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- Jan 16, 2014
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Started October off right with a movie I hadn't seen yet and an old cheese-ball that I hadn't seen in a while.
Black Friday (2021) - Low expectations but it's an inoffensive low-budget monster movie with Devin Sawa, Bruce Campbell and Michael Jai White. Parasitic alien turns Black Friday shoppers at a chain toy store into fast-zombie-ish monsters. A few good creature FX here and there but you could tell this was a COVID production (very empty for a movie supposedly about Black Friday) and you can rattle off the characters and their arcs without even watching the movie (it's people working a dead-end retail job on Black Friday). I wouldn't tell anyone to expect Ash from Mr. Campbell or Black Dynamite from Michael Jai White but they both play understated versions of the kinds of characters they're known for (cowardly asshole and smooth motherfucker respectively). I really wish Michael Jai White could have a Samuel L. Jackson-esque late-career star run. That dude is just so good in everything.
Anyway, the main girl's name looked really familiar so I looked her up: turns out it's the little girl from Pan's Labyrinth all grown-up. Meow. So yeah, a lot of obvious jokes and it doesn't really do anything new or exciting but if you like the "people trapped somewhere with monsters" genre, it's a totally serviceable 90 minutes.
Wishmaster - Don't know if it was somebody on here talking about it recently or somewhere else that reminded me about Wishmaster but this one hit me right in the 90s feels. I saw it when it came out and remembering it a) being corny as shit and b) having some awesome cameos in it. What I had forgotten was that it was one of the last great practical fx gore movies (until the modern era at least). It was essentially a slasher movie that came out post-Scream so it bombed miserably (made all the more amusing by the fact that Wes Craven produced it). The plot is rock simple (smart lady sort of unleashes an evil genie, he stalks her to try and force her to make her three wishes which will unleash his brethren, kills a bunch of people along the way, etc. etc.).
So yeah, the bad in the movie is pretty-straightforward: it's campy as shit and it's 90s as fuck. The hair and clothes, it has some of the remnants of the MTV/pop film editing style of that era and there's a couple of musical choices that immediately remind you why everyone forgot that era of post-grunge hard rock music. It also has a handful of CG shots that just aren't good. Most stuff from that era (pretty much everything that wasn't Jurassic Park and T2) didn't really hold up but this is particularly shoddy, especially in light of how good most of the practical stuff is. Oh, and the main protagonist was a perennial TV guest star who went on to do nothing after this. With good reason.
So yeah, I would totally understand someone writing off the movie after all that but it's got a lot to offer horror movie buffs: the opening scene and the final scene are both a sequence of great practical fx shots. People mutating and dying in all kinds of fucked-up miserable ways (shout-out especially to the "skeleton transformation" in the opening scene) and some really good use of "living statues". I wouldn't want to ruin some of the stuff in there but it's chef's kiss and pretty impressive for a movie with a $5 million dollar budget. Andrew Divoff (who plays the Djinn) just devours the scenery in a way that probably saves the movie for me. His ridiculous voice, his Freddy-lite one-liners and his over-the-top evil grins when in human form would've probably been embarrassing if done any more seriously but he just sold it for me. Finally, this movie was a horror nerd's wet dream in 1997. Robert Kurtzman, who directed the movie, was the K in KNB EFX (along with Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger) and dude (along with Wes Craven I'm sure) called in every favor he possibly could to the point that this movie is the "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" of that era of horror movies. The Djinn's victims in the movie include George Buck Flowers (the homeless guy in every 80s movie), Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, Tony Todd, Reggie Bannister, Ted Raimi (sort of) and Robert Kurtzman himself AND the movie has a narration intro from Angus Scrimm and brief cameos from Tom Savini, Joe Pilato (Rhodes from Day of the Dead) and Dan Hicks ("Bobby Joeeeee!!" from Evil Dead 2). And that's just the ones I recognized in the movie and the credits.
The movie has three sequels but Andrew Divoff is only in the first one (which I saw and remember being terrible) and supposedly the other two are even worse.
Black Friday (2021) - Low expectations but it's an inoffensive low-budget monster movie with Devin Sawa, Bruce Campbell and Michael Jai White. Parasitic alien turns Black Friday shoppers at a chain toy store into fast-zombie-ish monsters. A few good creature FX here and there but you could tell this was a COVID production (very empty for a movie supposedly about Black Friday) and you can rattle off the characters and their arcs without even watching the movie (it's people working a dead-end retail job on Black Friday). I wouldn't tell anyone to expect Ash from Mr. Campbell or Black Dynamite from Michael Jai White but they both play understated versions of the kinds of characters they're known for (cowardly asshole and smooth motherfucker respectively). I really wish Michael Jai White could have a Samuel L. Jackson-esque late-career star run. That dude is just so good in everything.
Anyway, the main girl's name looked really familiar so I looked her up: turns out it's the little girl from Pan's Labyrinth all grown-up. Meow. So yeah, a lot of obvious jokes and it doesn't really do anything new or exciting but if you like the "people trapped somewhere with monsters" genre, it's a totally serviceable 90 minutes.
Wishmaster - Don't know if it was somebody on here talking about it recently or somewhere else that reminded me about Wishmaster but this one hit me right in the 90s feels. I saw it when it came out and remembering it a) being corny as shit and b) having some awesome cameos in it. What I had forgotten was that it was one of the last great practical fx gore movies (until the modern era at least). It was essentially a slasher movie that came out post-Scream so it bombed miserably (made all the more amusing by the fact that Wes Craven produced it). The plot is rock simple (smart lady sort of unleashes an evil genie, he stalks her to try and force her to make her three wishes which will unleash his brethren, kills a bunch of people along the way, etc. etc.).
So yeah, the bad in the movie is pretty-straightforward: it's campy as shit and it's 90s as fuck. The hair and clothes, it has some of the remnants of the MTV/pop film editing style of that era and there's a couple of musical choices that immediately remind you why everyone forgot that era of post-grunge hard rock music. It also has a handful of CG shots that just aren't good. Most stuff from that era (pretty much everything that wasn't Jurassic Park and T2) didn't really hold up but this is particularly shoddy, especially in light of how good most of the practical stuff is. Oh, and the main protagonist was a perennial TV guest star who went on to do nothing after this. With good reason.
So yeah, I would totally understand someone writing off the movie after all that but it's got a lot to offer horror movie buffs: the opening scene and the final scene are both a sequence of great practical fx shots. People mutating and dying in all kinds of fucked-up miserable ways (shout-out especially to the "skeleton transformation" in the opening scene) and some really good use of "living statues". I wouldn't want to ruin some of the stuff in there but it's chef's kiss and pretty impressive for a movie with a $5 million dollar budget. Andrew Divoff (who plays the Djinn) just devours the scenery in a way that probably saves the movie for me. His ridiculous voice, his Freddy-lite one-liners and his over-the-top evil grins when in human form would've probably been embarrassing if done any more seriously but he just sold it for me. Finally, this movie was a horror nerd's wet dream in 1997. Robert Kurtzman, who directed the movie, was the K in KNB EFX (along with Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger) and dude (along with Wes Craven I'm sure) called in every favor he possibly could to the point that this movie is the "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" of that era of horror movies. The Djinn's victims in the movie include George Buck Flowers (the homeless guy in every 80s movie), Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, Tony Todd, Reggie Bannister, Ted Raimi (sort of) and Robert Kurtzman himself AND the movie has a narration intro from Angus Scrimm and brief cameos from Tom Savini, Joe Pilato (Rhodes from Day of the Dead) and Dan Hicks ("Bobby Joeeeee!!" from Evil Dead 2). And that's just the ones I recognized in the movie and the credits.
The movie has three sequels but Andrew Divoff is only in the first one (which I saw and remember being terrible) and supposedly the other two are even worse.
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