Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: reviews

  • 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

  • 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

  • Away We Go (2009) Review – A-Z “Hidden Gems” Film-a-thon Day 2

    Day 2: My A Movie

    I went through my giant 4,600-movie watchlist trying to find this week’s pick. I found three strong contenders: Atom Egoyan’s Ararat, one of the few narrative features about the Armenian Genocide ever to get any real attention; Sam Mendes’s Away We Go; and John Huston’s 1982 version of Annie. Ararat felt too heavy for the moment, and Away We Go seemed slight enough to ease into. My partner suggested the 1999 made-for-TV Annie with Kathy Bates, which is probably the “good” movie version anyway: closer to the Broadway tone, and without Carol Burnett seeming determined to prove how drunk a person can act on camera.

    Since I had just watched a kids’ movie, 8-Bit Christmas, I decided to keep things relatively light. Better, I thought, to start with lighthearted fare than go straight to the Armenian Genocide. So, away we go to…

    Away We Go (2009)

    The theater where I used to work played Away We Go during my time there, which meant that for a few weeks I saw the end of it over and over while cleaning during the closing credits. The song over those credits, “Orange Sky” by Alexi Murdoch, is by far the best thing about the movie. It is so good, in fact, that I can almost imagine Sam Mendes hearing it and deciding he needed to build a film around the feeling it gave him.

    That may sound flippant, but it gets at the problem. Away We Go feels less like a movie with something urgent to say than a movie assembled around a mood. Mendes, working from a script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, seems to want to make a lightweight road movie about an expectant couple drifting through America in search of home. There is nothing wrong with that in theory. In fact, it sounds promising: a small, funny, observant movie about adulthood, parenthood, and the panic of trying to build a life before the baby arrives.

    For a while, it almost works.

    Burt and Veronica, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, learn that Burt’s parents are moving to Belgium just when the couple had apparently assumed they would have family nearby for support. That premise is good enough to launch a movie. The trouble is that the script never quite makes the couple’s situation cohere. Did they move to Denver specifically to be near his parents? Were they already there? Was the pregnancy planned, half-planned, or an accident they are calmly absorbing? The movie wants the looseness of real life, where people do not always explain themselves in neat dramatic terms, but it never finds the confidence to make that vagueness meaningful. Instead, it often just feels underwritten.

    That becomes clearer as soon as the couple begins visiting the various people who are supposed to show them different models of adult life and parenthood. On paper, this is a strong structure. In practice, it produces a series of half-finished sketches. Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels are amusing as Burt’s foolish, self-involved parents. Allison Janney, meanwhile, arrives like she has been dropped in from an entirely broader comedy. Her character Lily is one of the most obnoxious people I have seen in a movie in quite a while, which could have been funny if the film understood her as a grotesque. The problem is that it seems to want us to accept her as someone Veronica would plausibly choose to spend time with.

    That is where Away We Go repeatedly loses me. The script wants characters to have relationships because the scene needs those relationships to exist, not because the story has made them believable. Veronica laughs with Lily, chats with her, and appears to enjoy her company. Fine. But why? What is the shared history there? What quality in Lily once made her seem worth keeping around? The movie never shows us. It simply assumes that because these two women are in the same room, we will accept that they are old friends. I did not.

    The same problem applies elsewhere. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s LN is memorable, certainly, but she does not feel like a person so much as a satirical parenting exhibit. She breastfeeds older children, co-sleeps to an absurd degree, and generally behaves in a way that is plausible enough to be recognizable but so exaggerated that she stops being useful as observation. That is the movie in miniature: it wants the authority of realism and the comic payoff of caricature, and it keeps straining itself by trying to have both.

    The first half of the film, at least, has enough oddity and momentum to keep a person engaged. The second half simply runs out of gas. The later stops on the road trip blur together, and the movie begins introducing dramatic material so abruptly that it feels less like life unfolding than screenwriters throwing fresh obstacles onto the road. Burt’s brother suddenly appears with a devastating marital crisis, and instead of deepening the movie, it feels imported from another draft. I do not object because bad things are unrealistic. I object because the screenplay has not earned this degree of melodrama. A movie about ordinary, mildly confused people can absolutely contain pain, but it has to arise from the emotional world the movie has built. Here it feels like the film panicked when it realized it had very little left to say.

    That, more than anything, is the disappointment of Away We Go. It is filled with the appearance of insight. It has tasteful music, shaggy dialogue, quirky side characters, and the outline of a human-scale story. But it never cooks any of it through. It gestures toward conversational wisdom, emotional honesty, and slice-of-life ambiguity without ever turning those qualities into drama. By the last stretch, I was no longer annoyed so much as bored. The movie had spent so much time pretending to be observant that it forgot to actually observe.

    The final emotional turn is where Away We Go really loses me. Veronica reveals that she never wants to have a wedding ceremony because her parents died when she was in college, and she cannot bear the idea of getting married without them there. Fine. That is sad. It is also, at some point, something a partner is allowed to find exasperating. The movie even gives Burt a scene where he is allowed to raise his voice, but he goes through the motions about something comparatively inane, as if the script wants credit for letting him yell without making him confront the one thing actually worth yelling about. Why is he not allowed to say the obvious? If Veronica does not want to get married, then she should admit she does not want to get married, instead of hiding behind the fact that her parents will always be dead and therefore can never attend the wedding. Veronica herself says they do not fight enough. Exactly. Happy couples fight. They especially fight about things this unreasonable. The movie’s refusal to let that argument happen is one of its most infuriating evasions.

    I went in hoping that Dave Eggers’s involvement might lead to something sharp and emotionally cumulative, if not exactly heartbreaking. Instead, Away We Go feels half-raw: all premise, tone, and suggestion, with very little finished thought underneath. You can nibble at the crispy edges and survive. But as a meal, it is about as satisfying as reheated hamburger.

    4/10

  • If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

    A minor masterpiece of stress, shame, and the feeling that reality is beginning to warp.

    The way Rose Byrne is shot and edited in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes her feel like an uncredited fifth character in Requiem for a Dream. If she were in that movie, audiences would be asking where her drugs are—but here, she needs none. Her mental illness behaves like a drug anyway, distorting time and flattening reality. She sees a therapist, though she is one herself. It makes you wonder: is this what my therapist is like when they’re not talking to me?

    Linda’s life collapses quite literally when a hole opens in her apartment ceiling—possibly from flooding, faulty plumbing, or maybe an alien in the walls. The film never clarifies, because Linda can’t. Her grip on cause and effect is slipping. At the same time, she is responsible for caring for her daughter, who can technically eat but refuses food because it feels “squishy,” and who is graded daily on how much she consumes. The entire household revolves around a single goal: getting her weight up to fifty pounds. Linda is never alone, yet utterly abandoned.

    Byrne carries the entire film, delivering a performance built on quiet humiliation and sustained dread. Linda isn’t heroic or admirable; she’s exhausted, brittle, and increasingly convinced she is failing at everything she is supposed to do well. Everyone else feels like a walk-on cameo. Conan O’Brien actually acts, briefly, and his presence reminded me of Dylan Baker in Requiem for a Dream: when someone is unraveling, the most others will do for them is ask a few questions and then discreetly step away.

    For a first feature, director Mary Bronstein shows impressive control. This could easily have been an amateurish mess—a pile of anxiety with no shape—but instead it becomes a low-budget, quietly devastating minor masterpiece. Byrne somehow landed a role most actresses would have killed for, had they known what Bronstein was after. Onscreen, it feels uncomfortably familiar.

    This is what I felt like during COVID.

    8/10

  • Day 12: Cube (1997)

    Goal: Find a movie I never heard of until it started showing up on streaming trends.

    —

    What I know about it:

    To me, this movie is an oddity. It’s like one of those titles that shows up on How Did This Get Made? alongside Death Spa or Chopping Mall—except this one actually has an overall good reputation. If it’s decent, why have I never heard a single respected critic mention it? Meanwhile, eXistenZ and Event Horizon weren’t exactly hits, yet people bring them up constantly on YouTube.

    The plot sounds intriguing enough: a group trapped in a mechanical maze that might be some layer of Hell. They move up, down, sideways—each new room maybe leading to freedom. I pictured Hellraiser by way of Saw, two movies franchises with famously devoted fans. So why doesn’t Cube ever come up in the same breath?

    I couldn’t find a proper trailer. I showed a clip to Josh on YouTube, and he wasn’t impressed. Maybe that’s a good sign. The movie doesn’t seem to sell itself, so maybe that is why no one has heard of it. He tends to like things that announce themselves loudly (Heretic, for example). Cube doesn’t seem to do that. Maybe the people who love it found it quietly—and showed it to their friends.

    I first heard of Cube in 2006, when it was the No. 1 most-borrowed DVD from Netflix in Carmel, Indiana. One month, it sat at the top of the local trends list like a mystery no one could explain. I’ve seen it pop up on other streaming charts since—but I’ve never once heard anyone talk about it. Ever.

    —

    After the movie:

    This was basically Canadian Escape Room: The Movie. Which is kind of impressive, considering it came out in 1997—long before “escape rooms” were a thing. I first heard of a real-life escape room in 2014, when they started popping up all over the West Coast. In Indianapolis, a place opened called The Escape Room. A year later, another one opened called Escape the Room. They weren’t connected, but I beat both. I was good, kinda—successfully completed both, where the success rate for each one was about 40%. Usually, I wasted time on red herrings, but I’d crack the last puzzle with seconds left.

    Cube didn’t invent the escape-room concept, but it definitely saw the appeal coming. Its roots are in point-and-click adventure games and Dungeons & Dragons modules. Sierra made some of the first “escape room”–style text adventures like Mystery House, where you typed in commands to make your way through puzzles. The version of this idea I played was Maniac Mansion — a Lucasfilm Games classic that added comic relief and actual personality. Every room in point-and-click adventure games is an escape room, and only the elite few wanted to think enough to make their way through those. The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam & Max Hit the Road are still two of the best games ever made.

    And before all that, there was Dungeons & Dragons. The legendary module Tomb of Horrors (Gary Gygax, 1975) was built entirely around the idea of a cruel puzzle dungeon. Players swapped horror stories about total party kills. The struggle was real.

    When I was a kid, that whole genre fascinated me. My favorite was Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, but I also loved Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers (1987)—a movie where Shaggy inherits a haunted mansion and has to solve puzzles to find a hidden fortune. Looking back, that was basically The Da Vinci Code for children.

    The problem is, puzzle-solving doesn’t translate well to film. Watching someone instantly solve something you never understood isn’t satisfying. It works in a game, or maybe a serialized show—like Batman cliffhangers: How will they get out of the conveyor belt trap this time? Stay tuned next week. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

    But Cube doesn’t build a world to make those puzzles matter. There’s almost no setup or lore—just math equations and quick deductions. The puzzles function as MacGuffins, filler between moments of panic. You can’t play along. You just wait to see who dies next.

    Still, it’s fun. The writing’s solid, and most of the acting works. The “villain” type might be the worst performer here—but that’s part of the fun. (Play “Spot the Worst Actor” at home and see if you agree.)

    The direction feels dated, full of leftover ’90s TV transitions. Even when there is gore, the whole thing looks like an episode of Goosebumps or early Buffy the Vampire Slayer—but cheaper.

    The ending, though, is a letdown. It just… stops. No emotional payoff, no moral, no world-building to make sense of anything. It’s one of those “Wouldn’t it be messed up if…?” movies that mistakes mystery for meaning. I think the implication is aliens—but it could be anything, and the movie doesn’t seem sure either.

    I liked Cube. I could almost recommend it. It deserves credit for being nothing like anything else from its decade, but it’s the kind of film that practically begs for a remake.

    5.5 / 10