Movies like Waxwork really make me question the wisdom of the Halloween Film Fest project. Was the point of this horror film-viewing exercise to inflict bad entertainment on myself? Did I intend it to become merely an endurance test? There are so many better things I could be doing with my time—but instead, there I sat last night for an hour and thirty-five minutes, watching this excruciatingly dull late-'80s crapfest featuring a cast of one-hit wonders, including Zach Galligan (Gremlins), Dana Ashbrook (Twin Peaks), Deborah Foreman (Valley Girl), and Miles O'Keeffe (Tarzan, the Ape Man). Sure, my main man David Warner also appears in Waxwork, but his bland character just doesn't give him the opportunity to spread his majestic acting wings like the role of Sark in Tron did.
Maybe I only imagined it, but I was under the impression that Waxwork had become a 'cult hit.' And I suppose it might actually qualify as one if college students are just looking for a movie to smoke pot in front of. But you can really do that while watching Out of Africa on fast-forward, and you'll probably be just as entertained.
Movies like Waxwork don't just make me question the horror movie marathon; they make me question my place in the universe. Why am I here? Where am I going? What's the point of it all? Then a kind of mid-grade despondency sets in.
At one time, somebody's dream was to make the film Waxwork, and to that end a lot of money and human labor was expended. Now that the dream has been realized, it stands as a symbol of the pathos and futility of all of our greatest ambitions. Whether we cure cancer or just make another shitty movie, it doesn't really matter all that much. Eventually all sentient life will be obliterated by some manner of apocalypse—and our dreams will cease to have existed. Without anyone to remember, the past never even happened. We don't disappear—because we were never there to begin with.
I'm going to go take a pill now.
Oh wow, that really is a bad cast. Dana Ashbrook was the worst part of Twin Peaks.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mind him on Twin Peaks, but he is AWFUL in this. Just astoundingly bad.
DeleteI wouldn't even watch this one.
ReplyDeleteYou need to get into the top shelf stuff. Why are you slummin' it with these forgotten shitty films? Go watch the Shining, or the Exocist... something that was at least done with a little bit of thought put into. I saw a few minutes of Jeff Goldblum in "The Fly" today, and I hoped maybe you'd be reviewing that one this month.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you want to be obscure, you can go for its sequel ("The Fly II", I'm pretty sure). It is arguably a better movie. Well, arguably, but we could have fun making the arguments.
DeleteMy question about "The Fly" is this: the premise of the movie is that the teleporter detected two different kinds of DNA (Goldblum's and the housefly's), and it didn't know which one to copy, so it combined them.
BUT, there are billions of bacteria which inhabit our every orifice, nook and cranny; and these too have DNA. So why didn't the teleporter fuse Goldblum with all that bacterial DNA too? And if there is a reason why the bacterial DNA was ignored, why didn't the teleporter also ignore the housefly DNA?
I'm saving all the really good horror movies for the final days leading up to Halloween...
DeleteSimilar to your Fly question...
I've always wondered about the rules governing invisibility in movies. Why does the clothing often disappear too? What about hair and toenails? Should they disappear? If I have a parasite inside of me, what about that? And bacteria? I want to see a copy of the rules!!
Yes, these are all good questions, which I hope somebody gets around to answering. Speaking of rules, do you have a working definition of "horror film" which is guiding your choices in this project? There is a 1975 film with Elizabeth Montgomery starring as Lizzie Borden, but I'm not sure if you would call it horror or comedy.
DeleteI think a case can also be made that "Space Jam" is a horror movie.
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