I meant to get to these a few months ago, but they’ve lingered around. With Batman vs. Superman continuing Warner’s desperate investment in doing the Marvel/Disney thing, here’s a look at some franchise-fighters to have come before. A note: We’re keeping this literal this time, much as I wanted to get cheeky and include something like Kramer vs. Kramer.
Freddy vs. Jason
So much for humble beginnings. Freddy vs. Jason introduces itself on about as inopportune a note as a film can: a callback – sorry, a montage even – of the most striking mise-en-scene from earlier Nightmare films, intimating in a florid blast of death-marked imagery that those nightmares were, at least, you know, nightmarish in their giallo-inflected surrealist imagery and disturbed editing, not unlike a tone poem to rococo human flesh warping. While director Ronny Yu deserves a bucket of credit for accepting the “Go Freddy Kreuger” slant of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift’s screenplay and imbibing in a montage of scenes from the inarguably superior franchise, we’re drawn to that age-old adage about not reminding audiences of better movies in your film. Continue reading
Meant to get to this a couple months ago, but better late than never. With that Daredevil “Punisher arc” raving up a storm, I thought a review of a real dust-kicker was in order. 
The late ‘40s were a high noon for the horror genre, easily the most desecrated ghost town era for a genre that has reinvented itself time and time again. From the irrepressible expressionist deviants of the ‘20s to the chiaroscuro nightmares of the early Universal films in the ‘30s to the sly, insidious Val Lewton carnival of the early ‘40s, horror was on a hot streak for decades until it hit the ice wall of WWII. Not that the real world horrors of the war inherently superseded the desire to thaw out the terror of the cinematic variety, but the will to nightmare was to be discovered somewhere else until the dawn of the atomic age ‘50s films, before horror would draw its fangs and get downright pernicious with the turn of the ‘60s and the prestige variant of the genre in the New Hollywood of the ‘70s. In the century of cinema thus far, only the late ‘90s can go blow for blow with the late ‘40s for sheer abandonment as horror packed up and went out to the country to cool its heels. 
Although Universal was nearly dead in the water by 1946, RKO’s Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur B-movie cavalcade was just a few years past its prime, and Warner Bros. The Beast With Five Fingers, released in that year, isn’t a patch on the dueling acmes of that cluster: the impossibly well crafted Cat People and the impressionistic, lyrical I Walked with a Zombie. So obviously, and honestly, we’re grading on a curve with The Beast With Five Fingers when we champion it – after all, this was a year in which the near-dead quasi-corpse of the genre was struggling to let its vaguely beating tell-tale heart be heard. But, with Warner Bros. playing Universal Horror for the only time in the whole decade, The Beast With Five Fingers is about as studious and sturdy an update of the even-then hoary Old Dark House format as you might imagine a struggling studio to release when they were stepping their toes in the sand of a genre that wasn’t really their own. 
Years of experience with Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, the reigning post-Bava Italian giallo masters, will give you Stagefright. For Michele Soavi, actor and assistant director to the masters turned first-time director here, this meant conjuring up this 1987 pseudo-slasher as his big come-up. The original title, Deliria, being vastly more apposite, this is less a slasher dressed up in giallo airs than a giallo putting on slasher clothing to sneak into the mainstream so it can uncloak its true self when the moment beckons. Like any good disreputable giallo, Stagefright is a bodacious concoction of performance-art murders choreographed like installation pieces, on one hand, and pure, unbridled instinct and impulse on the other. So while the kills may be judiciously filmed and planned, Soavi never lets anything as trivial as common sense or good taste trounce on his funhouse; his film is orchestrated but never programmatic. 
Like a flash of incandescent light that’ll burn your eyebrows off while staring into your soul, Emir Kusturica’s Underground is the film Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful wishes it was. Even more indebted to a theoretically cloying magical realism than Life and yet so disturbed and delectably flaring in its madcap intersection of styles, Underground is a paean to not only human life but cinematic life excavated in the death throes of crisis. Imagine if you will Vittorio De Sica directing Abbott and Costello with a script written by Billy Wilder with Benny Hill on trombone just in case, all of whom were alternately inebriated and cocaine-addled during the production, and the beguiling war-time-as-apocalypse-rave-as-long-cavern-of-the-soul milieu of Underground is at least intimated in your ear. 
Extraordinary Tales
Warcraft is out in theaters this Friday generally doing nothing to save the video game adaptation from the cinematic crypt. In eulogy, here are reviews of four that have come and gone before.
Another year, another ho-hum Lewis Carroll adaptation. Cutting to the chase, here’s a review of the best one. 
Would that the rambunctious punk attitude halfheartedly flaunted by X-Men: Apocalypse in a few of its extremities (hair, costumes) had descended into its major organs as well. A structural makeover, with a rebellious narrative more fascinatingly fractured than the milquetoast clash-of-kings promised here, could have made Apocalypse more than the competent, if bog-standard, throat-clearing exercise it ultimately is. On some level, the film retreats from the structural excess of previous film X-Men: Days of Future Past , where an overlapping, byzantine time labyrinth sometimes got the best of the humans trapped in its machinations. The longer but ultimately leaner (read: simpler) Apocalypse is a little more punk and less Rush this time out, despite the de rigueur world-ending climax that’s more or less accepted by this point in superhero cinema history. But it never attains the snotty, vituperative snarl of the Sex Pistols, the discombobulated comic brio of the Ramones, or the stylistic omnivorous brashness of the Clash; instead, it expends quite a lot of energy wallowing around in a state of blissful neutrality, not accomplishing much but doing an acceptable workaday job arriving at its mostly trivial end-goal. 
The Long Take 