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.

Dr. Strangelove is one of my favorite movies of all time.  It is dripping with satire and plastered with laugh out loud lines chronicling one of the biggest fears that consumed the people of the country in the 1960s.

The fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

It seemed like it was going to happen in the 60s.  But could something happen by accident? Those concerns were alive when Stanley Kubrick provided the answer with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Renegade General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) sent out a command from Burpelson Air Force Base that the planes circling the Soviet air space should continue on and drop their bombs on their targets, effectively starting a nuclear war.  He did this because he believed that fluoridation of the American water supply was a Soviet plot to poison the American people.

Clearly, General Ripper had lost his grip on his sanity.

But with the recall code in hi head alone, there appeared to be no way to sto the planes from starting WWIII.

United States President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) received the news from General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and the President started desperate measures to try and stop the bombs from being deployed.

Dr. Strangelove is an amazing film that shows the absolute best of EYG Hall of Famer Peter Sellers.  Sellers not only plays the President of the US, but he also plays Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair bound scientist from Germany who may have served Hitler, and British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who is trying his best to convince General Ripper to give up the recall code.  Sellers creates three distinct characters with three distinct personalities.  If you did not know already, you could be fooled into thinking that these were three different actors.  It was a tremendously epic performance from Peter Sellers.

Reports indicated that Sellers was also supposed to play the Major “King” Kong, the leader of the plane that we see, but he did not think he could do the proper accent. Slim Pickens took the role which became one of the greatest of his career, which included the iconic ride on the bomb down to the ground.

There is nothing off the table for Kubrick’s satire.  The idea of the arms race, the conflict between the USA and the USSR, the generals living the high life, the proposition of a President not having any real power at all.  These are all topics satirized by Kubrick and brought home by this talented cast.  And, SPOILERS since the film ends with the bomb being dropped, you would think that the American public, which was already scared and paranoid at the time, would be even worse after this film’s release.  However, that was not the case and an argument could be made that it helped take the sting out of the fear by making fun of it.

Either way, Dr. Strangelove is undeniably funny and brilliantly written, acted and is as enjoyable as it was the first time I saw it.  It is definitely…

After seeing the new reboot of Death Wish this afternoon, I decided it was time to check out the original.  I have never been a huge fan of revenge-killer flicks, but this is the one where most of the rest came from, starring Charles Bronson in what was most likely his most well-known role.

Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) was an architect whose wife and daughter were attacked in their home by three muggers who spotted the women at the supermarket.  After a violent encounter, the wife wound up dead and the daughter was traumatized.

Paul is downtrodden, but returns to work in an attempt to fall into work.  His boss, seeing how Paul is reacting, sends him on a work assignment out of New York, to Arizona.  In Arizona, Paul gets a taste of Old West justice and retaliation by one’s own hand.  Returning to New York with a special gift from a friend, a .32 handgun, Paul heads out on the streets in an attempt to draw muggers out of the woodwork to execute them.

Unlike the 2018 reboot, we see the change in the character of Paul Kersey as he becomes more brazen and confident.  Starting as a Pacifist- a conscientious objector during the Korean War, Paul at first was lost.  After his first kill, he became upset over the killing of a mugger, but as time moved on, he started stalking prey.  He became less concerned over his daughter, going as far as telling his son-in-law that he could not continue to whine and cry all the time.  Even after the police warned Paul that they were watching him, he continued to head out to hunt.

Of course, watching this film with a 2018 eye makes me wonder about the message of the film, but if I avoid that, this one is at least a much more interesting character study of a man who has lost everything and whose perception of the world changed because of it.

Charles Bronson does a wonderful job here, much stronger of a performance than that of Bruce Willis.  Vincent Gardenia played Detective Frank Ochoa, the man with the assignment to get the Vigilante to stop without arresting him or killing him.

Self-defense or brutal killer?  It is a question covered here much better than in the revenge porn of 2018.

When I first saw Seven, I saw it in the local theater and I remember not liking it much.  Everybody else seemed to have a differing opinion on it, going as far as to call it one of David Fincher’s greatest films.  So I decided to re-watch it.

It is better than I thought the first time back in 1995,

I would not put it as Fincher’s greatest film.  For me, that is probably Zodiac.  I enjoyed Gone Girl quite a bit too.  But Se7en would ow make the list where as before I would have omitted it.

Morgan Freeman is great as soon to be retiring Detective William Somerset.  Somerset was a man who had seen more than what he could handle over his years on the force and it had transformed him into a cynical, hopeless man.  Meanwhile, Detective David Mills still has the pretense that they can do something to help. So when they wind up investigating a series of brutal torture/murders based around the seven deadly sins, Mills and Somerset seemed to be opposites of the same coin.

They were in search of the mysterious killer who seemed to be one step ahead of them the entire time.  Kevin Spacey, currently a pariah in Hollywood, played this murderer with a creepiness and quiet evil that really makes him stand out despite only being on screen a short time.

Of course, the moment that stands out the most for this movie is the ending sequence.  While it creates a serious tension filled tone and an uncertainty of what was going to happen, if you think about it, it really does not make much sense in the story or to the character of John Doe.  It absolutely places an almost inhuman ability to plan out a murder.  The other murders were long term plans, even taking up to a year to do.  Suddenly, though, final two murders are last minute, spur of the moment murders that he could not have known about ahead of time. For someone as methodical as John Doe was in planning, switching to something so last minute is not going to happen.

So yes the moment was dramatic, but it actually does more disservice to the story for me than it does anything else.

I did like this considerably more the second time, but I still don’t see it as a masterpiece.

This is one of those all time classic films that I had never seen before.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was widely considered one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest performances, directed by Milos Forman.  The film won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress (Louise Fletcher).

There were a few things that surprised me about Cuckoo’s Nest.  One was how many familiar faces there was in this film.  I saw Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Scatman Cruthers, Sydney Lassick, Vincent Schiavelli and Brad Dourif.  According to IMDB, Anjelica Huston was also in the film, although the role was uncredited.  I had no idea the level of interesting actors that appeared here.

That list of actors does not even include Will Sampson as The Chief, who was probably the most compelling character to me. I loved the not-so-mute Indian and the relationship between him and R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) was one of respect and friendship.  I really liked how McMurphy tried to help the Chief out even before he knew the large man’s secret.

The other surprising thing about Cuckoo’s Nest to me was how funny the film was.  Sure it was dark as could be, but there is no denying that the tone of the film had its share of humor to it.  The setting did not seem to be conducive for humor, but this talent cast took the dark comedic material and made it work well.

Of course, the ending took an even darker turn, and yet I found myself strangely inspired by the actions of the Chief.

The performance of one of the iconic antagonists of all time, Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, was wonderful.  The cruelty of the woman was truly sad as she treated these poor men in such a rotten manner.  She was the perfect foil for McMurphy as they were opposites to each other.

Watching the movie today, much of what they show taking place in the asylum is outdated.  The shock therapy and the lobotomy are not used any more (I think…at least I hope), but the character and their motivations are still right on track.

I am certainly glad I took the time to see this great film.

Saturday night, I was feeling the desire to watch the Disney classic Aladdin, but I did not have the DVD in my collection.  I have a lot of DVDs so I was surprised it was not there, since Aladdin has been one of my favorite Disney movies of all time.  I know I had it once on video tape, but apparently I never purchased it on DVD.

That sent me on a search of streaming services, but they also turned out to be a dead end.  So I gave up on my wish.

Today I watched the animated Early Man and I hated it.  Because of that, I went on a search again to try and find a great animated film.  Heading to YouTube, I found success.  There was a version of the feature length film that was sped up just a little bit.  The songs went faster than normal, but I was willing to put up with that to get a dose of Aladdin.

I love this movie.  It might be my favorite of the Disney movies.  The number one reason is, of course, Robin Williams as the Genie.  The frantic, energetic performance may be the greatest voice over performance in the history of film.  If not number one, it is certainly in the argument.  Williams took the script and did his typical improvisation with it, and much of what he did with the script caused the animators to redo the visuals to fit Williams improv.  That is amazing respect shown one of the greatest comedic minds of out time.

The music is tremendous.  “Friend Like Me,” “Prince Ali,” “A Whole New World,” “One Jump,” could not be more perfect in this film.  Robin Williams showed even more of his skills with the vocals of the Genie’s songs.  The score beautifully highlights the story and the tone of the film.

The film also benefited from one of the best villain pairings of all time in Jafar and Iago. Jafar is as wicked and evil as any villain and he was brilliantly voiced by Jonathan Freeman.  Then, Jafar’s wicked sidekick Iago, voiced by the talented Gilbert Gottfried, played the villainous henchman without fail.  Iago delivered several of the best lines of the film with nasty precision.

But Jafar was not the only character with a sidekick here.  Aladdin had two of the best sidekicks ever in Abu the monkey and Carpet the Magic Carpet.  These character bring a flavor to Aladdin and each have a vital moment in the story.

The pace of the film is wonderful, as the film moves very quickly.  Aladdin has an exciting story with a great villain and a love story that feels real.  You care about these characters and you love the songs.  It is a classic film for the entire family and I am so happy that I was able to see it tonight after the failure of Saturday night.

Every Christmas season I pull out my favorite Christmas movie of all time. The Muppet Christmas Carol.  This came out in 1992 during a stretch when the Muppets were doing films based on classic literature stories such as this and Muppet Treasure Island.

A week or so ago, I made the list of Top 10 Christmas movies and this one came in at #1.

The story follows Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine) who is an old miser who hates Christmas.  Scrooge is haunted by three ghosts who show him the past, present and future in an attempt to save his soul from an eternity of lugging chains like his old business partners Jacob and Robert Marley.

Though the Muppets take certain liberties with the story, there is actually quite a few similarities between this and the Charles Dickens classic.  Many of the lines are used here, just as they are in other versions.  The classic Christmas Carol line  “if they are going to die, then they best get on with it and decrease the surplus population” is used to great effect.

Gonzo plays Charles Dickens as the omniscient narrator that follows along and adds the comments.  Rizzo the Rat tags along.  These characters are consistently breaking the fourth wall and each time it is funny.

Kermit the Frog is Bob Cratchit and Miss Piggy is his wife.  Robin the Frog got to be Tiny Tim. Honestly, every time Tiny Tim dies in this film, I cry.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it is hearing Kermit and Piggy so sad.  It is extremely well done.

Another thing that is well done is Michael Caine as Scrooge.  I know some people think that George C. Scott is the perfect Scrooge.  Others might say Alastair Sim or Jim Carrey.  However, I say do not sleep on Michael Caine.  Yes, he is acting with Muppets, but he carries this role beautifully.  You can see how Scrooge slowly changes from the wicked old brute he was into the caring, loving man of after.  Caine goes through every range of emotion possible and he so relatable.

I also love the Muppet designs of the ghosts, especially the Ghost of Christmas Present.  There are great songs as well.  “Wherever You Find Love, It Feels Like Christmas” is wonderful as is the “Scrooge” song at the beginning.

I think there are three Muppet movies that have to be considered the best ever made.  This is one of them.  I love this movie and I watch it every Christmas.

A friend and colleague of mine recommended I check this movie out.  It was released in 2014 and I think I remember some of the trailers for the movie.  So I gave it a shot tonight on Hulu.

It was okay.  Well acted with a solid cast.  I have always enjoyed Ed Harris and Micheal Pena. Eva Longoria might have stolen the show with her performance.

I wonder if Donald Trump had seen this movie and formed his border policies on what he saw here.  I couldn’t help but think of him as I watched some of the plot points that happened in the movie.

So Miguel (Michael Pena) is illegally crossing the border from Mexico to the United States with a family friend (Michael Ray Escamilla) when they meet Olivia (Amy Madigan) on a horse.  She gave them water and pointed them in the direction of possible work.  Her husband, a former sheriff Roy (Ed Harris) likes to do things his own way, she said, explaining why she had no work for them.  Little did they know that three teens were taking up position to shoot at the illegal Mexicans crossing the land.

The boys did not intend for anyone to get hurt.  They just wanted to scare the Mexicans, as they said. Problem was that Olivia heard the shots and, when she went to check on them, her horse was spooked and threw her.  She hit her head on some rocks and would die.

Roy also heard the shots and came rushing to the site, just in time to see Miguel standing over Olivia, his wife, with the bridal of the horse in his hand.  He assumed that Miguel had hurt Olivia trying to steal her horse.

Miguel retreats and Roy nearly shoots him, but he pauses, allowing Miguel to escape.  Taking his wife in his arms, Roy holds Olivia as she dies.

As I said, there was solid acting in the film, especially from Harris, who was solid as the grieving husband who still wants justice to be done, and from Eva Longoria, the wife of Miguel who faces dangers of her own as she tried to get to America herself to see her arrested husband.

I did have some problems with the movie, though.  First, it felt like everything really fixed itself quickly.  Terrible things happen to these characters, but then a scene or two later the situation resolved itself, setting up the next one.  It just seemed as if the movie wanted to show everything that could happen to or because of illegal aliens, but just did not have enough time to go into specifics in any plot.  Because of that, we did not have the chance to really get involved in enough of the story.  It was as if it was on fast forward most of the time.

I seriously wonder if Trump saw this movie prior to his infamous “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” comments.  SPOILERS: the film even ends with Miguel putting up a fence on the border.  Build a wall????  I wouldn’t be surprised.

I try to remain non-political here, but that was going through my head so much that it affected how I saw the film.

In the end, this is a well acted film that does not spend enough time on any one storyline to truly be effective.  Ed Harris, Michael Pena and Eva Longoria are good here, and this is not a bad movie to watch on a lazy night with nothing else to do.  It was okay.

I had a chance to attend a screening of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner today, and I was very pleased that I did.  I had never seen the film before, but I found it a fascinating look at the time.

Clearly, race relations remain at the heart of many of the problems we face as a society and it is vital that we face them head on and face them with honesty and respectfulness.  This film should be a cornerstone of that respect.

I truly enjoyed the movie.  A young white girl named Joey (Katharine Houghton) returned to her parents, Matt (Spencer Tracy) and Christina (Katharine Hepburn) Drayton, with her brand new fiance, Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier).  They had fallen in love on a trip to Hawaii and the whirlwind romance led them back to Joey’s parents’ door.  The issue?  John was black.

The Draytons were a liberal couple, raising Joey to believe color of skin was not important in the value of a human, and Joey was sure that they would have no trouble with her marrying a black man.  John was not as certain.

One of my favorite parts of this film was how human it was.  It did not make the Draytons racists.  On the contrary, they were reasonable, friendly and truly believed in the equality of the races.  You could see how much respect they had had for John and all the wonderful things he had accomplished as a doctor worldwide.  And yet, the thoughts of the dangers and troubles that their daughter would face in a mixed race marriage caused even these progressive thinking people to take pause.  I liked how they approached this plot point.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner would become the final appearance on screen for Spencer Tracy as Matt Drayton.  Tracy passed away not too long after the finish of the filing of the movie.  His performance is so great, as he embodied the struggle of his beliefs against his fears.  His longtime scene mate, Katharine Hepburn was beautiful throughout the entire film, with her tears just slightly hanging within her eyes.  You could tell how much of a connection these two actors had after years of working together.

Sidney Poitier also turned in a wonderful performance as Dr. Prentice.  You could see on his face how uncertain he felt when broaching the subject with Joey’s parents and how he felt when trying to avoid telling his own parents.  His strength of character really played through the film, making the struggle all the more challenging for Matt.

There were several other fun performances from secondary characters.  Isabel Sandford (from the Jeffersons fame) played housekeeper Tillie with all the sassy you would expect.  Cecil Kellaway received an Oscar nomination for his role as family friend and priest, Monsignor Ryan, who provided a neutral voice among the emotions.  Virginia Christine played the closet racist Hillary St. George.  Her firing by Christina was a highlight of the story.

At its time, this movie was very controversial, with the topic of interracial marriage being a hot one.  A few months after the movie finished shooting, the United States Supreme Court ruled the laws against interracial marriage as unconstitutional, making a line of dialogue about John and Joey being criminals in some states out of date.

Tracy and Hepburn together one final time made this film all the more powerful.  It was a real enjoyable film that I am glad to have had a chance to see.

Getting ready to watch the comedy The Disaster Artist, starring James Franco, this weekend, I pulled up The Room, written, directed and starring Tommy Wiseau, to wacth once more.

I saw The Room once before, as one of the RiffTrax Live showings and it was unbelievably and unintentionally funny.  The thought of watching the Room without some aid was harrowing.

Fortunately, three of the personalities at Collider Video, Mark Ellis, Dennis Tzeng and Ashley Mova recorded a movie commentary about the Room, with Mark and Ashley never having seen it before.  So I pulled both of these videos up, played them simultaneously and watched away.

The Room truly is one of the worst movies of all time.  It is either this one or Birdemic: Shock and Terror that take the crown.  It really is hard to say.

There is not much of a story.  Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is a successful banker and he seems to have a strong relationship with his future wife Lisa (Juliette Danielle), but Lisa is not happy.  She engages in an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero).

Did I mention that Mark is Johnny’s best friend?

The Room is so bad that you have to laugh at it.  You can really have a good time watching this because it is so horrible.  The acting, the dialogue, the plot, the sex scenes, the multiple establishing shots are all just terrible.

Honestly, I can’t imagine how a film like this gets made.  And yet, here it is.

Tommy Wiseau put his heart into this project, and he has given the world, unintentionally, something to laugh about.

I am very excited about seeing the Disaster Artist this week.  The film that is the making of the worst film ever.  James Franco seems to be channeling the mysterious Tommy Wiseau and could be nominated for an Oscar.  Is that ironic, that a film about the worst movie ever has a chance to be an Academy Award nominated film?

Thanks to Mark Ellis, Ashley Mova and Dennis Tzeng for doing this commentary.  Their reactions really helped me get through the film.  Because The room is definitely…

Oh my…

I had never seen Schindler’s List before.  It was one that I wanted to see and I found some time on this Saturday night.  It was on Netflix so I decided to give it a view.

I’m a wreck.

I have never seen a movie so brutally, numbingly sad and yet so unbelievably uplifting at the same time.  Never have I felt sick to my stomach directly because of actions of a movie, but now there were several scenes that ripped through my gut with devastation.

I teach a Holocaust unit at my school, but the scope of the loss will always be on the outside for me.  After viewing the film, I have just a little more understanding of the horrors that millions of Jewish people faced at the hands of the Nazi Party.

Which makes Oskar Schindler all the more of an enigma.  He was a member of the Nazi Party and he started out by taking advantage of the Jewish people on his own. His discovery that Jewish people would work for a cheaper wage made for good business.  Where he actually developed his desire to save the lives of these workers is not clear, but that is exactly what he did.

Liam Neeson was magnificent as Schindler.  Watching this man who had been so stoic and controlled for so long, break down and sob when he prepared to flee was just about more than I could stand.

The film was populated with brilliant performances from Ben Kingsley to Ralph Fiennes.  Fiennes was the quiet epitome of evil here as Amon Goeth.

Filmed in black and white, Schindler’s List was an astounding achievement in visual storytelling and it brought Steven Spielberg his Academy Award for directing as well as the Best Picture Oscar.

This is a masterpiece and as emotional as a movie could be.

Paragon is the highest rating that can be given and Schindler’s List deserves it.  I may never be able to watch it again, but it is a sad, beautifully tragic masterpiece.

Everyone should see this movie and remember what happened so nothing like this could ever happen again.

This week saw the release in theaters of another Pixar classic, Coco.  It was beautiful and exquisite and reminded us how wonderful Pixar could be.

Internet vlogger and movie commentator John Campea took that opportunity to create a top ten list of his favorite Pixar movies of all time.  Now, I have been doing some Top Ten lists with the Top Ten Show each week and I did not want to break that order.  However, John mentioned a movie in his top ten, #3, if I remember correctly, that I had never seen before.

Ratatouille came out in 2007, before I started seeing movies on such a regular basis, and I have heard many people, including John Campea, say that it is an overlooked gem of the Pixar movies.  Because of that, instead of doing a Top Ten Pixar list at this time (Toy Story 3 would be number one, btw), I decided to search out this movie with the cooking rat and to see if it deserves to be remembered so fondly.

Short answer: it does.

Separated from his family, Remy finds himself in Paris at a restaurant where he could, somehow, show his great skill of cooking.  Meeting with a clumsy and pathetic garbage boy named Linguini (Lou Romano), Remy found his chance.  Playing Linguini like a marionette, Remy was able to create wonderful food and reinvigorate the restaurant.

I enjoyed the movie quite a bit.  The set up was clever.  As in any Pixar movie, the animation was great.  I enjoyed the villains of the piece very much as their motivations made sense, in particular Chef Skinner, voiced by Ian Holm (from The Fifth Element). Patton Oswald as Remy the “Little Chef” was a solid voice performance.  Brad Garrett was great as the “figment of Remy’s imagination” Gasteau.  Peter O’Toole was absolutely terrifying as Anton Ego, the restaurant critic from Hell.

Although I enjoyed the film, there were some problems I had with it.  I must say though that Linguini and his constant screaming voice performance rubbed on my nerves the wrong way and it was a definite negative to the film.  I was also not a big fan of the rest of the rats as the story told with them felt a little cliched.  Honestly, much of the film felt pretty familiar.

None of those drawbacks for me would cause me not to enjoy the film, but I would not put it in my top three Pixar movies of all time.  It might make the top ten (for the time when I actually do that list) and I am glad that I watched it.

I got a chance to go to a Fathom Events presentation of Little Shop of Horrors, a movie that I loved.  However, there was a surprise… it was the Director’s Cut.

Frank Oz, director of Little Shop of Horrors, started the afternoon with a question answering session that gave us some background on the filming of the great musical and hinted at what we were about to see.  Oz had originally intended the film to be released in this manner, but they went back and added a “happy ending” instead for the wide release.  Oz said that this was the first time this original ending, a darker ending- as he put it, was to be seen on a big screen.

This made me even more excited to see the film.  I knew the original play Little Shop of Horrors ended in a much less happy way and I was anxious to see how different the end would be.

Whoa.  Quite the difference.

Last week I placed Audrey II on my list of Top 10 Movie Monsters, and after seeing the original ending, I believe that placement is well deserved.  The chaos and disorder that Audrey II brought to the end of the Director’s Cut was amazing.  It was anything but happy ending Seymour and Audrey.

Little Shop of Horrors is a great musical with amazing songs.  I love “Skid Row,” “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” “Feed Me,”among many others.  I found myself singing along under my breath through the whole film.  It was so much fun that I had a smile on my face the entire time.

Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene are perfect as sad sack Seymour and abused Audrey.  They bring such wonderful depth to both of these characters that I just can’t imagine anyone else ever filling those roles.  Steve Martin appearing as Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. is one of the greatest roles in comedic movie history.  Martin and the improvising Bill Murray are hilarious together in the dentist scene.

In the new (original) ending, Seymour certainly pays more for his part in creating Audrey II and the deaths of Orin Scrivello and Mr. Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia).

Little Shop of Horrors is a great Halloween movie, and this darker version fits even better.  I loved this movie before, but I think I like the original ending even more.

Little Shop of Horror is certainly…

We are just under two weeks away from the new Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnarok, and, in preparation for that movie, I watched one of the classic films from the oeuvre of Thor: Ragnarok’s director, Taika Waititi, What We Do In the Shadows,a  film Waititi co-wrote and co-directed with Jermaine Clement .

This was a film from 2015, but I had not ever seen it before.  I had heard great things about it but I have been delaying watching it until it got closer to Thor’s theatrical release. This felt like the perfect time to watch.

What We Do In the Shadows is a documentary-style film in the vein of “This is Spinal Tap” where we follow the undead lives of four vampires who share a flat together despite being extremely different.

Spoofing not only the vampire genre, but also The Real World type reality show, What We Do In the Shadows is fully original, funny and heart-warming.  It deals with friendship and brotherhood among a group of vampires who really should never get along.

There are some truly dark moments of comedy that are hilariously filmed in such a serious and deadpan style that it only increases the humor.  This film breathes a new undead life into what had really become a stale genre of movies.

Vampires had been done to death.  Since Twilight, which gets a good send up in the film as well, the vampire has been everywhere and has become overused.  Plus, the use of zombies and werewolves have had a similar fate.  What We Do In the Shadows takes those familiar characters and shows that it is not the type of character that has been overused, but the typical characters.  When a movie does something original and well-done with a vampire, it can still be creative.  The answer to losing interest in a genre is simply to make a good movie.

Jermaine Clement played Vladislav.  Taika Waititi played Viago.  Jonathon Brugh played Deacon and Ben Fransham played Petyr, the Nosferatu-like vampire that sired the other three. Things start becoming troubling when Nick (Cori Gonzales-Macuer) gets turned into a vampire and seems to not understand the vampire rules.  He brings a human named Stu (Stu Rutherford) into the house (albeit, everyone seems to love Stu), continually brags to people that he is a vampire and causes stress in his friends’ undead lives.

There are so many really funny scenes in this movie that you find yourself truly engaged in the film.  The characters are engaging and entertaining.  The mockumentary style really works in this film and the acting is top notch.  Every vampire trope is handled in a new and entertaining manner than they all feel completely fresh.

After watching What We Do In the Shadows, I have an even greater anticipation for Thor: Ragnarok, if only to see how Taika Waititi can bring this style of humor into the Marvel Universe.