Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
Being as The Blair Witch Project is my favourite horror movie, and I decided to Watch The Objective last week because it was directed by Daniel Myrick, half of the team who made that movie, it seemed to be the right time to watch Exists, a 2014 found-footage horror movie directed by the other half of the duo, Eduardo Sanchez.
The Nice Guys, writer/director Shane Black’s first movie since Iron Man 3, is a throwback to his 2005 movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which featured a pre-career resurgence Robert Downey Jr, and Val Kilmer’s arguably last “big” role as a thief and a private eye respectively, thrown together by circumstances to ultimately investigate a criminal case. Flash forward 10 years and now it’s Russell Crowe, enforcer-with-a-heart (kind of like Wade Wilson before he became Deadpool), teaming up with the private eye, played by Ryan Gosling. Black is a sharp writer, but the biggest hits of his career, Iron Man notwithstanding, are buddy movies – he also created Lethal Weapon, and Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans had the same dynamic in 1991’s The Last Boy Scout.
I fully admit I put off watching this movie for quite some time. Not that I wasn’t a fan of Flight of the Conchords, the HBO series starring Jemaine Clement, with some episodes written and directed by Taikia Waititi (the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok) – no, it was a wholly illogical and unreasonable devotion to certain kinds of vampire movies that put me off this movie. If you want to pop over to my reviews for A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Only Lovers Left Alive, that’ll give you the reasons why in better detail, but to sum it up: I’m a purist.
While I only ever read one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books, I did grow up watching the Johnny Weismuller movies when they would run on BBC2, and I watched quite a bit of the TV show that starred Ron Ely, back in the 70s, and I think I saw the Disney animated movie a few years back. I even had an idea for a Tarzan screenplay at one point, that would play up a mythical take on the character, removing him somewhat from the action/adventure pulp origins of the character. Fast forward a couple of decades later, and 2016 sees the release of The Legend Of Tarzan. I’m curious as to why they bothered.
No great secret here: I am a fan of the work of HP Lovecraft. That’s an easy thing to say these days I guess, if you want to get some kind of credibility in the horror genre, but I find it easy to weed out the real fans. The Fake Ones are all about tossing the name of Cthulhu around, while qualifying his work with a disclaimer that distances themselves from him. “I really love his stuff, but he was so racist …”. It’s the kind of surface-level thinking that shows in “Lovecraftian” fiction peppered throughout the Amazon .99c specials. Throw in The Elder Gods, some tentacles, Cthulhu, and hey presto, a Lovecraft pastiche. Very few people actually get the work of Lovecraft, they only get the pop culture tropes, then hit a brick wall. Fewer still moviemakers get it, but there have been some. There’s an article in me someday that will list my top 5 Lovecraftian movies, but this is a review of 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment, renamed The Creeping Unknown for the US market, a much more fitting title, I feel.
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 