Pre-Show Countdown

8 Ways Final Destination 5 Is Exactly Like TV’s The Office

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1. The characters work at a paper company experiencing hard economic times, to the point where their department may be shut down.

2. The boss is kind of a clueless figurehead nobody respects.

3. A talented young man is slumming it by working there, and obviously would be happier employed in a more creative field …

4. … but stays because of mousy girlfriend who also works there, but isn’t slumming.

5. A nerd wrongly thinks he’s God’s gift to women who clearly are out of his league.

6. An African-American man suddenly lands in middle management, where he oversees the plant/warehouse area.

7. A possibly crazy employee quietly dates an intern.

8. Occasional appearances by David Koechner. —Rod Lott

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Confession Stand

Confession Stand with Dwight H. Little

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Dwight H. Little is the director of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Marked for Death and the new, live-action, video-game adaptation Tekken.

FLICK ATTACK: Where did the H go? The credits just read “Dwight Little.”

LITTLE: I think it was after Rapid Fire, maybe. I got bored with it.

FLICK ATTACK: It’s been a lot of years since your last feature, so why Tekken?

LITTLE: It was a chance to re-collaborate with Alan McElroy, the screenwriter, who I did Halloween 4 and Rapid Fire with, and he and I have a great, common creative interest and rapport. I thought the Tekken world was a great platform for a martial arts movie. I had some success with Marked for Death and Rapid Fire, and it looked like it was in my area of expertise.

FLICK ATTACK: Were you familiar with the video games at all?

LITTLE: Only in sort of a passing way. I wasn’t like a hardcore player, but my two boys are into it, so I get into it vicariously. There was a mythology about the family and the Tekken corporation like you get inspired by a short story or a novel. I also love the ever-changing, interactive fight designs, so that was visually interesting to me. I thought it’d be a way to freshen up the genre of a martial arts action movie.

FLICK ATTACK: So then how do approach turning a video game into a movie?

LITTLE: You look at the exiting source material and find the thing that makes you passionate or gets you excited. I made the movie like I would make Rocky or Gladiator: The goal is to make a good movie, not a good video game. You have to commit to the characters to keep viewers actively commited to the story. Poppy visuals are not going to do it for 100 minutes. Alan and I said, “You know what? Jin and his devil wings and the boxing kangaroo — let’s leave that for a CGI or an anime movie. Let’s leave these heavy supernatural items on the table.”

FLICK ATTACK: Are you disappointed it’s coming out on DVD instead of hitting theaters?

LITTLE: Sure, but that reflects the world we live in. This movie, made 10 years ago, obviously would have been released on 2,000 screens. To market and release a movie now national is a $35 million to $40 million commitment in marketing. Our world is changing so fast, but Tekken will be platformed on Blu-ray, on Redbox, on iTunes, on VOD and Netflix and pay-per-view, and that’s how movies go into the world unless it’s Warner Bros and they have that massive marketing muscle.

FLICK ATTACK: You know a movie of yours I really liked? The Phantom of the Opera.

LITTLE: That was a movie that really kind of opened and closed without generating much interest at the time. It’s kind of startling to me, because on DVD, I guess it’s found a second life. I guess the reason is that movie is artistically very odd. You take a Robert Englund slasher movie and kind of do a mash-up with a very literary, opera-art movie, and put those two movies together. A lot of people really didn’t like it, but other people loved it, so it’s a challenging movie. If you’re a straight-up slasher movie, you’re suddenly going to be watching Faust on stage at the Budapest opera — I like it because of that, because it’s unpredictable.

FLICK ATTACK: So you’ve directed Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers. In a fight between those two, who’d win?

LITTLE: Between Freddy and Michael … Freddy’s too smart. He would outsmart Michael.

FLICK ATTACK: I think Halloween 4 is among the best of the sequels, but you never got to do another one since.

LITTLE: I think it’s time, honestly, to put it to bed. What Alan and I did is we went back to John Carpenter’s movie and said, “What made this movie?” And we just looked at it over and over and it was Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. If you have that investment in the characters and you care about them, then everything else is going to fall into place. That’s a movie. I think people sometimes lose sight — it’s just like in Tekken: If you find your way into Jin and his dilemma and his search for vengance against his mother’s death, then the rest of it, you’ll just follow him into the world.

FLICK ATTACK: Yeah, but Tekken doesn’t have Kathleen Kinmont taking off her shirt.

LITTLE: Yeah. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

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When it first came out, the dark, beauty-pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous was largely dismissed as a fitfully amusing comedy that lacked the improvisatory spontaneity that made the Christopher Guest films that inspired it so unique and special. Today, the film remains rough in some spots, but deserves to be re-evaluated as the rare social satire that has managed to become even more culturally relevant.

A large part of this is due to Kirstie Alley’s performance as a local Minnesotan pageant director/former beauty queen, who is only too happy to resort to murder to get her daughter into the state finals of the Miss Sarah Rose Cosmetics Pageant. Back in 1999, it seemed like Alley was channeling the dark side of Fargo’s Marge Gunderson (if only because of her accent), but now, it’s impossible to watch and not immediately be reminded of that inexplicable conservative icon Sarah Palin.

This uncanny coincidence causes the film’s many jabs at conservative “family values” to take on a newfound and occasionally disturbing piquancy. What may have once seemed overly broad now seems unfortunately believable in an age where conservative leaders such as Palin seriously decry the practice of advocating vegetables over junk food to school kids as a form of socialist liberal propaganda.

It also helps that the film features wonderful early performances from several young actresses who have since gone on to become an Oscar nominee (a nearly unrecognizable Amy Adams, playing a blonde cheerleading sexpot), a blockbuster star (Kirsten Dunst in full-on adorable-saint mode), a tabloid/reality-show train wreck (Denise Richards, whose natural, on-camera vacancy is, for once, used to great comic effect) and a corpse (a sadly underused Brittany Murphy, who has the film’s best throwaway line when she cheerfully admits her parents only had her because her brother needed a kidney).

While still not up to the comedic levels of Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman or A Mighty Wind, Drop Dead Gorgeous deserves to be revisited if only to appreciate how much can change and stay the same in the span of a decade. —Allan Mott

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Action

The Rundown (2003)

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Coming not-so-fresh off The Scorpion King, wrestler-turned-actor The Rock (not yet billed as Dwayne Johnson) fully earned his action-hero credentials in the enjoyable comedic adventure romp The Rundown.

He plays a “retrieval expert,” which mostly means he collects gambling debts, by force if he has to, although he hates guns. Eager to get out of the biz, he’s cajoled into the requisite One Last Job: plucking the boss’ snot-nosed son (American Pie’s Seann William Scott) out of Brazil and bringing him back home to L.A. Scott, however, doesn’t want to go, seeing as how he’s stumbled on to a treasure he’s hidden in the jungle – a treasure also wanted by a group of rebels led by barmaid Rosario Dawson, as well as the poor city’s devious slave ring owner Christopher Walken, (who is, no shock, 100 percent pure Walken).

So The Rock and Scott get to bicker and spar like The Defiant Ones, forging a bond only out of necessity to stay alive. They find themselves in the middle of a machine-gun riot, at the mercy of hallucinogenic fruit and having their faces humped by crazed monkeys. Their greatest adversary proves to be Ernie Reyes Jr. (the Surf Ninjas star all grown up), who unleashes his “spinning Tarzan jujitsu” on The Rock, in not only the film’s best fight scene, but best scene, period.

I’m not so much surprised by how pleasurable The Rundown is to watch than I am how charismatic The Rock is on screen. He’s a natural, a logical heir to the throne of Arnold Schwarzenegger (who cameos early in the film to pass the torch, so to speak) and can dispense lines like “You’re threatening me? You’re threatening me with pee?” with note-perfect delivery. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Jigoku (1960)

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At a time before the word “horror” even had a translated equivalent in Japan, writer/director Nobuo Nakagawa gave the country something to be all shook up about: a cinematic trip to Hell, and one full of gore of that! Jigoku is a real freaker-outer, starting with credits that suggest an Asian 007 adventure, but only if the guy in the audio booth tripped and fell on every SFX button at once. Your ears will hate it.

But your eyes will love it! College student Shirô (Shigeru Amachi, The Tale of Zatoichi) is having a bad run, starting when a drunk yakuza fatally stumbles into path of the car in which Shirô is a passenger. Then his fiancée dies in a wreck, so he drowns his sorrows in the bodily fluids of prostitutes. Then his mom falls critically ill. Then he becomes partly responsible for the deaths of several more people.

Finally, with a little more than half an hour to spare in the running time, he goes to Hell. Worse, Buddhists believe in a Hell comprised of eight Hells, so buckle up! Upon arrival, he gets his throat pierced, has to view a Your Life’s Greatest Fuck-Ups reel and learns just how hot flames of eternity can be. Shirô gets the 25-cent tour and sees the newly dead being flayed, boiled and spiked for punishment — different strokes for different folks, all rather graphically depicted with lots of red acrylic paint.

Weird and wild, Jigoku does drag in the middle, kinda like life itself. But its Hell sequence — if one could call a third of a film a “sequence” — is quite something to see, from both a visual and a historical standpoint. I would’ve loved to witness how it went over with audiences upon release. However, if you want to see some really crazy Asian shit without the heavy-handed morality tale but with all of the “Huh?,” 1977’s Hausu is your best bet. —Rod Lott

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