Who isn't a sucker for a good outer-space yarn? Thirty-three summers ago, Ridley Scott chomped through the guts of that candy-ass Star Wars crap and unleashed Alien on the shrieking matinee masses. It was like a Sam Fuller war movie crammed in a tin can, a vessel simultaneously erupting with Cronenbergian body horror, externalized in the creepy-erotic majesty of H.R. Giger's design, and cannily importing a decade of splatterific outrage from the grindhouses and drive-ins to the budding twin cinemas of middle America. All that, and Sigourney Weaver—the Final Girl to end all Final Girls—hanging tough in her iconic panties, and a cat named Jones.

James Cameron upped the ante with Aliens, and Scott never looked back. Until now. The promise of Prometheus has had fanboys and girls in a steaming lather all year. And not undeservedly. The director hasn't done sci-fi since 1982's Blade Runner, and the digital revolution now offers the technology to imagine things on a movie screen that really do look futuristic. Ironically, perhaps, the film is a prequel to Alien, or rather presented as part of the Alien origin myth that can now progress as its own franchise. The razzle-dazzle CGI deployed suggests technological advancements that far exceed anything at hand in the quartet of Alien movies, a paradox we'll have to live with.

Continued reading Space is the Place...

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[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Ridley Scott's sci-fi monster prequel (of sorts) Prometheus.]

In space, no one can hear you groan, but here on Earth, the exasperated cries elicited by Leprechaun 4: In Space are inevitable, and inescapable. Few '90s horror franchises more bluntly epitomized the genre's clichéd creative template, as the Leprechaun series followed up its disposable original (most notable for featuring a pre-Friends, original-nosed Jennifer Aniston) with a duplicative sequel and then subsequent installments defined by their central-location gimmicks (Vegas, Space, the Hood—twice!). It's the malevolent Irish creature's journey to the cosmos, however, that's most mind-boggling, as grindhouse icon Brian Trenchard-Smith's direct-to-video work not only rejects logic at every turn, but proves too lazy to even rip off its obvious influences with verve, much less cleverness. Of course, stupidity is almost the end goal of a movie whose very premise seems to be a joke. Yet if everything is intended to be a giant goof, it should certainly be funnier—and more fun—than the nonsense delivered here, which concerns the efforts of the titular creature (Warwick Davis, grinning and cackling with his usual cartoon glee) to marry alien Princess Zarina (Rebekah Carlton) and have her kill her king father by bribing her with riches, a scheme that will put the Leprechaun on the throne and thus soothe his everyone-looks-down-on-me insecurities.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Leprechaun 4: In Space (1997)...

Paul Williams' best-known song is probably The Muppet Movie's "The Rainbow Connection," which kicks off the film with a camera plunge from the skies into Kermit's swamp. Stephen Kessler opens Paul Williams: Still Alive with an allusive riff on that shot, a clip of the singer-songwriter skydiving on a 1977 installment of CBS' long-discontinued annual special "Circus of the Stars." Williams' tunes remain pop standards: Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen," The Carpenters' "Rainy Days and Mondays." The music enabled Williams to become a ubiquitous guest-star of the '70s; a friend who grew up at the time described him as "television wallpaper."

Growing up, Kessler was mesmerized by Williams. Transparently Napoleonic at 5'2", shaggy and dwarfed by his own outrageous glasses, he was, Kessler notes, "no one's idea of a leading man." Quick-witted quips and good timing gave him a decade of TV fame, a legacy Williams is semi-eager to disown. As his television time went up, he says, his songcraft declined. Watching himself on Merv Griffin, Williams can't stand revisiting his egotistical '70s self in action and worries about his daughter seeing the clip.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Paul Williams: Still Alive...

She owns an IMDB page stacked with credits that many of her acting peers might take a lifetime to accumulate. But what many folks don't realize is that no-budge MVP Amy Seimetz started out with ambitions as a writer-director, which she takes to the limit in her debut feature Sun Don't Shine. Kentucker Audley and Kate Lyn Sheil star as a couple on the lam, rambling through the Gulf Coast of Florida, a lost wonderland of faded pastels and mosquito-bitten dreams. As we noted after the movie's premiere at SXSW this spring, the film evokes Terrence Malick's Badlands as a Suncoast eruption of l'amour fou—that glockenspiel chime on the soundtrack an affectionate homage—the story as much an experience of sensation and memory as forward action, suspended in small observances as the actors' voices float over the breeze as their car races south. The atmospheric style snaps into visceral engagement as the couple negotiates their situation, which becomes apparent soon enough, and the audience begins to sort out their place in a cinematic cosmos of getaway episodes.

Seimetz says that someone told her "it's a surrealist movie posing as a vérité movie," and from the jump, she's created an immersive experience whose cinematography and sound design enrich a minimal screenplay that pushes faces, character and passion to the foreground, using a pulp-noir genre template as a structure for something surprisingly visionary. During SXSW, I met up with Seimetz, at far too early an hour, to talk about the film over coffee. Sun Don't Shine has its New York premiere this Saturday as part of Rooftop Films' SXSW Weekend program.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Amy Seimetz...

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the T&A-filled killer fish sequel Piranha 3DD.]

James Cameron may be credited as the director of Piranha II: The Spawning, but given his own rocky participation in the project—his Italian producers removed him from viewing or editing the footage he shot, and thus he had little to do with its final form—it's hard to slam the future "king of the world" for the legion of failures that define this sub-B-movie. A sequel to Joe Dante's smart and funny 1978 original (made with the legendary Roger Corman), Cameron's film is a misshapen mess that, unlike its cheeky predecessor, rips off Jaws to no appreciable effect, finding nothing but unintentionally corny comedy via its tale of a Caribbean resort terrorized by a school of flesh-eating fish... that can fly! Yes, the hook of Cameron's follow-up is that the military has bioengineered piranha with other animals' genetic material to create the ultimate airborne-aquatic killing beasts, which at the outset have fallen to the bottom of the ocean aboard a sunken supply ship. This carelessness doesn't seem to have brought the military out looking for the fish, however, which is as puzzling as the behavior of the intro sequence's couple, who out on a rowboat to try and fix the man's apparent performance-anxiety issues, decide to dive down to the submerged vessel for some sex—a carnal act that, as per horror dictates, naturally leads to grisly death.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Piranha II: The Spawning (1981)...

Overviews of the spaghetti western inevitably begin with Sergio Leone, whose presentation of Clint Eastwood as the ultimate laconic Westerner grows more iconic throughout the genre-codifying trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Time progressively slows to a mythic crawl, as mundane quick-draw showdowns and bounty hunter pursuits become epic set pieces through sheer duration.

Westerns had been made in Italy and Spain before Leone (largely by non-Italians), but his worldwide success was unavoidably influential. Segments of Sergio Sollima's 1966 The Big Gundown anticipate 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West, with another swoony Ennio Morricone score emphasizing similar slow visual coups. A showy tracking shot through an obscure Mexican village starts with two women at market and stops at a criminal's face being lathered in an open-air barber's chair. The man in pursuit is Jonathan Corbett (Lee Van Cleef), an unofficial volunteer killer for Texas who's "more popular than David Crockett." Transparently corrupt railroad baron Brokston (Walter Barnes) wants him to run for Senate and offer official support for a new line. "I'm interested in Texas," Corbett moralistically scolds, "not your personal profit"—but accepts the shady deal anyway. One last job will seal his popularity: tracking down alleged child rapist and murderer Cuchillo (Tomas Milian).

Continued reading The Good, the Great and the Grungy...