Horror in the 90s Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia (1990) 

Directed by Frank Marshall

Written by Don Jakoby, Wesley Strick 

Starring Jeff Daniels, Harley Jane Kozak, Julian Sands, John Goodman 

Release Date July 18th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $53.2 million 

Arachnophobia exists in two popular horror sub-genre: Man vs Nature and the Monster Movie. A new breed of spider is located by an arrogant scientist who believes he can control this uncontrollable element of nature that he hubristically believes that he has mastered. The monster movie then comes into play when the scientists creation gets away from him and begins to wreak havoc in a small time while working to perpetuate its species to take over the planet, essentially, the Americas at the very least. 

If you are skeptical that spiders could be considered monsters in a monster movie, you underestimate the talent of director Frank Marshall and his cast. Indeed, Arachnophobia functions as a movie that could induce a lifelong phobia of spiders, arachnophobia of the title. It's so effective at making spiders a horror movie monster that I honestly would not recommend showing this movie to children. I would especially not recommend this movie for anyone who already harbors a fear of spiders as this movie will only exacerbate that condition. 

Arachnophobia stars Jeff Daniels as a doctor who has moved his family, including his wife, played by Harley Jane Kozak, and their two kids, to a small town in California. Dr. Ross Jennings (Daniels) has been promised the role of the only doctor in this small town but things do not go as planned from the start. The elderly doctor he was supposed to replace has now refused to retire and Dr. Jennings' new home in the country is a money pit with termites and a crumbling infrastructure. 

Unbeknownst to everyone in this otherwise idyllic small town, a dangerously poisonous Brazilian spider has hitched a ride with a corpse to the local funeral home. Having killed a photographer working with Dr. James Atherton (Julian Sands) in Brazil, the spider, that Dr. Atherton had assured us was dead, arrives in this small town and finds its way to the barn owned by Dr. Jennings where it cross-breeds with a local spider and begins to create a mutated version of itself that is so deadly its population could wipe out North America in a period of months. 

Thus it falls to Dr. Jennings to first discover that we are indeed dealing with a killer Spider and then, in the final act, to have a face to face fight with the Spider Queen over the massive egg sack the Queen has laid in Dr. Jennings' new wine cellar. Did you know that wine is not flammable? Neither did this movie which seems to think Wine is an accelerant. Anyway, that aside, Arachnophobia has some silly elements but one thing the film gets right is the staging of spider attacks that kill character actors. 

Characters actors James Handy, Kathy Kinney, Henry Jones and Mary Carver each appear in remarkably well-staged scenes where they are menaced by little spiders. These scenes are filled with genuine tension via simple, classic, filmic technique. Good choices in the editing bay and in the staging of each scene create a genuine tension while the familiar and kind faces of these character actors, people you've seen even if you don't recognize their name, add tension because we don't want to see them be killed by spiders. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) 

Directed by Samuel Bayer 

Written by Wesley Strick, Eric Heisserer

Starring Rooney Mary, Jackie Earl Haley, Kyle Gallner, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, Kellen Lutz

Release Date April 30th, 2010

Published April 29th, 2010 

Lather rinse repeat; simple instructions very easy to follow. I cannot help but speculate that director Samuel Bayer received similar instructions as he approached remaking the horror classic “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Good looking teenager falls asleep, Freddy kills good looking teenager in dream, repeat. This re-imagining of the horror icon Freddy Krueger is like most remakes merely a faded, facsimile of the original. The film is something akin to an “American Idol” contestant's version of a Beatles song; it doesn't sound that bad but lacks the heart, soul, and creative energy of the original.

Jackie Earl Haley replaces the one and only Robert Englund in the iconic role of gardener turned child murder Freddy Krueger. In this version of the story Freddy was a beloved figure who lived and worked at a day school where the kids adored him. That all changed when one little girl, Nancy, told her parents about Freddy's fun cave in the basement. Years later, after Freddy's death, the kids who attended that day school are finally reuniting and with their memories re-emerging, so has Freddy Krueger, who begins attacking and killing them in their dreams. Only Nancy (Rooney Mara) is capable of slowing Freddy's bloodlust.

There is nothing really all that wrong with this version of “Nightmare on Elm Street” from a technical perspective. Director Samuel Bayer, a veteran of music videos, knows how to aim the camera and how to use angle and light for the creation of tension and suspense and he has a good eye for gore. What Bayer is lacking is a story of any depth and characters worth investing in and identifying with. Writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer operate from the recipe detailed in the opening paragraph - cute teen sleeps, cute teen killed, repeat. The settings for the deaths are generally the same; Freddy's creepy boiler room remains a creep-tastic setting even if that steam or smoke is still unexplained.

Heather Langenkamp had a winning combination of earnestness and determination and with that wonderful quiver in her voice she won us over and had audiences rooting for her survival even as Freddy was the more entertaining and charismatic of this deathly duo. Rooney Mara taking over the role of Nancy is basically filler. Someone needed to play the role and Ms. Mara was sufficiently attractive and available to fill the bill. Not much is asked of this mostly unknown actress and she gives just about what she gets from the weak script.

The rest of the cast is made up of pretty faces who line up as victim 1, 2, 3 and so on. The film ends on a strong note but I won't go into that too much other than to say that even fans of the original “Nightmare” will be impressed. It's fair to wonder that as a film critic I have seen too much. I have seen so many horror films and I am hard to impress and even harder to frighten. That's fair but I can recognize technique and I am aware when something works for a mass audience and something doesn't. The engaged audience member will likely recognize, as I did, the dearth of character development and the rerun nature of Freddy's kills.

However, those audiences not in fealty to the original as I am and more inclined to forgive the film its many repeats; those giving in to the legend of Freddy Krueger, well rehashed by the far too talented for this Jackie Earl Haley, may find themselves leaping in their seats and watching the movie through their fingers. If you are forgiving, enjoy “Nightmare on Elm Street” redux. Myself, I am going to watch Johnny Depp get sucked into his bed and explode in a geyser of blood in one of the greatest deaths of all time from Wes Craven's original “Nightmare.”

Movie Review: Doom

Doom (2005) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by David Callaham, Wesley Strick 

Starring Karl Urban, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Rosamund Pike 

Release Date October 21st, 2005 

Published October 22nd, 2005 

I am a huge fan of The Rock. The guy is charismatic, he's cool, he's big and surprisingly funny. That talent was on display in both of his previous roles in the action movies The Rundown and Walking Tall. So what happened to Doom?  Director Andrzej Bartkowiak somehow manages to strip The Rock of his charisma, his humor and any of his other appealing qualities for this human vs. aliens video game retread. Doom had little going for it when it was conceived. Take away the only really appealing element it had in Dwayne Johnson and you have one of the worst films of the year.

On Mars a futuristic research facility has sent out a distress signal of unknown origin. Scientists and archaeologists have disappeared and no one in the facility seems to know why. Enter the Sarge (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson) and his team of marine mercenaries. Sent to mars to find the missing scientists and help the corporation recover proprietary data, they soon find themselves up against an enemy that may or may not be human.

Hey wait... isn't that the plot for Resident Evil 2? Remove the trip to outer space and toss in Milla Jovovich in some skimpy ass-kicking outfit and you have essentially the same movie. There are even zombies in Doom and possibly, this point was not all that clear, a virus.

Funny thing, there were no zombies at all in the video game on which Doom is based. Of course there weren't any characters in the game either. Instead of The Sarge or Grimm (Karl Urban) or Destroyer (Deobia Oeparai) or the Kid (Al Weaver) you had the first person point of view of a gun that you used to blast alien monsters.

Creative license, I'm sure, was necessary for adapting Doom to the big screen but this departure is rather extreme and made worse by the fact that it's a near complete rip off of another bad video game adaptation. It's bad enough Hollywood studios cannot resist making video games into movies but do they have to make them knockoffs of other video game movies? UGH! 

We might have predicted the kind of disaster that is Doom considering the director. Polish born director Andrzej Bartkowiak, has the kind of resume that only Uwe Boll could envy. Bartkowiak directed two atrocious Jet Li flicks, Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave and, most egregiously, he brought Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds to the big screen, a cinematic nightmare of incalculable proportions.

Consider ourselves lucky Bartkowiak did not include Mr. Seagal in Doom. The combination of this already bad idea with Seagal might have caused time and space to collapse upon itself in a cosmic gag reflex hurling us all into the ether. Sorry, I'm just saying maybe things could have been worse.

In a nod to gamers Doom retains the first person shooting scenario that is one of the games trademarks. Unfortunately, once we enter the first person mode, which happens for much of the last 20 minutes of the film, watching Doom becomes very much like watching someone else play a videogame and knowing you don't ever get a turn.

The one thing the film had going for it was The Rock. Sadly, cast as taciturn, humorless pseudo cyborg killing machine The Rock loses every last bit of the personality that made him a star. The action genre that The Rock has quickly risen to dominate, in terms of the classic one man against the world Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Van Damme action genre and not the genre as a whole, is built on physicality and personality. Removed from that mold Rock is just another beefcake behemoth with a gun.

Walking Tall was an old school action flick that played to the strengths of Rock's personality while being just different enough from the old school to seem fresh and fun. The Rundown is an out and out buddy comedy that really allowed Rock to cut loose with that fresh charismatic smile and surly but exciting demeanor that I had hoped would become his trademark. Doom is a major step backward for the man once known in the world of professional wrestling as 'the most electrifying man in sports entertainment'.

Just who is the audience for Doom? Teenage boys who loved the videogame might find something to enjoy. But even the least discerning teenage male must have his limit. Doom is an abysmal mess of genre knockoffs and an outright theft of another movies plot and action. And the movie it steals from, Resident Evil 2, isn't very good either so you can imagine how bad a knockoff would be. 

Throw another hack director into the movie marketplace. Andrzej Bartkowiak joins Uwe Boll and the king of all hacks Paul W.S Anderson in the ranks of directors dragging the standards of Hollywood filmmaking to new lows. Where is the justice? Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and other auteurs struggle to find financing for their work, often having to leave the country as Allen did for his latest film Match Point, to find the funding to make one small picture.

Hacks on the other hand are finding ever growing budgets and clout. I know Hollywood is a business but that does not make such practices right. Watch Doom and tell me you disagree.