BIG ASS SPIDER
2013 - ***
A sometimes not wince-inducing monster film, Big Ass Spider shows director Mike Mendez knows how to keep a low budget giant monster flick fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) shoots for a Seth Rogen vibe as the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that eventually proves even to the military he's the best man for the job of tracking and wrangling the titular amok experiment. First it gets loose inside a hospital, then grows to titanic proportions, grabs the hottie lieutenant Grunberg likes and climbs a downtown L.A. office building. Playing a kind of PG version of Seth's unforgettable psychopath in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies regulations by showing full monster too early, and even though the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the nerves, low-key bemusement endures throughout. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with Grunberg; Clare Kramer is the hottie lieutenant who winds up all webbed up and waiting. Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña from Observe and Report (my review here). That's not a dis on Boyar, he's great, but Peña is hilarious because he's genuinely dangerous, Boyar is merely genial. If Pauline Kael had been alive to praise Observe and Report in 2009 she would, and maybe it wouldn't have bombed. She'd probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider, because she liked bad bug movies. She was a great, great lady, man.
WAKE WOOD
2010 - ***
Hammer is back, with this keen medley of Monkey's Paw-ish family grief, Wicker Man pagan rural secrets, and the terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason motifs. When a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moves his family to the small rural England town of the title and his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. But the grief-stricken mother (Eva Barthistle - who was in the similar The Children two years earlier) doesn't want to let her go when time's up. Ungrateful woman! Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her dull yellow raincoat in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish unease. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some gory deaths, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!
WOMAN IN BLACK
2012 - ***1/2
Hammer does it again! They are really on a second roll, and despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail, Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping, with a surprisingly solid Daniel Radcliffe as a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to inventory a dark decaying mansion. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit. If the story follows a too familiar pattern (Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents), hey, Hammer practically invented this shit. The ample presence of tight-lipped, suspicious locals at the inn harkens back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get a similar cold shoulder and the sense of pacing is superb, even with lots of Radcliffe running around the dark mansion with his drippy candle --the sort of thing I generally find tedious but here is done briskly with the dark always a breath away from swallowing Radcliffe whole. Director James Watkins shows that the chilling power of his Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke, that he is not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and that he is a force on the scene poised to become the next Terence Fisher.
DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS
1966 - **1/2
Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always Terence Fisher, such as in this 2nd entry in Hammer's Dracula series, which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terribly washed out non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc which I could never get into, thanks to my allergy to washed-out colors and non-anamorphic framing. Well, this new blu-ray version is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out aspects that stopped my enjoyment. Even pristine and robustly colored it's a bit of a dull, silly mess. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely debating whether to spend the night at Dracula's castle. Once Christopher Lee is revived he seems to resent having to wear fangs again and the script thinks one can make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films over on Divinorum Psychonauticus), and here's another thing I never understood: if you want to keep vamps away, just eat garlic! Don't hang it in garlands so some hypnotized maid can come remove it. It makes no sense when you can just poison the food supply directly to just put a bottle of poison in the kitchen and think that will do the trick.
Oh well, the blu-ray is delicious with rich sickly gold yellows and a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle. That's fortunate, as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds, saying they'll be right back and never returning. While Darwin chuckles from on high we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last real-time moment involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. I remembered that scene from my childhood (swirling it up with Horror Express), but not the cracked ice finale. I must have blocked it out. Good lord, it's not even cold out and here's this convenient 'frozen pond' so close to the castle it makes no architectural sense. If that sort of thing doesn't bother you, and you don't mind watching actors feeling uncomfortably under-directed, as if their marks had been drawn in wind, well enjoy. At least Drac's got good taste in brides. When he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley we all benefit since she finally lowers her beautiful red hair and neckline.
VALLEY OF GWANGI
1969- **
Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels why too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys led by James Franciscus stumbling onto a desert paradise hidden from man. It looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert they just were traversing, with no sort of ecosystem on evidence remotely close to being able to realistically nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus (colored purple here, for reasons which I'm sure exist). I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still knew more than the alleged paleontologist riding with the cowboys. At one point he even calls a dinosaur a "styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to enunciate two such Latin syllable-enriched names in one sentence. At least he knows to get out of the sun when it's time for the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down!
And no disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up in a flat ugly middle shot diorama desert (these films always imagine dinosaurs as being in the desert since that's where the bones are found, which is rawther ridiculous) and here their monochrome purple colors and lack of close-up inserts make them look like plastic kid's toys. So even if those toys come to brilliant slithering life under Harryhausen's patient hand, it never really adds up to anything anyone other than a very indulgent dinosaur fan kid would like. Harryausen's no slouch; he even animates the eohippus when a movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk and overlaid, but it's not even as interesting as a typical arc in Land of the Lost.
So yeah, I tried to love it as long as I can remember, but I can't dig Gwangi and I finally figured out why: it's not just that I hate children in monster movies, especially the burdensome cliche'd Mexican kid, one peso senor, that all monster movies seem to think settings in Mexico, Italy, or Spain, Brazil or Portugal require; it's not just that all that sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, it's because there's this unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to hunt this poor little horse down for the public's amusement, and to grab the still surviving beasts of Gwangi's valley for public display thus proving the point that man destroys everything he touches all in the name of a measly profit. Harryhausen's famous for getting us to care about his monsters, but that can backfire, such as Twenty Million Miles to Earth which also has the tiresome one peso senor kid. And like that film, our abused creature here even has to battle another abused creature, in this case a circus elephant, also Harryhausen-animated. I have the same problem with Hatari! My top ten favorite movies of all time are at least 60% Hawks, but I can't abide that film's obliviously callous approach to abducting animals and the icky triumph of Red Buttons in getting the girl through methods most boys wisely abandon before they even get a first date. Hawks, you're sending the wrong message to the children... in this one film.
Big Ass Spider/s and deadly mantises however never manage to earn my sympathy, and for that I am truly grateful, a realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead look over towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955--above) like a man who finally realizes what matters in life, and who thinks like a spider in love... with Mara Corday.
(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)
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