Kilmerthon: Blind Horizon (2003)

 

All Kilmerthon reviews are sorted under the label "Val Kilmer".

 

Out of 5:

Story: ⭐⭐⭐

Dialogue: ⭐⭐

Characters: ⭐⭐⭐

Visuals:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Soul:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Kilmer:⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Watched Aug 2, 2024

I actually really enjoyed this movie, but part of me wonders if I’m just starved for movies with intentional design. I recently came off of a very high vitamin D prescription meant to amend a vitamin D deficiency. This movie felt like that prescription, going gloriously overboard in both visual and auditory departments. In a contemporary amateur cinema landscape that’s in love with run-and-gun filming and shooting on locations that require zero additional set decoration, this was a much-appreciated change of pace. (I fear for my future aspirations of being a production designer haha)

 

Blind Horizon, essentially, is Will Wemer’s Paris, Texas but with an assassination subplot. That’s what it is. A man found unconscious in the Texas dessert wakes up from a coma with amnesia and no memory of who he is, but he does have one strong conviction – someone is about to make an attempt at the president’s life. Constrained to the small town setting of Blackpoint, Val Kilmer’s character Frank attempts to figure out who he is while the sheriff attempts to put the pieces of Frank’s attempted murder together, slowly realizing that Frank’s fears might not be entirely unfounded.

 

Now, I loved Paris, Texas, so I’m down with a thriller rip-off. I was hoping to find some hidden gems in this endeavour and this may be one of them. And it seems like doctor/detective/agent characters are a recurring theme in Kilmer’s filmography so I guess I better develop a taste of this genre.

 

I think Sam Shepard and Noble Willington had good on-screen chemistry and their characters, especially Shepard's, offers a grounding element of normalcy when compared to the very destabilizing scenes told from Frank’s point of view. The sheriff stands in for the audience, and we're trying to figure out everything alongside him. I’ll always question the realism of a Columbo-esque cop who genuinely cares about doing his job right but hey, movies are for escapism.

 

The last act reveal/plot twist was not as complex as the flashbacks set it up to be, in my opinion. I love a movie that gives me a puzzle to solves, but I don’t think I was given particularly useful pieces – the relevancy of the pieces mostly came after the reveal of their punchlines.

 

As for Kilmer in this movie, I think he blended into the dusty landscape surprisingly well. He’s amnesiac throughout most of the movie and so carries this Little Boy Lost demeanour, which can either be done well or not well… I give his depiction a 5/10. Again, I feel Paris, Texas is a better example.

 

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I’d stick my neck out for it. It didn’t bring a ton of new offerings to the table but at the very least, I found it memorable – I feel like these low budget efforts are often doomed by being super forgettable, a fate far worse than being “bad”, in my opinion. I have to give props to director Michael Haussman for taking his cool 5mil and trying to do something interesting with it. I feel like this is a rough gem.

 

Kilmerthon: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

NOTE: All future Kilmerthon reviews will be sorted under the label "Val Kilmer".

I regret not recording my thoughts back when I was watching all those Baldwin movies so, as long as I've got a similar fascination with Val Kilmer, I'm gonna try to do that, even if they're fairly brief and marred by my own personal biases.

Out of 5:

Story:⭐⭐

Dialogue:⭐

Characters: ⭐⭐

Visuals:⭐⭐⭐

Soul:⭐

Kilmer:⭐⭐⭐

 

This film is the epitome of not giving a damn. As a furry I came into it with an open mind - H.G. Wells' novel is arguably one of the first pieces of furry literature, so as a furry I hoped I'd be able to glean something from it.

I'm not good with movie analysis so I'll just give my thoughts straight up:

I'm honestly not sure what tone they were going for. If they were going for grindhouse I think they muddied it with an attempted sympathetic protagonist and romance subplot. The costumes were actually pretty good but not good enough to warrant a viewing based on that alone. Everything else besides the visuals felt woefully underbaked. Like, oozing raw batter underbaked. I could see attempts at deeper character development, but they were never committed to. The biggest problem in terms of story, I feel, is that this narrative demands at least a little introspection - Wells' novel is ultimately an allegory for the cruelty of humankind, but the movie approaches the subject matter in the most shallow terms possible (mutants with machine guns). So yeah. Even as a furry, I was not a huge fan.

 

Was this movie worth it to a fan of Val Kilmer? Sure. He does not give a fuck here and as a result I think a decent amount of his true arrogant self shines through under the crappy dialogue, which at the very least gives the film a bit of energy. There was also this weird sexual tension between Montgomery and Douglas during the first half that worked well as a set of jangling keys to get me through some of the more grating moments.

I'm unreasonably empathetic and often feel bad for good actors stuck in crappy roles but Val looked like he was making the best out of a crumby situation. His character was high for most of his final act but part of me wonders if that wasn't get Val using the excuse of method acting to make the process a bit less painful.

There's a scene 54 minutes in that I Christened The Only Good 30 Seconds In This Movie where a shirtless Kilmer with a flask and walkman tucked into his shorts gives David Thewlis a nice view of his junk while smoking a blunt and admitting he's had sex with a pig lady.

I haven't really done much research into production issues so I can't tell you what went down with any certainty, but I imagine the rocky production contributed to the downer vibe of this movie and my incredibly low SOUL rating. This is the movie that convinced me that my personal Movie Soul rating should be a quantifiable rating in all my future reviews.

Movies either feel soulful or soulless to me. Movies are a medium inherently tied to humanity - they are works of humanity reflecting back how we view ourselves in times of crisis and peace. The SOUL rating is not neccisarily a rating of how humanistic a given movie is, but rather, if it attempts to say something considered about humanity and if that was one of the main driving factors behind the story.

That's very convoluted and probably makes no sense. It's a gut feeling, It's a measure of whether or not a movie leaves me feeling empty inside. And this one did.

 

This movie was a sad orgasm achieved via some particularly shameful pornography. It got there in the end but nobody's happier for it.

If nothing else, I would love to give the original novel a read myself and see if I can't propose a better script. Time After Time (1979), a loose sci-fi adaptation of Wells' The Time Machine, is absolutely adorable and one of my favourite 70s movies, so a successful Wells adaptation is within the realm of possibility. But this one ain't it.

Making Myself Marginally Useful

 Womp womp. New carrd pertinent to this blog: https://zehrstapes.carrd.co/

So I've started a YouTube channel also called Zehrs Tapes where I'm actually uploading stuff. Mostly random home videos and rips of obscure movies and shows. It doesn't cost me anything to throw junk on there, so why not?

 YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_pXujcl5KvcuK8jE-nBEdg

Finally bought a VHS converter! It's my new pride and joy. I ripped Under the Hula Moon and uploaded it. Expect more Stephen Baldwin stuff. My man is a human car crash: awful, but I can't stop watching. NGL I'm kind of obsessed with this cute lil Angelfire site: https://www.angelfire.com/yt/stephenbaldwin/index.html

That's the latest iteration, which has remained unchanged since May 2004, but you should plug it into the Wayback machine and go back to 1999-2003 to actually view the site in its most complete form. I've been pruning through the movie reviews for new stuff to watch - or rather, find. Those films are in the weirdest places nowadays, scattered on every streaming service known to man. It feels like collecting the Infinity Gems, only there's no reward, cuz it's Stephen frickin Baldwin.

Anyway, this blog will probably turn into more of a resource dump, much like the YouTube channel, unless some particularly powerful poetry hits me and I feel like sharing it somewhere.

If I want to expand upon the memories relating to specific photos, videos or places, this is where those ramblings will go.

Until then, ramble on.

My current humble setup, feat. Moby the weevil (in the jar)

Finding The Flavour In Crackers

I'm currently contemplating an attempt to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, and that has me grappling with the truth that not everybody has delusions of grandeur. I haven't got theatre kid friends, so I'm left feeling rather misunderstood. At times I wonder if my parents raised me with the illusion that I can achieve anything but are now surprised that I actually believe it.

Anyway, I'm an artist who paints on Dollarama canvases. Quite literally. And my current mental project is to try and make a character out of Caledon, Ontario.

For a while now I've pondered making some sort of adaptation of the creepypasta 1999, which is about the only thing Caledon is known for, but that's a piece of history I don't think I'm equipped to tackle yet. If I want the setting to be a character, I have to build it. If Hollywood can set a hundred movies in Manhattan, I can set four in Caledon.

I'm convinced every Arcade Fire song is written about Caledon. They sing about the soul sucking dryness of suburbia depressingly well. If you live in a suburb without a car you may as well be in the middle of the Pacific without a paddle. Yeah, there's beauty if you look real hard, but there's also a lot of boys in camo pants and bass pro hats. That more than anything is why I might just move to Britain, even the remote places aren't that remote.

With small places, It's easy to pick out individual elements as opposed to vibes and customs, so I started compiling a mental list: the Cheltenham badlands. Traffic pylons. Italians. But you need to be careful. If all you have are copy-and-paste elements, you'll get a movie with all the local charm of Dudley Do-Right. I feel like Dogma does a good job of making a really white place look unique(...?). I dunno. There's small turns of phrase we grew up that are kinda unique, like "blacktop recess". Maybe that's grasping at straws.

My latest nebulous movie concept is Freak in a Beak, a humorous jab at folk horror. The idea hit me while watching The Passion of Darkly Noon. I feel like the constant demonization of the mentally ill in horror movies is something that shouldn't avoid scrutiny the way it does. I'm not great at comedy but damnit, I'll try. If 1994's Threesome is a comedy I feel like there's still hope for me.

I Am The Dwindled Son

This is a poem from an eclectic poetry book I had growing up, Poems of a Snow-Eyed country. All the poems were by Canadian poets, divided in chapters by geographical region. It has a pleasantly ramshackle vibe that I could never find in other poetry compilations. The book itself was a reject from an Etobicoke library, and at this point is filled with cryptic scribblings that I wrote in there in middle school.

Anyway, a lot of my favourite poems are in this book. One day I had the urge to read I Am The Dwindled Son, so I tried looking it up online. I'm used to finding Rabbie Burns poems with a quick Google search. But Dwindled Son wasn't online. At least, not yet. Besides the work of some of the more well-known poets like Leonard Cohen, I bet a lot of the poems in that book aren't online.

Ultimately the preservation of a lot of niche things comes down to individuals. Trash archivists, as I call them; not because what we archive is trash, but rather because the hoity-toities think that high culture is the only thing worth preserving. High culture will not survive the apocalypse. Besides maybe clowns. Street clowns are the true vanguard of anarchism, I will die on this hill.

Without further rambling, said poem:




I Am the Dwindled Son
by Alfred Desrochers

I am the dwindled son of a race of supermen,
The violent, strong, adventurous; from this strain
I take the northland homesickness which comes
With the grey days that autumn brings again.

All the fierce past of those coureurs de bois-
Hunters and trappers, raftsmen, lumberjacks,
Merchant-adventurers, labourers on hire-
Bids me to seek the North for half the year.

And I dream of going there as my fathers did:
I hear within me great white spaces crying
In the wastes they roamed, haloed by hurricanes:
And, as they did, I hate a master's chains.

When the tempest of disasters beat upon them,
They cursed the valley and they cursed the plain;
They cursed the wolves which robbed them of their wool:
Their maledictions dulled their pain.

But when the memory of a distant wife
Brusquely dispelled the scenes that faced these men,
They brushed their eyelids with the back of their sleeve
And their mouths chanted A la claire fontaine.

So well repeated to the echoing forests
This simple lay (where the wood-warbler tunes
On the highest branches his own plaintive song),
It mingles with my own most secret thoughts:

If I bend my back beneath invisible burdens
In the hubbub of bitter leavetakings,
And if, when thwarted or constrained, I feel
That urge to strike which clenched their massive fists;

If from these men, who never knew despair
And died even while they dreamed of conquering nature,
I take this sickly instinct for adventure
Beneath whose spell I sometimes fall, at night-

In this degenerate age of ours, I am like
The beech whose living sap was never drawn,
And I am leafed around by dead desires,
Dreaming of going forth as my fathers did.

But the faint words emitted by my voice
Remain: a rosebush, branches and a spring,
An oak, a warbler in a sheen of leaves;
And, as it did in my forefather's day,
In the mouth of him who was coureur de bois,

My joy or sorrow sings the landscape still.

Contextual Rogues: Movies Displaced in Time

Originally written 2021-10-15 but blogger was being an arse.

This isn’t a theory exactly, more a turn of phrase I created in an attempt to define an issue that arises when watching popular old movies. The issue of contextual rogues.

“Contextual spillover” is probably a better term but Contextual Rogue sounds cooler.

These are movies like The Godfather, Citizen Kane or Casablanca that are on every film student’s “100 MOVIES TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE” lists on IMDb. Movies you are encouraged the watch without being told why – “Just watch it, it’s fantastic, you’ll see what I mean.” While that might seem like a testament to a movie’s legacy, I feel like it encourages the viewer to ignore an integral part of many movies: the cultural context.

Right off the bat, this is not me complaining that everyone who doesn’t do hours of research before watching a movie is watching them “wrong”. I know that’s not a reasonable ask. But what I’d like to point out is that certain movies – the film buff favorites – have superseded their contexts.

Context is a cruel barrier in terms of how movies are perceived in later years, but I also understand that nothing exists in a vacuum and everything is a remix. Movies are informed by the eras and cultures they were made in, making them cultural time capsules of sorts. And if you need to do a deep dive on a movie for a research project, you quickly realize how much cultural influence informs movies. That all goes without saying, I guess. Of course movies are reflective of the cultures they’re made in. The “WHAT ARE THOOOSE??” joke in Black Panther was relevant at the time of its release but I won’t be surprised if in 50 years no one will remember the reference.

Back to Contextual Rogues: What do I mean that certain movies have superseded their contexts? What I mean is, how you discover a movie informs your first impression, and first impressions may be the only context you enter a movie with. If you are not forced to acknowledge some aspect of when, how, or by whom the movie was made, your interpretation could be wildly different than the filmmakers’ original intention.

I want to use some examples. Specifically, A Clockwork Orange and Boys in the Sand, both released in 1971.

When it first released, you could probably only see A Clockwork Orange at late night theatre viewings. Yes, it’s technically a dystopian future film, but in all other aspects it is a product of the time. If you bought a ticket to this film due to a scandalized review in your local paper, you knew what you were getting into. You are the intended viewer. I was not an intended viewer. Doesn’t mean I can’t watch it, but the filmmakers behind A Clockwork Orange did not make it with the intention of it being watched by 20 year olds in Toronto in the year 2020.

Back to the modern era. Let’s say your first exposure to A Clockwork Orange is when one of your buddies in high school lends you a flash drive containing all his favorite horror movies. You save those to your PC and watch them indiscriminately. Your only context in that situation is that A Clockwork Orange is a “horror” movie. You know nothing of Stanley Kubrick, of Anthony Burgess, or the cultural climate that movie was made in. You are not one of those kids watching the movie in a shady cinema in Liverpool at midnight in 1971. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s a fact that I think is worth acknowledging, even just passively.

The means by which A Clockwork Orange was found and watched in this situation gives no indication of the cultural context. Its popularity and notoriety have reached a point where you do not need to have an interest in dystopian or experimental cinema in order to find it. Maybe Kubrick wanted to create a gripping and surrealist commentary on society and issues of humanism, but all you went into it hoping for was a good horror movie.

Personally, I found out about A Clockwork Orange through WatchMojo videos around 2013. I didn’t watch it in full until much later but I had no real context for it in the beginning either.

I’ll come back to this later, but what I’m saying is, most movies are obscure. Most movies are obscure. Most movies exist within their own pigeonholes, but a select few have gotten popular enough that they’ve flown the coop. Or flown the dovecote, rather.

The next example I had was Boys in the Sand. I admit this is a recent fascination… but whatever.

Boys in the Sand is a gay porn film. A culturally significant one, to be sure, but still, a porn film. It is not a movie your high school English teacher would recommend to you. It is not a movie anyone outside very specific online forums would recommend to you. Unless you were an 80’s kid home alone watching your dad’s secret tape collection I highly doubt you’d stumble across it by accident. Boys in the Sand (I’m shortening it to Boys) exists in a pigeonhole – the Gay Porn pigeonhole. I did not find it watching WatchMojo, I found it by scrolling through a twitter account that posts vintage gay porn. My expectations were immediately tempered by the environment I was in. To find A Clockwork Orange, all I had to do was watch some random youtube videos when I was 13. To find Boys in the Sand, I needed to be actively looking for gay porn.

Boys in the Sand is not a Contextual Rogue. It is not mainstream, which I think helps preserve its historical context. Because it isn’t mainstream, you do not have a whole swath of people instinctively filtering their perception of the movie through a 21st century lens and posting lengthy video essays about it on YouTube. Which I suppose is unfortunate in some ways, since pornography is its own fascinating reflection of culture and is worthy of study, but I know it has plenty of its own dedicated scholars.

Anyway, the concept I’m trying to define here is very vague, but it’s been on my mind for a while now, the idea that all these “classic” movies are now strangers in strange lands, original meanings lost to time.

Or maybe this whole thing was just an excuse for me to talk about Boys in the Sand cuz I’m currently enraptured by it. I’d never seen gay porn shot before the 2010s before that. I knew once I got into Soft Cell that I had an innate fascination with retro queer culture, so I feel like I’m on the precipice of a rabbit hole. lol. I love how part 2 starts out with a totally logical setup and then BAM, Bath Bomb Boyfriend. That Casey Donovan ain’t too shabby looking, either. I’m not huge into buff dudes but they look good on their knees. Him in part 3... holy shit. If that’s not an art, I don’t know what is.

Also the camera’s keen focus on the male member has inspired me to try and use a slinky to create a packer with more realistic physics. Wish me luck.

Rest in power, Casey.

Bolton Fall Fair, but more morbid than usual

I went to the Bolton Fall Fair last weekend, braving covid and pubescent boys in camo pants in an attempt to ride The Scrambler and get some artistic photos. The Scrambler has been there so long I know exactly how to hook myself in and hook myself out all by myself. My brother wasn’t in the mood this year so I went solo.                                                                                                                                                                   Anyway, shit has been happening, if you haven’t heard. Things rarely depress me – I tend to just go all Doctor My Eyes and become numb to prevent myself from feeling any negative emotions. I think it’s maybe the British heritage. Anyway, this whole fair felt like a Doctor My Eyes moment.                                                                                                                                                                   Canada is still in performative mourning after the “discovery” of countless child graves associated with Indian Residential Schools. (I’m posting this on the first annual Truth and Reconciliation Day. I remember I used to gawk at the fact that Australia has a National Sorry Day but at least they’re actually trying to say sorry. I can’t help but think “reconciliation” is code for “getting the natives to forgive us”. They don’t owe colonizers forgiveness. I digress.) The flags have all been half-mast for what feels like 6+ months now – you can’t really be sure what they’re half-mast for anymore.                                                                                                                                                                    Anyway, there was this flashy new ride there, the Freak Out, and upon approaching it from the library I caught both the ride and the lowered flag at the perfect angle.                                                                                                                                                                  

It’s poetry in motion.                                                                                                                                                                    Another clip I captured was the Ferris wheel. I’m actually really bummed about the Ferris wheel – the model the fair used to have was the exact same model Childish Gambino and the teddy bear were riding in the 3005 music video, but alas, I knew that rickety old thing would be replaced eventually.                                                                                                                                                                   The Ferris wheel had its own speakers that were blaring music, mostly hits from 2020. And to preface this, covid is far from over – we recently entered the fourth wave – so this fair happened amid covid. And in a poetic stroke or morbid happenstance that I could not have scripted better, the Ferris wheel played Level of Concern, the song Twenty One Pilots wrote specifically about covid-induced anxiety. I wish the video I got was longer, but the ride operators were giving me looks.                                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                   The last decent image I got was a carnie taking a rest in his teacup ride, which I personally feel has huge “how tf am i an essential worker” vibes. This was near the end of Friday. night when things were winding down. I think his last rider was one little kid wearing noise-cancelling earmuffs, having a blast by himself. Me and you both, lil dude.                                                                                                                                                                  

The symbolism writes itself in this case, I think.