Guilty pleasure time.

The next film in the snowy Saturday binge watch is a silly, downright dumb, film from 1987 that, for whatever reason, I enjoy.  The Monster Squad is a group of children facing off against the iconic monsters of all-time in Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolfman, the Creature and the Mummy.

The Monster Squad is pure 1980s goodness.  It is like the Goonies blended with Ghostbusters in a B-movie extravaganza.  Is is stupid?  Sure.  Does it have major holes? Yep.  Does it work in today’s world?  Not so much.  Still, I cannot say that I don’t enjoy watching it every time it is on.

As I am watching the film, I am amazed at the small moments of depth that the film tries to sneak into the film.  Scary German Guy has a tattoo from a concentration camp on his forearm that we see after one of the kids say that he really knows about monsters.  When Rudy shoots the Wolfman, you can see the conflict within the boy’s face.  Whether intended or not, you can see he was shaken by his killing of the Wolfman.  The realization by Frankenstein’s Monster that he was an ugly creature and how that bothered him was surprisingly effective.  Sean later insists that they do not call Frankenstein’s Monster a monster, referring to him as Frank instead.

All of these moments were enjoyable and brought more to the story than just the silliness of the plot.

Now, there were a lot of things that would be frowned upon today.  Like, for example, how Rudy blackmails Patrick’s sister into helping them by taking pictures of her partially naked and threatening to post them at school.  Not cool, Rudy.  And… why did this group of boys desperately need to find a virgin to perform the ritual so badly?  I mean, they are in a monster club.  All of these boys were all certainly virgins.  Pretty sexist when you indicate that your virgin has to be the girl.

Shane Black, yes that one, wrote the script for The Monster Squad along with director Fred Dekker.  They weaved several hints and homages to the original Universal monsters of the old days of film in their script.  There is little wasted time here as the film moves quickly from intro of the monsters to the final struggle with the kids.  The kids do a good job of getting you invested in them and being cute.

And of course, it has one of the classic lines of all time with “Wolfman’s got nards.”

This film is absolutely not very good, but it certainly could be a nice introduction for families looking for monster/horror movies to watch with their kids.  The rating should not be a surprise since I use a picture of the Monster Squad on the graphic.  The Monster Squad is…

The snow movie binge continues with a 2005 reboot film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp in the iconic role of the eccentric chocolate factory owner.

This 2005 version was a reboot of the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that starred Gene Wilder.

Someone thought that this reboot was a good idea.  Spoiler alert…it wasn’t.

Among many things that this new version was lacking was one important detail.

Magic.

Watching these scenes of this reboot, it was clear that the magical moments that were throughout the original version felt dark and pedestrian here.  The color was muted.  The music was completely different.  The ambiance was just wrong.  The “Pure Imagination” scene in the original is beautiful, dream-like, stunning.  The same scene, sans the iconic song, was nothing more than one more poorly lit, nasty, unlikable moment.

Gene Wilder played Willy Wonka with a sense of sarcastic wonder, a hidden dark side breaking through.  Johnny Depp replaced that sense of wonder with a feeling of being broken.  We see completely unnecessary flashbacks to the character’s childhood, including his dentist father (Christopher Lee).  Willy Wonka does not need an origin story.  The mystery of why he does what he does should suffice.  This is a major flaw of this film.  And with all due respect to Johnny Depp, there are so many choices in his portrayal that simply do not help this character.

I did enjoy the performance of young Freddie Highmore as Charlie.  Highmore would go on to star in Bates Motel as the iconic Norman Bates and then on to The Good Doctor.  Highmore has shown his acting chops in these versions and he has a charming visage throughout the film.  You could see that the young man had a bright future here.

I also must say that I enjoyed some of the quips between Willy Wonka and Mike Teevee (Jordan Fry).  Seemed as if Mike kept noticing when Wonka was spinning his lies and then called him on it.  Of course, we also were meant not to like this kid either.

Perhaps this film would not be as bad as I think had it been an original film instead of remaking an indelible classic of all time (a member of the EYG Hall of Fame), but it did so every scene from the new film is being peppered by the memory of a completely better version.  If there was nothing to compare this too, maybe we would not realize how much it was missing.

How much magic.

Here on a snowy Saturday, I am going to get some of these movies watched and reviewed.  I will start off with A League of Their Own, a classic film about the All-American Girls Baseball League.

During World War II, people were concerned that baseball might be shutdown because the male players were needed in the war effort.  In response, they began a female baseball league to fill the gap. That is a true story.  A League of Their Own is a fictionalized version of this historical truth.

A League of Their Own is the story of two sisters, Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) from a dairy farm in Oregon, who were recruited to join the fledgling baseball league.  Dottie was the best player in the league and Kit always felt in her shadow.

However, the film was not just about the sibling rivalry.  There were many great scenes with the other members of the team played by a fantastic cast.  Madonna played “All-the-Way” Mae, a promiscuous sparkplug.  Rosie O’Donnell played Doris, a loud, obnoxious but big time hitter.  Tom Hanks was Jimmy Dugan, a former baseball star who lost years at the end of his career to alcohol and became the team’s reluctant manager.  Other great cast members included Garry Marshall, Bitty Schram, Anne Ramsey, Bill Pullman, Jon Lovitz, Tea Leoni, David Strathairn and Ann Cusack.

I love this movie.  It has so many absolutely classic moments that I love.  It also has my all-time favorite quote in any situation.  I am sure everyone would say that it would be “There’s no crying in baseball” because that is the most famous of the quotes.  However, that is not it.  My favorite quote comes near the end of the film when Dottie’s husband returned from WWII and she decides to go back to Oregon with him instead of to the World Series.  Jimmy hears this and he confronts her.  Dottie said that it “Just got too hard” and Jimmy responds “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great.”  I love that quote because it sums up my exact feelings of baseball and why it is such a emotional and compelling sport to me.

But there are other scenes as well.  The “no crying” scene includes a confrontation between Jimmy and the umpire where Jimmy asks him if “anyone ever say you look like a penis with a little hat on?”  Then, after being tossed from the game, Jimmy says, “You misunderstood me!”  LOL!  That is funny. But there were poignant scenes as well. The scene where Betty “Spaghetti” (Tracy Reiner) receives a telegram from the War Department telling her that her husband had been killed in battle was heartbreaking and painful.  This excellent cast was up to every challenge it was presented with.

I do have one major problem with the movie and it deals with a spoiler.  The character of Kit is so unlikable, whiny and bratty, but yet the movie gives her the big moment in the end.  Everything dealing with Kit makes me want to see her lose, not get the big hit in the end.  Heck, even in the final scene, she selfishly runs through a stop sign at third base to barrel over her sister at home plate, knocking the ball free to win the game.  To me, the character does not earn that scene because there is absolutely no growth from her through the entirety of the film.  I loved it when Dottie finally stood up and called out her babyish behavior.  I hated watching her new team carry her around on their shoulders like she was a hero of the game.

Other than that, I love A League of Their Own.  It has wonderful scenes and it truly promotes the love of baseball that I have had for my entire life.  The sentimental scenes at the film’s end at the Hall of Fame were extremely well done as well, creating a sense of nostalgia despite the film not even being over yet.

If not for Kit, this would be rated higher.  I do love the movie and I consider it one of my favorites of all time.  As a movie, I give it…

As a child, I always enjoyed the series of films in the Planet of the Apes franchise.  I remember having Megos of some of the apes and they had a Saturday morning cartoon show.

So I was excited as an adult when there was going to be a new Planet of the Apes film coming out.  I went to the theater and I remember as clear as day.  It was terrible.

Now, since then, the Planet of the Apes franchise was rebooted again with a prequel and the focus fell upon the apes themselves, especially with leader Caesar played by Andy Serkis.  This trilogy of movies were wonderful (although I did not love the third one as much as the previous two).

These films needed to be great to wash the stench of horrid that was left in the mouth after the release of the 2001 Planet of the Apes, starring Mark Wahlberg.

Recently during these rewatches, I have seen a couple of movies that, when viewed again in a critical eye, I enjoyed more.  Se7en was one of them.  Sicario was another.  A good rewatch can some times improve the viewing of a movie.  So I wondered if a second viewing of The Planet of the Apes, which I had not seen since 2001, would make a difference.

It did not.

This was still a terrible movie.

Tim Burton directed this and he seemed to be throwing in tones that just did not work together.  Was this supposed to be some sort of satire?  Some sort of comedic commentary?  An action movie?  Science fiction?  I think an argument could be made for all of these, but in a way that they simply never meshed together.

Mark Wahlberg has become a considerably better actor in the years since this one.  He was not good here.  You buried the best actors on the cast (Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giametti) under make up as apes, really hamstringing what they were able to do.  This was not like the motion capture of today where there is more emotion on the face of Caesar than on some of the human characters.  These prosthetics may have been great in 2001, but they still were basically masks.

The story was all over the place and the final battle made no sense and was hurt by the arrival of a deus ex machina to save the day at the perfect moment.  But even worse was the very end that made absolutely no sense and really tried its best to match the iconic ending of the original Planet of the Apes from 1968.  It failed.

On this watch, I though the middle of the film was better than I remembered, but by this point, I was already tired of the silliness and the stupidity of the story.  The writers tried desperately to shoehorn Easter eggs in from the previous movies, but they felt so forced that it ended up as eye-rolling moments instead.

I am so glad that they were able to get this story right with the Rise of the Planet of the Apes because this one was a total flop.

John Carpenter created one of the most iconic horror movies of the 1980s when he directed The Thing, starring Kurt Russell.  My friend Chris had recommended I watch this as part of my rewatch binge weekend, and I told him that I had never seen the original.  He responded with shock.

So, seeing that it was available on Amazon, I decided that I would go ahead and watch it.  I had seen the prequel that was made in 2011, but I was not a fan.  It ended with a scene of a dog running through the snow in Antarctica and I did not understand.  However, I do now after seeing how Carpenter’s film starts that way.

The Thing creates a remarkable tension and fear by first, isolating the group and amping up the claustrophobic feel, and then placing them in a situation where paranoia took over.  You did not know who you could trust.  You did not know which one or ones of the group were already a part of this monster.  Trapped in this blizzard without any access to the outside world, the group had little choice but to turn on each other.

There is another aspect being examined here besides the result of isolation and paranoia.  The fact that this is an all-male outpost allows the film to examine the effect of male masculinity on the situation.  Sticking out heir chests and gritting their teeth, these men did not want to show any signs of lacking their manhood and the situation placed that manhood in jeopardy.

Kurt Russell is fantastic in the film.  Russell has appeared in several of Carpenter’s movies, but few with as solid of work as The Thing.  Keith David, who I just watched last night in They Live with Roddy Piper, was here also, bringing a load of attitude and questionable behavior.  Wilford Brimley also had a memorable role here, looking much different than the mustached older gentleman that I remember.

Yes, many of the shots of the creature looked kind of silly and may not have aged well but the practical effects actually did make me jump a couple of different times.  There is something about the all-practical effects and no CGI that make The Thing even more effective.

A remake of a 1951 film, The Thing is considered one of the genre’s best examples in the 1980s.  The film is a great example of the use of claustrophobia to make the audience feel enveloped and helpless and, when you throw in the paranoia, you have a fantastic horror film.   Thanks Chris.

“I’ve come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum.”

“Rowdy” Roddy Piper, WWE Superstar, was not the pro wrestler you might expect to star in a science fiction B-list film by John Carpenter.  And yet, Roddy Piper was absolutely perfect as Nada, a bad ass drifter who stumbles across a secret few people knew.  Piper was able to take the cheesy aspects of the script and dialogue of They Live, and make an indelible mark in this role.  How many people could deliver that line about bubble gum seriously?  Roddy could and he did.

They Live is a tremendous movie.  It has quite a list of hidden messages that are anything but subtle.  But that is not what makes this film stand the test of time.  That is the performance of “Hot Rod.”

Carpenter wisely kept Roddy’s dialogue down.  Nada was a man of few words and that certainly helped with Roddy’s acting skills.  But even so, Roddy knew how to connect to the audience, something he did for years in the ring.

And the biggest benefit of someone like Roddy Piper is you have someone who spent a lifetime making fake fighting look real.  The iconic fight scene in They Live between Roddy Piper and co-star Keith David is one of the greatest, most realistic fight scenes ever placed on film.  Piper and David’s characters beat the living crap out of each other and there were signs of it.  The blood, bruises and swelling highlighted how brutal the fist fight was.  This six minute fight scene comes well into the run time of the film and never seemed to end.

Nada gets chucked out a window in this film as well in a shocking moment that I remember not believing when I fist saw it.  It was a great scene and Piper played it beautifully.  He was tossed from the window by Meg Foster’s character Holly, who plays a huge part in the end of the film.

Speaking of the end, this film did not have a happy ending, in particular for our heroes and that made it hard for the young me to watch considering I was a lifelong wrestling fan and I loved Roddy Piper.  Still, the ending fit the story and opened the world of the film to uncertainty and potential chaos and those are things that John Carpenter movies love.

They Live is certainly not a brilliant, high-budget film.  It is a B-movie that has a fun science fiction script packed full of social messages and an unexpectedly fantastic performance from Roddy Piper.  It is a film that can be watched at any time and enjoyed for what it is.

Even if you are all out of bubble gum.