Not a great bouquet - Flowers in the Attic

I will never forget the first time I came across V.C. Andrews. I was twelve years old and browsing the bookshelf of my aunt's, and I came across a book whose cover caught my eye.

Yes, it was Flowers in the Attic. 

I pulled the book from the shelf and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting cross legged on the bed, transported to a world of untouchable excess and incest.

Yes, incest.

Looking back now, I was much too young to be reading something like that (where were my parents! Oh, my sullied youth!), but once I finished the book, I was hooked.  I NEEDED to find out what happened to the children after the last page was turned!  Luckily for me, Andrews was a prolific writer, and there was no shortage of books penned that followed the same basic formula of excess, loss, and sex.

I was kept busy for quite awhile.

Eventually I moved on, and my tastes matured.

Many years later, I came across a video cassette in a dusty box at a garage sale.  Nestled in the bottom of the box was a tape, marked twenty five cents.

"Flowers in the Attic"?! I exclaimed to myself.  They made a movie based on a book I so well remembered!

I threw the quarter at the old lady on the porch and ran to my car with my find, eager to get home and pop it in.

An hour and a half later, I was ready to claw my eyes out and stick pins in my ears.

What the hell had they done to the story?!  It was only dimly related to the book! The character's names were the same, and the basic plot was similar, but they left out so much of what made the story a page turner back in the day. 

I'm willing to forgive that though.  I don't hold the story in such high esteem (its about incest for the love of it all, how good can a formula romance about incest be?) that I want things to be exact.  As long as the movie is good!

This wasn't.

Jeffery Bloom did the script treatment, and also directed the film.  Up until this point, Mr. Bloom had been involved with mostly TV stuff.  Well, there was that movie, Blood Beach, but that is a post for another day.

The film opens with a voice over by Cathy, the eldest daughter, played by Kristy Swanson (who has been pretty prolific in television post Flowers).  Whoever the sound guy was, they failed.  It sounds as if she is speaking with the microphone IN her mouth for the entire voice over. 

Then there is the creepy daddy angle.  We are treated to a variety of shots of Cathy in what might be compromising positions with her father.

 We are left to assume that she is the favorite of her father's for a very special reason.  In the background, they always show her mother, looking on with disapproval.

The father dies somehow, and now we have a single mother with four children who must go crawling back to her childhood home, where her overbearing mother waits to welcome her back with a bullwhip.

Yup.  A bullwhip.

On the bus headed to their grandparents house, we are treated to this wonderful bit of dialogue:

Cathy: Mother should have prepared us for something like this.

Chris: What do you mean?

Cathy: She never allowed us to have a dog... or a kitten.

Chris: What's that got to do with anything?

Cathy: Because pets DIE Christopher! And if we had had a pet, we would have learned something about that!


Yes... A dead pet is the perfect training tool for the loss of a parent.  I need to go get a hamster or something.

The premise from this point out is that the kids are locked into a suite in this giant house, with access to an attic, while their mother tries to win back the love of her dying father.

So now we are stuck with four kids to carry the weight of the story.  Okay, I don't mind.  The two little ones, Cory and Carrie (played by Ben Ganger and Lindsay Parkey), are so young that they are fed a line at a time so they don't flub.  This leads to a choppy series of cuts back and forth between the little one uttering a line, and a reaction shot from someone else.  At times it is dizzying.

I'm not going to bore you with the rest of the plot (trust me, you would be bored), so I'm going to hit the high (or.. is it low?) points for you.

• The random groundskeeper/dog handler/handyman.  Why are we treated to random shots of him staring angrily out of a window? 

• Horrible wigs.  I've seen better fare in costume shops, and those are cheaply made.

• The ability of the elder brother, Christopher, to divine that they are being poisoned with arsenic, using an old microscope and some dusty reference books.  Hey, wish I could do that! 

• The kids constant reference to their grandmother as "THE grandmother".  Not really a big deal, but it got on my last nerve the five hundredth time I heard it. (Another robotic Nurse Ratched performance from Louise Fletcher, but what works in One Flew falls flat here.)
  

• The score! Holy hell.  At the beginning of the movie Cathy gets a music box from her father, and we hear the same damn refrain throughout the whole film, with dramatic swells and squealing string sections during such dramatic events as... walking down the stairs.

• At the climax of the movie, Cathy is shoving a broken cookie in her mother's face, yelling "EAT IT MOTHER! EAT THE COOKIE!". This causes her mother to fall to her death.

• Cathy does another mic in the mouth voice over at the end of the movie, talking about how she got a job to put her brother, Christopher (oh mighty arsenic discoverer), through med school.  After being locked in the attic for who knows how long, poisoned, and uneducated, just what was she doing to put him through school? I'm not sure I want to know.

Interesting to note, an alternate adaptation of the novel was penned by renowned horror writer/director Wes Craven back when the book was being shopped, but this was passed over for Bloom's by a studio that was afraid to be up front with the incest and rape present in the original story (innuendo, and faint innuendo at that is all we are treated to). 

I had a chance to read through Craven's script, and I can say I dearly wish it had been produced.  Written just after the first Nightmare on Elm Street, it is full of witticisms and humor, and doesn't shy away from the harder subjects the book tackles.

V.C. Andrews died just before the film was released in 1986, but was reported as saying she was not happy with the finished product.

Neither should you be.

A New Beginning for cynicism

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning



With Jason done in "once and for all" at the end of "The Final Chapter," the producers of this now iconic series found themselves in a quandary - the villain was vanquished, but these films were still making a great profit on the turnaround. What to do? This is how we find ourselves staring down the gaping maw of "A New Beginning."

Our film starts with a reasonably done dream sequence, shot in Corey Feldman's backyard, in which he reprises his role as Tommy from Part 4. Some random teenage idiots dig up Jason's grave, while little Tommy Jarvis watches from the trees. Jason, who just happens to be buried at ground level, clad in his hockey mask and grasping a weapon in each hand, awakens and makes quick work of the disrespectful douchebags who dared to disturb his sleep. Noticing Tommy in the treeline, he hefts his machete, and approaches in his usual menacing way. Tommy stares, horrified, while the rain mists his glasses, and finds himself unable to move. As Jason looms, he begins to scream...and I've now described the only scene in this entire movie worth seeing. The rest of the flick follows a teenage Tommy as he arrives at his new home, and people start dropping like flies, as per the formula.

It's true that these films are formula pictures, but don't let that fool you; done correctly, a formula can be quite entertaining. I refer here to your James Bond or Rocky-type flicks: we all know what to expect, and that often is part of the fun. But "writers" Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann seemed to have missed the point; the fun, corny dialogue of the previous films is replaced with vulagarity, the novel "jump scares" of the first two films are replaced with gore, and the subtle sexuality of the teens in the originals is traded in for gratuitous T&A. That campy humor I so loved in the early sequels? It became gross overgeneralizations of unwholesome, disgusting characters, and that's what we're left with for our comic relief. A prime example are the white trash Ethel and her son Junior, who utter such memorable lines as "He hurt me, Ma," and Ethel threatening the sherrif by screaming "I got a bomb on me!"



This is supposed to be funny? It hurts my soul a little.

Practically 2/3 of the characters in this movie are pathetic examples of human beings, and we're exposed to their depravity from the very beginning. The aide that delivers the teenage Tommy Jarvis to the Pinewood Youth Development Center (some kind of strange home for disturbed and wayward youth, where most of the "action" takes place) does this disturbing thing with his tongue behind actress Melanie Kinnaman's back...and that's just in the first five minutes. From the paramedic who laughs at a teenagers dismembered corpse, to the antics of Ethel and Junior, and even to the slimey Mayor himself, no sense of common decency goes unchallenged in this movie. While the first movies were sort of potboiler/thrillers that loved to pay off a gag with what they called "a magic trick," this one just revels in all the wrong things. Knowing that co-writer/director Danny Steinmann had a background in the adult film business, I more liken this outing to something I refer to as "murder porn." The fact that it was pretty much butchered by the MPAA upon release is only the more upsetting, considering that what made it to the screen was already more than over the top. Also, seriously lacking in this film are the strong females we'd so loved in the previous films. There wasn't really a heroine to cheer on, unless you count the 12 year old kid. No, I contend that Pam survives out of sheer luck, and the rest of the women are only here to be naked for a bit, and then to be dead for a bit.

A lot of people dislike this one because (spoiler) it's not Jason at all, but a copycat killer. I happen to think that was a great idea, a fun bit of misdirection, but the people wanted their masked slasher, God love 'em. No, what bothered me was that the guy behind the mask had no motive whatsoever. So, your candy bar obsessed kid was chopped up
with an axe by a woodchopping lunatic? Great, go get him! Oh, wait, he's in jail. I guess I'd better off two greasers working on their car! Yeah, that makes sense. Hell, Jason himself had better reasons for his rampages than that!

I'm hard on the director, but there were two shots (aside from the opening) that I did genuinely enjoy: One is a closeup of Junior's snot and blood-covered face as he rides manically around in circles on his bike, and the other is when the camera is mounted behind a flashing police light, "Naked Gun" style. Yes, this is the work of a true autuer.



And that's about the best acting in the whole movie...nah, the Doctor (played by the guy that gives young Indy his hat in "Last Crusade") really wasn't that bad. I also must give kudos to composer Harry Manfredini, who once again turned in an incredible score. It's just too bad they had NO IDEA where to place it! I refer here to a driving scene, with suspenseful strings behind it...but there's no tension. There's no kill. They're driving a car, and it's scored like a chase scene.

Ultimately, this movie raises more questions than it answers. Where the hell did Tommy learn Kung Fu? Why is the killers mask, which should be evidence, in Tommy's bedside drawer? For that matter, why is there a butcher knife in a hospital room? Why does the punk rocker chick do a pop and lock/mime dance to a synthpop song? And why, during the traditional "cat jumps out and scares you" scene, did they feel it necessary to fling a cat, from offscreen, headfirst at a table? And finally, why did I pay money for this sleaze?

I contend that this movie should be scoured from the Earth, and the producers agreed - the inevitable sequel completely ignores the fact that it ever existed, and so should we all.

The Unborn - Should have been aborted.

It seems that everything Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company had taken on up to this point had been a remake of a piece of my childhood.  From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Friday the 13th, you could expect that the movies would be obviously predictable (I mean, we knew the stories already right?), but entertaining nonetheless.

Enter David Goyer's The Unborn.  This was, to quote the producers, “Just what we had been looking for in an original script.” Granted, I would have had high hopes too, coming from the man who wrote the screenplay for Dark City, The Dark Knight, and a slew of other films.  The Unborn, however, ends up being a horrible mishmash of posession/jewish exorcism/nazi experiments/fetal demise/ugh.  (Can you believe that Goyer compared his script to the likes of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist?!)

Being a huge Gary Oldman fan, I went into this willing to look PAST whatever shortcomings there were, and just sit back and be stupidly entertained for an hour and a bit. 

I just couldn't.

Odette Yustman plays the main character, Casey, and I have to wonder if Megan Fox was too booked or too expensive for them to woo with the script. Odette is a veritable clone of Fox, almost down to the cow eyed looks she splashes across the screen with such frequency.  It doesn't matter who they cast in the role at the end of the day though, because the STORY is just so badly done, no amount of professionalism or oscar worthy acting can save it.

So here is the premise of the film, some chick starts having weird encounters with strange potato bugs, starts seeing blue gloves laying in the street, her eye starts to turn blue, and it all turns out to have been because she had a twin that died in utero.  A twin who wants to be born now.  A twin named Jumby. (Jumby?)

But wait! That isn't all there is to the story! It ALSO has to do with Nazi experiments on twins during the war!  Don't forget about the Dybbuk angle, which it seems they tried to tie in with the whole dead in utero twin thing, but only half heartedly.  Oh! And this is all supposed to tie in with the fact that Casey is pregnant (though she doesn't know it until the end of the movie, and with one “baby-makin” scene in the whole film, in the middle of the film, after things have already started to go all wonky, I'm not sure how the audience is supposed to just understand that a pregnancy is totally the reason it is all crazy up in there.  One of the funniest quotes of the movie, unrelated except tangentially, is Romy, the token black friend, talking to Casey in the opening scenes about one of Casey's dreams: “That your vagina is completely disease infested.”  This in response to Casey wondering what it all means.  They then share a laugh that can only be replicated by two chicks who have gone shopping for douche together.)

The story line is so fragmented and nonsensical that it doesn't even really pay to try and make sense of the strings that tie everything together.  The story can really take a back seat, though as long as you don't mind sitting through five minutes of exposition to get to a special effect or a predictable jump.

The special effects aren't bad.  Mostly CGI and quick shots of disturbing images, but interesting.  As long as you like upside down headed dogs, people crab walking on the stairs (a la the exorcist), old people with upside down heads crab walking (a la In the Mouth of Madness),  and people with huge mouths, it will suit your taste.

A few highlights:

• Gary Oldman tootling on a glitter dusted shofar before the exorcism of Casey starts.
• Romy opening the door to the little kid, who says, in a creepy voice: “the door is now open”. (really?!)
• Casey's boyfriend killed by her own hand. (bye bye baby daddy!)
• Potato Bugs.  Come on, but Jerusalem Crickets are totally sweet.
• The evil demon/dead twin/dybbuk think is named Jumby for goodness sake.

 Um, yeah, that is really about it.

Save an hour and a half and just watch the trailer.  It has all the good parts in it.  That is what sucked me in.  I should have known better, but I'm an endless optimist when it comes to horror movies, so predictably I spend most of my time being disappointed.

This was no exception.

An Auspicious Start

It was pointed out to me that the name of our new fledgling project had been used before. As a Mistie (follower of the pop phenomenon Mystery Science Theater 3000) I'm embarrassed to say that this connection eluded me, though I am perfectly willing to admit that there was most likely a subconscious influence by those pioneering folk from Minnesota. To give credit where it is due, I feel obliged to present to you the original Film Antipreservation Society, as envisioned by my hero, Crow T. Robot.



One hopes to carry on in this great tradition, and do the little gold fella proud.

In the beginning...

No one can deny that there are great films out there.

Movies that touch your heart.  Movies that chill you to the bone.  Movies that draw you into non stop action.  Movies that make you laugh until your ribs are aching.

However.

For every great film, there are hundreds of movies that should never have seen the light of day.  Movies that do the entire industry a disservice.  Movies that should have been allowed to die long ago.

This is dedicated to those movies.  From here on out, sit back, grab the popcorn, and prepare to embark on a journey into a realm few have the fortitude to enter.  Join us as we explore the vast landscape of movies that stink.  Movies even WE have a hard time sitting through.  Movies that should have never seen the light of day.

We, the Anti Preservation Society, invite you to kill a few brain cells with mind numbingly bad horror, comedy that is so bad it is scary, and action that falls flat on its face.  These movies must die, but we just can't help ourselves.