Movieline Online

THE FLICK: As a director, Jess Franco doesn’t just cut corners, he massacres them! It’s one of his most identifying traits as a Euro-trash auteur. Over the course of his career – which must span nearly 200 films under various aliases – Franco never seemed to have a budget larger than your average 8-year-old with a Handy Cam. So circumstances demanded severe compromises. Of course, these are the sort of challenges all filmmakers face. But Franco’s “quantity over quality” approach set the standard for exploitation cinema, excusing any number of onscreen gaffes and goofs as long as there were enough boobs and blood to provide a distraction. A lesser director might have hung his head in shame, but Franco simply continued to shoot, pumping out movie after movie and often turning a tidy profit for his producers. The DVD format has been particularly kind to Franco, polishing a numbers of turds into shiny special editions that almost convince you the guy had some talent. He doesn’t, just to ma...

THE FLICK: You would think magic and magicians would be a much more common subject for Hollywood, with all its inherent showmanship and mystery. However filmmaking itself is a sort of cinematic slight of hand, whether it comes in the form of editing, acting or special effects; it creates an illusion of reality in much the same way a good performer pulls off his master trick. This “double-negative” cancels out the thrill one might have watching a master magician at his craft on the screen, since any filmmaker worth his weight could perform the same feats of skill with a push of a button. The Prestige actually proves my point, after a fashion. At one point in this story of dueling magicians who physically and mentally mutilate one another in the course of their professional competition, much is made of the use of a “double” to pull off a particular trick. For Hugh Jackman’s character, a bitter showman with a flair for the stage, this is an unacceptable compromise. He wants to perform “re...

THE FLICK: Lucio Fulci’s reputation comes with a whole lot of baggage; namely a suitcase full of gore that the director lugged around beginning in the early 80’s until his death in 1996. His films were the very embodiment of “Fangoria”-friendly splatter-fests, full of body-obsessed, gross-out sequences that existed almost entirely outside the narrative. For Fulci, story was a distant second, but that didn’t stop Zombie, The Beyond and House by the Cemetery from becoming legendary in select horror film circles. All of which makes Perversion Story (aka One On Top Of The Other) stand out as an anomaly in the director’s oeuvre. Heavy on plot, if light on originality, Fulci proves that he could deliver a coherent, intriguing mystery if given the right material. Not quite a giallo by definition (Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is a better fit), the story involves a flashy San Francisco doctor (Jean Sorel) whose wife (the outstanding Maris Mell) dies under mysterious circumstances, leaving a...

THE FLICK: Let’s talk about what The Departed “isn’t” before we decide what it “is.” It isn’t the best film of the year, no matter what the buzz says. I know everyone wants to give Marty an Oscar, but, let’s be honest; anything he earns this year will be the equivalent of a Lifetime Achievement Award. And it isn’t Scorsese’s best effort since Goodfellas; hell, Casino and even The Aviator had more creative pizzazz. But it “is” the most commercially successful film of his career, fitting in snuggly into a categorical genre (or the closest the director has come since Cape Fear) and reinforcing the familiar themes and off-color details that have defined his work since Mean Streets in 1973, his first studio effort. Scorsese’s self-described “European sensibility” has always kept his work from reaching the masses like his childhood inspirations, Hollywood mainstream efforts of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The director’s own films emerged through a filter of Catholic guilt and street-level brutality. H...

THE FLICK: Anyone who still believes that Sarah Michelle Gellar was the reason behind the first film’s success, please raise your hand. Good, now that we’ve kicked all the Buffy fans out of the room we can get down to the facts. People enjoy these movies for two reasons: to laugh at them or to be scared s***less by them. In the case of Takashi Shimizu’s remake of the sequel to his original film’s sequel (it’s all very confusing), you’ve got a little of both. The story is straight-ahead stupid, juggling three stories across two continents with a moderately successful twist at the end. “God-girl” Amber Tamblyn takes over for Gellar, whose death is a highlight of the first act...and sweet retribution for anyone who sat through those Scooby-Doo movies. But the curse lives on, attaching itself to a trio of Tokyo schoolgirls (someone been surfing for internet porn!) who begin to see that creepy kabuki kid and his contortionist mom everywhere. That clever choreography is Shimizu’s one true ac...