Chasing Amy

Year: 1997
Director: Kevin Smith
Writer: Kevin Smith
Genre: Romantic comedy

I feel really strange classifying Chasing Amy as a "romantic comedy". Sure, the plot focuses around romance and has many very funny pieces of dialogue... but does that mean it has to be pushed into the romcom world? In comparison to all the other doofy and vapid romcoms out there I really feel like this takes the lead. Typically I hate this genre but there are times it works well.

Chasing Amy follows a pretty simple, if modern, premise. Guy meets girl, guy falls in love with girl, girl turns out to be lesbian, guy tries to get with her anyway. I've never quite been a fan of movies where full-fledged lesbian characters end up getting with and loving men for any reason. It almost always feels like such a cop out. At the very least, the movie seemed to put in some very useful conversations that addressed my anger. However, the lesbian character still found herself in a heterosexual relationship at a point. I must say though that I was especially interested to see how the film portrayed this realization with her group of lesbian friends. She got ostracized which is how I've seen things handled in the LGBT community from time to time.

I still didn't quite like how much she seemed to love the straight sex. I guess that just makes her a fuller character though since she had a rich sexual background which took on all forms. It may very well be true that for some people they will every once in a while like someone of the opposite or same sex when they usually don't. That may continue on to the sexual realm. Basically, despite taking a path that I usually despise, I can forgive Chasing Amy for doing it.

The film is very smart at its portrayal of characters and situations. Some of it is a bit ham-fisted near the end but mostly it all plays out perfectly. It doesn't get your typical romcom ending either, which is probably my favorite part of the whole experience. For those looking for a smarter romantic comedy this is one to watch.

Curse of the Puppet Master

Year: 1998
Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: Benjamin Carr
Genre: Horror: Evil Dolls

So here were are after the supposed end of Puppet Master. As I predicted, the story has been restarted in a way with new characters. The puppets are still the same though, and unfortunately Leech Girl is back. At the very least though, she had absolutely no use in the film other than to look scary at a few points so thank goodness.

As or the movie itself, I'm not sure where it's supposed to take place in the timeline. The characters apparently got the puppets at auction some years ago but it doesn't make sense that the last owners would have sold them. That is, unless they died or something. It couldn't come before the last two Puppet Masters because the puppets were still in their Bodega Bay Inn home at that point and not shipped across country and back due to auctions. Really then, I can only assume this film is supposed to happen 20 years after the last two or something of the sort. I doubt it really matters.

So you've got a man and his daughter who operate a puppet show and have various other novelties. The father invites a young gas station attendant to work for him as he apparently is really good at whittling. He wants the young man to build a new puppet for him that lives. Of course, the father has to say something ominous and predictable like "you have to put your soul into it...". Seeing nothing wrong with this picture, the guy happily takes on the job.

The puppets seem to quite like the arrangement and are generally well-behaved through most of the movie. Only during the climax do they really get back to old form. Strangely, the acting of the puppets is even more wooden than it has ever been before. They were barely animated at all and were rarely shot in full (so that hands could manipulate them from the lower half in shots). It's really weird that the production values would shoot down so much from the last film to now. I suppose Full Moon began to tire of their star series and may have been working on other projects. I'll have to look into them more to see what else they had going on at the same time.

Overall, this film was actually a lot better than I thought it'd be. There is one glaring issue though and that is the end of a film. If you thought The Blair Witch Project had a sudden ending try this one on for size. It cuts off immediately in the middle of a climactic scene! It's as if you were watching something on TV to have it cut off for a test of the emergency broadcast system. Except, apparently, this is the way they wanted it to end. I'm not sure if the next film will be a continuation of this one, but it sure looks like that's what they wanted to do.

The Children

Year: 1980
Director: Max Kalmanowicz
Writer: Edward Terry, Carlton J. Albright
Genre: Horror: Sci-fi

Going into The Children I had no expectations. I'd never heard of the film before or anything but it was in the horror section, so I went for it. Occasionally blindly jumping into movies like that has yielded some real gems (Brutal Massacre). Of course, it has also yielded some real junk (Terror Toons, Don't Scream, Stupid Teenagers Must Die!). Anyways, I like to watch random movies in case they end up being my next favorite.

The Children is not my next favorite. It's pretty dry and predicable. You have a story that starts out with some charming kids on a school bus that drives through some weird mist and then they all disappear. As they show up later they seem very interested in hugging. Once someone gives them a hug the hugging party is burned/melted. It really makes no sense and apparently has to do with a nearby nuclear power plant. How a nuclear power plant makes children go insane and give them the ability to melt people I'll never know.

The effects for the dead people are pretty good. For the children themselves not so much. They basically just have darkness around their eyes and fingernails painted black. Wow! I got really bored about 3/4th in and the finale was weird. It kind of comes out of nowhere and although it's really predicable once you're there, it feels like they just had no way to complete the script. Oh well.