Omni's Random Video Noise

It's weird too, cause it kicks around a bunch of stuff I really don't like.

Useless scenes where people say seemingly significant but meaningless things ("He SEES you!"), jumpscares (**** that ****), and the female lead coming on to the male lead right the royal **** out of NOWHERE (it's offhandedly excused with another version of that Who Framed Roger Rabbit line, "I'm written that way").

All fairly stupid ****. I'd include "gore" in there, but honestly it's pretty dialed back and the special effects are a lot stronger than The Thing. Needa wig people out somehow, right?

And you know, that "wig people out" bit seems to conflict an awful lot with that "I don't want to watch a movie to feel bad" thing I said, but you know what? I can appreciate some creepy ****, a moody atmosphere, and you can be damn sure I'm on board for a movie centered entirely around the concept of GOING INSANE.


So, the idea is that Sam Neil plays an insurance investigator. Probably one of the grayest area jobs I've ever heard of. He looks to prevents scammers from being scammed. Alright. Kinda like those people who get paid a subscription fee to lay flowers and wreathes out to die on tombstones. Profiting off of death, but doing something superficially "nice", while altogether pointless.

Anyway, he gets dragged in to investigate the disappearance of Stephen King-esque horror author legend Sutter Kane. I'm partial to R.L. Stine myself, but in this universe Sutter Kane's books have literally reached Harry Potter levels of popularity.

****, really? Imagining a world where horror is that popular is already a sign of the end times.


I mean, really, I don't get horror, what's the ****in' appeal? The Walking Dead was best enjoyed as a drama (before Season 2 ****ed it up, gosh, what is it with Season 2s? You know how much I HATE Code Geass Season 2? Don't get me started.), why should scenes of rotting people ripping the intestines out of a horse appeal to me?

I don't know where I heard it, but someone somewhere sometime said that horror exists to supplement thrills to the lives of people who've been sheltered from such extremes besides.

I don't know if I can really accept that given how desensitized people are to that crap nowadays (which is still pretty scary when you think about it), but it certainly strikes a chord.

There's SOMETHING in these movies that appeals to people who are not me and I CANNOT figure it out.

I CAN figure out why I like In The Mouth of Madness though, and it's because as I've said before, I enjoy psychological thrillers. I like watching characters brought to the brink, and we get that in spades with Sam Neil's character who remains firmly, and understandably, skeptical that anything supernatural is going on for over half of the movie.

It's not like all the spooky reality-bending **** is falling on deaf ears though, he's joined by... some actress who doubles with Sam as our viewer surrogate. So while he remains firmly in denial, to help root us, she's the one going over the edge.

Somewhere past the halfway point though, the roller coaster crosses the peak and Sam's character, Trent, descends into total mind****ery. Everything from chronological anomalies to realities nested within themselves, it's friggen' nuts and I really liked seeing (or should I say NOT SEEING?) the Great Old Ones rise up whisk humanity away to places and for purposes we haven't the language to sufficiently describe.

If this is a "Lovecraft-type story", I'm on board. This falls into that same category shared by Titanic: flawed in some pretty big ways, but I find myself watching it over and over again so much that I gotta add it to my personal collection.


That kickin' theme song too.


Final Verdict:

[Pretty Good]


REWATCH UPDATE (5/22/2022):

In the Mouth of Madness is one of those movies that I was persuaded into liking, but not quite enough to add it to my collection, despite what I wrote above. I mention the "kickin'" music which bookends the movie, but watching it again it feels out-of-place. It feels more like a signature John Carpenter thing than an appropriate complement to the movie.

And I'm certainly fond of John Carpenter movies and their B-movie flavor in general, but watching this again the "B-movie flavor" came off as a bit aggressively bland.

The whole appeal of "B-movies" is ostensibly that, while lacking the budget, production quality, or aspirations of an "A-movie" it's still very entertaining in it's own humble cheeky way. I definitely get that impression from movies like Dragon Tiger Gate, The Stuff, or Returner, but those movies despite often looking worse, being melodramatic, or even unintentionally funny are at least a good romp despite or even because of those reasons. In the Mouth of Madness feels like it's trying to occupy that space, but it takes itself way too seriously.

I still like Sam Neil's character and his acting performance, and I still appreciate the psychological themes explored, but this movie doesn't really engross me and often I find myself waiting for the next semi-memorable setpiece. It takes a third of the movie just to get going, and honestly the best part of the movie to me was just the characters trying to get to the fictional town of Hobb's End. Once they're there, it's just sporadic exposition that means nothing to us as viewers (because it's just Sutter Cane going on about end-times and believing in reality vs. fiction) or townspeople standing around looking menacing.

When Sam tries to leave town and realizes his card keeps getting teleported back to face the mob, just the look on his face, without any words spoken, communicates so much about his headspace in that moment, where's coming to accept the absurdity of the situation, and he's making light of it, as he does when he laughs at his own movie before the credits.

Those moments were interesting, but the character development in this case is very stutter-y so we don't get much opportunity to dwell on Sam's decent into insanity.

The horror elements seemed more to be shock material than anything else, and unfortunately when you're trying to emulate the sort of well-known horror tropes of an established author like Stephen King, the scary children and mob with pitchforks thing just comes off as kinda phone'd in. There's even a scene where Main Girl is stopped by a group of bleeding and mutilated kids who make vague threatening statements, but she has like no reaction. And that's kinda my reaction.

Definitely view this movie in a much less positive light than I did before, but it's still a decent watch.


Final Verdict:

[Good]

Ikiru is by no means a bad movie, but unfortunately, I can't help but begin describing it as... a movie that shifts wholly back and forth between powerful moments and heavy-handed emotional drama.

I instantly recognize our samurai master,Takashi Shimura, as our lead and I think, "Hey! I liked him! Glad to see he's our lead this time." before opening narration informs us that he's already dead inside and about to discover that he has stomach cancer.

Following a great montage that takes a "**** yeah!" righteous stab at bureaucracy, our main man, who... I don't even know the name of. Section Chief? His name is Section Chief. Goes to a hospital and in a fairly roundabout way learns he probably has cancer. PROBABLY.

We never get any medical confirmation of that, or at least he doesn't. Seems a bit of a stretch to expect us to buy that he should be so certain he's doomed to die based on something a random stranger says. I think further emphasis on his interpretation of the how the doctors were acting would have telegraphed that information better.

Hell, this same plotbeat was told better in the song, Nightmare to Remember. I say it's better because we at least get the same impression from the perspective of the character. As far as he should know he really does just have an ulcer.

Anyway, he abandons work and rolls through various coping mechanisms. I say "various", but really he does two things:

He hits up a stranger who takes pity on him and takes him out partying and he tries to live vicariously through one of his upbeat employees.


I honestly expected to see more things, but immediately following that we timeskip to after he's died and we're told through LONG expository dialog by ******* bureaucrats at his funeral WHAT HE DID.

Apparently he sought out the problem that was presented to him at the beginning of the movie and decided to fix it, making a park which he dies in for thematic significance.

I REALLY don't think this was the best way to present this story. It rips me out of it to divorce us from the story's continuity at such an odd time only to flash forward and then flash backward, only giving us glimpses of what happened intermixed with a pretty meager attempt to redeem his co-workers, which we're shown doesn't even stick.

Way to depress the hell out of me. Not even the one guy who suddenly sticks up for him out of the blue does anything like quit out of conscience. It's just a very ugly snapshot of bureaucracy.

I agree, bureaucracy is an ugly thing, but is that all this movie was trying to tell me?

You might argue that the story is of this man's significance as someone who breaks the mold.

Alright, I could buy that, but unfortunately I feel the movie stumbles over that in the same way. Also I really can't get over Mr. Takashi's performance.

Make no mistake, we've got some great moments with him, particularly when his son lays into him with cutting accusations of greed and promiscuity, not to mention an inheritance dispute. WOW. WAY TO MAKE ME HATE THAT CHARACTER.

Friggen' nice. The biggest kick here is we never really get to see his son eat that sweet sweet karmic backlash by finding out what he did by snuffing his dad in his moment of weakness, no, for some reason everybody's just out of the loop that he knew he had cancer.

I really don't know how this serves the story. Everybody's ignorance just feels like trampling on a grave.

But honestly, my biggest issue with the movie is this:


It's that overacting again. It's that miserable, hunched, bug-eyed, look of horror on his face at all times that kills me. On top of his silence. He barely says anything most times, leaving people to wonder what's wrong with him and so scenes are just protracted out to a frustrating degree. I really liked the "Life is Brief" scene, but that should have been the climax for that arc in his development.

Isn't the common theme of knowing your doom, fear, followed by resignation? I don't feel like we ever got to that point. At the very least, we weren't able to share it with the character before he was whisked away into history.

I prefer Seven Samurai.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

Lifeforce immediately drops all pretenses at the beginning when it calls itself an adaption of a book called "Space Vampires".

Darn.

Alright, so how is the accurately titled, "Space Vampires"?

Well, the first half is dull, dull, dull, dull setup. It's very dull. Boring in fact, it's actually pretty boring. Mindnumbing you might say.

It begins out in space, SPACE!, where we got all the cool set design and then they find the vampires and bring them back to Earth where the rest of the movie takes place.

Oh... Earth... ( -__-)

It's just a lot of characters talking, speculating, becoming erotically transfixed with to the "perfect" nude woman who wakes up and starts sucking people's souls out. I guess that's risque, but I don't think the movie as a whole pushes the envelope far enough to be interesting.

THAT IS, until the second half of the movie where Patrick Stewart shows up, becomes possessed by Space Vampire Lady and wills an angry kiss from the nearest man.



Final Verdict:

[Meh...]