Open House

If you hate realtors and love Adrienne Barbeau, you must watch Open House.  And I do love Adrienne Barbeau.  Always nice to see her show up (as with her recent turn on Sons of Anarchy – short-lived thought it may have been).

Adrienne plays a successful realtor. This is late 1980s Hollywood so women realtors are, naturally, a threat to everything!

Her boyfriend is a therapist who hosts a radio call-in show. He is all about “protecting the callers’ privacy”. Because calling into a radio therapist (if he’s even a doctor I don’t know) is of course clearly protected by doctor-patient privilege although all 38 of your listeners heard the conversation in public. It’s just good TV.

And someone is killing all the realtors!

Lots of bad acting, lots of really odd gay references that made me wonder what the hell was going on with that (as in: “is someone just randomly casting his boyfriends?”), the soundtrack is an amazingly muddied bunch of weirdness ranging from elevator music to 70s porno track, the acting is overdone, the special effects aren’t very good, the story makes no sense.

So, if you hate realtors and you love Adrienne Barbeau, you’ll probably like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you only mildly dislike realtors and think “who’s Adrienne Barbeau”, you probably won’t like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you enjoy condiments with your food, you probably won’t like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you’ve recently inhaled oxygen into your lungs, you probably won’t like this movie. Probably. No guarantees.

If you like seeing an overweight bully realtor try and take on Adrienne and her agents and who ends up in a dog collar while taking a whiz before he’s killed, you might like this move. Probably. No guarantees.

The killer turns out to be something of a surprise and, since I know you’ll never watch this movie if you haven’t already seen it, the killer is a homeless guy (I did not know there were homeless people in the 80s, so I did learn something <sarcasm tag>) who moved into a home that wasn’t really abandoned, but it wasn’t occupied either, and then “those damned realtors—oh you realtors!!! <angry fist>” tried to sell his house and he had been “taking good care of it”.

So it’s about homeless people having the right to move into homes that aren’t occupied and, if a realtor tries to sell it, to kill all the realtors in creatively stupid ways.

I did not understand this movie. It was mildly entertaining. I blame the laundry fumes.

Bad Kids Go to Hell

Bad Kids Go To Hell. (According to IMDB, it is “Based on the best selling indie comic book series/graphic novel of the same name.” If that adds anything.)

TL;DR: Just watch it. Unless cockroaches terrify you.

Slightly longer TL;DR: This may be the best bad movie ever. At least of 2012.

Full-blown OMGSTFU already review:

The movie kept coming up in Netflix “recommends” but the cover art and the description just left me blah. “Oh, hooray. <yawn> Another scary movie about teenagers possessed by demons during a visit to the local Pepperidge Farms store and now their nostrils glow before they kill someone.” Or: “Oh, hooray. <yawn> Another shaky-cam movie about teens trapped in a haunted house/mental asylum/forest.”

Well, that should teach me to prejudge things. (If I had a nickel for every time I said that!)

This is a comedy/mystery (maybe a bit of horror) somewhat along the lines of the Scary Movie franchise. Based upon some reviews, you’d think this movie sucked tailpipe. However, on its merits in that small sub-genre, it’s actually pretty subtle and pretty well done. Many reviews are “Oh, har. A horror version of Breakfast Club.” Those people fail at life. There’s also a lot of “this movie’s a mess” reviews. Because, I guess, people don’t pay attention because it’s all spelled out PRETTY FUCKING CLEARLY IN AMERICAN ENGLISH IF YOU WOULD PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE AND WATCH IT YOU FUCKING MORONS. It saddens me that a movie like Bad Kids Go To Hell is, apparently, too deep for a lot of people. I mean WTF Fred?

Don’t get me wrong. We’re not talking about some Ingmar Bergman-like reductive reflection on life and the misery one endures by silently plucking out one’s own pubic hairs on a remote island in Finland. It’s a comedy/mystery movie that, even if it weren’t supposed to make sense, still does make sense if you’re paying attention and graduated from 8th grade. There’s no deep message. No meaning of life will be found here. It’s called relaxing your goddamned anal sphincter, kicking back, and just enjoying it for what it is: a pretty well done B-movie.

Much like ice cubes on your nipples, the points are: (1) not every movie has to be a work of art that causes one to cut one’s self out of a sense of loss and existential angst; and (B) some people just don’t know how to have fun. Whew. That’s out of my system.

The movie is set at Crestview Academy (a ritzy school for rich kids), where a group of kids will be spending their 8-hour detention in the library. Turns out Crestview was built on land stolen from a Native American and it’s cursed! (Maybe.)

Our plucky kids (actually, high school seniors in the movie), locked in the library on their own with no internet (but they very specifically and clearly have “intranet”) and no cell phones and NO SMOKING!, decide to hold a seance. Stuff happens and death starts its march through the detained. I am compelled to point out that, since this school is an Academy, that that means school uniforms.

The movie does pluck a bit heavily upon the Breakfast Club theme (right down to Judd Nelson appearing). But there are subtle tips of the hat to quite a few other teenager movies from Breakfast Club to Carrie. Done pretty well. It’s enjoyable just for those little homages.

The young cast is quite competent – a pleasant surprise these days in terms of young actors. Everyone seems to be having a good time with it (which, IMHO, counts for a lot of the reason the movie is enjoyable).

There is some funny and very politically incorrect humor. This movie is not recommended if you’re having your vegan-heart liberal friends over for the weekly “tofu and wilted cardboard dinner with a piquant rosé from that charming winery in Argentina we visited last year”.

There is a bit of blood and gore. The soundtrack is actually pretty cool. And between it and the movie, I bought the soundtrack.  It’s kind of hard to describe kind of “happy goth” maybe? (The last time I bought a soundtrack was the one to Empire Records [without seeing the movie] and I still stab myself from time to time over that mistake.)

And, finally, the stripper scene. Yes, there is a stripper scene. A stripper scene that even I, a non-heteronormative red-blooded American man, found to be enjoyable. I was honestly sad when it was over.  The actress who does it (Amanda Alch, I believe) just has fun with it. Plus, the way it’s filmed is just a hoot. (Full disclosure: if a man had done that with the same level of appeal and talent, I’d feel the exact same way. It’s probably one of the funnest, most enjoyable stripping scenes in a movie that I’ve seen.)

This movie is so goodly bad that I may actually buy it, too.

Absentia

Occasionally, I get lucky and stumble across a movie that I actually like.  It is at those moments that I question my sanity.  But that’s a topic for another day.  Plus, you won’t get regaled you with the crap I’ve seen (like the abysmal, disjointed, predictable, poorly written, bland, and uninteresting Side Effects with Jude Law – so bad that it may never get reviewed by me because…well…I don’t think there’s a way to verbally convey how bad it is).

Absentia is a really nice little movie.  It fits, to a T, the first line of the Wikipedia definition of suspense:

Suspense is a feeling of pleasurable fascination and excitement mixed with apprehension, tension, and anxiety developed from an unpredictable, mysterious, and rousing source of entertainment.

The movie was funded via Kickstarter (I did not fund this movie and have no ties, financial or otherwise, to it), and the cast members are newer and somewhat unknown.

It starts off slowly, but I found myself engaged pretty quickly.  Courtney Bell stars as Tricia. Katie Parker co-stars as her sister Callie.  Tricia’s husband Daniel has been missing for seven years, and she’s in the process of having him declared dead when Callie comes back into her life.  Callie had also been absent for a long period – different rehab places in different states, maybe some other wandering during that time.

Callie is a recovering addict who seems to be clean.  She’s found a little religion (a very minor theme which also plays off of Tricia’s Buddhism prayers) and healthy living; one day, while out running she encounters a man in a pedestrian tunnel.  Someone that appears to be your rather stock “homeless” guy, even though she’s a bit freaked out by him.  And things slowly start getting weirder and weirder.  Piles of small things (buttons, watches, etc.) show up first on their doorstep and, later in Callie’s bed.

Then, Daniel reappears.  Which kind of throws a monkeywrench in Tricia’s relationship with the detective she’s been seeing.   Eventually, Callie discovers that people have been disappearing in that area for a long time.

The best thing about this movie is the technique.  Most of the reactions of the people involved seem like “now, that’s how most people would react in that situation”.  No overblown emotional shit; no stoic “nothing can phase me” shit; no flying karate kicks to the Adam’s apple shit – the actors made the characters believable.  There is one excellent “gotcha!” scene.  I’m sitting on the edge of the sofa with a nice bowl of ice cream.  You know it’s coming.  Yep.  Yeah.  Yes.  Come on alreaBAM!  My spoon goes flying across the room.  Just perfect timing.  Several times, I was sitting on the edge of the sofa actually caring about what might happen to the characters.  Because they did a great job with building suspense both in the movie (things happen slowly, up to a point) and with the soundtrack. While there are a couple of loud moments, mostly the soundtrack is minimal and is there to add to the sense of suspense.  When was the last time you saw a movie and found yourself suddenly at the edge of your seat?

Another nice touch was showing possible logical explanations, from a logical police officer POV, for everything that happened.  Although it may not necessarily be what really happened.  A “well of course there’s nothing supernatural going on because it can all be logically explained (unless there is something supernatural going on)” thing.  The movie serves up a little something to think about without being “this movie has a message”.

All of the actors were really good.  I found myself liking their characters and wanting to see the actors in other work.

Definitely a nice pick for Halloween time.

Absentia poster