Dir - Amy Heckerling
Overall: GREAT
Reuniting with Alicia Silverstone after their hugely successful collaboration on Clueless nearly twenty years earlier, writer/director Amy Heckerling takes on the undead in Vamps; a delightful and hilarious horror spoof that is refreshingly light on its feet. Heckerling's penchant for pop culture references, fast banter, and manageable dramatic stakes are crystalized here where Silverstone and her bestie Krysten Ritter face off against a handful of inconveniences in their struggle to stay modern while not feeding on humans. A plethora of recognizable faces show up along the way, including but not limited to Sigourney Weaver as the reckless head-vampire "stem", Malcom McDowell as Vlad Tepish, Tod Barry as a minor undead, Dan Stevens and Wallace Shawn as Van Helsing decedents, and Richard Lewis as Silverstone's former counter-culture love interest. While the budget is only sufficient enough to pull-off CGI of the most utterly embarrassing variety, Heckerling's script cruises along with endlessly hilarious gags that present a world where nearly all of the malevolent tendencies associated with bloodsuckers are de-fanged and made adorably harmless. The central theme of nostalgia warrants numerous cutaways to Golden Age Hollywood films and old timey flashbacks and it oddly has a coming-of-age agenda, even with protagonists that are pushing a few centuries.
Dir - Domiziano Cristopharo
Overall: WOOF
A Naked Drug Addict - The Movie aka Red Krokodil is a bold yet largely unwatchable examination of the tribulations of substance abuse. Brock Madson is the only actor on screen or at least the only character on screen as his narcotic-fueled psychosis is host to various hallucinations which include a nude double of himself, another naked person with a large bunny mask on, and an eyeball poking out of the wall. While these freaky visuals snap the viewer out of the purposely tedious nature of the non-narrative, the overwhelming majority of the run time is just dull and ugly. Again, this is intentional as Cristopharo and screenwriter Francesco Scardone pull no punches with their harrowing depiction of its subject matter as the day-to-day monotony of Madson's doomed protagonist blends one wretched scene into the other with no variation between them. Which begs the question of who the audience is for such a thing. Admirable and even noble perhaps in how determined the production is to slam home its point, (drugs are bad folks), but such a thing is just disturbing and gross as well as being the antithesis of compelling. Like many an exploitation film, it tries to get by on its audaciousness alone, but it just ends up being a miserable hour and twenty-three minutes that sails off into the atomic bomb sunset without saying anything as profound as it lets on.
Dir - Paco Plaza
Overall: MEH
Instead of continuing their writer/director partnership on the REC series, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaz split for the third and fourth installments, with the latter's REC 3: Genesis emerging two years ahead of Balagueró's REC 4: Apocalypse. Sticking to the found footage framework only throughout the twenty minute, pre-title opening, the movie eventually settles into its horror/comedy/action shtick and while it delivers crowd-pleasing moments in each of the genres that it attempts to balance, it does so at the cost of each of them. This is to say that a tonal issue plagues most of the proceedings, where Plaza bites off more than he can chew in a bold attempt to revamp a franchise that many could argue needed no such revamping, let alone any further entries. On the one hand, retreaded the hand-held camera format could have easily been redundant, but the conventional approach here unavoidably pales in comparison to what Plaza and Balagueró were able to perfect before. Its gory, well-acted, genuinely amusing, fast-paced, and has a predictable ending that still manages to pull at the heart-strings, (and deservingly so), but it is also just another high-octane zombie movie that does not take itself too seriously, which is something that the world hardly needs more of.
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