Horror in the 90s Leatherface Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 

Directed by Jeff Burr 

Written by David J. Schrow 

Starring Kate Hodge, William Butler, Ken Foree, Tom Hudson, R.A Mihailoff 

Release Date January 12th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $5.8 million dollars 

Bottom-feeding cash-ins are always pretty obvious about their intentions. That was certainly the case when a group of huckster con-artists looked to cash in on the legacy of the greatest horror movie ever made, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Studio execs like money and when they can seize the rights to an exploitable property, they eagerly gobble up the opportunity with little concern for the quality of the product they plan to capitalize on. With this as the background, was there any way for Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre to succeed? No, probably not. 

A very game and determined Kate Hodge stars in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 as Michelle, a student driving her dad's vintage car from California to Florida alongside her soon to be ex-boyfriend. William Butler is the soon-to-be ex of Michelle and he quickly makes a case for why they are no longer going to be together by being a whiny little prat. He can't understand why Michelle would want to leave him for a chance to travel the world. We understand it from just a few lines of whiny, man-baby dialogue from Ryan. 

The story of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 kicks in when the couple stops at a last chance gas station. The creeptastic gas station employee, begins to perv on Michelle, eventually spying on her in the ladies room. He's stopped by a transient, Edward 'Tex' Sawyer (Viggo Mortensen), who hopes that interceding will convince Michelle and Ryan to give him a ride. He ends up getting shot by the creepy gas station attendant while giving Michelle and Ryan a chance to escape. He appears benevolent but it's merely a ruse, he is, after all, a member of the Sawyer clan. 

Michelle and Ryan's escape is short-lived as they are soon chased down and menaced by what they assume is the gas station creep. They end up with a flat tire and try hiding on a side road. This side road however, leads them right to Leatherface (R.A Mihailoff) who attacks with his trusty chainsaw and his unnatural amount of physical strength which he demonstrates by ripping the top off of the car's trunk. Having made another narrow escape, Michelle and Ryan end up in another crash and, after colliding with Benny (Ken Foree), the trio end up in a life threatening game of cat and mouse with the horrific Sawyer family. 

The mercenary nature of Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 is obvious in the dimwitted marketing campaign which focuses entirely on Leatherface's weapon of choice, a chainsaw. In this case, it's a custom made saw, silver plated and engraved with the film's tagline, 'The Saw is Family.' The movie was pitched with a comic teaser trailer in which the custom chainsaw is gifted to Leatherface King Arthur style, via a lady in a lake. You can almost hear the cash registers ringing in the hearts of heartless studio execs. 

Cynicism aside, for just a moment, I want to commend Kate Hodge and Ken Foree. These two terrific actors work very, very hard to bring something to this beyond the cash-in effort being put in everywhere else in the movie. Where the film's writers, director, and producers either don't know or don't care about the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hodge and Foree are giving great performances. While the rest of the film appears dedicated to sullying the memory of the original, these two performance darn near redeem the misconceived enterprise that is Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3. 

Hampered by a script that adds unnecessary aspects to the Sawyer legacy, Hodge delivers a gritty, hard as nails final girl performance while the horror veteran Foree is so good as Benny that the character is allowed to survive wounds that were absolutely intended as his death blow. Benny survived only because test audiences loved Benny and hated seeing him go. That's yet another testament to the mercenary quality of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3. But, it's also a credit to Foree whose performance is so good, you may not mind the ludicrous nature of his miraculous survival. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Horror in the 90s: Brain Dead

Brain Dead (1990) 

Directed by Adam Simon 

Written by Adam Simon, Charles Beaumont 

Starring Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, George Kennedy, Bud Cort, Patricia Charbonneau 

Release Date January 19th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $1.6 million dollars 

One image. Brain Dead is remembered for one, singular image. The fact that this one image has nothing to do with the movie that contains it, does not matter. There is only one thing that anyone remembers about Brain Dead and it is just one memorable, awful, brutal image. You see it in all of the marketing materials about the movie when it was released. To those who've never seen Brain Dead, this image is the star of the film. It's a very compelling image, one worthy of building a bizarre cult movie marketing campaign around. 

In a college science lab there is an unnamed student toying with a human brain. The student shoves an electrode into the ooey gooey brain situated in a petri dish. The brain is connected to something, a metal apparatus. Upon this apparatus is a complete abomination. Stretched like horrifying silly putty across an empty expanse, connecting to a circular metal apparatus is a human face. This face has eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It seems to have facial muscles somehow, hidden behind a weathered expanse of skin. 

The facial muscles are implied in the film by the way the face twitches in pain when the brain in the pan is electrocuted back to life. Depending on where the student stabs his electrode into this brain in a pan, the face twitches its eyes, wrinkles its nose, or turns the mouth in a pained expression, a wince. From the manner in which the student playfully stabs away at this brain, this is a normal day in the lab. We don't know how long the student and the face have been in this dynamic, but it is not the first time this student has engaged in this twisted game. 

You would be forgiven if you thought that this detached face were that of a main character, that of Bill Pullman, or Bill Paxton, or Bud Cort. It's not. In fact, we have no idea where this face came from or how this face ended up attached to a brain in a pan being painfully stimulated by electrodes. We get only a vague sense of why this is even being done. It's being done to prove that the human brain is capable of being stimulated after death. 

That's part of the crazed, doomed experiments being conducted by Bill Pullman's monstrous, genius brain scientist. Dr. Rex Martin believes he can cure all manner of neurological disorders by using the brains of the dead as guinea pigs. Dr. Martin's particular specialty is paranoia and he is convinced he can cure paranoia via brain surgery. This brings his research in line with the awful, amoral aims of Bill Paxton's corporate shark. Paxton wants Pullman to cure the paranoia of a genius mathematician, Bud Cort, so that said genius will reveal an equation that could be worth billions. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review What's Love Got to Do With It

What's Love Got to Do With It (2023) 

Directed by Shekhar Kapur 

Written by Jemima Khan 

Starring Lily James, Shazad Latif, Emma Thompson, Sajal Aly 

Release Date May 5th, 2023

Published May 4th, 2023 

What's Love Got to Do With It has some hard work to do to overcome a rote, predictable outcome. The film follows a documentary filmmaker, played by Lily Collins whose new documentary is about her Pakistani friend, played by Shazad Latif, going through the motions of an arranged marriage. She's supposed to document his marriage to a stranger arranged by a matchmaker but since this is a movie and both Collins and Latif are young and attractive, we know that the movie is arranging for them to be married. 

Knowing that, the movie needs to find a way to be charming while also being insanely predictable. The film has an uphill battle to try and build tension into a movie story that has no tension whatsoever. It can be done, most romantic comedies are built on a highly predictable conceit. The key to a modern rom-com is scribbling in the margins, creating laughs and charm amid the highly predictable machinations of a pre-destined ending. 

Zoe (Collins) doesn't believe in love. She's not a romantic, she's a pragmatist. When she tells fairy tales to her best friends daughters, her cracked fairy tales invariably find the female protagonist rejecting the Prince in favor of independence and adventure. Her retelling of The Princess and the Frog has the hero failing to kiss the frog, preferring to take her new talking frog on the road to show off for audiences. Hey, how cool would it be to have a talking frog, right? 

Zoe's conceptions of love and marriage are put to the test when her long time neighbor and friend, Kaz Khan tells her that he's agreed to see a matchmaker for an arranged marriage to a Pakistani woman, one approved of by his mother. His choice is fraught with backstory, Kaz's sister has been cast out of the family after she married a white man and had a child. Kaz's desire to be a good son to his traditional mother and grandmother drives his actions but it's clear his heart is not in this idea. 

Zoe is compelled to capture the wedding process on film after she finds out that her latest documentary idea, something dreary about war or famine or some such thing, has been rejected for being too bleak. Needing a pitch in a pinch, she pitches Kaz's arranged marriage process as a documentary and receives a greenlight from her producers. Getting Kaz's green light however, is a little harder, he's not exactly thrilled about this idea. He reluctantly agrees and the documentary becomes the bomb under the table, that McGuffin that threatens the status quo of Kaz's plans for his arranged marriage. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Horror in the 90s Tales from the Darkside

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) 

Directed by John Harrison

Written by Michael McDowell, George A. Romero 

Starring Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Christian Slater, James Remar, Rae Dawn Chong

Release Date May 4th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $16.3 million

Why don't more people talk about how great Tales from the Darkside The Movie is? I've seen Tales from the Darkside The Movie a few times but somehow, it wasn't until this viewing that it really clicked for me. This anthology of three horror movies, and one wraparound segment, combines the talents of Stephen King, George Romero and a powerhouse cast, across four stories, to deliver one of the most consistently entertaining horror movies of the 1990s. 

Let's begin with our wrap-around story. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie opens on a peaceful suburban milieu. A lovely looking woman has purchased groceries and is returning home to start dinner for a dinner party. This is classic horror movie stuff as perverting the pristine perfection of suburban life is a classic trope. The first signs of such perversions of norms only arrives once we are inside the home of that plain Jane woman and her groceries. 

We arrive in the home of Betty, played by rock icon Debbie Harry, before she does. While she's getting her groceries, the camera takes us into her home and a strange looking broom is propped against a wall. While we puzzle over the broom, which brings to mind a witches broom, we begin to hear a noise. The camera slowly reveals a door in the kitchen and someone struggling to open the door before fearfully retreating when Betty comes inside. The skillful visual filmmaking tells us everything we need to know, Betty is a witch and whoever is in that locked pantry, is her prisoner. 

Perverting things even further, Betty soon reveals her victim, tiny moppet with floppy hair and a crooked grin. This is Timmy (Matthew Lawrence) and we soon learn that Timmy is set to be that night's main course as Betty is bringing her witch friends over for a Timmy casserole. In a desperate attempt to keep himself alive, Timmy grabs a story book called Tales from the Darkside and offers to tell Betty a scary story as a reason to keep him alive. She agrees and we proceed with our first terrific story. 

The most star-studded of our three stories was not quite so star-studded at the time of release. Lot 249 stars a pair of stars before they became big stars. Steve Buscemi and Julianne Moore were at the beginning of what would be lengthy and critically acclaimed careers when they played academic rivals in Lot 249, the story of a man and his mummy. Christian Slater, already having become a leading man by 1990, is the best known of the cast which is rounded out by lesser known character actor Robert Sedgwick. 

Lot 249 is a tale of revenge as Edward Bellingham (Buscemi) is convinced that a rich idiot, Lee (Robert Sedgwick), has used his influence, and his equally rich and duplicitous girlfriend, Susan (Moore), to steal a lucrative scholarship from him. The loss may force Bellingham to have to leave school just as he is on the verge of an astonishing breakthrough in his research on ancient Egypt. Through nefarious circumstance, Bellingham has secured Lot 249, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus that could be worth millions, depending on what he finds inside. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Documentary Review It's Quieter in the Twilight

It's Quieter in the Twilight (2023) 

Directed by Billy Miossi 

Written by Documentary

Release Date May 19th, 2023 

Published May 18th, 2023 

I was vaguely aware of the Voyager Spacecrafts. The Voyager mission launched one year after I was born. It would then bubble back up into the culture every couple of years when the mission reached a new milestone, traveling and providing the first up close images and data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. What most people don't realize is that the Voyager mission never ended. Though Voyager surpassed Neptune in 1989, the mission continued and continues as we speak. 

The new documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight takes us through the history of Voyager via the people who have been with Voyager for the past 46 years. Many scientists and engineers have come and gone from the Voyager project over the years but a core of around 10 to 12 people have kept watch over this urgently important space mission for nearly 50 years. Director Billy Miossi brings those remarkable people into the spotlight in It's Quieter in the Twilight and they have a remarkable story to tell. 

The launch of Voyager was improbable. By 1977, going to space had already become something that Americans were used to. For years, each space launch and moon landing was broadcast live. The news led with stories of space travel and interviews with NASA scientists about how incredible space travel was. Voyager was one of the last times that many Americans gathered around their television to watch a launch and hear about what incredible discoveries we were going to make. 

Then, every few years, Voyager re-emerged and changed the way we saw the solar system. After launching in 1977, Voyager reached Jupiter in 1979. The following year, 1980, we saw the rings of Saturn for the very first time thanks to Voyager 2. Voyager 1 would bring us back to Saturn the following year. 1986, 9 years into its mission, Voyager captured the first up close images of Uranus and once again reshaped how we saw the universe. Three years, later, for many, Voyager's mission ended with Neptune and another historic moment in our unending attempts to understand our universe. 

But the mission did not end. Voyager continued on. Year after year a small but vital team kept collecting data from Voyager and, though most people were unaware, they kept making history. In 2012 Voyager became the first man-made object in interstellar space. It's hard for most, myself included, to fathom just how incredible that is. To its credit, It's Quieter in the Twilight captures the quiet awe of this achievement and the people whose life simply goes on revolving around Voyager and data points that Voyager is still capturing today. 

Find my full length review at Futurism.Media 

Movie Review The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid (2023) 

Directed by Rob Marshall 

Written by David Magee 

Starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer King, Javier Bardem, Melissa McCarthy, Daveed Diggs 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 26th, 2023 

I can't sit here and tell you I was a big of The Little Mermaid. I am not a fan of director Rob Marshall's bombastic, somewhat chaotic, and often wonky vision of this Disney classic. I was all set to write a mostly negative review of The Little Mermaid. Then, when the movie ended, I stood outside of the theater and watched the crowd making their way out of the theater and I was struck by the reaction of others. Specifically, I saw a uniformly joyous response from young girls leaving the theater. More than one said they wanted to be Ariel for Halloween. They were singing the songs, the choruses anyway. 

It was the best possible review anyone could give to The Little Mermaid. The young girls from 4 years old to 12 years were in universal praise of The Little Mermaid. And listening to that broke through my cynicism. Their joy reframed my context of The Little Mermaid. This movie is not to my taste at all, but it's not meant to be. If a movie can inspire this much joy in the audience intended to enjoy it, who am I as a middle aged dude to say that's bad. 

Halle Bailey stars in The Little Mermaid as Ariel, the youngest daughter of King Triton (Javier Bardem). Ariel is an endlessly curious young woman, her eyes filled with wonder, she explores the seas searching for human treasures that fall into the ocean. With her pal Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), she also finds trouble. While searching for treasure in one of the many sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, she and Flounder narrowly and daringly escape a very hungry and determined shark. For Ariel, this is just another day of adventure. 

However, this is not just another day in her kingdom. This is the day that her sisters from around the world are visiting to meet with the King and when Ariel fails to show up on time, the rift between Father and Daughter is further exposed. King Triton wants his youngest daughter to be more careful. He especially wants Ariel to shake off her fascination with humans. According to Triton, it was human who murdered his wife, Ariel's mother and his grief has curdled into anger and suspicion of all humans. 

This does not curb Ariel's curiosity however, and when she spots a ship caught in a storm and dashed on some rocks, she leaps in to help the ship's captain, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer King). Saving his life, Ariel doesn't fully reveal herself to him but her voice is burned into his memory. He vows to search for the mysterious young woman who saved his life. Meanwhile, the scheming Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), has witnessed all of this and sees Ariel's desire to be a human as her chance to upend her brother, King Triton, as the ruler of the seas. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review The Machine

The Machine (2023) 

Directed by Peter Atencio 

Written by Kevin Biegel, Scotty Landes 

Starring Bert Kreischer, Mark Hamill, Iva Babic 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 30th, 2023 

The Machine is a labored but amusing extrapolation of comedian Bert Kreischer's most beloved routine. According to Kreischer, as a college student, he traveled to Russia on a school trip. While there, he found himself partying with the Russian mob, first at his dorm and then on an ill-fated train ride. The winding and wild party story eventually finds Kreischer being called 'The Machine' for his prodigious ability to put away high proof alcohol without passing out, and finds 'The Machine' being enlisted by the gangsters to help rob everyone on the train. 

It's a classic piece of stand-up comedy but is it enough to stretch out to a feature length film? The answer is a bit of a mixed bag. The movie version of The Machine finds comedian Bert Kreischer, playing himself, struggling with his persona as a hard-partying, drug and alcohol imbibing comic and his real life as a husband and father of two young girls. Bert cannot seem to balance these two parts of his life and as we join the story, he's hit rock bottom. 

After a drunken episode of his podcast, Bert had his 15 year old daughter, Sasha (Jessica Gabor), drive him home. When she gets pulled over by Police and is subsequently arrested, the drunken Kreischer decides to livestream the debacle on social media, doing grave harm to his already strained relationship with his oldest daughter. This rock bottom moment causes Bert to go into therapy and quit drinking and partying entirely. Unfortunately, Bert's past is about to come back and haunt him as a Russian gangster has finally seen his stand-up routine and wants revenge for something Bert doesn't remember doing. 

Kidnapped during Sasha's 16th birthday party, Bert, along with his disapproving father, Albert (National Treasure Mark Hamill) are trundled off to Russia. Their kidnapper, Irina (Iva Babic), is the daughter of a Russian mobster and is at the heart of a struggle for control of crime in Russia. She needs The Machine to lead her to a watch that he stole while drunk on a train in college. Not the easiest thing to find, especially through the blurry haze of alcohol, drugs, and time. Nevertheless, if Bert and his dad cannot find the watch, a hitman is set to murder Bert's daughter. 

That's the premise for The Machine and it sounds a lot funnier than it really is. Sadly, stretched thinly over a feature film, Kreischer's funny, lively, and irreverent story takes on a highly conventional narrative that features many repeated jokes and more than a little dead time as exposition and needed stakes are set up. In fairness, the conventional plot and the stakes set, are relatively well executed. It's a standard bit of movie comedy. But that's also a bit of a problem as audiences might expect more from a performer with Kreischer's reputation for energetic and off-color humor. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media