And that's it for Mr. Verhoeven. Verhoeven's a pretty off-an-on director; sometimes he fails and sometimes he knocks it out of the park. Still, I'll always be excited to see any new work he creates. The man has his own style and point of view. And, dammit, I like sex and violence.
Best Dutch film: Turks Fruit. Best American film: Robocop.
Worst Dutch film: Wat Zien Ik. Worst American film: Showgirls.
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1997 - Starship Troopers - A great sci-fi flick with non-stop action. I know Verhoeven intended this as a parody of fascism, but the popcorn spectacle of the film obscures most of this (other than the obvious FedNet spots). It's certainly more fun, anyway, to watch the movie cheering for Rico and company, rather than lamenting the young people's decision to voluntarily step into the state's meat grinder.
2000 - Hollow Man - Perfect invisible special effects grafted to a mediocre story. The basis of the idea is solid: when you know you cannot be seen, your morality can turn invisible as well. It worked best in the original Invisible Man movie. Here, it only leads to a slasher movie-style ending in which a group of people are picked off one by one by a monster. I wish Verhoeven had made Fade by Cormier instead.
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1992 - Basic Instinct - Verhoeven channels Hitchcock through his own, particular filter of violence and wild sex. As in Flesh + Blood, Verhoeven presents us with characters who are flawed and gray-shaded. Sharon Stone does a damned fine job as Catherine and appears to lose herself in the roll. The thrice-repeated jumps at the end, where Catherine looks as though she's going to stab Nick, threatened to take the film into bad horror movie territory. For the most part, a well-constructed and satisfying movie.
1995 - Showgirls - Very nearly, but not quite, in the "so bad it's good" category. Chop out 30 minutes of the movie so that it's an easy-to-digest 90 minutes long and this would be gold on the midnight movie circuit. Despite it's Razzie-winning reputation, I had fun with this film. I enjoyed the campiness, the bright colors, the bizarre lines ("At least people aren't cumming on you anymore."), the cat fighting and the strange fascination with fingernails and potato chips. Hell, even the 5.1 mix sounded great for songs.
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1987 - Robocop - Best revamp of Frankenstein since 1931? Like Verhoeven's second Dutch movie, his second Hollywood movie explodes with intensity. Fittingly, the sexual intensity of the European movie has been replaced with intense violence in the American film. Humanity, greed, privatization, technology-gone-wild: Robocop, like any great sci-fi movie, covers a lot serious ground behind a whiz-bang shell.
1990 - Total Recall - To this day, the best Mars movie out there. As well as being an excellent Schwarteneggar action flick and flirting with some interesting ideas about identity, the texture of this film is great. A giant tracer pulled out of a nose, a tri-breasted woman, annoying robot cabbies, Mars Today,... all are details that add to the experience. As I mentioned above, it's too bad scenes that take place before Quaid's visit to Recall destroy the potential ambiguity in the story. Interesting, for Matrix fans, that Quaid is offered and refuses "the red pill" so that he can stay in the dream.
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1985 - Flesh + Blood - An un-Hollywood Middle Ages, filled with grime, violence and plague. A chopped up, plague-infested dog as a weapon… not something you see every day. I liked the moral ambiguity of everyone in the movie; there wasn't really a set of "good guys" and "bad guys." Even the almost-obvious pure "good guy" Steven kills women and children with the aforementioned plague dog. However, Verhoeven's shooting of the battle scenes didn't energize me. Those could've been done better, I think.
1985 - The Hitchhiker: "Last Scene" - An above-average episode of a horror anthology series. This is the closest to the horror genre Verhoeven's ever gotten, and he didn't do a bad job. Surreal and well-constructed, with a nicely spooky "psycho-in-a-mask-making-threatening-phone calls" character.
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1980 - Spetters - In a way, this is nouveau-Soldaat van Oranje, with modern life in Holland replacing WWII. Again, we follow a group of men (and women this time) whose experiences in life (rather than the war) separate them onto wildly different tracks. Standing up to the old man, buying a business instead of hopelessly racing bikes, and stopping whoring yourself out are all ways to grow up in this film. Mature, I suppose, but the bike racing and whoring were much more fun to watch.
1983 - De Vierde Man [The Fourth Man] - A sudden change in Verhoeven's style. Suddenly, he's talking about adults and using loads symbolic imagery. The film was a bit ham-handed with the symbolism; I don't need to be reminded with a flashback that the key Mary carried in the dream is the same as the one on Gerard's keychain. Still, it was fun to put the pieces together. I wish the satisfying open-ended "is he nuts or was it real" ending was used in Verhoeven's future Total Recall.
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1977 - Soldaat van Oranje [Soldier of Orange] - Interesting to see WWII from the Dutch perspective. Despite its length and subject matter, the movie never reaches epic status. Similarly, it seems, the Netherlands's role in the war was the same. The film was also unique in that, though it follows a group of men like many war movies, all of the men trace very different paths through the war and none of them are ever shown in traditional, front-line combat. As far as Verhoeven's historical films go, this is an improvement over Keetje.
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1975 - Keetje Tippel [Katie Tippel] - Sort of a more elaborate, period version of Wat Zien Ik. Both follow strong women living in Amsterdam as they navigate through and battle with a cruel culture. In other words, this is a step back for Verhoeven from the level of Turks Fruit. Keetje doesn't grow at all as a person; she just lucks her way from the (literal) gutter into the upper class. As such, I don't think the film has much of a point, other than the zinger at the end: "What you saw was all true!"
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1971 - Wat Zien Ik [Business is Business] - Fairly pointless character piece concerning a prostitute in Amsterdam. Maybe it's because this was his first big film, but Verhoeven seems like he's holding back. The number of amusing fetishes he squeezed into the film is notable, however. Due to cultural differences, I can't help but feel like I missed a lot of the humor.
1973 - Turks Fruit [Turkish Delight] - From the first scenes of fantasized violence, to Erik's first scatological line in the movie, I immediately knew Verhoeven wasn't going to hold back this time. This was exactly what this whirlwind, nothing-withheld love story needed; we can really see why Erik loved Olga so damned much. I was also impressed with Hauer's subtle character work. In the hands of anyone else, this probably would've been degraded into cheap melodrama (man finds love of his life, loses her, and she dies from a brain tumor), but Verhoeven makes it work on an entirely higher level.
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Santa Claus was generous this year, so I'm ready start my Verhoeven Chronocinethon. What this means is that I'm gonna be watching all of Paul Verhoeven's films in chronological order. As I go through them, I'll post mini-reviews here. It's a couple months of fun for me, anyway.
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And, that's all she wrote! Carpenter's one of my all-time favorite directors; he's got a sensibility in his movies that no one else has and -- to me -- it's addictive as hell. I zoomed through these 20 films a lot quicker than I expected. Every day, I looked forward to two more Carpenter meals to scarf down. I'm sad to be finished.
Since last year, I've been keeping a ratings log of every movie I watch. Carpenter didn't do too badly. I gave high ratings to 13 of his films. Of the 7 I didn't like so much, 3 were TV movies and 1 was a college film. Essentially, there were only 3 feature films I didn't care for. Not a bad record at all. Even more telling: out of 198 movies on my list so far, I've only rated 4 movies a perfect 10. Carpenter has 2 of those.
What is my hope for the future of John Carpenter movies? Personally, I'd love another movie with the flavor of Prince of Darkness. What I'd really like to see, however, is a straight-up Western. He's always wanted to do one of those and I'd like to see what kind of a Western he'd come up with. It'd be interesting, to be sure.
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1997 - Vampires - Jack Crow is probably one of the most unlikable movie heroes ever... and I wouldn't have it any other way. A Western-flavored vampire movie with a healthy-heaping of ass-kicking and a new twist on the vampire myth I hadn't seen before. I hope this is the kind of movie that is quintessential of the modern Carpenter era (which I peg as starting with Memoirs after his 4-year break). The ending -- in which Jack promises to kill Tony and his girl, but gives them a head start -- is far removed from his earlier apocalyptic endings and more inline with the hopeful finishes to his modern movies.
2001 - Ghosts of Mars - Shockingly bad. I can barely believe this a Carpenter movie. It has the same basic set-up as Assault on Precinct 13, but does almost everything wrong in comparison to its predecessor. There ain't enough space to go over everything that didn't work, and it ain't something I'm keen to go about listing, anyway. I felt depressed enough as the credits rolled for this, knowing this was the public's latest taste of Carpenter's work.
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1995 - Village of the Damned - I think these types of stories worked better in the Cold War era and are best left there. Other than the doctor's speech to the children about emotion -- which made me wince – I don't think this is a bad horror movie. But, it's not a good one, either. Perhaps Carpenter and Universal were hoping to capture that Thing remake magic, but it wasn't even close.
1996 - Escape From L.A. - A near-clone of the first film. Compared to NY, LA is put together better, has more exciting action sequences, and an even scarier dystopia. On the other hand, the humor is forced, a basketball contest is laughable compared to a death match, and the characters are less memorable. Also, very strangely, this film has one of Carpenter's most optimistic endings ever. Overall, I'm surprised to find I like this one better than I remembered, though I'd rank it about equal to the first film in the end.
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1993 - Body Bags - Horror vets like Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, Roger Corman and David Naughton, 60s model Twiggy, Luke Skywalker, and Sheena Easton are all mixed up in one of those all-too-rare Creepshow-style horror anthology movies. Nice job on the casting!
"The Morgue" - Carpenter hosts these wraparound segments himself. He's such a goofball in this part of the movie, you can't help but crack a grin. The character strikes me as strange, however. I don't think of Carpenter as a blood-and-guts moviemaker and his Coroner here plays against that impression.
"The Gas Station" - "Do I still have it in me?" is the question Carpenter must have asked himself -- 15 years after Halloween -- before filming this segment. He even rips himself off at one point using the "killer gets up in the blurred background as the heroine rests in the foreground" trick. Carpenter does play with some new (for him) camera tricks and I dig the cold, blue lighting of the gas station. A decent morsel of slasherness.
"Hair" - The weakest of the three stories. At the end, when Stacy Keach looks directly at the camera -- twice -- I couldn't tell if that was his way of acting like his brain had been eating by hair-aliens, or if it was an intentional wink-wink to the audience, acknowledging that this segment was meant to be taken lightly. If the latter, Carpenter didn't do a very good job of making the previous stuff in this segment wink-wink funny.
"Eye" (Directed by Tobe Hooper) - Ostensively, this has the strongest story of the three, yet it drags. Probably this is because, only two years prior, the definitive "serial killer body part transplant takes over a person" movie came out in the form of Body Parts. The idea ain't exactly original, so we're mostly left waiting for the good stuff to start happening. The good stuff, unfortunately, doesn't really pay off too much at the end.
1994 - In the Mouth of Madness - After a six-year absence, we finally get another true Carpenter-style movie. Probably the best Lovecraft film ever made not based on a real story. I can't really say anything objective about this one, as I have double-found memories of it from youth. For one, this was the first Carpenter movie I was able to see in the theater. And, way back when, I entered and won a "John Carpenter Trivia Contest" on AOL. The prize: a poster for this movie signed by the man himself. It hangs on my home theater wall with pride to this day.
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1988 - They Live - Republicans are alien ghouls from outer space. I love it. The movie probably works better in this era than it did when Reagan was President. Not that there aren't flaws in the film: some of the political satire is ham-handed and portions of the plot make no sense (why do the Ghouls promote the shanty town bum to one of the elites?). Personally, I can forgive the problems because I enjoy the premise, actors and visuals so much. Carpenter was very wise to allow Piper to improvise on set: classic lines and fights emerged from that.
1992 - Memoirs of an Invisible Man - Not one of Carpenter's auteur moments, for sure; this is Hollywood's movie, from the casting to the score. It's a perfectly acceptable invisible man flick, with all the invisible fun things you'd want to see. Chevy Chase's annoying personality is kept to a minimum. Enjoyable, but nothing to ponder over very much the next day.
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