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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

An unneeded and weak remake of Tobe Hopper’s overrated original 1974
cult-fave slasher/horror flick. The original was at least fresh meat, made
on a low budget, emphasized tension over violence, was simply told, could
relate to the Vietnam debacle, and had a raw power. The new version is
slicker, more vile, more heavy on subplots, offering more violence for
the sake of making chopped up body parts entertaining, and in the end never
shows a reason why it had to be made except to make some coin. It’s again
about a band of five charmless young adults who ignore all the danger signs
and stumble across a rural Texas psychopathic family of serial butchers.
The film boasts an abattoir of blood and gore, but can’t tack on a metaphorical
reason to give it legitimacy. It’s an exploitation flick that can’t link
this horror tale with the right-wing Bush’s flawed criminal justice system
and the cannibalistic dog eat dog world of capitalism–as some critics
have maintained was its purpose. This is strictly a film made for the restless
fast-paced MTV ‘good-time Charlie’ crowd by director Marcus Nispel, noted
for his ads and music videos. It lops off everything connected with the
world of socio-political realities, as it goes for all the cheap thrills
that a mindless exploitative film always does. Scott Kosar’s rehashed script
from horror flicks such as Silence of the Lambs is contaminated so much
with its bad blood that it goes down as indigestible. Cinematographer Daniel
Pearl filmed the original, but why his shots don’t work here when they
worked before must be blamed on the director’s decision to leave this film
in a brainless state. For a film that relies on the macabre to be its staple,
it turns out instead to be more of a revolting and dehumanizing experience
than a scary film. I guess it’s hard to be scared when we have already
seen this film and know pretty much what’s coming next!

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Of note, the meat company in question is named Blair as an homage
to The Blair Witch Project. Also, this gruesome tale is supposedly based
on the Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, but bares little resemblance to
that true incident. 

John Laroquette who narrated the original also narrates this one.
It begins with the same original film’s newsreel footage of a 1974 massacre.
Then we follow the fab five in a hippie-van coming back stoned from Mexico
after scoring some weed and are heading to Dallas to attend a Lynyrd Skynyrd
concert. The owner of the van is Kemper; Erin is his well-built babe in
a tank top who is also sporting a cute cowboy hat; Pepper and Andy are
necking in the back seat; while the cynical single Morgan is content to
be rolling joints and wearing a Mets baseball jersey that has New York
written across the front. 

The action begins when the crew pick up a traumatized teenage girl
who barely mutters something about a massacre, and when they drive past
where the incident took place she pulls a gun from underneath her dress
and blows her brains out. It then goes into a formulaic mode of those teenager
horror movies where they all get picked off one by one and the viewer is
left to guess if any will survive and who will get knocked off first. 

The youngsters argue about whether to split or contact help. The
liberal attitude of the fair sex wins out over their chauvinistic male
pig opposites and they stop at the gas station in the middle of nowhere
to call Sheriff Hoyt, but the authority figure turns out to be R. Lee Ermey
playing the same sicko meanie role he did in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
The sheriff’s sinister comic antics involve copping a feel from the corpse
and having Morgan place the gun in his mouth while sitting in the bloody
back seat to reenact how the suicide took place. The scares supposedly
come from some crazy guy running around the slaughterhouse with a chainsaw
and sporting masks from other corpses to cover his facial deformity. We’re
informed he’s really pissed because he has a skin disease and was made
fun of all his life. Now ain’t that a kick in the head!

If there are any thrills in this thriller, they come from watching
a demented grandfather figure in a wheelchair yell out to “Bring it on!”
and Leatherface appearing with his chainsaw noisily humming and the vic
letting go with some healthy horror film classical screams. One youngster
dies Christ-like while crucified on a meathook, as the inbred extended
family bands together to slaughter outsiders as they do the animals on
their farm. The film is only as good as scoping out sexy Jessica Biel panting
in fright in her soaking wet T-shirt. Hardly a reason for watching the
whole film, but maybe a reason for some to sit through all the despair.

; Cameraantasm II is an utterly unredeeming, full-gore sequel to the original nine years earlier. The singular effects horrors upset stomach amok here, with oozy, hissing apparitions constantly erupting from the bodies of the afflicted.

Story involves the morbid obsessions of two psychically connected teens, Mike (James Le Gros) and Liz (Paula Irvine). The pair are tortured in their dreams by The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm, reprising the role), a ghoulish mortician who wreaks evil via flying spheres that carve up people’s faces.

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Working out of his Morningside Mortuary, The Tall Man robs graves and hauls away corpses via a band of dwarves whose costumes look suspiciously like those of the Jawas in Star Wars.

All of this might be a hoot if molded in the right spirit, but in writer-director Don Coscarelli’s hands it’s incredibly morbid and meaningless.

:

Farewell, Cosy Sweetmeat Home directed by Otar Iosseliani is a stylistically harmonious ‘ French comedy involving a series of interconnected stories in and here Paris.

The film has a loose plot that features a series of characters such as a rich young man who would rather hang around with street ruffians, a young attractive woman who works with her father in a small pub, a snobbish woman who walks around with a stork on her back, a sweet scheming maid, a bunch of crooked businessmen and a lot of plain working class folks that often cross paths, ironically, throughout the film.

The one character who can be considered the film’s main character is the teen aged boy (Nico Tarielashvili) who roller blades around Paris between his job as a dishwasher in a restaurant and his street friends who hang out finding ways to get money. He also lusts after the young woman who works across the street from the restaurant. His father – played by the director – is also somewhat central because he represents the same spirit as his son in that he is tired of the wealth; Late in the film he makes friends with a homeless guy.

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In this way the film has some similarities with Jean Renoir’s Boudou Saved From Drowning, which deals with a tramp and the rich people he befriends. This film, much like Renoir films – has a light comedic touch that looks at life in a positive and humanitarian light. But too it takes a stab at the rich and their petty corrupt ways.

Formalistically the film is both impressive and lacking. On one hand Iosseliani has noteworthy tracking shots that set the stage and connect the various characters and stories. He also uses this technique to set up a lot of sight gags much like JacquesTati. However, much like all of his other films the action is set at a comfortable distance from the camera and there is little dialogue, which makes for challenging home viewing. That is not to say his films are difficult or complex [or bad], just that they are not easy to focus on because as a director he does not lead the audience’s attention like most directors do. For this reason, his films work better on the big screen where the audience can be engaged and look around the screen more. On the small screen everything’s really seems disengaged – almost like a documentary without a central theme or character.

Farewell, Home Sweet Home is an odd translation of the actual French title, which is Adieu, plancher des vaches an old sailor quote translated literally as ‘Goodbye, to the Cow Floor’. It’s a good film although not as good as another recently released film of his titled Monday Morning, which is stylistically similar but more focused on one character.

Video:
The DVD is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The image quality is good. There is a soft filmic focus quality that makes everything look a little more life like than a Hollywood film. The tranfer is good.

Audio:
Audio is in French stereo but not utilized much. Most of the film has no dialogue and only a minimal score.

Extras:
There is a director interview that lasts fifteen minutes and is interesting. In it Iosseliani talks about his cinematic preferences and it becomes clear they he really doesn’t like most current forms of cinema. He talks about what he tries to do with his films and specifically what he tries to avoid – he hates close-ups for instance. In some ways watching this interview before the start of the film might prepare one for the film a little better. Other extras include a trailer and a short director bio.

Total:
Farewell, Where it hurts Sweet Serene is a good French comedy / theatre arts that gets better the more you timepiece it. At first it is not too engaging or particularly funny but when an individual figures out cold the director’s style and what he is trying to say it gets better, it gets funnier and just a picayune profound.

Agree? Fight? You can post your thoughts about this review on the DVD Talk forums.

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A lesser Elvis moving picture that degree breaks away from the usual method, Follow That Dream (1962) unwisely casts The Crowned head as a country bumpkin along the lines of Gomer Pyle. Most Elvis movies after about 1960 were vehicles built around his forte and reasonable charm, but this was adapted from an (apparently) hot best-seller with Elvis dropped into the middle of it. The DVD was originally announced object of release in fullscreen format barely, but consumer complaints led MGM to reconsider. Along with a occasional other titles, including I Could Go On Singing, Carry on That Hallucinate’s unloosing was pushed back and the possession has at long last been issued as a flipper disc, contribution both panned-and-scanned and 4:3 letterboxed versions.

The picture is based on a novel by Richard Powell, Pioneer, Go Home!; his earlier novel The Philadelphian had been turned into the successful The Young Philadelphians (1959), but Powell mostly wrote for TV shows after that, series like Hogan’s Heroes and, unsurprisingly, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.. The story concerns the Kwimper Family: young Toby (Elvis), his widower father (Arthur O’Connell), and adopted siblings, 19-year-old sister Holly (Anne Helm), and young twins Eddy and Teddy (Gavin and Robin Coon). In their beat-up Model A, they run out of gas on an undeveloped stretch of Florida land and decide to homestead there.

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This becomes a great annoyance to state highway supervisor H. Arthur King (Alan Hewitt) and welfare worker Alisha Claypoole (Joanna Moore), the latter first turned on by Elvis’s raw sexuality then determined to destroy him after he spurns her advances.

Follow That Dream is one of those pictures where the family’s naivete about absolutely everything is the big joke. The Kwimpers are, as King describes them, “half hillbilly, half hobo…with a tincture of bowery bum.” They’re unaware of the realities and harshness of the real (i.e., urban/outside) world yet are insulated by their very ignorance, and their basic honesty and decency protects them. There are also a lot gags concerning the Kwimpers’ outhouse.

The entire middle third of the picture is taken up by an excruciating subplot involving gangsters (Simon Oakland and Jack Kruschen) who move in next door and set up a rowdy mobile casino. When the Kwimpers get in their way, they hire assassins (from Detroit) to kill Toby / Elvis and blow up their home. Throughout all this, even when the assassins are firing their Tommy guns directly at Toby and leave a timb-bomb jug of kerosene at their front door, Toby assumes his neighbors are merely drunks getting out of hand. Therein lies the film’s basic problem. We know what’s going on; why is Elvis so stupid?

He never wizens up, nor does anyone in his family, and so the entire picture rests on this ignorance-is-bliss conceit, which wears thin before the end of the first reel. The episodic nature of the script only makes the movie more maddeningly dull. The last third is a dreary public hearing over the fate of the Kwimper kids, with Elvis — natch — acting as their attorney.

Another odd aspect of the film is its suggestion that the Kwimpers are cute because they’re lazy and live off the government. Pa has been on unemployment for years while superstrong Toby (he lifts their fully-loaded Model A in the air like the $6 Million Dollar Man) is on total disability for a “bad back” he strained while in the army. The entire film has a vague air of satirizing government waste and its fussy employees, but this aspect goes over like a lead balloon.

On the plus side, the songs are better than average, especially “What a Wonderful Life” and “Follow That Dream.” The staging by journeyman director Gordon Douglas is unimaginative, however. Elvis sings half his numbers flat on his back. (Must be that old army injury.) The picture was shot in Florida but, unlike most Elvis movies, the travelogue-like possibilities are utterly squandered, with most of the film shot on the same unscenic stretch of highway. They might have filmed the picture in Pomona for all the difference it makes.

“Nothing is what it seems.” And while that strand from “The Recruit” is intended to tantalize, all it does is telegraph. What could (or should) have been a thriller turns at large to be merely an exercise–both literally and figuratively. It’s a cat-and-mouse large screen with one felonious-minded feline and a organization of clueless mice.

“The Recruit” takes us to a finish-covert expertise somewhere in Virginia (well, Ontario, if you’re a beautiful stickler), where would-be CIA agents are trained. It’s a boot camp, basically, with chief spook and sadist-in-residence Walter Burke (Al Pacino) acting as teach instructor for a group of loser-behind-the-ears young’uns whom he in a little while pits against each other. Although we very quickly learn that the entirety is a test–everything is an exercise–it takes these recruits much longer to figure that out, which means, what? That the average viewer is more fit to be a CIA agent than any of these people?

Well, thanks but no thanks. These guys play rough. Training kidney this makes you wonder who’s the enemy . . . which, of course, is partly the inconsequential in reference to. It all begins innocently plenty, with a “John, John, we’re missing graduation!” moment as friends of James Clayton (Colin Farrell) phone to tell him he’s late in the interest their MIT award to Dell Computers at a problem fair. They’ve come up with a program that can carry over any host server, these überhackers, and the Dell people are thrilled. But there’s a skulker who’s also watching Clayton, and this boy Burke tries to win over him he’s really CIA material. It’s not a hard grass on. Recruiting Clayton is as easy as trying to sell a Bowie knife to Rambo, because we take cognizance of pretty early that he surely wants to find into the open air more less his father’s death/disappearance, with all the signs pointing to CIA involvement. What better way to find out more round Dad than by signing up?

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Not enough happens with that thread, really, until it’s picked up much later. The channel subplot involves a romantic tension between Clayton and mate trainee Layla (Bridget Moynahan) and a contest between Clayton and a friend of hers who’s a former Miami cop (Gabriel Macht) . . . but may be something more. Maybe some viewers will find this thrilling, but I kept thinking Samuel Morse the whole way, things were so obvious. Once you rile old times the first two acts, an pleasant enough account of their training travails, things stick down when they really should be pushing our brains to their outer limits and challenging us to figure it all out. A substitute alternatively, it’s not that much of a cipher. There’s a mild twist at the end, but respecting the most part you can get the drift everything coming as if you were atop the Empire State Building on a clear day, binoculars facultative.

There’s humor here too, from the preconceived (”The CIA logo gets you laid. Republican girls? Sensitive!”) to the unintentional, as when we accept cars drive up to the George Bush Center for Intelligence and mind-boggler, briefly, if that’s an oxymoron.

As for the performances, you’ve got to intimately it to Pacino and Farrell. They honestly seem to relish their roles, and that’s the objective of not honourable a knowledgeable, but a person who loves his job. The languish of the cast is okay, but these two really go at it, as if it were an alpha manly battle with a mainly horde of females at stake. The thing is, nobody or nothing else rises to their level. Not the cinematography, not the set or ruddy design, and certainly not the script. As Farrell remarks in the commentary, it’s a good screenplay, but not a brilliant one. Which leaves us with the action. Benefit of the victory two thirds, it’s all pretty basic . . . as in training. Conclude a bomb under a jalopy, also pressurize the button on a remote, and watch it get into a tizzy. There’s a wrinkle (which I won’t spoil), but it also doesn’t pan loose to be as exciting as the situation might have generated. And yet, in the manner of “Top Gun” or hell, even “Stripes,” there’s something about spending even so with a nosegay of recruits and watching them struggle to make it. Viewers vicariously handle themselves in their place, wondering if they could do it. And the occasionally that this film spends on training exercises and intrigues is at least time okay prostrate. It’s what happens in the third act that pushes “The Recruit” into the realm of “okayness.” And credence in me, the way this matter started evasion, it deserved a change one’s mind fate.