Daily Archives: August 4, 2008

Disaster Movie Poster Is Half True

Irritations, Musings, Posterized!

After cycling through a couple long-lead teasers early on, the main theatrical poster for Lionsgate’s forthcoming Disaster Movie, which of course echoes back to the crammed visual-gag posters for Superhero Movie, Scary Movie and all the other spoof flicks of the past half-dozen years, just goes kitchen-sink character collection, under the tagline, “Your favorite movies are going to be destroyed.”

I suppose I get all the superhero inclusions (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Hellboy), but then there’s visual riffs on… Juno, Enchanted and High School Musical? Plus animated flicks like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Kung Fu Panda? Am I the only one confused, and disheartened? Ever since Not Another Teen Movie, which actually had some smarts, these genre-spoofing titles have, broadly speaking, been on a big-time downward slide, from an already middling perch. And sure, cheats have been part of the last couple Scary Movie flicks, but are filmmakers (and I guess I’m thinking chiefly, though not exclusively, of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who’re jointly responsible for Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and now this latest flick) even trying anymore? Hell, are executives even reading scripts anymore, or are these things greenlit solely on a title and coverage written up by a 22-year-old intern fresh off the bus from Ball State?

I assume (hope?) there’s at least some tossed-off plot contrivance that serves as a tip of the cap to the title, but if you’re not trying first and foremost to lampoon genre conventions why call it Disaster Movie, I guess is my point — why not just Popular Movie, or Money-Making Movie? And, more to the point, can flat-tire “satires” of this ilk — which seem to consist of people dressed up like characters from other movies, doing bad impressions and getting hit in the balls or plowed over by speeding vehicles — be long for a world in which any number of YouTube creations can offer the same sort cheap, dumb, double-F laffs, and often do it much better?

Dennis Woodruff Is Still Around, Just So You Know

Amusements, Interviews

I missed it, from a few weeks back, but over at FilmStew, from the “keep on keepin’ on” files, Richard Horgan has up a nice happenstance-encounter riff about Dennis Woodruff, the wildly colorful and self-promoting aspirant actor-filmmaker whose armada of intricately decorated and customized automobiles are familiar to most Los Angelenos. It seems Woodruff has a new 36-minute documentary, Surfin’ in the USA, available via his web site (it sounds like his Heavy Metal Parking Lot), and is otherwise just still exercising his creativity in nutty, idiosyncratic fashion.

The Midnight Meat Train

Film Reviews

A stylishly photographed but woefully thinly characterized slice of stalking terror, The Midnight Meat Train is a grim, bloody genre offering purely for hardcore horror fans. An adaptation of Clive Barker’s same-named short story, the movie can’t hold up in comparison to The Strangers, a far more skillful evocation of dread from earlier this summer, but it does possess a passably intriguing blend of artfulness and intensity, courtesy chiefly of director Ryuhei Kitamura.

Though they have the fifth installment in the lucrative Saw franchise not too far around the corner, distributor Lionsgate seems to be looking to distance themselves a bit from the horror game by fulfilling the contractual obligation of a theatrical release for this film, but dumping it in a scattered assortment of discount to mid-range theaters nationwide, including no single major venue within the greater Los Angeles area.

The English language debut of Japanese filmmaker Kitamura, The Midnight Meat Train finds a way to tweak and enliven standard-issue genre visuals much better than did fellow Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai in Shutter. The film’s cinematography and creative framing mitigates, or at least masks, much of the depravity of the narrative, which is the difference between this and mental rot like last summer’s Captivity, which was merely the nasty playing out of a string, a series of strung-together, artificially flavored torture sequences. There’s still a good bit of that grim sadism here, but The Midnight Meat Train has a certain tonal authenticity, not unlike Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.