"Furry Vengeance"
Richard's Review: 0 stars
We are gathered here today to mourn the death of the career of Brendan Fraser. In the early 1990s Mr. Fraser's career appeared vibrant and healthy in films like "Gods and Monsters" and "Mrs. Winterbourne," but following a career high with box office champs like "The Mummy" his career began a long, painful battle with bad material and began to look as green as the green screens it often performed in front of. With the release of "Furry Vengeance," the battle is lost. A career, who once shared the screen with Oscar winners like Shirley MacLaine and legends like Ian McKellan, is now content work opposite angry raccoons. R.I.P. the career of Brendan Fraser.
In "Furry Vengeance" Fraser plays Dan Saunders a well meaning real estate developer who has moved his family from Chicago to the middle of nowhere to oversee the building of a subdivision. His contract is for one year, but his supposedly eco friendly, "green" boss has a different idea. He wants to clear cut the surrounding forest and build a new suburb. To prevent the destruction of their homeland the forest's animals, led by a raccoon who fancies himself a fuzzy William Wallace, leads a campaign of psychological warfare on Saunders.
"Furry Vengeance" is as direct-to-DVD worthy a movie as will be released theatrically this year. Ten minutes in I was wishing the movie would take a sudden turn from flaccid family friendly fare into more "When Animals Attack" mode. Nothing would have pleased me more than to see the animals rise up against the filmmakers, hijack this movie and make it a true revenge film. Twenty minutes in I was wishing I had claws, like the little furry creatures in the film, so I could claw my own eyes out.
I know "Furry Vengeance" is meant for little kids, but kids deserve better than this. In a twelve month period that has given us "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Where the Wild Things Are," movies that raised the bar for children's entertainment, a return to this mush-headed-slapstick is taking a giant step backward. With the Laugh-O-Meterâ„¢ set somewhere between the hit-in-the-crotch gags of "America's Funniest Home Videos" and a "Knock Knock" joke, it aims to amuse developing brains but it telegraphs every joke and by the time Fraser shows up in a pink track suit with the words Yum Yum on the bum, all hope is lost.
The cast is uniformly bad, but it is Fraser who makes the biggest impression. He's acting at a level that, I'm sure, The Three Stooges would consider over-the-top. Watching this it's hard to imagine that this is the same actor who once dazzled in "Gods and Monsters." Perhaps my reports of his career death are, as Mark Twain once said, "greatly exaggerated," but he has to try harder if he wants to keep his career off the critical list. Go see (if you must) "Furry Vengeance" with low expectations, but be warned, it's worse even than you think it is.
"Gunless"
Richard's Review: 2 1/2 stars
In its opening minutes "Gunless," the new Paul Gross film, simultaneously pays homage to and has fun with the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. The dusty landscape and stark camera work look lifted from "A Fistful of Dollars" and the opening credit pays direct homage to the Italian master. A red hot branding iron embosses the words "Once Upon a Time in the West" across the screen. However, with a quick flip of the compass dial -- and by superimposing the word "North" over "West" -- the movies takes a sharp turn away from Leone territory and into the Great White North. Call it a Poutine Western if you like, but with that one simple change "Gunless" becomes a uniquely Canadian western.
Paul Gross plays The Montana Kid, an American gunslinger who comes North and finds nobility and becomes, well, gunless. Wanted by bounty hunters he drifts north, taking refuge in a small one horse town. He's a tough, ornery killer who lives by the code of the gun, but after spending time with the locals and a goofy Mountie (Dustin Milligan) -- particularly with the fetching Jane (Sienna Guillory) -- he realizes he doesn't need his firearm to live. His resolve his challenged when his arch enemy Ben Cutler (Callum Keith Rennie) shows up to take the Kid back to the US, dead or alive.
"Gunless" is silly. Not "Blazing Saddles" silly, but a man says to his horse, "You've got carrot breath" silly. The first half of the film is played strictly for laughs, and while much of it isn't that successful, Gross does do the finest face plant in the history of Canadian cinema. The humor seems to be aimed at kids but I'm not sure children will be that interested in the story of a gunslinger, his code of honor and a widow who builds a windmill.
The "Benny Hill" humor is largely put on hold for the middle part of the movie when it becomes like an eager-to-please Bollywood movie, mixing romance, action, humor and even a dance sequence. It's all over the place and while some of the transitions from farce to sincerity to gun slinging are kind of jarring, the movie retains a kind of goofy charm throughout.
Gross, despite his background in light comedy on "Due South," is most effective here not when he is playing around, but when he is deadly serious. A number of scenes leading up to the pivotal show down show him in full-on Clint Eastwood "Unforgiven" mode, twirling his peace maker while trying to come to grips with all the blood he has spilled in his life. They don't exactly fit the tone of the scenes that came before, or the scenes to follow, but it is a good indicator that Gross can play a slightly darker character than the nice guy roles he usually takes on.
"Gunless" is probably the most Canadian western ever made. It's a story about a gunslinger that is anti gun—boy, is the NRA going to hate this movie -- and anti violence. More to the point, however, the story is used to display the subtleties of Canadian and American relations.
"Nightmare on Elm Street"
Richard's Review: 1 star
No, you're not dreaming. Freddy Krueger is back. Twenty six years after he first started knocking off the sleep deprived kids of Springwood, Ohio the baddie who gets you when you are most vulnerable -- when you're asleep -- is using his iconic claw hand to terrorize a new batch of kids.
Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Freddy had a run in with the local townsfolk and is now taking revenge on Springwood's children. Unlike the Pied Piper, Freddy was a suspected pedophile who was hunted down and burned alive by a mob of angry parents. Now, years later he's getting even, passing like a virus through the dreams of his murderer's high school age children, all of whom have the same puffy, darkly circled eyes of people who drink way too much Red Bull. When Mr. Sandman comes bad things happen. The kids soon become daydream believers as one by one the dreamy Freddy becomes a reality and kills them while the doze.
Like the originals -- there were eight "Nightmares" in total -- the "Nightmare on Elm Street" reboot alternates between reality, scenes of spurting blood and is-it-a-dream-or-not-sequence? sequences. Drowsy teens wander aimlessly doing all the stupid things kids do in these kinds of movies, like go into creepy old attics late at night and, in a technological update, allow their computers to enter Sleep Mode -- Oh no! The scariest thing about the movie, however, is the acting.
The actors aren't aided by a script that has a teacher nonchalantly say, "Are you OK Miss Fowles?" after a student lets loose with a blood curdling scream in class but even though the script is loaded with clunkers it deserves better than it receives here. The acting is classic b-movie horror technique. Each of the teens seems to have talen lessons in how to exchange horrified meaningful looks with wide (although very puffy) eyes while spewing lines like "Just don't fall asleep! If you die in your dreams you die for real!"
The acting is uniformly cringe worthy, although Jackie Earle Haley, who is making a career playing these kind of unpleasant characters in movies like "Shutter Island" and "Little Children," is suitably menacing as Freddy. Unfortunately in reinventing Freddy's back story the film focuses on his nasty er… pastimes with the kids. A scene with Nancy (Rooney Mara) dressed in a little girl's dress isn't scary, it's just creepy. And not creepy in a good b-movie way, I mean creepy in a perverse NSFW way.
By and large the surreal CGI effects -- like Freddy emerging from a wall -- aren't as effective as original director Wes Craven's decidedly lower tech effects. This is a remake, and not a very good one, that rehashes many of the images from the other "Nightmare" films, leaving the new film with a "been there, done that" feel for anyone familiar with the other movies. Of the new set pieces some are ridiculous -- like the clawed hand in the bathtub tentatively attacking Nancy -- and some are cool -- like the indoor snow storm, but none have the oomph of the original.
Ironically without the thrills and chills of the original "The Nightmare on Elm Street" redux is a sleep inducing exercise in how NOT to revitalize a movie franchise.
