(1991)
Dir - Martin Campbell
Overall: GOOD
Produced by HBO and therefore a made for TV movie, Cast a Deadly Spell is oodles more clever and fun that it would otherwise appear. Television writer Joseph Dougherty's script rather sufficiency melds classic film noir with the Cthulo Mythos and does not take itself all that seriously in doing so. There are giggling gremlins portrayed as a routine, rodent-like nuisances and a sassy, dancing stone gargoyle, case in point. Future Golden Eye and Casino Royal director Martin Campbell is right at home with the material, creating a textbook mood for each genre that he is playing with. With all these noir and horror cliches firmly and equally in place, it is a fun experience to see them all play out in such a deliberate, tongue in cheek manor. The lead is literally named H.P. Lovecraft, (though his first name is Harry instead of Howard), and the concept of all forms of good and evil magic casually existing in 1948 Hollywood is a fascinating idea that translates well with a slew of jokes along the way. The dialog is just witty enough to work and Fred Ward in the lead seems tailor-made for playing the consistently smirking, smart-ass, tough guy P.I., just as Julianne Moore excels as the singing, sultry, backstabbing femme fatale.
(1994)
Dir - Michael Almereyda
Overall: MEH
Part Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog, Hal Hartley, and David Lynch, (who acts as an executive producer and actually has an amusing cameo as a morgue attendant), Nadja is an intentionally bizarre arthouse excursion not without some merit. In toying with the Bram Stoker novel and unofficially remaking Dracula's Daughter, writer/director Michael Almereyda has a solid premise here, but the film is avant-garde for the mere sake of it with incredibly strange performances and dialog mixed with random visuals like pixelated POV shots, the use of stock footage, (including some of Bela Lugosi from White Zombie), and quirky editing tricks. Besides the stylized look of the film, (a look which Ana Lily Amipour would certainly draw inspiration from with her remarkable A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night two decades later), the use of Portishead and My Bloody Valentine also make the movie a hipster experience before there was such a thing. The humor is suffocatingly dry yet easily noticeable, like how an intense showdown near the end is undercut with a laughing Dracula Halloween toy superimposed over the eerie Transylvanian sky. Moments like this are aplenty and also hit or miss. Not that the plot is particularly important, but it is anything but logical. Though at least the eccentricities all around still keep things interesting even when they are borderline tedious.
(1998)
Dir - Robert Rodriguez
Overall: MEH
Fully acknowledging that movies like The Faculty are forcefully hip, studio crafted popcorn hoopla aimed solely at teenagers and college kids, one does not have to condone them to still not fancy them. Everything this movie borrows, (cough, steals, cough), from represents certain pinnacles of particular genre cinema, be it John Hughes' stereotype-exploring, high school drama The Breakfast Club, every version of Jack Finney's conformist nightmare Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or John Carpenter's paranoia fueled remake of The Thing. Yet the finished form simply reeks of blatant, manufactured silliness meant to be quickly consumed and just as quickly forgotten about. As Robert Rodriguez's direct follow up to the excellent From Dusk Till Dawn, it is disappointing to see him go through the motions and basically just do a solid for the Weinstein brothers who wanted to cash in on Scream's self-aware, R-rated, slasher-esque success. All this aside, the film is laughably silly and mostly aggravating to watch as every single character is an obnoxious, exaggerated caricature and in a perfect horror film, they would all die horribly and slowly for our amusement. Instead, they all live happily ever after and you are left with awful grunge covers of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" and "Schools Out" ringing in your head.
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