Tag Archives: camp

Batman: The Movie [1966] Batman: The Movie [1966] 3 star

September 5th, 2010 by surlaroute

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I watched this as part of a weeklong HD re-watching of all the more recent Batman movies, from Burton to Nolan (no new reviews of those, alas, I have too many others to catch up on: I’ll do it again maybe when I get the blu-rays, maybe before the next one hits cinemas). I was kind of excited to see this old one, having watched the TV series quite a bit as a teenager, and having kind of missed a little (just a little, mind) of Joel Schumacher’s inclination to the old school camp in Nolan’s darker masterpieces.

The fun gets started early here, right in the credits, in a note from “The Producers” flatly stating where the movie is coming from, which pretty much anticipates the bulk of any criticism the movie will ever get, as follows:

“We wish to express our gratitude to the enemies of crime and crusaders against crime throughout the world for their inspirational example. To them, and to lovers of adventure, lovers of pure escapism, lovers of unadulterated entertainment, lovers of the ridiculous and the bizarre — to funlovers everywhere — this picture is respectfully dedicated. If we have overlooked any sizable groups of lovers, we apologize.”

Thereafter we are plunged quickly into the end of a typical Batman and Robin scenario, a structural technique we’d become used to in the likes of the Bond and Indiana Jones movies, which here involves Batman literally punching a shark (which is clearly made of rubber) in the face. If you’re still hoping to take the movie seriously at this point, then it’s really not the movie’s fault lol. If you’re still having issues later when exchanges like “Holy hallucination!” “I wish it were, but it’s not! It’s 3 dehydrated pirates… rehydrated!” are being thrown around, then you should probably stick to picture books.

I’ll be honest. This isn’t as much of a riot as I’d hoped for. It’s been over a decade since I saw the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward, but I have vague memories of scenarios even wilder than this movie has. I remember the crazy fight scenes (all the Biff! Baff! titles etc) bizarrely turning into dance sequences in some episodes, for example, and there’s none of that here (do comment if I have merely dreamt this lol). Lee Merriweather’s Catwoman has nothing on the Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar version I remember, too. But it’s still seriously worth checking out for a wildly different approach to Batman than we’re used to today. I’d love to write more on this but it’s better perhaps to simply link to this page which says all I want to say and more on the subject. The new movies are near perfection as cinema, it’s true, but this one has a place that urgently needs defending.

Girls Rock! Girls Rock! 3 star

February 10th, 2009 by surlaroute

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Just to get the obvious comment out of the way first … shyeah, like I needed a movie to tell me this :-P This is a documentary I’ve been looking forward to seeing for over a year now. The short form of this review, sadly, is: plenty of girls … not a lot of rockin’. I’m trying to think if I even saw a single male face in the movie … there may have been a dubious character glimpsed in one of the older girl’s bands at home but I’m pretty sure the whole thing is XX which makes sense. I won’t get into an argument over, “what about transgenders, or just plain old equality,” because I know nobody’s allowed to even think anything like that in these situations.

But I will say I find something in creating an “anything goes” haven for girls like this with no boys allowed just as much a problem as the one it’s trying to solve. There is something about the place, too, that calls to mind a movie like Jesus Camp, like these girls are somehow being recruited to fight some kind of undeclared war. There’s a point where you realise a lot of these girls aren’t gonna live up to what the rock camp teachers want from them anymore than they are to the things society at large supposedly wants from them. Facts are inserted scatter-dash onscreen, with innocuous statistics like “70% of 11-17 year olds watch MTV” given equal weight to sadder ones like the number of girls who vomit to lose weight or have been “sexually harrassed” by classmates. And for all the desire to get these girls to break the mould and really “rock“, when they actually make anything that sounds like music (aside from the rather noisy ending where I’ll admit, some of them do kinda rock), it sounds a lot like the girl pop they claim to be trying to avoid.

Like in another documentary about kids, Mad Hot Ballroom, there’s another point where you realise the camp is probably as much for the teachers as it is for the girls; one of the camp staff even admits this to camera. In short, I think everybody’s heart is in the right place here, but I think it’d be nice if people would just focus on teaching kids the simple act of being themselves and fearless. The self-defence stuff here truly made me gag … at least until Palace made me giggle.

It’s not a bad doc, don’t get me wrong … I was just kinda disappointed by the way a place like this functions. You’d think an offbeat anti-status-quo camp for a creative medium, full of the most interesting creatures on earth, would be much more interesting … much more different. Aside from the simply adorable Palace, I’d really rather watch a double bill of Mad Hot Ballroom and Rock School / School of Rock. Then truly rock out to a Smoosh CD :)

Return to Sleepaway Camp Return to Sleepaway Camp 3 star

November 3rd, 2008 by surlaroute

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Another I was very much looking forward to, even though I knew it couldn’t possibly be half-decent let alone live up to my favourite installment of the original trilogy which was the hilarious Unhappy Campers. But in most areas this surprised me. The look and style, first of all: this reminded me of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast 2 in that it’s gotta take some skill these days to make a movie so badly acted and shot as this really is. Like it’s not even 2000s bad acting here, it’s like 80s bad acting; if that makes sense … The “fat kid” is possibly the most annoying character ever to grace the genre and somehow even that adds something good to the movie, lol. Felissa Rose returns from the original to reprise Angela Baker (she was played by Pamela Springsteen in the other parts; I was disappointed to hear she wouldn’t return, but Rose is great though her role, not to mention the actress that plays it, isn’t that important here) This may make me sound stupid but I really didn’t figure out where Angela was for most of the movie, lol; though I finally did at least before the unmasking. In short, it’s a worthy new entry to the series if only for the fact that stylistically it blends in with them so well … it’d be almost a shame if it were slickly Bayified like so many new horrors are. The “broomstick in the floor” scene is the icing on the cake for me, really; I think if they’d looked down that hole just one more time I would’ve wet, ROFL …

Daddy Day Camp Daddy Day Camp 3 star

April 29th, 2008 by surlaroute

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Now, how do I say this …? Despite really enjoying Daddy Day Care, I still came to this expecting the absolute worst after the reviews and, well, just look at the re-casting they did. It’s almost as bad as Splash, Too, lol. The presence of Cuba Gooding Jr. not only makes it worse but adds the whole dimension of depressing to the picture. I mean, really: what happened to him?!

But you know what? It grew on me. I laughed. Loudly in places. I mentioned about the toilet humour in the first movie that I liked how it threatened to go too far yet never quite did. I’ve gotta say, here, the gross stuff does go a little far – you could almost make a direct comparison between the “I missed!” scene in the first movie where evidently a little boy with potty problems gives Eddie Murphy’s bathroom a new coat of brown paint, yet all this is played from Murphy’s expression, and a scene here where a kid vomits all over the inside of Cuba Gooding’s tent – I guess Gooding’s expressions aren’t as convincing, because he has to have some of the vomit drop on his forehead. Later, we get the full-on Problem Child/Little Britain style projectile stuff. Not necessary. But I did laugh.

In the end it has just as solid a family message as the first, and I was honestly slightly stirred especially by the son taking matters into his own hands to win the contest, also the climbing wall smashing down on all the trophies :) Scattered throughout are a number of scenes with a very cute girl called Telise Galanis who hopefully has a future. I truly had no problems with it. Yes, the first is better, duh, it was first. But this one really deserves some kudos for overcoming such mindbogglingly bad casting issues.