Many Days of Friday the 13th - Friday the 13th (2009)

Friday the 13th (2009)

    So here we are at the latest Friday the 13th film, which is already 5 years old.  After it came out, there was quick talk of a sequel after its great recordbreaking first weekend.  However, it had one of the sharpest declines by the second weekend.  In fact, the box office fell by a surprising 80.4%!  That's the 7th biggest drop of a film to open at #1 at the box office... ever.  So what was it?  Was it negative reviews?  Bad word of mouth?  Did something huge open the next weekend?  Let's take a look.

     For some reason, after the success of 2003's Freddy Vs. Jason, there was no movement on another film in either one of the series.  By 2009, Michael Bay's company Platinum Dunes had decided to reimagine the Friday series after having success rebooting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, The Amityville Horror, and The Hitcher.  There was actually a good deal of excitement in this announcement.  Unlike other things Michael Bay touches, the remakes weren't all that bad.  I genuinely liked his company's remakes at that point.  So I was kind of excited that he was taking a a series that had devolved into self parody and that no one really cared about anymore and put a crew together to make something of it.  

    The movie starts off with a running start... literally.  It begins as the end of the original 1980 Friday the 13th did, this time with new actors and filmed in artsy black and white.  Everyone knows what happened in the first film, so I'll just say that Mrs. Voorhees meets her demise at the hands of a young female camp councillor.  Then we fast forward to present day where some dipshit 20somethings are looking for some wild growing weed to get rich.  The GPS screws up and they end up camping in the woods for the night.  Obviously with the franchise this is in, it doesn't turn out well.  There's some sex, crude remarks, pissing in the woods, and hey!  One of the guys finds the weed!  But crap, Jason doesn't like his weed touched, so the guy gets bashed to death.  And Jason isn't having this weed stealing.  He'd been quiet all alone in the woods until some stupid college aged idiots come and start to steal his mellow down medicine.  And he doesn't approve!  So he kills the rest of them one by one in increasingly painful ways.  One guy gets his leg caught in a bear trap, and then a few minutes later gets the ol' machete to the face!  Oh it's good to have Jason back...

    Fast forward a few months and a group of college students are taking a vacation at spoiled rich asshole Trent's upscale cabin in the woods.  (No relation to this Trent.  Oddly enough, the same actor played another asshole named Trent in Michael Bay's Transformers.  I like to think it's the same character.)  Meanwhile Jared Padalecki is looking for his missing sister (one of the kids looking for the weed).  The cops don't like him doing so, making the people in the area feel unsafe, etc. or something like that.  Besides Jared Padalecki, the only interesting character in this film in Chewie, the asian-american weed addict.  He's just so likeable, which is an odd thing  for this series.  I guess Arlen Escarpeta, Chewie's best friend, is alright as well.  He's funny too, but are any of these peripheral characters here for anything more than to be knocked off?  Absolutely not.  This is Friday the 13th we're talking about here!  We want things this way!  Below is a picture of the main cast of the film.

    One thing about this particular installment in the series that I do like is that for the first time since the early 1980s, Jason runs!  It brings a bit more menace to the film that the later installments in the series didn't have.  There's one big difference between this film and the first three films in the series, however.  Like Part IV and Part VII, these are not camp councilors as the main characters.  They are simply partying teens out for a week in a cabin by Crystal Lake.  Sadly, I like the camp councilor stories better.  They just have a different vibe to them than the other entries do.  Something else odd the writers did was to give Jason a secret underground lair beneath the old camp and surrounding area.  I'm wondering how it got there, as it seems to connect all the cabins and various other places.  Did Jason just spend 30 years digging it all?  Did he hire the Amish to help?  Does the camp just have very overactive moles?  While it doesn't make much sense, it is odd and different.  And another good point of the film is that aside from 1 or 2 characters, we don't actively want these people to die.  I mean, they may be a little annoying at times, but they aren't all sleazeballs.  And of course, there's my favorite aspect to the film.  The fact that within the first 40 minutes, we basically have the end of the first film, then we have Jason in his second film burlap sack mask, and then a bit later we have Jason get his iconic hockey mask.  I wish he'd have kept the burlap sack for longer, though.  You all know it's my favorite.

    Now for some negatives.  I guess it's not really a negative, but a positive for some people, but there is tons of nudity here.  Like some of the most I've seen in a horror film, and definitely the most in this particular series.  There's lots of boobs, rear nudity, and even some full frontal... and a very graphic sex scene.  And for the ladies... two shirtless guys.  (Woohoo?)  However, for those looking for inventive kills... Look elsewhere.  Like the first few films in the series, this goes back to basics.  No powertools, no punching someone's head off, no tossing someone on a huge corkscrew or killing people in virtual reality.  Instead we get arrows in the head, bear traps, machete kills.... Basically people just getting killed with sharp objects.  I think the most inventive kill was just setting someone on fire, actually.  I don't find these deaths to be negatives, but I know some would get bored by them.  To me, these are more realistic and are potentially frightening a little bit.  When I see someone's head get punched off or someone have their heart punched through their chest, I laugh.  When I see someone have a metal pole pushed through their throat or a leg get snapped in a bear trap, I cringe and think "Oooh, that's gotta be painful."   And just for fun, here's the obnoxious character's epic death scene, including his girly scream.

      Even though it's not the best regarded film in the series, I do like this film quite a bit.  It has no huge negatives when considered in relation to the other films in the series.  Even the acting isn't really bad.  It's not the best, but at least they have some trained actors here.  And the film does get down to business pretty quickly and doesn't let up that much.  Remember how the first few films took their time to get to the killings thinking it made things suspenseful even though it really didn't?  Yeah, they know it doesn't work here, so they just decrease the time between killings every so often.  I've often wondered why the movie hasn't gotten the sequel that was announced right after the film came out in theaters.  These films aren't expensive to make and there is an audience for these.  From what I read, it seems the downward economy that started right about the time this movie came out put the sequel on indefinite hold.   However, last year Warner Bros sold their ownership of Friday the 13th back to Paramount so that they could co-produce Chris Nolan's Interstellar.    And apparently now Paramount is working very hard to make the sequel a reality.    There is also a new TV series apparently in the works, though I'm not sure if it's been greenlit or if it's just a pilot that we'll have to wait and see if it gets picked up.   The new film is apparently set to debut next year, 2015.  I hope they don't go the found footage route which I've read they are considering.

     Well, that's it (for now) for the Friday the 13th series, folks.  I intend to start my series of write-ups on the Nightmare on Elm Street and Star Trek film series very soon.  I hope you've all enjoyed this as much as I liked writing them.  

 

Godzilla (2014) review

      Now, let's get this out of the way first.  I'm a Godzilla fan-boy.  I own all the movies, even the bad ones.  I even own the 1998 Godzilla.  I don't like it that much, but I do own it.  I've been looking forward to this movie since the first trailer came out last year.  You would think that being a fan-boy of the Toho movies, that I would be against this movie, since it's an all CG Godzilla, not set in Japan, not done by Toho, etc.  Well, sorry, but when it comes to Godzilla, as long as the movie is interesting and has a lot of destruction in it, it's a good Godzilla film.  And today I've learned that there's a very vocal minority that completely hated the movie.  I honestly do not understand those people.  They either don't understand Godzilla or were expecting something akin to Independence Day.  I would caution those people that they'd be better off watching the 1998 version of the movie... and that therefore they should probably butt out of the conversation, and should be laughed off the internet for liking that movie better.

    So the movie is about this bomb defusing Navy guy played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass, Kick-Ass 2) who, 15 years earlier was son of a scientist (Bryan Cranston) who worked at a nuclear power plant in Japan.  His mother (Juliette Binoche) worked there too.  Well, there was a disaster there that the Japanese government has labeled as a nuclear accident.  Since then, his dad has been trying to get evidence that the incident was not a nuclear one, and was instead caused by something living.  Before the incident, there were seismographical readings that were patterned instead of random, which could not be caused by an earthquake and wasn't coming from the plant itself.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character ends up having to go to Japan in the present day to bail his dad out of jail after he trespassed on the supposedly radiated property they used to live on near the plant.  After that, things go to shit.  Ken Watanbe plays doctor Serizawa, who is a scientist who knows more that he lets on at first.  Elizabeth Olsen plays Aaron Taylor-Johnson's wife, who is a nurse in San Francisco, where they live in the film.  It's hard to write this without giving too many plot points away.  Let's just say that there are more monsters in the film than Godzilla himself, and they do tend to get more screen time than he does.  Also, the main characters are not well fleshed out.  I felt more for Ken Watanabe than I did Aaron Taylor-Johnson.  Heck, I felt more for the other monsters in the film than I did him.   But see, unlike the film's detractors, I went in not caring about the human characters.  In Godzilla films they never matter that much anyway.

     Now I know that many will consider myself an impartial reviewer for saying such things, and they would be right.  If you look at it as just a big disaster film that's supposed to wow you with CGI, it's merely a good movie.  If you go in wanting human drama and character development, you're going to hate it.  If you go to see it wanting destruction, an easy to follow plot, cool cinematography, and a technically well made film, you'll probably love it, as the latter is what I wanted.  There's been a lot of talk about Godzilla himself being in only 20 minutes of the film.  Well, I wouldn't say that's true.  He may be on-screen for 20 minutes, but as in Jaws and Alien, there's a build up here.  You see the other monster about 30 minutes in.  This monster, the MUTO or whatever they call it, is the star monster here.  That's the way actually a lot of Godzilla films are.  The other monster terrorizes the city or whatever, and Godzilla comes in late in the film to destroy it.  I know a lot of people have actually never seen a Godzilla film though, so I can't hold their disappointment at this against them.  I just know what to expect, and they didn't. 

    The cinematography here is great.  I loved the way that the camera was always at human level.  You saw things as the people would.  You don't have fancy crane moves.  You don't see Godzilla at face height unless there's a person at face height of Godzilla in that situation.  (Like the halo dive.)  It gives a more "you're there" feel to the film, but it's not shaky cam, thank goodness.  I'd compare the way it was filmed to Jaws, where you are at water level in the scenes where people are in the water, not 5 feet above it.  And the music to this was great too.  Alexandrè Desplat's score is one of the best I've heard for a while.  There's a primal sense there that goes great with the force of nature theme in the movie.  It's a dark score, but adventuresome as well.  I'll definitely be getting the soundtrack.

     All in all, it's the best monster movie I've seen in a long while.  I'd put it on par with Jurassic Park in terms of monster movies.  (I know it's a stretch calling it that, but T Rex is king of the lizards, and Godzilla is king of the monsters.)  The acting in the film is pretty good, but the characterizations are pretty meh.  I don't even remember the names of the characters, but that doesn't bother me here.  At least I didn't actively want them to die like the ones in the 1998 version.  I think I'll go see this in theaters another time or two before it leaves.  I liked it that much.  It's set to make almost $100 million this weekend, which will make it a hit.  It was shot for $160 million, which is only $30 million more than the 1998 version cost, and that's without inflation.  So it should make up it's money by the end of next weekend just in American box office.  Please folks, if you want some fun, go see this.  If you want a brooding character study, go watch The Dark Knight again.  You should know what you're going to get with a Godzilla film.


6 1/2 out of 7 stars.   Must see.

5 Weirdest Godzilla Moments and 5 Favorite Godzilla Films

     As posited when I did the top films that influenced who I am, I am a huge Godzilla fan.  It started when I saw my first Godzilla film when I was about 9 years old.  That film was Godzilla Vs. The Sea Monster, a 1966 film that isn't considered one of the best.  And I don't count it as one of my favorites either.  It's near the middle of the 28 Toho Godzilla films in that regard.  Yes, not counting the new Legendary Pictures version or the quite horrible Roland Emmerich film from 1998, there are 28 Godzilla films.  The first one came out in 1954 in Japan as a nuclear fable.  Having been the only country to have an atomic bomb dropped on it (2 actually), they knew first-hand the effects of nuclear war.  And Godzilla was supposed to be a personification of those effects with the destruction he caused by trampling through the cities and laying waste with his nuclear breath.  The first film was a dark one, and it did so well in Japan that an American company bought up the rights and re-edited the film, inserting Perry Mason himself, Raymond Burr, as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo as Godzilla attacks.  The film was retitled, Godzilla, King of The Monsters, and is actually a great movie in it's own right, yet not as dark and very different from the Japanese original.  The original Japanese film was quickly followed up with a hastily made, inferior sequel called Godzilla Raids Again in 1955.  Despite it's strong sales, it was not well received critically, and when sold to America, they tried to market Godzilla as a different monster called Gigantis, and the film flopped.  Godzilla would not appear in another movie until 1962, when he met up with King Kong...  That movie, and it's American redub (which is the only way you can see the movie in America, unlike the other Godzilla films), did so well that Godzilla would appear in a movie almost every year from 1964's Godzilla Vs. Mothra until 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla.  The only year in between those without a Godzilla film was 1970, when the Japanese studio system started to collapse.

     Due to the success of American Saturday matinees on TV and all-day marathons of Japanese monster films in movie theaters Godzilla remained popular even after the films stopped being made both here and in Japan.  In 1984, Toho decided that Godzilla might be profitable again.  (The 1970s had been a time of declining ticket sales for Godzilla films... and lower budgets.)  1984 saw the release of Return of Godzilla, which was a dead serious take on Godzilla, akin to the 1954 original, but with some sci-fi action added.  It's a pretty great Godzilla film and did well in Japan.  It was re-edited and released in America in 1985 as Godzilla 1985.  Raymond Burr, star of the American re-edit of the original Godzilla, was again called back to reprise his character.  New scenes were added, some scenes were deleted, and a scene where a Russian submarine tries to stop a nuclear launch was redone so it looks like they tried to actually launch the weapon.  The film didn't do well critically or in theaters here.  However, this new series continued in Japan until 1995!  It's referred to as the Hesei series by Godzilla fans, referring to who reigned in Japan while the bulk of the series was produced.  The original 1954-1975 series is referred to as the Showa series.  Godzilla was actually killed off in 1995 to great media attention. 

    In 1998, the American Godzilla came out to a critical drubbing around the world.  It didn't feel like a Godzilla film, it didn't look like Godzilla, and those that are fans of Godzilla call it GINO (Godzilla In Name Only).  And the movie is actually not that great.  The story sucks.  But it has some cool destruction scenes, I'll give it that.  Due to the film, Toho decided to make a new Godzilla series to rinse the bad taste left in peoples' mouths from the American film.  This new series is called the Millennium series, as it started with Godzilla 2000, which was also released in American theaters.  (I know, as I was one of the few who went to see it.)  It was again re-edited and dubbed, but not to the large extent of the last two times.  The new dubbing made the film a bit less serious, and the film was re-edited to move things along quicker.  In fact, most prefer the American edit to the Japanese one.  5 films followed after that one, and since 2004, there has not been a Godzilla film.

5 Weirdest Godzilla Moments

1.  Okay, so this is the only one here that I couldn't find a film clip for.  In the 1964 film Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Mothra's fairy companions, who are only a foot tall, translate the attempt by Mothra, here in larva form, to convince Godzilla and Rodan to join up with it to fight the new menace, Ghidorah.  So we get to hear translated Godzilla and Rodan being sad that the humans don't understand them, and Godzilla appearing to curse at Mothra resulting in the little fairies saying "Oh Godzilla, what bad language!".  Maybe you have to be there to consider this weird, but I always have.  Up until this film, the 5th Godzilla film, the series was considered serious, but it was this film as well that turned Godzilla into a good guy, so...

2.   Godzilla plays volleyball with a giant lobster.  This is from Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster and it may seem out of character for Godzilla, but there's a reason for that.  The movie was originally going to be a King Kong film.  However, at the last minute, they decided Godzilla was a better choice.  So all throughout the film Godzilla does Kong-like things.  I think he even beats his chest a few times, and he's woken up by lightning, which in the Japanese films, gives Kong his power.

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3.  Godzilla and Angillas, um... talk to each other.  And I mean, it's translated into English in the American version...  This happens in 1972's Godzilla Vs. Gigan.  In it, a tape that only monsters can understand is played like hundreds of miles away, but somehow Godzilla hears it all the way on Monster Island.  And he proceeds to speak in English to Angillas, and Angillas speaks back...  No, that isn't odd at all....  In the Japanese version, the monsters sound like records scratching and have Japanese speech bubbles to translate what they are saying to each other.  That makes a LITTLE more sense, right?  Right?  Here's a rip that shows both the speech bubbles and the English dub.

4.  Godzilla's victory dance.  Okay, this one is from Invasion of the Astro-Monster from 1965.  Aliens bring Godzilla and Rodan from earth to their planet to fight Monster Zero, who just happens to be King Ghidorah.  So they fight him and seemingly win, after which, Godzilla does a little dance that was popular in Japan at the time.  This moment in one of the more serious films of the series....

5.   And I saved the best for last.  In 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah (also known as Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster), Godzilla fights a big pile of sludge brought about from humanity's trash.  (I shit you not.  The Japanese love to talk about environmental stuff.)  And believe it or not, that's not the most WTF part of the film.  No, there's also little animated sections for some reason...  And comical music... and people get eaten away by toxic gas.  And most of all... Godzilla suddenly learns how to fly.  Yes, Godzilla can now, for one movie, fly.  And if that weren't intriguing enough, he flies... backwards.... propelled by his own radioactive breath.  Yes, folks, this is something you have to see to believe.

And here's something I couldn't leave out either...  In 1973's Godzilla Vs. Megalon, Godzilla performs the world's longest jump-kick.  Forever enshrined during the opening of a few seasons of MST3K too!

Top 5 Favorite Godzilla Films

1.   Son of Godzilla (1966)

     This was the first Godzilla film to not have any city-trampling.  This one is set almost completely on a far-off island where scientists are doing weather experiments.  This was my dad's favorite Godzilla film, as it includes Minya, commonly believed to be Godzilla's son.  Throughout the film, Godzilla teaches Minya to breath radioactive breath (Minya manages smoke rings instead) and fights giant praying mantises called Kamakaras or Gimantis and a giant spider called Kumonga in the Japanese version and Spiga in the English version.  It's definitely not one of the more serious Godzilla films, but it's not the silliest either.  It sports an odd musical score, and is the first Godzilla film helmed by the director of many of the later Showa pictures, Jun Fukuda.  It's quite entertaining, and the second Godzilla film I ever saw.  And for once, the characters are somewhat interesting too.

2.  Godzilla 1985 (1985)

     Another one of the first Godzilla films I saw, and the only one never to be released even on DVD here in America.  There's been some rights issues with the film since the mid-1990s that have yet to be resolved.  At any rate, it's a very serious film.  Godzilla looks truly menacing here, and the city destruction is some of the best out of Godzilla history.  For the first time in decades, you actually see Godzilla stomp on people....  You see him pick up a train with people in it and then throw it back down.  And Godzilla has fangs!  And looks pissed off.  For once, Godzilla is kinda scary for the first time since 1954.  If you can find it, check it out.

3.  Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah:Giant Monsters All Out Attack! (2001)

     This movie was concieved and directed by the guy who directed the kick-ass Gamera films of the 1990s, which were often considered darker and better than the Godzilla movies produced at the time.  In this film, Godzilla is a bad guy, as he was through all of the Millennium series.  But also King Ghidorah for the first time in history, is a good guy... and he's shorter than Godzilla!  The movie also brings back fan favorites Mothra and Baragon.  Godzilla looks more reptilian here than ever before.  In fact, Godzilla was originally meant to walk on all fours in this film, but that wasn't to be.  He also has stark white eyes with no pupils... Yet again, if you want to see Godzilla as an evil bad-ass, here's one of the films to see.  It's actually got some pretty good special effects too!

4.  Godzilla Vs. Gigan (1972)

     Ok, so this one is either loved or hated by Godzilla fans.  It does have quite a bit of stock footage from earlier Godzilla films stuck in there which kind of stick out, but it's not as much as some claim.  However, it also introduced a monster Godzilla fans really like in Gigan.  And the end monster battle lasts about 30 minutes in a Godzilla amusement park!  The plot has to deal with these people building an amusement park to bring forth world peace.  (Yeah, I don't get it either.)  But their intentions are really to destroy all of earth's monsters and reform the world to suit their needs as their world has been polluted to the point of destruction!  But who cares, right?  We're here to see men in rubber suits beat the crap out of each other and destroy scale models, am I right?  Well, there's a lot of that in this film too.  Even though the Godzilla suit used here is obviously falling apart.  You can see bits of rubber fling off during the fight!  And the King Ghidorah suit was in such bad shape that during most of the fights, stock footage had to be used, as evident from it going from day to night and back quite a few times during the fights/destruction scenes.

5.  Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

     Why is this so good?  Well, it's the first time in the series that more than two monsters fight each other, that's why.... and it was still sort of serious despite the talk between the monsters I explained earlier.  And it's got enough city destruction to please most anyone.  It's directed by the guy who did the original Godzilla film, and in fact, quite a few of the Showa series films, Ishiro Honda.  So it's got some quality to it, even if it is just a monster free-for-all.  I'm still unsure of the plot... so.... yeah....

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Be sure to watch the new American Godzilla film.  It's gotten good reviews and looks great.