Showing posts with label Psycho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psycho. Show all posts

Review: Occupant (2011)

Occupant (2011)
Director: Henry Miller
Writer: Jonathan Brett
Stars: Van Hansis. Cody Horn, Thorsten Kaye



Occupant begins with the death of an old woman in her apartment. She shakes around, gasps, coughs, and finally kicks the bucket.  We have our title and credits on display and the movie begins to chug along.  The scene isn’t particularly frightening, in fact, it's pretty goofy. 

The setup goes as such; the old woman’s grandson, Danny, arrives to confirm the death of his long estranged grandmother.  When, at her apartment, he discovers that it's rent controlled on the lease and obscenely cheap, considering it has 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, living room, dinning room, and a kitchen.  Or, we’re told that’s how big it is; we hardly see more than 4 rooms the whole time.  

The, at first, apprehensive and grumpy Danny is told that if he can stay in the apartment for 12 days without leaving he becomes the lease holder in the eyes of the law and it remains rent controlled.  Once he finds out… he still doesn’t seem to really give a damn.  Until the aggressively friendly doorman and lawyer convince him he should stay… hell they even make arrangements for him, deliver his food, and help him avoid being kicked out.  The entire plot relies on a New York doorman and a New York lawyer selflessly trying to get a 20 something guy a nice apartment on the cheap.  Next time I go house hunting, I want that kind of representation.  Yet this guy kind of treats them like shit anyways.  He’s such a passive character he even starts painting the apartment and stops after like 3 minutes, leaving a few red blotches for the whole movie, which makes it just that much more a chore to get through.

- Sir anything you need, I will get you.
- Hey f*ck off man, don’t be pressuring me into the best situation ever.


Danny’s also got himself a sexy, blonde, web stalker, she first appears when Danny’s on the way to his grandma.  She videotapes him and follows him around a bit before they flirt.  She comes back again, because we need a female presence in the movie, saying she tricked the doorman into letting her in. It’s not creepy because A. She’s hot.  B. She has whiskey.  They hang out, have dinner, have sex, and then she films herself going through all his stuff, for her “stalk blog.” She treats it like an episode of “MTV Room Raiders” but… it’s not his stuff… it’s his dead grandmother’s…ok.
           
- Hey how’d you know where I lived?
We only met once, when you told me you run a “stalk blog.”
- Don’t worry about that, I’m pretty.
I’m just here to judge you based on this dead lady's stuff.


Occupant sets up a lot of potential scares and even more possible resolutions as Danny slowly goes unhinged.  Is the building owner trying to scare him away?  Is the doorman preparing to kill him?  Is it all a plot by stalker-cam girl? Is there a monster in the closet?  Is the apartment haunted? However, what the movie fails to see is setting up all these scary possibilities doesn’t actually make it scary.  Especially when the protagonist has no desire to actually do anything.  It would be scarier if something started to actually happen. Instead, we have a repeat of the stalker girl set up.  Someone comes to the door, we build to a scare, and we cut away to the next day. 

Sure, there are a few good moments. A dark figure standing in the background here or there is actually pretty spooky. Watching a totally unhinged Danny build death traps near the end is pretty fun, because he is actually doing something proactive.  The atmosphere built in the apartment is decent, and the film is shot better than it has any right to be.  There’s just barely enough good to make you sit through it thinking there will be a decent pay off.  But… no… they even tell you the ending right as Danny starts to hit on his stalker girl.  Sadly. It turns out Danny was just crazy!

I don’t know why I even bothered to think otherwise.

After Danny’s suicide by a door filled with nails… yeah that happened and it was hilarious and awful. We watch a new family move into the apartment.  We can only assume that it’s no longer rent controlled.  A little kid finds stalker girl's camera (which was left there because?) and watches the footage and what he sees is terrifying.  No, it’s not the sex tape they made. Just footage of Danny killing and hiding the girl’s dead body!  Then the door buzzer rings and the kid looks at the door in fear.  We close the movie. 

The movie leaves so many unanswered questions, sets up so many cool little things, and then fails to deliver on any of it.  Outside of a few cool shots and the doorman’s funny facial hair there is nothing redeeming about this movie.  Just skip it.

Hello, I’m your friendly doorman… and this is my mustache. 


- Will Woolery

Review: Psycho Beach Party (2000)

Psycho Beach Party (2000)
Director: Robert Lee King
Writer: Charles Busch
Starring: Lauren Ambrose, Nicholas Brendan, Charles Busch, Matt Keeslar, Thomas Gibson, Amy Adams, Kimberley Davies



Both a loving tribute and merciless send-up of exploitation cinema, Psycho Beach Party gathers the best tropes from three decades of B-movies and tosses them into a joyful stew. Based on the long-running play written by Charles Busch, the film's influences are written right in the title: the Frankie and Annette teen romps of the 1950s and 60s mashed up with the Hitchcockian psychodramas and slasher films of the 60s and 70s. As a capper, Psycho Beach Party then takes the sexual subtext of all those genres and turns it into text, both with single-entendre sex puns and even less subtle kink. More playful than graphic, the film revels in young sexuality in ways that feel more like Beach Blanket Bingo than Halloween, yet still treats the audience to the image of Marvel Anne (Amy Adams) lecturing Starcat (Nicholas Brendon) on responsibility while covering her naked pudenda with nothing but her hands.

Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose) is an innocent teen who, unlike every other teen, goes to the drive-in to watch the movie and is both fascinated and repulsed by all the necking going on in the surrounding cars. But Chicklet has a dark secret. Whenever she sees a circle, another personality takes over and she becomes the aggressive dominatrix, Ann Bowman (gasp!). Foul mouthed, lewd and sophisticated, Ann Bowman proclaims her desires and hatreds with operatic flourish: "Who do I have to fuck to get a hot dog in this place?"



Later, on Malibu beach, Chicklet meets a cadre of surfers led by The Great Kanaka (Thomas Gibson). She's immediately attracted by college dropout and first year psych student, Starcat and begs the boys to teach her to surf. Starcat insists that girls can't surf, citing first year Freudian nonsense about penis envy and the male hunting instinct. When Chicklet takes her case directly to Kanaka, Ann Bowman steps in, and not only gets Chicklet into the surf, but makes Kanaka her sex slave.

Meanwhile, a killer is stalking and murdering the teens one by one and police captain Monica Stark (Charles Busch) realizes that Chicklet is at the center of the mystery. Could Ann Bowman be responsible?

If it all sounds ridiculous, it's because it's meant to. The period movies Psycho Beach Party lampoons were no less so. Using naive and flat out wrong ideas about insanity, 60s psychodramas told thinly veiled cautionary tales about female hysteria and sexual repression. "Schizophrenia" (later called multiple personality disorder or dissociative disorder) was a go-to diagnosis for crazy people in the movies because it was lurid and strange. Norman Bates being the most famous example.


Psycho Beach Party plays on the plot details of those earlier works beat for beat, only it has the sense to turn it into a funny. In essence, Psycho Beach Party is the cinematic equivalent of watching a dozen B-movies all at once and riffing them with your giggling friends. The brilliance of Psycho Beach Party is that you never have to have seen an Annette Funicello movie to get the joke, because like all great satires, Psycho Beach Party is both a parody of the genre and a beautiful example of the genre.


There's also a luau dance battle. Luau. Dance. Battle.

- Katherine Turner