Dir - Adam Egypt Mortimer
Overall: GOOD
The sophomore effort from writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer, Daniel Isn't Real is an adaptation of Brian DeeLeeuw's novel In This Way I Was Saved, (DeeLeeuw co-writing the screenplay here as well). Staring two sons of famous actors in Miles Robbins and Patrick Schwarzenegger, it plays with an interesting premise of mental illness manifesting itself both literally and disturbingly. Mortimer lets loose with some freaky, body horror visuals, preferring to tease many of them almost subliminally in a tripped-out fashion as the story becomes more and more unraveled. Though the film plays heavily on its psychological elements, things do become more directly supernatural after awhile. Thankfully, Mortimer peels back these layers in a stylish and controlled manner as not to make things fall apart too much as they easily could have. While it does not follow its own narrative rules 100% consistently and both Robbins and Schwarzenegger may be a bit too dashing and pretty to be as relatable as would be preferred, it is a solid work that does more than enough cleverly to recommend.
Dir - Richard Stanley
Overall: GOOD
It ended up taking Richard Stanley twenty-three years since the legendary debacle that was 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau, (for which he developed and was then fired from a mere three days into shooting), to get another full-length project off the ground. With such an outrageous gap, the resulting H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space may as well be a debut and a vividly demented one at that. Using such source material, it pulls off a nifty trick by having increasingly ridiculous performances and dialog fit the steadfast Lovecraftian theme of madness. The more things unravel and the more comical they become, the more the author's work faithfully comes to life. In a role tailor-made for him, Nicolas Cage once again goes full Nicolas Cage, indulging in numerous scenes where he screams, becomes violent, screams some more, changes his accent, and then follows it up with more screaming. Elsewhere, Stanley lays on the cliches too thick at times, with a couple jump scares, a creepy kid talking to invisible things, (seven year old Julian Hilliard who has to date appeared exclusively in horror movies playing creepy kids), and predictable shots that are all meant to be scary yet have been tediously overused to the point of no longer connecting. Still, it is a mostly satisfactory work and always nice to see a filmmaker returning after so very long with a fully-formed vision in tow.
Dir - Glen Danzig
Overall: WOOF
Only every so often does a cinematic trainwreck gem come along that truly deserves a standing ovation. Verotika, (the directorial debut from Glen Danzig), is just such a gem. Awkwardly void of self-awareness with every last frame, Danzig employs a lack of talent behind the lens akin to such contemporary non-filmmakers such as Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen. It is a baffilingly hilarious experience more than could even be expected. Of course when you are talking movie-making incompetence, it is not just bad acting on a criminal level, cheap sets, clueless cinematography, asinine dialog, and incoherent or even non-existent screenwriting, all of which this has in incalculable spades. It is also just the complete inability to pace any of the scenes in a remotely engaging manner. The three vignettes that make up this anthology "film" rely on a short, sentence long premise and continue to go virtually nowhere in every single instance as they are played out on screen. Often times the dialog is as embarrassing as the "actors" delivering it, which is hard to imagine upon viewing. By an overwhelming majority though, Danzig just refuses to yell "cut" and these poor people on screen are simply left to their own devices. This makes every single moment that the camera keeps staying on them more and more uncomfortably ridiculous. Whatever he was trying to accomplish, it is impossible to comprehend how he was not making an intentional comedy. You really have to see it to believe it and even then, you still will not believe it.
No comments:
Post a Comment