and 2007, the series was worth watching. Not great - the series will never be much more than an annual Halloween treat at cinemas - but fun to watch.

This year sees the return of Jigsaw in what seems like it could be a prequel of sorts. It’s hard to know since the timeline of these movies is a bit of a mess. Saw X will probably just be more cash milking from the big Saw machine. I’ll probably end up sitting through it just out of curiosity. I just doubt we’ll ever reach the pinnacle of the aforementioned trilogy ever again. It’s time for Lionsgate to let Jigsaw RIP.

Universal's Monster Problem

The executives at Universal Pictures must feel a lot like those congresspeople who were publicly berated by John Stewart for allowing health coverage to lapse for 9-11 first responders. They looked to their left and right, trying to figure out how to respond to the truth based on how others were reacting. So it is with the once mighty Universal.

They’ve spent decades following the moves of the other major studios and attempting to emulate their successes. Marvel is creating the MCU? Great, we’ll do that too! Disney’s Star Wars IP is delving into every corner of that universe with varying takes on the source material. Let’s do that too! How about a comedic Dracula? The only problem is that, when it comes to creative endeavors, following is often the same thing as surrendering, and the so-called “Dark universe” was aborted before it had even left the gate.

No one in power at Universal these days has any understanding of why people like me love the old Universal Monster movies. I suspect they go down the list of possibilities in search of a cash-laden answer.

Is it nostalgia? Possibly, yes, but we cannot traffic entirely in nostalgia even though the Star Wars franchise seems to be pretty successful at doing so.

Is it horror? Well, those old movies weren’t that scary to begin with, and things aren’t scary when you already know the ending.

Is it star power? YES! We absolutely need big movie stars in these films. Tom Cruise is at the top of our list.

What about big name directors? What? Hahaha! No.

It’s black and white film, isn’t it? No. Damn.

The fact is that lots of people love these movies for lots of different reasons. I can only tell you mine. I grew up when the monsters were horror icons. Before the slasher films - even before Star Wars - these characters WERE horror. In magazines like Forry Ackerman’s Famous Monsters, kids like me were treated to images from films most of us had never even seen. Our primary exposure was those magazines, TV shows like the Groovie Goolies and The Munsters, and Halloween costumes. These characters were ubiquitous in the same way a wicked witch or a skeleton or a ghost was. They were truly iconic but they had very little in the way of real character. Much like Jason Voorhees who would take up the same mantle decades later, they were the blank slates of horror. They were designs made incarnate.

Flash forward to my young adulthood, and the original films found new life on DVD. For perhaps the first time ever, I sat and really watched all of the Universal Monster movies. I bought the deluxe sets that included all the sequels and I watched every one of them, no matter how bad they were. It was easy because they were usually very short (less than 90 minutes), and due to their age, there was an intriguing camp factor that was even more appealing when the films were bad. During that time, I learned that there were only a handful of masterpieces among these features, but they were all entertaining in their own ways.

I will always love Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula, but since it was so very early in the world of talkies, it lacked the music cues that would help to drive the emotional content of subsequent Monster films. At the end of the day, I have to declare that my favorite Monster movie is The Wolfman. Why? Character and tragic romance. Lon Chaney Jr. was absolutely perfect as the titular character. No, he was never a great actor, but that actually proves to be a strength here. He doesn’t so much act as mourn his way through this performance.

And here’s something to consider - The Wolfman wasn’t based on an existing story. Yes, it was based on legends, but not on a previously published work like so many of the Monster scripts. That gave screenwriter Curt Siodmak the freedom to create a relatable protagonist in place of the imperialists, deranged scientists, and undead royalty of most of the previous Monster films.

The Wolfman had it all - up and coming star Lon Chaney Jr. (with a name engineered to get attention from horror fans), up and coming ingenue Evelyn Ankers, cameos from horror icons Bela Lugosi and Claude Rains, a proven director who enjoyed working within the studio system, incredible special effects for the day, and most of all - the talented designers and crew who excelled at producing that gothic visual vocabulary that included fog shrouded moors and enormous European manor houses.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to state that the world of the Universal horror pictures was a consistent presence, at least up until the Black Lagoon movies. I’ll never forget taking the Universal tour in LA and seeing the Little Europe set that appeared in so many of these films. Of course, it had been rebuilt in 1967 following the big studio fire, but it was a faithful recreation that tugged at my heartstrings. There’s just something about the romantic, “foreign-ness” of those settings to Americans. In some ways, it was a lot like the otherworldly beauty of New Zealand in the Lord of the Rings films.

That romanticism of story and setting is something that pervaded most of the early Monster films, and its pinnacle is reached in The Wolfman. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a very long time since I saw a Hollywood feature that I would call “romantic” in any way. It’s an element that’s sorely missing from most modern cinema, and it’s an absolute necessity for any reimagining of the Universal Monsterverse.

I believe George Lucas recognized this when he was creating the Star Wars prequels, but he lacked the ability to write a tragic love story that was believable. In the OT, John Williams provided the romance. Can you even imagine the original Star Wars scene where Luke looks out at the sunset without William’s moving score? Without sound, it’s just some doof with sun in his eyes. With it, that doof has longing in his heart. That makes Luke relatable, especially to young people.

Without romance, all modern IP is just shadows and light that does little more than keep the content pipeline filled. It’s time to correct that, and Universal could absolutely lead the way.

Another Haunted Mansion Movie

Disney is definitely persistent in their pursuit of profit. If any Disney IP is popular, it must be monetized in every possible permutation! One of those permutations is the feature film, and nothing gets stuck in the Disney craw like a popular IP that hasn’t been turned into a cash cow movie with sequels, ancillary rights, and rabid new fans.

When the Disney parks were first conceived of, many of the lower-tier dark rides were based on existing IP. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Peter Pan’s Flight, and Snow White’s Enchanted Wish (AKA Adventures and AKA Scary Adventures) were inexpensively produced and popular ways to keep patrons away from the E-ticket rides. Those expensive E-ticket rides, however, were almost entirely made up of new IP. The one exception was the 20,000 Leagues submarine ride, but even it started life branded as the generic Submarine Voyage. The other big-Es were Small World, Matterhorn, Country Bear Jamboree, Enchanted Tiki Room, Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion. As Disney execs have looked down that list in the decades since Walt died, they’ve had blockbuster movie dollar signs (you know - dollar signs with glitter and stars) dancing in their eyes. Most of these rides have been made into movies, with only one - Pirates - emerging as the proof of concept that continues to taunt Disney executives to this day.

Which brings us to the new Disney film, The Haunted Mansion. Have you seen the trailer? If not, I’ll link to it below. Take a look.

Here we go again. Yet another attempt to turn the beloved ride into a family comedy. Did they learn nothing from the Eddie Murphy debacle? I’ve been surprised by the recent wave of nostalgia surrounding that awful film, but I shouldn’t have been. After all, it’s been 20 years since its release - more than enough time for kids who saw it to have grown up and remember it fondly because children have no taste.

While I’m hopeful that this will be a better movie than the 2003 mess, it still looks like a greatest hits of the ride. The thing that made Pirates of the Caribbean work (the first one, anyway) was it’s insistence on ignoring the flimsy narrative of the ride and forging its own way. Yes, there were nods to the ride, but they were few and far between. That’s the kind of approach we need for the Haunted Mansion.

While a prestige series doesn’t have the bottom-line appeal of a cash cow film franchise, that’s exactly what I feel the HM needs. Imagine a Disney anthology series wherein a variety of writers and directors take their turn at presenting various stories of the Mansion. It could be a series where the house consumes someone new each week along with an exploration of the various resident's’ backstories. This seems more in line with the ride’s episodic presentation and better for a variety of approaches. In my series, we’d have horror comedy, straight-up horror, and full-on comedy side by side.

Instead, Disney is once again chasing the lowest common denominator. Yes, I’ll see it, but I’m pretty certain that I won’t be happy about it. At most, I’m looking forward to the soundtrack.

Review: Nope (2022)

A lot of people have hyped Jordan Peele as the writer/director who’s revitalizing horror. As is usually the case, this was just hyperbole, but it did make expectations extremely high for Peele’s 2022 feature, Nope. Sometimes high expectations can crush a film. Let’s face it - no movie could have lived up to the hype that surrounded Nope during the buildup to its release. And then it crashed and burned. It seemed that no one much liked the film, let alone loved it.

I finally saw the film last weekend, and I can honestly say that there are some brilliant ideas on the table. Unfortunately, those ideas and caught in such a trap of convoluted execution that the film fails to take off and soar like it’s antagonist.

What finally convinced me to see this movie was the incredibly well-edited trailer featuring the recitation of the Purple People Eater song by Michael Wincott. This trailer was created by Universal specifically to garner Oscar votes for the film. Check it out below:

Now, if the film had matched the tone and timbre of that trailer, I’d probably be raving about it now, but it didn’t. The film we got is a mess made up of cardboard characters, a paper-thin plot, and random asides that never quite add up within the world that’s presented onscreen. I think I can see the movie that Peele was trying to make amid the forest of narrative problems, but that film didn’t end up on the screen, this one did.

One of the biggest issues is that this movie can’t decide what it is. What we end up with is one part Lost, one part Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and one part Mulholland Drive. All of those properties relied on well-developed characters, and they all have disparate tones that wouldn’t work well together. Had Peele pulled this off, he might have deserved the accolades he’s collected since his breakthrough.

While I thought that Get Out was entertaining enough, I also felt like it was over-hyped. It was a great first film, no doubt, but it was not exactly a crowning achievement in horror. It was buoyed by two facts: It was an original film in a world of remakes, and it was a film made by a black man in a world filled with films made by white men. Both of these make the film worth watching. It’s lucid production make it worthy of regard, but I think that Peele was saddled with the wunderkind label too early in his career. He needs time to develop as a filmmaker and as a human, and we need to give him that time.

One thing about the production that was particularly troublesome to me was its treatment of animals as objects. I’m not sure if that was an intentional subtext or just the assumption of a human who exists in a culture that’s routinely brutal to animals, but I found it more disturbing than the main story.

I also have to ask, how can you set a feature about extraterrestrials and the film biz in Agua Dulce, CA and not shoot at least one scene at Vasquez Rocks? That simply baffles me.

I support Peele’s experimentation with Nope and hope his next picture is all the better for it. That doesn’t change the fact that I wouldn’t recommend seeing this one.

Horror Movies I'm Looking Forward to in 2023

I’m not much for looking back, but I love looking forward to things. Even if they don’t turn out the way I’d like, it’s still fun to have something to look forward to. So here’s my list of the horror awesomeness I expect out of 2023!

EVIL DEAD RISE - I’ll at least give it a chance. I’ve yet to find an ED movie unwatchable, even the sequel by Fede “I can’t direct my way out of a wet paper bag” Alvarez.

RENFIELD - While I know it’ll probably suck (Ha), my fetish for all things Dracula has me looking forward to the new film that focuses on the only character in Dracula who’s stranger than ol’ Drac himself. While I wish they’d make a movie from the excellent novel by Paul Witcover, Dracula Asylum, that novel has been all but forgotten. Sad.

LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER - Another Dracula spinoff. This one is about the ship that ferried Drac across the ocean. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t get enough. Help!

DARK HARVEST - This one’s a horror tale set during Halloween season with a butcher knife weilding antagonist named October Boy. Add in an experienced director and the fact that it’s based on a novel and I’ll at least give it a shot.

I was hoping for a longer list, but alas, most everything else just looks like shiny CGI paint splattered on a screen. Seriously, people, please stop supporting superhero movies so the studios will make something with a little more substance.

Review: Wednesday Season 1

I grew up watching the Addams Family. I usually watched it on a tiny 13” black and white television because the rest of the family wanted to watch something else. I loved it. I still do.

When the Barry Sonnenfeld movies arrived, I was slightly disappointed. Sonnenfeld isn’t a great director. He’s a great cinematographer, so the films looked great and the actors were well cast, but the rhythms of the films lacked something.

The franchise languished for a long time before the baton was picked up by no less than seven production companies combined. They thrust the Addams back into the market as a pair of animated features. These were written by people who didn’t fully understand the fact that these characters should never feel the need to fit in because the rest of the world needed to fit in with THEM. While these presented an interesting attempt to mimic Charles Addams’ wonderful cartoons, again there was something missing.

Which brings us to 2022 and the long awaited Wednesday Addams spinoff series on Netflix. Written and created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, and helmed by Tim Burton, the show has been a huge success in terms of sheer numbers, but is it an artistic success as well? Sadly, it isn’t.

Gough and Millar are lazy writers who have basically written a live action Scooby Doo series set in a low rent version of the Harry Potter universe. This makes the series the reverse of the brilliant Brady Bunch movie. The world has conformed to the Addams so that they’re not the strangers in a strange land that they’re meant to be. In order to make that work, Gough and Millar have taken a rasp to Wednesday’s sharp edges and ground her down to a nub of her former self. It’s worse than annoying - it’s boring!

I could go on and on about how characters just spout exposition out of nowhere or how they tell us who they are instead of showing us. Every scene is a missed opportunity. Yes, there are a couple of laughs, the sets look nice, and Jenny Ortega is great in the pared down role she was given, but that’s about it. This show is dull unless you’re a kid. But if you’re a kid, should you really be watching a series with cursing and adult themes? I have no idea who these numbskulls thought they were writing for, but I get the feeling that it was a nonexistent audience.

The trouble is that it’s a roaring success because it had just enough Addams-ness to provide some great moments for the trailers. Yes, the trailers were great. They even persuaded me to sign up for a month of the wasteland of streaming content that is Netflix. I’m not sure what I expected. Lydia from Beetlejuice? Maybe the show would have been better if the lead had been Lydia instead of Wednesday. At least that would explain how the lead character simply doesn’t behave like the Wednesday I’ve come to know and love.

I recommend skipping this one unless you enjoy self torture. If you need a Wednesday fix, check out this video instead. My favorite moment is at 1:34.

Halloween Ends (FINALLY!)

Let’s just dive right in. The Halloween clock is ticking and I just don’t want to waste what’s left of October on bad movies like this one. Yes, Halloween Ends is a total POS. The last one, Halloween Cooks or Maims or something was worse because it had zero in the plot department and even less in character development. Yes, you can have negative, sucking character development and last year’s Halloween movie proved it. This year’s version has a story to tell, but it’s a meandering mess with old characters who act like they’re new people who we’ve never met before.

While I’d like to lay the blame for this carnage at the feet of clumsy director and co-writer David Gordon Green, the other THREE writers have to shoulder their portion of the blame too. That’s right four people, Green, Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier and Danny McBride all worked on this trash and gave it the thumbs up. All four of you should be banned from ever writing a movie again.

What’s good? The score by original Halloween director John Carpenter, his son and one of his son’s friends, is great. I even bought the soundtrack album on vinyl which won’t be in my hands until NEXT YEAR, but that’s another rant. The basic production design, such as it is, works without being distracting, and the film looks pretty good overall.

What’s not so good? Everything else. The story makes no sense. I never post spoilers if I can help it, so I’ll just say that Michael Myers is practically written out of this film. In his place, we’re left with a confusing mess of cancel culture lessons, angry band camp bullies (yes, who knew there was such a thing?), and an all-new Laurie Strode.

For some reason, the Laurie we get in this alternate universe is a happy grandma who loves to celebrate Halloween. Huh? What happened to survivalist grandma? That was the only truly inspired part of Halloween 2018 and here they go and screw it up by changing her character completely. I don’t get it.

I’m not going to waste any more keystrokes on this garbage. Just don’t give these people any of your hard-earned cash. There’s much better things to do with it this Halloween. If you really want to watch a Halloween film, watch Halloween H2O and pretend it really was the glorious end of this soul-sucking franchise. That’s what I’m doing.

Clearly Not Recommended.