That this went straight to video despite the success of the Dawn of the Dead remake and despite the presence of Ving Rhames and Mena Suvari in the cast was about the worst omen a zombie movie could have, and I’d read some pretty bad things about it. As always, though, I seem to come from a different place than most interested parties on this one; I wasn’t that crazy for Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn, though the original Day has its moments it’s still no original Dawn, and just last year I had, some might say, the misfortune of seeing Day of the Dead 2: Contagion, which I actually found myself kinda liking.

There’s nothing wrong with this one at all – that they even include to an extent the “docile zombie” element from the original is all I need to forgive any of its failings. No, that element isn’t probed as beautifully as Romero did; but they come closer than Snyder’s Dawn which, even though they used a mall and everything, completely missed the point of Romero’s original. The gore is fantastic, and frankly I’m baffled as to why anyone thought this wouldn’t do well on the big screen.

Lord … Ed Wood meets Herschell Gordon Lewis with a dash of John Waters lol. And by no means does this have even the semi-historical significance of either of those first two guys’ work – letting alone the artistic merit because, well, it’s best left alone, right? – nor any of the bite of the last. It actually makes me feel better when I watch a movie like this alongside a movie like Cathy’s Curse ‘cos it kinda reassures me and hopefully anyone reading that I’m not just a blind sucker for anything weird and obscure and dodgy lol. While Cathy went in the box with some of my favourite horror movies, this goes more with the forgettable likes of Mother’s Day, Bloody Birthday and Black Christmas – not to mention of course most of the HG Lewis stuff. I guess everyone has their own preferences. This one’s just not for me, and given the content, though I hadn’t expected it, I really would’ve thought otherwise.

You probably couldn’t get a more precise blending of The Exorcist and The Omen (and, hey, throw Amityville on the pile too) than this if you literally cut them together lol; and a lot of the production values at best leave a lot to be desired, at worst demand the need for new underwear.

But this holds together well enough with decent performances, a proper old creepysad score reminiscent of Christian Gaubert’s for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, and, in fact, almost by virtue of those very same production values that will leave a lot of watchers howling. If you’re into obscure 70s horror, you’re in for a treat. Yes, for the second time this evening following certain moments in AVPR, I almost had an accident when Cathy appeared claiming, “My name is Laura” with what can only be described as sh*t smeared on her face in an hilariously awful attempt to mimic Dick Smith’s makeup on The Exorcist that actually manages to outbad Seytan ... but overall, I think it’s some kind of gem to go in the box with the likes of Happy Birthday to Me, Sleepaway Camp II and Slumber Party Massacre II. I should’ve saved it for Halloween, really, but I couldn’t wait.

I honestly wanted to start this review by basically saying, WTF did you expect? I kinda-sorta-liked the first AVP movie. And this one begins, if anything, better than that one did; throughout, it’s certainly slicker and better in the visual effects department. But between the earth teens storyline and the, “See? No Monster!” scene, just … oh my God. I appreciate that this movie is aimed solely at fanboys but come on, cinema is a broad enough medium that you can be so superficial and at least partially fulfilling in other ways; the first movie showed that in its ending. It’s been a long time since I saw it, but I swear, even Predator 2 was better than this under the gore and visuals.

Yes, still, if you’re complaining – and I am – “what did you expect?” is certainly a valid response … but jeez, it scares me to think anyone over the age of 13 is paying for this crap.

No, no, no, old review below! You bad old review, you!

lol. I’m even annoyed that I used The Quote in that otherwise damning review, ‘cos I was gonna start with it this time around. Oh well, I’m gonna do it anyway.

“Would you ever say, ‘Stop. If you loved me, you’d stop’?”
“Not in a thousand years.”
“Not in a thousand years … that’s my girl …”

Quite honestly, I could end the review right there. That single scene alone goes through me like electricity every time I see it. I’m sure everyone at some time or other has read a book or seen a movie or watched a TV show and wanted the story to go some way it never … not in a thousand years … would conceivably go, right? Well that scene for me, every time I see it, is just one of those inconceivable deliveries for me.

It’s the scene that always comes to mind when I tell people that this is one of the most romantic movies ever; what I always even forget myself is how romantic the rest of the movie is too. Sure, people are dying and those deaths are being investigated … but it’s always Florence or Sardinia etc … Lecter’s hand brushing Clarice’s hair on a carousel … it’s just got such a romantic approach to everything it touches. Even Hans Zimmer’s score knows it. I just love it.

1st September, 2005:

I still love the ending of this movie (“Tell me, Clarice, would you ever say, stop, if you love me you’d stop?” “Not in a thousand years.” “Not in thousand years…. that’s my girl … this is gonna hurt …”), I just get such a kick out of the fact they took the whole love story thing to its weird but perfect conclusion (my favourite moment in Silence of the Lambs is when Lector’s finger brushes Clarice’s) but the rest of the movie is pretty dull. It’s all interestingly designed and slickly produced and the acting is all round stunning, but for some reason it still drags.

One thing I do love about the movie is its dream-like quality – there’s almost no other way the movie could’ve worked, so literally insane is the direction the novel takes. Almost the entire movie here feels to me like Clarice’s flashbacks in Silence, and that makes so many of the movie’s flaws (eg. no matter how good Julianne Moore is as Clarice, she’s no Jodie) somehow palatable. However, even viewed this way, after a while it just feels a little pointless.

The classic. I think. This is one of those movies I’ve watched so many times both for fun and for study that I can’t help but quote vast chunks of it out loud as it plays. There are just so many things about this movie that, to my surprise every time, lift it far above the quality genre pieces the other installments in the series are.

It’s a perfect screenplay, to start with. Syd Field talked a lot of nonsense (I realised, eventually) about screenwriting and his “paradigm” is broken down with every recent passing week, but one of his books I’d still recommend is “Four Screenplays” which simply broke down four screenplays – this one, Thelma and Louise, Terminator 2, and Dances with Wolves – and showed why his system worked, owing a lot of course to Joseph Campbell, whose thoughts on mythology are overwhelmingly present here too – I think Jodie Foster in particular is fond of talking about the mythical aspects of this movie whenever she’s asked about it.

It’s interesting to me to notice that all those four screenplays, all produced between 91-92, have some seriously powerful women in them – Clarice Starling, Thelma and Louise of course, Sarah Connor, Stands with a Fist – and one of the most stand-out things about Silence is that it was made at a time when doing the whole feminist thing still actually meant something, before people started to see such things with an eye for cynicism and post-modernism.

I like the lightness here too, though, and it’s something I noticed while watching Hannibal is yet another thing I think they got right (in comparison to the very straightlaced Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising) there; “If this door should fall down or – heh-heh – anything else …”, “No … no, you ate yours,” – I think part of the reason I for one really didn’t object to Thomas Harris thinking a romance was spawned here is because of how the sharp minds of Clarice and Hannibal right from the off even resembled one another in the humour department.

It’s really just one of those perfect movies you can’t say much of for or against, being as it’s there in front of you as it is and it couldn’t be any other way. Even though I practically know it by heart, I still love it, could even watch it over again right now just a few days after watching it before. It’s classic Jodie, definitive Hopkins, perfect in genre; basically, more deserving of the Oscars it received than just about anything since. What else is there to say?

I have to ashamedly admit I tried watching this last year and I fell asleep – and I hardly ever fall asleep just ‘cos I’m tired. But I still gave it the benefit of the doubt and figured since I plan to make Hannibal the centrepiece of my Valentine’s Day this year as has long been my intention, I may as well do the whole series beforehand, and fit a virgin viewing in to boot

“You’re not following the human order, Hannibal. You’ve got to stop hurting the bullies.”

With a line like that and a cinematic legacy like Hannibal Lecter, this movie should really be so much better than it is. I was wary about a movie that looked so much like it was going to extend the “waahhhh boohoo I’m a victim of the 20th century” excuse for Hannibal Lecter even further than Hannibal went. Like I’ve said before, I think Hannibal is one of the most romantic movies ever … more on that maybe on Thursday … but there’s a point where the 20th century excuse can be applied so broadly as to demand a line to be drawn. So if you think I’m weird for thinking what I think about Hannibal, lol, then you might wanna think twice before venturing here.

In all, this is ever so slightly better than I feared (having fallen asleep the last time, how could it not be? lol) ... but it’s ever too involved and procedural to the point of distraction. I was inclined at first to blame this on the adaptation process but as I followed that thought through I realised that actually, though the screenplay clearly tries to keep a lot of events in that could easily be cut for the screen, those events actually wouldn’t even be relevant even in the longer novel form. As the end credits rolled I realised Thomas Harris himself was responsible for the adaptation, so I guess either way the blame falls to him. There’s a good story here, but it needs to be so much clearer, if only to match the simplicity of what came before in the Lecter story onscreen, even going back to Manhunter.

It’s basically very up and down – for every moment worthy of the title, there’s something like the, “The little boy died years ago – his heart died with Mischa,” line that makes the psychobabble at the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho seem positively legit lol; for all the good that Rhys Ifans and Dominic West put in by being so totally different from anything else they’ve appeared in, there’s things like the mask thing … yes, it has more sense to it than my initial kneejerk reaction of “WTF, why would he willingly put that mask on back in the 1950s!??!?” lol … but again, it’s just not made clear enough what it is nor what it signifies; basically as if it’s purely been shot for the trailer.

But for all that up and down that preceeds it, the main “transformation” scene where Hannibal gets his first taste of flesh is actually quite beautifully done – Gong Li walking away, “what is left in you to love?” with his creepily familiar tilting of the head at her followed by the animal dive to bite at a cheek … I can’t deny it left me with something almost approaching what Hannibal left me with … albeit it far less romantic … it’s by no means a failure, and I’ll no doubt watch it again to see if there’s anything else to it.

There isn’t much to add on seeing the Theatrical Cut of this to what I wrote below of the Director’s Cut except that, to my surprise, this (only slightly shorter: about 8 minutes as opposed to 30 I expected below) cut makes what I already found to be a fantastic movie even better. All the daughter stuff is there. I’ve read some comments about pacing being altered here and there but overall I didn’t notice any differences except in the ending, which is just infinitely more satisfying, creepy and thought-provoking. Apparently neither this cut nor even just the alternate ending are available on DVD in the UK which sucks. So it goes without saying, pay the little extra – and another little extra (a whole £1 on PlayUsa) for both cuts – watch the director’s cut as a curiosity, by all means but personally I’ll be coming back to the Theatrical Cut from now on.

10th October, 2007:

Addendum: Just realised, for the record so all the talk about running times etc below makes sense lol, yet again I’ve accidentally managed to see the Director’s Cut first.

Wow I kind of knew that this would be good, as most Stephen King short story adaptations are, as most John Cusack movies are … but I have to say my excitement was dulled a little by what looked like an overlong running time for such a movie, at almost 2 hours rather than the expected 90 minutes.

What I found was that the extra 30 minutes were the most pleasantly surprising, heartbreaking backstory of Cusack’s character that at once makes us plain care a little more about his plight, but at the same time bridges the gap between two halves vastly varied in tone, all the while making the movie infinitely more powerful than it has any real right to be. While the first half of this movie is almost pure comedy, all the jumps and scares done very knowingly with one-line snarky responses from Cusack, who wholeheartedly revels in it, the second half is chill, nightmarish, and quite honestly the scariest thing I’ve seen in quite some time (I’m inclined to say since The Sixth Sense but looking back over old reviews I’m reminded of The Skeleton Key and the original Saw).

1408 is certainly up there with Secret Window, The Green Mile, Misery, if not quite rubbing shoulders with Carrie and The Shining. The visuals are stunning, Gabriel Yared’s score alternates perfectly between Elfman-esque thrill-enhancement and his usual dreamlike emotional stuff. But those aren’t the things that really made the movie for me. I’ve always loved John Cusack … like, really loved, he’s one of the great Js, Johnny, Josh, Jared, Joseph, mm-hm but I digress … but here, I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s by far his greatest performance. In a world post-Johnny being nominated for Jack Sparrow, I swear – okay, I believe – Cusack should get a nomination for this role, it’s just sucks you in to every twitch he makes. That the movie also manages to successfully work its way past a bone fide “Then he woke up and it was all a dream,” scene (incidentally, just about around the 80-90 minute mark where I originally thought the movie should’ve ended), and my stomach only sank for a nano-second before I was sucked into the nightmare again, is pure icing on the cake. Definitely one I’ll watch again and again.