Blood Monkey, That Funky Monkey

Ever go to a party where no one had fun but the host? The food is exotically inedible. The music, a demo CD of someone’s boyfriend’s struggling band. A guest falls asleep or starts a vomitfest in the bathroom just when that weak drink has reached your urinary tract. There’s no place to sit and no one to have an intelligent conversation with regarding the controversial finale of America’s Next Top Model and just when you’ve summoned the strength to hasten an exit, you discover someone has mistakenly grabbed your winter coat, leaving you with an ill-fitting loaner that your still sickenly energetic host has kindly dug up from the basement to put over your shoulders.

If Blood Monkey is that party, then bless dear old Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham for having a ridiculously good time hosting it, even if it’s at the expense of the rest of the cast, crew, and more importantly, the baffled audience who really just want more blood monkeys.

Quick Plot: Abraham plays Professor Hamilton, the typical Col. Kurtz-esque genius living deep in the jungles of Thailand with his badass female bodyguard Chenne. The pair are soon joined by a jeep-ful of attractive and annoying anthropology graduate students taking a semester to study with one of the preeminent minds in the field.

Also, to be eaten by blood monkeys.

Who are these young brainiacs with charming accents, you might ask? Or you might not, since like virtually any movie made today starring twentysomethings, the twentysomethings are the least interesting things onscreen. There’s a blond who carries the most luggage (cause she’s blond, duh), a nerd identified as such because he wears glasses, a screamy girl with a video camera, a good-looking guy who seems to make the most decisions, his dull love interest who seems smart because she’s a brunette, and in a feat of screenwriting superiority, the guy who introduces himself as such:

“I’m Greg. The good-looking one. And I’m also like a genius in anthropology.”

You gotta love when a script is fully aware that its audience identifies characters by their rating on an Are You Hot scale. Greg—or Craig, I don’t really care—also gets the fun job of sexually harassing every female  in sight in that charming manner that only happens in movies and would be sue-able in real life. I actually found myself pitying poor actor Matt Reeves for having to say some of the Neil LeBute-ish dialogue about that silly but sexy child-bearing gender.

You know who else I pitied? Me. That’s right, when I queue up a film called Blood Monkey, I expect little more than what its title promised. You know what it promised? A blood monkey.

It’s not that Blood Monkey didn’t have blood monkeys. Throughout its 90 minute running time, we see various evidence that blood monkeys—a separate branch of evolution—are well and good in Thailand. And that their point of view is very orange. And that they set the kind of traps you’d find on Endor and that their brains are really big. That’s all fine and dandy but WHERE ARE THE BLOOD MONKEYS?

I asked that question a thirty minutes into the film. I asked again at the hour mark. Do you want to know when director Robert Vampire Circus Young answered? In the very. Last. Shot.

That’s a lot of time to waste when one could be filling it with blood monkeys.

High Points

I joke about F. Murray Abraham’s role here—especially when he opens up a can of whoop tush—but it’s actually nice to see such a celebrated actor having fun in the boonies of SyFyVille. Never does Abraham show the slightest sign of being too good for this material, and his clear enjoyment at such a villainous and physical role is ultimately the only REAL reason to watch this blood monkey-less Blood Monkey movie.

In a similar vein, the only character who comes close to matching Abraham’s enthusiasm is his bodyguard/maybe lady love Chenne, played with such angry violence by Prapimporn Karnchada. Watching her smack nerdy anthropologist students or drop-kick their makeup caboodles is oddly wonderful

Low Points

Is it really THAT HARD to write and direct young people as likable, interesting creatures? As movies like Blood Monkey and Grizzly Park seem to suggest, the answer is yes, yes it really is that hard

Lessons Learned

Chekhov’s rule of handheld video cameras: if the feature ‘night vision’ is referenced, you can bet a barrel of blood monkeys that we’ll be seeing green in the final reel

Most idiots can’t resist taking a ride on the baggage carousel, especially the self-proclaimed good-looking ones

The jungle is not good for the complexion

Rent/Bury/Buy

Blood Monkey wasn’t originally made for the SyFy Channel, but that’s where it ended up and really, that’s where it belongs. The location is gorgeous, the characters dull, action not terrible and script generally more funny than it ever meant to be. What makes it mildly recommendable is the energy and talent of F. Murray Abraham, coupled, of course, with the fact that he’s actually in this movie. So while it might not satisfy your taste for blood monkeys, it will quench your Salieri salivation and hey, I suppose that’s more than King Kong can say.

Monday March Musical Madness: Fame 2009

In case you didn’t know, I think Alan Parker’s 1980 sorta musical Fame is a genuine great film about young artists. When I make a statement like that, I often catch an eye roll or sarcastic comment about how it’s a silly ‘80s dance movie and ancestor to High School Musical.

Then I call my lawyer to get me off yet another murder charge.

Look, I’m not comparing an epic tale of teenage performers to Schindler’s List or Starship Troopers. But I am defending its reputation, which too often gets lumped with lighter later season Glee-type bubble gum fare. Fame is not. There’s abortion, attempted suicide, failure, dream crushing, teen exploitation, illiteracy, and ultimately, no fairy tale rich and famous contracts. It paints a stark but loving portrait of what it’s like to be gifted and driven but plopped in an environment overcrowded with people that might be MORE gifted and MORE driven than you ever thought yourself capable of.

In 2009, the remake warlords released an updated Fame for the 21st century audience. Critical and audience response wasn’t kind, but the sirens of instant watch called and hence, here we go:

Quick Plot: A gaggle of dancers, musicians, and actors line up to audition for entry into the High School of Performing Arts. Like its predecessor, Fame starts with an amusing montage displaying the range of talent on the streets of New York, from one kid’s adorably awful Taxi Driver impersonation to a classic pianist’s easy mastery of a difficult piece.  Once the placard reads “Freshman Year,” we settle on our cast:

Malik, an intense aspiring actor whose hard knocks childhood has closed him off from tapping into his true potential

Joy, a peppy actress who flunks out of school because of her job on Sesame Street 

(no, really)

Alice, the rich dance star who dates bad boys but not in an exciting way

Jenny, the mousy actress who’s boring but white and therefore our apparent lead 

Denise, a secret vocal powerhouse whose strict parents want her to focus on the classical piano

Kevin, a ballet dancer from Iowa who might not be cut out for the big leagues

Neil, a filmmaker-in-training learning that the industry is full of crooks

Marco, a musician whose experimental style mildly ruffles teacher Kelsey Grammar but then never really seems to go anywhere

And a few more pretty fresh faces who I forgot about.

You might have already guessed it, but therein lies the biggest issue of Fame, a film that actually started promisingly before descending into a messy collage of pretty but bland people I just didn’t care about. The decision to approach the film as a true ensemble piece is admirable, but there are simply so many storylines going on that not a single one has the time to become any more than a one-line stereotype. This ain’t Contagion being directed by Stephen Soderbergh. It’s Fame being directed by the guy that mashed together the messy Glee 3D concert movie.

It’s a shame. While none of the kids register along the lines of Paul McCrane’s character actor star-making performance in the original, there’s still clear talent in the new cast. Collins Pennie’s Malik has something of interest behind sparse screentime, while the ridiculously long-named Anna Maria Perez de Tagle has a likable peppiness as the dropout Joy. What’s worse is that *some* of the stories have genuine potential but not a single one gets paid off.

Take for example the character of Kevin, a fresh-faced dancer whose mother runs a Midwest ballet school. Teacher Bebe Neuwirth (fine, as always) is hard on him, recognizing his talent and effort but not ignoring the fact that his solo technique won’t get him work in the competitive world of professional dance. In one of the film’s best and easily most honest scenes, Newirth denies Kevin a recommendation because she simply doesn’t believe he should pursue dancing as a career. This is really the only storyline that follows the same beats as the original film, and yet when Kevin inches toward a moving subway train, the depth and punch of attempted suicide just feels forced. This might be the best story IN Fame, but because it’s spread out in snippets and pushed aside for the dullest romance in recent teen cinema history, how are we supposed to take it seriously?

So about that dull teen romance: it stinks. For some reason, Fame seems to think that it needs to ultimately focus on a pretty white ingénue. Kay Panabaker plays Jenny as a boring young girl who starts dating a slightly less boring young man, has an uncomfortable encounter in a casting trailer that almost insults Irene Cara’s heartbreaking nude audition gone wrong, then sort of gets back together with now really boring boyfriend in time to sing (terribly) at graduation. We never actually see her give anything near a great performance that makes us think “yes, let’s see her shine!” Sure, Maureen Teefy’s Doris wasn’t the most likable onscreen presence in 1980, but she had genuine pluck and a real journey that let us see her grow from freshman to senior year. Jenny is a surface-level character who somehow steals the most screentime and in the end, the film is all the worse for it.

I could go on. I could, so I guess I just WILL.

Remember how in the original, we had a snooty ballerina in an abortion clinic after fooling around with a straight-from-the-streets bad boy? Here we have Alice, who dances well and has rich parents so she must take an interest in a minority student from the other side of Central Park. So she points him out to her parents at dinner, says he’s dangerous and she likes it, then goes offscreen for a good hour, and in the final wrapup of the characters, she breaks up with him to take a role in a water ballet show. Now I’m not saying that we NEEDED another abortion, but were we supposed to be invested in a relationship that barely gave us its lovers IN THE SAME SCENE?

Much like Glee, Fame’s cast is (for the most part) musically talented but underserved. As Denise, Naturi Naughton possesses a pretty incredible voice that does surprising justice to Cara’s Oscar-nominated Out Here On My Own. But the story insists on making her character a dull wallflower who sings modern rap with her pals while following her parents’ more traditional dream path to Carnegie Hall. This conflict is perfectly fine for the film, but it’s handled terribly. For one thing, we don’t ever really care about her partners’ stake in the group so when a big name producer tells them he’s only interested in her, are we really supposed to be sad? Especially since Denise has thus far shown no actual stage presence to be believable as the next Mariah Carey?

You get my point.

At an oddly chosen 100 minutes, Fame simply bit off more than it could chew. There are too many characters with terrible division of screentime between them. Director Kevin Tancharoen can stage a fine musical performance or montage, but he clearly doesn’t have a grasp on Allison Burnett’s wannabe epic script. This is a film that clearly came from good intentions but had absolutely no idea how to make them a reality.

High Points

As I say for the similarly flawed beyond possible repair Smash, it’s always nice to see a film embrace and exploit its NYC setting to the extreme

Michael "Brianna Barksdale” Hyatt alert! Wire fans rejoice!

Low Points

Aforementioned confusion of the film’s script and character weight. Seriously, are we aware that Panabaker’s ABC Family Channel-level romance got more attention than a suicidal dancer AND character dropping out of HIGH SCHOOL TO BE ON SESAME STREET???

Odd Point

Part of what made the original Fame such a groundbreaking film was its portrayal of a realistic gay teenager learning in his most awkward years who he was. This Fame has no acknowledged gay characters, though I think most audiences (self included) would certainly assume things here and there. On one hand, maybe it’s a positive sign that a character can just be gay in a teen film without it being an issue. On the other, are we missing a prime opportunity to explore that in a mainstream film? I dunno, I just work here.

Lessons Learned

Bach was a stubby little German guy who wore a wig and died 1000 years ago

If you want your child to graduate high school, do not even THINK of signing release forms 

for her to be employed by PBS

The theater is not a place for cowards (just narcissists)

Rent/Bury/Buy

For the first forty minutes or so of Fame, I was genuinely excited and eager to rebuff the critical sentiment that it was a dud. Then the film decided to do everything wrong. I’m fully aware that a 1980 movie about teenagers might show some signs of aging, and yet I truly believe Parker’s 32 year old film remains far more relevant to today’s youth than this oddly patched together yawn. If you NEED to watch a talented teens movie with more current slang, at least start with the earnest Center Stage (I’m not kidding!) or the giddily wonderful Step Up sequels (skip the first one, please). 2009’s Fame is a not dreadful watch for a random lazy day, but don’t tune in expecting any of the heart so rich in the original. It’s there, and that is that.

Lisa It's the '90s, Happy '90s Lisa

Ahhh, tweendom, a crucial time period in a young girl’s life filled with peer pressure, shopping malls, unrequited crushes, and Blossom hats. 

It’s a generational thing.

Quick Plot: Lisa (My Two Dads’ kid Staci Keanan) is a responsible(ish) 14-year-old with a close "we're like sisters!" relationship with her single mom (Cheryl Ladd) and mildly unsettling hobby of innocently stalking older men from afar and putting their pictures in a scrapbook she compiles with BFF Wendy. Nothing bad can come from that, right?

One day, Lisa bumps into Richard, a good-looking restaurant owner who instantly becomes her latest obsession. Before she can ask mother may I sleep with danger, Lisa is making late-night calls to Richard with a husky Cinemax caliber voice, teasing him with her secret identity while still wondering why her silly mom won't let her date until she celebrates sweet 16.

Oh Lisa, silly silly Lisa. Didn't you hear that ominously sexy smooth saxophone playing over the opening credits? Haven't you noticed the way Richard's dark eyes linger on attractive women who end up raped and dead the next day? Silly teenagers and their ignorance of the world. If only our precocious heroine had read a newspaper and picked up on the fact that Richard is so enamored by answering machines, maybe the little dear would have pieced together the fact that Richard is the infamous Candlelight Killer, the sort of criminal that only exists on Lifetime movies: handsome, wealthy, and classy in his kills of beautiful women.

Lisa was a 1990 theatrical release, although watching it today, the movie feels made for TV in a way most PG-13esque thrillers about romantic obsession usually are. Director Gary Sherman has a varied genre resume, with the interesting subway cannibal tale Raw Meat, the maybe Dan O’Bannon inspired Dead and Buried, and the tragic but not as worthless as folks say Poltergeist III. Lisa is more than competently made, but its target audience is currently in seventh grade.

In many ways, Lisa seems to anticipate the imminent chat room dating horror stories of the mid-90s. Lisa and Wendy’s afterschool hijinks are surprisingly believable for teenage girls who get excited by the notion of adult romance without considering any of its actual requirements. Sherman’s script (with co-writer Karen Clark) has a strong ear for the way middle schoolers might talk, and while the fashion and slang may be hilariously dated, the story and its dialogue hold up well.

The styling, on the other hand, extends past the title character’s straight-leg white denim. Lisa looks and feels like a TV movie not just because of its subject matter, but also in how it’s conveyed. The finale is scored to the most ridiculously emotive electric guitar riffs I’ve ever heard try to express danger. It’s weirdly wonderful, but not scary in the least.

High Points

Jeffrey Tambor alert! He’s credited as “Wendy’s Dad,” and hey, I’ll take it

Staci Keanan worked quite a bit in the late ‘80s, and her naturalness in front of the camera shows quite well. While Lisa is something of an idiot in some of her choices, we never doubt Keanan’s performance

Low Points

With its late-night Babysitters' Club tone, it’s just hard to ever really feel the danger Lisa might face

Lessons Learned

Setting your mom up on a pseudo blind date with the mysterious man whom you’ve been having tame phone sex will inevitably have some negative consequences

Between the cinematic years of 1982 to 1994, all little brothers were born with a gene that predisposed them to being obnoxious

Stabbing the guy trying to kill you is a great idea, but standing in fear as he struggles to pull the knife out of his shoulder? Not the brightest

Rent/Bury/Buy

Lisa is sort of like predator propaganda overprotective parents might have enjoyed showing their tween daughters back in the day. While the film is well-made for its ilk, I doubt it translates clearly to a world now run by Facebook and dating websites. Instead, Lisa waits on Instant Watch for viewers looking for some medium brew ‘90s nostalgia. It’s not sleazy enough for a drunken night of trash-talking, nor is it so good to overcome its original target. The film was a slightly better-than-average teenager thriller in 1990. Today, it’s just sort of there.

The Power of Trees Compels You

When the director of The Exorcist makes a universally panned dud about a killer tree that’s only on Instant Watch for another day, you might as well cancel all my appointments. It was time to watch William Friedken’s The Guardian.

Quick Plot: A brief title card informs us that during Druidic times, people worshiped trees.

That’s that.

Cut to the present day, where a pair of parents are on their way out for the weekend. This is clearly quite convenient for the mysterious nanny who uses the break as the perfect chance to take her newborn charge into the woods and sacrifice him to a giant Sleepy Hollow-esque tree.

I’ll say it once: prospective nannies’ references should be checked more thoroughly than pretty much anything you’ve ever thought to check in your life, be that taxes, your bakery line number, or whether or not you remembered to put on deodorant before leaving the house.

Fast forward to a new happy couple played by Law & Order’s Carey Lowell and one of the minor characters in two of my favorite sports movies (Field of Dreams and The Cutting Edge, and yes, figure skating is a sport or would you like to try it yourself?), Dwier Brown. Phil and Kate, as they are called, are forced to hire a live-in babysitter when they decide to rent a modern house out of their means, since Kate has to return to work in order to help pay the rent. After a token montage necessary for any movie with job interviews, the couple decide on a young gym teacher in the making.

Except then she ends up dead.

Choice number 2, luckily, is a sexier Mary Poppins named Camilla. Before you can sing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Camilla is showing up in Phil’s sexy dreams and lecturing Kate about how breastfeeding will keep her baby pure. What she doesn’t say, at least not out loud, is that Baby Jake needs to save his purity so that he makes a better human sacrifice to Camilla’s tree boyfriend.

As much as the idea of a killer tree may SEEM the culprit for The Guardian’s sour reputation, it’s really more the lack of suspense that damns it into unfortunate territory. We know from the very first lullabye that Camilla wants to feed Jake to the woods, which wouldn’t be terrible if we didn’t ALSO know that we were in the hands of one of cinema’s all-time greats.

Truthfully, The Guardian isn’t nearly as laughable as one might expect when watching a cross between The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (before that was a thing) and Little Otik. The opening baby sacrifice is actually quite disturbing, and the whole cast is solid enough to sell most of the material with a straight face. We get coyotes eating nerds, trees decapitating middle-aged punks, and branches wrapping themselves around their victims like an anaconda on Owen Wilson. So in terms of ridiculous killing styles, The Guardian is kind of awesome.

It’s just also…kinda…eh…hmm. Muddled could be a good word. The shaky marriage between domestic Fatal Attraction-like thriller with the whole, you know, woman worshiping a killer tree just never meshes in a way that feels, dare I say it, organic. It’s obvious that there were script and production woes (I doubt we’ll get a proud Friedken commentary should The Guardian ever make it to Blu Ray) and while the pedigree behind the film makes it superior to a lot of rival horror films, it’s still an uncomfortable combination of too many hard to handle elements.

High Points 

Jenny Seagrove makes for a surprisingly believable sexy tree hugging nanny, something I assume is hard to because thus far, even Meryl Streep hasn't attempted that feat (and yes, that's a challenge) 

Maybe it's just a sign of the times, but I enjoyed the 'switch' of having the husband be the one accused of paranoid hysteria. From the 90s to now, most of these kinds of films always want to use the crutch of maternal instinct and the fact that it's more believable for the world to NOT believe a raging mother. Considering how easy it would have been to have Carey Lowell's character blend jealousy with fear, it's a refreshing gender swap.

Low Points

On one hand, the big thug massacre is big and gory and kind of kickass. On the other, I'm probably just saying that because it involved laughable 45 year old schoolyard bullies and death by dummy

Lessons Learned

If you don’t want anyone to know that you sustained a gigantic gash on your tummy, perhaps you should be safe and not wear a flimsy white blouse when the wound is still fresh

No matter how many babies you feed a superevil ancient tree, all it takes is one chainsaw to show it who’s boss

When reporting a series of supernatural events to a dubious police detective, you might want to leave out some of the less important and more unbelievable elements, like how the woman who tried to sacrifice your baby to a tree could also fly 

The Winning Line

“She has an accent...European I think, British maybe.”

Now I could understand someone mistaking a Belgian accent for French or Scottish for Irish, but…well…I guess Britain IS in Europe…

Look! It’s…

Candyman’s jerky professor Xander Berkely popping up in the film’s last reel to play a detective

Nostalgic ‘90s Alert!

“I love you, Roseanne Barr,” jokes Phil to his (not really) chubbily pregnant wife. Savvy Roseanne fans can easily date The Guardian by the fact that she still had a last name.

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Guardian is certainly an interesting watch, both for Friedken fans who can’t shake the curiosity of watching him tackle killer trees and horror nerds who, you know, just love when ANYONE tackles killer trees. It’s not a hidden gem or so-bad-it’s-wonderful campfest, but for a 1990 horror film with a bad reputation, it’s not boring to watch. Plus, you know...killer trees.