Change Your Image
Chrisball1981
Reviews
Bleeders (1997)
I feel sorry for the monsters
Nobody's written a review of this for a while, but never mind, so here I go. Got this for £1 second hand in a charity shop. This still represents mediocre value for money. My version was on DVD and has the title 'Hemoglobin' rather than 'Bleeders' or 'The Descendant' as some reviewers here. I've no idea if the different titles have different cuts. The cut I saw was pretty bad. The producers of this must have thought they'd lucked out for a while- the cast's actually quite good (including Rutger Hauer), the location's great- a spooky Canadian Island standing in for New England, and a script by 'Alien' writers Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset, borrowing heavily from HP Lovecraft. But the end product is naff.
Where id it all go wrong? Well, the first rule of making a monster movie is make the bloody monsters scary. The second rule is make the bloody monsters scary. You get the idea. Well I saw these monsters and all I could think was 'I could kick their asses'. I'm not some macho meathead- I'm a 34 year-old nerd, but I could still kick those monsters' asses. They're weird inbred troglodytes descended from a family of 17th century aristocratic dutch perverts. They have messed-up faces and eat pickled corpses. They aren't vampires and can easily be harmed and killed by normal, conventional means such as knives, guns and boat propellers. They have strong arms, but move about by shuffling along on their butts because they DON'T HAVE ANY LEGS.
Yep. The 'terrifying' creatures in this movie are all seriously disabled and stalk their victims by walking on their hands and shuffling along on their asses, at a crawling pace. Plus they're deathly afraid of strong light. Their only weapons are small, stubby daggers made out of scraps of bone. The villagers, meanwhile are tooled up with a wide variety of high-powered firearms (that they somehow can't shoot straight) and have access to an endless variety of blades and blunt implements (that they somehow choose not to use).
Seriously. If I was in this movie, I'd have just sat in the lighthouse and shot the freaks one by one as they struggled to climb the stairs. Even if I ran out of ammo, I could just throw heavy objects at them. If I ran out of heavy objects, I could still smack them on the head with a big stick as they butt-shuffled slowly towards me. If they broke the big stick, then I could still kick them in the face before they could reach me. they'd have to bite my foot off before they'd even stand a chance. The average 10-year old could beat up a dozen of these with a bit of effort and imagination.
In short, these poor creatures are actually considerably less threatening than the average dairy cow. They aren't scary monsters, they're just very sick, profoundly disabled adults. Watching this turkey, I felt more sympathy than fear for these unfortunate individuals. They do not make the grade as antagonists of a monster movie.
Sadly, this film isn't quite bad enough to make it an ironic comedy in the vein of 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'- or 'The Room'. It's just a bit rubbish.
Lemming (2005)
A bizarre 'postmodern' tribute to David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'.
I watched this movie on TV with no expectations other than that the premise sounded interesting. I'd previously seen the director's Earlier film 'Harry, he's here to help' & enjoyed it, but hadn't made the connection between the two when I watched 'Lemming'. However, I very quickly made many connections between this film & David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'.
A number of other reviewers on this site have noted the similar tone and common themes to some of the Lynch films, notably 'Mulholland Dr'. They seem to have missed the extent to which this film is a tribute to Lynch, and in particular 'Lost Highway'. Without wanting to spoil the plot of either, I'd just like to say that 'Lemming' can even be read as an unofficial companion piece or sequel to 'Lost Highway'.
'Lemming' takes 'Lost Highway''s dream-like premise of body-swapping souls doomed to repeat their struggle against each other throughout eternity and relocates it to a part of the south of France that looks all too much like the Californian setting of the movie it pays homage to. If my memory serves me right, the protagonists even live in a suburb called 'Bel Air'. Numerous scenes in the film directly reference 'Lost Highway', and even serve as a bizarre form of exposition for some of 'Lost Highway''s more surreal moments- footage taken by Alain's robotic helicopter in one sequence in 'Lemming' bears a striking resemblance to the grainy floating video footage on the mysterious video cassette sent to Fred & Renee in 'Lost Highway'. In 'Lemming' Alain watches footage of a lumberjack contest on late night TV with a sinister grin on his face, in apparent reference to the apparent axe-dismemberment of Renee in 'Lost Highway'.
I imagine that some people reading this will think I'm reading too much into a handful of scenes in 'Lemming' that accidentally or deliberately pay homage to David Lynch's Oeuvre- he's a very influential film maker after all. I held that view myself until I noticed that numerous characters in 'Lemming' were named in direct tribute to 'Lost Highway'. the main antagonists in 'Lemming are a couple named Richard and Alice. their equivalents in 'Lost Highway' are Dick (short for Richard if you didn't know that) and... Alice. Lemming's hero is named 'Alain Getty'. the hero of 'Lost Highway' was played by Bill Pullman until his body-swap, and thereafter by... Balthazar Getty.
That's only a taster of the inter-textual references between the two films. There are many more, as well as a few with David Lynch's other notable LA body-swap head-trip movie, the aforementioned 'Mulholland Dr', and others.
However, I actually very much enjoyed 'Lemming'- for the most part it feels like a very, very good piece of 'fan fiction', and the director, Dominik Moll manages to perfectly capture much of the atmosphere of David Lynch's film, without ever resorting to the level of graphic sex and violence found in the original. I've got nothing against graphic sex and violence when done properly, mind, but it was nice to see a surreal movie not relying on these to boost their audience for a change.
Watching 'Lemming' did feel a little bit like being subjected to a very lengthy 'postmodern' in-joke at times, but it was still fairly enjoyable, particularly Charlotte Rampling's typically brilliant & unsettling performance as 'Alice'. I'd recommend this film to fans of darkly humorous, surreal cinema in general, and in particular fans of David Lynch & 'Lost Highway', who'll hopefully have as much fun spotting the numerous references as I did.