Moviebob's Reel Retro: The Classic Film Criticism of Bob Chipman

By Bob Chipman

Critic Bob Chipman is best known for reviews of big new releases; but he's also written extensively on classic, obscure and even forgotten films of the past. Now, in this latest volume of The MovieBob Anthology, he collects a personal selection of favorite examples on the subject for your reading pleasure. From career-overviews of Herzog, Raimi, Burton, Shyamalan and more to restrospectives of entire series like GODZILLA and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET to Westerns to Schlock, there's something to discover for everyone within!

While perhaps best known as the creator and star of classic Web Video series like Escape to The Movies, The Big Picture and The Game OverThinker; Bob Chipman has also published numerous volumes of written reviews, commentaries, thinkpieces and features covering the worlds of film, television, video games and the broader breadth of popular culture. Now, through The MovieBob Anthology, a selection of his best work is yours to own - selected and organized by theme by Bob Chipman himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Chipman
• Release date: Mar 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781495195068

Book preview

Moviebob's Reel Retro: The Classic Film Criticism of Bob Chipman

REEL RETRO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe my success, which includes the opportunity to write these pieces in the first place and the ability to share them with you again, to many fine people who’ve enabled my career to this point: Stuttering Craig Skistimas of ScrewAttack and Fullscreen, who was among the first to discover my work, Russ Pitts, who first reached out to me about reviewing movies professionally, and Susan Arendt, who was the original editor of a great deal of the work included here. I offer them all my sincere thanks for their help, encouragement and (most of all) their friendship.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Patricia & Peter Chipman.

The original pieces contained in this volume are culled from a variety of sources. The majority originated on The Escapist (www.escapistmagazine.com) and the MovieBob Blog (moviebob.blogspot.com)

Copyright © 2016 by Bob Chipman

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4951-9506-8

Revere, Massachusetts

www.moviebob.blogspot.com

INDEX OF TOPICS

HALLOWEEN TREATS

Brotherhood of The Wolf, Vampyr, Lair of The White Worm, The Sentinel, The Pit

ON THE ROAD WITH BERGMAN

Ingmar Begman: The Seventh Seal, Persona, The Virgin Spring

KNEEL BEFORE ZOG

Werner Herzog: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Incident at Loch Ness, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man

THE TEN BEST FILMS OF 2009

Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Informant!, Where The Wild Things Are, The Brothers Bloom, Moon, A Serious Man, Inglorious Basterds, District 9, Up, Watchmen

STRANGE LOVE

Max Mon Amour, Living Dead Girl, Natural Born Killers, King Kong Lives, Tromeo & Juliet, May, Possession

BURTON’S BUSTS

Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of The Apes, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory,

ANOTHER ROUND

Beerfest, The Thin Man, Strange Brew, Sideways, Drunken Master II

OLD NIGHTMARES

The Nightmare on Elm Street series (includes Freddy’s Nightmares & Freddy vs Jason)

THREE MOVIES THAT CHANGED CHRISTMAS

Miracle on 34th Street, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Scrooge (1951)

THAT ONE PART WAS AWESOME

Superman III, Zabriske Point, The Expendables, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Protector (Tom Yum Goon), Zombie, Swordfish, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Return of The Dragon

SPECIAL SCHOOL: HALLOWEEN

It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, Halloween is Grinch Night, The Worst Witch, World of The Worlds, Mad Monster Party,

RED DEAD REVIVAL?

Stagecoach, Fort Apache, High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Dollars Trilogy, Wild Bunch, High Plains Drifter, Tombstone, Unforgiven

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

Dreamscape, Somewhere In Time, Spellbound, Brazil, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

WHEN IN ROME

Sign of The Cross, The Robe, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra,

BEYOND DEAD

Non-zombie George Romero: Martin, Knightriders, Creepshow, Monkey Shines, The Dark Half

CUTTING ROOM

Black Christmas, Peeping Tom, Sleepaway Camp, Curse of The Living Corpse, Alone in The Dark, Eaten Alive, Slumber Party Massacre, There’s Nothing Out There

SIMIAN CINEMA

King Kong Lives, King Kong Escapes, Mighty Peking Man, A*P*E, Konga, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Max Mon Amour, Monkey Shines, Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp

INSTANT GRATIFICATION

Killer Klowns From Outer Space, The Final Countdown, God of Vampires, They Live, Fire & Ice, Zu Warriors, Oblivion, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Dollman, The Apple, Chocolate, Uncle Sam, Streets of Fire, Tarzan The Ape Man, Dinosaurus!, Rampage

ALL THE LITTLE ANIMALS

The Killer Shrews, Squirm, Prophecy, Godmonster of Indian Flats, Food of The Gods, Blood Freak

ART AS ACTION

Curse of The Golden Flower, Mars Attacks, Izo, Strings, Excalibur,

IT’S TIME TO LIGHT THE LIGHTS

The complete Muppet movies (Muppet Movie to Muppets Wizard of Oz)

SINCEREST FLATTERY

Black Dynamite, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavara, The Kentucky Fried Movie, Call of Cthulhu, Grindhouse, Behind The Mask

TEST YOUR MIGHT

Society, Horrors of Malformed Men, Ilsa: She-Wolf of The SS, Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, Visitor Q, Cannibal Ferox

LITTLE GREEN MAN

Retrospective of the Leprechaun series starring Warwick Davis

REAL PEOPLE, FAKE MOVIES

Time After Time, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, Iron Monkey, Adaptation

BRAND X

Because of Winn-Dixie, Where The Heart Is, Radio Flyer, One Two Three, Kung-Fu Master!

TEST YOUR MIGHT: ROUND 2

House At The End of The Park, Blood Sucking Freaks, Who Can Kill a Child?, The Beast, Irreversible

ROCK ON

One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, Ironmaster, When Women Had Tails, Clan of The Cave Bear, Quest For Fire,

SAM THE MAN – PARTS I & II

Retrospective on the career and films of Sam Raimi

NIGHTFALL

The climb and collapse of M. Night Shyamalan

KAIJU CRUSH

Daimajin, Dogora, Gorath, Gappa: The Triphibian Monster, Thunder of Gigantic Serpent, Yonggary

SPACE INVADERS

The Deperate Hours, Hider In The House, Hostage, The People Under The Stairs, Venom, Suddenly

10 BIBLE MOVIE WEIRDER THAN NOAH

The Sin of Adam & Eve, Salome’s Last Dance, King of Kings (1927), The Passover Plot, The Adventures of Mark Twain, The Sign of The Cross, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Judas Project, Jonah: A Veggietales Movie

KING OF THE MONSTERS

The complete classic Godzilla filmography, 1954-2014

DON’T WATCH DIS-TOPIA, WATCH DAT-TOPIA

Hell Comes to Frogtown, Prayer of The Rollerboys, Tank Girl, Daybreakers, Equilibrium

WHEN JIM CARREY RULED THE WORLD

Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb & Dumber, Batman Forever, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, The Cable Guy, Liar Liar

HALLOWEEN TREATS

(Originally published October 2009 on The Escapist)

When in doubt (or, rather, when in authorship of a weekly column and facing down a deadline) a film writer can always rely on a list of you should see’s tied to an upcoming holiday. I tried to minimize the number of times I’ve gone to that well, but sometimes it really is the best decision; and yeah – as a lifelong film geek just starting to make a living at it, I was overflowing with offbeat recommendations I just had to make. The single greatest dissolve in cinematic history I’m referencing in Brotherhood of The Wolf, incidentally, involves a slow pan over a reclining Monica Bellucci’s bare breasts morphing into a birds-eye pan of a similarly-shaped set of mountains. No, really.

I love Halloween.

Halloween fascinated me as a kid, and fascinates me to this day. Like Christmas, Easter and the other half-secular Western/American holidays, it's the (so far) end result of an annual celebration that began in Pagan Europe, then got co-opted by Christianity in Medieval times only to re-assert its innate Paganism amid 19th and 20th Century consumer culture. (When enough time has passed for proper perspective, I sense that the real history of American spirituality will be a history of Paganism being reborn through Capitalism.) But Halloween, it seems, asserted this aspect of itself much earlier on, as though even my pious ancestors saw in All Hallows Eve a chance to let their darker fantasies come out to play.

It's customary for film critics to offer up on Halloween lists of their favorite or rare Scary Movies, and I am nothing if not a slave to tradition. So, without further distraction, here are a few from my stuff that needs to be more widely seen file that I imagine might help make your Festival of Samhain complete.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (aka Le Pacte Des Loups) (2001)

Imagine Castlevania by way of Masterpiece Theater and you're about 1/100th of the way to this astonishing 2001 French mini-epic from Silent Hill director Christophe Gans; a one-of-a-kind fusion of gothic-horror, giant-monster, political-thriller, costume-drama, martial-arts and historical-romance. A massive, wolf-like monster (believe it or not, that's the true part) is devouring peasants in 18th Century France; so the king conscripts a Canadian naturalist and a Native American shaman/hunter to track and kill it.

Along the way they uncover a sprawling conspiracy involving the local nobles, gypsies, witchcraft, The Vatican, courtesans, one-armed gunslingers, incest, and the shocking secret of The Beast itself... oh, and even though it's 1765 and we're in rural France, everyone (or, at least, everyone participating in the big, brutal fight scenes) knows kung-fu.

All of this seeming nonsense is tied together by being played 100% straight: Nobody ever winks at the audience or crack self-referential jokes, and the result is spellbinding. It also has a great cast, though non-French audiences are most likely to recognize the inhumanly-beautiful Monica Bellucci (Persephone from the Matrix sequels) adding some welcome glamor (and nudity) to the proceedings; and multiethnic martial-arts star Mark Dacascos (The Chairman on Iron Chef America. Really) as the Indian action-hero. It also contains what may be the single greatest dissolve in motion picture history. You'll know it when you see it.

It's Alive (1974)

There have been a lot of movies with this title, and even a mezzo-mezzo 2009 remake, but there's never been anything quite like this 1974 oddity from B-movie legend Larry Cohen; which holds the dubious honor of being the best Killer Baby movie ever made. The feral infant in question has claws, fangs and superhuman strength; and after slaughtering the entire medical team assisting his birth he escapes the maternity ward and proceeds to wreak bloody havoc all over suburban Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the creature's parents' marriage rapidly implodes under the weight of mutual unspoken guilt and blame. Heavy stuff for what remains superficially a sleazy exploitation thriller, made heavier still by a conscious refusal to explain exactly what caused the mutation to begin with. Theories of evolutionary adaptation are tossed around, with the creepy implication that It may represent a new human species better adapted for a polluted, increasingly dangerous world; what some have interpreted as an even creepier implication that his adaptation has a more personal origin - an in-utero defensive reaction to Its mother's onetime consideration of an abortion. Yikes! Now that's edgy. Beat that, Fringe.

Vampyr (1932)

Most of the famous silent or transitional era horror films require a certain amount of forgiveness on behalf of the modern audiences, but here's one that's often overlooked, likely because it was enough ahead of its time to seem modern now. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, it's one of the first (but far from last) vampire thrillers to claim a loose basis on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. Amusingly, it cheats at being both an early-sound and silent film by having most of the exposition revealed in a book being read by the hero, a young man staying at a rural in who seems to be drifting in and out of a haunted dream (nightmare?) in which he's tasked with unraveling the mystery of local vampiric goings-on that may or may not be real, imagined, shadows-of-the-past or none of the above. The story, ultimately, is secondary to the real impact of the film: It's one of the most accurate-seeming renderings ever of what it might be like to inhabit someone else's nightmares.

Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Here's a British oddity that features, in no particular order: An acid-spitting snake woman, psychedelic hallucinations of possessed, orgiastic medieval nuns and a giant pagan serpent-god... and yet the most memorable and hard-to-believe sight by far is that of future chick flick staple Hugh Grant (yes, that Hugh Grant) as a cocky, action-ready badass who at one point hacks a killer snake-person in half with a broadsword.

Directed by offbeat auteur Ken Russell, this is a loose reworking of a later-day Bram Stoker piece that is itself inspired by the famous British folk tale of the Lambton Worm: A Scottish archaeologist finds a dragon-like skull at the site of notoriously cursed medieval convent, which seems to tie in to the arrival of a vampire-esque noblewoman, a spate of missing persons and the local legend of not-entirely-slain prehistoric serpent god. It's a strange mix of real horror, eroticism, button-pushing blasphemy, bawdy Scottish revelry and dry British gallows humor; but damned if it doesn't deliver whenever it needs to.

The Sentinel (1977)

Here's a great scary-as-all-hell haunted house movie that no one seems to remember, mostly because it came out amid more popular late-70s occult horror flicks like Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen. Even still, it can stand on its own as a great, unsung example of the genre. The actual story - a model discovers that her surprisingly-affordable New York apartment is a gateway to Hell - is as old as they come, but here the execution makes the difference: The ghostly manifestations mostly take the form of seemingly flesh-and-blood people who appear dangerously confused and frightened themselves (definite shades of The Sixth Sense); and the effect is genuinely unsettling... until, of course, it becomes simply terrifying.

As a nice bonus, you get one of those great only in the 70s casts - a mix of aging legends (Ava Gardner, Martin Balsam, Burgess Meredith) and not-yet-famous faces (Jeff Goldblum, Jerry Orbach, Christopher Walken) in cameos. The film actually caused some minor controversy in its original release because a good deal of the freakish ghouls in the all Hell breaks loose finale were played by folks with actual physical deformities, something I don't think anyone could get away with today.

The Pit (1981)

Okay, okay... Before anyone who's actually seen this gets mad at me, let me stress: The Pit is by no means a good movie, but along with being partially Halloween-centric it's bad in both a genuinely unique and genuinely entertaining way. Those of you who are fans of Mystery Science Theater will understand, those of you are not fans of MST3K should become fans. This is another weird combo movie: Primarily, it's about a mentally unstable (possibly meant to be autistic) young boy whose sociopathic (to say nothing of murderous) tendencies are awakened along with the early pangs of puberty.

He's sexually obsessed with his new babysitter in a very ahead-of-his-years stalkerish way, he's a peeping tom, and he has a habit of feeding those who rebuff his advances (or just plain piss him off) to a family of ravenous prehistoric troll-monsters living at the bottom of a giant hole he found in the woods. Since a demonic talking teddy bear also figures into things, it's possible that the monsters are supposed to be imaginary, a projection of the kid's psychosis, but the film never really makes up its mind either way, which only increases the unintended comedy factor. Even still, I can't deny that it's got a hell of an ending.

Well, that's what I've got for now, though give me an hour or two and I'm sure I'll come up with a dozen or so more... but that'll be for another day. Until then, Happy Halloween!

ON THE ROAD WITH BERGMAN

(Originally published November 2009 on The Escapist)

I bet you could fill an entire anthology exclusively with pieces from young film writers in their first year on the theme of I’m going to use X occasion to introduce my readership to The Classics! In truth, though, one of the positives from my tenure as the movie person in residence at a site mainly focused on video-game fans was in fact the opportunity to do pieces like this for an audience that hadn’t necessarily heard it all before.

I'd like to share something with you: When movie critics get together, we talk shop - mostly stuff we've seen, stuff we want to see, and how crummy untrained upstart Internet Brats like yours truly are ruining everything for the venerable field Print Journalism. As such, it's not uncommon to find oneself defending one's reviews.

What is uncommon, but not unheard of, is to find oneself defending one's readership. Usually, sleight is unintended: Well, that must be easier at least if it's learned that you're doing capsule reviews or working for a less-than-highbrow (read: not a Film Journal) publication; or I'm surprised they sent you to this if one is working for... oh, I dunno, a videogaming site and the movie is something other than a teen-targeted action flick.

Now, I get that no malice is meant by such idle chatter, but the casual implication at hand - that Escape to The Movies fans would be assumed to be easier to please because gamers apparently don't possess a sophisticated appreciation of the cinema - does tend to stick in my craw somewhat. Go ahead and call this