Tag Archives: Alamo Drafthouse

Ju-on

Lots of horror movies out these days, which means lots of chances to see Sarah Michelle Gellar taking a shower while a creepy Japanese curse causes fingers to appear out of the back of her head (or something like that) in previews of the latest Japanese horror remake, The Grudge.

I haven’t had a chance to see Ringu yet (it’s in my Netflix queue), but thanks to the delightful people who run the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain I had a chance to see Ju-on last night, a few weeks before the American remake hits theaters.

In any case, this one was a good, scary atmospheric piece. There’s this house, where it is established in the opening credits that a man previously went crazy and killed the hell out of his wife, son, and pet cat. Now people (the residents, remote family members, social workers, and police) wander in and out of the house for their various reasons, and some very angry dead people aren’t willing to stand for it.

The narrative is split up into randomly-sized and ordered chunks exploring the consequences of each individual’s passage into the range of the grudge. This works really well for the first hour and change of the movie. Unfortunately, the last two such scenes don’t make a lick of sense, and I left the movie with no idea how things had turned out or what the ultimate cause behind the evil was, or even if I’m supposed to know these things or not. But that’s okay, because I went for the creepy atmosphere, and got that in spades.

I’m still going to watch the remake, though. My hope is that an American director will insist on some coherence near the end. If I’m really lucky, it will cohere and also explain what was going on in the original, instead of just cohering by him making something entirely new up instead. Plus, Buffy in a shower. I mean, by far not my first choice of BtVS characters to see nekkid, but neither will I turn down what I’m offered. (Anyway, I’m sure there will be no nudity and that I’d have gone to see it no matter what. But you never can tell.)

Placer Sangriento

mv5bmti5mjq1njiwnv5bml5banbnxkftztcwmtkzodeymq-_v1_A few months ago, the Alamo Drafthouse was showing Night of the Bloody Apes on the Weird Wednesday midnight show. I was all prepared to go and had talked Laylah into joining me, but she had to be on a plane the next morning and didn’t want to miss the sleep. Luckily, Netflix had it. Unluckily, she hasn’t had time to come over and watch since it arrived, what with the law school thing going on. But, in the meantime, I’ve watched the rest of the DVD, which included Feast of Flesh and a wealth of special features designed solely for me.

Lots of previews for movies far too bizarre to remember anything of. Four short subject films, including a burlesque of a stripper (eventually down to pasties and whatever passed for a thong in the 1950s) being carried around by an ape, a short of four topless chicks bathing with each other in a stream on film stock that would have embarrassed Zapruder, a female wrestling championship round announced by the most condescendingly misogynistic man I’ve heard in a really long time, and, um, a fourth one.

As for Feast of Flesh, it was your average Phantom of the Opera knockoff where the masked organ player stalks the 20-something party set on the beaches of Argentina, first hypnotizing young women in dated bikinis with his music (which, to be fair, had a haunting quality to it) and then overdosing them with heroin once they annoy him and leaving their bodies strewn on the beaches. And he might have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those pesky cops!

The plot has nothing to recommend it; I was just barely able to keep my attention on it over the three days it took me to watch, and I’ve reconstructed some of the particulars from the imdb link above. It’s not impossible that I simply made up other details. If you can watch it and get a more accurate summary of what happened, then you’re a better man than I.

The reason to watch this, aside from the outstanding extras from a bygone movie era, is to laugh at what Argentinians and Americans considered shocking in 1963, including topless dancing girls, topless ocean swimmers (in all cases, the nudity can only be verified in slow-motion or frame-by-frame), bodies with large hypodermics sticking out of the chest, and lipstick lesbian volleyball players. According to imdb, that was enough to earn an X-rating in the United States. In any case, I’ve revealed every interesting point the movie has to offer, so unless you’re actually me (I’ve found that very few people are), give this one a pass.