Menace II Society

You almost have to like Menace II Society. What other film presents a bunch of gun-tot­ing homeboys sitting around watching It's a Wonderful Life?. And, it's a reasonably interesting piece of street film making.

But its ironies are a little too ham-fisted, and it occasionally smacks of a social worker delivering a lecture.

The double homicide that opens Menace II Society possesses an authentic sense of casual shock. Likewise, the film offers an insider's view of drive-by shootings and drug dealing. The Hughes brothers have hit home with their unrelenting chronology of gang life and urban pathology. Most vivid is the film's presentation of violence that is passed on as a grim legacy from generation to generation.

But the movie contains a primary prob­lem — its odd distance from its own subject matter, almost as if it's a re-enactment from a "reality-based" TV show.

Which isn't surprising, given that the filmmakers, twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, previously directed episodes of the Fox network's America's Most Wanted. They've also made a series of rap videos. Menace II Society is influenced by both of these formats.

Caine (Tyrin Turner), a de facto gang leader, is the movie's central, tragic figure. Actor Larenz Tate's O-Dog, however, embodies the film's most chilling quality. When he takes offense at a Korean grocer's comment, O-Dog coolly kills both the man and his wife. Then he steals the videotape from the store's surveillance camera — not because he's trying to cover up the crime, but because he just likes showing the video of the murder to his friends.

Menace II Society strives for a hard edge, even as it attempts to be a hip hop version of Bunuel's classic film Los Olivdados.

It also wants to be a message picture, and presents critically important moral lessons: Violence breeds violence. Crime doesn't pay. Blacks killing blacks is just another form of racial genocide.

But, too often, their presentation bears a dry, lackluster quality that's over-ridden by the charged energy of gang activities. The movie lectures about the destructive nature of violence, but only comes to life when the homeboys start popping each other. Menace II Society will be an eye-opener for many viewers, but its morality is almost lost amidst the kinetic kicks of its storyline.

Twister

The family that chases tornadoes together, stays together.

That unique insight is the central point to Twister. Fortunately, Twister doesn't need much of a point. The movie succeeds nicely as an action-filled exercise in the surprisingly danger-filled pursuit of weather forecasting.

Twister also manages to breathe new life into the disaster genre as it takes a moribund formula and treat it as if every contrived moment was fresh and new. The movie has a fun time with the usual list of suspects and manages to take a relaxed liberal position in a genre typically noted for its more overtly fundamentalist attitudes (well, what are disaster movies except modernized biblical tales).

As it might be written in the Gospel According to Irwin Allen, it is a dark and extraordinarily stormy night in Oklahoma. A massive set of cold and warm fronts are about to collide across the American Midwest, an event which normally sends every hick in the stick scurrying for the nearest storm shelter.

But Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) isn't just a hick. She is a scientist and tornadoes are both her passion and her nemesis. She has especially been obsessed by them ever since her childhood. The sight of her father (and the barn door) vanishing into the maw of a nasty cyclone still haunts her. For her, storm-chasing (which is the nickname for her profession) is a form of therapy.

Likewise, her husband Bill (Bill Paxton) is also remarkably obsessive about funnel clouds. He feels that he has some sort of a psychic bonding with the storms and can often sense their impending arrival. All he has to do is pick up a handful of dirt, look briefly skyward, and suddenly he knows more than the National Weather Service.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have as much bonding with Helen as he does with an Arctic air mass. Which is why he shows up at the storm front with divorce papers in one hand and a girlfriend (Jami Gertz) in the other. Though he and Helen have been separated for some months, she still thought that they might patch things up during brief lulls on the radar map.

Jo and her fellow storm-chasers are a tad miffed with Bill. Not so much about the girl-friend, but more so because he has taken a job as a television weather forecaster and insists that he isn't going to run after tornadoes anymore.

Since the rest of the team of storm-chasers are all young research assistants (cutely played by Alan Ruck and Philip Hoffman), the result is more like a disjointed family rather than a pack of meteorologists. Mom and the kids obviously know that they are just going have to weather out old dad's mid-life crisis. Besides, the girl-friend is a marital therapist who has been helping Bill to
develop his sense of personal responsibility.

Besides, the storm-chasers know that Bill can't resist a chance to try out his own invention. The central focus to their pursuit is a devise called "Dorothy," a canister loaded with sensors that can track the interior forces of a tornado. Since his chief professional rival (Cary Elwes) is also on the chase with a similar gizmo (a tarted up rip off of the home spun original), Bill is strongly tempted.

The only problem is that "Dorothy" has to be planted right in the path of an oncoming cyclone in order to work. Does this mean that the rest of the movie is spent with everybody driving like lunatics toward assorted twirling behemoths? You bet. After all, Twister is directed by the same man who did Speed.

As a director, Jan De Bont doesn't make movies so much as he constructs thrill rides. But he also happens to be very good at building cinematic roller coasters and Twister delivers much of the same wild, punchy fun as did Speed.

Though Twister has already been widely criticized for its weak storyline and characters, the movie is actually better scripted and performed than it has been given credit. Both Hunt and Paxton give solid, understated performances that keep their characters warm and convincing even while the stunt work does otherwise.

Besides, neither Hunt nor Paxton are the main stars in this film. That honour belongs to the stunningly vivid monsters of the vortex produced in the software labs of Industrial Light and Magic. As the tornadoes start flinging cows and oil tankers across the screen, the film jerks to life at its own rude level.

Which is enough to place Twister ahead of many other current Hollywood films. Throw in a few more flying cows and the movie could almost be a masterpiece.

Screamers

There must be something about the science-fiction stories of Philip K. Dick that inspires filmmakers to unusual levels of stunning incoherency. Both Blade Runner and Total Recall, the two previous adaptations from the Dick canon, had plot lines that shifted faster than grains of sand in a windstorm. Likewise, so did the characters.

At his best, Dick could give his readers the tail spinning conviction that everything real was illusionary and that nobody could ever be certain of anything, not even their own existence. For Dick, there was no easy division between human consciousness and a good job of deceptive programming. "I think, therefore I am" was a philosophic assumption that Dick could never accept.

Which is part of the problem encountered by Commander Becker (Peter Weller) in Screamers. Like Blade Runner, the movie ultimately tries to wrestle with the question of what is human. Unlike Blade Runner, Screamers gets pinned to the mat more often than not.

On the planet Sirius 6B, a brutal war is dragging into its tenth year. The world has become a ravaged battleground between the Earth Alliance and the New Economic Block (N.E.B.). The surface has been thoroughly nuked and the combatants now primarily stay hidden in underground fortresses.

But the protracted stalemate is suddenly shaken by an offer of peace from the N.E.B. Just as abruptly, peace is shattered by the crash landing of an Alliance troop transporter. Evidence from the ship convinces Becker that the war has simply been relocated to a new planet. In a face-saving move, both sides have decided to abandon the troops on Sirius 6B while routinely feeding Becker and his men with phony messages on a virtual reality system.

Feeling just a tad bitter, Becker sets out to make his own peace with the equally hapless N.E.B. forces. The only problem is that no one knows how many, if any, of the enemy troops are even still alive. Making matters worse is the increasingly unpredictable behavior of the screamers.

The original model of the screamers were insect-like killer robots armed with a wide variety of blades. The Alliance unleashed them as an ultimate weapon against the N.E.B. But the screamers have their own elaborate system of automated programming design and manufacturing and are rumored to be pursuing their own evolutionary leaps. They have even created androids who prey upon their potential victims by appealing to the human sense of empathy.

About now, Rutger Hauer should make an appearance. Unfortunately, he doesn't. Likewise, Weller is no Harrison Ford. He's not even a Charlton Heston, though Weller makes a game try at projecting some of old Chuckie's sense of jaded machismo.

Much of the acting in Screamers has a flat, stilted quality that undercuts the central paradox of the movie. Only Jennifer Rubin, as a female N.E.B. officer, delivers any convincing pathos. Of course, this immediately makes her a prime suspect on the human/nonhuman detection scale.

But the real problem with Screamers is the script. None of the characters are ever fleshed out or clearly defined in any distinctive way. Their humanity is only hinted at through bouts of chain-smoking (special cigarettes that prevents radiation poisoning) and a taste for Mozart (Don Giovanni is Becker's pet fave).

The androids do not fare any better. Unlike the alluring "skin jobs" of Blade Runner, the replicants in Screamers are almost as marginal as their human targets. One of the deadlier models come in the form of an orphan boy clutching a death-dealing teddy bear. The first appearance of this killer waif is mildly shocking. When an entire army of dangerous Oliver Twist types goes gunning for Becker, the film takes a plunge into bad camp.

The multiple twists and turns of the plot also never quite matches up. Contradictions abound, and not just because they are suppose to in a Dick-derived movie. The pre-production history of Screamers is almost as long as the war on Sirius 6B, with Dan O'Bannon first drafting a version under the title of Claw at Disney Studios back in the early 1980s. Screamers plays as if a few too many versions had been stitched together during various rewrites.

Though the film maintains a reasonably suspenseful tempo, Screamers never manages to engage at either the intellectual or emotional level. In turn, the film is too preoccupied with being cerebral to ever fully unload to the action audience.

Ironically, the hi-tech shredding machines shown dicing a man at the movie's beginning are actually the most interesting element in Screamers. Unlike the filmmakers, at least these nasty little drones know what they are doing.

Bad Moon

Werewolves have never really fared well on the big screen. Oh sure, they have had their moments (The Howling and An American Werewolf in London). But they also have provoked some mighty awful duds (Wolf and any of The Howling sequels). Unlike vampires, werewolves lack some special pull with the audience that might produce a heightened sense of engagement.

Which is a major problem with Bad Moon, a horror film that mistakes ponderous pacing for serious film making. Though some fans might be pleased by the movie's refusal to lampoon even some of the goofier traditions of the genre, the final effect is a film that is weak in both its bark and bite.

Janet (Mariel Hemingway) is an attorney and a single-mother who has moved to the Pacific Northwest in order to escape urban rot. Her ten-year-old son Brett (Mason Gamble) is a sweet if slightly vapid lad who seems totally devoted to his pet German Shepherd. His dog Thor (Primo), takes care of both of them as best he can.

But Janet's younger brother Ted (Michael Pare) suddenly decides to move in, trailer and all. Ted is a photojournalist whose last assignment was in the wilds of Nepal and he is a little shy on explaining why his girlfriend didn't come back with him. He is also a little reluctant in saying much about his newly acquired interest in ancient books on werewolves and his uncanny ability to understand the thought processes of domestic canines.

Nonetheless, the family thinks that Uncle Ted is great. Only Thor has enough sense to keep a wolf out of their deluxe hen house, especially after a few campers turn up half-devoured.

Like most werewolf movies, Bad Moon offers a slight variation on the dysfunctional family theme a la Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (which was sort of a werewolf tale in blood-soaked sheep clothing). But Janet's family is too well adjusted (in a dip-headed sort of way) to be of any interest. Even Uncle Ted is so blandly nice that you half expect him to get in touch with his inner wolf child. The whole movie only snaps to life on the rare occasion when someone gets their head bit off.

Which means that the writer-director of Bad Moon, Eric Red, didn't spend enough time studying the Stephen King movies that he keeps trying to rip-off in his film. Though he repeatedly "quotes" from such works as The Shining, Cujo, and Silver Bullet, he doesn't have any sense of the material. King's masterly of the contemporary American Gothic genre is rooted in his firm sense of the tensions lurking just beneath the surface of average life. Even at his worse, King can evoke a family structure riddled with enough suppressed fears and frustrations to fill a clinic.

The characters in Bad Moon could barely sustain a mediocre situation comedy. Even when Uncle Ted starts eyeing sis and Brett as his next meal, the effect is barely noticeable on the taboo-violation meter.

Besides, the real test of any werewolf movie is the transformation scene and Bad Moon even falters by that standard. Saved for late in the movie, it plays as a poor mix of old-school optical effects and good make-up design. Compared to the ground breaking work done in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, the effect is hokey at best. But it is better than the cheap-Jack (pun intended) work done in Wolf.

But if you really want to see a great werewolf movie, why not rent a copy of Wolfen. It isn't exactly about werewolves, but Wolfen delivers enough wolves for any canine fan and it is the singular masterpiece of its own bizarre, self-made genre.

The only thing singular about Bad Moon is the strange way it turns a short running time into a long haul.

The Crow: City of Angels

Los Angeles is now officially the host of the apocalypse. Sure, New York once had the edge on impending social collapse and the Third World is still a prime contender as the starting gate for the Four Horsemen. But L.A. now has the End of Time thing signed, sealed and delivered.

Just check out such movies as Strange Days and Escape From L.A.. In each, LaLaLand has become a wasted Sodom barely fit for wild dogs and movie producers. Even a dead man might have second thoughts about traversing such a demented landscape.

Then again, Los Angeles may only be fit for the dead. At least that is the underlining attitude in The Crow: City of Angeles. Less a sequel than an elaborate reworking of the original Crow, City of Angeles manages to take the dark tone of the first film and push it further.

Too far, perhaps. The movie plays like a vindictive dirge at a black mass hosted by the manic depressive set. In its weird mix of punk nihilism and spiritual redemption, The Crow: City of Angeles achieves a sense of visual stylization that far exceeds its limited narrative grasp. But that alone already places it well ahead of its current competition in the Gotterdammerung category.

Despite the lingering controversy over the bizarre accidental death of Brandon Lee during filming of the first Crow, the second movie has managed to find a reasonable way to both reference and connect with the original. The young Sarah is now an adult (Mia Kirshner) and has moved to Los Angeles in a failed attempt to escape from the post-industrial rot of Detroit. Plying her trade as a tattoo artist, Sarah discreetly wears a pair of crow's wings on her back and is haunted by nightmares involving a man and his son being gunned down by a nightmarish band of aging rockers.

But the murders are no dream. Ashe (Vincent Perez) and his son are inadvertent witnesses to a gang slaying ordered by Judah(Richard Brooks) and his henchmen have strict policies about not leaving any clients for the Federal Witness Protection Program. Since Judah is some sort of unexplained mix of new age gangster and fallen angel, he fear no mortal agent. Only a force from beyond life can harm him, which Ashe is more than happy to do once he returns from the dead.

At which point, The Crow: City of Angeles becomes a strangely brooding combination of crypto-fascist fantasy and fin-de-siecle romanticism. Judah and his gang thrives upon calculated doses of extreme violence and sexual decadence (with enough S&M references to qualify as soft-core pornography), while Ashe and Sarah are two innocents with enough purity in their hearts to stock a convent. No wonder Curve (Iggy Pop), Judah's right hand man, finds them both baffling. Neither of these characters seem to have any place in a Los Angeles as hellish as the urban acid trip configured in the movie.

But while the plot of The Crow: City of Angeles settles into a dry recitation of Ashe's murderous hunt, the visuals (and music soundtrack) takes off in their own highly charged direction. The movie successfully takes the pop surrealism of the music video format and convert it into a sustained exercise that largely holds the viewers' attention. The film ironically approximates a drive-in movie made by Fellini while on a heroin rush. Framed within the context of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, the movie turns each killing into a quasi-religious ritual.

The Crow: City of Angeles will not be to many people's taste. But then, neither was the original. Likewise, the movie's last stretch turns dopey as it scrambles for an ending. Even within its own mystical universe, the film's final reel defies rational explanation.

But the real achievement of The Crow: City of Angeles is its odd ability to sustain a long, lingering chord of dark otherworldly angst. It plays like a rough night on the far side of the moon, which means that it successfully captures at least one aspect of contemporary Los Angeles. It remains a city of dreams, both good and
bad.

Mars Attacks!

Hundreds of tacky looking space ships attack the earth. Thousands of rampaging, bug‑eyed Martians ruthlessly zap humanity in a mindless extermination campaign. The U.S. Congress, a herd of cows, and Tom Jones' band are all fried to a crisp. Gee. It's a shame about those cows.

This just about sums up Mars Attacks!, the latest tribute by director Tim Burton to his childhood fondness for bad movies. Unfortunately, Mars Attacks! also invokes the current (and extremely advance) state of Burton's own sense of arrested adolescence. The film plays like a simple‑minded gag thought up by an obnoxious five‑year‑old. Even during its funnier moments, Mars Attacks! barely rises to the level of a cheap giggle cooked up in the back row of a school room.

Of course, a lack of subtly is not surprising since the focus of the movie's extended homage are the zanier B science‑fiction films of the 1950s. Though the plot is loosely lifted from Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, the trashy feel of Mars Attacks! is closer to the cruder sensibilities of such non‑classics as Invasion of the Saucer Men (a movie so poorly budgeted that a pre‑Batman Frank Gorshin was the major star). But Mars Attacks! lacks the rude zestiness of a good drive‑in movie. Heck. Mars Attacks! even lacks the genuine, raw badness of an Ed Wood movie.

Though some advance word had suggested that Mars Attacks! would play as a kind of Dr. Strangelove antidote to Independence Day's jingoistic seriousness, the comparison is thin. In many respects, Independence Day is actually a funnier film. It was also a more affectionate homage to the genre. Mars Attacks! has a weird, distracted feel to it and often suggests that Burton never really liked these lousy movies in the first place. Maybe he only watched them because he liked seeing people blow up.

Which is basically the sole focus of the movie. For reasons that are never explained, the entire population of the Red Planet charges toward earth. A blathering dolt of a US President (Jack Nicholson) stumbles around, hoping to make peaceful contact with the Martians. Then they start blasting everyone who comes within firing range. An utter dope of a scientific advisor (Pierce Brosnan) successfully argues that the Martians deadly behavior is simply a cultural misunderstanding. Then they wipe out Congress and beat the stuffing out of the scientific advisor.

Meanwhile, a crooked and extremely drunk real estate developer in Las Vegas (Nicholson again) has some vague scheme of getting the Martians to check‑in at his new casino. The developer's wife (Annette Bening) has abandoned booze in favor of New Age mysticism and Sixties style retro fashions. At the same time, the always horny presidential press secretary (Martin Short) finds himself incredibly attracted to a Martian female. The rest of the movie's long list of well‑known performers stand around with little to do until they get blasted.

OK. So once again Burton demonstrates that he doesn't give a hoot about narrative. Besides, what do you expect from a film that is based on a set of bubble gum cards briefly distributed in 1963(and pulled from circulation because of their excessive violence). Besides, both Burton and his screenwriter (Jonathan Gems) freely admit that they didn't realize that the cards even had a story. They thought that the text on the back of the cards were just advertisements (which suggests that neither of these guys can read).

Burton's best films (i.e. Batman and Beetlejuice) have usually gotten around the narrative problem by creating surprisingly strong characters and monstrously effective villains. But the human characters in Mars Attacks! are all weakly written and severely underdeveloped. Brosnan has a few daffy moments as a kind of inverted Hugh Marlowe as his smug scientist deftly misinterprets every known fact about the invaders. Likewise, Jim Brown imparts a few precious moments of dignity in his role as a ex‑boxing champion turned Vegas lounge greeter. On the other hand, Nicholson manages the unique feat of giving two of his worst performances ever in the same film.

Ironically, only the Martians have any limited appeal. Maybe its their goofy, wide‑eyed looks. Or perhaps it is the sight of their enormous, silly brains. More likely, they become sympathetic by default. After all, the Martians have no pretense of being anything other than a pack of ill‑bred fraternity boys running wild on an especially nasty set of pranks. As they make yapping noises while stitching human heads onto the bodies of Chihuahuas, the little green mirth makers are almost capable of stealing your heart. While they are at it, they will also help themselves to your kidneys, spleen, and liver.

Thanks to the superb CGI work provided by Industrial Lights & Magic, the Martians are also the most brilliantly satiric reference made in Mars Attacks! to the B movies of yesteryear. Designed to move in a slightly jerky manner like old fashion stop‑motion animated models, these pesky marauders glide about with spooky mechanical precision as they smirk their way through every slaughter.

Too bad they don't have a better film to star in. But good film making is seemingly something that Tim Burton is now determined not to do. Instead, he has become an aging prankster looking to indulge himself in minor gags that might vaguely amuse the pre‑teen set("heh heh, that was cool"). Likewise, he seems insistent on making movies that are completely lacking in any real sense of fun.

Which is one of the reasons why Mars Attacks! is a long and charmless bore.

Scream

Like it or not, the slasher genre is back with a Scream. Wes Craven's new entry has already proven successful enough in the States to insure a slew of copycat productions as the teeny-kill horror movie once again becomes a hot Hollywood prospect. But the odd (and distinctive) aspect about Scream is neither its gore nor high body count. Instead, the movie invokes such a thick, irony-laced approach to the deconstruction of the entire genre that a casual viewer might rightly be afraid that there will be a pop quiz after the screening. The whole thing could have been retitled Freddy Krueger Meets the Tenure Committee.

Scream begins with a basic outline of most modern horror films. A home-alone teenager (Drew Barrymore) finds herself taunted by a series of increasingly threatening phone calls from an apparent psycho. The caller forces her into playing game of horror movie trivia in which the winner is allowed to live. Unfortunately, she stumbles on a tricky Friday the 13th reference and discovers that this is one test graded by something more severe than the curve.

A massive manhunt ensues, though the only clue to the killer is his peculiar use of a mask based upon the Edvard Munch painting The Scream (arty chaps, these wackos). Increasingly, a trail of evidence (and corpses) leads the police to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a high schooler whose mother had been butchered in a grisly case a year earlier. Is Sidney a potential victim, or a ticking emotional time bomb? Since the local cops are all blunder heads, it is up to a TV news reporter (Courteney Cox) to discover the truth. Besides, the reporter already has a book deal lined up on the side, so she is highly motivated.

But the basic plot quickly gives way to a torrent of self-referential commentary. Though the psycho in Scream sees himself as the world's leading expert on slasher movies, he is obviously working in a very competitive environment. The whole town has seen virtually every teeny-kill pic ever made and the local citizens routinely nitpick as if they were preparing for a seminar at the British Film Institute.

Scream is an overt continuation of the theoretical musings that previously dominated Wes Craven's New Nightmare. But while New Nightmare floundered in its neo-Godardian posture (the movie was essentially a variation of Godard's Contempt), Scream manages to keep enough action on the screen to hold the average attention span. It also manages some genuinely funny moments, especially through its surprisingly effective undercutting of the killer's physical prowess. At its best, Scream plays like a modern version of Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (though not quite as totally sassy).

Of course, the fact that terms like "deconstruction" and "neo-Godardian" can be applied to a slasher film is an odd tribute to director Craven's eccentric position in the horror genre. Craven has always been a little too smart and tasteful for his own movies. After all, his production of Last House on the Left was based upon Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. So it is not surprising that Craven is now seemingly hell bent upon redoing the entire French New Wave.

Such weird ambitions is what makes Craven's Scream a decent bit of intellectual fun. But if he gets anymore self-referential, then we may have to ship this boy off to France.