Our Lips Are Sealed

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

Director: Jonathan Levine

Rating: R

I first heard about this movie after reading another review of it over on Twins Of Evil. I was intrigued. I had not heard of any of the actors involved, nor had I heard of the director (who has since directed 50/50 and Warm Bodies). The movie had not been released in theaters in the US, and has never been made available for Region 1 DVD. Having hunted down a copy of it and watching it, I can't understand why it wasn't released in the States. 

It's your average slasher movie. Teenagers travel out to the country, they party, they get wasted, they get picked off one by one as the night wears on into daylight. 

That's right, some of the slasher killings happen during broad daylight. Which doesn't happen often in these kind of movies. There's no flinching away from the violence, but I can honestly say that I've seen far worse. 

So why wasn't is given a release date until just recently? 

Well, the Weinstein Company sold it to another production company that went bankrupt. Stuff happened. It got picked up by a UK home entertainment label and released on DVD and BluRay, but we poor suckers here in the US got zilch. Until now, when the guys at Dimension Films decided to help those who haven't seen Mandy Lane to get their chance at it.

That's right. Mandy Lane has a new 2013 release date for VOD and a theatrical run. October, 2013 for a limited release in theaters, and September, 2013 on VOD. 

But why should you care at all about a movie that was stuck in limbo for seven years? Is it worth it?

I actually think it is. Mandy Lane starts off with an accident that alters a friendship between Mandy (Amber Heard) and Emmet (Michael Welch—the guy who played Mike Newton in the Twilight movies—no, don't run away!). Emmet obviously likes Mandy in ways she doesn't reciprocate. The timeline skips ahead nine months and Mandy has moved on to newer, more popular friends. And, yes, all the boys do love Mandy Lane. She's pretty, she's quiet, she's never been on a date with anyone. So, like every other gross-out teen comedy movie, the main guys in the movie all swear they're going to totally bang Mandy Lane if she joins them on the weekend trip to one a ranch house. 

Their conversation makes me uncomfortable and the look Amber Heard gives them all, a little shy and friendly, kind of breaks my heart. She just wants some friends who won't treat her like an object. 

And yet, she's surrounding herself with these superficial, mean people who are treating her like an object. As the narrative goes on, you wonder exactly what Anson Mount's character (Garth) does later on in the movie: Why do you hang out with these people?

She's mum about it. She just quietly listens to her "friends" say stupid things to each other, smoke dope, drink too much, and snort prescription drugs. They're all pretty flawed people. 

Bird (Edwin Hodge) manages to catch a moment alone with Mandy where he warns her that "they're all trying to get with you." He is less gross about his interest in her. He asks to hold her hand. They walk together for a little ways, and he asks if he can kiss her. Mandy offers up her cheek with a smile, and Bird just kisses her cheek. It's actually a sweet moment. Before anything else can happen, they're interrupted by Garth, the ranch hand, who offers to drive them the rest of the way.  

The other characters aren't that important. Just Garth, because Mandy is intrigued by him. She's dared to go ask him to join them all in the main house for drinks and ends up talking to him some more. 

Two people go missing during the night. Then another. There's gunfire and one of the girls gives Mandy some kind of pill that makes her drowsy. Morning comes, the last two teens are offed in broad daylight, and we learn the twist. Then there is a twist on the twist. 

The film is very pretty to look at. The soundtrack is very pretty to listen to. It's a teen slasher movie that's pretty. The effects are practical and pretty spectacular. But do you know what sold me on it? 

The opening title card. Have a look:

The splatter is animated. It looked like the cover of a horror novel I might pick up at the used bookstore. So I kept watching. 

And I ended up liking it. It had its fair share of clichés, but I was so taken with Amber Heard's quiet performance and curious about where this was all going that I went with it. For my memory, I'm hard pressed to think of a more recent horror movie where the filmography was so appealing to look at. 

Give it a shot on VOD in September, or go see it in theaters in October. 

Check out the trailer:

That French Horror Film That I Will Never Watch Again

Martyrs (2008)

Director: Pascal Laugier

Rated: R

Let me begin this review with a little story. Back in 2008, I watched this French movie called High Tension and I decided that I rather liked the French horror genre. So I followed that up with Frontier(s), which had waaay more gore in it than I'm used to. That was sort of the signal to "stop," but I didn't pay it any attention. I was enjoying a new side of foreign film and thought the premise for Martyrs sounded interesting. So I checked it out.

I will never, ever, watch this movie again.

Once was enough.

The comparison of violence I witnessed in the last, oh, half hour of Martyrs to the entirety of High Tension is ridiculous. Martyrs put me through the emotional wringer and left me feeling limp and sick to my stomach. I cried for, like, a solid hour after watching this movie. Messy crying, too—none of that delicate "oh, let me dab at my eyes with this tissue" crap.

It is a beautifully shot movie. It is extremely well-acted. The special effects are so good that one scene in particular just had me gaping in terror instead of wondering how they did it. You know that moment when an awesome stunt happens and you wonder to yourself "how did they do that? How much corn syrup did they end up using?" That never happened while I was watching Martyrs. I was just sucked in. The story had a hold on me and I believed what I was seeing.

And I never want to see it again.

Here's the IMDb summary:

A young woman's quest for revenge against the people who kidnapped and tormented her as a child leads her and a friend, who is also a victim of child abuse, on a terrifying journey into a living hell of depravity.

"Tormented" is such a light word for them to use. No, she was tortured. But don't go comparing this in your head to Hostel or Saw. Those movies seem to celebrate their violence. Martyrs is shocking when the violence happens. It's not there to be celebrated, it's there to be a part of the story that's being told of this girl and her need for revenge and her only friend's difficulty coping with it. There was no letting up in it at all. There are no moments of tension-breaking humor and no cutaways to secondary characters on a second plot point. I wouldn't necessarily call it "meaningless," because there is a point to it—a story is being told about some terrible people who do terrible things for a specific reason to these girls.

Here is what one YouTube reviewer had to say about it:

I am only including a video for this particular movie because of how difficult it is to explain how good Martyrs is and how much I can't make myself watch it again. SlimmBob here does a pretty good job of letting you know the main story without spoiling plot points and showing just how emotionally drained it can make you.

Here's what I wrote for Amazon.com in November of 2009:

One for the strong of will…

...not the faint of heart or mind.

Not to give any plot points away, Martyrs is—succinctly—good. It's one of those films that you watch with your hands cupped over your mouth, tears pouring down your face... At no time did I ever lean back in my seat with relief. Not even at the end. In fact, I started at the credits dumbly until they finished.

It is a powerful film. The narrative unfolds slowly and halfway through it one is left wondering where this could possibly be going and how on earth can it get any worse than it already has? Then it does. The main character is plunged into a situation that I will not delve deeper into to save those who may watch. As a warning, you may only want to watch it once (as I did). While the characters resonate deeply with me and I am invested in both of their stories, I don't think I can watch this happen again. But I do recommend it for it's dramatic narrative. As far as story-telling goes, Martyrs weaves one hell of a tale that leaves the viewer thinking about the outcome for hours after you have turned the DVD player off.

As an avid horror film watcher, I am a poor gauge to measure how "gory" something is (after seeing so many I've gotten rather desensitized to the imagery and this, frankly, worries me). I'll put it this way: emotionally, by the end of it all, I felt like curling into a dark corner and crying for a while (and I did end up bawling for a some time). And yes, it is violent. The images in the last twenty to fifteen minutes were hard for me to watch, but I was just too transfixed (in the "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God" sense of the word) to turn away.

There is talk about remaking Martyrs for the American audience with the producers of Twilight, and to that I say: "Pppffffttt. That'll never happen."

And I hope it doesn't. Because a version of this movie that's palatable to America's current audience would be impossible to watch. They'd change the things that made the French version so chilling just to keep from offending anyone. They'd dumb it down. In fact, the guy they want to direct it, Daniel Stamm, said this:

"[The original film] is very nihilistic. The American approach [that I'm looking at] would go through all that darkness but then give a glimmer of hope. You don't have to shoot yourself when it's over."

That whole "there is no hope" thing was kind of part of the whole movie, so... No. Just, "no."

Plus, I'd have to watch it again.

And I won't do that.

I can't make myself recommend this one to everyone. It was an excellent example of filmmaking, but it was just so... If your curiosity has been piqued but you can't make yourself watch something that will either make you feel utterly depressed or sick, then go read Critical Dave's review of it (it's full of spoilers). If you can handle it? Do a little research on it first and watch it.

Here is the trailer:

Not Your Average Slasher Movie

Tucker & Dale Vs Evil (2010)

Director: Eli Craig

Rated: R

I recently came across this movie after browsing through the horror tag over on Trailer Addict, and I couldn't be happier for finding it. The premise of the movie is a flip on the tired old "college kids being hunted in the woods" one that we have seen over and over. Instead, the unfortunate hillbillies are mistaken for murderous kidnappers and are attacked by the college kids.

Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) are a pair of best friends set out to a cabin in the woods of West Virginia to fix it up as a vacation home and do a little fishing. Early on in the movie you get the feeling that these two have known each other since they were little kids (which is proven in a line of dialogue later on), and they are a pair of really likable guys. 

In parallel, we have the stereotypical college kids heading out to the backwoods to party. The usual horror tropes follow: the kids are nearly in a car accident as Tucker is pulling out in the road, the kids are off-put by Tucker's appearance at a gas station, and Dale accidentally scares the crap out of the kids by trying to flirt with Allison (Katrina Bowden) whilst inexplicably holding a scythe (he was given advice from Tucker to "smile and laugh" and the payoff is both hilarious and slightly sad). 

Let's be honest here. He's adorable.

So, plot things happen, Allison cracks her head on a rock while getting ready to go skinny dipping, Dale (who is night fishing with Tucker and trying not to peep at Allison while she takes her shirt off) jumps in and saves her from drowning, and her friends see this:

"We got your friend!"

They assume that Dale is trying to eat her face. Because they're kind of dimwitted. They run off, leaving Tucker and Dale to return to the cabin with Allison. They bandage her head, dress her in some less revealing clothes, and Dale makes her breakfast. Twice. 

Meanwhile, back with the college kids, they are all assuming the worst has happened to Allison. Chad, the "leader" of the group, vows revenge. One character, Chuck, decides to go back to the car to drive into town and get help. Upon finding Tucker's cabin, everyone assumes the worst. Everyone except Mitch (whose name I only know because it's on his shirt), who keeps interjecting with actual logic. Such as: "perhaps they took Allison to the hospital," and "it's just a cabin, it doesn't mean they're psycho killers." Mitch is therefore the only smart one of the bunch. But he's still nervous about just going in there alone.

To be fair, this place does remind me a lot of the cabin in Evil Dead.

Meanerwhile, after some awkward explanations, Allison and Dale end up playing a trivia game together while Tucker does some yard work. All while this is going on, Mitch is approaching the cabin to talk with either Tucker or Dale, and Tucker is using a chainsaw to break up a tree stump. Which has a bee's nest inside it. This leads to Tucker fleeing the immediate area all while swinging the chainsaw around like Leatherface and causes Mitch (and the others) to run in a panic.

This is when the insane accidental deaths start happening.

Back with the trivia game, we're given a little more insight into Dale. It's revealed that he is incredibly good at retaining information but never made it past the third grade. He considers himself stupid because of that fact. Allison tells him: "there's a difference between education and intellect." 

In general, Dale has very low self-esteem. We see Tucker often try and boost the guy's mood and point out the positives in Dale's personality, but it's hard to just suddenly gain self-worth when it's so easy to think negatively about oneself. It also doesn't help when Tucker loses his temper with Dale and blames him for some things. 

Allison then proceeds to nail the premise of the movie on the proverbial head when she says that: "so many of the major problems and conflicts in the world are caused by a lack of communication."

Such as: "we've got your friend."

Tucker returns, covered in bee stings, and tells Allison that he saw one of her friends while he was outside. Allison suggests she go find them herself, but Dale is rightfully concerned about her leaving considering she hit her head hard enough to knock herself out for quite a while. Instead, he and Tucker head out.

Then the group of college kids find Mitch and assume that Tucker and Dale killed him. 

There's a nice touch here where one character is starting to call someone on her cell phone, but Chad breaks it in a fit, claiming that it'll never work out in the woods. She could have gotten a through to someone if the idiot hadn't destroyed her phone—which is a nice turn on the "phones don't work out here" trope so often used in horror movies. 

Chad is starting to show signs of being, well, a little unhinged. It does not help whatsoever that he and the other college kids overhear an out-of-context conversation between Tucker and Dale. It really doesn't help when Dale decides it would be a good idea to leave them all a note to let them know that Allison is safe. 

It really, really doesn't help that Dale wrote the note with a freaking axe.

So things get worse. College kids die like they're competing for Darwin awards. Allison gets knocked unconscious again, Chuck finds a cop who was established earlier on in the movie, and shenanigans ensue.

Stupid: diving headfirst into a wood chipper. 

The movie just keeps escalating from here on out, and I won't give away anymore spoilers because it's worth watching. Alan Tudyk is perfect, Tyler Labine is a big ole softy, and Katrina Bowden is blissfully normal (especially in comparison to the other two girls who are pretty much just caricatures).

Essentially, Tucker & Dale Vs Evil is a spoof movie for the "creepy/murderous hillbillies" horror genre. I would have liked to have a better idea of who each of the college kids were, considering I didn't know half of their names. That, however, is the only complaint I have for the movie on a whole. Well, that, and one continuity issue regarding fingers that bothered me. I do recommend it, though. 

Watch it for Tucker and Dale.

All in all, Tucker & Dale Vs Evil is a fun movie to watch. Go buy it, rent it, or whatever it.

Infinite Loops

Triangle 2009

Dir: Christopher Smith

Rated: R

I had a migraine by the time the end credits of this particular movie started. Because I felt like I'd been brained with the Confuse-O-Stick® and left to deal with what everything might mean in the consequences of the actions Jess (Melissa George) perpetrates. So this one's going to be shorter than usual. It starts off in a confusing place. I'd be more detailed about it all, but I'm still trying to patch the ragged quilt of plot together. It's not out of sequence in the way that Pulp Fiction was—where everything comes full circle and makes sense at the end. Everything does come full circle, but it still makes no sense.

Long story short, Jess is taking a boat trip with her friend Greg on a Saturday morning. She's preparing to leave and presumably takes her autistic son, Tommy, to school so he can be looked after while she's gone. But when she arrives at the dock, Greg can tell something is off with her because Jess looks incredibly confused. His other friends (Sally, Downey, Heather, and deckhand Victor) can't ignore her odd behavior and the girls rudely whisper like high school gossip hounds on the stern of the boat. At this point, even though I'm confused by Jess, I already really don't like Sally. I might have liked Heather if she'd spent more time in the movie. But that's giving away a plot point.

This is kind of like how I ended up looking by the end of this movie... Tired and confused.

They sail out until the wind just up and dies on them, and like in any good "scary" movie our heroes are headed right for a huge storm while stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Sure, they try calling the coast guard, but see it's an electrical storm so the radio is all messed up. Greg does get a hold of someone for a second who sounds distressed, but the storm capsizes the boat and Heather is missing when they all climb on the wreck and try to think about what to do next.

My question is: What was the point of Heather in the first place? I felt no emotional connection to her at all. She's a stranger to me and to Jess and Sally's frantic shrieking about her just makes me feel less. Because I do not like Sally. Sally needs to shut the hell up.

So they finally see this cruise ship heading toward them and climb on board when they see someone peek over the side on the upper deck. Jess keeps mentioning that she can't shake the feeling that she's been there before and everyone else doesn't believe her. She hears things in stereo at one point, finds her car keys on the floor, and they all split up once they reach the dining hall to see if they can find anyone to help them.

Since when is splitting up ever a good idea in these kind of movies?

Jess ends up on her own after a bit of an argument with Greg and, thanks to a mirror with "GO TO THE THEATER" written on it in blood, Jess eventually makes her way there. But not before an injured Victor tries to strangle her and she accidentally kills him when she shoves him away from her. Jess then runs to the theater and finds Sally and Downey screaming over Greg's body—saying she shot him and generally shrieking a lot. Both get shot by a masked figure and Jess runs.

She eventually fights the figure off and it warns her, muffled through the Scarecrow mask, that she needs to kill everyone to leave. Jess isn't having any of this nonsense and, after wresting the shotgun away, shoots this person and then watches as he/she falls overboard.

Then Jess sees the boat. The capsized boat she'd just been trapped on a few hours earlier. This means it was her that they'd all seen lean over the railing.

And so the infinite loop begins. Jess has to dodge her duplicate and find a way off the damn cruise ship. It just so happens that Scarecrow up there was right. Jess does have to kill all of these people to get back home to her son. So she dons the boiler suit, puts on the mask, and picks up the shotgun.

There are some really disturbing visuals of the piled-up bodies of Sally copies that just make me feel even more confused than I already was. Eventually, Jess reaches the point in the time loop where her "first" encounter with herself occurred. She lands in the ocean and wakes up on the beach back home.

I am still really confused.

Jess gets back home and, disturbingly, she overhears herself screaming at Tommy. Apparently she either blocked this from her memory or it's just another plot hole. In any case, Jess sneaks into her house and kills herself. In front of her son who, naturally, freaks out.

Is it considered "suicide" if you stuff your own body in the trunk and happen to be alive to do that?

Whatever. At this point I was glaring at the screen.

So after Mommy Dearest whacks herself and stashes the dead body in the trunk of the car, she proceeds to drive Tommy to school like nothing happened. She's telling him things will "be different" when a seagull rams into her windshield. Add this to the list of traumatic things Tommy's had to deal with in his morning. Jess gets out of the car to toss the gull over an embankment and we see a huge pile of seagulls much like the multiple Sally pile-up. My head really hurts at this point.

It gets worse. I'm just going to spoil the ending because I'm still a little mad at myself for watching this.

Because Tommy is upset about the bird blood still on the windshield, Jess is distracted and ends up steering into oncoming traffic. She is thrown from the car, but Tommy and her dead body are still in the wreckage. Strangely, she ends up standing near a taxi driver (who says nothing can be done for them) and asks him to drive her to the harbor.

Then the movie pretty much starts over.

Remember how I said Jess was a little out of it when she met Greg at the dock? Now we know it's because she's dealing with the whole "I killed my son" thing.

Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 81% on the tomato-meter (out of 37 critics, 30 gave it a "fresh" and 7 said it was "rotten"). I happen to fall in the other 45% of the audience that did not like this movie. I will admit the acting from Melissa was (as always) great. Perhaps it was just that the story idea was too much for my tiny brain to wrap around—the idea of filling up a cruise ship with dead bodies until one different fractal finally lets her get home when she can save Tommy from herself. Granted, it's a new twist on the whole "stalker killer" trope, but I didn't like these characters.

I get tired thinking about Triangle. On a scale of "NO" to "AWESOME" I give it a half-hearted "Meh."

Near Dark Vs. Twilight

Near Dark (1987) Dir: Kathryn Bigelow Rated: R

Twilight (2008) Dir: Catherine Hardwicke Rated: PG13

Here's a short summary of Near Dark from memory: Set in a small Oklahoma town, Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) meets Mae (Jenny Wright) one night. They like each other and Mae pretty much falls in love with Caleb once they get to talking. He offers her a ride home. They kiss, Mae gets a little carried away, and Caleb is suddenly on his own and feeling like he's got the worst flu known to man.

Because Mae is a vampire. Which means he is turning into a vampire.

The "v" word is never mentioned in Near Dark. Not once.

Wanting to keep him, and the secret of her and her traveling companions (and her undead family), Mae brings Caleb in to the fold to meet Jesse (Lance Henriksen), Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), Severen (Bill Paxton), and Homer (Joshua Miller). We soon find out that Mae is nothing like her companions. Jesse is the father-figure, Diamondback is his mate, Homer pines for Mae but can't do anything about it because he's too "young" (even though he's really the oldest out of all of them), and Severen...

Severen is just plan batshit crazy.

I'm not even kidding. He wears sharpened spurs on his boots. And uses them. Not against a horse or anything—on a dude's neck when Jesse and the rest of the family initiate Caleb. They only even consider counting him as part of the group on Mae's insistence and Caleb's kickass moment of heroics when he saves them all from pretty much the entire Oklahoma police force in the middle of the day. And this is after he's turned completely (but he still never killed anyone—instead feeding from Mae when he got too hungry). Which makes him just as flammable in sunlight as the rest.

Put to the test, Caleb can't stand the thought of killing someone else. Mae doesn't have the taste for it either and she's really fallen in love with Caleb. She gives him the chance to run off and save himself and his family (Homer wanted to turn Caleb's sister for himself—he's old and alone in his child's body and wants a companion just like him) is kidnapped while she watches over Caleb.

In an interesting twist of mythos, Caleb could be cured by a blood transfusion (which, strangely, makes sense). I won't go into why Bill Paxton looks like someone used his face as a bullet-ridden Brillo Pad in the original poster, but let's leave it at: "Most awesome death of a vampire in a movie ever." Mae saves Caleb's sister, makes it back to him a little worse for the wear (sun burnt just a wee bit), and they use the same blood transfusion trick on her. The ending says that you don't have to change to fit in or impress a girl. Be yourself. We like you guys best when you aren't posturing or killing bartenders with spurs.

Now let's take a look at Twilight. Bella meets Edward. Bella finds out Edward is a vampire (Stephenie Meyer's version of a vampire, at least). Bella meets Edward's family. More vampires (the ebil kind) come after Bella. Edward saves Bella from the other vampires. Thus: she loves him. Despite a lack of chemistry and the fact that Bella is all up for being dying to be with him (literally), this is somehow a good role model for teen girls because of the symbolism of saving yourself before marriage. Except it's not.

Twilight tells girls that they should change to keep the love of their life. Near Dark tells us all that you can still be yourself to meet your perfect match and that person—the one willing to learn more about you rather than wait for you to change so they can commit—is the one for you.

Near Dark is rated R and has no sex—just a couple of really hot kisses between two adults (and a lot of violence). Twilight is PG13 and has an underaged teenaged girl making out with a 130 year old vampire in her bed. In her underwear. *raises her hands in confusion*

My real question is, WHY DID THEY FEEL IT NECESSARY TO CHANGE THE ARTWORK FOR Near Dark?! I apologize for yelling, but tell me which looks better and/or cooler.

This one that I wanna frame and put up on my wall:

Damn, Bill! What the hell happened to your face?!

Or this garbage that misrepresents the movie completely and looks like the Photoshop Disaster to end all Photoshop Disasters (I mean, look at how awful this is)?

Damn, Adrian! What the hell happened to your face?!

I understand that they might feel like someone would look at a copy of this thinking: "huh, this looks like Twilight" and pick it up out of curiosity. Honestly? That first cover up there had me way more interested in it when I first picked it up. I wanted to know just what the hell happened to get Bill looking like roadkill.

Bottom line? Buy Near Dark or add it to your Netflix queue. Just watch it. It's far more romantic and exciting than Twilight. And the acting is miles better. In this fight, Severen kicks Edward's ass.