Film / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / February 2024 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Focus Features | Miramax
I wanted to get into a deeper rant about the rapidly disintegrating media literacy we seem to be contending with, this notion that everything gets just a little shittier with each passing year, but I’m trying to be less negative in 2024. I’m celebrating ten years with my wife. I’ve got a new ferret. My panic attacks are being numbed relatively well by medical marijuana edibles. Why pitch a fit over things I can’t really control in any form or fashion?
But there’s a few things already bugging me, as we get into what will hopefully be a year of leveling things out against a backdrop of rigorous, almost tedious normalcy, so let me just briefly touch on a couple of quick notes about the way people read and think about movies.
1.) Just because a movie failed at the box office, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. I can almost guarantee you that some of your favorites either underperformed or even, gasp, bombed. Shitty movies can fail to find an audience, but you shouldn’t take the word of the box office for whether or not it’s a good movie. This has been a dumbass way to think about films for much longer than I’ve been alive, and I’m thoroughly sick of it. Comic book movie fans, I’m looking at you in particular.
2.) Same goes for the aggregate at Rotten Tomatoes. You have to actually read those reviews to understand the aggregate score, which should not under any circumstances be taken as a clear mark of quality. People need to stop doing this, especially if they work in the marketing department for a movie studio, or happen to be a fan of, oh, let’s say comic book movies.
3.) Reading bad reviews of the movies you like. Do people not do this anymore? How important is it to you to be completely surrounded by the opinion that the things you enjoy are utterly and completely perfect? I find negative reviews of movies I like fascinating, and I’m starting to sincerely feel like I’m the only one who does. This is another area where comic book movie cultists have shit the bed for everyone else, but the Disney Adult mentality lives in a variety of neighborhoods.
4.) I said, “briefly touch on”, and that was apparently bullshit, so let’s just get to the movies this month. As is the format now, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way back up. It’s like a ranking, but dumber.
Wholly Moses! (1980): F+
Image © Focus Features | Miramax
One review I read of Wholly Moses from its Wikipedia page describes Wholly Moses! as a film “Meant to cash in on the popularity of The Life of Brian. That’s a fair assessment, and it’s not inherently a bad one. Parodies of Bible stories and characters with an absolutely stacked cast that included Dudley Moore, Lorraine Newman, Richard Pryor, Madeline Khan, Paul Sand, James Coco, and several others? There’s some pretty clear potential for that kind of thing to at least be fun.
And while I have no doubt that some people probably have fond memories of watching Wholly Moses! growing up, ultimately, I’m a man watching this almost completely forgotten film in his late 30s. I don’t know if I would have liked this as a child, but I’d like to think this blithering mess of a deserved obscurity would have probably annoyed me a lot less than it did in 2024.
Wholly Moses! is nothing more than a series of barely connected sketches that do nothing more than introduce shrill caricatures who banter back and forth for what seems like an eternity. This is the formula the film maintains from start to finish, with Dudley Moore and Lorraine Newman (one of the movie’s only two bright spots) playing two idiot tourists in the wraparound for what’s basically an anthology film that kind of sort of stays along a narrative path.
Virtually none of it is funny. No one has chemistry with each other. Scenes go on for entirely too long. The script does not possess moments of wit or insight. It’s just endless gags and reactions, with occasional detours into elements and plot points that I guess someone somewhere thought were clever. Outside of a genuinely chilling and all-too-brief performance from John Ritter as Satan, there’s just nothing here. It’s a void where any potential pleasure or enjoyment goes to die. Lorraine Newman in particular deserved far better.
8 Heads in a Duffle Bag (1997): D+
Image © Orion Pictures
Certain VHS tapes seem to haunt my dreams, whenever I imagine some form of the video stores of my youth. The shitty video store at a convenience store in Ucluelet, British Columbia, a town that didn’t have a dedicated video store (well, it did, but it closed about a week after I moved there) had movies I memorized for a time. The stock rarely changed. When it did, it was bleak shit like 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag, which I saw every day on the shelves for about a year and change. As far as I know, no one rented one of the last movies Joe Pesci starred before more or less retiring for 20+ years.
It's hard to blame him for leaving the business, assuming a big sweaty slab of screaming misery like 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag was one of the motivators. Pesci isn’t bad as a gangster who suddenly finds himself missing the severed heads his boss tasked him with delivering, but you can’t help but read the weariness of his character as complete indifference with a script that shoves his character into a horrible situation involving a medical student named Charlie (Andy Corneau), his girlfriend (Kristy Swanson, reminding us why we don’t see her very often), and their fucked up, jackassy family. The story expands to include two medical school buddies of Charlie (David Spade and Todd Louisa), and I will give you a fucking dollar if you’re still giving a shit once all of these wheels are in motion.
Writer/director Tom Schulman is a very good screenwriter, and while 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag won’t stop me from eventually checking out his recent film Double Down South, which has been garnering good reviews, this 1997 misfire is almost unwatchable. There’s some good dark comedy here, and the scenes with Pesci, Spade, and Louisa suggest a much better film, but the rest is extremely poor casting and viciously unlikable characters. I was right to just keep walking and browsing in 1997, but I’d be lying if I said this isn’t the kind of failure I can’t help but find fascinating.
Double Feature Wildcard! The Last Exorcism (2010) and The Last Exorcism Part II (2013): C-/D+
Image © Lionsgate
I don’t particularly want to review The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part II at the same time, but there’s absolutely no chance that I will ever want to talk about these movies again, so we may as well slam a review together and remember why it’s perfectly fair that some people absolutely despise found footage.
The two movies in the Last Exorcism series make for a weird double feature. The first entry is a found footage movie. The other is a more straightforward narrative horror experience. Neither of them are very good, with both movies telling the story of a young woman named Nell (an excellent Ashley Bell) and her seeming possession by a demon. The first film is told from the perspective of a documentary film crew (Iris Bahr and Adam Grimes) following around a guy (Patrick Fabian, who is quite good) who performs fake exorcisms. You can guess where this documentary goes when everyone meets Nell, and her charming family, and discovers that Nell might just be possessed for real. It’s not a bad premise, but the tension doesn’t really start to make itself apparent until more than half of the movie is over. The characters driving this story fail to connect or establish something compelling, except for the fact that we the audience already know The Last Exorcism is headed. That and some good performances get you to an excellent climax, but by then it’s sort of a “Too little too late” situation.
Certainly not something that needed a sequel, but Nell was back in 2013 with The Last Exorcism Part II. Abandoning the found footage construct could have worked, especially with a story that focused intensely on Nell in the aftermath of the first film. Ashley Bell’s performance is the only thing keeping this together, with a sequel bogged down in comically dense characters, a plot that never really justifies continuing this story in the first place, and a painfully slow pacing that only seemed to benefit my appreciation of Bell. As a double feature, we have a tonally disjointed narrative with a lot of forgettable elements. Whether as found footage or as a traditional film, I found myself struggling to care about anything happening in either Last Exorcism.
The Last Amityville Movie (2023): B+
Image © Box Office Gold Productions
Full disclosure: I’m a supporter of Josh Spiegel’s Patreon and take part in the Discord community built around his excellent YouTube channel Movie Timelines. For those reasons I was made aware of The Last Amityville Movie, a horror-comedy written and directed by Spiegel that satirizes the unfuckingreal number of movies bearing the Amityville name. Because guess what, you can’t copyright the name “Amityville.” Knowing how many movies there are beyond the famous Amityville Horror (which in of itself has a few thousand sequels), I kind of wish someone would.
But then we wouldn’t have the sincerely funny and clever Last Amityville Movie to enjoy. Because while I may have been made aware of this movie by being part of Spiegel’s online community, my overwhelming enjoyment of this film stands on its own. It helps a little (but isn’t crucial) to know how many Amityville movies have been made (well over 100 feels like a good conservative guess), as the movie does indeed set up the premise that it will be the last true Amityville movie. But that’s really it.
You don’t even need to understand that Spiegel is a real-life YouTuber outside of the movie’s plot about said YouTuber receiving a strange gift in the form of an item that came from the original Amityville house. This sets a series of events in motion, with Spiegel dealing with a malevolent supernatural force that seems committed to driving him insane while in quarantine from his family (Christy Mele and Stella Spiegel, who are both very funny) during a new unspecified pandemic. This is mostly played for laughs, with scene-stealing moments by some of the other actors (particularly Eric Barnard as a neighbor) but there are moments of genuine tension, and even a couple of impressive jump scares.
Without relying too much on humor or references that only an extreme niche of movie nerds would appreciate, The Last Amityville Movie travels far on a budget of significantly less than $10, 000. It blends horror and comedy more effectively than not, and its plot offers some genuine surprises and inspired bits of silliness and atmosphere. This one is worth seeking out, and Josh Spiegel is a name worth following to see what he does next.
The Holdovers (2023): A+
Image © Focus Features | Miramax
Sideways remains not only my favorite movie from writer/director Alexander Payne, but also one of my favorites with star Paul Giamatti. To have these two working together again for The Holdovers set some pretty high expectations for a good time. The kind of anticipation that usually results in extreme disappointment and a promise to never again be my own obnoxious hype machine.
The Holdovers stands above all of that as one of the best movies I saw last year. It’s not a surprise that Giamatti is brilliant as a terminally cranky teacher at a New England prep school, tasked with watching the kids no one came to pick up over Christmas break 1970. It’s also not a surprise that Alexander Payne directs a brilliant cast and a phenomenal script by David Hemingson with the talent of a man who hasn’t made a bad movie yet. The Holdovers has an insulated atmosphere that wraps itself around the characters and a small range of locations, and then wraps all of that around you. It’s very tempting to call The Holdovers a cozy movie, as it has an ability to draw you into its kindness and even its darker moments. Time flies by watching something this good.
No, what surprises me about The Holdovers is where we go with these characters. It isn’t just an opportunity to see Giamatti and Payne work together again. It’s an opportunity to see incredible actors like Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston, and the astonishingly good Da’Vine Joy Randolph shine in a character-driven movie that’s equally rich in atmosphere, dialog, and development of its main plot and various threads. The Holdovers is one of those movies where every single component is completely and totally perfect. The end result is that you just can’t help but be in a good mood when the end credits roll. Good art inspires and transforms in a variety of ways, and it’s a pleasure to see such a mix of new and veteran talent prove that with what will surely be one of the best movies of this entire lousy decade. The Holdovers is art that makes the world a little brighter.