Daily Archives: October 27, 2009

Beer Wars

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

The oldest known written recipe in the world is a formula for beer scratched out on a clay tablet, part of an epic poem devoted to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of mood-altering liquids. Yet if you’re anything like me, regardless of which lagers you enjoy either at home or out with friends, you haven’t necessarily spent a whole lot of time thinking of your beer purchase as representing a dollar-for-dollar vote in some larger, sprawling corporate crusade for sociocultural dominance. Anat Baron’s Beer Wars is the movie to change that. An eye-opening, wildly engrossing documentary about how corporate beer giants work to intimidate, silence, swallow up and sink independent brewers, this no-holds-barred exploration of the American beer industry reveals the truth behind the label of your favorite beers.

Somewhere there exist fuller, complete notes on Beer Wars, bristling with deeper comparative insights regarding this movie. At least that’s what my gut tells me. But the truth is I cannot now find them, so I have no proof of such claims. So was I drunk when I watched this DVD? Am I drunk now? Both? Like Brittany Murphy in Don’t Say a Word, I’ll never tell. But I can definitively say that Beer Wars exists at the intersection of overall topical interest and quality, deftly interwoven third-person human interest stories, which is a sweet spot not many documentaries hit.

An industry insider (albeit an unlikely one, given that she’s allergic to alcohol), Baron is the former general manager of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which she joined early in its existence and helped quickly move up in the market, to over $200 million in annual sales. Baron is neither a Michael Moore-style crusader who impresses her personality upon every frame of her movie, nor a deep-tissue massager of newly unearthed, difficultly won facts, but her movie sheds light on what are now the two mammoth beer corporations — Anheuser-Bush and MillerCoors, the latter of whom merged late in production on the film — who continue to push out and squash the American dream of the small business brewers, whom Beer Wars unabashedly argues have a deeper interest in taste and quality. A small handful of original animation interstitials by David Stone and
Casey Leonard, meanwhile, are peppy and engaging, even if they come off a bit like
a page ripped out of the playbook of The Kid Stays in the Picture or some Moore film.

Interwoven with some noodling around by Baron herself, this story of status quo protection is told chiefly through two of these entrepreneurs battling the financial might and dodgy tactics of Corporate America. Sam Calagione (above) is the personable founder and CEO of Dogfish Head, a Delaware microbrewery, and a guy whose ambition doesn’t seem to outweigh his zeal for a quality product; he’s into smart, modulated growth, which means not taking his company headlong into some harebrained public offering. Meanwhile, Rhonda Kallman, a former executive and co-founding partner at Samuel Adams, has dreams of introducing a caffeinated beer into the market, and works individual storefronts and bars in Boston and the Northeastern corridor to try to make her dream a reality. They’re each great subjects — interesting and relatable.

In trying to understand how unbalanced the beer industry is, Baron discovers an incredible connection between beer and politics, which leads to an explanation of the three-tiered distribution system, established after Prohibition, and why the big players are so intent on preserving their 75-year-old monopoly. This is probably the most fascinating part of the film, and one that could have used a bit more investigative muscle, or naked provocation. The issue here isn’t about the protection and integrity of laws governing underage possession and consumption; it’s that the biggest players seek by hook and by crook to leverage their already ridiculous competitive advantage, pressing for even more favorable legislation (over 37,000 laws and counting) even though the current distribution method basically obliges micro-brewers (who can’t sell their products online, obviously) to use delivery trucks bought and paid for by Anheuser-Bush and MillerCoors, who can then directly limit and otherwise blunt the impact of their competitors’ market penetration. This wouldn’t fly in any other industry; free market proponents would have an absolute shit fit.

Beer Wars comes to DVD presented in a 16×9 aspect ratio, with a nice array of supplemental features, including deleted scenes, extended interviews and a post-screening (if I recall correctly) chat with Baron and her subjects moderated by none other than Ben Stein. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Definitive Proof of Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day’s Existence

Ephemera, Trailer Watch

Although I typically loathe anything that would give IGN any additional traffic, five minutes from the opening of the sequel to Troy Duffy’s 1999 shoot-’em-up The Boondock Saints is now online, definitively proving its actual existence. More later in the week regarding the movie, which is… something. Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day opens on October 30 in limited release.

 

Stan Helsing

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Stan Helsing is written and directed by Bo Zenga, an executive producer of Scary Movie, a producer of Turistas and the writer of Soul Plane, which is a list of credits that may not inspire much in the way of qualitative expectation. But, somewhat surprisingly and definitely pleasantly, his well cast comedy lampoons contemporary film audiences’ familiarity with the horror genre without ever stooping to senselessly overloaded referential gags, like Disaster Movie or Superhero Movie. Coming off a brief theatrical engagement in select cities, and now out on DVD, the movie stands as a perfectly acceptable Halloween weekend treat for those who like their spook-season entertainment vacuumed mostly free of fright.

The film centers around the misadventures of hapless, hands-off video store clerk Stan Helsing (Steve Howey) and his three pals — ex-girlfriend Nadine (Diora Baird), Teddy (Saturday Night Live‘s Kenan Thompson) and dim bulb massage therapist Mia (an exuberant Desi Lydic). During what should be a routine delivery before heading out to a Halloween evening party, Stan and company find themselves stranded in a mysterious residential development known as Stormy Night Estates. There, Stan learns of his true destiny as a descendant of the legendary monster hunter Abraham Van Helsing, and engages in a battle against evil in the form of character parodies of a half dozen movie monster icons — Jason, Leatherface, Freddy, Michael Myers, Pinhead and Chucky. The big dramatic wrap-up involves double entendres, mock-dream endings, a karaoke showdown… and comedy legend Leslie Nielsen in a small role as a waitress. Yes, a waitress.

Zenga elicits winning performances from his main cast, but also smartly divvies up lines so that the burden of this most excellent adventure is shared, with everyone having a stake in its harebrainedness. Some amusing if inessential early sight gags and jokes rooted in familiar stereotypes of ethnicity (video store customers returning copies of The Ring all drop dead in a pile, while African-Americans dissect The Blair Witch Project and hypothesize this is why black people don’t go camping) eventually give way to comedy of a slightly higher degree of difficulty. Yes, this movie features three bathroom sequences, and some foley fart work, but its dialogue is also funny and, more importantly, consistently true to character. When Terry talks about the phenomenon of “urban mirages,” or when Mia queries a hitchhiker who claims to have been wrongfully incarcerated, “So, how is it that you got invited to prison in the first place?,” it stems reliably from their own warped worldviews. That matters, giving the movie a sense of rooted sincerity that not many of its spoof brethren can match. And it doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Baird spends the entire film in a skimpy Indian costume, while Lydic cycles through three different sexy costumes, for reasons poked fun at within the story.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Stan Helsing comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. Bonus features are anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with Zenga and actors Thompson and Lydic, in which the trio discuss the movie’s Vancouver night shoot, Thompson’s driving skills and penchant for improvisation, as well as Baird’s prodigious rack (“We all wanted to touch them,” says Lydic). There’s an 11-minute making-of featurette in which Howey rails in mock-anger against Zenga for his wig-and-bandana combination (which Baird points out makes him look like Bret Michaels, “which isn’t a good thing”), while a half dozen extended, alternate and excised scenes — including, yes, “deleted doll rape” — run a total of eight minutes. The movie’s theatrical trailer and a clutch of photographic stills and storyboards, in two separate scrollable galleries, are also included, along with five minutes of outtakes in which the cast members accidentally destroy a wooden four-post bed that their characters are meant to simply push out of frame. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

Writer-Director Fred Dekker Talks Night of Creeps

Interviews

Before Slither or even Killer Klowns From Outer Space, back when VHS genre hits were truly built on word-of-mouth, there was 1986’s horror comedy Night of the Creeps, a camp classic about a small college town ravaged by killer slugs from outer space. Out this month on DVD for the first time ever, the movie arrives in a special director’s cut with its original, never-before-seen ending and over an hour of bonus features, in the form of deleted scenes and six all-new behind-the-scenes featurettes which include examinations of the movie’s effects and creature work; cast members Jason Lively, Tom Atkins, Steve Marshall and Jill Whitlow reminiscing about the making of the cult classic; a special look at beloved genre star Tom Atkins; footage from a June 2009 cast reunion screening at The Original Alamo Drafthouse Cinema; and more. Two separate audio commentary tracks are also included. In advance of the movie’s DVD and Blu-ray release, I spoke with writer-director Fred Dekker; the conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: What’s it like to have the opportunity to revisit the movie and give something back to fans, given that there hasn’t been a commercial home video release in so long?

Fred Dekker: It’s awesome, and in the case of Night of the Creeps it’s an opportunity to finish a painting that I literally didn’t finish however many years ago. The ending of the movie in the screenplay was not the ending that we ended up releasing, because of a disagreement between the studio and myself. So when Sony came to me and asked if I wanted to remaster it and do a bells-and-whistles DVD, I said, “Great, can I put the ending back on?” and they didn’t bat an eye. So that, for me, is the real prize — that this is the version of the movie that I wanted to release originally.

BS: How much longer is the director’s cut, or can you address some of the differences therein?

FD: Well, let’s just assume that spoilers aren’t involved, and that the movie is old enough where if you haven’t seen it by now, it’s your loss. It’s not that much longer, but spiritually — or maybe that’s too prosaic and pretentious a word — or in terms of intent it’s quite different. And in fact we did a transfer from an interpositive for the feature, which looks unbelievable, but we could only find the ending as a three-quarter-inch videotape, so we had to really finesse that ending in order to make sure that you don’t notice that we’re going to a slightly degraded image. But I’m thrilled that it’s the movie that I intended it to be.

BS: What were your inspirations for the film, and what do you think of some of the other movies that it perhaps in turn inspired, from the Chiodo brothers’ work to something like Slither?

FD: The obvious ones are the George Romero Dead movies; at that point there were only three of them, Day of the Dead being my personal favorite. I’m so clearly taking a page from George’s book. And Alien is obviously an inspiration in terms of the parasite that gestates inside the body. And then there’s a whole handful of references from the 1950s, visually and plot-wise, from B-movies like It Came From Outer Space, Plan 9 From Outer Space. And the other big influence that I’ve come to realize and appreciate only in the wake of his death is what an impact John Hughes had on the movie in terms of the tone of the characters and their relationships and dialogue. …I’ve never been a horror-movies-only kind of guy, and I realized in resurrecting this movie that it was an early example of a mash-up.

BS: And yet when someone comes out of the gate and has any degree of success or notoriety within the horror genre, it seems like they maybe have a harder time breaking out of that mold.

FD: I’m glad you said that, because it’s absolutely true, and if I’d had my druthers I probably wouldn’t have elected to do a horror movie as my first film. But one of the things that you’ll hear quite a lot from directors is that when they get their first shot they try to put in the kitchen sink, and so one of the things that I attempted to do with this movie was to do as many different kinds of movies in one as I could, just in case I never got another shot. So there’s a film noir element, a detective story in there. There’s at least one romance — actually two romances in there. There’s some horror, some comedy, some science-fiction. There isn’t a western sequence or a musical number, but pretty much everything else is reflected there.

BS: You mentioned your disagreement with Sony — what was the nature of the conflict regarding the ending, and do you have regrets about how you handled it?

FD: Long story short, as people will see in the director’s cut and hear about in the DVD extras, is that the ending rests on an optical effects shot, and in those days there was no pre-visualization or CGI, where you could just sort of put it together in rough form. So what I had was a matte painting, a miniature and a whole bunch of elements that were ultimately going to be superimposed together. But I made an enormous mistake — and I have to take the hit for it myself — and I showed the studio, and I even showed it to an audience, unfortunately, the effects before it was finished. It had a galvanizing, negative effect on everybody, they said, “Oh, well that sucks.” And I explained to them, “Well, no, the effects aren’t finished.” But they kind of just dismissed it. And this was also the ’80s, where at the end of Carrie Brian DePalma does a wonderful scare that was hugely influential. Sean Cunningham stole the idea and had a cheap scare at the end of Friday the 13th. So it was kind of the era of the cheap scare, and at their urging I [followed that lead]. So the [ending of the] theatrical version has always had this kind of dumb, cheap scare I’ve hated. So now I’ve been allowed to rectify that mistake.

BS: Prior to recording the commentary track, how long had it been since you’d seen the movie in whole?

FD: I’ve been lucky enough with a fan resurgence over the last couple of years, so I’ve actually been lucky enough to show it a few times — in Toronto a couple of years ago, and just earlier this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. So I’ve seen it a couple times, on and off, in the last couple years. There was a fallow period in the 1990s where I’d run across it on television and avert my eyes and run away. But I’m beginning to appreciate it more than I used to.

BS: So why do think Night of the Creeps holds up and still connects with fans? Or, for that matter, why so many horror films do?

FD: Horror is a wonderful metaphor for high school. We all go to high school terrified, and to take those terrors and turn them into vampires and zombies and stuff like that is not much of a stretch. In making Night of the Creeps I didn’t have a political or personal agenda, I was just making something that I thought was fun. But in retrospect it was a really smart move, if I can pat myself on the back, to superimpose the fact that the movie takes place in 1986, rather than say present day and have everybody with the big hair and shoulder pads and that awful color palette, because by saying it’s 1986 it makes it a bit of a period piece, and it also calls to mind an era when everything was very shiny and happy and Reagan was the president, but underneath, I think, was a great sense of, “What the fuck?” And I think that’s kind of the movie — it’s colorful, fun and catchy, but there’s this undercurrent of being headed for something b
ad.

BS: When did idea first take hold, and was the screenplay something you slaved over?

FD: Oh God, no. I’ve told this story before: I was having trouble sleeping and the line, “Thrill me,” came to me, and I thought what a great way to introduce a character, to set up a guy who doesn’t give a shit. So I got up and wrote the first scene of Detective Cameron waking from a nightmare and talking to a police sergeant about a body that had been found, and I hammered the rest of it out in maybe three weeks.

BS: Do you have any other projects definitively lined up?

FD: It’s been a tough road for me, because it’s taken my movies a while to find their audience. Probably my most successful movie financially was RoboCop 3, which everybody hates. So it’s been tough. I’ve been developing [things] for three years. But in my day job, I just turned in the script for the sequel to Cliffhanger, which I had a lot of fun writing. It’s a big, smash-’em-up, fun, popcorn action movie. And then I’m developing, with producer Curtis Burch, a very low-budget drama based on a documentary film about a playwright named Oakley Hall III — a really charismatic, interesting guy in upstate New York who in the 1970s fell off a bridge and suffered brain damage. And the film is about his resurrection and redemption, and finding his way in the world. No zombies or explosions, monsters or gunshots, it’s just people.

BS: So would the Cliffhanger sequel bring back Sylvester Stallone?

FD: I cannot comment on that at this moment.

To purchase Nights of the Creeps on DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here.