Another Hitchcock classic down.

I had a great time this morning watching the creepy and frightening The Birds, Hitchcock’s follow-up to his all-time classic Psycho.

San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippy Hedren) met handsome lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a pet shop.  Knowing who she was, Mitch had played a bit of a joke on her to put her in her place.  Melanie wasn’t going to settle for that so she purchased two love birds and followed Mitch to his home town of Bodega Bay to deliver the birds.  Melanie met Mitch’s overprotective mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy), his little sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) and an old flame Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette).

As the human drama continued to play out, the local birds started to act in peculiar ways: a seagull struck Melanie on the head.  A group of birds attacked a fishing vessel in pursuit of fish.  Crows began to group up.

Soon, these packs of birds were attacking school children, breaking into houses and pecking the eyes out of local residents.  Mitch and Melanie desperately tried to keep his family safe from the deadly assault of these birds.

The Birds is a fascinating film.  First of all, it is extremely suspenseful.  Hitchcock masterfully builds tension and suspense with each shot of the birds and the use of silence in the background.  The first half of the film is spent on developing characters and their motivations and the horror elements of the film are placed on a slow burn.  This worked brilliantly by building the anxiousness of the audience.  Then, when the birds would attack, it provided even more of a shock to the viewers.  I know that I shouted out loud several times (when the birds came flying out of the fireplace into the Brenner home, I blurted out).

Making things even more tense for the audience is the fact that Hitchcock has taken a species that has never been aggressive,  that have been docile, and turned them into monstrous killers.  Birds are just a normal part of the world.  In fact, you probably do not even notice that they are there.  That only adds to the overall effectiveness of the sudden turn into creature features.

Finally, the fact that Hitchcock does not take the time to give any reasons behind the attacks or any motive whatsoever makes the violence even more disturbing.  There are several potential hints dropped throughout that could lead to answers.  These include things like: “it’s the end of the word”, the constant shots of the two caged love birds, Melanie is evil and has brought this curse with her, poisoned bird feed, the birds are getting sick etc.  Honestly, I prefer the open ended aspect of the film’s feathered felon’s motivation because it allows you to decide for yourself which of the obviously dropped hints are important and which ones were Hitchcock just playing with the audience.  I suppose there is a strong chance that Hitchcock had no idea the real motivation and he just provided a series of possibilities to keep people talking.

There are some tremendously iconic horror scenes in The Birds, including the children running in fear from their school and Melanie trapped inside a phone booth.  There are some amazing shots that director Hitchcock placed in this film that creates such a wonderful tension in his viewers’ mind.

Even the ending left the results in question, and I thought it was quite the ballsy choice.  Hitchcock did not feel the need to wrap things up in a neat bow and the unpredictability of the whole film shows what a master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was.

Weird.

I was watching a Movie Trivia Schmoedown episode and there was a question about a movie called Drop Dead Gorgeous.  The question asked about plot details and sounded interesting to me so I went looking for it.  I found it on Amazon and so I was excited.

As I’m watching the mockumentary at the heart of the movie, I was thinking to myself that this did not remind me much of the question in the Schmoedown.  Pushing that aside, I kept watching until the end.  Then I went to Rotten Tomatoes and this film had no rating on the site.  I was confused even more.

Then, I saw it.

I saw another movie named Drop Dead Gorgeous, but it had been released in 1999.  That was the film the Schmoedown question had been written about. This one was an entirely different movie.

Hm.

This film was a mockumentary about a filming of a model for the new campaign of fashion star Claudio (Steven Berkoff).  Claudio had chosen young and unknown model Cynthia (Ivy Levan) as his new “girl” and she dove into the life of a model, including drugs.  Unfortunately, Cynthia overdosed in the middle of a photo shoot.  The problem was that her untimely death did not stop the shoot from continuing.  In fact, her death actually made her even more in demand.

There was some real dark comedy here and I did not mind much of it, but the characters were so out of their minds that it made much of the satire involved to be too crazy.  I started wondering why the dead body of Cynthia didn’t start going through the stages a dead body would go through, but perhaps the film was not interested in any sort of truth.

There were many moments of dark humor here.  Some worked but a lot of it was kind of over the top.  At first I thought there was going to be a mystery involved int he death, but that was not a focus.

The film was scathing towards the modeling world, no doubt.  The way they treated Cynthia’s dead body as a lump to be bent and taken advantage of was shocking.  It was certainly saying that this is how real living models are treated.

The problem was there was just too cartoony characters involved here that overtook the message.  The film was watchable, but it could have been extremely more biting than it turned out to be.

Maybe I have to keep looking for the other Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Based on a short lived ABC television program, Police Squad!, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad started a successful spoof franchise starring the always wonderfully deadpan Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling yet somehow super effective police officer Frank Drebin.

The Naked Gun is unapologetic for its comedy and it is not afraid if a joke does not hit because if you, as an audience member do not like one joke, wait ten seconds and there will be five more.  The rapid fire humor covers all realms of type during the 90+ minutes and Leslie Nielsen is the perfect foil for it.

Frank catches wind of a potential plot to assassinate the visiting Queen of England by local businessman Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban).  Why did Ludwig want to assassinate the Queen?  Well, it is never quite revealed, but those pesky plot details are just in the way.

Ludwig’s assistant Jane (Priscilla Presley) is sent to get close to Frank, but she falls in love with the cop, causing even more trouble for him.  Frank’s quest to stop Ludwig seems to border on obsessive so he is removed from Police Squad, but that does not stop him from heading to an Angels baseball game where the assassination is scheduled to take place by one of the players.

The baseball scenes in The Naked Gun are some of the best comedy of the entire movie.  Frank finds himself as the singer of the national anthem before he works himself into the role of the home plate umpire.  These baseball scenes are a total hoot.

The film features great cameos from Reggie Jackson and EYG Hall of Famer “Weird Al” Yankovic.  There is as well a long list of baseball announcers appearing including but not limited to Jim Palmer, Dick Vitale and Dr. Joyce Brothers.

There is also a strange cathartic release seeing all of the harm done to OJ Simpson’s character, Norberg, as Frank’s partner and best friend is constantly placed in situations that cause him harm or pain.  Just something right about that.

The Naked Gun is certainly a ridiculous film, but as a spoof movie, it is one of the true classics.  You cannot go to a Naked Gun movie for the intricate plot.  It is meant to make you laugh, and Naked Gun does that throughout the movie.

Continuing to work on the gaps in my Alfred Hitchcock film series, I pulled up Rebecca, the Academy Award winner in 1941.  I heard the movie’s name mentioned during the Movie Trivia Schmoedown as the only film Hitchcock directed that would win Best Picture so I put it on the list.

This was a well-deserving Oscar winner.  The film was tremendous.  I loved just about everything about it.  The story was mysterious and engaging.  The acting was wonderfully strong.  The tone of the film had that suspenseful feel that was so obviously Hitchcock.  The twists of the plot were well done and came from the story.  It made sense even though you did not expect it.  I really enjoyed this movie.

Wealthy Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) meets up with a shy and self-doubting woman and they get married.  However, it appeared that de Winter has been carrying a flame for his dead wife, Rebecca, who died in a boating accident the year before.  After they get married, the couple returned to his home, Manderley, where he had lived with Rebecca and where several servants still held loyalty to their former mistress.

Joan Fontaine played the new wide, Mrs. de Winter, whose first name is never revealed.  She does a great job playing that self-doubt that is really attacked by the staff, in particular, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson).  Mrs. Danvers, who was Rebecca’s personal housekeeper, was quite a creepy character who played on the young lady’s insecurities in her anger and jealousy.

Then the story takes a twist that caught me off guard.  I really enjoyed the twist and it turned the whole film’s narrative on its ear.

The black and white film brought such a series of wonderful imagery that it helped play into the tone of the film.

This is right up there with my favorite Hitchcock films.

I got a chance to see 2001: A Space Odyssey today for the first time ever and, man, what a trippy film to watch.  I am really not sure exactly what I saw.

2001 was being re-released in IMAX theaters for a week and I was anxious to see it.  I mean, I knew of the film, the way the AI Hal 9000 took control of the space station and would not follow instructions of the humans any longer, leading to some dramatic events, but that was just a part of the film.

Based on Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Sentinel, 2001: A Space Odyssey stretched what a film’s narrative structure was and how a film was presented.  This was a bold chance taken by Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director, but it reached a new level of filmmaking.  Not every scene worked, and honestly, there were some sections that were somewhat dull, but the originality at the time cannot be ignored.

It starts at the dawn of man and ends up going through the weirdest light show you can imagine.  It is all really about (I believe) the evolution of the human species, as only Stanley Kubrick can see it.  All this plus large black monoliths floating in space and buried in the earth.

There is no doubt that the special effects were amazing and WAY beyond its time.  The film is literally a visual odyssey through every imagined acid trip possible.  The music was awe-inspiring as well.  Even more than just the music, the use (or non-use as the case may be) of sound was as brilliant as any movie has ever done.  The sound kept the audience off guard and downright anxious.  This film is a technical masterpiece.  Art at its highest level.

Hal 9000 is a great villain as well, but it still was a difficult thing when he was basically begging Dave for his life near the end of the film.  That made Hal very human and allowed us to understand his motives for his evil actions.

2001: A Space Odyssey felt too long, but the beauty of what was seen and heard out weighed any nagging issues over the narrative structure.  There is a reason why this is seen as one of the all time classic films ever made.  If you get a chance to see the film on an IMAX screen, take advantage of it.  It is a beautiful event, even if parts of the film are a tad boring.

Holy S%$^

Ripley, you are one badass mamma!

It had been too long since I saw the Ripley Scott film Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens so I watched Alien yesterday and it was great.  Then, since Aliens was 155 minutes long, I waited until today to watch it.

Holy S%$#

This thing was just completely insane.  I do not remember being this tense or ridden with anxiety the last time I watched this film.

Aliens was just tremendous.  I liked it even more than the first one.

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was found 57 years later, still floating in her cryo-sleep on her escape vehicle after the first film.  Returned to civilization, the Company did not believe the story that she told about surviving the alien and having to blow the compound up.  However, when the moon LV-426 where Ripley’s team originally landed, picking up the alien had been colonized and contact lost, a team was sent to scout and rescue whom they could.  Ripley was asked to go along, but she did not want to go.  Unable to escape the nightmares, she finally decided to join the search as long as they were there to wipe the creatures out of existence.

This film is more of an action/adventure film than a science fiction film, though it still can be categorized as such.  I liked the crew that accompanied Ripley this time, including the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen) who Ripley did not trust, weaselly Company man Burke (Paul Reiser), Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), Hudson (the late, great Bill Paxton), and Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein).  The cat is replaced in this film by Newt (Carrie Henn) the sole survivor of the outpost- a little girl who has survived in the vents.  These characters meant more to me than the ones in the first film so, for those that would not make it, I felt more of a loss.

I found myself yelling at the screen, supporting Ripley as she ripped through the situations she gets dropped into.  Showing just how capable and kick ass she truly was.  I threw my fist into the air as Ripley yelled at the Alien Queen, who was trying to kill Newt,  “Get away from her, you bitch!”  What a perfect moment.  And while that line of dialogue could be seen as corny or over-the-top, it is delivered so perfectly by Weaver and is such a release of pent up frustration and anger for both Ripley and the audience, it is a perfect moment.

Again, I knew the end result of the film, but it had been long enough that much of the film was a refresher.  I remembered more about this film though than I did the first one prior to the re-watch.

The core of this movie is Ripley.  She is, not only, bad ass, she is extremely smart.  Remember how she was right in the first film and none of this would be happening had they listened to her?  She puts that quick brain on display here as much as she puts her bad ass self.  She is commanding, dominant and powerful in her opinions and damn those who may be in her way.  I loved how she stood up to the brazen Marines at the start and how she was able to overcome her own desperate fears to become an icon of female power.  She is the ultimate female action hero in movies and she is truly the total package.  Plus, she can run the exo-suit cargo loader like a boss!

The film is a great looking film, even though there are a few moments where the green screen was apparent.  Still, for 1986, this is an impressive feat.

It is a remarkable film.  It sits at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes out of 66 reviews there was only one dissenter.  I wondered who that was, because I couldn’t believe that someone went against this.  It was Gene Siskel of all people.  Wild.

This was an amazing film.  I do not remember being this amazed by it when I first watched it so I am truly glad I got to see it again on HBO.  I think this one has found its way into my favorite films of all time.

“Game over, man.  Game over.”

Ridley Scott’s classic horror movie set in space, Alien was on the agenda today and I enjoyed it a great deal.  I had not seen the whole film in along time so it was very much fresh viewing.

Of course, Ripley was right.  Every time she said something in the movie, she was spot on.  If what she said was followed, they all would have survived.

Unless, of course, that pesky robot wrecked it for them.

Sigourney Weaver created one of the first really kick ass females on the big screen with her role as Ripley.  Ripley took care of business and set a standard of female heroes for the next several decades.  I did not remember Tom Skerritt ( who I knew as Jimmy Brock from Picket Fences) was in this movie.  He was positioned for you to assume that he was the star of the movie, but it was clearly turned out to be Ripley.

The effects are still reasonable and actually increase the terror of the situation.  I’m not sure the Xenomorphs would be nearly as frightening had CGI been a thing in 1979.  The practical effects here were really exceptional and chilling.

The argument I have heard about Ripley going back for the cat is a silly one.  Of course she should have gone back for the cat.  She was right about everything so I am with her!  Team Ripley!

The movie went at a solid pace, building tension and anxiety the whole time.  You are never quite sure what is going to happen next and that feeling of claustrophobia is a real sense.  You are filled with it the whole time and when the alien arrived on the shuttle with Ripley the final survivor, you cannot believe what is happening.  I knew Ripley survived and I was still nervous and tense the whole time.

And of course, Alien played a huge part in Avengers: Infinity War (thanks Spidey!).

It is a shame that the new Alien movies are no where near as strong as this one is.  I will be rewatching Alien 2 either later tonight or tomorrow.

My memory of Disney’s The Rocketeer was that I did not like it much.  I remember renting the VHS of the film when I was younger and not being a huge fan.  After revisiting it today, I found myself in a different mindset.

The Rocketeer was quite a fun ride and my opinion soared to new heights.

Bad puns aside, I found much more enjoyment today than I did when it first came out.  While not perfect, The Rocketeer brought that feeling of the old pulpy serials of the 1930s combined with the adventuresome qualities of an Indiana Jones.

Billy Campbell was solid as Cliff Secord, the down-on-his-luck pilot who finds the top secret rocket pack after an accident on his airstrip involving the mob and the FBI.  Hoping to use the rocket pack to make some money and get back on his feet, Cliff winds up in the middle of a Nazi plot to use the technology to take over the world.  Campbell felt authentic in the role, bringing a quality of heroism and bravery to Cliff.  He did that without sacrificing the ability to show that he was still in over his head.

Timothy Dalton was great as Neville Sinclair, the Hollywood movie icon who had a dark secret he was keeping.  Alan Arkin played Peevy, Cliff’s close friend and genius mechanic.  LOST’s own John Locke himself, Terry O’Quinn played Howard Hughes, the famous philanthropist who designed the rocket pack.  Paul Sorvino played Eddie Valentine, local mob boss who is working with Sinclair to find the rocket.

Much of the special effects do not hold up to today’s standards, but I am sure they looked fine for the time.  I loved the ending of the film how everything came back around from earlier in the movie and paid off (especially the chewing gum).  My favorite moment was when the FBI and the mob teamed up and were shooting at the Nazis.  It was an ironic moment and a ton of fun.

Tiny Ron played a fascinating character named Lother, the giant henchman with the rubbery face.  I found him intriguing to watch and somewhat frightening as well, but when he was running, there was a comedic aspect to it.  He made me think of Frankenstein’s Monster and I did not want him to be shown quite so awkwardly as he was.  It is believed that this character was based after a man named Rondo Hatton, the “ugliest man in Hollywood” who appeared in several films in the 40s as henchmen roles and some horror movies.

The movie was based on a comic book by Dan Stevens from the early 1980s.

The Rocketeer was more fun than I remembered and I am glad I watched this one again.  There are flaws here and there, but it was a worthwhile watch.