FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / August 2020 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Lionsgate
Apparently, COVID-19 has become, among many things, a chance to catch up on certain movies. To be more precise, certain franchises that I just haven’t caught for one reason or another. I recently watched every Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie after the second one in a single day.
That’s six in all, which, holy shit, I do not recommend.
I’m planning to watch all of the Fast and the Furious at some point this week (not in one day). It’s not that I’m out of stuff to watch. I just find myself, like many others, looking for ways to mix up the routine. If you’re like me, you’re leaning on movies and media more than ever. You may also have family around more than the norm, which for a lot of us has meant watching a broader range of things. I work from home, and I watch a lot of movies to begin with.
However, my wife has been home since her job furloughed her (hooray for working in an industry that plans trips for schools?), and she often joins me for whatever I’m watching. She gets to pick things, too, creating this mindset where I’m saying things like “What have I been meaning to see for the longest amounts of time?”
Following that thread has been interesting for me. Between my wife and wanting to go against my wheelhouse of stuff I tend to watch, I’ve been having some interesting watching experiences. I’d love to know if anyone else has. Let me know on Twitter.
I don’t go in for that “We’re in this together” horseshit, but I do think I’m not the only one having deep thoughts like, “Why haven’t I gotten drunk at 9 o’clock in the morning and watched the two Blair Witch follow-ups someone somewhere actually thought we needed.”
Once again, film brings us together.
The Cameraman (1928): A+
Image © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer | Criterion
Recently released in a lovely edition from Criterion, the best film Buster Keaton made during his tumultuous time at MGM is breathtaking comedy, timing, and physicality rushing at you again and again. If you don’t watch a lot of silent films, whatever the reason, something like The Cameraman can be an astonishing discovery of how fascinating and entertaining some silent films continue to be.
The Cameraman establishes and maintains a simple premise. A photographer who aspires to success in MGM’s newsreel department tries to impress a girl. That’s basically it. The best Buster Keaton movies told straightforward-yet-compelling stories. The ingenuity of his strongest moments on screen come from Keaton finding singular comedic moments, channeling his fascinating energy as a filmmaker, actor, and stuntman into remarkable characters, and some of the most incredible stunts ever committed to film. The Cameraman is loaded with all of that, and supported further by a great ensemble cast (particularly Marceline Day).
This is one of the best comedies ever made. Period. It’s one of Keaton’s best, as well. If you want to get some vibrant, hilarious film history knocked off your to-do list, this is one of the most enjoyable places to do that.
The Love Guru (2008): F+
Image © Paramount Pictures
This is a good example of the point I was making at the top of the column. Has The Love Guru, the last major movie Mike Myers has made to date, ever been a good movie? No. Will it someday perhaps find a small, deeply devoted following? Maybe, but I hope not. The movie looked hellish and tangibly painful, when I saw trailers for it twelve years ago. I held off on watching it. That was always the right thing to do.
Now, in 2020, I’ve seen it. Am I glad I did? Sort of. While not a good, funny, or even admirable movie in any significant sense, The Love Guru had two appeals for me.
One, it’s a time capsule for a career (Myers) at the peak of its popularity, as well as for the time and place in which it was released.
Two, a romantic comedy about a spiritual guru (once more, Myers), done as kind of a shriller, less-structured Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers vehicle is a clusterfuck of a truly unique kind. My fascination with this kind of disaster, which shows Ben Kingsley give a performance so repellent and unfunny, it actually made me a little mad, is something I’ve talked about before. Watching a movie fail again, and again, and again, and again, and again, is something I can sometimes absolutely enjoy as its own concept of enjoyment.
A performance by Verne Troyer, who worked with Myers on the Austin Powers series, is literally the only thing that brought me actual joy. In the sense of what you generally hope to feel when watching a comedy. That’s where the “+” in the F+ comes from.
Often enough, something this bad makes you feel cheated, if only a little. I get that. However, with things being what they are, there is something almost soothing about exposing yourself to what I can almost objectively call one of the worst comedy films ever made.
Try it.
Scare Package (2019): B+
Image © Shudder
I’m always grateful for movies that prove the unshakable appeal of anthology horror. These movies have been around for decades. Their popularity moves up and down, but the odds are solid that you can find at least one for almost any given year in the past 50. Scare Package is one of the most likable extensions of a tradition that stretches back to iconic studios like Amicus Productions.
The title alone can make you optimistic for a good time. I promise it will be. Whipping through seven short comedy-horror pieces by seven unique filmmakers, Scare Package is perhaps most impressive for how enjoyable all of those stories are on some level or another. A few of them are incredible examples of just how fast and hard a good short film can cut (pun partially intended).
Of course, the real star might be the wraparound segments. Set at a video store, they operate and entertain beautifully on their own. They also connect to the stories in a fairly unique way. Scare Package has a likable, multifaceted talent for maintaining that dance of a love for horror history and references, with material that has its own stellar, creepy, hilarious qualities.
Scare Package is currently available to stream as a Shudder Original.
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965): A+
Image © Columbia Pictures
Gaslighting goes to some of the darker reaches of ambition in one of Otto Preminger’s best movies. You like psychological bouts of extreme claustrophobia? You’re in luck, slugger.
A single mother from America (Carol Lynley), new to London, goes to the preschool to pick up the young daughter she had dropped off there earlier in the day. The kid isn’t there. No one at the school knows what in the hell she is talking about. The police, led by the quietly determined Newhouse (Laurence Olivier, in one of his best), struggle to understand what’s going on. Ideally, you’re going to struggle, too. I suspect you will.
I was impressed again and again with not only the performances of Lynley, Olivier, and Keir Dullea (David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey), but with the movie pushing itself to the very limit of everything it could possibly give to a legitimately startling conclusion. Bunny Lake is Missing is disconcerting entertainment to an extreme that is difficult to achieve even today.
It’s also worth watching to see Noël Coward play what I can only describe as the kind of guy who would give Frasier Crane a symphony of bleeding ulcers.
The Walker in the Woods (1980): C-
Image © Walt Disney Productions | Buena Vista Distribution
Don’t expect to see The Watcher in the Woods on Disney+ anytime soon. That isn’t because the movie holds the same level of infamy, as, say, Song of the South. It just happens to be that The Watcher in the Woods, at one point, considered a potential winner in the vein of The Exorcist, was one of the more embarrassing experiences for Disney during a time when it was ACTUALLY POSSIBLE for the company to do poorly.
The movie is easy enough to get on DVD, which offers alternate endings, as well as a clearer idea of the film’s aspirations. However, for whatever reason, Disney by and large doesn’t seem interesting in celebrating a costly failure that didn’t find a particularly large audience after the fact, like Fantasia.
A fairly standard family drama, set at and absorbed by a ghost story set against a suitably bleak English backdrop, The Watcher in the Woods still has a lot to offer. Beyond a strong performance by Bette Davis, still a commanding presence at that point in her career, the movie deals a unique tone and pace in its tale of a young girl who becomes possessed by a torture spirit. In other words, the setup is ordinary, but the execution in many ways isn’t.
The disjointed feel of the cut that eventually stayed in theaters plays hell with your concentration. Stay along with it. There are elements to appreciate. Among them is the film history rabbit hole the movie can take you on.
Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His books Love and Quarters and Bondage Night are available through Moran Press, in addition to A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press) and Clouds of Hungry Dogs (Kleft Jaw Press). He is also a writer, performer, and producer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions. He lives on a horrible place called Long Island.