Blue Velvet (1986)

Cinema Confession: I had never seen "Blue Velvet" until tonight. I'm no stranger to David Lynch, I've seen 8 of his movies. I just never got around to his most famous. I really liked it a lot.



Dennis Hopper is great of course, but I really enjoyed the scenes between Kyle Maclachlan & Laura Dern. I do wish I wouldn't have waited so long to see it because there were so many scenes that I had heard about of the years. I wish I could have seen it totally fresh, but at any rate, it was worth the wait.

--Popkoff

TRON (1982)

Cinema Confession #2: I had never seen “TRON” before I walked into the Alamo Ritz for the first film of a triple feature which also included an encore presentation of “Ninja Annihilation War” which I wrote about previously here, plus the Terror Thursday screening of “The Gate.” This screening was also presented by Arcade U.F.O., a brand new video game arcade located right here in Austin, TX. Their introduction of the film painted “TRON” less as a film, and more as a historical document, and in a lot of ways, it is.

The film is about a arcade-wiz/computer hacker (Jeff Bridges) named Flynn who is literally sucked into a computer that he's trying to circumvent. To be more specific, he is digitized by a laser and streamed into the vindictive hard drive; it's all very high tech. The computer, known as Master Control, basically runs everything at ENCOM, the software corporation that Flynn used to work for before his ideas were stolen and he was fired by the evil Dillinger (played by the always great David Warner). Master Control does his best to confirm the fears of 80's audiences everywhere that artificial computer intelligence was inherently evil and would eventually turn on humanity. In this case, Master Control had grown “2,415 times smarter” then it's “writer,” Dillinger, and had ceased control of ENCOM.

Anyway, once inside the computer, Flynn meets several defunct programs (all of which are played by their human-programmer/counterparts a.k.a. users), including an expert gladiator named RAM (played by Dan Shor of “Dead Kids).” Flynn is then forced to compete in Gladiator-style games where life and death are the only 2 outcomes. Eventually Flynn leads a rebellion against the Master Control that could be his only chance to get back to the real world.

The computer world, as it were, is made up of a three dimensional grids, 80's video game graphics, and a rotoscopic technique in which the human characters were filmed in black & white and then colorized later. All of this add up to a look that despite it's dated qualities, looks like no other film ever. That's the good news.

The bad news, at least as far as I am concerned, is that I think I missed the boat with this one. If I would of watched "TRON" when I was a kid, I probably would have a strong affection for it, but watching it for the first time now just made me feel like I don't understand computers.

Anyway, it was kind of worth it just to see the scene where Jeff Bridges looks at a 4 foot wide door and says "now that's a big door."

"TRON" screened on 9/11/08 at 7:00 at the Alamo Ritz, and was presented by Arcade U.F.O.

Phantasm 2 (1988)

Liz: “That's right...It's only a dream.”

The Tall Man: “No!! It's not!!

Cinema Confession #1: I had only seen one “Phantasm” movie before walking into the Alamo South for this Terror Thursday screening of “Phantasm 2,” and that was the original. The reputation of the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) as a cinema villain is legendary in Horror-circles, and with good cause. His thin, pale, and lanky features, especially his hands with their long pointy fingers, recalls “Nosferatu.” His squinting grimace and bellowing voice is simultaneously hilarious and quaking.

Made nearly 10 years after the first one, “Phantasm 2” not only recasts the main character, Mike (played this time around by James LeGros, who I remember best from the film “Scotland Pa),” but completely shifts the feel of the film, forgoing the surreal dream sequences and opting instead to create an apocalyptic-revenge-road movie, not unlike “Terminator.” The story picks up with Mike, now an adult, being released from a psychiatric hospital. He's been having reoccurring dreams about his past, and about a beautiful and strange girl, who Mike senses is in trouble. He quickly gets back into contact with Reggie, the balding ice cream vendor, who battled the Tall Man with Mike when he was a teen.

Reggie, hellbent on revenge and heavily armed, teams up with Mike to head out on the road in search of the Tall Man, in hopes of putting an end to his evil ways. Mike on the other hand, wants to find the mystery girl from his dreams, hopefully before the Tall Man does. The Tall Man, meanwhile, is wiping out small towns across America, unearthing the corpses of their dead and turning them into an army of reanimated-dwarf-minions; he does this with the help of his flying-metal-bladed-spheres of course.

Mike & Reggie eventually meet up with the girl in Mike's dreams, Liz, who shares the same nightmares Mike has. The 3 of them also pick up a hitchhiker named Alchemy, played by the strangely attractive (and large-mouthed) Samantha Phillips. Her character serves little purpose in the film other than being Reggie's comically unrealistic love interest, and everybody else's eye-candy. A quick glance at her filmography, shows Miss Phillips has had a long career mostly in Skinamax-type “Horror” films such as “The Bare Wench Project 2,” “Cheerleader Massacre,” and “Andromina: the Pleasure Planet.” She was also in “Weekend at Bernie's 2.”

Anyway, Mike, Reggie, & Liz meet up with the Tall Man in a climatic final 25 minutes that sheds away much of the doom and gloom of the first hour of the film and replaces it with some truly fun and imaginative special effects. Reggie's chainsaw joust is pretty classic, not to mention his ridiculous 4 barrel shotgun.

Overall, “Phantasm 2” was a fun Horror movie that was really more of an Action movie I think it was little built up in my head because I found myself having to slog through the pacing in the first half. Still, there's no way around the incredible entertainment value of the Tall Man.

“Phantasm 2” screened at the Alamo South on 9/4/08 and was presented by Terror Thursday.