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Showing posts with the label Fantasy

Cronos (1992)

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I first saw this ten or fifteen years ago while exploring Guillermo del Toro's filmography.  Filmed in a combination of English and Spanish, Cronos is his first film. I recall thinking it was good but being a little underwhelmed at the time, particularly compared to his follow-up, The Devil's Backbone. If I noticed this was set at New Year's, I forgot it soon after. While this didn't leave much of an impression on me then, it absolutely did now. I think I was expecting a more typical vampire story, and as a result wasn't ready to fully appreciate the more subdued, thoughtful film del Toro delivered, which is more a fairytale assembled out of deconstructed horror elements than the usual superpowered monsters. In my defense, understated genre films were more common in the '90s and early '00s, so something like this stood out less then than it does in 2023. Regardless, this is fantastic, which means it's time for a mandatory spoiler warning. If you're a

Mouse Hunt (1997)

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Just about the only thing you'd describe as subtle in this comedy from the late '90s is its holiday setting, which - to be fair - is a bit ambiguous. The film definitely starts just before Christmas, though even that takes a little while to be established. Christmas Eve plays into the story in a fairly significant way, though we sort of breeze through the 25th itself. After that, the timeline gets a little muddled, though it certainly seems like virtually all of the movie would have to be set between Christmas and New Year's. But I'm getting quite a bit ahead of myself. Let's start by acknowledging what I assume is obvious from the seemingly contradictory fact that this involves some pretty impressive talent yet has been virtually forgotten: it's not good. That's not entirely accurate. Instead, let's say this really doesn't work, and most people without an interest in Gore Verbinski's filmography would be better off skipping it. This is Verbinski

A Biltmore Christmas (2023)

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Fairly high concept for a Hallmark movie, this is about a screenwriter scripting a remake of a classic Hollywood Christmas movie getting magically transported back to the production of said movie in 1947 and falling in love with its tragically doomed star. If all that sounds a tad over-ambitious for a studio known for cranking out relatively uniform (but surprisingly high-quality) low-budget television movies... well... that is an issue here. While A Biltmore Christmas is decent, it's clear they're biting off a bit more than they can chew. Watching, you can tell everyone involved is putting in real effort, but you can see where they just didn't have the time to set up complex shots, learn more than surface-level impersonations of characters from classic Hollywood films, or nail the look and feel of the era they were emulating. I don't think any of that is necessarily a dealbreaker, depending on what you want out of this. This is, after all, a TV Christmas movie, and in

Red Snow (2021)

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After watching Red Snow, I find myself a little surprised it's not better known, which is another way of saying I had a blast watching it. This is a horror/comedy vampire movie, and - honestly - that's about all I want to tell you before dropping a *spoiler warning* and advising those of you who like this sort of thing to check it out. Okay, I'll toss you a few more bones, in case you need more convincing. Or, in the case of those of you who are die-hard horror fans, perhaps a warning to temper your expectations. After all, this is a movie *I* really enjoyed, and - in case you've forgotten - I don't exactly have the best tolerance for scares, gore, and the like. Red Snow is absolutely the kind of R-rated horror movie that elicits complaints about not being gross or scary enough for a significant subset of the genre's fanbase. If that's a deal-breaker for you, you're probably better off skipping this. But for the rest of you, it's delightful. And, for

The Christmas Raccoons (1980)

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Animated Christmas specials serving as stealth pilots is something of a tradition in its own right. The most successful example, of course, was The Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire , but a number of other properties attempted to use the format , as well, including the one we're looking at today. Astonishingly, this one seems to have been successful, as it spawned a number of additional specials and eventually a series that lasted for five years. Lindsay grew up watching said series - I did not. She assures me that the kids who appear in the frame story of this special would be dropped pretty fast, with the world defaulting to one entirely occupied by anthropomorphic animals. That premise does sound at least marginally better than what we just watched. Let's start there. We're introduced to a park ranger, his two kids, and their dog, Schaeffer. The forest they're living in (and that the ranger is looking after) is being mysteriously cut down, so he goes to investigate

Round and Round (2023)

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Last year we made time to review a decent number of Hallmark holiday movies and found the recent entries quite a bit better on average than we expected. The best of the bunch was Hanukkah on Rye , a delightful classic romantic comedy I found funny and sweet. The movie received a bit of backlash due to what some viewers felt were stereotypes  but otherwise seemed to be well received, so it's not too surprising to see a new entry this year. What is surprising is the premise: rather than play it safe with another straightforward romcom, Round and Round is a time loop movie in the vein of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, both of which are namechecked and discussed by characters in Round and Round as they try to figure out the temporal disturbance at the movie's core. I'll cut to the chase and reveal I don't think Round and Round is in quite the same league as its predecessor, but it's nevertheless a solid TV movie and - largely by default - probably the second-best Hanukk

My Mother the Car: Many Happy No-Returns (1965)

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Often regarded as one of the worst, if not the worst, American sitcoms in history, My Mother the Car ran for thirty episodes between 1965 and 1966. The premise of the show is that the main character, David Crabtree (played by Jerry Van Dyke, the younger brother of Dick Van Dyke), discovers his dead mother has been reincarnated in the form of a 1928 Porter who talks to him through the radio when no one else is around. I should add this was written and produced by some of the greatest legends in television history - Allan Burns and Chris Hayward created the show, and James L. Brooks wrote for it. As explained by Burns in this clip , the series was envisioned as a satire of the sub-genre of '60s sitcoms built around an absurd fantasy gimmick (think Mister Ed or Bewitched), but something went wrong and the satirical elements were lost in production. In that interview, Burns blames it on the show becoming too cute, but I think the issue was intrinsic to the premise. The shows they were

Repeat Performance (1947)

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This movie should be much better known. Repeat Performance is a holiday fantasy/noir from 1947 about a woman who just killed her husband in self-defense at midnight on New Year's, wishes to relive the past year to change her destiny, and finds her wish is granted by the magic of the season only to learn that while the paths of fate can be traversed differently, the destination will always be the same. I don't feel too bad spoiling this, because the movie kicks off with Twilight Zone-esque narration that more or less spells all this out. So, this is basically a post-war fatalism entry for the holidays. Again, why in hell am I only just hearing about this now?!!! Okay, I can probably shed a little light on that now. First, if you're not thinking about the thematic and historical significance the holidays lend the movie, it's easy to gloss over them, as well as how much of the movie is actually set during the season. Second, the movie has some pacing issues: it drags a bit

Ebenezer (1998)

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For those of you who weren't reading last year, well... first of all, welcome to the party, pal! But second and more germane to the topic, I spent a comically large portion of 2022 watching and reviewing roughly fifty adaptations of A Christmas Carol, presumably making me one of the world's foremost masochists on the subject. This was still just a drop in the bucket as far as the breadth of TV and film versions of the story are concerned, but I managed to check off virtually every adaptation on my list. Virtually. There were a couple that slipped through the cracks. The most notable of which is an elusive 1940s version from Spain that's probably going to be one of those "white whales" I obsess over for decades. But after that, there was Ebenezer, a version starring Jack Palance, with the setting moved from London to the American West. This was an extremely late addition to my list - because the title differs from the usual pattern, it hadn't initially caught m