I saw this a million years ago, back in what would have been
a rare trip to the movies, probably unsupervised because I know without a
shadow of a doubt that neither of my parents would have been dragged into a
theater to see this in a million years. In 1989 or 1990, I can't remember
which, I was deemed old enough to see movies on my own (a day I suspect my
parents had waited for for a very, very long time at that point). The
only problem was that I struggled to find rides to the theaters. When I found this in my Netflix streaming suggestions, I
remembered that I'd seen it. I remembered a few vague details:
Kevin Bacon with too much Einstein-crazy hair, the monsters that dwelt beneath the
surface of the planet, and I remembered that I hadn't liked the movie very much.
So, I was surprised when I started to enjoy myself.
Horror movies with a PG-13 rating are generally a hairy
bunch: not only not scary, but so much care has been made to extract
every single cent to be obtained from the widest possible teen market that the
film is boring. If you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you consider
trying to end your life with the straw from your Coke. I've been in that
position a few times, although not recently. Well, The Virginity Hit
was like a year ago and I had that brief thought back then.
Tremors doesn't
suffer from that. This movie, if viewed through a 12-year-old's eyes,
would have been pretty scary, the characters vibrant and a little funny.
In some ways, this reminds me, at least in spirit, of Scream, and if you
read my blog with any regularity, you KNOW how I feel about Scream. Even new, knowing
stuff was coming, I still jumped pretty frequently. I wasn't scared, but
they got my pulse racing a few times. Fun times, although not for the whole family, unless your family's a little dysfunctional, which is cool.
Jonah Hex. PG-13, 1 hr. 24 min. Directed by: Jimmy Hayward.
Release Date: June 18, 2010. DVD Release Date: October 12, 2010.
I walked in to this knowing that I was about to sit through
a comic book movie, which I normally enjoy, but my problem with this particular
sub-genre comes in to play when I’m faced with comic book movies made from
comics that I’ve never heard of before. Jonah Hex is one of those comics. I went through my comic book phase, although
I focused on Marvel superhero teams like The Avengers, Generation X (for about
three months), and especially The X-Men.
A scarred cowboy with a lisp and an ability to speak to the dead wasn’t
really going to be high on my list.
But, on the one hand, I loved the setting, which has
elements of a “what if?” America, in which technology was a little more
advanced post-Civil War than it was in the history books. Culturally, everything appeared right, but
the technology that we did see was years ahead of what it should be, without
explanation. I also thought that while
this wasn’t Josh Brolin at his Oscar-nom best, it was still a decent performance
within the parameters of the character.
On the other hand, I had about 40 minutes of dealing with
Megan Fox playing herself… more or less.
I’m not inferring that Megan Fox is a prostitute or anything like that,
but the personality we watch her is basically the personality we “see” when Megan
Fox is in front of a camera, but not acting a role. Sure of her appearance and its impact on the
men around her, a certain awareness of her sexuality, and a constant battle
with the fact that she’s not nearly as smart as she thinks she is. And since not once in the 84 minutes of this
movie was she actually showcasing her best… um, talents, that got old pretty
quickly.
I also had a problem with the story, which meanders its way
through a series of highly improbable events which the hero not only manages to survive,
but thrive within. There’s no magic, no
mutant powers, but apparently physics were taking a few days off. On top of that, it’s not all that interesting
OTHER than the setting. If this had
taken place in some other place in history, I wouldn’t have had anything I
enjoyed in this tale.
