I’m pretty sure that I had this terrifying but kind of bitchin’ dream because last night I watched the Dennis Quaid direct-to-DVD horror/thriller Horsemen.

Though the movie is decidedly lame with lots of stupid scenes that borrow heavily from good movies (spoiler alert, Ziyi Zhang does not make a very good Hannibal Lecter), it was notable for how horrifyingly gruesome it was.  Honestly, I can’t understand why the movie never made it to theatres because I thought people loved that shit.  I’m not usually squeamish (Hostel?  Oh please.  Ho hum) but this was seriously stomach churning.

What Horsemen does is take one somewhat obscure and really icky subculture, suspension, wrestle it from the hands of people for whom body piercing is not “extreme” enough and probably didn’t get enough attention as teenagers (including Criss Angel) and turn it into some really creepy scary gory death scenes.  Like, really gross.  Apparently nightmare-inducing gross.  Really, these scenes are the only notable thing about the movie.  The dialogue is weak, the story is predictable apart from the twist which is somewhat interesting but does not at all make up for the rest of the movie that is a gaping [edit: there is supposed to be another word here but I can't remember what it was supposed to be...I am not a very good proofreader] occasionally punctuated by vomit.

But wasn’t my dream so fucked up?!

Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a 12 year old boy living in what seems to be the projects of a cold and dreary Swedish town (are there Swedish towns that are not like this?).  For some reason, despite his small stature and oh-so-flattering white blonde Dutch boy hair, he is bullied by the other boys in his class and, because he has no father figure in his life, can’t bring himself to stand up to them.  One cold and dreary evening in the courtyard of his horribly depressing apartment complex, he meets the beautiful but strange Eli (Lena Leandersson) and they form a tenative friendship.

Meanwhile, their sleepy (and cold and dreary) town is falling victim to a rash of inexplicable murders in which the victims are suspended upside down and their blood drained.  Oskar is morbidly fascinated by this turn of events – until he realizes that Eli is causing them because she is, in fact, a vampire.

The unfortunate thing about this movie seems to be that there are two films here that appeal to different sensibilities.  First, the element of two innocent children who are on the fringes of society developing a bond of trust and friendship and experiencing tenative intimacy.  The second is a gruesome vampire story with attack scenes that verge on cartoonish in their use of CGI and buckets of blood.  Though the movie is very pretty, it’s hard to not be taken out of the story and forget your admiration for the velvety cool colors and the wide-eyed beauty of the littlest vampire when someone is being attacked by computer generated cats.  I think less ambition in terms of the violence could have served the film well, though overall it was very well done and genuinely creepy.

It wasn’t flawless and it didn’t reinvent the genre, but The Strangers was solidly scary with above average art direction and surprisingly beautiful cinematography.  As the debut feature for writer/director Bryan Bertino (who, by the way, is decidedly sexy himself) it’s really impressive. 

One of the awesome things that Bertino does is nearly make you forget you’re about to see a horror movie for the first 20-25 minutes.  Instead, Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are returning to the family summer home after a wedding at which they had somewhat of a falling out.  But in the throes of their conflict, they are interrupted by a loud knock.  The movie then proceeds to be wholly creepy, with 3 masked strangers (ooh!  like the title!) appearing at the house to stalk, scare and torture the couple for the next hour. This hour includes at least 3 really good, well-placed shock moments that made me literally jump out of my seat and either gasp or yell.  And I definitely wasn’t the only one in the theatre that was freaked out.

Of course, the movie did suffer from some stereotypical horror movie pitfalls (e.g., me wanting to scream “TURN AROUND!!” or “WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING INTO THE GARAGE??!??”), a few of which were pretty distracting and unrealistic, even in light of the crisis Kristen and James were facing.  But between the OMG moments and the dark, neutral, contrastingly pretty cinematography (and pretty Liv Tyler and her disgustingly pretty hair), I had a really good time at The Strangers and hope that Bryan “sexy” Bertino gets to direct something else.

A footnote: supposedly the movie was based on “true events,” and all internet sources (OK, just Wikipedia) point to the Keddie Cabin murders, but this could have just been added by someone who wanted publicity for their Keddie Cabin documentary.  I dunno, but that’s a scary story too, so check out the site if you’re morbid like me.

Name a Woody Allen crime/punishment/guilt/searching for God thriller that would barely be worth $6.50 somewhere in Iowa, much less $14 at the Arclight in Hollywood:
Cassandra’s Dream

Which is more fun to watch, Colin Farrell as the bright spot in Cassandra’s Dream or Colin Farrell fucking a model on that sex tape?
Trick question! They are both fun to watch in their own way.

Name a woman who is hot and great to see starring in a Woody Allen movie because she’s very womanly (see: a plenty, curves) but still portrayed as “the hot girl” but is not really much of an actress:
Hayley Atwell (you get partial credit for Scarlett Johansson, but the ‘great to see starring in a Woody Allen movie’ part of the question would be wrong wrong wrong.)

Who likes the poster anyway and is going to keep going to see Woody Allen movies as long as they don’t star ScarJo or someone else that I find patently offensive because she loves Annie Hall and Manhattan more than every other movie combined?
It’s me. The sad answer for that one is ME.

In Hard Candy, this photographer, Jeff (hot hot in glasses Patrick Wilson) chats up a 14 year old girl Hayley (everyone’s favorite impregnanted precocious teen, Ellen Page at her pixiest) online. They meet for coffee, she convinces him to take her back to his house where she proceeds to drug and fuck with him for the majority of the movie. She does some seriously depraved shit.

It’s really well directed, really well acted and the definition of provocative. Basically Hayley is convinced that Jeff is a molester and deserves everything she does to him so I kind of sat there (as I know I was supposed to) the whole time thinking “Jesus, does *anyone* deserve this kind of shit?” But it’s the moments of tension and the bright and blurry production design that really stood out to me. When Hayley gives Jeff a semblance of a chance to escape, his panic is so palpable, not only because of Patrick Wilson (can I reiterate how hot he is even as a child molester? Hot!) but also because of the way the camera pans frantically around his ultramodern neatly decorated house with red and yellow contrastingly saturated walls and the hot and cool color filters. I also think it’s a mark of a well-directed movie when you can feel that kind of tension without the benefit of heavyhanded scoring. I totally hate overscoring, but there really isn’t much to be found here, so that’s just great!

The Hayley character is a little over the top in her sadism, but Page makes it work because the contrast between how she looks and how she acts. Her cutesy pixie hair and freckles somehow temper the fact that she sprays bleach in Jeff’s mouth and keeps you from condemning her…Wilson really looks his part, too. He is attractive (Hayley points out that he “doesn’t look like someone who has to meet girls online”) but a little balding and his insecurity shows in how he carries himself, even before he gets tied to a chair by a 14 year old girl. Sandra Oh also has a brief cameo as a suspicious neighbor and even she seems right for her part – buttoned up with pearls as the mom of a Girl Scout who solicits Hayley as a babysitter.

So yeah, Hard Candy is really well done, pretty fucked up and generally [insert word that means entertaining but doesn't imply that I like watching people be tortured].

Will Smith is ripped.

Dogs are awesome.

Chicks suck at surviving the apocalypse. 

Seriously, though.  I saw this about a million years ago. So: Do you like the Coen brothers?  If yes, you’ll like it.  Just go, already.  It’s probably been spoiled for you enough.

WRONG.

I only watched the first 30 minutes or so, but what I gathered was that both Clive and Jen are in unhappy marriages and both have daughters.  They meet on a train (title!), try to begin an elicit affair but on their first night together in a seedy Chicago motel, they like get mugged and it’s very violent and then they start getting blackmailed by the guy that robbed them.  Clive Owen’s daughter is dying of Type I Diabetes (the bad one!) and Jennifer Aniston’s husband is total dick (I guess?).  I turned it off after this.  Also, Clive Owen is an advertising executive, because god forbid we have a movie in which the male protagonist has a job that isn’t ad executive or attorney.  Whatever.

Pay for another movie but get there early and watch the first 90 seconds of this one.  There’s a hot scene between Eva Mendes & Joaquin Phoenix.  (Don’t worry, Eva Mendes doesn’t really talk during this part).

Then go see some other, better movie (Michael Clayton, maybe).

Then get this on DVD in 3 months and watch it where you can make snarky comments without getting dirty looks from people who paid $11 to see this ho-hum crime thriller.  And you can watch the first 90 seconds a few times, you know, if you need to…

So, it was good and George Clooney does stare at the camera for minutes at a time and I did enjoy it.  Score.

It’s hard to draw comparisons between this movie and others.  It definitely has elements of little-guy-lawsuit-against-evil-corporation movies like A Civil Action or The Rainmaker but it’s a lot more than that too.  The title would suggest it’s a character study, which it kind of is, too.

I don’t know, I really don’t want to give too much of it away since I really liked it going in with zero prior knowledge.

George Clooney is so hot.  I know, that’s like the revelation of the century, but come on.  It needs to be said.

He’s a lawyer with a kid and gambling problem who works at a huge law firm that’s defending some chemical company that Tilda Swinton works for.  There’s like intrigue and scandal and, I just realized, no real love story.  Interesting.  It’s good. 

Christ is George Clooney hot.