Holiday Flix: Stephen King's Sometimes They Come Back

For one reason or another, I've not done this Movie as an Easter pick.  You could almost say that on the 3rd Year it rose.  Ha ha- sacrilegious.  Today's Film is Sometimes They Come Back, a 1991 Film based on a Stephen King Story.  A Film based on a Stephen King Story- how unique!  Even by King's standards, this one is a bit of a weird stretch.  The Story involves a man moving back to his Hometown with his family, only to discover that something from his past won't stay dead.  Can he finally face up to it?  Will any of this actually make that much sense?  Without SPOILing the Plot's weirder stuff just yet, I do wonder how there are TWO Sequels to this.  I guess you know what's coming next Year then.  To find out if this is more It than Lawnmower Man, read on...

A man- Tim Matheson- moves to his Hometown with his Family after an 'incident' in Chicago.  It's too expensive to shoot there, so just trust us.

What could go wrong?

Oh right- his traumatic past.

As we eventually learn, he lost his brother in an accident involving some bullies who decided to park their car on a train track to mess with them.  Guess what happened.  Oh and put 50s Greasers, Bullies and Train Track on your Stephen King Bingo Card.

He starts teaching at the School and then strange things start to happen.  The biggest is when a car- the same one hit by the train- chases down and kills his student.

So this was Filmed in Missouri and Carnival of Souls was done in Utah, but doesn't this remind you of that same bridge?

When the one student dies, a Greaser takes his place.  Why this 20-something in a class full of Seniors isn't weird to anyone is anyone's guess.

The group continues to kill and replace students until they get back to full power.

Given the fact that nobody sees the car or witnesses the crime, Matheson looks suspicious.

Mind you, the kid above was *literally* torn to pieces, so how does that look normal?!?

He finally finds the connective bit he needs to stop the gang- the lone survivor of them.

On the plus side, Sanderson isn't typecast as a Hacker/Computer Expert here.

The gang continues to attack him and his family, finally revealing their true forms when the Budget allows.

The only way to stop them: get his dead brother back.

Naturally, this all leads to a big showdown at the same tracks and the gang is killed again, but for real...assuming that they aren't in the Sequels.  The End.

It's fun and all, but so full of silliness.  The Film is supposed to be taken 100% seriously, but it is really hard.  For one thing, the Plot involves undead Greasers in 1991.  I mean, do I have to even expand upon this?!?  Second, said Greasers just act ridiculous, constantly doing this stupid laugh.  It worked for Tim Curry, but not for you!  Third, the whole premise is just bizarre.  As someone points out on IMDB, the group is killed because the keys were lost in the previous scuffle.  Back from the dead, they somehow drive around easily without the keys.  For the climax, they lose the keys...again and they can't drive away to save themselves.  Did that make sense?  They somehow act like dicks in public, but also drive a magic, invisible car.  On top of that, when they start to haunt the son, he sees stuff from his dad's memory.  I guess the idea is that *they* are projecting this, but, otherwise, how would he know any of that?  Their powers are just kind of vague for lazy screenwriting's sake.  They have a super-indestructible car (it flips over a parked car with no effort), can possibly teleport and project their pre-death forms to everyone.  Why not just give them a magic, laser-firing ring like Dracula had to while you're at it?!?  So, the final product is a mix of silly and super-serious.  It didn't totally work for me, but you might disagree.  I'll leave you with a pretty sad attempt to copy the 'Everything floats down here' bit from It...

Next time, I look at a Film with a familiar title.  Is it worse or better than the first one?  Stay tuned...

Reflections: Mirror Mirror II- Raven Dance

Dance, Raven Dance!  Today's film is Mirror Mirror II: Raven Dance.  I actually mentioned this film long ago, but had not actually seen it until recently.  Basically, I highlighted the fact that Sarah Douglas is the female equivalent to Lance Henriksen- always starring in sequels to films in which she wasn't in the original.  She has Superman II (unless you count that one scene), Conan the Destroyer, Puppet Master 3 and others, while Lance has The Omen: Part II, Aliens, and Mimic III, among others.  Here's the thing though: she's barely in this.  She's in the movie like Neil Armstrong (R.I.P.) is in Mass Effect 3!  The plot is a bit confusing, so try to keep up...if I can.  All you need to know is that the Mirror is back and that shit goes down.  Everything else...I'm not sure.  To find out what I mean, read on...

In, I guess, the Present, a woman at an Institution (Douglas) is insisting that this mirror is evil.  The Nuns are not buying it.

Nice of the Nun from the cover of The Devil Inside to make a cameo.

Ready for things to get weird now?

The mirror makes some silly effects and suddenly it becomes, um, more present day.  Some rock band is there...for some reason and play in front of the mirror.  It makes some more silly effects & zaps our heroine and her brother to...somewhere.

Amidst this confusing plot, you can see one of the earliest roles by Mark Ruffalo.  He's the Joe Dalesandro of the film, but only because the other guy is Roddy McDowall.

The title comes from two-three scenes of the heroine dancing and a Raven showing up a couple of times.  No, really.

The whole movie involves a plan between McDowall and this lady to make our heroine lose all of her money by being crazy.  To that end, they hire...William Sanderson?  Why are you back here...and a different character?

That sure won't happen again in this series...right?

Remember what I said in the last review about one scene being in all of the films?  Yeah, this is it for Part II.

I should also mention that there's a scene where McDowall tries to molest our heroine.  Yeah, he'd totally try to molest a girl.  Ri-ight.

I can't even begin to explain what's happening here, but I can tell you that a monster comes out of the mirror and Ruffalo attacks it.  Is Ruffalo a spirit?  What is the monster?  These questions are never really answered.

All of a sudden, our heroine wakes up in the beginning of the movie, just with her in place of Douglas.  Time keeps on slipping?  The End.

Dear Lord, what is this movie?  Let's begin with the good stuff: it looks neat.  If I could actually decipher the plot, it might have some atmosphere.  The acting is not terrible, but it does fluctuate quite a bit.  Here's the problem: I have no idea what this movie is about.  When does the opening take place?  How does the mirror make our heroine teleport?  What is its plan?  Are McDowall and the blonde pawns of it?  Who is Mark Ruffalo here?  How can he always be angry?  How does that work?  Wait- I lost my focus there.  The point is that the movie is a confusing mess, making everything about it weaker.  A stupid story is at least able to be understood if you can place the reality in which it takes place.  This movie is a neat idea...I think.  If someone can explain what the actual idea is, by all means explain it to me.  While I await that explanation, I'm just going to keep making this face...

Next up, the third film takes a very strange turn.  On the plus, Billy Drago makes every film better...right?  Stay tuned...

Bad Doggy: Man's Best Friend

There are many good reasons to be a cat person.  They're small, usually nice and sleep 98% of the day.  Not like those big dogs who can tackle you and want to go for a walk every 5 minutes.  On top of that, there are far fewer evil cats in cinema- barring, of course, Evil Cat.  Dogs, however, are vicious killers in many films.  From thought-provoking films like White Dog to utter shit like Rottweiler, these car-chasing beasts are on a rampage!  This brings me to today's film, the ironically-named Man's Best Friend.  This 1993 film is not exactly the most famous of this genre, which is surprising.  I mean, how could the combined star power of Lance Henriksen and Ally Sheedy make be a major hit?  Plus, this is the feature film debut of Max, the world's most jumping-est, climbing-est dog.  What other film includes a credit like 'Max's Behavior By:' in it?  It is a tale of science gone awry, not to mention an interfering women leading to the death of at least a dozen people.  Get out your collection of acid pee for my review of...

The film begins with a woman contacting a news reporter (Sheedy) about some questionable operations in her company E-Max.  She sets up a meeting at 8:30 that night and returns to work.  Unfortunately for her, a P.O.V. monster breaks out of its cage and kills her, only to be stopped too late by an unseen man and his dart gun.  Meanwhile, the lady reporter is excited about the chance to break out of the 'fluff journalism' with this story.  Her excitement fades when 9pm comes and the woman doesn't show up.  Naturally, she decides to break into the facility, which proves easier than you might think.  Note to multi-million dollar companies: hire more than one guard!  They learn that vivisection is going on with many animals, including rabbits, monkeys and cats.  In the upper part of the lab, they discover tigers, panthers and...a dog.  Yes, this is Max- our villain/adorable animal for the film.  The guard shows up, but Max takes him out by knocking some barrels into the guy.  By the way, the guard is played by a character actor who will make you go 'I know that guy, but from where' for like three days.  A scientist (Henriksen) shows up, but gets knocked out of the way by the women and the dog.  The trio escape, leading the man to go to the police.  Fun fact: the fat, jaded cop is played by Robert Costanzo, who is also the voice of Detective Harvey Bullock on Batman: The Animated Series.  Good to see that you've been type-cast, buddy!  Lance explains that the dog is a million-dollar experiment and belongs to him, which makes the cops apathetic.

Ally's boyfriend is upset by her bringing the dog home, but eventually learns to deal with it.  Well, except for the part where Max keeps him from getting laid.  In the neighborhood, Max is allowed to run around and we learn that this is a bad thing.  You see, Lance did genetic engineering on him, putting the DNA of animals such as the owl, the chameleon, the panther and the tiger.  Naturally, all of this tampering has made the animal unbalanced and the drugs keeping him sane are wearing off.  This proves true when he is allowed to chase a cat & he manages to climb up a tree (panther DNA) and swallow the cat whole!  Okay, I guess he has snake DNA too!  The kids that see this, of course, tell nobody.  How many lives would you save if you weren't idiots?  As a bonus, the dog breaks into the house of a neighbor and rapes it's female dog!  Besides being freaky, they play 'Puppy Love' over it.  Were you trying to make a rape scene (animal or not) funny?  I really don't get it!  Lance, meanwhile, is getting more incensed with the cops for not helping him enough.  To make matters worse for him, they begin to look into the death of the woman from the first scene.  While that's going on, Max kills a mailman.  Ha ha- it's funny because he died!

Here's the cat video...just for Carl.

As the third act comes along, things don't get any more nice.  Ally's boyfriend is really upset with the dog, after it caused him to nearly have a car accident and because it ate his bird!  To get back at it, he poisons some meat and tries to feed it to the dog- but he's too smart for that.  Lance finally finds the news station and pressures the camerawoman for information about our heroine.  The police finally wise up too and bring in the cavalry.  Unfortunately, this dog can out-run cop cars and leap over a blockade thanks to a badly-input digital effect.  Some dog catchers try to get the dog, but it locks the garage door on them & uses his chameleon powers to kill them Predator-style.  No, really.  Oh yeah, the boyfriend gets killed after the dog sprays his face with acid pee.  Apparently he's part Xenomorph too!  Lance grabs our heroine and her new puppy while the cops are away (why exactly?) and drives to the E-Max facility.  The dog gives them pursuit, however, and causes them to have a cliche, spinning car crash.  All of them walk out barely harmed and Max chases our heroine into the building.  After a long, tense scene it...licks her face.  Unfortunately, Lance shows up with a shotgun, having apparently abandoned any attempt to recapture the beast.  It tackles him, but he also gets a shot off and kills it.  The puppy validates it's existence in the film by accidentally electrocuting Lance.  In the Epilogue (I'm learning), the female dog has puppies, one of which is a dead-ringer for Max.  Nobody notices that, huh?

This movie could have been great, but falls flat more often than not.  The plot is a good one, having science gone awry and a killer animal.  However, logic is stretched to an extreme degree to make any of this work.  Can you really take just enough DNA from an animal to give another one a single trait that it has?  Furthermore, can this actually be done without killing the animal?  I mean, i'm no scientist, but I find this pretty implausible.  Older movies such as Ghost of Frankenstein actually addresses ideas like this with more logic! Aside from that, the movie does have some good kills and action in it.  I liked the attention to detail put into some of these, even if I didn't exactly find it all that logical.  The use of a real dog is a nice touch, although it also makes some things awkward.  As bad as Max could be, does anyone really want to see it get shot to death?  If you like these killer animal films, you can do far worse.  If you've seen Day of the Animals or, quite frankly, any William Girdler films, you'll know what I mean.  It could have been a lot better, but it works.  How do you feel about it, Lance Henriksen?

Next up, we get one more bad doggie for August.  This one is so bad that even dares to rip-off The Omen!  Stay tuned...