Horror in the 90s Tremors

Tremors (1990) 

Directed by Ron Underwood

Written by Ron Underwood, S.S Wilson 

Starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross, Reba McEntire, Finn Carter

Release Date January 19th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $16.9 million 

Somehow, I had managed to convince myself that I didn't like the movie Tremors. I don't know where this opinion came from as I am not sure I had actually watched the movie until now. I have little memory of seeing it before seeing it for this project and quite enjoying it. Indeed, I really had a great time watching Tremors. Why I thought I had disliked it is a mystery to me. It's my own personal Mandela Effect, my mind was convinced that I had disliked the movie when reality was that I had not seen Tremors before. 

That's about as deep as I can be in a review of a movie with such shallow pleasures as Tremors. That might sound insulting, but it's not intended that way. Tremors is quite shallow but that's not a bad thing. Instead of going for anything of substance, Tremors is about shocks and thrills, a gross monster and plenty of gross jokes as well. The movie is intentionally dumb with dopey characters getting by on their wits and dumb luck as they battle one of the most inventive movie monsters in quite many years. 

Tremors stars Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as Val and Earl, Nevada rednecks working every part time job in their tiny, tiny community. Indeed, Perfection, Nevada has all of 14 residents. That is until residents start to get sucked into the ground and eaten by giant, poop brown slugs with snakes for tongues. It takes a little while to get going but once Val and Earl find out about the giant monsters, the movie takes on a much faster pace and cleverly pays homage to drive-in monsters of the past. 

That's the true heart of Tremors, an old school monster movie. Elements of The Blob, The Killer Shrews, Night of the Lepus, Shriek of the Mutilated and so on. Tremors isn't as much of a blood and guts horror movie as those films, the kills are relatively tame by the standards of some of the great 60s drive-in movies, but the homage is still quite clear. In the heart of Tremors, this is a movie you half watch while making out in a car, in a field, with a tinny speaker in the window and a sea of fellow cars stuffed with friends. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

 

Movie Review Management

Management (2009) 

Directed by Stephen Belber

Written by Stephen Belber 

Starring Steve Zahn, Jennifer Aniston, Woody Harrelson, Fred Ward

Release Date May 15th, 2009

Published October 10th, 2009

I have seen some truly unendurably awful movies; I'm looking at you All About Steve, but few are as mind numbingly tone deaf awful as Management, a new, supposed, romance starring Steve Zahn and Jennifer Aniston. From first time writer-director Stephen Belber comes a romance so ludicrous and so off-puttingly wacked that even Ms. Aniston's charm gets trampled in the wake.

Management stars Steve Zahn as a slow witted creep who acts as the night manager at his parents roadside motor lodge in Kingman Arizona. One night he meets Sue (Aniston) who's just passing through on business. It's love at first sight for him but she is rightly creeped out, especially after he drops by her room unannounced with a bottle of champagne and invites himself in.

The whole thing should end there. He's a creepy, 40 something adolescent and she sees that right away. We see it more than she does because he is the supposed hero of this disaster and thus we are subjected to him throughout. Nevertheless, the movie can't end 10 minutes in and she is forced to keep the movie going with a very bad and incomprehensible decision.

When she leaves the following day, the creep follows her, cross country, to her home in Maryland. Further poor decision making is all she can do to keep the plot moving forward. The two spend an awkward evening and morning together, no sex, and he's back on a bus to Arizona.

Oh, but we are only half way into this disaster. She must then make another bad choice and return to Arizona, on business and not really at his prompting. They have another brief interlude, including a visit to his dying mother that makes everyone uncomfortable, and then she's gone and he's chasing her across the country again.

Somehow, they get to Washington state where more incomprehensible crap takes place. She moves in with an ex played by Woody Harrelson and the creep skydives into their pool. He works and lives in the basement of a Chinese restaurant. The movie thinks these ideas are charming and funny though nothing is actually done to make them charming or funny.

The whole of Management plays like a joke that everyone involved assumed would be funny but just isn't. Jokes fall flat from the actor's mouths. Pratfalls are taken with no set up. Ideas are introduced as if the idea were really all anyone had and that should somehow be enough. It's not.

Jennifer Aniston's losing streak has reached astonishing proportions. Management is her third consecutive rom-com disaster following the abysmal twosome of He's Just Not That Into You and Love Happens. That Management is somehow worse than both of those films is even more astonishing.

Steve Zahn is a funny actor who in the right role can be very effective. Here, dressed as a teenager with the haircut of a mental patient, Zahn starts as a creep and remains a creep throughout and yet is supposed to be the romantic hero. The plausibility of any movie is negotiated on the movie's terms. Even by that standard Management fails. Even by its own rules it cannot make this creepy moron seem like a match, not just for Jennifer Aniston, but for any other human being ever.

Management is a loathsome exercise in quirk as a replacement for acting, character development and storytelling. A trainwreck of bad choices, flat humor and tone deaf pacing.  It is mind blowing that anyone involved thought this movie was a good idea.

Movie Review Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

Directed by Andy Tennant 

Written by C Jay Cox 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Candace Bergen, Fred Ward, Jean Smart

Release Date September 27th, 2002

Published September 24th, 2002 

In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon showed herself to be the romantic comedy heiress apparent to Julia Roberts. With her perky good looks and sugary sweetness offset by a wonderfully mischievous smile it was impossible not to fall in love with her. Witherspoon brings those same qualities to her latest film, Sweet Home Alabama, but under the direction of Andy Tennent the same qualities that made you love her in Legally Blonde make you loathe her in this dense retread of every romantic comedy ever made.

In Alabama Reese has one of those great Hollywood lives where everything is perfect: perfect job, perfect friends, perfect man, just perfect. As Melanie Carmichael, Reese is a New York fashion designer about to marry the son of New York’s Mayor. Patrick Dempsey plays the perfect guy, Andrew, just going through the motions playing the same role Bill Pullman played in Sleepless in Seattle. No matter how good a guy he is, the trailer has already explained his fate.

After Andrew asks Melanie to marry him, Melanie has to go home to Alabama to take care of the small detail of her current husband Jake (Josh Lucas). In flashback we are treated to the scene when Jake and Melanie fell in love, they were struck by lightning as the shared their first kiss. Watching this scene my eyes rolled so far back I could see the dull faces of the people directly behind me. You can say I’m cynical but haven’t we seen this exact seen or something very similar at least a thousand times? Melanie and Jake’s bad sitcom style arguing is just one of a million tip offs that they will back together at the end of the film.

Having returned to her home town for the first time in 7 years Melanie takes time to revisit her old friends including Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry) who has a secret only Melanie knows about, the kind of secret that stereotypical southerners don’t react well to. There is also Melanie’s former best friend Lurlynn (Melanie Lynskie) who now has three kids including a newborn she takes to the bar as so many southerners are prone to do. Let us not forget Melanie’s parents Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place, who don’t so much fit into the role of stereotypical Southern parents that everyone in the audience assumed they would be.

So golly, do you think Melanie’s unusual southern friends and family will clash with her high class New York would be in laws?

Poor Candace Bergen, this wonderfully talented Emmy winning actress is stuck with the film's most thankless role. As the ever scowling and disapproving mother-in-law, Bergen is never allowed to smile, never allowed to joke. The purpose of Bergen’s Mayor of New York and mother of the groom is to be the bitch so at the end of the movie she can get her comeuppance in what is supposed to make the audience cheer.

That is the essence of the problem with Sweet Home Alabama, every scene has been filmed with the purpose of exerting a particular response from the audience. It is as if every scene in the film was individually test screened by demographic to make sure it illicited the correct audience response.

Like a romantic comedy machine, Sweet Home Alabama grinds through it’s mechanical plot, perfectly calibrated to meet exactly what the audience expects. The film is so predictable even lines of dialogue can be anticipated. Scenes are setup ten to twenty minutes ahead so, rather than watch the movie, I was sitting and waiting for the expected payoff and like clockwork I didn’t have to wait long for it in exactly the way I expected.

Sweet Home Alabama is the latest film to exhibit my biggest movie pet peeve. A film based on seemingly intelligent characters making intensely dumb decisions because if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a movie. Not a frame of film goes by that Melanie doesn’t have an opportunity to solve all her problems with one intelligent decision. One line of intelligent dialogue and problem solved, movie over.

Sweet Home Alabama is an awful film and I had very low expectations for this film. I expected to laugh a couple times, fall in love with Reese Witherspoon again and leave the theater with a smile on my face. Instead I walked out depressed after seeing a film that illustrates everything that is wrong modern Hollywood film-making. This is yet another film that had a poster before it had a screenplay. A film where marketing execs made the creative decisions and hired creative people to carry out the vision of the publicity department. Director Andy Tennent was likely instructed to simply make Reese look cute and hope that the writers might squeeze in a sight gag or one liner somewhere, spoiler alert: they didn’t.

To steal a line from my hero Roger Ebert I hated, hated, hated this movie. This film does not improve upon the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. I still love Reese Witherspoon, but only because I watched Legally Blonde. Had I not, I might curse her for having made this film. Hollywood has no shame churning out the same drivel month after month. And I know what you're saying and yes I shouldn’t act so surprised but I honestly believe that there is art out there somewhere, Sweet Home Alabama dims that hope slightly but that dream is still there.