Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

We've all seen the movie a million times, a bunch of dumb college kids go camping and stumble across a mysterious spooky cabin, where they are then picked off one by one by some sort of monster or another. Heck, I just wrote about The Cabin in the Woods a few days ago, which was pretty much the ultimate deconstruction of the genre.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil would actually make a great double feature with The Cabin in the Woods. Though a much sillier movie than Cabin, Tucker & Dale also takes the premise of the camping kids getting killed and turns it on its head. This time, the rednecks aren't the enemy, the prejudice and hysteria of the stupid kids is the real killer.

Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) are two good hearted best friends who also happen to be rednecks going on a vacation to a run-down old cabin that Tucker bought with the intention of fixing up. On the way, they encounter the group of college kids, who believe them to be scary inbred hillbilly murderers. When one of the kids, Allison (30 Rock's Katrina Bowden), falls off a dock and hurts her head on a rock, Tucker and Dale rescue her and take her back to the cabin to fix her up. The kids think she's been kidnapped and taken to a torture dungeon or something, and in a panicked attempt to rescue her, begin getting themselves violently killed one by one, through their own clumsiness and idiocy. Tucker and Dale can do nothing but watch these morons pick themselves off.

It's all very cleverly executed. Kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets The Ladykillers. Tucker and Dale are loveable guys, though a little dim. If you think teens behave stupidly in serious horror movies, wait until you see these kids. Their dumbness is exaggerated to a hilarious degree. It's nice to see southern stereotypes busted up a little bit, we northerners can be a little unfair.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is director Eli Craig's first film, and hopefully it will attain a cult status that will allow him to work some more. He put an interesting spin on well worn territory; not an easy task at all. This is a funny movie with a good heart and plenty of gore, in case the good heart is not enough for you.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies / OSS 117: Lost in Rio

I take back anything disparaging I might have said in my somewhat disappointed review of The Artist. Michel Hazanavicius is a GENIUS. I thought The Artist was fine, but after all the buzz and the hubbub, I walked out of it feeling pretty underwhelmed. But his spy spoof, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, and it's sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio are exactly my kind of movie.

I had known of these movies' existence for years, and had been interested in seeing them, but I had never made the connection that The Artist was directed by and starring the same guys, Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin.

OSS 117 is a spy spoof based on a long running series of French novels and movies that predates even James Bond. The agent in question is Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, who is basically all of the worst qualities of Sean Connery's James Bond pushed to hilarious extremes. He is cocky and arrogant, racist, sexist, and xenophobic, not all that smart, and incredibly lucky.

In the first film, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, Bonisseur de La Bath is sent to Cairo to investigate a missing fellow agent. While there he runs afoul of Nazis, Soviets, and Muslim extremists. Really, Muslims in general, after he beats the crap out of the guy who keeps him awake at night by ringing the early morning prayer bell. There are all of the ingredients of a good spy movie, cars, action, violence, betrayal, and girls, including Dujardin's The Artist costar, Berenice Bejo as Larmina.

Cairo, Nest of Spies is set in the late 1950's and Hazanavicius shoots it in the style of films from that time period. The camerawork, production design, and wardrobe are spot on. Of the old Bond movies, it is probably most visually similar to the first two, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.

The sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, follows Bonisseur de La Bath as he teams up with a sexy female Mossad agent in Brazil to hunt Nazi war criminals and recover a microfilm that would be damning to the French government. While there, he encounters vengeful Chinese, a foul-mouthed CIA agent, alligators, and hippies.

Like the previous film, Lost in Rio is also shot in the style of a film from the time period it is set in. This time around, it's set in 1967. One of the funniest running gags in the whole movie involves the extreme overuse of the slick split-screen editing style of such late 60's films as The Thomas Crown Affair.

After watching these movies, I'm convinced that Jean Dujardin is one of the funniest comedy actors in the world. Nobody on earth plays smug and self satisfied as hilariously as he does. He plays that up a bit in The Artist, too. Sometimes he smiles proudly to himself at a one-liner he makes, even when nobody is around to hear it. I also love what a terrible spy he is, completely ignorant of other cultures, politics, and even foreign languages. A joke that runs through both movies is that he doesn't know a word of any foreign languages. He learns to count to five in Arabic in the first one, and nods dumbly as the CIA agent endlessly insults him in English. He doesn't even seem to know what exactly the Nazis did that made them France's enemies. I also loved all the smaller details about his character, such as his disgust at the dust on Larmina's car.

I can't recommend the OSS 117 movies enough. They're smart and goofy at the same time, balancing high brow and low brow comedy pretty perfectly. I laughed a ton during both of them. Not only that, but I think they've improved my opinion of The Artist, too. Seeing it in context as a piece of Hazanavicius' body of work really helped. He was doing for silent movies of the 1920's what he did for spy movies of the 1960's with these, though the OSS 117 movies are considerably sillier. I now eagerly await whatever Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin have up their sleeves for us next.

Johnny Dangerously

Every, I don't know, 5 or 10 years, Hollywood decides it's once again time for a humorous pastiche of a bygone era of cinema. Usually those movies come and go without making much of a splash. Comedies are marketed towards youth, and the youth has little to no connection to or interest in the old days. But they always try, and hey, some of them are actually pretty good movies.

Johnny Dangerously is one of those movies that was on Comedy Central all the time in the late 90's. I don't believe I've ever seen the whole movie from beginning to end, but it's very possible that I've seen it in bits and pieces. I always enjoyed it, it's a really fun movie.

Made in the early 80's by director Amy Heckerling, Johnny Dangerously is the story of the rise of a prohibition-era Chicago gangster (played by Michael Keaton) who went into a life of crime to pay for his perpetually sick mother's medical bills. Meanwhile, his own brother (Griffin Dunne) is climbing the ranks of the District Attorney office. Not knowing that Johnny Dangerously (an alias) is his brother, he is determined to bring him in.

What follows is a fast paced barrage of silly sight gags and one liners, not unlike Airplane! or Top Secret!, the difference being that Dangerously plays them with a self aware wink at the audience, hell, even address the camera, whereas the humor of the Zucker comedies is found in the straight faced seriousness the actors play it with.

There's some really funny stuff in here. Michael Keaton is awesome as always, funny and mischievous and suave in the title role. Joe Piscopo found the role he was born to play: a cartoonish old timey gangster. Peter Boyle has some great stuff as Johnny's mentor. Maureen Stapleton gets some good material as Johnny's mother.

There are some great running gags throughout. I especially liked the bookends, where Johnny is telling his story to a kid at the pet store he now owns. Keaton is always maintaining his pet store business with the animals while he's talking, putting price tag stickers on dogs, polishing the turtles, etc.

When Johnny Dangerously begins the joke pacing is pretty fast and furious. Unfortunately, it can't sustain that rate through the entire running time. While still funny, the movie does gradually lose its steam as it goes. Some of the jokes are a little corny, but more gags hit than miss.

In my last few reviews, I notice that I've been throwing in another movie that might play as a good double feature with the one I'm reviewing. It wasn't intentional, it just happened that way, but I'm thinking of making it a regular feature of my reviews. Sort of a "if you like this, try these together" recommendation. With that in mind, I think Johnny Dangerously would play really well in a double bill with one of the Coen Brothers' most underrated films, The Hudsucker Proxy. Yes, that would make a pretty great movie night.

Black Dynamite

Spoofs are maybe the hardest subgenre of comedy to pull off. The Zucker brothers perfected it throughout the 80's with Airplane!, Top Secret!, Police Squad, and The Naked Gun. But at some point after that, the genre degraded into The Scary Movie series and even worse. They became a mindless string of fart jokes and obvious references to the previous year's blockbusters (usually with farts added). Then along came 2009's Black Dynamite, by Scott Sanders, a pitch perfect spoof of the Blaxploitation flicks from the early 70's.

Black Dynamite follows the mold set by the Zuckers with Airplane by having the actors play the movie completely seriously and letting the gags arise around them. In addition to that, it lovingly inhabits the genre that it's mocking, by including cheap production values, intentionally bad edits, and a hilariously on-the-nose soundtrack. In that way, it reminds me of the British TV show, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, in my opinion the best and funniest intentional replication of bad filmmaking ever made, something that is much, MUCH more difficult to believably achieve than it sounds.

Michael Jai White (formerly of the terrible Spawn movie from the 90's) co-wrote and stars as the titular hero, a kung-fu ladies' man with a license to kill. When his brother is killed over drugs, he makes it his goal to track down the people bringing the drugs into the city. In the process he uncovers a deeper conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

White is hilarious in the role. He really is impressive. He gets that for a movie like this to work, you have to play it straight. Never let the audience know you're joking.

I once heard an interview with "Weird Al" Yankovic, discussing his cameo in the original The Naked Gun. While on set, he believes that he actually witnessed the point when Leslie Nielson, so great in Airplane! and Police Squad, realized that he was being funny. He started playing the role differently after that, which was evident in the Naked Gun sequels and the million other spoofs Nielson became identified with throughout the years.

Anyway, this movie doesn't do that. I hear there's a sequel on the way, and I hope these guys understand why this one works so well.

I'm going to wrap this up now because I don't want to spoil any of the surprises Black Dynamite has in store. The jokes fly by at a rapid clip, making it one of the rare comedies that really does benefit from repeat viewing. This is a movie I plan on owning. A