Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

Fright Club

Fright Club: Best Horror Movies of 1974

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Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, The Godfather: Part 2, A Woman Under the Influence, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Conversation, Lenny—1974 was a hell of a year in movies! And horror was just as revolutionary.

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of those gems of 1974 with our pick of the five best. But we still love It’s Alive, Dark Star, Sugar Hill, Beyond the Door, Frightmare, CaptainKronos Vampire Hunter, and Abby. We just love these five more.

5. The Phantom of the Paradise

Brian De Palma’s first and only musical is a Phantom of the Opera/Faust/The Picture of Dorian Gray mash up (with some Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and more than a little Rocky Horror thrown in for good measure). That’s a heady mix.

A campy skewering of the soulless music industry, Phantom sees tiny Seventies staple Paul Williams as the Satan-esque Swan, a music executive with a contract for you to sign. Poor Winslow (William Finley) is just as wide-eyed about his music as all those would-be starlets are about their chances for fame and fortune in this evil world of pop super stardom.

Like many horror musicals, the film works best as a comedy, but Finley’s garish visage once he makes his transformation from idealistic musician to mutilated Phantom is pretty horrifically effective. The film as a whole is a hot Seventies mess, but that’s kind of the joy of it, really.

4. Blood for Dracula (Andy Warhol’s Dracula)

The film was also released as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, which is kind of rude since it was actually Paul Morrissey’s Dracula. The longtime Warhol collaborator had just made Flesh for Frankenstein with Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro and Arno Jürging. (Both films were made available in 3D. If you are ever able to screen them theatrically in that format, you are compelled and required to do so!)

Set during a Socialist upswelling just before Fascism took hold in Italy, the film sees a weak and anemic Count reeling from the lack of virgins to eat. He travels with his manservant to the Italian villa of Il Marchese Di Fiore. But he did not take into account that Joe Dallesandro is the handyman there.

Lurid, hot and sloppy in that gloriously garish Morrissey tradition, it’s a trashy treasure.

3. Young Frankenstein

Will you look at this cast? Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman are untouchable comedy gods in this movie (per usual). Gene Wilder is the master of pretending to the a comedy’s straight man but employing every physical instinct for comedy. Peter Boyle, Teri Garr and Marty Feldman round out one of the most spot-on comedic ensembles ever assembled.

But Mel Brooks’s horror comedy is unlike many of his other comedies in that it honors and loves that thing it sends up. He used cinematic techniques popular in the 1930s, shot in black and white and even borrowed actual sets from James Whale’s original Frankenstein laboratory.

The result is a perfectly executed horror comedy.

2. Black Christmas

Director Bob Clark made two Christmas-themed films in his erratic career. His 1940s era A Christmas Story has become a holiday tradition for many families and most cable channels, but we celebrate a darker yule tide tale: Black Christmas.

Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority girls; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.

Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling and the end of the film is a powerful, memorable nightmare.

1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper’s camera work, so home-movie like, worked with the “based on a true story” tag line like nothing before it, and the result seriously disturbed the folks of 1974.

Hooper sidestepped all the horror gimmicks audiences had grown accustomed to – a spooky score that let you know when to grow tense, shadowy interiors that predicted oncoming scares – and instead shot guerilla-style in broad daylight, outdoors, with no score at all. You just couldn’t predict what was coming.

He dashes your expectations, making you uncomfortable, as if you have no idea what you could be in for. As if, in watching this film, you yourself are in more danger than you’d predicted.

But not more danger than Franklin is in, because Franklin is not in for a good time.

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Born Again

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Nosferatu

by Hope Madden

It’s a funny idea, revisiting Nosferatu. F. W. Murnau’s 1922 original is itself a reimagining of Dracula (criminally so, as the filmmaker was successfully sued by Bram Stoker’s estate and all prints of the film were believed destroyed at the time).

But Murnau’s changes to the vampire fable and his approach to the story were compelling enough to motivate Werner Herzog to put his own magnificently bizarre spin on Nosferatu in 1979. And the fascination and horror surrounding the forbidden original inspired E. Elias Merhige’s brilliant 2000 horror comedy Shadow of the Vampire (for which Willem Dafoe earned a much deserved Oscar nomination).

So, there is obviously something there. Something in the criminal DNA of Murnau’s macabre fantasy arouses the most fascinating reincarnations. Since the 1922 masterpiece, none is as assured, as complete or as clearly stand-alone from Stoker’s source material as Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu.

In collaboration with longtime cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and The Northman composer Robin Carolan, Eggers conjures an elegant, somber, moody Austria breathlessly awaiting death.

His film pulls in the shadow play that made Murnau’s film so eerie, as well as the plague-infested storytelling that gave Herzog’s film its touch of madness. But Eggers’s script fills in narrative gaps with a backstory that diverts from any previous tellings, enriching characters with a ripe darkness that influences the entire fable.

Eggers centers his tale on a love triangle, as so many have, but he invests in two characters the other storytellers, including Stoker, mainly wasted. Nicholas Hoult (having a banner year) plays Hutter, the intrepid real estate man sent to Transylvania to finalize accounts with an eccentric nobleman, leaving behind his beautiful bride, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).

Hoult may be the first actor in any version—Nosferatu or Dracula—to give the Hutter/Harker character real depth. He is flawed, terrified, earnest, insecure and loyal. It’s a standout performance in an impeccable ensemble.

Depp mines for something primal, and her performance is unsettling. Isabelle Adjani’s turn in Herzog’s version hints at what obsesses this desperate bride, but Depp is given the space to create a solid, haunted character to hang the movie on.

There are three other characters that every filmmaker has fun with, and Eggers finds ways to freshen up the monster, his minion, and the mad doctor who would be his downfall. Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhert von Franz (the Van Helsing stand in) is just manic enough to be alarming.

As Knock (known in Dracula as Renfield), Simon McBurney is a menacing, manipulative lunatic with a far meatier and messier role in society’s unraveling.

Eggers keeps the Count (Bill Skarsgård) shrouded in darkness long enough to build excitement. What the two deliver is unlike anything in the canon. It’s horrifying and perfectly in keeping with the blunt instrument they’ve made of this remorseless monster.

His monstrousness makes the seductive nature of the tale all the more unseemly. This beast, the rats, the stench of contagion infesting the elegant image of Austria and her beautiful bride—it is the stuff of nightmares.  

It makes you grateful that Eggers was not intrigued by Stoker’s elegant aristocrat and his tortured love story, but drawn instead to the repulsive carnality of Nosferatu.

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Good Girl

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Babygirl

by Hope Madden

It seems impossible not to compare writer/director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl with Steven Shainberg’s 2002 indie treasure Secretary (based on Mary Gaitskill’s brilliant short story). Reijn’s tale is almost a perfect inversion.

Secretary saw a relative newcomer (Maggie Gyllenhaal) deliver a revelatory turn as an absolute nobody actively seeking domination, finding it in a chilly CEO (James Spader), and slowly, wickedly, hilariously discovering ways to take control of the situation so she could pressure him to control her.

Fast forward more than two decades and Babygirl completely reframes the same tale of one woman who really wants somebody else to be in charge for a change.

Nicole Kidman—a veteran whose craft is beyond reproach—plays Romy, a tech company’s CEO. Romy has a perfect life that includes a saucy relationship with her hot husband (Antonio Banderas), little notes left in the lunches she packs her two kids each morning, and an incredibly successful company.

And all seems almost well until an absolute nobody—an intern (Harris Dickinson)—senses something in Romy and acts on it. Soon this woman who is in control of everything she surveys risks all for a little humiliation and discipline.

Though Reijn’s film benefits from sly humor, it’s far from the dark comedy of Secretary. Babygirl hones closer to thriller, building tension, keeping the pace charged, and breathlessly suggesting our protagonist’s ruin behind every unlocked door.

Kidman is characteristically amazing. She is a risk taker as an actor, and what she does with this character is fascinating. The outer shell is different, person to person, interaction to interaction, but the humanity lurking beneath is never far from the surface.

Her chemistry with Dickinson is electric but not exactly sexual. Babygirl complicates gender politics and sexuality and shame, specifically as each is loosely defined across generations. It’s an observant script and a film a bit less interested in titillation than in human drama.

Reijn’s entire ensemble is unafraid to be unlikeable, which is necessary when ambition, jealousy, insecurity, sex and shame commingle. This is a tight script, perhaps too tidy and structurally familiar because its most satisfying moments are its messiest. But it is a fascinating and fresh look at something we’ve been conditioned to turn away from.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Mufasa, Sonic 3, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Babygirl & More

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Mufasa: The Lion King, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, The Six Triple Eight, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, The Fire Inside, Nocturnes

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Once and Future

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Mufasa: The Lion King

by Hope Madden

It was hard not to be a little worried about Mufasa: The Lion King. Or maybe it was hard not to be worried about Barry Jenkins. Too few of our genuinely brilliant independent film directors come away from Giant Studio Efforts unscathed. (Quick callback to last week’s JD Chandor debacle, Kraven the Hunter.)

Surely there are some auteurs who are able to leave their unique thumbprints on Disney films. No one comes to mind except Rian Johnson, and man, people really universally loved The Last Jedi, didn’t they?   

Well, Mufasa is far from the flaming disaster of Kraven, thank goodness. And it’s not nearly as polarizingly renegade as Jedi.

Safe. That’s what it is.

It’s also very pretty, if equally needless. The film delivers the origin story of Simba’s father Mufasa, providing—as origin stories so often do—a glimpse into the early development of other beloved and not-so-beloved characters. Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is separated from his parents and his pride by a great flood. Washed far from home, he’s saved by a bratty little cub called Taka (Theo Somolu). While Taka’s father, the king, will never accept this outsider, Taka’s mother (Thandiwe Newton) takes him in.

As Simba and Taka (voiced as older lions by Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr., respectively) flee a marauding pride led by the villainous Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen, gloriously and effortlessly villainous), they find out what kind of lions they really are.

And here for a while we get a bit of something refreshing. Mufasa’s worthiness to rule is grounded in skills learned from hunting with the females in the pride. And some of these transcend hunting skills: he listens, he’s humble, he’s honest.

The CG animation is mainly very impressive and there are camera movements and choices that feel like new ideas in an old tradition. But tradition wins out, not just in the look but in the storytelling. (Outsiders are bad. It takes a king to lead. Women support the men who make things happen. Lions don’t eat meat?)

The core story is often interrupted by a framing device of an elderly Rafiki (John Kani) telling the story of Mufasa. These breaks are meant to be funny, and sometimes they do generate a chuckle, but they feel more like well-timed bathroom breaks for when the film hits Disney+.

But it’s not bad. Your kids might like it. They won’t likely remember it, but they won’t hate it. It’s perfectly safe.

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Why Yes, That Chicken Looks Familiar

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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

by Hope Madden

Just over 30 years ago, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit took in a lodger and invented a new kind of pants. Neither were what they seemed.

And just when you thought you’d seen the last of Feathers McGraw—well, several decades after you thought you’d seen the last of him—he resurfaces with a diabolical scheme involving zookeepers, turnips, and gnomes.

Oh, and vengeance. Vengeance most fowl.

Longtime Aardman Entertainment filmmaker Nick Park takes on a couple of partners this go-round in co-writer Mark Burton (Shaun the Sheep) and co-director Merlin Crossingham, who’s been part of the Aardman team for years, directing video games, television, as well as the documentary A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman.

After 2023’s disappointing Aardman sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the stop-motion plasticine legends could use a reminder of how they nabbed all four of those Oscars. And so, W&G return with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

What have the lads been up to? Gromit’s been finding peace in his garden. Meanwhile, Wallace has invented a yard gnome that does gardening so Gromit doesn’t have to. Norbot (voiced Reece Shearsmith) is so efficient and hardworking that the whole of Wallaby Street wants his help! What could go wrong?

Loads! Especially once Feathers McGraw catches wind of the new invention, thanks to the crack reporting of one Onya Doorstep (Diane Morgan).

We lost Peter Sallis, longtime voice of Wallace, back in 2017, but Ben Whitehead takes on lead duties with appropriate aplomb.

Otherwise, expect the expected, which turns out to be the film’s strength as well as its weakness. The film mixes silly with clever in exactly the right proportion, as is the charm with the entire franchise. Wallace is so addicted to tech that he’s sure his old ceramic teapot is broken because he keeps pushing its knob and nothing happens. It doesn’t turn on. Nothing!

There are dozens of bright sight gags, loads of Rube Goldberg style tech, and plenty of endearingly dunderheaded characters. The animation itself, full of thumb prints and vivid color, is as brilliant as it has ever been.

There’s just not a lot of surprises. No one expected a giant were-rabbit in the lads’ last film, and it was right in the title of 2005’s magnificent Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Vengeance Most Fowl is a comforting, comfortable adventure, but it breaks no new ground and leaves less of an impression than you might hope.

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My Only Friend

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The End

by Hope Madden

In 2012, Joshua Oppenheimer co-directed (with Anonymous, to keep the second filmmaker from being murdered) my personal pick for greatest documentary ever made. He won the Oscar two years later for The Look of Silence, a sequel of sorts, but The Act of Killing is unlike anything else ever made and will stay with me until I die.

That’s not the only reason I was excited about The End, Oppenheimer’s narrative feature directing debut. There’s also Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, two of the greatest living actors. It’s a musical, but I won’t hold that against it.

Don’t think Wicked. The End is not dazzling song and dance numbers boasting stellar vocals set to catchy tunes you’ll be humming after the credits roll. The somber choreography and overlapping vocals feels a bit more inspired by Sondheim, and the setting is anything but dazzling.

George MacKay plays Son. He was born in the underground bunker Mother (Swinton) and Father (Shannon) evacuated to with Butler (Tim McInnerny), Doctor (Lennie James) and Friend (Bronagh Gallagher) sometime before climate change irreversibly destroyed the planet. They arrange and rearrange the masterpieces of the artworld that crowd their walls, swim to keep healthy, and practice emergency drills. Meanwhile Son is helping Father write his autobiography, that of the brave philanthropic energy tycoon who is definitely not to blame for the fall of mankind.

And there is fragile, manufactured, numb peace among them underground. Until Girl (Moses Ingram), an outsider, a survivor of the disasters that have claimed nearly everyone on the planet, makes her way to their compound.

With the influence of the outsider, each member of the little community reflects on what they’ve ignored for years: the little inconsistencies, the fictionalizations, the lies they tell themselves and each other to get numb. To forgive themselves of what a person is willing to do to someone else to survive.

It’s a clever conceit artfully executed. Each performance is beautiful. James and Gallagher are especially powerful in smaller roles. Oppenheimer’s script, co-written with Rasmus Heisterberg, quietly unveils each self-serving, nearly innocent sin that becomes the inescapable rot that ruins a civilization.

Aside from one devastatingly absurd number showcasing Shannon, the music doesn’t add a lot. Swinton’s not much of a singer (well, at least we’ve found the one thing she isn’t good at), which makes the songs a little harder to bear.

In the end, The End is a bold, admirable film that’s sometimes too obvious, a bit too long, and a tad gimmicky to meet its aspirations.

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Hunt for Green December

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Kraven the Hunter

by Hope Madden

I keep waiting for Aaron Taylor-Johnson to become a giant household-name superstar. He’s a good-looking kid, always turns in solid work, makes interesting career choices. I’ve been a fan since 2010’s Kick-Ass, but it doesn’t seem to me that he’s really hit.

Maybe now’s his time. He does a solid job in a supporting turn in Nosferatu, hitting screens this Christmas. And based on the trailer, he seems to be leading the most anticipated horror sequel in decades, next summer’s 28 Years Later. Plus, he’s finally starring in his own franchise comic book superhero movie, J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter.

And holy shit, J.C. Chandor! Do you know how good a director he is?! Margin Call, All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year—these are brilliant films. Brilliant! And you know what happens with genius indie directors pair up with Marvel. Just look how well that went for Oscar winner Chloé Zhao and her endlessly maligned Eternals.

What to know going in? It’s rated R. Hmmm, provocative. Oscar winners Ariana DeBose and Russell Crow join Taylor-Johnson, along with beloved indie actors Christopher Abbott and Alessandro Nivola, plus Fred Hechinger, who is killing it in 2024 (Thelma, Gladiator II, Nickel Boys).

The result: After a fun, bloody prologue, Act 1 plods along with scene after scene of exposition. In Act 2, we get to see a lot more exposition, a bit more action, but at least the seriously fine ensemble is able to carve out some weird, fun characters.

Hechinger comes off best as the sweet-natured younger brother Dmitri to Kraven (Taylor-Johnson). Both sons of criminal kingpin Nikolai Kravinoff (Crowe), Dmitri craves his father’s respect while Kraven spurns all his dad stands for and hunts down baddies like him all over the world.

Crowe, brandishing a ludicrous Russian accent, is fun in that saucy Russell Crowe way. Likewise, Nivola and Abbott are delightfully, drolly evil and seem to be having an excellent time.

DeBose is wasted in a badly written role. Her scenes are almost exclusively with Taylor-Johnson, who’s asked to look good shirtless, move about well, and talk more than the character should just to make sure audiences don’t get lost.

The biggest problem are the CGI animals. Yikes. (It makes one worry for the brilliant indie director Barry Jenkins and his leap to CGI animals/giant studios with next week’s Mufasa: The Lion King.) How can they all look this bad?

But, Act 3 delivers so much blood! I’d almost forgotten about that R rating until Kraven snaps shut those bear traps on that bad guy’s head!

It’s not a great movie. I doubt it’s really franchise material, which is almost too bad because I’d love to see Hechinger again. It’s not really worth waiting for the Act 3 payoff, unless you just really like bloodspatter and viscera in your superhero movies.

Maybe 28 Years Later will be better.

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Winter of Discontent

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Oh, Canada

by Hope Madden

Paul Schrader has made a career of solitary, perhaps unforgivably damaged men seeking final redemption through self-sacrifice. The stakes and damage change from project to project, but the themes remain consistent. You can see what drew him to the Russell Banks novel Foregone, in which a lauded documentarian now dying of cancer sits for an interview determined to confess his fictionalized mythology to his wife.

Retitled Oh, Canada for the screen, the film sits with Leo Fife (Richard Gere), wheeled out in a sour mood to his living room, which has been transformed quickly into a film studio. His former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill) intend to film a final farewell with the famous American draft dodger turned Canadian documentary provocateur.

Leo just wants to tell his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) who he really is.

As Leo reminisces, Jacob Elordi takes on the younger self moving through marriage and back to high school, to youthful indiscretions and less youthful betrayals. Periodically, Gere will walk out of a scene as Elordi walks into it, Schrader reminding the viewer that memory is a tricky thing, sometimes as fanciful and artificial as fiction.

This artifice becomes the film’s undoing. There’s a staginess to the dialogue, a theatricality to the aging and de-aging, the way one actor will take on multiple personas. It fits with the theme of memory and truth but is at odds with what Schrader does best, and that’s brutal truth.

Gere delivers exactly that in the film’s most blistering and uncomfortable scenes, almost hateful in his regret, in his desperation to come clean—as clean as this rather dirty man can come. His contempt for himself extends to his students, some for being like him, some for having been weak for him. When the opportunity arises, Gere and Schrader are on a different level than the balance of the cast and the rest of the film. It seems Schrader exposes something of himself as this character, this filmmaker, commits his own deterioration and death to cinema.

The last Banks novel Schrader adapted, 1997’s Affliction, generated two Oscar nominations, including James Coburn’s win. And while both novels fit the Schrader canon, neither film seems like his creation, something sprung from the folds of his own brain.

Schrader’s greatest screenplays—Taxi Driver, First Reformed, The Card Counter—find hope in the hopeless resolution. Oh, Canada lacks the cohesion of story and the poignant irreversibility that Schrader’s best films boast.

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Most Natural Painkiller

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Queer

by Hope Madden

William S. Burroughs is a tough writer to set to film. Queer, an appendage to his first novel, Junky, published decades later as its own novella, is particularly thorny. Rather than submerging the writer’s themes and curiosities under layers of surreal flourish—as most of his novels did—both Junky and Queer mainly skim the surface in a Bukowski-esque autobiography by way of fiction. Mainly.

Protagonist William Lee—the Burroughs stand-in—is a recovering heroin addict in 1940s Mexico City, played with ferocious commitment by Daniel Craig. Without the buffer of the drug, Lee is a raw bundle of longing, isolation and desperation passing time among expats and looking for a different kind of fix.

Luca Guadagnino’s bittersweet period piece works best when it directs the confessional prose to create a character study. Craig meets that challenge, delivering a performance of unsheathed vulnerability and ache cut with salty wit and self-loathing.

Burroughs was the master of the unreliable narrator. Though Guadagnino doesn’t develop the same kind of reckless guide through his film, the script and performance make it clear that, though Lee is our protagonist, he’s not to be trusted. He’s a user, and though Craig’s performance is wonderfully human, he’s also every ounce the Ugly American.

That creates some fascinating scenes, but it does not make for much of a narrative arc.

Queer follows the relationship between Lee and the much younger WWII veteran Eugene Allerton, played with intriguing distance by Drew Starkey. Jason Schwartzman pops in and out for comic relief and the great Lesley Manville arrives in a third act that feels, while fascinating, also wildly out of place.

Because the relationship between Lee and Allerton is never really probed, and Allerton remains as distant and mysterious to us as he does to Lee, Queer feels unfinished. Guadagnino’s aesthetically lovely turns toward the surreal do little to either clarify the story or to deepen the mystery. They feel like ornamentation, which draws more attention to the artifice of the period detail, the stilted ensemble performances and the musical choices.

There is something in Queer that is beautiful, provocative, unsettling and unpleasant—all adjectives easily at home within the Burroughs atmosphere. It’s not a terrible way to spend an evening, but it’s not entirely satisfying, either.