Hey yo, everyone. Bryan here, and here’s more completely random reviews of movies that I practically picked out of a hat. Basically the whole purpose of this column is to say “hey, remember This Movie?” and then assume that you don’t remember it, and spend several hundred words talking about it. That’s how we roll here, bitches.
Finally, we’re gonna be starting to look at some older movies. Well… kinda older. These are both from the 90s, and they’re both somewhat defining of their generation, but in completely different ways. One is a masterpiece, and the other is a lazy sack of crap. You can guess which is which.
And no, I still have not thought of a better title than “Working Title”. My lack of creativity knows no bounds.
Urban Legend (1998, directed by Jamie Blanks): 2/10
With a cover like that, how could it be bad?
A brief anecdote: while I was watching this salad-tossing waste of film, I stopped a couple of times out of sheer anger towards the movie. Needed a little break. So I stepped outside into my driveway for a quick breath of fresh air. The second time I did this, the moonlight illuminated what seemed to be an insect hovering near my head. I couldn’t see exactly what it was, and I swatted at it… only to make an unnerving discovery. Somehow, in violation of seemingly every law of physics, a spider had managed to build a horizontal web which stretched over the entire width of my driveway. I was covered in the sticky strands: on my hand, on my face, they were everywhere. Got that mental image? Good. Because that story is far more horrifying than absolutely anything that happens in Urban Legend, and the spider’s impossible web was way more plausible than anything the killer does in this pathetic movie.
In the wake of Scream’s success in the late 90s, several copycats were promptly greenlit. All of them were pretty fucking terrible, and Urban Legend is no exception. This film assumes that you’re stupid. I mean, really stupid. It goes past “contrived” and directly into the realm of “no, that couldn’t ever fucking happen, not ever, you retarded fucks”. If you could play this movie at a forensics examiners’ convention, it would be a huge success. Real-life CSI techs would have never seen a funnier comedy than this.
Okay, I don’t even wanna talk about it, but we gotta get to the plot eventually. STUPID FUCKING TEENAGERS DIE, THE END. No, sigh, it’s more complicated than that. We get a pre-credits sequence, in which a young woman is driving on an unlit backroad at night, and is forced to stop at a creepy gas station. Or, at least, what this movie considers a creepy gas station. Apparently, being staffed by a stuttering Brad Dourif is enough to count as terrifying. (In fact, this movie leans hard on that geek-show bullshit; over and over again, it expects us to be suspicious of people just because they look a little bit weird.) The idiot woman is eventually terrified enough to drive off… only to be decapitated by the person lurking in the back seat.
Yeah, I can totally see how you'd miss something like that.
Okay. Time out. How the fuck does that work? When did the killer sneak back there? How did they hide there undetected for so long? Especially since we are explicitly shown the woman reaching and getting something from the back seat, seriously, there’s no fucking way that this is physically possible. For that matter, can you really chop someone’s head off with a standard-issue hatchet from the hardware store in one swing? I realize that this was before the Iraqi beheading videos taught us all what it really looks like when someone gets their cranium hewn away from the torso. But still, the killer has no leverage whatsoever back there, and the headrest should have gotten in the way, and the movie seemed to forget that the goddamn car was still in motion when the driver died, and… sigh. I gotta keep the review moving. If I stop on every single point of ridiculousness in this essay, it would be thirty pages long.
Anyway, our focus shifts to our main character: Natalie (Alicia Witt, her crimson-haired gorgeousness being half the reason I bothered with this movie, whose talent goes entirely wasted here), a student at a very prestigious, very fictional Ivy League school. She hangs around with a gaggle of goddamn annoying douche bags played by Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, Michael Rosenbaum, and Tara Reid. Why yes, this is one of those miserable movies which populates its cast full of WB teen heartthrobs. I HATE SCREAM’S INFLUENCE ON SLASHER FLICKS, I HATE IT I HATE IT! Ahem. Back to action. A killer starts knocking off victims in various implausible ways, and it seems like the kills are based on various urban legends.
This poor lady desperately needs a new agent.
COINCEDENTALLY, this school’s most popular class just happens to be about urban legends! And the professor is played by Robert Englund, how bout that. (This is the point on A Pup Named Scooby Doo where Fred stands up and accuses Red Herring of being the culprit.) So yeah, a bunch of people get killed right in front of Natalie, but nobody believes her. The school apparently has one sassy fat black female cop (Loretta Devine) for its entire security force, and she’s pretty incompetent. “I saw someone murdered here!” “…shut up, stupid kid!” is the pattern which happens a lot. Apparently this is all kinda connected to a massacre which happened at this school years ago, which was all covered up. Um. No it wasn’t. MASS MURDERS DON’T GET COVERED UP. EVER. NOT IN AMERICA. THAT SHIT DOESN’T HAPPEN. If someone slaughters an entire dorm full of students, everyone will remember that story forever.
But that doesn’t stop the smarmy old college dean (John Neville, what the fuck are you doing in this?) from trying to keep things under wraps, which leads to one of the stupidest sequences I’ve ever seen in my life. Natalie’s roommate, played by Danielle Harris, is a moody goth bitch who is constantly fucking random dudes in their dormroom. (The one time I laughed during this movie was when we randomly see Danielle fucking a dude while a White Zombie song is blaring in the background, which is cute meta-hindsight gag.) But THIS time, she meets someone on a goth web chat (like many a 90s thriller, this film has no fucking clue how the internet really works and is just exploiting it as a cheap gimmick) who turns out to be the killer. Natalie walks in on the killer killing the roommate, but thinks they’re just fucking, so she ignores the muffled groaning and goes to bed. After she wakes up and finds the body, the death is ruled a suicide. BULLSHIT. FUCKING BULLSHIT. FORENSIC PATHOLOGY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, YOU FUCKING BULLSHIT MOVIE.
Even these guys are calling bullshit on you, Urban Legend.
I’m gonna stop trying to describe the plot, it’s an exercise in futility. So let’s just pick apart a few details. Firstly, the killer. Oh god. Let’s just say that, once we learn the killer’s identity, it turns out that this person is not exactly an intimidating physical specimen. In fact, they’re pretty puny. Which makes the offensively contrived nature of the kills even worse in hindsight. And this killer’s disguise: a big parka with a hood. Um. What? How does that cover up their face?! Over and over again, we’re looking directly at this person with only the hood on their coat covering their head, and the movie acts like this somehow means that it’s completely impossible to see any part of their face. BULLSHIT FUCKING BULL- okay I gotta stop doing that. So let’s note that the movie also makes sure that plenty of people implausibly have identical coats in order to make them suspects, and move on.
This is taking too long. Let me quickly sum up a bunch of other stupidity: there’s an abusive over reliance on fake-out jump scares, where someone’s friend sneaks up behind them and grabs their shoulder. The generic Scary Orchestra Music has never been overused worse than it was here. The protagonist has a Dark Backstory which helped cause the killings, but it’s the lamest goddamn dark backstory imaginable. The movie also shares that bizarre late-90s-slasher prejudice against reporters, claiming that all journalists are just heartless hacks who coldly exploit real-life suffering for their own personal glory. And of course, the movie has a Third Act Thunderstorm, because unless the weather magically took out all the phones the killer’s plan wouldn’t have worked at all.
People in 1998 would've burned you at the stake for using one of these futuristic doohickies.
Wait a goddamn minute. Phones. Cell phones! Why doesn’t anyone in this movie have a cell phone? This was 1998. Practically every college student had a cell phone in 1998. I was a college student in 1998, and I had a cell phone in my pocket when I watched this fucking movie in the theater! BULLSHIT FUCKING BULLSHIT FUCKING BULLSHIT FUCKING BULLSHIT FUCKING okay i‘m done.
Clerks. (1994, directed by Kevin Smith)” 10/10
Pictured: not supposed to be here today. Also, he smells like shoe polish.
The story about how this movie was made is pretty fascinating, and has long since become Hollywood legend. Kevin Smith, a film school dropout with no experience and no funding, managed to somehow make a movie which pretty much gave him a permanent career as a theatrical motion picture director. So much of the movie’s is based around the simple rule of The Show Must Go On. We don’t have any money: borrow some from our parents, some from an insurance settlement, and bet the rest on maxed-out credit cards. We don’t know enough actors: just cast the same friends in multiple parts. We don’t have a set: use the convenience store where Smith works his day job. The store is fucking tiny, and doesn’t have enough room for standard blocking: have practically the entire film be people just standing in one place and talking. We can’t shoot when the store’s open during the day, and don’t have proper lighting to make it look right at night: just put in a subplot about the security shutters being stuck, so we can’t see the windows. There’s no money for traditional postproduction color correction: shoot the whole thing in black and white. Over and over again, Smith & Co. proved that they needed to make this movie, that they would not take no for an answer, and would overcome any obstacle along the way. But to me, the most amazing thing about it is that unlike most other no-budget successes like El Mariachi, the movie itself is just as great as the story of its making.
Just for any moon men who’ve recently arrived on Earth, I’ll go ahead and summarize the plot. Our tale follows a passive, insecure twentysomething named Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran). On his day off, he’s called in and forced to come to work anyway at the bane of his existence, the QuikStop convenience store. This is one of those little general markets which mystifies me as to how it stays in business: it’s not attached to a gas station or other typical draw, it’s not in a good location on a barren street in the middle of the city-sprawl Jersey, the parking lot is so tiny that it doesn’t even deserve to be defined as such. Dante is forced to deal with an endless barrage of freaks and morons as customers, and the strangers are hardly the worst part of his day. His alleged best friend Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) who runs the video store next door is a thorough asshole, an obnoxious piece of shit who amuses himself by tormenting everyone around him in an inexplicably cruel fashion. Meanwhile, Dante’s also coming apart at the seams trying to deal with women who are more sexually experienced than he is, including his current girlfriend Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti) and the ex he still pines for, Caitlin Bree (Lisa Spoonhauer). And oh yeah, there’s also some talkative little kid in a wool cap and a taciturn fat guy in a trenchcoat who hang out on the sidewalk all day, but they probably never become important so I won‘t bother naming them.
I wonder whatever became of those guys.
I actually had to strain a bit in describing the plot, because the film certainly doesn’t have a traditional plot arc. The movie is almost entirely spent just watching Dante suffer in misery as the entire world conspires to fuck him up the ass. This could have easily turned into something which is tough to watch, where you get pissed off that this guy never catches even the tiniest break; as much as I love Clerks: The Animated Series, it sometimes goes overboard in that department. As played by O’Halloran, Dante is essentially a good guy, very nice and likable and relatively intelligent; his only problem is that he’s a complete doormat who lets the entire universe walk all over him at will. (So let’s be thankful they changed the ending, which I’ll come back to.) Meanwhile, Anderson pulls off a fuckin’ miracle with Randal: I absolutely should have despised this character. He should have come off like, oh, the pink-wearing villain Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: someone SO despicable, so loathsome, so utterly devoid of any positive qualities whatsoever, yet infuriatingin their smugness and arrogance and condescension towards the rest of the world. Characters like are the cheapest of heels, and make me wish it’s possible to physically reach into the screen and strangle a fictional person. But Anderson’s acting somehow dodges that trap. He comes off as so dopey and damaged that he genuinely doesn’t understand what a complete douche he is, someone who kinda-sorta means well but is so impulsive and dumb that everything he touches manages to spontaneously combust.
The supporting actors… well, I did say that Smith didn’t know any real ones, right? Ghigliotti is the only one who gets more than a couple of scenes, and I dunno, something just didn’t sit right. And some of the other cameos are downright embarrassing: check out the chick who speaks the Egg Man monologue, and marvel at how she trips over her own dialogue when she gets to the punchline. Also, marvel at the fact that they didn’t bother to do another take to cover that blown line; they really had no money. But the amateurish performances somehow manage to combine to make the movie better. Ditto with the cinematography: nowadays, we know that the awesomely static framing and the flat lighting and the general off-kilter feeling is because Smith was a fucking incompetent photographer and never had any idea what the hell he was doing. But even in hindsight, this movie’s visual ugliness doesn’t feel like a negative, in fact quite the opposite. It’s about a sad slackers leading a crummy life in a soul-destroying job; and the grainy, poorly lit, horribly composed images are unbelievably perfect for telling this story.
Prettier pictures do not guarantee a better movie.
It all synergizes together into a movie which I love, love, love with all my heart. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m personally a lot like Dante, so I can easily imagine all this shit happening to me. I’ve had shitty jobs just like that, having to deal with every backward-ass fucking customer on the planet, while sociopathic coworkers and lying-sacks-of-shit employers seem to be actively trying to make my day as hellish as humanly possible. You try to survive this life by pretending you’re smarter and better than all of these dicks, while drugging yourself with a steady diet of movies and junk food. So when I first saw this, about fifteen years ago, it felt like an unbelievable revelation. They just didn’t make movies like this, not back then; the early 90s were one of the worst eras in film history when it came to Hollywood’s obsession with movies which were about people who were nothing like us, leading glamorous lives of danger and adventure. I can enjoy a good popcorn flick as much as anyone, but sometimes I want something personal and deeply-felt, dammit.
Clerks. certainly qualifies on both the personality and the depth. It’s basically Kevin Smith’s thinly-veiled autobiography, probably much more so than he intended. I don’t think he deliberately meant to say “this is my fucking life, I’ve accomplished nothing and have little joy. I wanna stop being a damn clerk and make movies. PLEASE GOD let that happen.” Well, thankfully, the movie managed to get accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, and Harvey Weinstein happened to see it, and the rest is history. Well, after Miramax did a little bit of tinkering, anyway. The movie had an incomplete soundtrack, and the studio infamously spent much more money just securing the rights to various background music than Smith spent making the actual movie. Kevin’s original budget was around $26,000, but Miramax threw another two hundred grand at the essentially completed film just in order to clean it up a little. Who knows exactly what the original final print looked and sounded like. But we must be very thankful for one absolutely mandatory bit of meddling: the original version ended with Dante being shot dead by a robber. Weinstein wisely made them cut off that bit, which tremendously improves the story arc of the entire movie. Who wants to see a sad ending when you’re not even supposed to be here today?
We've all had days like this.
Postscript: And oh yeah, the DVD version I watched here most recently had a weird addition. It added in a new animated scene, illustrating exactly what happened inside the funeral home. Why? Smith seems oddly obsessed with recreating that scene, considering he’s done it at least twice, he also did a comic book adaptation which was basically identical to the cartoon here. It adds absolutely nothing to the movie, and in fact spoils one of the best gags when our characters leave. And having Joey Lauren Adams’s character from Chasing Amy show up just makes it even weirder; yeah, I know that it’s all the Askewniverse and all these people are connected, but it’s still jarring to hear a recognizable celebrity voice in what was otherwise a collection of (at the time) complete nobodies. It’s a pointless scene, one so superfluous that I have no idea why it was ever made.
Basically it looked like that.
Ta-ta for now, everyone. (Does anyone use the word “ta-ta” as meaning “goodbye” anymore, or has it completely become a synonym for “female mammary gland”?) See you back here next week with more random shit.