The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Start listing nominees for the title of "the king of B-movies," and Roger Corman's name will have to be near the top. He's been involved with hundreds of movies during his lengthy career, whether it be as a writer, producer, or director. He's also been credited with helping launch the careers of numerous A-list actors and directors. But as a filmmaker, one of his most well-known movies was his 1960 monster movie The Little Shop of Horrors. It's been overshadowed over the last few decades by the musical it inspired, and really, maybe that's for the best.

Our story takes us to Skid Row in Los Angeles, where Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles) runs a flower shop. The shop doesn't get much business, but his two employees — Seymour Krelboin (Jonathan Haze) and Audrey Fulquard (Jackie Joseph) — enjoy it there. Unfortunately, Seymour is fired after messing up one too many arrangements.

Desperate to keep his job, Seymour reveals to Mr. Mushnick that he has developed his own plant, crossbred from a butterwort and a Venus Flytrap. Though the plant, which Seymour has named "Audrey Jr.," looks sickly at first, Mr. Mushnick is intrigued by its uniqueness and gives Seymour one week to have it ready to be display in the store.

But as the days start to pass, Seymour is disheartened to find that Audrey Jr. is unresponsive to plant food. It isn't until he pricks his finger on a thorn that he realizes Audrey Jr. craves blood. He begins a nightly routine of feeding the plant blood from his fingertips, as people flock from all around to see it.

But Audrey Jr. starts growing at an alarming rate, even developing the ability to speak (as voiced by Charles B. Griffith). Audrey Jr. demands more blood, but Seymour has become anemic from his constant bloodletting. Faced with little other recourse, Seymour begins feeding it dead bodies for sustenance.

The Little Shop of Horrors is typical '60s Roger Corman. Shot over two days and a night with recycled sets and a budget of 30,000 dollars, the movie is about as cheaply made as you could expect. It's got a wealth of cheesy acting and hackneyed writing, lame sets and lamer special effects. But it's got a weird charm to it that makes likable in a bizarre way, even if the movie isn't really all that good. I don't know what makes it that way, but I'll try to find out through this review.

Corman sits at the helm of this little picture, and the way he makes the movie, you can see why someone would try adapting it for the stage. The movie is made in such a way that it feels like Corman simply filmed the actors performing a play. The simple cinematography and cheap sets and props really give it that feeling too.

And in watching the movie, I started noticing scenes would just prattle on for several minutes at a time with little to no satisfactory payoff. Take Jack Nicholson's scene, for example. It doesn't have anything to do with any other part of the movie, other than extending the running time. Actually, more than a few scenes feel like useless padding. The movie's only 72 minutes long, and if you removed all the padding and useless scenes, you could probably whittle it down to an hour. Maybe even 45 minutes if you're feeling brave.

But let's move along to the script, written by Charles B. Griffith. The movie is promoted as a black comedy and actually features precious little of the titular "horrors." But unfortunately, I just didn't think the movie was all that funny. It just didn't do anything for me. I mean, did it really need that recurring Dragnet parody? Did that Jack Nicholson scene need to drag on for so long if it had to be in the movie at all? Were all the scenes with Seymour's hypochondriac mother and the stupid "who's on first?" routines absolutely essential to the movie? My argument is no on all counts. If I may summarize, Griffith's script is lacking in humor, likable characters, and dialogue that goes anywhere.

But let's wrap up this review by continuing onward to the acting. My honest opinion is that pretty much every actor in the movie is either annoying or just plain bad. I really had to struggle to even so much as tolerate the cast. I know I should expect such acting out of a Roger Corman movie, but come on now. I will give credit where credit is due and say I though Mel Welles was amusing enough. But the rest of the cast simply got on my nerves.

I went into The Little Shop of Horrors expecting it to be 72 minutes of dumb fun. It was certainly 72 minutes long and it was certainly dumb, but I'm not entirely sure about the fun part. It wasn't just my kind of movie. That's disappointing too, because I loved the remake. The original Little Shop of Horrors is, sadly, just kinda lame. It's too bad they had to wait two and a half decades before Seymour would feed us a good movie.

Final Rating: **

Reefer Madness (1936)

Picking a movie to review for this blog doesn't take a whole lot of effort. A lot of the time, it's just as simple as me stumbling across a movie and thinking it might be fun to write about. But there's been the rare occasion where I'll see a movie and realize that not only am I a fool for having watched more than ten minutes of it, but that I just had to post something about it.

Such was the case with Reefer Madness. Yes, the legendary anti-marijuana propaganda movie from the '30s. I'd have probably never bothered watching it at all if Netflix didn't carry a DVD of Reefer Madness featuring a satirical commentary from the RiffTrax crew. And I'm a sucker for RiffTrax, if anything, so I rented the DVD and couldn't believe my eyes. I was simply amazed at just how terrible the movie is. So let's dig into Reefer Madness and I'll try explaining just how bad it really is.

The movie quickly introduces us to Mae Coleman (Thelma White) and Jack Perry (Carleton Young), a pair of pot dealers. While neither have any moral problems with peddling their illegal wares, they disagree on who their target market should be. Mae prefers to sell only to adults who know what they're getting into, while Jack goes out of his way to push it on teenagers.

Helping Jack are Ralph (Dave O'Brien) and Blanche (Lillian Miles), who act as Jack's go-betweens by inviting high schoolers and college students to house parties so Jack can make a few sales. It is at one of these parties that the lives of several characters begin spiraling out of control.

When a young man named Bill (Kenneth Craig) attends one of these parties and gets roped into the world of marijuana, his grades start slipping, and he stops interacting with his parents and friends. He even starts having a few rounds in the bedroom with Blanche. His girlfriend Mary (Dorothy Short) arrives at Mae and Jack's apartment looking for him, but ends up being taken advantage of by Ralph. Bill, stoned out of his mind, stumbles into the room and attacks Ralph. Jack tries breaking things up and in the ensuing fight, Mary is shot and killed. Things only start going downhill from there, all because of that damn reefer.

I've never smoked weed, nor do I ever plan to. But I don't need to to know that Reefer Madness is a tremendously stupid movie. It's grossly inaccurate, for starters, and it's lacking in anything that even remotely resembles common sense. I know that most of these propaganda movies don't exactly care about the facts, but Reefer Madness is particularly bad about it. And it's just a bad movie in general, too.

Directing this little project is a guy named Louis Gasnier, a French filmmaker whose work I'm unfamiliar with. And I'll probably stay unfamiliar with it, since Reefer Madness is the only one of his movies I've actually heard of. The real problem with Gasnier's direction, besides the terrible editing, is that the movie is just plain boring. The movie is supposed to be a prime example of unintentional camp, but it took all of my effort to pay attention to it. I was continually looking at the clock, trying to gauge how much time was left. Bad movies are one thing, but boring bad movies are insufferable.

The acting is far from good, too. None of the actors in this are worth watching, to put it bluntly. I can get over the so-called "teenage" actors all looking like they're in their thirties, but their lack of talent or even the ability to try being convincing is annoying. There's not one performance in this thing to tell you about. I couldn't even find a single, solitary well-acted scene or well-delivered line of dialogue. It's just pathetic.

But the worst element of the whole thing is the script. The badly written, totally ignorant script. Credited to Arthur Hoerl from an "original story" by Lawrence Meade, the script is about as braindead as you can get. The fact of the matter is that the only reason Reefer Madness is a cult classic at all is because of how misinformed it is about marijuana (or as the movie spells it, "marihuana"). The script actually includes dialogue about how weed is more dangerous than heroin. No kidding, the movie tries to make the argument that marijuana is worse for you than heroin. There's no way they could be serious, because that's an outright lie. Not only that, but the movie depicts marijuana use as having consequences that no pothead I've ever met has suffered. I'm astounded by just how wrong the movie is.

For quite some time, Reefer Madness has been touted as a campy exploitation movie that borders on the salacious. Turns out its reputation has been overblown. The movie is a terrible waste of time, one that is only enjoyable if you've smoked a whole pound of weed. While Reefer Madness is the movie's most famous title (it was originally called Tell Your Children and was given multiple titles on the exploitation movie circuit), crap is still crap no matter what you call it. And thus, I'll ask that you skip Reefer Madness altogether. This mess could use a little less attention.

Final Rating: *

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

As a horror fan with access to the Internet, I've been privy to some of the weirdest, most disturbing ideas that one could possibly come up with. Think up the grossest thing you can, and someone has probably used it in a horror movie. But perhaps the craziest of all the stuff I've seen is a movie titled The Human Centipede (First Sequence). I first heard the title and the movie's concept back in April when IFC Films picked up the movie and gave it a very small theatrical release, and that was enough to convince me that there's probably very little out there that could top it in the way of sheer oddness. 

I didn't want to see it. I was afraid to even get near it. I'd see the DVD at Walmart (of all places!) and cringe every time I'd look at it. But after a while, the curiosity got the best of me. I was going to be brave and actually watch the movie that I'd initially believed was just too weird for me to stomach. I had to sit down and watch The Human Centipede on Netflix. It's a movie that doesn't feel like it should possibly exist, but it does. It does exist, and I've seen it. And I have to tell you about it.

As the movie gets rolling, we're introduced to Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie), a pair of vacationing New Yorkers on a road trip across Europe. They get lost in the middle of nowhere while driving to a party in Germany, and their misfortune is only compounded when they end up with a flat tire. With no cell phone service and no passersby willing to offer help, Lindsay and Jenny are stuck hiking through the woods in search of assistance.

They eventually arrive at the home of Dr. Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser), who was once one of Germany's most respected surgeons. His specialty was separating conjoined twins, but the good doctor has elected to take a new career path. He drugs Lindsay and Jenny, taking them to his laboratory where they will be part of his latest experiment. Dr. Heiter's plan: to stitch the girls and a Japanese tourist (Akihiro Kitamura) together mouth-to-anus to create the titular human centipede.

What you've just read is the basic plot of The Human Centipede. I'm not making any of that up. I couldn't in a million years. I can't say I'm surprised that someone came up with the idea for the movie; we've all had crazy thoughts on occasion. But what blows my mind is that somebody actually went and created the movie. They wrote it, talked investors into giving them money, hired a cast and crew, bought equipment with which to film and edit it, got a theatrical distribution deal through IFC Films, and somehow even got Roger Ebert himself to write about it. It's a movie about a mad scientist that sews people together ass-to-mouth just to see if he could do it!

The Human Centipede was the brainchild of Tom Six, a Dutch filmmaker with only three prior credits to his name. He wrote, produced, co-edited, and directed this wacky little adventure into the realm of body horror, so if there's anybody to blame and/or applaud (depending on your opinion of the movie), it's Tom Six. As far as direction goes, Six's work actually isn't that bad at all. It's actually pretty good. The movie flows well, with tight editing and wonderful cinematography from Goof De Koning. Six isn't playing around, though, because he goes to great lengths to establish an uncomfortable atmosphere. He could have gone campy with it, but outside of the occasional bit of overacting the movie's as serious as you could get. Combining the cinematography with the concept and the creepy music (well, creepy ambient noise, to be more honest) composed by Patrick Savage and Holeg Spier, Six puts together a movie that's almost too creepy and bizarre for its own good.

It's at this point in the review that I critique the script, but I'm not sure I see the need to. Six's screenplay is actually rather inconsequential. There's no story to be found here, just the movie's basic concept. There's so little story, I wouldn't be surprised if Six just wrote a simple outline of what he wanted to happen and had the actors ad-lib it all. But considering what this movie was about, expecting a story makes about as much sense as a screen door on a submarine. You don't go into a movie called The Human Centipede expecting Hemmingway.

So let's just move on to the cast. And if you're expecting any sort of performance review for the actors playing the human centipede, you're not gonna get much. Akihiro Kitamura screams yells a lot and that's pretty much it, while Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie are painfully annoying in the scenes where they have dialogue. They're so irritating that the idea of having their mouths sewn onto someone's ass actually sounded pretty good. At least you only have to put up with their shrill blabbering for half an hour before they finally shut up for good.

If you're going to watch The Human Centipede for the acting, you're going to want to pay attention to Dieter Laser. Not only does he have an awesome name, but his overacting is tremendous. He alternates between scary and off-putting to over-the-top insane, and is honestly a lot of fun. And while I was watching the movie, I had a thought: Laser looks and sounds like a weird hybrid of Udo Kier and Tommy Wiseau, so I want to see some ambitious filmmaker come up with a reason to have all three of them team up together, like a remake of ¡Three Amigos! or a Marx Brothers homage or something. I genuinely want to see that and would pay money to do so.

But no matter what this review says, you've already made your mind up. You've developed your opinion of The Human Centipede just by reading the title and the plot synopsis. And really, there's no need to critique any part of it, as it's not so much a movie as it is an idea. Anything could have happened in the movie, and it still would have been a horror flick about three people stitched together in a humiliating fashion. That's all you really need to know about it. You'll either see it or you won't, and this review just won't matter. And judging by what I've seen online, the "(First Sequence)" subtitle means only one thing: more human centipedes. Indeed, Tom Six is actually working on a sequel as we speak, aiming for to release it next year. I'm actually afraid of how that will turn out.

Final Rating: ***½

Judge Dredd (1995)

Go through my archives and you might notice that the overwhelming majority of the comic book movies I've reviewed were inspired by American comics. While Marvel and DC have the most representation in my past reviews, even the smaller companies whose material was translated into movies I've reviewed are from the United States. But American comics aren't the only ones that can be adapted into movies. England's even gotten into the act a couple of times. One such occasion came in 1995 with the release of Judge Dredd.

The titular character made his first appearance in 1977, within the pages of the second issue of famed British anthology comic 2000 AD. Created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra (who borrowed the title from a horror comic conceived but abandoned by 2000 AD editor Pat Mills), Judge Dredd has spent the last three decades serving as 2000 AD's most popular recurring character. Hollywood took notice and turned Judge Dredd into a movie, but like nearly all comic book movies from the middle of the '90s, it was mediocre at best.

Sometime over the course of the next 990 years, the world goes straight down the crapper. The planet has become a desolate wasteland, with the majority of the human race being corralled into enormous "Mega-Cities." And in these Mega-Cities, the crime rate has skyrocketed to unconscionable levels. In response, the traditional justice system has been replaced by the Judges. They are the police, court system, and executioners all rolled into one, given the power to arrest, convict, and sentence criminals on the spot.

In Mega-City One, the most famous Judge of them all is Joseph Dredd (Sylvester Stallone). Dredd's unwavering devotion to the law and the lack of leniency he shows towards criminals have become the stuff of legend, earning him the respect of young cadets and the fear of the general public.

But when a news reporter critical of Dredd is murdered, all the evidence points directly at our hero being the culprit. The bullets retrieved from the reporter's body are traced back to Dredd's "lawgiver," a customized handgun that uses DNA identification to make it operable only in the hands of the Judge it is assigned to. In light of this, Dredd is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at a penal colony.

With Dredd out of the way, it opens the door for Rico (Armand Assante) — a psychotic ex-Judge who had framed Dredd for the reporter's murder — to cause havoc in Mega-City One by massacring Judges right and left. Dredd must find a way to return to the city, clear his name, and judge Rico for his many crimes.

I can't say I know a lot about Judge Dredd. I've never even seen an issue of 2000 AD, let alone actually read one. I could memorize his Wikipedia article and still feel like I know nothing. But what I do know is enough to convince me that Judge Dredd has the potential to make a kick-ass movie. But this movie does not live up to that potential. It's dumb, silly, and never reaches a plateau higher than mediocrity.

The movie was directed by Danny Cannon, who has spent the bulk of his career working on episodes of CSI and CSI: Miami. His film career hasn't been that notable, though, with the only other movie on his résumé that I recognize is I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Cannon's work with Judge Dredd is actually pretty good, but it's not without its flaws. For one, he doesn't do much to separate it from the dozens of other futuristic action movies from the mid-'90s. It doesn't help that some of the digital effects are less than convincing, and the green screen work is just plain bad.

Cannon still makes a good go of it, though. For all those flaws, he manages to keep the movie at a steady pace and does his best to keep it from getting boring. He also gets some nice cinematography from Adrian Biddle and great music from Alan Silvestri. So at least there's something good about the movie, right?

But things start getting really bad when you take a look at the script. The script for Judge Dredd is lousy, no two ways about it. It's credited to William Wisher and Stephen E. de Souza from a story by Wisher and former New Line Cinema executive Michael De Luca, which is your first sign of trouble. It's not Wisher or De Luca that troubles me, but de Souza. I know he's written good movies, but after Street Fighter, seeing him listed in a movie's credits always fills me with a certain sense of dread.

Like I said, Judge Dredd's script is bad with a capital B. The story is threadbare, the dialogue is forgettable, and the jokes aren't really that funny. (The "I knew you'd say that" running gag is really lame, too.) The worst part of it is Fergee, a supporting character that ends up tagging along with Dredd during most of the movie. He's supposed to be the comic relief, but I don't see what's so damn funny about him. Fergee's transition from comics was a really rough one, because the character is useless and only serves as a way to make me hate an otherwise passable movie. I kept waiting for Dredd to just shoot him or leave him somewhere to die, and it never happened!

And rounding out my review is the cast. In the title role is Sylvester Stallone, who didn't exactly have the best of luck when it came to picking movies in the '90s. For every Demolition Man, Cliffhanger, and Cop Land, there were more like Rocky V, Daylight, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Judge Dredd was just another entry onto the list of less-than-stellar Stallone movies from the decade. His performance here isn't as bad as some people say, though. It's most definitely not his best role, but it's far from his worst too. Stallone is pretty much playing every stereotype you'd expect from him, and that's entertaining enough for me.

Meanwhile, Armand Assante is gloriously over-the-top as our villain du jour. He's absolutely unrestrained, chewing the scenery every second he's on the screen. Assante is a heck of a lot of fun, if anything. Among the supporting cast, Diane Lane appears as Judge Hershey, the closest thing Dredd has to a friend. Her performance is a little bland, which is unfortunate considering how talented she is. The problem is that the role is so underdeveloped and uninteresting that Lane would have been hard-pressed to come up with a positive contribution.

The worst part of the cast, though, comes from Rob Schneider as the aforementioned Fergee. I noted that the character is supposed to be the comic relief, but he's the exact opposite of funny. Schneider is more annoying than anything, to the point that you'll wish you could beat the crap out of him if you ever got the chance. The character is awful, as is Schneider. But then, it's the same old Rob Schneider you'd see in every other movie he's ever been in. And I'm actually convinced that the only reason he ever gets any work at all nowadays is because Adam Sandler keeps letting him tag along to movie sets.

I know I've said a few negative things about Judge Dredd. But it isn't that bad. It's a decent enough time killer, something to turn on during a rainy day and just zone out. Of all the cheesy action movies out there, you really could do a lot worse than this. So I'm going to give Judge Dredd two and a half stars, bordering on three. And here's hoping that the Judge Dredd movie that's currently in production (with a planned 2012 release) will improve upon this one.

Final Rating: **½

Tron (1982)

Not all cult films have need to have the same massive audiences that The Rocky Horror Picture Show enjoys. Others can develop their own devoted fanbases through means beyond repeated midnight showings. Some become what they are through nostalgia, with fans who loved it in their youth and still loving it when they rediscover it in adulthood. One of these movies is Tron, a movie that I often heard about, that I'd been told was awesome more than once, but never actually had the desire to see.But with a sequel being released next month, and the fact that it's been on my DVR since July and I still haven't watched it, I might as well go ahead and finally see what all the fuss over Tron is about.

Meet Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a once-successful software programmer for the ENCOM Corporation. He created several video games for ENCOM, but his work was stolen by another programmer named Ed Dillinger (David Warner). Dillinger passed off Flynn's games as his own and earned a series of promotions that eventually made him a high-ranking executive. Flynn, on the other hand, was fired from the company and stuck having to open a small arcade populated by the games that were stolen from him.

In the three years since then, Flynn has spent much of his time trying to hack into ENCOM's systems and find evidence that Dillinger ripped him off. He's eventually locked out of the system by the Master Control Program (voiced by Warner), a self-aware artificial intelligence developed by ENCOM that has been absorbing other programs from around the world to make itself more powerful. He finally gets into the system with a little help from friends and current ENCOM employees Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan).

But the MCP isn't going to take this lying down. It zaps Flynn with a prototype laser, one that breaks down objects in the real world and reconstructs them within ENCOM's mainframe. Flynn arrives in a digitized world and is immediately taken prisoner, forced into gladiatorial combat against other programs in the system. He forges an alliance with some of these programs to overthrow the dictatorial MCP and return to the real world.

I don't know if Tron is as awesome as it had been described to me. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad movie at all. It's actually pretty entertaining. But I just didn't feel that it lived up to all the hype. The biggest flaw with Tron is how dated it feels. The visuals have not aged well at all. But you have to remember that CGI was very primitive back in 1982. After almost three decades of evolution in the field, the effects in Tron are gonna look a little hokey.

However, if you look at it from 1982 standards instead of 2010 standards, it's actually pretty impressive. As far as styles go, it's like an '80s version of what Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller did with Sin City; the actors were filmed in black and whote in front of a black backdrop, with pretty much everything else filled in digitally. Director Steven Lisberger does an admirable job of combining each of the elements at his disposal to craft a rather imaginative piece of work. You'd never know that Tron was Lisberger's first live-action feature film, judging by how good it's put together.

Though digital effects have obviously evolved by leaps and bounds over the last three decades, Lisberger's direction makes the movie engaging and fun nonetheless. It's a captivating movie, one that you can't turn away from. Lisberger shows a lot of talent through his crafting of it. And really, it's a shame that his career dwindled so rapidly after Tron, because I'd like to see what he could do with updated technology. (Then again, I guess that's what Tron's sequel could be for.)

I also liked the movie's score composed by Wendy Carlos. The music admittedly does sound cheesy nowadays, but it works great for Tron. It goes a long way in establishing the movie's tone and atmosphere. And really, isn't that what all good movie soundtracks are supposed to do?

I didn't think Lisberger's script was anything special, though. The dialogue is forgettable, and outside of the "journey into cyberspace" aspect, the characters are just there (with only Flynn, Sark, and the MCP standing out), the story isn't anything that hadn't been seen before. It's really the whole computer world thing that makes Tron's script any different from all the other sci-fi movies of the '80s. I know I'll probably catch hell from at least one Tron fan for saying that, but that's just how I see it.

Wrapping us up is the acting, which is very good all across the board. The bulk of the heavy lifting, though, is done courtesy of Jeff Bridges and David Warner. Both of them are fantastic, as close to perfect as they could get. Bridges is especially good, playing his role with a confidence and swagger that makes his character believable. He's very amiable, and the movie is better for his presence. Warner does some fine work himself as not one, not two, but three characters. He's Dillinger, the voice of the Master Control Program, and Sark, the MCP's primary henchman. Dillinger only has a handful of scenes, and the MCP voice isn't much, so you'll mainly see him as Sark. And his performance as Sark is impressive, giving the movie the effective villain it needs.

Tron is one of those movies that was way ahead of his time. It was so ahead of its time, in fact, that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused to nominate it for any special effects Oscars because it viewed the use of computer graphics as "cheating." And while I said I didn't think it was as awesome I'd been led to believe, it's still an immensely entertaining movie. I can't lie, I thought it was cool. So Tron earns three and a half stars on my usual scale, and I'd definitely recommend it to anybody who hasn't seen it yet. Here's hoping that Tron: Legacy is as good.

Final Rating: ***½