Movie Fest

I had some friends over on Sat­ur­day for movies. We ordered Big Guy’s Piz­za and watched some real rasp­ber­ries in the world of cin­e­ma. Two reviews lie after the jump. We watched four, but I’m not going to review the ones I’d already seen.

Attack of the Killer Shrews was so bad it was­n’t even good. Here is a quick review. Here is a slight­ly longer one. It has noth­ing to do with this.

The giant shrews are dog-sized. Get your head around that. Actu­al­ly they are just dogs with shag car­pet­ing duct-taped to their backs. The token black man is the first killed [of course] and I detect­ed a heavy dose of racism in the film. The black guy is named Rook Gris­wold. A rook is a big black cousin of the crow. Then the dogshrews chase him up a tree, effec­tive­ly “tree­ing a coon.” Then they knock down the tree and eat him. Mean­while, back at the com­pound, no one won­ders why he is late. Stu­pid frig­gin’ movie. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the racist over­tones are prob­a­bly the most coher­ent part of the movie. The oth­er non-whitey gets it next. A Mex­i­can named Mario who looks like Ron Jere­my. Then the sci­en­tist gets nib­bled on and poi­soned by the shrews, runs into the next room and keels over while typ­ing “For every action there is an equal and opposi…” And the main sci­en­tist guy says with a note of pride “He did sci­ence to the last.” There is also this drunk guy who basi­cal­ly wigs out all the time. This movie is per­haps the dumb­est thing I have ever seen. I’m going to stop writ­ing about it before I get dumb­er­erer.

The Haunt­ing was a much bet­ter flick, a hor­ror clas­sic indeed. And the fact that Robert Wise direct­ed the thing imme­di­ate­ly gave it a spe­cial place in my heart. It has some pret­ty intense cin­e­matog­ra­phy, which cou­pled with the heavy use of sound and doors that nev­er remain open, do well to make things a bit eerie. I think it was Hitch­cock [?] who said that the scari­est thing he could ever show peo­ple was a closed door. Any­way, there aren’t many spe­cial effects, just some breath effects and a ridicu­lous­ly amaz­ing scene where a door flex­es and bulges. The Haunt­ing also has a sado­masochist les­bian sub­text and heavy mir­ror sym­bol­ism [which I think prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with reflect­ing the oth­er­world­ly side of the house and the hid­den things in the minds of the char­ac­ters]. Apart from a wealth of hokey voice-over inner mono­logue the movie was great!