Horror in the 90s: Frankenhooker

Frankenhooker (1990) 

Directed by Frank Henenlotter 

Written by Robert 'Bob' Martin, Frank Henenlotter 

Starring James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Louise Lasser 

Release Date April 1990 

Box Office $205,000 

Frankenhooker is a visionary work of cinema. It's a vision so bizarre and singular that you can barely wrap your mind around the existence of such a thing. I want to be in a room where someone thought of the idea for Frankenhooker and then wrote a screenplay. They then took the idea to other people and instead of laughing this bizarre idea out of existence, they handed over funding to make Frankenhooker. Actors were then sought and cast in  Frankenhooker. Movie theaters were then invited to book Frankenhooker to be screened for paying audiences.

How? How did this get past the idea phase? How did anyone conceive of this series of scenes which begins with a woman being destroyed by an out control lawn mower and then having her head preserved and attached to a patchwork of body parts cultivated from dead sex workers. There are many weird movies in the world that leave you scratching your head over how someone came up with such nonsense but few of those movies have the head of a dead woman being grafted onto a body made up of a patchwork of dead sex workers. 

If you don't know about Frankenhooker you, perhaps, think I have had some kind of mental collapse and that I am just making something up out of the fractured pieces left in my shattered psyche, but no, Frankenhooker is an actual movie that was made and distributed. Frankenhooker is 33 years old and readily available to anyone capable of streaming movies right now. Rather than being the dramatic result of this writer having suffered a traumatic brain injury, Frankenhooker is a real movie. I swear it is. 

Frankenhooker stars James Lorinz as Jeffrey Franken, a small-time mad scientist who lives with his mother. James is in love with Shelly and the two are set to be married soon. That all changes when Shelly is gruesomely murdered by an out of control, remote control lawnmower that Jeffrey had made as a gift for Shelly's father. Though most of Shelly was eviscerated, Jeffrey manages to save her head and uses a solution he'd created for a different mad scientist project, one involving a brain in a jar on his mom's kitchen table, Shelly's head is preserved. 

But why? Why preserve Shelly's head? Well, Jeffrey believes that he can save Shelly from death. Yes, Jeffrey has a cure for decapitation but it's not a cure that is easy to deploy. No, unfortunately, it will require a lot of bloody murder of sex workers. Thus, in order to save Shelly, Jeffrey takes the last of his life savings and goes to big city where a pimp named Zorro helps him hire several sex workers whom Jeffrey plans to murder and assemble into the perfect body for Shelly. He has two days to make this plan work with a thunderstorm expected to power Jeffrey's Shelly monster. 

The ending of the movie turns the Frankenstein story into a Tales from the Crypt/Twilight Zone style movie with a twist that turns the tables on Jeffrey in a visual you need to see to believe. Then again, to believe anything in Frankenhooker actually exists, you need to see it for yourself. It's one of the wildest ideas that anyone has ever brought to the big screen. The fact that something this insane exists is a testament to pure insanity as art. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media

Movie Review The Holy Mountain

The Holy Mountain (1973) 

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky 

Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky 

Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas Zamira Salinas 

November 27th, 1973 

Published May 15th, 2023 

Is Holy Mountain a movie or an experience? Perhaps it is both. I'm not sure exactly what it is but it had a major effect on me. Written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the movie is a wildly political, deeply esoteric and visually daring film of extraordinary ambition. Watching Holy Mountain is what I imagine it must be like to be drunk. I've never had a drop of alcohol but observing drunken behavior, I am reminded of how I felt watching Holy Mountain. The film left me dizzy, delirious, occasionally giddy and left me needing a nap. 

Every frame of Holy Mountain could be a painting. Jodorowsky's taken for composition is extraordinary. The opening moments of the film both set the tone for the rest of the movie and do nothing to establish a recognizable story. Two nude women kneel next to a black clad person wearing a large black hat. The background is a psychedelic black and white. The person in the black hat proceeds to brutally and painfully sheer the hair from the women's heads. Why? I don't know but it is damn sure a striking series of visuals. 

Our protagonist in Holy Mountain is a man who vaguely visually associates with Jesus just before he was nailed to the cross. He has long brown hair, a beard, and a lanky, emaciated frame. Our Jesus stand-in is introduced lying in his own filth. Covered in flies, urine flowing around him, and  a general air of gross, the man is awakened when a bunch of naked children start throwing rocks at him. He flees. Eventually, our Jesus meets a tiny man with no legs or hands and the two become fast friends. 

They travel to town where they witness a series of indescribable events that include a recreation of the fall of the Mayan people with the Mayans represented by Lizards and the invading Spanish portrayed by a plague level of frogs. The frogs destroy and consume the lizards as Jesus and his friend dance about. Meanwhile, soldiers arrive to break up the scene and one of the tourists breaks off to have sex with the soldier while her husband watches and calls on Jesus to capture the event on camera. 

Eventually, our Jesus stand in realizes that his resemblance to Jesus could be a way to make some money. He begins accepting money to carry a giant cross while tourists snap photos of him. However, when he falls asleep, he's kidnapped by the same people who gave him the cross to carry. They proceed to make a plaster cast of him as Jesus on the cross and when our Jesus awakens, he finds a room full of plaster versions of himself as Jesus and suffers intense despair before destroying all but one of these plaster Jesus's. 

I have left out so many things. You have no idea. And what I have described thus far is maybe 20 minutes into the movie, at most. Holy Mountain only gets wilder from here with sequences that it would take pages to try and summarize and then assess the meaning. Let's just say that what is still to come in Holy Mountain amounts to a series of artist allegories regarding corporate greed, violence, sexism, religious corruption, the death of the ego and the overall idea of what it means to transcend in the Emerson/Thoreau sense. 

It's a lot and I am not sure I understood a lot of it or what I was meant to understand. Jodorowsky appears to want the viewer to take something away from Holy Mountain that is just for them. At the same time, he's not without a very personal, political perspective. Much of that boils down to greed is bad, corruption is bad, and everyone is susceptible to these societal ills. We can try to assign more depth to Jodorowsky but the basic message is a leftist perspective that is deeply opposed to the corrupting influence of capitalism and generally suspicious of anything that represents a capitalistic status quo. 

Find my full length review of The Holy Mountain at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Monica

Monica (2023) 

Directed by Andrea Pallaoro 

Written by Andrea Pallaoro 

Starring Trace Lysette, Emily Browning, Patricia Clarkson, Adriana Barraza, Joshua Close 

Release Date May 12th, 2023 

Published May 12th, 2023 

Monica is a quiet, thoughtful, and quite brilliant film about grief and the strange pull parents have on children, no matter the distance. It doesn't matter if the distance is measured in miles or time, the inherent desire to connect with parents is a universal feeling, regardless of your background. In the case of Monica (Trace Lysette), the distance is physical, it's measured in decades of time, and it's embedded in bitter sadness and grief. Monica has been estranged from her mother, Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) for nearly 20 years. The last thing Monica's mother said to her, at a bus station in Ohio was "I can no longer be your mother." 

Now, Eugenia is dying and having been found by her brother, Paul (Josh Close), and his wife, Laura (Emily Browning), that pull I wrote about earlier surfaces for Monica. Despite the rightful bitterness and remarkable hurt, Monica cannot resist the pull of seeing her mother again before she passes away. The question of a reconciliation looms but carries more weight in this case. Eugenia is suffering from brain cancer, her mind is slipping, especially when she refuses her medication. It's been nearly 20 years and she may not recognize Monica. 

Of course, time and Eugenia's illness aren't the only reasons why she might not recognize Monica. When the two last saw each other, Monica was at the beginning of transitioning. 20 years later, Monica is indeed a different person. The layers of this story are remarkable as now Monica may have to decide if she will tell her mother that she is her child, the child Eugenia abandoned at a crucial moment in her life. It's heavy stuff but in the brilliantly subtle hands of writer-director Andrea Pallaoro and star Trace Lysette, the fraught emotions are played only on Monica's face as she takes in the huge emotions at play inside her and around her. 

Find my full length review at Humans.Media 

Horror in the 90s: The Exorcist 3

The Exorcist 3 (1990) 

Directed by William Peter Blatty 

Written by William Peter Blatty 

Starring George C. Scott, Brad Dourif, Scott Wilson, Nicol Williamson

Release Date August 17th, 1990 

Box Office $44 million 

People forget just how big a hit The Exorcist 3 was when it was released in August of 1990. William Peter Blatty's first and only directorial effort managed to top the box office on opening weekend and accumulated overall, a gross that would be over $100 million dollars today. Despite much negative reaction to the film at the time, The Exorcist 3 has persisted in the minds of horror fans as a rare third sequel in a famous franchise that doesn't stink out loud. 

The Exorcist 3 centers on a Police Detective, Lt. William F. Kinderman, played by legendary actor George C. Scott. Kinderman recalls having been at the scene of the crime when in 1975 Father Damian Karras plunged to his death from the apartment window of young Regan MacNeil after having participated in Regan's exorcism. It's a horrific memory that Kinderman shares with Father Karras' close friend, Father Joseph Dyer (Ed Flanders). And it's a memory that creeps back into both men's minds when a series of murders occur that recall a demonically possessed killer. 

In 2020, The Exorcist 3 turned 30 years old and on my podcast, the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast, we watched it and reviewed it on the show. Our review was incredibly positive. We loved George C. Scott's performance and the wild horror imagery of William Peter Blatty's shabby but endearing first time direction. Watching the film again, a mere 3 years later however, the charm is less pronounced. What steps forward are the flaws, the strange choices, the reasons the normies of 1990 hated this movie. 

It's sad but it appears to be true that I willed myself to like The Exorcist 3 so much in 2020 that I neglected just how weird and random William Peter Blatty's choices are. First of all, one of the first images of The Exorcist 3 is a jarringly silly shot that is intended to be frightening. Church doors fly open, and an ill-wind blows through the church, creating a chaotic swirl of loose hymnals and biblical verses. The camera slides into the chaos before cutting to a close up of a cross where a ceramic Jesus of Nazareth comically opens his eyes. The image of Jesus here looks like comedian Tom Kenny and the horror spell that Blatty is trying to cast fails immediately. 

This is followed by an attempt to give The Exorcist 3 the feel of a waking nightmare. The camera leaves the church and takes on a first person perspective, as if we are the camera and we are in the midst of a dream. We are walking down a wet street late at night. In the distance, a man who appears to be wearing a Priest's garb runs quickly and strangely across the street. The camera moves up and down with each step, the camera, our eyes, fall upon the sidewalk before us. A young man appears to the left of the frame holding a rose. We walk past him and continue up the street. The young man emerges again somehow having teleported to a spot ahead of us. He holds out the flower and we walk past. 

We then leap to a new location, the steps from Georgetown below the former home of Regan MacNeil. It's the place where Father Karras died after leaping from a fourth story window. We, the camera, roll down those stairs just as Father Karras did, rolling and bouncing horrifically until we reach the bottom, and there the nightmare ends. We awaken to helicopters intercut with scenes from the church. Our protagonists, Lt. Kinderman and Father Dyer going about their business. Kinderman is investigating a grisly murder scene. Father Dyer is practicing a sermon and scolding a student priest, played in a cameo by a very young, almost unrecognizable Kevin Corrigan, a favorite character of mine. 

The visual marriage of Lt. Kinderman and Father Dyer is accompanied by dialogue that establishes the long-time friendship of these two men. It's a friendship bound in the blood of their dead friend Father Karras. it's established that each man is haunted by this date, the date of Father Karras's death. They are haunted so much that they each feel the need to comfort the other. Each man talks of having to cheer up their old friend and thus they meet at a local movie theater for an umpteenth showing of It's a Wonderful Life. 

One can infer that Blatty is intending to evoke the life-affirming emotional power of It's a Wonderful Life to underline how these two men appreciate being alive. Other than that, it's a particularly random inclusion. The movie date is followed by a bizarre non-sequitur conversation in which the detective relates a story about why he doesn't want to go him to his wife and mother-in-law. It's a story about a fish currently occupying Kinderman's bathtub and how he hasn't had a bath in 3 days because the fish is there. This is the pretense Blatty feels is necessary to get Kinderman and Dyer to have dinner together and rehash stories about Father Karras and Kinderman's strange new murder case. 

Not to be Mr. IMDB trivia, but, as we cut to the restaurant in the following scene, there is an entirely random and uncommented upon cameo from a famous non-actor. Glimpsed ever so briefly in this scene is the former United States Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop. Most won't recognize the man but if you are of a certain age, his oddly styled beard, a style referred to as a chinstrap, as it circles the face without including a mustache, is a strangely familiar sight. Koop became famous in the late 80s and early 90s when he defied the Reagan and Bush administrations to openly discuss AIDS. He spoke of safe sex and promoted condoms at a time when it was not something conservatives wanted him to do. 

That's a wordy way of saying that spotting C. Everett Koop in a brief cameo in The Exorcist 3 is weird and quite distracting for someone who knows who he is. Perhaps the former Surgeon General was invited because he shared a prominent Letter C with star George C. Scott. These are the kinds of bizarre intrusive thoughts that such random inclusions invite. And they are a warning to future filmmakers, try to minimize such distracting cameos in your movie as they might pull focus from what you are trying to accomplish in a scene. 

Find my full length piece at Horror.Media

Movie Review Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. #3

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. #3 

Directed by James Gunn 

Written by James Gunn

Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Pom Klementieff, Karen Gillan, Sean Gunn, Will Poulter, Vin Diesel, Chukwudi Iwuji 

Release Date May 5th, 2023 

Published May 3rd, 2023 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. #3 arrives at a strange time for a Marvel movie. The Marvel film universe appears, in many ways, to be in decline in relevance and popularity. The biggest stars such as Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, and Chris Evans, have left the MCU and the fan base is growing impatient with how the latest phase of this universe is unfolding. Add to that, Guardians writer-director James Gunn who has already abandoned Marvel to take over the leadership of the D.C Film Universe even as his final MCU movie is only now arriving in theaters. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. #3 is feeling like a bit of an afterthought. Intended as a coda to James Gunn's little corner of the Marvel Universe, the film has the feel of an afterthought as well. The villain pales in comparison to Kurt Russell's towering Ego in Volume 2, the lack of the Peter Quill-Gamora dynamic feels like a pivot that no one in the Guardians universe wanted to make but were forced into, and what has replaced that dynamic here feels quite slapped together and unwelcome. 

The story of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 picks up on an outpost called Knowhere. The Guardians and their allies are regrouping for their next gig, saving the universe when someone brings the fight to them. Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), glimpsed in a post-credits sequence in Volume 2, comes to Knowhere with the intent of kidnapping Rocket (Bradley Cooper). He's here on the orders of the Grand High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), the man who created Rocket many years earlier. 

The Guardians turn back Warlock but not before he nearly kills Rocket. The rest of the plot will center on the gang having to enact a heist to steal the plans they need to save Rocket's life. This will involve a reunion with Gamora (Zoe Saldana), now a member of The Ravagers, who has no memory of her other life as a member of the Guardians. She's a completely different person than the Gamora the Guardians knew and she angrily asserts just how much she doesn't know the family she'd had in another life. She's willing to help out of sympathy for her sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), but she'd rather killer Peter than listen to any of his memory of who she might have been before. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret

Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret (2023) 

Directed by Kelly Fremon Craig

Written by Kelly Fremon Craig

Starring Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Abby Ryder Fortson, Benny Safdie 

Release Date April 28th, 2023

Published May 2nd, 2023 

So, I didn't get the memo regarding Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret. Having missed my critics screening a few weeks ago, I saw the film at a public screening, unaware of my apparent massive faux pas. After having watched and enjoyed this lovely, sweet, funny coming of age story, I was informed that a woman at my screening had complained that a 'Creep' had attended the screening. Said 'Creep' was me. Being a single man seeing the film alone and sitting in the only available seat in the front row, I had been identified as a creep. 

Upon reflection, I guess I understand. This is a movie about a young woman discovering her body for the first time as she comes of age as a woman. Why would this appeal to a single man is not an unreasonable question. I will admit, the subject matter is not relatable to my experience. That said, I would think that encouraging men to see a movie with this kind of sensitivity and understanding toward the experiences of young women is not a bad thing. In fact, if more men gave a movie like this a chance, it might help them understand their partners, mothers, sisters and daughters a little more. 

Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, awkwardly but sweetly illustrates the kinds of things that young women experience but don't like talking about, especially with the men in their lives. But it's also a movie that invites you to try and understand the struggle of young women and that's valuable information for everyone. It's especially valuable when the story is this well told. Writer-Director Kelly Fremon Craig has crafted a warm, sensitive, unrelenting story of teenage womanhood, a story filled with humor and charm. 

Abby Ryder Fortson stars as Margaret, a 12 year old girl who has just learned that she's leaving her home in New York City for the suburbs of New Jersey. It's a jarring shift in geography as it means changing schools and losing touch with friends. Worst of all, it means being separated from Margaret's beloved grandma, Sylvia (Kathy Bates), a rock and a fount of humor and wisdom that is an irreplaceable part of young Margaret's existence. Nevertheless, they will have to get by with daily phone calls and a few weekend bus trips to the big city. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.media

Movie Review Polite Society

Polite Society (2023) 

Directed by Nida Manzoor 

Written by Nida Manzoor 

Starring Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya 

Release Date April 28th, 2023 

Polite Society is a charmer. This story of sisters, a weird wedding conspiracy, and wild stunt work, is highly unconventional and succeeds fully on the charm of its star. Priya Kansara is plucky teenager, Ria Khan, who dreams of being a stuntwoman. Her dreams are supported by her loving sister, Lena (Ritu Arya), a struggling artist who has been forced to move home. There, Lena takes great care to record her little sister's stunt videos in which she mimics famous female stunt women and posts the videos to her YouTube channel. 

The sisterly bond is put to the test when the family attends a party at the home of a rich family. The mother of this rich family, Raheeta (Nimra Bucha), is very eager to marry off her handsome, doctor son, Salim (Akshay Khanna), and she has her eye on Lena. It's a little odd, Lena is attractive but she's a depressed, failed artist from a middle class family, hardly the most likely wife of a rich man. This sets off Riya who is immediately suspicious of Raheeta and Salim. 

Cleverly, the film posits many of Ria's concerns as coming from a place of not wanting to lose her sister. Ria clearly feels that if her sister gives up her dream of being an artist, their parents will see it as an opportunity to tell her not to follow her dream of being a stuntwoman. As these scenes play out, there is some genuine evidence that Raheeta and Salim may have motivation that goes beyond merely wanting a son to get married. The conclusion of this plot is wild and weird and really, really fun. 

Find my full length review of Polite Society at Geeks.Media