Body Parts. Eric Red. 1991. ⚀

[half an hour passes]

OK, now I’m definitely regretting starting this Eric Red festival. Yes, Near Dark is a very good movie, and The Hitcher is original, but…

The two previous movies in this blog series were tedious, and this one is… what’s the word for when something is more boring than tedious? Stupefying? This is stupefyingly boring.

The story is the old hoary thing about a guy getting a transplant from a killer, and then… HORRIBLE THINGS HAPPEN.

It’s just such a cliché that if the movie is going to work, you have to do something fun and original with it, and Eric Red just doesn’t. It’s unbelievably basic.

And it didn’t do very well at the box office, but I guess video sales could make up for that? Still… why would anybody bet $10M on this piece of… nothingness?

If only.

[twenty minutes pass]

Should I bail? It’s just even more boring, and I didn’t think that was possible.

OK, since this movie is horrible, horrible and horrible, perhaps the finale will be fun?

I’ll stick it out. Thank you imdb, reviewer.

[the end]

I was right! The finale was hilarious! I’m not totally sure that it was meant to be funny, but… I think it was? And that almost reevaluate the entire movie: Was it all a parody?

So now, in retrospect, I almost like the movie, but that doesn’t really help with how excruciating it was to watch this.

I’m now watching the documentary helpfully included by Shout! Factory on this bluray. Red seems likeable? And very sincere: He’s saying that he just made this movie to be entertaining, and not because he’s got stuff to express or anything.

I’m liking everything Red says here, so now I feel kinda bad about hating this movie so much.

Oooh! I’m not watching an Anthony Redman interview. He was the editor? And he’s now officially my favourite person in the world. The anecdotes! The jokes! The philosophy! I hadn’t expected this. He starts off with “well, in those days I was dealing weed…” And then he started working for Corman and then the anecdotes just keep on coming. It’s 22 minutes, but I wish it was three hours. You can hear the crew laughing in the background but trying to keep it down.

After listening to this, I feel really bad about hating the movie he edited. Listening to him talking about it, it sounds great.

I’m totally willing to believe that I’m wrong about this movie. Especially after all these cocktails.

Heh heh. I’m now watching the Peter Murnik interview (Shout! Factory is really doing a good job here with the extras), and he’s saying that he bought his house in LA from the residuals from the VHS release. I knew it!

Blue Steel. Kathryn Bigelow. 1990. ⚁

[twenty minutes pass]

So this is a fantasy movie? A copy kills an armed guy in the middle of robbing a store… and she gets shit for it? I mean, even getting mildly questioned about killing somebody is apparently very unusual.

I guess the Bigelow/fascist complex stuff started very early and the criticisms after Zero Dark Thirty were just behind the curve?

[twenty minutes pass]

The guy playing the other cop is possibly the most annoying actor ever? He seems to be doing some sort of fake Brooklyn accent?

The entire movie is kinda bad. The over-the-top psycho performance from whatisname is just tedious. Who cares? Talking to a god, smearing himself in blood… it’s boring as fuck.

[twenty minutes pass]

So she gets the killer, but they had to let him go because of technicalities (or because the cop was boinking the suspect). Otherwise how can the cop go rogue and have to kill the psychotic killer?

The script on this movie is so paint-by-numbers that I’m now seriously regretting buying all these movies (co-)written by Eric Red.

So now I’m wondering what people thought of this piece of crap.

Oh! Hm. OK, it that few people like this movie, perhaps it’s better than I thought.

*refocus*

[the end]

Sorry, I had SPOILERS hoped for some kind of twist here. Like… the protagonist being insane and just imagining the whole thing, and that the bearded guy was innocent.

But, not, what you see it what you get: A totally standard, stupid movie about a psychotic serial killer, and the cop that has to break the rules to get him.

Cohen and Tate. Eric Red. 1988. ⚁

So this is Red’s first movie as a director. After the success of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (which he co-wrote), it’s no wonder he landed a directing gig. So what’s going on here, then?

[half an hour passes]

Oh, this is so… different… from The Hitcher. Instead of a guy running away from a psychotic murderer, involving a lot of car chases and killing, we have … a boy … running away from two psychotic murderers, involving a lot of car chases and killing.

HOW DOES RED COME UP WITH THESE THINGS!!!

[twenty minutes pass]

The main problem here is that this movie is just kinda boring.

The kid playing the er kid is awful, but Adam Baldwin is convincingly psycho (perhaps that’s just his real personality?) and Scheider is a pro. Together they’re… just kinda middling?

[the end]

So the Home Alone bits (where the kid schemes and stuff) liven things up a bit, but it’s still a slog. It’s just 90 minutes, but it feels so much longer. The scene where they kill the family, for instance, is padded out with what feels like minutes of the woman pleading (and she’s the only female character? so that’s really weird), and the repetetive structure of the film, where nothing so much progresses as it just … goes on and on.

Oh, I’m watching the “making of”, and there was originally even more pleading when they killed the single female character.

*sigh*