MOVIES YOU WATCH BECAUSE OF WHO'S IN THEM - BUT IF THIS MOVIE GAVE ME ANYTHING, IT WAS A GREAT SONG... AND NOTHING ELSE BECAUSE THE REST WAS A TOTAL PIECE OF CRAP...

Beneath (2013)

Do you have ANY idea HOW MANY MOVIES, SONGS, AND TV EPISODES THERE ARE WITH THIS NAME? SOME IN THE SAME FREAKING YEAR??? Usually when a film proclaims itself to be an IFC After Midnight Film, you can expect one made outside of the US, but this incredibly offensive offal was made in the good ole' USA. I have absolutely no idea where as this movie has no wiki page of its' own and the IMDb apparently doesn't have a freaking clue either.



This starred Jeff Fahey, one of those on the list of people I'll watch in anything (although that list is coming under stricter scrutiny lately). The horrible thing has actually been in my draft pile for a couple of months - it's part stupid cliche', part stupid unreal behavior, and the rest is just plain bad acting in a movie claiming, of course, to be inspired by real events.

Real events, which we all know by now is relative, meaning simply that yes, there are coal mines, yes, there are accidents, and yes, people have died in them. That's it. So.

In 2013 (in the movie), a collapse at the Brackett Coal Mine left 19 workers trapped nearly 600 feet underground. This is what happened... beneath the surface.

Now, I looked this up (of course) and the most complimentary thing I could find about this 'Brackett' story is that it is a VERY LOOSE interpretation of mine collapses and, of course, despite its' claims, IS NOT A TRUE STORY. Which is good because is sucks sooooo bad.


We have a crew of miners who apparently have survived in good health in a coal mine for years although they do not wear respirators (the one guy who actually had one had no filters on it), they rarely wear their helmets, I didn't see ANY goggles or any other safety gear that you would think a veteran coal miner would make sure to have at all times in order not to spend out his latter years with black lung. OR, get thousands of dollars in fines for violating OSHA regulations.

The stupidest premise in the world and the most clichéd: Judith Marsh (Molly Hagan) decides she wants a take-your-daughter-to-work-day and picks the last day of George Marsh (Jeff Fahey) on his last working day, because he is retiring. Speaking from the OSHA view, this is impossible. Where my hubby works (not a mine) I can't just stroll onto the place - there's permits and equipment and this and that and the other thing... and when there's an accident, those rules get so tight you could make a diamond out of coal - no pun intended.

So. No masks, just boots, jackets with SMALL reflectors, and when they feel like it, a helmet - no respirator, no earplugs, no safety goggles. 

This is supposed to be spooky because 19 miners died ??? in a tragedy where they were stuck and left to die slowly as the air ran out. Pffft. Whoops, that was a waste of air.


So a cave-in happens of course when two miners are careless with a piece of equipment they've run (and I'm sure they had to get certification to do so) for years. It's a machine with a large rotating steel drum equipped with tungsten carbide teeth that scrape coal from the seam. It can mine as much as five tons of coal a minute – more than a miner of the 1920s' would produce in an entire day. 

These guys want more money. More coal, more money. So, they get really greedy and careless, and they break open a hole in a wall, causing the cave in. Score so far: 3 dead, 5 or 6 missing, one badly hurt.


They have 72 hours to spend in their little survival chamber that they conveniently were near when the collapse happened. They have oxygen and plenty of supplies to last five or six days. The chamber is well lit and has portholes to looks out. The inside looks like a decompression chamber.

The daughter starts to hallucinate - first she thinks she sees one of the miners stick his finger in the wounded guy's leg and move it around, then when alone with the injured guy, helping him with his leg, she thinks she sees his face melt. She grabs her helmet an runs like an idiot. Did she close the door?

She comes face to face with a now blind, zombie-like version of one of the original miners - uh, maybe. They make the movie too damned ambiguous - are they really seeing spectres or is it just the lack of oxygen causing them to hallucinate?

Whatever the hell is going on (and by now I really really really don't give a damn) she goes on a killing spree which the movie seems to think is a perfectly rational thing to do and she lives... and gets out... isn't that lovely?

The ONLY good thing about this movie is a song that played at the end. Believe me, if it had played at the beginning, I would have listened then shut the freaking movie off.

'The Lost Soul' Doc Watson Family

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE THE BAD MAN, TO BE THE SAD MAN, BEHIND BLUE EYES




Maniac (2012) French-American

It is estimated that only about 8% of people in the world have blue eyes. It is also said to be a 'diminishing trait' meaning, I guess, that before the invention of contacts, you could be confident that the striking young gentleman or beautiful lady's blue eyes were for real. In 1985 (if you weren't born yet, shut up) there was a western that I ACTUALLY WATCHED AND LIKED called Silverado. It's main purpose seemed to cram in every actor and actress currently popular for some kind of story and lots of shooting. 

But there was one young actor and... I don't OMG and I don't think OMG even existed back then, but O.M.G. this guy had THE BLUEST eyes I had ever seen and he was gorgeous to boot - when it turned out he was a nasty bad guy I actually booed. But from then on, no matter how bad the movie, I watched everything he was in that I could find. 

His name is Jeff Fahey. Nowadays his roles seem to be as the corporate bad guy, the scruffy bad guy, the western bad guy (again), and, kind of like Tom Savini, seems to be around to appear in movies where he's there for, oh, five minutes tops, two of those with Michael Biehn (John Conner's dad in the Terminator movies). He's still doing that - the last movie I saw both him and Biehn (for two minutes) was in the movie Sushi Girl but that's coming later. Jeff's eyes may have faded just a bit but they are still striking and yes, I have had a movie crush on the guy since Silverado.


Long story short (way WAY too late) there's only one more actor with eyes that beat his - Elijah Wood. Okay now you can OMG. I'd seen him around... somewhere, but in Lord Of The Rings (those constant closeups of his cherubic face helped) those blue eyes looked enormous and the color of - huh, I tried to look up what the bluest blue in the world is and I got a bunch of links about Crater Lake, Oregon (I've been there several times, and it is gorgeous) so I'll guess it'll have to do or at least come close. Those eyes are something you could stare at for years.

The movie? You should know by now the movie is just coincidental to my rambling. In 1980 a gruesome and stupid horror movie came out called Maniac about a guy off his nut in NY, going around killing girls, scalping them and putting the hair on mannequins in his apartment to, I don't know, re-create his dead mother or something. She was a whore and constantly made him miserable so he starts killing after her death. It was horrible then (starring Joe Spinell who unfortunately died early at 52) and even featured Tom Savini (billed as 'disco boy') and I don't want to watch it now.

But I guess I just did. For some ungodly reason, Elijah Wood did a remake of this movie. It. Was. Horrible. It was embarrassing. And worst of all, for some other ungodly reason they decides to show most of it from Frank Zito's (Elijah Wood) POV, meaning you don't even get to SEE those blue eyes for a lot of the movie. If that was supposed to be clever, they failed.


Frank Zito is a mentally disturbed young man who has taken over his family's mannequin sales business after the recent death of his mother, who also moonlighted as a prostitute. Frank's childhood experiences of seeing his mother bring home clients or being taken out with her to turn tricks has left Frank unable to enter into meaningful relationships with women, and his sexual impulses tend to manifest themselves as violent urges that Frank externalizes as his mother's will. Struggling to come to grips with his mother's treatment of him, and spurred by memories of his mother brushing her hair before going out at night, Frank stalks, murders, and scalps a woman one night, attaching her hair to a mannequin that he then keeps in his bedroom.

Aaaand there's your movie. Lather, rinse, repeat. The act of scalping them was pretty well (and bloodily) done, putting those bloody things (literally) on dummy heads, going to get another one. Wow, what a riveting story. Oh but wait - there's the artist who's gonna redeem him, right? Photographer Anna (Nora Arnezeder, a French actress) takes pictures of his mannequins (the non-bloody, non-scalpy ones) and asks if she can use some of them in her exhibit. He reluctantly says yes and so she does - and puts her face on every one of them. Vain much? Seeing her all over the room makes Frank really, really nervous and really, really, murdery. Hey, my blog, my vocabulary, shut up.

So will Frank resist the kill and go for the, uh, love? This is a slasher flick, what do you think? He actually gets worse, scalping one woman while she's still alive (a flinch-worthy scene I must admit). Finally he goes after Anna - but kidnaps her instead of his usual MO. In a really REALLY movie DUH scene she escapes, gets in a car that hits Frank, then crashes, sending Anna through the windshield (because in France apparently they have neither seatbelts nor safety glass). Frank is messed up, but hobbles over and scalps Anna as she dies.

Her scalp takes its place of honor on a mannequin in a wedding dress. And we get some weird LSD-like experience of Frank, as he's dying, believing the mannequins all come alive to tear him apart, revealing him to actually be a mannequin himself, while his 'love' in the wedding dress turns her back on him. Later the cops crash into his apartment but he's already dead, somehow making it into the closet. YAWN.

I would say I hope that's the last bad decision Wood makes, but he currently stars in a TV show with a human in a dog costume so... yeah.

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HIGHER EDUCATION WILL KILL YOU

The Demon Within
aka The Sculptress (2000)

This is a cautionary tale: If you are French and want to study art in San Francisco, don't come crying to me when you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Seriously. And Jeff Fahey what the hell? You're seriously trying my willingness to watch a movie because of who's in it. Am I being really really silly chiding a man for starring in a 13 year old movie? Yes. Yes I am.

For those not familiar with Mr. Fahey, I first noticed those incredible baby blue eyes of his when he played the greasy (but gorgeous thank you very much) Deputy Tyree in the star-studded Western-when-Westerns-weren't-cool Silverado, a movie that also boasted the likes of Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Costner, and Linda Hunt, just to name a few. It was one of my faves in 1985 and probably the only Western I'd seen on purpose in my whole life.

So I'm a Fahey fan - it was a trio in the 80's and 90's - him, Rutger Hauer and Clayton Rohner. So sue me. Everything they were in, I absorbed. Now I see them and think shit, what happened? Then I look in a mirror and think oh yeah, it's been almost thirty years and hey, they all still look pretty damn good. Better than me, that's for sure. Scruffy and all. Can you tell I really don't want to get into this movie? If they've gotta name it twice just to get people to see it, it's a pretty good indication it's going to suck. If it has mostly people you've never heard of, suck suck suck suck suck.

So Sarah is in an art class in San Francisco but she has a real problem (besides being from France and able to afford an apartment as well as enrolled in a prestigious art school with no discernible income). One, she apparently has a psychopath living next to her. Two, the devil wants her. More specifically he wants the psycho to have a baby with her and boom, demon child. But small problem (pun intended). The psycho, Matthew (Jeff Fahey looking like he's either totally drunk or stoned through the whole movie - sorry Jeff) is an <takes deep breath> ex-Catholic priest who is also impotent and thus incapable of having sex with all the little boys - oops, sorry, wrong sin - girls he pursues so he kills them. Whew. 

So according to movie rules, Satan has to do the dirty deed himself. Well, not himself, he has to use an incubus. And if she's a virgin <laughs into sleeve> the woman becomes a succubus (oh really - must be rules just for this movie) and will have a demon child.


So Matthew kills, Sarah sculpts the victims while in a fugue state and the teacher meddles where he ought not. Sounds about right. Since Sarah is a Catholic, of course she turns to - well first she turns to a medium, tarot cards and books about meditation and her teacher. THEN she turns to the church. Meanwhile Matthew, who hadn't been aware of Sarah before is getting massively irritated by her constant chiseling (she's chiseling clay with a bang bang sound like it's marble or something - DUH) then discovers she's his 'type' and installs a peeper's camera so he can - well, he can't do anything, can he?

So Sarah has an ultimate choice - die or become possessed. At least according to one of the millions of dependable mediums practicing out there <laughs into sleeve again>. Matthew decides to pursue her and chases her down to the bay. Um, I've been to San Francisco and I know where the art institute is (although they show a different building so maybe...) and folks, it is miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. But <shrugs> that is where they are and that is where he manages to dump her into the water - but not before she stares up at - something that has a gargoyle on it (one of the things she sculpted while in a trance). 

Um, I'm sorry but I was all over there and nothing like that was anywhere NEAR it unless my mind is seriously lacking (which cannot be ruled out). She stares, Matthew attacks, glub glub.

Sarah's apartment is now empty so time has passed. Matthew is still scheming and screaming at himself as he wants and can't have more women. Then he keeps hearing the sound of a chisel. Through the hole in the wall he sees nothing. But he keeps hearing it (a chisel is pretty loud against clay you know) and he can't resist - he climbs through the window. Nothing. Until he turns around and sees her. 

Sarah is standing there naked (demurely so, apparently Succubi have modesty) looking like a statue herself. Until her glowing eyes open and he screams like a little girl. Our final scene is Sarah speaking to someone from her apartment in France where she apparently has found fame. And a sperm donor. Sarah is very pregnant and we know what that means, right? Right? WAKE UP!!!