You were right, Billdude.
Mandy (2018)
I'll just hand it over to Billdude.
From here...
I don't know if you've already seen this movie, or were planning on seeing it, and I'm going to have to watch it a second time to really be sure, but the critically acclaimed 2018 Nicolas Cage film "Mandy" is possibly one of the nine or ten worst movies I've ever seen in my life and the worst I've seen in the last five or six years, worse even than "Suicide Squad," "The Dark Tower" and "Hesher."
More on this later.
...and here...
Go ahead and see it if you want, obvs.--YMMV.
But for me, it was like someone took a 14 year old heavy metal fanatic, showed him a few David Lynch dream sequences, used CIA brainwashing techniques to make him think he was the new auteur director, gave him tens of millions of dollars to make a movie with, and then made him make a dumb super violent crazy Nicolas Cage revenge thriller.
The movie is drenched in bright red neon nightmare light; it's supposed to make you think of Lynch and nightmares but just makes it look like the whole damn thing was filmed inside an active volcano's lava lake.
The soundtrack is creepy string drones and sudden deafening noise blasts--again, a bit like any dark scene from "Mulholland Dr." but just repetitive and annoying.
The acting: Linus Roache (Bruce Wayne's dad from "Batman Begins") plays some creepy Jesus-Manson-LSD cult leader who leads some freaks (and some "Hellraiser" style psycho bikers) to kill Nicolas Cage's wife. He looks like a 1970s rock star and generally tries to conjure up Lynch demons like Willem Dafoe or Dennis Hopper (the Hopper line from Blue Velvet "DON'T YOU F***ING LOOK AT ME!!!" is used.) He could have been good, but the director gave him these long monologues that just bore you to tears because there's nothing of substance whatsoever in them.
Nicolas Cage meanwhile is totally dormant for the first hour of the film, then once the wife is killed, he just does his usual psycho raving crap, all of which go in the "Nic Cage Loses His S***" reel on Youtube.
The style: it's all crazy evil violent stuff from frame one to the end, it's set in 1983 Pacific Northwest for little discernable reason, and--again, like Lynch--the writer-director likes to throw in "whacky" ironic comedy moments like having Cage yell "Ya ripped mah SHIRT!!! Ya ripped mah SHIRT!!!" during a fight, or intertitles that look like 1970s/80s band logos, or other "badass" stuff. The end results comes far closer to "Hudson Hawk" than Lynch. Death scenes are, of course, as gory and torturous as you could imagine.
If I were still 12, this movie might have had some effect on me, but I thought it was beyond awful and the critical acclaim is inexplicable to me.
Again, your mileage may vary, but for me this is a new Zero.
Yep, all of that.
All of that happens in the flick.
And all of that for my experience with it too.
Except it's not my worst of all time, I've seen worse.
But not much worse.
I literally had to pop a couple Ibuprofin when it was over.
The annoying score, and annoying red lighting made me subliminally squint and brow furrow for the whole two hours, and it turned into a tension headache in my forehead and eyeballs.
Ugh.
Give this shitfest a pass.
If you want a grindhouse revenge movie, watch "I Spit On Your Grave".
You get a skinny weird looking chick with big poofy hair just like the chick who plays the titular Mandy, but she doesn't die, she gets her own revenge, and there's not all the pretentious pseudo-Lynch bullshit, and you don't get a stupid cult leader flapping his yap for long boring stupid monologues.
Okay, one thing I liked.
The Cheddar Goblin.
I wanted Nick Cage to have to fight the Cheddar Goblin.
He doesn't.
Worth skipping it for that alone.
There you go, Panos Cosmatos!
Make a whole spinoff movie about Cheddar Goblin!!
That I might enjoy!!
No, it's you, so you'd ruin it.
Let James Gunn direct a Cheddar Goblin movie, and accept half writing credit.
Previously-
Thursday, August 8, 2019
"Mandy", sucks. (MM #118)
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2 comments:
It also ripped off "Hellraiser" for those biker guys. Didn't it?
Again: WHY WAS IT F***ING SET IN 1983?!? Because of "Stranger Things"?
King Crimson's "Starless" plays over the opening credits. Somebody alert %Legion%. That was the best moment of the movie by far. They even threw a mention of it in the opening credits: "Opening Credits Theme: "Starless" performed by KING CRIMSON"
Well, at least Robert Fripp got some royalties, so he can put out another 20 disc club-only box set of live performances from the 70s. That's nice. But critics must get really bored with dumb lameass Adam Sandler comedies and crap if something like this jolts them into giving it an 81 on Metacritic.
I watched the original "King Kong." The movie director character guy is a bigger asshole than the Mr. Burns parody of the guy on The Simpsons! When he says "Nah, it was beauty killed the beast" at the end it was like he was saying "yep, that's a big dead ape in front of me, anyone want to go get some coffee?"
Re: Cenobyte bikers.
Oh, yeah!! Them too!!
Yeah, they were a waste.
First, they're nigh invincible when they're required to capture the wife, then they become as weak as Goombas in Mario when they're required to die at the hands of Nick Cage.
Also, they never let you have a good look at the female one with the greasy skin mask.
I couldn't figure out what her deal was until the light hit her just right, and I squinted just right.
A makeup guy busted his ass on that, and they hid it in darkness.
Well, maybe it actually looked awful head on.
*Shrug*
Re: 1983.
Yep, Stranger Things.
Everyone's cashing in on it.
Re: King Crimson.
Yes!!!
I saw that, and went "well, why didn't BD love it just for that??".
And then the rest of the movie happened, and I was like "oh...".
Re: King-Kong.
Everything was horrible in the 30's.
Until Superman.
Movies and radio were dominated by pro-racist, pro-imperialist, PT Barnum style animal exploitation, toxic masculinity bullshit.
Superman, the voice of the streets and the left started to sneak back in, and things balanced back out a little.
For a little while.
Until the comics code.
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