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I used to just review them because I saw the m, and what else am I supposed to do, you know? I already saw it, might as well Write the fuckin review you know. I started to watch all the Dracula pictures, a ll the Chucky pictures, everything. I heard alot about this director, Larry Fessenden, who is some new york independent filmatist who has made a trilogy of pretentious horror movi es - NO TELLING, HABIT, and WENDIGO which got some good reviews when it played at a film festival here but I haven't seen it. First I checked out NO TELLING which is supposedly an "eco-horror" film and is about some dude doing weird experiments on animals. I was impres sed when I heard that he never graduates to experimenting on humans - t hat made it sound more realistic than most horror movies and that could be creepy. Unfortunately I only made it about 8 minutes into the movie before the community theater style acting made me throw in the towel. As far as I saw, the movie was just about couples standing around in a field talking about relationships. So I gave up on Larry Fessenden, but I forgot he directed HABIT and ende d up taking it home by accident. Basically it's the story of some dude right after he broke up with his girlfriend, who gets real drunk at a party and meets a new girl named Anne. She looks kinda like Winona Ryder or a cuter Ricki Lake during her petite elf period. Befor e he knows it she's givin him a hand job in the park and she bites his lip and sucks the blood. But he thinks nothing of it and keeps dating h er and you can see where it would go from there. The basic storyline is your generic vampire tale but the approach is a l ittle different. Mr Fessenden is obviously going for a very naturalist ic feel and with the exception of a few subjective type shots there is almost nothing clearly supernatural or stylized. It's mostly like one o f those movies about these fuckin egomaniac new york artist types and t heir dating scene and troubles with alcohol and all that shit. All the usual vampire shit is here, and some of it works real well in th is context, like when Anne says "Aren't you going to invite me in?" It seems like what she would say even if she wasn't a vampire and could en ter a household without permission. And of course they got the daylight , no reflection in the mirror, garlic, etc. And you get all the little double entendres where the dude says she has "a timeless quality," etc. Alot of it pounds you over the head but I think in general you could s ay the movie is subtle about its vampire story. Because there really is no overt mention of vampires until the very end and the final showdown takes up maybe ten minutes or less. There's also at least one obscure vampire detail, that she gets preoccup ied by knots. She looks much too innocent a nd cute to be a bloodsucker but during the sex scenes she turns believa bly animalistic. She still seems pretty real, though, enough that you b elieve he might be staying with her even if she didn't give him the han d job. The main dude is pretty good too and wouldn't you know it, he's played b y Larry Fessenden himself. At this point I've got to mention that this guy seems pretty full of himself and the movie is extremely pretentious . The biggest threat to the realistic feel of the movie is the dialogue , which often wanders off into preachify mode. The characters make litt le speeches about philosophy or the corruptive effect of pop culture on our society or what have you. Larry has to make a speech about his lat e father and he talks about how people said he wasn't an optimist, but he really was, and he believed this and that and blah blah fuckin blah. Larry is obviously just talking about Larry because this has no story or thematic purpose. You want to nudge Larry, tell him to drop the bull shit. Too often the characters have obnoxious conversations that must b e the independent filmatist's idea of sharing the interesting conversat ions he's had with his friends. It's not as bad as those first 8 minutes of NO TELLING though, and the a cting is better, so I was able to give him some leeway. Good thing it w asn't until the end that I saw the credit that says "Writer, Director, Sound and Picture Editor: Larry Fessenden". Or that he plays saxophone in the band that does alot of the music. Or that he narrates the traile r and describes himself as "Larry Fessenden, the acclaimed director of underground cult films." He also narrates a semi-interesting but preten tious making of documentary where he mentions the following directors: Stanley Kubrick, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Copolla, Les Blank, Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese, who he refers to as "Mar ty Scorsese," maybe because he worked with him, playing the role of "co kehead" in BRINGING OUT THE DEAD. I wouldn't compare HABIT to anything by those directors, but it does see m to be going for some of the same things George Romero did better year s ago in MARTIN. That was another realistic character drama in which on e character sucks blood and may or not be a supernatural vampire. It al so reminds me of DRILLER KILLER where Abel Ferrara directed himself as a similarly obnoxious new york artist type, although HABIT is better ma de and has more sympathetic characters. Although HABIT is only partly successful, I do admire what Larry was goi ng for. He may not be inventing a new genre, but at least he's trying s omething pretty uncommon, in a genre where retreads are considered pret ty acceptable. I'd rather see someone try something really pretentious than just cash in on whatever the horror fad is these days. Unless it's NADJA, man, give me I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER over NADJA a ny day. HALF PAST DEAD I don't know how to explain my fascination with Steven Seagal, but you c an read my review of ON DEADLY GROUND and maybe you'll understand. I do n't think the dude is exactly advancing the cause of Badass Cinema with his works, but I still enjoy every new chapter of his saga. This time around we find Seagal working with a young rapper named Ja Rul e, stealing cars for some European guy. Although Seagal may SEEM to be a mere car thief (or I guess, since he's Steven Seagal, an ex-CIA black ops car thief), it is heavily implied in the opening s cene that he MAY actually be some kind of undercover FBI agent. I don't want to give anything away though, who knows if he really is undercove r or not. Nobody really knows until they themselves have seen the movie . Of course, as soon as we've introduced the idea that Seagal MAY be FBI, he fondles his wedding ring and stares meaningfully out the window, so we know that he is still mourning the death of his wife. And in the ver y next scene he has a job that goes wrong and he gets shot and he and J a Rule end up in prison. By the way I forgot to mention that Seagal's name is Sasha, and he leave s his hair down instead of the traditional ponytail. At this point in the picture we realize that this takes place in the nea r future, when Alcatraz has been reopened under the futuristic name "Ne w Alcatraz." It is supposed to be a top of the line maximum security jo int but since it's new they make a few mistakes. For example when they' re loading the convicts in the screws don't mind that Seagal gets out o f line and just starts having a conversation with Ja Rule. Also, as soo n as they get through the metal detector they start boxing one of the s crews, and throw him through a bookshelf, and they don't get punished. I mean I guess it's some kind of futuristic liberal prison because they also got this kind of new agey hispanic warden in a leather jacket. He practically coddles the lovable old man who they are abou t to execute for accidentally killing 5 people during a train robbery. So luckily Seagal is there when Morris Chestnut and a bunch of other individuals with Columbine style weaponry and clot hing drop in with parachutes to try to kidnap the old man to find out w here he hid the gold that he stole during the futuristic train robbery that accidentally killed 5 people and put him on futuristic death row. When last we saw Morris Chestnut in the Seagalniverse, he was a m...
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