Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: horror

  • 27 Movies: The A-Z Film-a-thon “Underdog Edition” — Day 5: Dracula: Dead and Loving It

    I went to school and I got the big D.

    I started this entry with a different D movie in mind and almost immediately regretted it. For years, I had somehow convinced myself that the famous “April 25th (the perfect date)” meme came from Drop Dead Gorgeous, so I picked that for this series and wound up disappointed on multiple levels. It turns out the quote is actually from Miss Congeniality, which left me feeling like I deserved to wear a critical dunce cap for the rest of the week. Drop Dead Gorgeous had its moments, mostly because the cast seemed to be having fun, but it was sloppier, more grating, and more strangely offensive than I expected. Also, it should probably receive a special Razzie for worst sound effects editing of all time. I gave it a 3/10 and moved on.

    When Plan A crashes and burns, it is time for Plan B.

    Day 5: Letter D

    Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks, 1995)

    “Put him in a straightjacket and give him an enema. Wait—give him an enema first, and then put him in the straightjacket.” [self-satisfied smirk]

    Considering how little I tend to like vampire movies, I sure have seen a lot of them. In my imagination, I think I love the trope of vampires because it takes me back to childhood, when my older siblings would tease me by playing up my Transylvanian heritage. They would say, “I want—to suck—your blood, bleh bleh…” and I would get scared and go cry in the corner. I keep watching vampire movies, but I think the only ones I truly like, I can count on one hand: Fright Night, Let the Right One In, What We Do in the Shadows, Only Lovers Left Alive, and the 1922 Nosferatu.

    Even though I do not think they are great movies, I love Dracula movies for all the tropes they carry forward from the early days of cinema. One of the most memorable shots in Murnau’s Nosferatu is the shadow of Count Orlok’s hand creeping into frame and clutching at the damsel’s heart. It looks cool, but I could not tell you what is literally supposed to be happening there. My best guess is that the shadow represents Orlok’s dark soul reaching for the purity in Ellen and crushing it like a candle flame. A trope was born, and ever since then Dracula movies have loved showing the vampire’s shadow interacting with the world in ways that reflect unconscious desire rather than the laws of light. Why should this make sense?

    The shadow is a central gag in Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and it delighted me because it gets at something few vampire comedies are willing to say outright: this lore makes no sense. Vampires may very well be ripe for lampooning, but most parodies still treat the basic mythology as something to preserve. There is usually an unspoken rule that you can joke around the lore, but not puncture it completely. What We Do in the Shadows, for example, mostly plays vampire rules straight. Its humor comes from mixing immortal creatures of the night with the awkwardness of an Office-style mockumentary. The joke is not that vampires are incoherent as a concept; it is that these vampires are ridiculous people. Dracula: Dead and Loving It goes further. It keeps nudging at the idea that the whole mythology starts to fall apart the moment you examine it too closely. I suspect that is one reason audiences resisted it at the time. In movies, Santa Claus and vampires occupy the same strange category: they simply must exist, and the moviemaking spell breaks the moment anyone suggests otherwise.

    What definitely works in Dracula: Dead and Loving It is that it is a Leslie Nielsen vehicle, and I am happy to go along with it. Some of its best scenes run on absurd comic logic delivered with total seriousness, which at times reminded me of the Marx Brothers. That is one of the highest compliments I can give a comedy, though I will stop short of putting it in their league. I can easily imagine Groucho making a meal out of Dracula’s ridiculous Coppola-inspired hair, treating it like some bizarre hat he wore around the house for no reason. Groucho, however, would never have repeated the joke in the third act by literally checking it in at a party and calling it a hat. That moment really stinks, and it contributes to the sense that a tug-of-war was happening behind the scenes. Every so often, certain bits feel as though they survived less because they were the funniest choices than because somebody in Hollywood worried the trailer needed a few easy visual gags. More than once, I had the strange feeling that I was not supposed to be liking this as much as I did.

    I think the biggest reason Dracula: Dead and Loving It was such a dud at the time was its grotesque, hard-R violence, which reaches too aggressively for laughs through shock imagery. I cannot think of another vampire movie this explicitly gory besides the Blade films and Renfield, and those all came later. In my mind, the classic vampire belongs to a more quaint kind of horror, though I may just be projecting my own ideal version of vampires onto the screen. I want the horror to come from the idea of the vampire itself. I do not need a splatter cannon spraying blood at me. That sort of thing always makes me think, “Okay, I understand. Your movie is rated R. Congratulations.”

    While Leslie Nielsen is borderline great here, Mel Brooks casting himself as Van Helsing remains a baffling choice. Brooks’s comic persona is too rooted in cocky idiocy for the role to work. He carries himself less like a master vampire hunter than like a blowhard who wandered into the wrong movie. My guess is that Brooks may once have pictured himself as Dracula, but handed that role to Nielsen because Nielsen was more bankable numbskull, while Brooks was never going to convince anyone he could sell the picture as its title character. Even so, it is hard not to wonder whether the movie might have worked better with the roles reversed. Nielsen had much stronger “smartest guy in the room” energy, especially before The Naked Gun turned him into a patron saint of deadpan stupidity. He is very good as Dracula, but he might also have made Van Helsing into someone worth rooting for.

    If Dracula: Dead and Loving It is a bad movie, it is the kind of bad movie I would gladly watch whenever it turned up on cable. I was smiling and laughing out loud for probably 65 percent of it, because when the jokes land, they land with sharp comic timing. Had the film been a little less graphic, and had its reputation not become so tied to the amount of blood it spills—or rather, spurts—I can easily imagine it becoming a minor Comedy Central staple in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Instead, it slipped into a strange obscurity, even though it is less hokey and far more faithful to the spirit of its source material than Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I more or less hated that one, and came away thinking, “Mel Brooks, no more.”

    What is most surprising is that the failure of Dracula: Dead and Loving It seems to have ended Brooks’s directing career altogether. And yet, improbably, in 2026 he has completed the ultimate hat trick: Spaceballs: The New One has finished filming, entered post-production, and even coaxed my favorite actor, Rick Moranis, out of retirement. Even when everyone inevitably tells me this one is terrible too, I am still going to see it. At this point, I am old enough to know better than to take a Mel Brooks-directed comedy for granted.

    6.5/10

  • A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017)

    A sheet, a pie, and a lot of waiting

    David Cross once called Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked “the most miserable experience of my life.” He only did it for the money, as he wanted to find funding for some of his own passionate projects. Sensing utter desperation, a producer coerced David into conditions he felt were pointless. In one scene, he wore a Pelican mascot costume, for real, for days worth of filming during extreme humidity. A stunt person or extra could have been in the costume instead, and, even worse, his character was not even supposed to actually be in the costume. The audience was only supposed to think that he *might* be in the costume.

    I thought of that while watching this haunted little movie. Apparently, Casey Affleck was always underneath the sheet in A Ghost Story—a lot more than he ever needed to be for the experience to be, I’d say. Sometimes, hiring a major actor for a role where you can’t see their face qualifies as stunt casting, especially when they are given so little to -do-.

    .

    The visuals are the primary draw here. Everything is impeccably framed, with a little bit of vignette on the outer corners of the frame. It’s as though a ghost is remembering their past as if they were watching a vintage home movie. There is a Tsai Ming-Liang level of action happening onscreen here. I feel like I need to research more about the house where this was shot. Whereas in Goodbye Dragon Inn, Tsai focused on a movie theater’s final days before it was shut down, focusing on all of the grody little details that still existed there: the leaky roof, the cruisiness of its usage by gay men. I felt like Tsai looked at the theater, saw it was going to be demolished, so he gave an assignment to himself. How can he capture the majesty of a theater, it’s downfall, and somehow preserve it. Goodbye Dragon Inn was a movie about the very worst days of a once majestic theater.

    A Ghost Story’s backstory is a little less noble. Yes, the house was condemned, but the story came first. David Lowery found a house from a list of buildings that were to be torn down and used the film’s budget to fix it up to make it look more livable as a family home before its eventual destruction. Whereas in Goodbye Dragon Inn, Tsai incorporated a character who moved extremely slowly with one leg that couldn’t move so you could really take in the atmosphere of the theater, there are shots in A Ghost Story where nothing happens for almost no reason. The most memorable scene in A Ghost Story comes when Rooney Mara grabs a dish left for her on a table, sits at the wall for some reason, and pierces the fork right in the center of the tin. I thought “Are we going to watch her eat this entire pie in one shot?” There is nothing else to look at. There is a ghost and a piano. Old, undecorated suburban houses are not that interesting to look at, so we just watch her, chomping away.

    I liked the pacing of A Ghost Story. It was like Tsai Ming Liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul without the purpose. There is nothing that makes me roll my eyes as quickly as the idea that a ghost might be haunting an old house, but I do love the folklore tradition of ghost stories. There is truth in that aspect, that ghosts are more bound by a location than by time. I understood the main point of the movie: someone who believed in his own love so deeply that, once he died, he becomes his own self-fulfilling prophecy. “Wait… I have been haunting myself for years? Why?” Tsai makes slowness feel like observation; Lowery makes it feel a little like homework.

    7/10

  • Day3: Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987) review

    A-Z “Hidden Gems” Film-a-thon Day 2

    “One day, when you are famous and everyone knows your name, people will see this and laugh at you.”

    “Good. I hope they do. I am quite happy with how it turned out.”

    That was an exchange I once had with my sister about one of my own early creative projects, the album Mad Cow Disease by my high school musical group, The Cadets of Temperance. My college-era zombie movie, Oh, No! Zombies!!!, inspired similar reactions from older relatives who seemed less charmed by my artistic instincts than I was. Other people involved had supportive families. Mine sometimes looked at what I was making with the expression of people being asked to admire a live electrical fire.

    So I feel a certain kinship with Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste.

    Watching it, I kept imagining Jackson showing this thing to his family at age twenty-four while they tried to process what exactly they were seeing. “What is this?” “Why do the aliens have human disguises that still leave their giant butt cheeks exposed?” “Why does the man with the head wound keep putting his brain back into his skull and carrying on?”

    To my disappointment, Jackson never seems to have offered a great canonical explanation for the aliens’ protruding rear ends. But with a title like Bad Taste, perhaps he felt no obligation to. If anyone questioned the exposed buttocks, he could always point to the marquee and say: I warned you.

    The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of men battling grotesque aliens in rural New Zealand. The creatures look a bit like something Jim Henson might have designed on weekend during a high degree fever. One character, Derek, suffers a catastrophic head wound early on and spends much of the film scooping fallen brain matter off the ground and stuffing it back into his skull. At one point, he even seems willing to supplement his own supply with alien brain. This is not a movie in which medical distinctions matter.

    What struck me most was not the story, which barely qualifies as one, but the brute fact of the movie’s existence. I watched it on Plex without subtitles, which did it no favors. The accents are thick, the sound often resembles dialogue captured inside a coffee can, and the image has that faded, fragile look common to low-budget productions. And yet the camera, while shaky, is never hopelessly amateurish. The movie may not be polished, but it is recognizably a movie. That already puts it ahead of many ambitious homemade projects.

    Bad Taste is less a world than a continuity exercise. Nothing in it feels fleshed out enough to support a larger mythology, and Jackson does not seem especially interested in coherence for its own sake. What he is interested in is getting the shot, finishing the effect, solving the problem in front of him. That is the real subject of the film.

    Jackson plays Derek, the memorably concussed hero, but he also seems to play half the surrounding population. So many characters look suspiciously like Peter Jackson with slight variations in beard, wig, or voice that the film begins to feel like one man arguing with himself across New Zealand. From a strict continuity standpoint, it is not impressive. I noticed missing details, shifting visual elements, and the usual evidence of a production held together with stubborn improvisation. But Jackson was operating under absurd constraints, including the small matter of having to act in multiple roles while also making the movie.

    And that is why Bad Taste matters.

    Not because it is a great film on its own terms. It is not. The writing is thin, the world-building is nonexistent, and much of the humor depends on the audience finding sheer excess funny. But the movie proves that Jackson had the one quality no school can really teach: full commitment. He shot the thing over four years, beginning with a self-financed budget of 25,000 New Zealand dollars before receiving further support from the New Zealand Film Commission to complete it. He had no film-school polish because he had never gone to film school at all. He left school young (age 16), taught himself by doing, and turned this movie into his education.

    In that sense, Bad Taste was his film school. Cheaper, too. The only thing he really missed were the writing classes.

    I made Oh, No! Zombies!!! the summer before my senior year of college and used its music for my final project. My presentation got honors largely because the professors laughed constantly while I explained how the movie had been made and how all the pieces fit together. I had been inspired by Ed Wood and by the worst zombie films I could find. What inspired Jackson here is harder to pin down. Bad Taste does not feel fully enough formed to be parody, and it is too odd to read as straightforward homage. It feels instead like a prototype for the grotesque brilliance he would later achieve in Dead Alive/Braindead: the early, unstable version of a sensibility not yet fully invented.

    I tried to watch Bad Taste when I was a junior in college and gave up. At that age, time felt too valuable to spend on something this ragged. I should have stuck with it. Watching it now is a little like seeing an early bicycle built by the Wright Brothers and asking why it does not fly. Of course it does not fly—that was never the point. The point is that it moves at all, that someone figured out how to make it work, and that they carried it across the finish line. Bad Taste is that kind of movie: less impressive for what it achieves on screen than for the fact that it exists, undeniable ragged—but overall complete.. Most movies, even now, never get that far.

    4/10

  • The A–Z Hidden Gem Film-a-thon Returns

    27 days, 27 movies—one for every letter of the alphabet, all chosen because they might secretly be great.

    Last year I attempted something maybe ridiculous: I watched 27 movies—one for every letter of the alphabet (with an extra number entry)—all pulled from my IMDb watchlist. The idea was simple: pick movies I had been meaning to see for years but probably wouldn’t get around to otherwise. These were all well reviewed movies, that had 80 or higher on Metacritic.

    This year I’m trying a different angle. Instead of clearing out the backlog, I’m hunting for hidden gems: movies that the world seemed to ignore, dismiss, or misunderstand, but that might actually speak to me. Some will be under-appreciated oddities. Some will be cult favorites. Some might be fascinating disasters (think Showgirls, or Joker: Foie a Deux, maybe. The only rule is that they are movies I suspect I might genuinely enjoy—even if almost nobody else did.

    For the next 27 days, I’ll watch one film for each letter of the alphabet and write about it here.

    We begin with not A, but a numeral. The # 8, specifically.

    The first film is one I know almost nothing about: 8-Bit Christmas. Yes, today is St. Patrick’s Day, and yes, it is definitely a Christmas movie. But the title alone is enough to intrigue me. I grew up in the NES era, and the idea of a movie about childhood Nintendo obsession has enormous potential.

    What I’m hoping for, honestly, is something stranger than the trailer probably promises—maybe a world where Neil Patrick Harris and June Diane Raphael somehow get rendered into chunky 8-bit sprites and have to fight their way out of a video game.

    Hopefully that’s what I am getting with this one. Fingers crossed. Wish me luck.

    The A–Z Hidden Gem Film-a-thon Returns

  • Day 6: The Witches (1990)

    Goal: Find a horror movie I wish I’d seen as a kid.

    What I know about it:

    Based on a Roald Dahl book — which I never read — though I did start the graphic novel adaptation by Pénélope Bagieu. I loved that version. It felt like the perfect bedtime story to read to all the imaginary historical figures in my head who wanted to learn about modern life. That’s probably the best way to describe both that time in my life and the tone of the story itself.

    From the marketing I remember, The Witches looked like one of those kids’ movies built around the trope of adults conspiring over a terrified child — laughing maniacally, looming above him, and plotting his doom. The trailer had shots that could’ve been outtakes from A Clockwork Orange, which was probably close enough to my recurring nightmares that I wasn’t exactly rushing to buy a ticket. For reasons unknown, my dad — who took me to almost everything — skipped this one.

    After the movie:

    “Your grandmother just has a slight case of diabetes, that’s all.”

    What an odd way to introduce kids to diabetes. The movie hints that sugar is essentially poison for Grandma, yet nothing comes of it — no payoff, no consequence. Was that just a random subplot or a witch’s failed hex? Either way, it’s bizarrely specific for something so pointless.

    The Witches starts strong but has aged unevenly. The early 1990s were the dark ages of “clever kids versus magical villains” movies. We took what we got — and we liked it.

    Anjelica Huston gives one of her best-known performances as Miss Ernst, the Grand High Witch. If you don’t love watching her tear off that mask and putting it back on, adjusting her nose with perfectionistic concern, you and I probably wouldn’t get along. The makeup effects rule the movie, but it is Huston who owns it — she’s the part everyone still remembers 35 years later.

    The film loses steam once the mouse transformation happens. By today’s standards, the “mousecapade” section feels slow and static. Director Nicolas Roeg, best known for Don’t Look Now (one of the best and dullest horror films of the 1970s), brings striking cinematography but not much momentum. Jim Henson’s studio did the effects, and it shows — the witch makeup is brilliant, but the mice barely move.

    Realizing Henson’s studio was involved gives The Witches some weight in cinematic history. It’s often described as “intensely frightening,” though today’s kids — raised on Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings — would find it pretty tame. What ultimately holds it back is its small scale.

    There was a 2020 remake directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch. It’s technically longer but adds no substance. IMDb reviewers called it “needless” and existing for “no good reason.” Hathaway’s wandering accent doesn’t help — part Russian, part Scottish, part… something.

    The acting in the 1990 version is otherwise strong, except for Jasen Fisher as the boy. He has that vague, untrained-kid energy common in early ’90s movies. My friend Josh pointed out he looks just like Macaulay Culkin, which only made me wonder why Culkin wasn’t cast instead. He would’ve worked great. Roeg probably just said, “Can you read these lines without tripping? Great — you’re a mouse!” Everyone else, though, is Harry Potter-level casting.

    So, who should watch The Witches in 2025?

    I go by the Goosebumps rule: those books were perfect for my inner eleven-year-old, but by twelve I’d already outgrown them. No respectable parent should show The Witches to a child under nine — but that’s exactly who will love it most. They’ll be just traumatized enough to think it’s great.

    A pretty good movie, but its usefulness today is limited.

    7/10

  • Weapons (2025) movie review

    Zach Creggor’s latest taps into many of the most expected small town fears.

    Early in the movie Arrival, the feeling of fear seemed very familiar. When Louise (Amy Adams) walks into her classroom to teach at her prestigious university, only a handful of students are present. Didn’t you hear? Alien spaceships are hovering over our largest cities. The human race might be done.

    Sigh… everyone go home.

    As Arrival was to 9/11, Weapons is to Columbine, or perhaps Sandy Hook. Early in the movie, there is a town hall meeting for all of the parents of the students who ran out the front door in the middle of the night into the darkness and haven’t been seen since. They were all from the same classroom, which drives the parents to dabble in conspiracy theories. Witchcraft?

    Julia Garner as Justine, one of the many lead characters that swap in and out in Weapons.

    The principal invited the teacher of the classroom, which quickly becomes a notable mistake. “Why is she here?,” exclaims Archer (Josh Brolin), as he explains, rather ignorantly, why she is the only plausible explanation for what happened. If there is one thing I know about town hall meetings from TV shows (Parks and Recreation), it’s that they tend to groupthink themselves into the lowest common denominator.

    The characters, who swap in and out as leads across a half-dozen overlapping stories, are rough clichés for this type of suburban town—which is probably the point. Everyone is drawn quickly and given a quirk or two, but there’s nothing to anyone that makes them feel like more than archetypes. This story could happen anywhere, we come to believe.

    The villain here is likely to be referenced among horror movie buffs as one of the best of the twenty-first century so far. Does the occult really work like this? How does one acquire the capabilities of a level 16 wizard? Could no one roll a die and escape the cold grasp of a terrifying lich that seems to acquire whatever they want?

    Cary Christopher as Alex. Terrified of terrifying?

    The movie doesn’t quite make sense. The biggest problem is the ease with which Archer triangulates the exact location of the destination point that the kids ran to in the middle of the night. He knows the degree by counting the number of concrete slabs the kids ran over. The problem? All of the kids ran out the front door and then straight ahead. What is the likelihood of that? Every kid’s house pointing directly to the same center point? It’s as though everyone built their home so they could walk out the door and be inspired by the emperor’s glorious house on a hill. City planning doesn’t work that conveniently for amateur sleuths trying to solve an implausible mystery.

    Nonetheless, Weapons is atmospheric and extremely satisfying. The split narrative works well, showing several different characters, flaws and all, in ways that overlap and converge unexpectedly. I thought of Doug Liman’s Go mixed with Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. I hope that reads like high praise, because it is. Director Zach Cregger almost convinces us that this silly premise contains a story that needed to be told. I don’t believe the evils of the world work this way—but this movie made me feel like they could, and that’s what makes it linger.

    7.5/10