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JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER 2007
Written by John Ainslie and Jon Knautz.
Directed by Jon Knautz.
Starring Travor Matthews, Robert Englund, Daniel Kash, David Fox, Rachel Skarsten, James A. Woods and Dean Hawes.
I’ve seen a lot of movies that were pretty good right up until an awful ending. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer is the first one I’ve ever seen where the ending is pretty good, but everything up until that sucked really hard.
Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews) is a plumber with an anger management problem. His family was killed by a monster in the woods when Jack was a boy and it’s left him with a lot of undirected rage. Jack is seeing a counselor about his emotional problems. He’s also got an incredible naggy girlfriend and is taking a night school science class. Jack’s professor (Robert Englund) gets possessed by a demon and after the film fiddles around for a looooong time with Englund chewing up the scenery, Jack eventually has to save his classmates from their demonic instructor and discover his destiny in the world.
Let me start with the good thing about this movie. The last 25 minutes or so when Jack FINALLY starts slaying monsters is corny and cheesy, with fight choreography straight out of a high school play and a supernatural beast that looks like H. R. Puffinstuff’s version of Jabba the Hutt. It’s also relatively fun. Do you remember those TV shows from the 1990s - Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess? Those shows were created by horror filmmaker Sam Rami and the good part of Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer comes close to what it would have been like if Rami had tried to create another TV show starring Ash from the Evil Dead movies. It’s melodrama that completely embraces larger-than-life silliness.
Unfortunately, the first 60 minutes of this film are lame and poorly done. Jack wanders from pointless scene to pointless scene while vain attempts at humor are hurled at the audience. And while the title character is treading in stagnant water, Robert Englund is doing his own one-man-show as the Professor. If you just watched the middle part of this film, you’d swear that Englund was the star of it. From scenes going on too long to characters who stand around waiting for something to happen to dialog that sounds like bad improv, it all has an amateurish quality to it.
If you’re a fan of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess and the Evil Dead films, you might enjoy watching the last half of this movie. I can’t think of anyone on Earth who might enjoy the first half. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer might have made a decent first episode for a syndicated TV series. As a feature film, even a direct-to-DVD flick, it’s a failure.
JAWS: THE REVENGE 1987
Written by Michael de Guzman.
Directed by Joseph Sargent.
Starring Lorraine Gary, Lance Guest, Michael Caine, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young, Judith Barsi, Lynn Whitfield and Mitchell Anderson.
Holy buckets, this film is definitely in the running for best bad movie of all time. This thing is laugh-out-loud funny in its ineptness. If you tried to make a parody of the Jaws films, you couldn’t make anything more effective than Jaws: The Revenge.
Even after the debacle that was Jaws 3D, someone at Universal Pictures still thought they could wring a little more money out of the movie-going public by cranking out a fourth Jaws flick. I can only imagine how much hookers and blow was enjoyed before they came with that idea. I can only guess how much more hookers and blow had to be consumed for the studio to go through with it after Roy Scheider turned them down and they had to resort to bringing back Lorraine Gary, who played Scheider’s wife in the first two films. The studio executives must have then had to spend a year at the Bunny Ranch and snort the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Columbia to decide that their killer shark movie should have a subplot of middle aged romance.
Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) is still living in the island resort town of Amity, years after it was terrorized by two great white sharks. Her husband has been dead for several years after a heart attack (although the film takes great pains to remind us that Roy Scheider used to be the star of these movies), her younger son Sean (Mitchell Anderson) is a town deputy and her older boy Michael (Lance Guest) is a marine biologist living with his wife and young daughter in the Bahamas. After one of the most hilarious shark attacks you’ll ever witness, Ellen decides to spend some time with Michael and his family. She flies down to the Bahamas…and the shark follows her. Yes, that’s right. They don’t even bother for a moment to pretend this murderous fish has anything in common with an actual animal. They might as well have put a mask on it like Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees or Leatherface because that’s exactly the sort of character it is.
In the Bahamas, Ellen gets romanced by a local pilot named Hoagie (Michael Caine). This goes on despite the fact that Lorraine Gary looks almost old enough to be Michael Caine’s mother. She was certainly long past her freshness date when she made this movie. Eventually, Ellen, Hoagie, Michael and Michael’s black friend Jake (Mario Van Peebles) all end up on a boat trying to kill the shark. That involves them turning a flashlight into some sort of “shark taser” and an explosion that defies every known law of physics.
I can honestly say that if the shark had walked up out of the surf on its hind fins, put on a top hat and danced a jig on the beach…that would have been only slightly more ridiculous than what happens in this film. Between Hoagie apparently being able to walk on water, a great white that looks faker than the Landshark from Saturday Night live and a Greg Evigan impersonator whose acting consists of a variety of blank stares, there are more unintentionally funny moments in this movie than you can shake a stick at.
If you want to watch something good, stay far away from Jaws: The Revenge. If you and your friends want to watch a bad movie you can make fun of, it doesn’t get any worse (and therefore better) than this.
JERICHO MANSIONS 2003
Written by Alberto Sciamma and Harriet Sand.
Directed by Alberto Sciamma.
Starring James Caan, Genevieve Bujold, Jennifer Tilly, Victoria Jane Allen, Peter Keleghan, Maribel Verdu, Bruce Ramsay, Mark Camacho, Susan Glover and David Gow.
This film is like the construction of a very weird and very bored kid on a rainy afternoon when the power is out and he can’t watch TV or go on his computer. It’s a misshapen entity made out of the cinematic equivalent of Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, scotch tape and the twist ties off of loaves of bread. Featuring Jennifer Tilly’s cleavage and James Caan as septuagenarian beefcake, it’s also one of those stories that only has about 25 minutes of basic plot, so they add in another 70 minutes of filler to make movie out of it.
Leonard Gray (James Caan) is the agoraphobic and mentally slow building super of a 6 floor apartment building. He’s referred to as a concierge in the film, but that’s only because this thing was made by Europeans and that’s apparently what they call their building supers. Anyway, the movie starts out by making you think that Leonard is going to be the centerpiece of a tale that involves the multiple different lives of the building’s tenants.
There’s Valda (Susan Glover), the middle aged woman who’s going a little crazy out of loneliness. There’s the young couple, Eugene and Dolores O’Donnell (Bruce Ramsay and Maribel Verdu). Eugene is a bit of a handyman and is infringing on Leonard’s territory. Dolores is a drug addict having an affair with another man in the building. That guy is Bill Cherry (Peter Keleghan), who’s the sort of dick who has sex with his mistress and is completely oblivious to her disinterest during the act. Bill is married to Donna (Jennifer Tilly), a licensed masseuse. Bill and Donna have a daughter, Holly (Victoria Jane Allen), that Leonard occasionally babysits. There’s also the token gay guy, Gilbert (Mark Camacho). At least I think he’s supposed to be gay. If he’s not the token gay, I don’t know what purpose his character serves. And finally, there’s the insanely angry landlady named Lilly Melnick (Genevieve Bujold). Her husband dies at the start of the film and Lilly basically never stops screaming at people throughout the rest of the movie.
As far as the plot goes, one of the folks in the building gets killed, Lilly yells a lot, Donna and Leonard have sex but not really, and some other stuff happens that has nothing to do with the big secret that gets rolled out in the last half hour of the movie. Then there’s the big secret, which might have been surprising but by the time it finally arrived, I had absolutely no interest in anything or anyone in this tale. I won’t spoil the secret, except to say it’s one of those overwrought gothic things that might have been believable in a novel 100 years ago but now just comes off as stupidly unrealistic.
There are two good things in Jericho Mansions. Jennifer Tilly is quite sexy and James Caan does a good job playing Leonard as the sort of little man leading a little life that other people never really think about that much. Even Caan can’t hold his performance together, though, as the story turns into a cross between a bad soap opera and an even worse psychological horror flick.
Everything besides Tilly and Caan is either outright dreadful, like Genevieve Bujold doing 90% of her scenes like someone’s sticking a cattle prod in her vagina; or ultimately meaningless, like the subplot of Eugene making Leonard feel threatened, which is touched on twice and then forgotten.
Jericho Mansions also has a soundtrack of loud, intrusive music that sounds like it’s from a totally different movie, flashback sequences that look like they’re from the old TV show Twin Peaks and CGI special effects that appear to have been done by a high school A/V club.
This is one of those films that isn’t interestingly bad or entertainingly bad or amusingly bad. It’s just bad. Don’t watch it.
JERSEY GIRL 2004
Written and Directed by Kevin Smith.
Starring Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Raquel Castro, George Carlin, Jason Biggs, Jennifer Lopez, Stephen Root, Mike Starr, Will Smith, Jason Lee and Matt Damon.
Now this is the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez movie that doesn’t suck. Made in the same unfortunate Bennifer era that produced Gigli, Jersey Girl was writer/director Kevin Smith’s attempt at making a film for normal adults. It’s a funny and unsentimentally sweet look at what it means to be a parent that takes Smith’s wonderful dialog and well-conceived characters and does something grown up with them.
Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck) is a rising young New York City publicist who’s devoted to his job and only slightly less devoted to the girl of his dreams, Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez). They get married and have a baby, but Gertrude dies as their daughter is born. Filled with resentment toward his daughter, Ollie palms her off on his father (George Carlin) and tries to resume the life he had before he ever met Gertrude. One public relations fiasco later, though, and Ollie is out of a job, living with his dad in New Jersey and forced to confront his conflicted feelings toward his little girl.
7 years later, Ollie is still living with his dad, working for the city and raising young Gertie (Raquel Castro). He’s been trying for years to get back to his old life in New York but he’s no closer now than he was 7 years ago. After meeting a smart and sexy young woman named Maya (Liv Tyler), it looks like Ollie might finally be settling in to his new life. But then he gets an opportunity to get back everything he felt was taken from him, to have his old life back. But that would mean destroying the only life his little girl has ever known and loved, losing the relationship he’s rebuilt with the father and missing out on whatever might happen with Maya. You can probably guess how that all works out.
Jersey Girl is a romantic-comedy about the paternal love a father feels for his daughter. The conflict in the story comes from the clash of that love and Ollie’s perfectly human self-centeredness. Ollie is an ambitious achiever who had everything he ever wanted and then had it all taken away from him, leaving him a baby to take its place. Then when Gertie becomes the most important thing in his life, she also becomes what’s standing between Ollie and all the things he once had to have. The film doesn’t shy away from Ollie’s selfishness or his arrogance, yet Affleck and Smith manage to make the character sympathetic in his weaknesses. Life wasn’t fair to Ollie Trinke and in that situation it’s normal to focus more on what you lose than on what you still have. But you can’t be a parent if your mind is constantly on what been lost. Your heart must be filled up with what you have.
Affleck, Liv Tyler and George Carlin all give tremendous performances in this movie. This may be the best acting job Affleck has ever done Carlin is hilarious as Ollie’s booze house, no nonsense, blue collar dad and Tyler is almost irresistible as the direct and sensual Maya who stumbles over Ollie like someone at the beach finding gold with a metal detector.
Jersey Girl does seem a bit disjointed at times. By skipping over the whole middle part of Ollie’s story, the 7 years he was raising Gertie, the beginning and end of the film don’t link up quite as smoothly as they should. It’s also disappointing that Smith crafts such interesting characters as Maya and Ollie’s dad and then makes them nothing but bit players in Ollie’s life. More could and should have been done with both of them.
And while Smith is at time a brilliant writer, this movie demonstrates that he’s not much of a filmmaker. Jersey Girl is more creatively ambitious than the other films Smith has done. As smart and as sharp as those movies are, they comfortably reside within a cinematic niche and appeal to a niche audience. Jersey Girl is trying to be broader and less reliant on snark and self-aware schtick. Smith can write that kind of story. He’s just not able to tell it on the screen. This film reveals him to be a director with a good sense of pace, but a rather pedestrian visual sense and a surprisingly unschooled storytelling sensibility. I mean, there are at least five separate instances where Smith falls back on that most tired and worn out of stylistic clichés, the musical interlude where a pop song comes on the soundtrack signifying exactly what the characters and thinking and feeling as they silently go through a montage of actions on screen. You can get away with that once, maybe twice. By the fourth time, the viewer is going to be rolling their eyes at it.
Minor quibbles aside, Jersey Girl is exactly the sort of movie you’d expect to get when the guy who did Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy grew up, got married and had a kid. It’s the same clever, emotionally open sort of tale. It’s just moved beyond thinking dick jokes, drug humor and pop culture references are the neatest things in the world. If you’ve moved beyond that as well, I think you’ll really enjoy this film.
JIMMY ZIP 1999
Written and Directed by Robert McGinley.
Starring Brendan Fletcher, Andrienne Frantz, Chris Mulkey, Robert Gossett, Zia Harris and Ike Gingrich.
Do you remember the TV show “Touched by an Angel”? Well, this film could have been titled “Touched by a Homeless Guy with Tourette’s Syndrome”. It manages to combine cloying sentimentality, an exaggerated faux realism, poor storytelling and a couple of welding montages straight out of an old episode of The A-Team.
Jimmy Zip (Brendan Fletcher) is a dull witted teen who loves to blow stuff up. He runs away from his maniacally abusive foster dad to the streets of L.A. There, he hooks up for about 2 minutes with a band of street kids who look like they’re auditioning for a remake of 21 Jump Street before getting a job offer from Rick Conseco (Chris Mulkey), one of the pimp/drug dealers who looks like a real estate agent and only exists in the movies. Jimmy works as one of Rick’s couriers until he joins the band of street kids in tormenting a homeless guy who lives in a junkyard. While taunting the poor bastard, Jimmy gets caught and the homeless guy ends up with $20,000 of Rick’s drug money that Jimmy forgot to deliver.
An enraged Rick sends a couple of thugs with Jimmy to get the money back and when they can’t find the homeless guy, the thugs decides to torture Jimmy. Why? Because they’re violent idiots. Anyway, the homeless guy saves Jimmy and takes him to another scrap yard, where he suggests Jimmy and he use Rick’s money to buy steel and sculpt it into art. After some bonding between Jimmy and the homeless guy, who’s named Horace Metcalf (Robert Gossett) and has the sort of Tourette’s Syndrome that only comes out exactly when the script needs it to, Jimmy takes the money back to Rick anyway.
I was actually surprised when that happened and it gave me hope this movie might be something worthwhile. Those hopes were dashed pretty quickly. The twist was only so the film could have Jimmy see a street girl named Shelia (Adrienne Frantz) that he liked become one of Rick’s whores, then he steals some more of Rick’s money and returns to Horace to make metal sculptures. When Jimmy and Horace try to get a snooty art gallery owner to give them their own show, she refuses until Rick threatens her. You see, after tracking down Jimmy and Horace, Rick doesn’t kill them for taking his money. No, he decides to let them make their sculptures and scares the gallery owner into giving them a show in the hope that Rick can get his money back by using Shelia to seduce middle-aged guys into buying the artwork. For a pimp/drug dealer, Rick has kind of an esoteric decision-making process.
The gallery show doesn’t go quite as planned and Jimmy and Shelia have to race back to the scrap yard, which was apparently right next door to the art gallery, to save Horace from being killed in a car-compactor. Rick and his thugs follow and Jimmy kills them with a giant flame thrower that he and Horace built.
When Jimmy Zip started, it was so goofy I thought it was going to be a parody of the “street kid goes good” genre. I’m sure a lot of the plot I just detailed seems like a parody. Unfortunately, Jimmy Zip is completely straight faced, unironic and non-subversive. It’s not a parody. It’s not a satire. It’s simply another “street kid gone good” movie that goes on far longer than the storytelling of writer/director Robert McGinley can sustain.
There is some decent acting going on here. Adrienne Frantz is quite appealing as Shelia. Robert Gossett keeps Horace from being nothing more than a clichéd caricature, even though that’s how the role is written. Brendan Fletcher is totally convincing as a teenage loser, which means he’s a good actor or really was a teenage loser. However, Chris Mulkey gives the best performance by far. Until the film turns Rick into every pissed off crime boss from every bad 1980s action movie, Mulkey gives the character a moral center and a sense of purpose. For most of the movie, I felt that Jimmy would be better off under Rick’s guidance. He might be a pimp/drug dealer, but he’s rational, reasonable, forgiving and even inadvertently benevolent. Jimmy would have much more likely become a model citizen with Rick than he would with Horace, who resembles a retarded kid that gets treated like a mascot at summer camp.
On the whole, though, Jimmy Zip is too long, too silly, too contrived and too sappy. It’s the sort of crap made by sub-mediocre filmmakers when they finally scrounge together enough money and it’s the sort of crap made by actors when they can’t find any other work. I supposed being in Jimmy Zip was better than waiting tables…but not by much.
JINDABYNE 2006
Written by Beatrix Christian.
Directed by Raymond Carver.
Starring Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, John Howard, Deborra-Lee Furness, Sean Rees-Wemyss, Eva Lazzaro, Stelios Yiakmis, Simon Stone, Leah Purcell, Betty Lucas, Alice Garner Tatea Reilly and Chris Haywood.
Even in the best of all possible worlds, Jindabyne would have probably been a slow, quiet, unfocused and pretentious film. In this world, however, these filmmakers made an awesomely wrong-headed storytelling decision about half-way through. That inexplicably dumb choice invalidates everything that comes before it and turns everything that comes after in into an almost unendurable, torturous slog.
Leading up to that stunningly stupid moment, this movie starts off like a horror movie with a guy in a truck pursuing a young girl in a small car. Then it breaks away from that to introduce us to a large cast of characters. Claire (the lovely Laura Linney) is an American woman living in Australia with her Irish husband Stewart (Gabriel Byrne). They have a young and emotionally delicate son named Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss) and are one of those couples that sort of drift in and out of being connected to each other. They seem to have a conflict revolving around Stewart’s mother infringing on what Claire feels is her familial territory. Claire and Stewart are friends with Carl and Jude (John Howard and Deborra-Lee Furness), an older couple raising their morbid granddaughter Caylin-Calandria (Maya Daniels) after their daughter died. Their conflict seems to be Jude’s resentment that Caylin-Calandria survived while her mother died.
After spending the first 20 minutes of so of the film acting as though it’s going to be a coming-of-age story about the two kids, surviving the turmoil of their parents and grandparents, all of that is abruptly thrown aside. Then Stewart, Carl and two other guys head deep into the Australia countryside to fish at a special river. It turns out that the guy in the truck from the beginning of the movie killed the girl and dumped her body in the river. The four fishermen find the girl’s body, and here’s where whatever might have been right about Jindabyne goes completely and irrevocably wrong. The four men decide to just leave the girl’s body where it is and keep fishing for another day before finally notifying the police.
The movie goes on after that and physically demonstrates Einstein’s theories of the passage of time, because the second half of this film takes an an eon to get through. There’s a whole bit about the public revulsion at what Stewart and the other men didr, it goes into the complicated marital history of Claire and Stewart, Claire goes on a quest to try and connect with the dead girl’s family and atone for what Stewart did, the killer in the truck shows up a few times for no good reason except to keep the audience awake, we suddenly get a theme about the divide between white Australians and the Aborigines and the story even finally comes back to Tom and Caylin-Calandria for a resolution to their little story that doesn’t fit at all what they were doing in the first part of the film. And aside from Laura Linney doing some very fine acting, as usual, none of the stuff I just described is at all interesting or compelling or enlightening or entertaining. You can’t care about any of that and you’re left with either turning the movie off or suffering through to the end like a masochist.
That’s because these filmmakers botch the most important moment of this story and the most important scene in the film. That being the discussion Stewart and the others have about ignoring the dead girl and just fishing like nothing happened. The filmmakers botch it because that discussion never happens. It’s not in the film. There’s a scene where they find the body and then there’s a scene where they’re deciding what to do with the body while they’re fishing, but we never get to see or hear the conversation about whether they should fish or go for the cops. It never happens.
But the characters HAVE to have that conversation and the audience HAS to see them have that conversation. Not just because it’s what every group of normal human beings would do, if only to verbally reassure themselves and each other that they aren’t vile bastards for ignoring the dead girl in favor of fishing, but because that’s the moment when the audience is supposed to see who these guys really are, who they think they are and who they think each other is. Those are the emotional truths and lies and confusions that are meant to link and infuse everything that comes after that conversation, and they’re meant to make us remember and re-examine everything that came before that conversation. Without it, there’s this big, gaping wound in the story and it’s all that you feel or focus on.
I think the filmmakers did it that way because this film is really about the female characters. Claire and Jude are much more prominent and get far more lines and scenes than Stewart or Carl. In fact, almost all the female characters get more attention than their male counterparts. But the biggest and most powerful moment of the story happens to the 4 male characters. If the film correctly dealt with that moment, it would have to spend more time with those men and shove the female characters off to the side. These filmmakers didn’t want to do that, but it is what the story demanded.
This is another one of those films where you can really enjoy Laura Linney’s performance. She gets a chance to shine the way she can as a woman who shouldn’t be that likable on paper but is tremendously involving anyway. The rest of Jindabyne is either tedious or painful to sit through. It’s frankly absurd how meaningful these filmmakers thought Jindabyne would be, while they passed over the most meaningful aspect of the story. It’s like the movie has a stroke in the middle of the story and doesn’t realize its left side is paralyzed for the rest of the film.
Unless you plan on fastforwarding through every scene that doesn’t have Laura Linney in it…take a pass on Jindabyne.
JOHNNY VIRUS 2005
Written and Directed by W.W. Vought.
Starring Mark Kiely, Patricia Heller, Bob Golub, Gregory Scott Cummins, Richard V. Kicata, Andy Baum and Ken Olandt.
Well…I suppose you have to give these filmmakers credit for imagination. I’m not sure anyone else has ever thought about stitching together a lame episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with a terrible episode of Tales From The Darkside and a horrible episode of The Sopranos. Of course, watching Johnny Virus demonstrates that no one ever should have thought of such a thing.
In some ill defined era of the Chicago underworld, a crime boss is killed. His daughter Franziska (Patricia Heller) and her right hand man Giusseppi (Richard V. Licata) suspect an inside job. So they hire an “extractor” out of Milwaukee named Walt (Gregory Scott Cummins) to torture a confession out of suspected murder Johnny Virus (Mark Kiely). So the first section of the film is Walt working over Johnny in what can only be described as the anti-Saw of torture stories. This has to be one of the least graphic and least disturbing torture sessions in movie history. Instead of being reduced to a piece of butchered meat, Johnny ends up looking like an underwear model with some tomato paste smeared on him.
The middle of the film is about one of Franziska’s goons named Barney (Bob Golub) disposing of the traitor’s body, only to seemingly have it to come back to life. This section of Johnny Virus has absolutely nothing to do with the first part and turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with the last part. Why is the middle of the movie like this? I have absolutely no idea.
The overlong final bit of this motion picture turns into a doublecross-a-thon where the audience is supposed to be kept guessing as each lie and betrayal is revealed. The only genuine betrayal, however, is of the viewer that wastes their time and money on Johnny Virus.
It wouldn’t be entirely fair to say this group of performers can’t act. I’m sure they’d be well received at dinner theaters throughout the state of Idaho, North Dakota and Utah. They’re capable of mouthing dialog and conveying an emotion or two. I can’t be too hard on them because as sub-mediocre as they are, these actors are by far the best thing about this film.
The writing is monosyllabic. The direction is confidently sclerotic. The sets look like something you’d find on the stage of a middle school gymnasium. The story has the tempo of a metronome on Thorazine. Everything reeks of the most self-indulgent sort of amateurism.
Clearly, Johnny Virus is the scripts of three separate and unrelated short films Crazy Glued together in a vain and vainglorious attempt at making a feature. Such a conglomeration only exponentially increases how much it sucks. This motion picture is boring, lifeless and fruitless as it staggers from one insipid scene to another.
Johnny Virus is one more movie that should never have made it to DVD. It shouldn’t have been made at all in the first place. Don’t watch it.
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