The Canal (2014) 1h 32m

Ireland.  All I really know about it, from the top of my head, is the following:  A history of strong political discord and activism, potatoes, the WWE wrestler Sheamus, and the stereotype of Boston police being Irish.  I'm sure there's more but right now I'm too lazy to attempt to recall additional info.  Why am I even rambling about Ireland right now?  It's because today's film comes from the Emerald Isles!

The Canal focuses on a family of three, at least until they become a family of two.  The husband, in the course of his archivist work, finds that their home has a history of strange murders in it.  In his paranoid husband work he finds his wife having an affair.  After stumbling into a toilet that makes Trainspotting blush, he sees a strange man attack his cheating wife.  Unable to save her, or stay conscious, he comes to and calls the police.  The cops assume it's him, he begins to think it's the ghost of a man that haunts his house, and his sanity seems to dangle from a thread.  Was it ghosts?  Was it his own cracking mental state?  Was it a ghost that flew up his ass and used him like a murder puppet?  This is where I would make a "C-anal" joke but I'm trying to avoid it.

 There's the old adage of "children should be seen and not heard," and when it comes to celluloid there are definitely some kids that I feel should not have been given the opportunity to be on film.  I bring this up because the child in The Canal has perfected his mumble-core acting at such a young age that it ruined scenes for me.  I didn't even have an issue with his accent, just his annunciation of words.  Plus he's one of those kids that his acting just doesn't seem to fit the emotion of the moment.  I feel bad for talking shit on him though because he's young so there's a lot of room for improvement over time.  Hang in there kid!

One thing that I did love about this film was the very ending of it.  I mention time and time again on here when a movie tips its hand and I see the ending coming early but the very end of this film caught me by surprised and I got super hyped on it.  Honestly.  It went down and I yelled "OOOOOOOO RAD!" at the TV, and then the movie was over.  This isn't the kind of film though where I could just tell you to watch the ending though because the whole is greater than some of its parts.  I'm not saying this is a perfect film, it reminded me a bit too much of the first season of American Horror Story, but I'm not going to write this one off.

I give The Canal 2.5 flags of Ireland out of 5:

The Fly (1958) 1h 34m

I remember, as a kid, seeing parts of The Fly remake.  Where Jeff Goldblum mutates and vomits on things and then puts a shotgun muzzle to his fly head while begging for death and looking gross.  It's a far cry from his open shirt sexy lounging pose in Jurassic Park, or his weird alien acting in Earth Girls Are Easy.  But we're not talking about him anymore.  We're talking about the original with Vincent Price and some other people I might never care about.

If you're unfamiliar with it, The Fly is science gone wrong.  We start with a woman running from a body with the head and arm crushed in some sort of machine press.  She then calls Vincent Price (because who the fuck else would you call in this situation) to say she just murdered his brother/her husband.  We're then told the story leading up to that moment.

Her husband creates some a form of matter transfer and while testing it on himself a fly is also in the chamber and they swap some DNA.  The man becomes more fly-like, and the fly becomes more man-like.  We don't see this happen, instead our experimenter keeps his head under cloth and his arm hidden in his coat.  We eventually see the fly arm and then a reveal of the head where his wife somehow elicits the same scream of indiscriminate emotion over and over.  As he loses his rational mind to the fly part of him, he begs her to help with his suicide.  After he writes "love you" on a chalk board she seems to think that it's okay to then do this.  It's just one of those weird moments where you see the character rationalize it in their head in that moment.  It's awkward.

This movie has one of the most annoying kid actors I've ever seen in a film.  He had to have been a stage-trained actor because everything he said was slow, loud, and over enunciated.  He is also given a line in which he says "...you know how women are."  You're fucking eight!  You don't know how women are!  How much tail has this kid been getting on the sly to be able to say that shit?  You know how women are?  They'll fuckin' send you to your room and ground you for talkin' shit like that.

Also the husband/brother tested the machine on the family cat and it didn't succeed.  We just get cat meows from the air.  The moment he even looked at that cat I instantly wrote this guy off and was waiting for his death.  Fuck you fly man!  You got what you deserved for fucking with that cat!

I give The Fly a solid 3 pictures of Vincent Price from the Simpsons out of 5:

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