Monster of the Day #531

I really liked this movie, probably more so than would be considered reasonable, given the movie in question.

I saw this was on Netflix or Hulu, one of those, and made a note to watch it as soon as possible (Ip Man came first, and we were out of town last weekend, so maybe this weekend).  I still can’t believe the premise of this thing; I simply must see it for myself.

I had high hopes for this movie but came away feeling very ‘meh’ about it.  Now ‘The Car’, that’s a ‘good’ bad movie.  Maybe even a great ‘bad’ movie.  I have The Car’s horn sound as a ring tone, and the movie didn’t try to explain itself or it’s ludicrous-ness every 5 minutes.  This movie would have been so much better had it just taken the idea and played it straight rather than being all ‘meta’.  

Rubber II: Retired

The natural double bill for The Car 2: Repossessed

I’m bolting for the door!

so … I looked up the film, having never heard of it. Was this a prank of some kind? How did this get a team of people to make it? What the HELL?!

Sandy Petersen has been driven speechless by the fact that this movie apparently rolled into production.

Yeah, but they also had to tread carefully.

Well, they did after they canned the original director. Sure, the guy had made such famous films as Wall Street and Platoon. In the end, though, he went over budget and they had to fire Stone.

Stumped me again.  What movie are we looking at here?

One of those films where I saw the trailer and said “No.” I like an unusual monster and a desert setting and all that, but again, if you don’t have enough confidence in your own idea to play it straight, why should I bother with it? Why couldn’t you just make a horror movie about a tire possessed by some alien intelligence? That could have been kind of interesting. Gyped again.

I’m not sure, but I think the title was something like RUBBER.

 8th largest tire manufacturer in world they are out of Korea.  Check your Hyundai.

Rock, that’s rather dismissive, isn’t it? You can’t really be arguing that there’s only one correct way to do a story. Aside from all the other problems with that idea, it would result in tremendous boredom.

 And while Whale threw in some humorous elements to THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE INVISIBLE MAN, they were still straight in their premises, were they not?

Well, with newer films, those made after what we could call the post-irony period of the 70′s, you occasionally run across something where it seems someone came up with a premise and then asked themselves “Should I play this straight? It’s a pretty far out concept. Yeah, I’d better try to make it funny, then people will laugh WITH me and not AT me!” That’s the attitude that irks me. It seems to me it’s braver to play a concept like killer tires or clowns or whatever with a straight face than it is to assume people will laugh at you and try to head them off at the pass. NIGHT OF THE LEPUS gets a lot of ribbing, but I think it’s a decent enough movie that it holds up. If it were outright comical, it would just feel like something they were fully embarrassed with. So it seems with this recent number of comical horror films. It seems like they would have been embarrassed if they just tried to scare people. (An off-shoot of this might be how the makers of the original PIRANHA have tried to re-write their intentions. The film certainly seems to be a straight horror picture, not the spoofy sort of deal the director and writer insist it actually is. They made a really good monster movie, yet seem to be afraid of having people think of it that way.)

Someone get this man a budget!

Well, obviously mileage varies. But the reason most people find Night of the Lepus so awful and hilarious is that it takes a simply unbelievably hysterical idea–giant killer rabbits–and plays it completely straight. To most, including, it must be said, myself, this doesn’t come across as brave so much as utterly clueless. I understand where you’re coming from, but confidence isn’t always a good thing. Frankly, the makers of Night of the Lepus probably should have been a lot less confident. If so, they might have chosen a central premise that didn’t strike 98% or more of the audience as completely ludicrous.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with asking an audience to laugh with you as long as you execute the movie properly. Evil Dead II, Return of the Living Dead 1 & 2, Re-Animator, Tucker & Dale Fight Evil, Black Sheep, Dr. Phibes, etc. A film fails not from its approach, but from how well it achieves its intent. That said, there are many, many films that went for comedy and abjectly failed. But that’s an execution issue, not a conceptual one.

Proof ya never know what a post will go afar…
Dr. STRANGELOVE did the comedy angle, and FAIL SAFE did the direct fear angle. F S worked just fine, though the ending was just short of having a ‘Mineshaft Gap!’
Was the humor in Dr. S meant to make the ending a bit more endurable, mayhaps? Or just to show the directors attitude towards the whole concept of M.A.D.?
Also, there’s the Riff factor. The more seriously a film takes a shaky premise, the more it sets it’s entirety (Cast, crew, writers) for a wedgie. Any Rifftrax or Cinematic titanic always comment on a blown concept like a mecanic talks about a dumb driver move.

“Well, ya see here, you shouldn’t oughta let the FX guys use cheap rubber in the monsters suit, but yer real mistake was letting the audience know it was a dream sequence. That’s what caused the blow out at the box office.”

I recently watched RE-ANIMATOR, and I’ve seen DR. PHIBES a few times. They have some humor in them, but both still function as horror stories (particularly RE-ANIMATOR). There’s subtle satire and there’s outright spoofery. The scene shown in the trailer for RUBBER, where a cop shows his colleagues a tire and says, more or less, “this is our enemy” and one guy responds by asking if the evil tire is round, or black, or whatever it was, didn’t strike me as funny. It was just insulting, on a gut-instinct level. I’m not saying there’s only ONE way to tell a monster story, that would be folly, but there are ways that just alienate a potential audience. Comedy is hard on it’s own. Mixing it properly with horror is even more so. RUBBER looked like it belongs in the same class as that movie where Ron Jeremy’s disembodied, alien-possessed penis goes on a killing rampage.

It’s been my experience that it doesn’t matter HOW good a movie is, SOMEone, SOMEwhere will make fun of it. That shouldn’t be the concern of the film makers. I’m sure the Rifftrax guys would be just as merciless with QUO VADIS as they were with PLANET OF DINOSAURS. I’m sure they’d be just as funny too. How shaky a premise is, or how straight it was handled, wouldn’t have much to do with it.

 At least I knew how to react to FAIL-SAFE!, which is one of the few films to ever actually scare me. STRANGELOVE just had me tilting my head in confusion most of the time. Part of it seems to be that FAIL-SAFE! wasn’t as pretentious as STRANGELOVE (a film which clearly thinks it’s brilliant in it’s own observations on human nature).

Let’s take ON THE BEACH, as hopelessly flawed an end-of-the-world flick as was ever made. Would it have been better if it were played for laughs? I don’t think so. At least as is there are a few good scenes with some fine actors to enjoy. The concept keeps it from having any validity, but the only thing that really scuttles the flick is the pretentious nature of those who made it. Had they not been so focused on a message and substituted a killer plague or cosmic storm for radioactive fallout (and this, remember, in 1959, when every grade-schooler understood the principals of atomic bombs), it would have worked just fine. Actually, even the flawed atomic bomb stuff might’ve worked had they been less focused on changing the world.

It’s a complex matter, for sure.

Man, how’d I forget Tremors??  That’s one of those rare movies all three of us enjoy about equally, and are happy to make time to watch.  What a great damn movie that is.

 Hummm…
Interesting. Never thought of the threat in ON THE BEACH as unworkable. Did the remake use the ‘killer germ’ idea? Still, it’s been so long since I watched the original.

Re:Riffing. You’re right, any film can be riffed, but as to how badly it ‘needs it’, IE to make it watchable is a personal question. Very subjective, methinks. Rifftrax did Star Trek 2, which I enjoyed. Sometimes they just seem too sure of themselves. But like I said, that’s a subjective view.