Beneath The Mississippi (2008)

AUGUST 20, 2011

GENRE: CRAP, GHOST, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

I just looked over my list of “Crap” films on HMAD (refresher – films without any redeeming value whatsoever; the worst of the worst in other words), and I am hard-pressed to find a movie of less value than Beneath The Mississippi, which fails on nearly every level a film can be measured by. In fact, some of these films I should probably “de-tag”, especially the earlier ones in HMAD history as I was naively thinking it couldn’t get worse than things like They or The Breed (let alone harmless, forgettable junk like Pulse or Prey), but believe me, if 3-4 years from now I am reviewing something and saying “you know, in retrospect, Beneath The Mississippi wasn’t THAT bad”, I will quit on the spot.

Honestly, apart from a fairly decent main theme, there wasn’t anything even remotely approaching a decent movie here, or even a watchable one. Hell even in Dead Calling or Drive Thru (frequent punching bags) my reviews point out that at least there was a cute girl to look at or something, but this can’t even offer that much. And it’s not a slam on the actresses, it’s the fact that I can’t SEE THEM CLEARLY enough to judge whether or not they’re attractive or not. Just take a look at these screenshots:

Now, I didn’t go out of my way to find the worst of the worst, I just took them from 30 minute intervals in the film. You’ll notice the last one’s not THAT bad (still underexposed and poorly digitized/compressed), but guess what – that’s actually as best as it gets in the film, I think. Most resemble the others, where it’s so murky that it’s hard to even separate the character from the background, let alone any actual features. And yes, this is from Echo Bridge so it’s possible that the transfer is partially to blame, but with everything else in the movie clearly NOT the Bridge’s fault, I will side with them on this one and chalk it up to the filmmaker’s obvious incompetence.

What other problems, you might ask? Well how about the fact that the movie can’t even stick with one aspect ratio throughout its bloated 112 minute runtime? You get 2.35:1, 1:78:1, and some sort of approximation of 2.35:1 where the top portion and bottom portion of “black bars” aren’t evenly distributed, as if they did a mask over their footage in Final Cut Pro and didn’t bother to check to make sure it was even. To be fair, it DOES seem like there’s some sort of attempt to make this a creative decision, as one shot actually changes from 2.35 to 1.78 as a character dies (I think?) so maybe there’s some sort of “in the real world it’s 1.78 but in the hallucination world it’s 2.35” motif going on, but if so it’s a remarkably failed attempt at one, and if I hated myself enough to watch any part of this movie again I could probably debunk that anyway (in fact I know I can since the issue begins in the first few minutes, before they even set off on their trip let alone start going crazy).

At least, I THINK they are going crazy. I am not a deaf person (in fact my hearing is about my only sense that functions at 100%, I can usually hear my cell phone buried in my pants in another room while I’m watching TV in my pajamas!), but I think I know now what the world “sounds” like to those who have at least partial hearing left – it sounds like Beneath The Mississippi. The dialogue in the film doesn’t seem to be spoken, only muttered – only about 10% of the lines are clearly spoken and recorded. After the opening scene’s narration, at least 10-15 minutes went by before I could pick out another wholly discernible line of dialogue; even catching the character’s names took some effort. And some lines are clearly dubbed, so the filmmakers know how that process works, so I am baffled why they didn’t just re-dub the entire movie once it became clear that their sound guy was clearly drunk or working with malfunctioning equipment. I can understand a radio through a wall easier than the average scene in this movie.

In fact the movie inspired what will be my next week’s article for Badass Digest (I’m writing about Fright Night this week): taking pride in your work. Having just witnessed some of the post production issues on Chillerama, I understand that sometimes you just have to let stuff go because the time just isn’t there to do it the way you want (even with pointless stuff like my own credits – I wanted to do more animation with the full-screen credits for the four directors and the producers, but just wasn’t given enough time). But here’s the thing: Chillerama is premiering in two days and was bought up prior to completion by a major distribution company, with a release date in mind, whereas Mississippi was an independent film shot in 2004 and the movie was first released in July of 2011 (with a few festival screenings in 2008, as best as I can tell – their official website is maddeningly vague). Needless to say, I think they had time to go back and fix the sound, edit it properly so that room tone stayed consistent as they cut back and forth during a conversation, sync up the dubbed shots a bit better, etc. Hell I myself could improve this movie just using the DVD and my own personal (non-professional) computer, so there’s plenty of ways to improve it when they have the actual elements at their disposal. I'm sure they didn't INTEND their audio to be this awful, but the point is there was time to improve it, if not fix it entirely. And besides, being a primarily exterior film, ANY production would have known that ADR would be necessary as source sound would often be marred by things beyond control - i.e. planes, other boats, birds, etc.

They also could have edited it down a bit (or a lot). 112 minutes for a movie that’s essentially Blair Witch but with 6 people is ridiculous; even YellowBrickRoad came in much shorter. The one benefit to never having anything approaching coherent dialogue in your movie or a complicated plot (basically they go down the river, one disappears, the rest start freaking out and yelling at each other, one by one they die/disappear) is that you can literally just remove entire chunks of it and it won’t matter, because no one in the audience can probably understand much of what is happening anyway, nor have we been given enough reason to care about any of the characters to be upset if a slice-happy editor inadvertently removed the scene where they disappeared.

But dammit, I stuck with it. I would not let the unintelligible dialogue, the image so ugly that I was worried my TV might commit suicide, the laughably bad production value (a newspaper headline about the “Soul Survivor” of some tragedy is a particular highlight), or the basic fact that I hated it beat me! Sure, I had plenty of Xbox games to play and other movies/shows to watch, and could have just said “Fuck you”, thrown the disc in the trash, and watched some random Maneater movie on Netflix, but I was hellbent on making it all the way through. And this is great, because I then looked up the movie on IMDb and found that I seem to be the first person to actually watch the goddamn thing. Not only did it not have any external or user reviews, but it didn’t even have 5 VOTES yet (mine seems to be the 5th, in fact), and the only posts on its messageboard are from the director. The DVD has been out for a month and yet not even the usual trolls have bothered to chime in with their “worst movie ever!” insight (for once I might not even counter that they haven’t seen enough movies – I sure as hell have and I am contemplating slotting this as indeed the worst movie I’ve ever seen). Not to mention, it apparently DID show at a festival in 2008 (and won two awards, for the love of Christ), but the internet yields absolutely no reactions of any kind on any site. Even some of those obscure (pre-internet) Hong Kong movies I’ve seen at the New Bev I can find SOMETHING on, but this, after about a half hour, the only evidence of it being watched I could find were my own tweets about how terrible it was.

Let’s keep it that way. The movie is not available on Netflix streaming or anything of that sort, best as I can tell, and even a movie this terrible doesn’t deserve to be downloaded, so the only way to see it would be to buy a copy, and I strongly urge that you do not do that (I’ll be keeping my copy as a reminder to keep from being too harsh on any other film in the future). And it’s too goddamn long to even merit a “hey let’s get drunk and watch this” type viewing. Not to mention, the film’s presentation will have you convinced that you’re already drunk out of your mind even if you hadn’t taken your first sip, so it’s potentially dangerous as well.

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned any names yet. There’s a reason: it’s possible that the filmmakers (or at least, whoever did their credits) knew how terrible the movie was and tried to obscure their involvement, because how else could you explain these illegible credits? Even the damn title is near impossible to make out:

So perhaps Joanic Dshayivr? doesn’t want to be associated with this thing, and thus I will respect his/her wishes. I do not wish them luck on their next project, however. If in 7 years this was the best they could do I can’t imagine how bad something that was “rushed” (like a normal movie) would turn out.

What say you? (Nothing, no one else has seen it.)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Voodoo Moon (2006)

AUGUST 19, 2011

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Part of why I always listen to commentary tracks is because they might explain (or at least hint) at the reasons why a movie came close to being really good, but for one reason or another just didn't quite hit the mark. Usually it's financially related, or maybe the shooting schedule was reduced by a few days halfway through production. And thus, I wish I hadn't watched Voodoo Moon via Netflix Instant, because I don't have access to the commentary, which COULD have explained why a cool/interesting idea had such a clunky presentation. Or it might have just been the director narrating the movie; I will probably never know.

I also could have seen a good transfer instead of this Starz shit that Netflix offers. Seriously, why are these transfers always so goddamn bad? I may be harsher than most on the service as a whole, but I can recognize (and acknowledge) a good transfer when I see one. However, these Starz ones are always awful (and almost always cropped, UGH). Netflix - believe me: you are never ever going to even be a serious contender to replace physical media as long as you offer such sub-standard shit as a major part of your library. Fix these transfers or just get rid of them entirely.

Anyway, as I said, the concept is pretty interesting. Our heroes are a brother/sister pair, Cole and Heather, who are the only survivors of a massacre in their small town when they were children. She's moved on, he's committed his life to finding the demon who did it. To do so, Cole studies ancient magic and things of that sort, and believes/practices multiple religions as well, the combination of which have given him minor superpowers as well as tracking skills. So the two of them go on the road looking for him, meeting up with a rogue's gallery of folks that Cole has helped along the way (many played by familiar character actors like Jeffrey Combs and Dee Wallace), who aid him in the final battle. Oh, and the villain can turn people into zombie helpers, so there's more action than the usual single villain plot would allow for.

Pretty cool, right? Well, unfortunately it never fully connects, because the movie as a whole feels like the feature version wrapup to a TV show (or a comic book, as writer/director Kevin VanHook hails from that world). There are lengthy flashbacks and bouts of exposition that don't seem like natural elements to a stand-alone film, but more like catch up dialogue for series newcomers. Sort of like that one scene in the first X-Files movie where Mulder gets drunk and explains the entire history of the show up until that point, except we get these sort of scenes 4-5 times over the course of the movie. Most of the "survivors" explain how Cole helped them (often with flashbacks and stories that seem like they could have been their own little movie, or TV episode/comic book issue), and the epilogue of the movie goes on forever, as if it was the last time we would ever be seeing these beloved, fan favorite characters.

Likewise, it also often feels like we're coming in to a story in progress. I actually had to check the IMDb after about a half hour to make sure that this wasn't a non-numbered sequel to some other movie ("Voodoo Dawn" or something), because I had trouble understanding what was going on and why certain scenes seemed to be inserted from another movie. Take Combs' first scene - they suddenly cut to him in some location apart from our other characters, he gets out of his car and walks up toward a motel, only to be pushed down the stairs and seemingly killed by one of the bad guy's minions. Um, OK? Who was he? Why did they cut to this? It's as if we should have already known who he was and then been shocked by his seeming death (he actually survives and resurfaces in the third act, broken neck and all). I guess since it's Combs we can sort of apply a bit of our familiarity/fondness for the guy to make up for such an awkward introduction, but it doesn't change the fact that it keeps the audience at a bit of a distance.

So without the commentary or any real information on its Wiki or IMDb pages, I just have to guess why the movie was so clunky, and that would be money. VanHook himself said on the IMDb that this was NOT based on one of his comics, though I suppose it could have been a comic idea that he decided to make as a movie instead. But there are several clues throughout the flick that suggest that they didn't have the dough to fully realize the ambitious idea. For starters, the FX are pretty bad throughout the flick, particularly in the big climax where Cole and the demon finally face off. Not only are they hovering above the ground (bad green-screen!) but their fight is not a physical one - it's magic based. So it sort of looks like The Covenant, with two dudes just lobbying giant balls of "magic" at each other, and they don't look particularly good either. I mean, I can take bad FX throughout a movie, but they should at least make sure the climax looks good, since that's what A. the movie is building toward and B. what you will most likely remember later. I mean, there's a decent transformation from man to crow (the Prophecy films seem to be an influence), but months from now I won't remember that, I'll only remember Eric Mabius' badly composited image shooting a silly looking translucent ball at the other guy.

There's also some baffling editing in a few spots, particularly in a big massacre/siege at the farm where all of Cole's survivors have met up. There's a big fight in the cornfield, heroes are getting killed... and then all of a sudden there's a cut to the next morning, where one of our heroes (Cole's former lover) is calmly sipping a coffee. Huh? It's like a 5 minute chunk of the film was removed (I checked the runtime, there's nothing to suggest this was an actual edit). A lot of the violence also occurs off-screen, which can be confusing at times, like when one guy (Frank Collison, the hot dog enthusiast from The Happening) just wanders into the cornfield and then we see some digital blood flying into the air. I thought the villain was turning folks into helpers? Why did they seemingly eviscerate him? Or did he actually win that fight? That's why it's a good idea to SHOW things in a movie. Visual medium, folks.

(Interestingly, this same sort of problem plagued the woeful The Graves, which was helmed by Brian Pulido, who is also a comic book artist. Maybe these dudes just don't understand fluid action or something since they're so used to having to reduce everything to a single shot?)

But as long as you can get past the fact that the movie seems to be intentionally keeping you at arm's length, it's not too bad, especially for a film that debuted on the Syfy Channel (back when it was still Sci-Fi, in fact!). The last thing I ever expect to think after watching one of these movies is "this script deserved a better production", so I give props to VanHook for coming up with an interesting concept instead of the usual giant monster run amok things that they do. I also dug the fact that our heroes were brother and sister, sparing us any obnoxious romantic drama and giving a different dynamic to their scenes together than we usually see.

And I liked that Combs seemed to be in a different movie entirely. While everyone else is pretty serious and plays their roles straight (though John Amos gets to tell that "You blew a seal" joke about the penguin with car trouble), Combs acts like he just wandered in from the climax of Death Becomes Her, walking around with his head cocked at a nearly 90 degree angle but still trying to act normal, playing cards with Amos and even attempting an arrest. It's a wonderfully out of nowhere (and somewhat ill-fitting) dose of morbid humor, and just proves that having Combs in your movie automatically makes it a little more memorable. How he never managed to work steadily in big budget features (in character roles, not the lead) is beyond me, though his stage work as Poe in Nevermore might open up some doors for him.

It's a shame that the Syfy movies are almost never this outside the box. As Roger Corman explained, they have to keep the audience interested (meaning: show a kill) every 10-15 minutes, before the commercial breaks, or else they will change the channel, so I get why they don't try to get TOO creative. But there's no reason a movie like this (which has no obvious points to put a commercial) couldn't be modified to fit their criteria by simply showing the demon turn someone into one of his zombie helpers whenever they had to keep the audience's finger off the remote. Also, the fact that they are the "Syfy" channel means that they can't really dip into slasher or survival horror territories; monsters and mad scientists are pretty much all they can really do without straying too far outside of their brand. Hopefully the Chiller and Fearnet channels take off and start their own original movie series; there is a certain charm to these things, and I'd love to see it applied to a type of movie where having good FX or a great looking giant monster isn't necessary.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Dinocroc Vs. Supergator (2010)

AUGUST 18, 2011

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Apparently, Dinocroc Vs. Supergator is a semi-sequel to existing standalone films, but I haven’t seen either of them (Dinocroc was off my radar entirely). But my brief inspection of their IMDb pages doesn’t reveal either David Carradine or anyone else playing Drake, who is responsible for them being created according to this movie, so I’m guessing that this is an in-name only affair, or they ret-conned the mythology. However – who cares? If I reached a point in a movie called Dinocroc Vs. Supergator where I couldn’t follow the plot, I’d just shoot myself and you wouldn’t be able to read this review anyway.

Honestly though, this one’s actually pretty fun. There’s a curious shortage of monster action (only like 5-6 attacks), but they make up for it with better than usual (but still bad) FX and a few characters I actually enjoyed, particularly the main “couple”; an average Joe kind of guy who was investigating Drake and a female game warden, played by the ultra-fetching Amy Rasimas, who is not only tall (yay!) but a decent actress as well; after the blocks of wood in those Shark Attack movies I would have been satisfied with one who could say her lines properly, but Ms. Rasimas makes for a good heroine – kicking some ass and actually seeming like a real person. Some of the extras/bit players are atrocious (at least one – Jerry the Pool Boy - has become a running gag on The Soup, in fact), but having charming folks in the leads goes a long way, and of course Carradine is always fun. He’s not in the movie too much, and has the least satisfying death in any Vs. movie ever made (he has a heart attack and dies without ever even SEEING the damn things), but adds a touch of flavor and old-school Corman charm to the proceedings. If only he could get off like a normal person...

Another thing in its favor is that most of the victims actually appear prior to their death scene. For example, early on we meet a film producer who is taking a quick break in between installments of a horror franchise that releases a movie every October (gee, wonder who they’re mocking here?), and of course he’s heading to the same island where the title characters are running amok. Now, you know he’s a goner, but the fact that they introduced him and told us a bit about him can suggest that maybe he’ll play an important role in the plot. Maybe he will try to get footage of the monsters for his next movie, or stick around with our heroes as a comic relief character. So when they do cut to him again, and Dinocroc bites his goddamn head off a few minutes later, it’s actually a bit of a surprise (they also use a giant croc head in close-ups instead of a full CGI creature, making it even more fun), because he was given more of an “arc” than most of these things offer.

Of course, that’s what happens when you get someone like Jim Wynorski directing. He’s hardly a great filmmaker, but he at least knows what he’s doing and has an appreciation for this sort of material. When you get some hack like Declan O’Brien shooting the movie, you end up with repetitive, boring shit like Sharktopus, where the film’s entertainment value starts and stops with the monster. Here, I was entertained even when they weren’t on-screen, thanks to the goofy "FBI takes down evil scientist" plot and fun chemistry between the two leads (the movie gets a lot of mileage out of the hero’s ugly Hawaiian shirt). And I also liked that they gave us two male heroes; our FBI guy and also a hunter known as The Cajun, who is brought in to aid the human villains cover up their mess but ends up being an actual hero. Not only does the script give them about equal screentime (making it harder to tell which one will die, if at all), but it also makes them fast friends instead of the usual sort of “Don’t get in my way/You stay out of MY way!” type shit.

The only area it really drops the ball is the promised title fight. Not only does it take forever to even get the two things in the same spot, but when they finally do start fighting it’s over less than two minutes later. Worse it’s not even that awesome; Dinocroc just sort of bites Supergator on the side and he dies, and then Dinocroc gets blown away by an explosion. This moment is actually kind of great, as he’s outside the building that blows up so he just sort of takes the brunt of the blast on his side and dies from that, but still – I wanted a real fight to the death between them. I don’t like Freddy vs Jason much at all, but at least they deliver an epic fight at the end; this one was literally over in seconds.

The rest of the action is more satisfying. Supergator racks up 2-3 kills in the first 90 seconds of the movie, which is a record (and Dinocroc then flattens a guy as he breaks free a few seconds later). There’s a fun Jurassic Park ripoff chase scene (yellow jeep and all), though they add a boat and rockets to the mix, and I also loved when Supergator just walks up to a tour bus and then jumps on top of it and flattens it (and its driver). As usual there’s not a lot of logic to their ability to get around (at one point Supergator somehow manages to swim up to and under a guy that’s only in about a foot of water), but there’s a variety to the scenes instead of the usual “guy is water-skiing/surfing/swimming and then gets sucked under by the monster” stuff. And again, most of the victims are people we’ve met more than 30 seconds ago, so there’s a bit of a quality over quantity aspect to it that you don’t often see, and I sort of appreciated that. Maybe it means the usual drunken audiences for these things found it “boring”, but I prefer it to the typical “every 10 minutes we meet someone new and then they die” approach.

As usual, there’s a commentary with Corman and the director, which is a bit unusual in this case since the movie is directed by “Jay Andrews”, a pseudonym for Wynorski that the back of the DVD is forced to explain – gotta be a first for a modern film (it’s a bit common with special edition DVDs of old Italian horror films that were originally attributed to fake names). It’s a bit more specific to this film than usual, though Roger does offer some general insight, and tells a pretty funny anecdote about how an old SAG rule required an actor to be paid daily from the first until the last day that they were used (even if they weren’t actually working in the days between). Apparently Jack Nicholson used to take advantage of this rule, purposely choosing roles where he’d have to only work on say, day 1 and day 15, collecting fifteen days’ worth of SAG pay instead of two. Awesome. They also reminisce a bit about Chopping Mall, which is always a good thing. Definitely worth a listen if you enjoyed the flick and/or just like to hear two old-school guys shooting the shit. The trailer for it and a bunch of their other films are also included (and on the commentary Corman promises Piranhaconda is on its way).

Eventually they will run out of monsters to combine or add adjectives to and this “series” will die, but it’s good to know that they still haven’t run it completely into the ground already, and are still managing to make something worth a damn. Not a good film by any means, but one I can at least watch without hating myself/what I do.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Atrocious (2010)

AUGUST 17, 2011

GENRE: MOCKUMENTARY
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I love that the only one of the “Bloody Disgusting Selects” titles that I saw before its acquisition was also the only one in English. Given the mandated late timeslot afforded to the releases (10 pm on Wednesdays and 12:01 am on Saturdays, at AMC theaters), it’s a pretty likely bet that I’ll fall asleep anyway, but since they’ve otherwise all been subtitled foreign language films, it’s even MORE likely. And while that’s fine for the Saturday showings (because that would be Saturday’s movie (not Friday’s) and thus if I dozed off I could watch something else for the day), I opted for the Wednesday at 10 screening of Atrocious, which meant if I fell asleep for too long, I wouldn’t be able to review it and thus my streak would be over. But hey, I like a challenge.

And I am happy to report I did pretty damn good, only dozing for about 2 minutes somewhere in the middle of the flick, right around where the dog went missing. My review will assume that the two minutes I missed did not contain the information I thought the film could have used or hinted at, though if it did (can anyone confirm?), I apologize.

Anyway, I think this is the best of the “series” yet, or at least tied with the enjoyable Rammbock, which was also the first. It helps that I just watched a not-very-good found footage movie (Grave Encounters), so I can confirm that my disappointment with that film wasn’t just the result of me possibly just being sick of these movies as a whole. Blending Paranormal Activity’s haunted house/amateur “trying to get a ghost on camera” approach with Blair Witch’s crazy, frenetic treks through the outdoors (in particular a hedge maze of sorts in the family’s backyard), Atrocious is a good slow burn, spending half of the runtime on setting up the characters and back-story of the alleged haunting, and the second half on a nearly nonstop chaotic run through the maze and house as our characters are terrorized by something or someone unknown.

Spoilers ahead!

I’m on the fence if actually providing the answer was necessary. I think it might have been even creepier to leave it up to our imagination, or just assume it was indeed the ghost that they heard about (sort of like Blair Witch – if you assume that they are being killed by some unseen random redneck hunter type, the movie still works, as there’s nothing that proves that they WEREN’T). Instead, they give an answer, and while it’s a nice surprise, it also feels a bit out of nowhere. Again, perhaps in the two minutes I was out there was a lot of exposition, but it doesn’t seem like it would have fit in given what was going on before/after I slept – a skilled movie dozer such as myself can just tell these things!

Writer/director Fernando Barreda Luna also cheats a bit in order to preserve the surprise until the last moment. At one point our main character walks down into the basement and hears what sounds like a news report or something, and the subs (and presumably the Spanish audio) only give us a few keywords, making it nearly impossible to decipher. He then approaches the source of the audio (an old TV set) and the movie suddenly freezes, at which point we are treated to actual news reports about the family (spoiler!) being found murdered, including the character who was just holding the camera. It would have been a fun (or annoying, depending on your POV) way to end the film on these reports, but instead the movie then rewinds and we watch the basement scene again, only this time with all of the audio intact (as well as the outcome, i.e. his death). Again, there’s almost nothing in the previous 70 minutes that would suggest this information, so the fact that it comes via a “rewind” makes it feel even more tacked on. It would have been better to have the police reports at the top of the film, without actually spoiling who specifically was dead (just “police investigate the murders of several family members” or something to that effect), and then let the video footage play out sequentially, without any rewinds.

In fact, there’s a rewind at the top of the movie too; we see the final shot (without any context, obviously) and another scare bit, and then rewind, too fast to make out anything of note, all the way to the beginning, when the characters first begin filming their trip to their old family home for a vacation of sorts. I assume that this is to get a scare in there earlier, since the movie takes a while to get to its first chronological spook moment (which would be the conclusion of the missing dog subplot – obviously it ain’t pretty), and while it works better than the one at the end, it’s still a bit jarring and unnecessary. Obviously Blair (and possibly Paranormal) was an influence, but that didn't have this sort of thing, just the text at the top that vaguely suggested that things don’t turn out too well for the main characters (does it ever for these things?).

But once that manic chase into the maze begins, it never lets up, and provides some of the most tension and genuinely scary moments I’ve seen in one of these things in a while. One key element is that there are two cameras/operators, which allows us to believe that no one is “safe”, because one can get taken out and we still have a POV for the rest of the flick. I loved Paranormal but they never made it seem like Katie would ever pick up the camera herself should anything happen to Micah, so as long as it was him running around (and there was still a lot of movie left), you sort of knew he’d be OK. But here, I legitimately thought our hero could bite it while he was running around at the beginning of the chase. Ditto his younger sister (the other “camera”), who gets separated from him fairly early in the chase as they run around looking for their missing little brother (as well as their hysterical mother, who ran in ahead of them). It might get a bit repetitive (I don’t think this will hold up on repeat viewings), but the big scares play terrifically, and often just with sound – I was legitimately chilled by the sound of fast-approaching footsteps from behind our camera operating character, as well as the sounds of thuds and cracks as he/she/it tried getting into the house later on in the sequence once they finally find their way out of the maze.

And by setting everything pretty much the entire 3rd act in real time, you don’t have to worry about the usual “why are they filming?” thing. It’s dark/outside so they need the camera’s night vision (usual excuse), and they establish the house’s electrical issues early on, so they need it in there too. There are a few awkward “I will put the camera down gently and in a good spot to get the rest of the room” moments, but nothing too clunky – you have to accept such things in these movies if you’re going to bother watching them in the first place, and as long as they aren’t too excessively ridiculous (i.e. if a character picks up a camera in the middle of being beaten to death, then yeah, you can bitch), it just goes with the territory. In fact I think the approach is a lot better than most; in Blair they went too overboard with the “realistic” approach of a panicked person with a camera, and folks were getting motion sickness (or just avoiding the film altogether) as Heather and Josh got a lot of B-roll of sideways trees or the ground. On the other extreme end of the spectrum, we have Diary Of The Dead, where everything was perfectly framed at all times regardless of whether or not it made sense. But here it’s natural (the camera is upside down for a while) without being headache inducing - a good balance between the need to accurately present a frightened camera operator and the need to show the audience what the hell is going on.

This review is now longer than the movie (under 80 minutes*) so I’ll wrap it up. Obviously home will be where most of you see it if at all, but I was happy to see a fairly decent sized crowd for a largely unadvertised foreign movie showing at a late time on a weeknight (more than the audiences for Rammbock and Phase 7 combined, in fact). The rather unnerving scares (particularly the final shot) might even play better at home when you have to go off to your room in the dark instead of walking out into a bright theater lobby, and you can also skim some of the early padding (I had to laugh at the lengthy song credit part of the end titles, as all of the songs were in the overlong “driving to the house” sequence, heard for about 2 seconds each). It won’t change your mind if you just don’t care for this particular sub-genre, but it might restore your faith in it a bit.

What say you?

*The IMDB lists two runtimes, 82 and 75 minutes. This was clearly the 75 one; anyone know about that other 7 minutes? More exposition, or more shaki-cam shots of the hedge maze?

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Fear: Halloween Night (1999)

AUGUST 16, 2011

GENRE: SLASHER, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

If you recently read (or inexplicably memorized) my review of The Fear, you might panic at seeing a review for The Fear: Halloween Night (retitled from The Fear: Resurrection), as I said that I wouldn’t bother watching the sequel until I ran out of movies. This was just an empty (read: forgotten) threat, obviously, because here we are and I already have the rest of the week’s movies planned out. HMAD will continue, and thus I will keep seeing bland, forgettable movies like this.

Of course it’s a very fitting sequel to the original, as that movie was also bland and forgettable. I re-read my review twice trying to rejigger my memory of it, and came up with nothing (I can’t even remember the supposed incest storyline – if I can’t even remember THAT then you know the movie’s bad and/or my memory has really shit the bed). I think this one might be a minor improvement, because it wasn’t as confusing (and the DVD didn’t seem to be edited this time around) and the characters were somewhat likable, but I wouldn’t argue if you said otherwise.

The thing that bugs me about these movies is that they can’t just let Morty bust out and be a real villain. Once again he is kept on the sidelines for most of the movie as we deal with the endless subplot about our hero possibly being the killer himself, a storyline that can’t be satisfied either way. If he IS the killer, he’s not as cool as a wooden mannequin, and if he’s NOT, then you’re just wasting time that could be spent on the big guy lumbering around killing people. As it is, more people survive this than any other slasher I can recall (at least five characters get away, including the nerdy pal), and worse, it takes forever to get going. The first hour only offers us a single death (not counting the obligatory tragic prologue), and then his spree largely occurs off-screen so they can keep up the lame mystery.

When Morty IS rampaging around it’s kind of fun though. He has one-liners, all of which are terrible and clunky, which just entertains me. The best/weirdest is just a natural progression to what was a weird choice for a fear – instead of rats, the dark, etc, this guy is afraid of making decisions. And Morty is so strict when it comes to his MO, he doesn’t just kill him when he has the chance; instead he drags him over to a burning car and handcuffs him to the bumper, then hands him an axe and says “Decisions, decisions” (i.e. chop his arm off or stay and burn). It’s remarkably stupid, but you gotta appreciate that the screenwriter wrote himself into a hole and refused to break tradition. The rest of the fears are pretty normal, and gives him fun ways to kill folks, such as the girl who is afraid of red – he drags her to a sparkling clean white toilet and smashes her head onto it, then drowns her in the now red toilet water. Nice.

It also provides a good line, as our hero is demanding everyone dress up as their fear (so the girl who is afraid of red puts on a red dress and bright red lipstick, and the guy who is afraid of sharks dresses as a shark, etc). But he hasn’t said what he is dressing up as, so his ring-wanting girlfriend asks how he plans to dress as “fear of commitment”, in front of all their friends and his grandmother no less. Hahaha, two points. And again, they are largely likable folks for once, and I particularly liked that they all warmed to Currie’s grandmother (played by Betsy Palmer) instead of treating her like some old coot that was cramping their style.

But man, is it slow, and never bothers to explain certain things. For example, at one point Currie’s girlfriend is found hung, and clearly dead, yet later she reappears without any explanation. Two other character’s fates are determined by the fact that they DON’T reappear (“I guess they’re dead, they never came back” will be your thought process), and the final shot seems to be suggesting that Morty was built by Currie’s father, which I think contradicts information in the first film. Not that it matters much, I am baffled that the film even exists – the first must have done really well on VHS.

On that note, the only returning personnel from the first film are executive producer Greg Sims and makeup man John Beuchler; even the guy playing Morty is different. So to hell with any sort of continuity, Morty just lives with these folks now. The director’s name is Chris Angel, which I would change if I was him, and this was his first feature (he also helmed the last two Wishmaster movies). He lucked out with his DP though: Brian Pearson shot this, a decade before going on to work with some of the bigger 3D titles (My Bloody Valentine, Final Destination 5), and you can see that he’s a DP that deserves more than DTV junk – even in the lame pan & scan transfer it’s a pretty good looking film. And you can also enjoy an early performance by Emmanuelle Vaugier, wearing glasses (she must be the smart one) and harboring a fear of closed spaces, so she dresses up like a box (?). Sadly she’s the first of the “fear group” to die, and off-screen to boot, so it’s hardly a memorable turn, they barely ever even give her a closeup.

And while it’s sad that two crew members died before the film was released (the stunt coordinator died on another project, not sure on the other), I had to laugh that they couldn’t even get one of their names right. Right at the top of the end credits they dedicate it to costume designer Pearl Bellesen, and then they spell her name wrong for her regular credit (“Belleson”). What a wonderful tribute, ya goons.

Now, this was 12 years ago, so I think Morty is gone for good. It’s a shame, I think he could have been a cool/memorable movie killer, but he got stuck in two underwhelming movies. Still, he got a second chance, unlike Dr Giggles, Shocker, Harry Warden, etc... I bet he totally holds that over those guys down in Horror Hero Hell.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Fright Night (2011)

AUGUST 15, 2011

GENRE: REMAKE, VAMPIRE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PRESS SCREENING)

Ignoring quality, Fright Night falls exactly in the middle of the remake spectrum in terms of approach; it’s not a total overhaul like Dawn of the Dead or Prom Night (again, we’re ignoring quality here), nor is it a scene for scene redux like Let Me In or Quarantine. It feels familiar throughout, but doesn’t really directly copy anything either, even the few lines that are brought back (“You’re so cool, Brewster!”) have a different context. And the best scare in the movie only works if you’ve seen the original – once it again it opens on a TV showing Peter Vincent, and then the camera starts panning over to the bedroom. Fans of the original will expect to see Charley and Amy making out, but instead we discover we’re in the middle of an attack on some anonymous neighbor. Unfortunately, that’s about as good as it gets, and as the movie goes on it just has less and less of its own identity.

Tom Holland’s Fright Night was a lot of things (and let me remind you, I’m hardly an expert on the 1985 original; if you recall it actually served as an HMAD entry because it had been so long since I watched it): fun monster movie, engaging 80s comedy, etc – but one thing that really shined through was that Holland wanted to pay tribute to both a type of horror flick (specifically Hammer films) as well as honor the sort of icons that that AND this current generation has failed to create: the closest thing the 80s had to a Vincent Price or Peter Cushing was Tom Atkins, and most of his movies only got appreciated later on. You can see Tom Holland sitting there and saying “I want to make something today that honors the guys that inspired me!”, in other words. But here? You can just sort of see a bunch of execs sitting around looking over what hasn’t been remade yet, coming across Fright Night, realizing that they didn’t have much else to go on, and decided to make it in 3D and hope for the best.

And thus, while they carried over the plot, they forgot to bring the charm or even any real POINT. Colin Farrell is actually pretty good as Jerry; not as suave and romantic as Chris Sarandon’s version, but more of a dark and mysterious type of guy that women want to just plain fuck. Unfortunately, he’s a lot more likable than the film’s hero, since they’ve turned Charley into an asshole who mocks his former best friend in front of his cool new pals, shuts out his girlfriend, etc. I assume the idea is to give Charley an arc, start him off as a selfish prick who learns to man up over the course of the movie, but they never truly deliver that change – just because he walks next door with a crossbow doesn’t make up for the fact that the only reason he even knew about Jerry in the first place is because “Evil” Ed had to blackmail him in order to get him to hang out for a few minutes and fill in the exposition.

This is another major issue. One of the remake’s few genuinely good ideas is that Ed and Charley are former best pals that have drifted apart, and you get the sense that by hunting this vampire they’ll regain their broken friendship and even make it a bit of a tragedy. But no! They have one scene together, most of it spent arguing in between Ed explaining everything (Charley’s such a douche in this he doesn’t even notice Jerry’s strange behavior, Ed has to spell it out for him), and then Ed is killed/turned a few minutes later. Worse, Ed then disappears entirely until the 3rd act, which just doesn’t make any sense to me. First of all, Jerry doesn’t have a Billy Cole type character in this one, and thus he is the only viable threat during the entire second act. I know screenwriter Marti Noxon worked with Joss Whedon a lot and thus it’s not entirely inconceivable to think that they’d pull a shock twist and kill Jerry off at the end of the second act and make Ed the Big Bad, but by this point in the movie we have already been assured that being clever or daring was not an option*.

So anyway, by the time Ed shows up in vampire mode you’ve probably already forgotten about him (the original was a bit long itself; this one’s actually longer), and there’s certainly no sense of tragedy to his fate, nor does Charley even seem too hesitant to take an ax to his former pal. No attempt to reason with him, see if there’s any humanity left in there, nothing. He shows up and then they start fighting, swinging weapons and CGI bloodspray flying in our face.

Oh, yeah, the 3D. As with the script, all of the best moments are in the first act, as Craig Gillespie uses the technology not to throw shit in our faces (though I actually flinched at the first “Comin at ya!” gag, so kudos) but to have fun with the visuals of three-dimensional corners and furniture. Charley sneaking around Jerry’s place, or Ed trying to avoid him – these scenes provide terrific 3D, turning otherwise bland suburban homes into minor carnival funhouse arenas; I actually found myself trying to peer around corners and such. Unfortunately, the cat and mouse stuff is largely abandoned once Jerry blows up the house (an event that you see in the trailer that occurs much earlier than expected), and even when they have a potentially fun set, such as Peter Vincent’s weapons room, they never utilize it for anything good. Instead, they start using the technology for (admittedly impressive) sparks and embers flying around after a vamp is toasted, and endless (less impressive) digital blood splatters. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you should SKIP the 3D if you head out to the theater (it is native, after all, not a post-convert), but it’s definitely not worth the extra dough in my opinion; if you have any issue whatsoever with the format, this will certainly not change your mind.

Back to Vincent, he was surprisingly one of the better things about the movie. I’m not familiar with David Tennant, but I enjoyed his work here, as he plays a sort of Russell Brand type, masquerading as a Criss Angel-esque douchebag (the scene where he slowly strips himself of the persona is one of the film’s highlights). There’s an idiotic back-story about why he has an interest in vampires (with a predictable and even more idiotic payoff), but for a character that was clearly reverse engineered from both the need to live up to the original and also for Charley to get some ancient weapon, it could have been a lot worse. Still, I wish Charley sought him out specifically FOR his weapons, not “how do you kill a vampire?” advice, as it seemed like an anachronistic leftover from the original; why couldn’t he just Google it, the same way he Googled how to pick a lock? Nothing about it is new (stake through the heart, sunlight = bad, etc), and thanks to Ed we know that this is the “real world” (Twilight is mentioned), so it’s not like vampires are some sort of foreign entity. It’s like they started coming up with ways to make the Peter Vincent character relevant for 2011 (he was originally a corny horror host, remember) but forgot to finish.

Oh, and while it got a big cheer, the cameo scene was completely pointless. I guess I can appreciate that it wasn’t too “winky” (people who haven’t seen the original won’t be distracted by the appearance, nor will they be “lost” at some in-joke), but it’s also extraneous; I am willing to bet that if it was just some random day player actor in the role, the scene would have been cut entirely. And there certainly seems to be some editing going on; Charley’s two pals get turned but disappear until the end (actually one of them remains MIA), Toni Collette’s character is sidelined (and shares only a single scene with pre-identified as vampire Farrell, despite the trailer and initial plot summaries hinting that the two would have some sort of budding romance), and the final scene redefines tacked on (so Charley just sort of hangs out in Peter’s Vegas penthouse now?). I heard rumors of reshoots; I’m curious if the changes were for better or for worse.

Also, and I’m sure it wasn’t intentional (again, they’re not that clever), but I was sort of charmed at how they seemed to be honoring their “remake-ness”. By definition a remake is a copy of the original (presumably better) thing, so it’s amusing to see James Franco’s brother and Sofia Vergara’s sister in small roles (the ultimate get would have been Frank Stallone or Jim Hanks). And while they don’t bring back J Geils’ awesome theme, they do spotlight a pretty great cover of The Jakes’ “Cough Syrup” by the band Young The Giant.

Ultimately the movie’s biggest problem is a total lack of personality or creativity. They didn’t really bring anything new to the table, and curiously dropped things that you’d think would be fun to see with improved visual effects (Jerry doesn’t turn into a bat this time). It’s not terrible or even BAD, per se, but it just has nothing to say or offer, and leaves no lasting impression. You might even argue with me now, but by the time it comes out on Blu-ray I’ll bet you’ll already forget why you disagreed. And no, the fact that "Jerry doesn't sparkle" isn't enough for me to give this a pass, and if it is for you, then you're apparently too easy to please.

What say you?

*One idea for the remake was to go meta and have Charley seek the help of actor Chris Sarandon (maybe they read HMAD!), who would have experience with this sort of thing given his starring role in the movie Fright Night. But that would have been creative and fun, so it was dropped.

PLEASE, GO ON...

Targets (1968)

AUGUST 14, 2011

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

I queried my Twitter followers and the majority said that Targets counted as a horror movie, so blame them if you take issue with it being here. But also, it’s about an aging horror star (Boris Karloff, basically playing himself albeit with the name Orlok) who is preparing for his final public appearance (at a drive-in showing his new movie The Terror), so it fits under the HMAD rule that as long as it’s about horror it counts. And if I didn’t count this, my movie for the day would have been the sequel to The Fear, so come on. Cut me some slack.

And besides, the real plot of the movie is about a crazed sniper who creates chaos on the 405 freeway before hiding out (and resuming his killing spree) inside the drive-in. Replace the gun with a knife and it’s basically a slasher, especially since he manages to kill about a dozen people before there’s any sort of panic. I don’t know if it was a budgetary issue or just poor logic, but I was baffled how he was able to take out 3-4 people at the drive-in before anyone noticed. His gun didn’t have a silencer and he wasn’t even waiting for loud parts of the movie, so I guess the folks were just really into The Terror.

But still, it’s pretty terrifying. As I mentioned in my King of the Hill review, I have a very unmotivated but fairly strong fear of snipers. I went to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl once and I spent the entire night staring up at that cross on the hill across the way, convinced someone was up there planning to take shots at us. And with the villain doing his thing on a road I drive on all the time (right near where I got into a (non-sniper related) accident the other day, in fact), it just made it all the more scary to me. Basically it’s the strength/speed/distance combo that a sniper rifle can provide. A guy with a knife, you can run. A bomb dropping, you can hopefully see it coming and get to safety. Even a normal gun, the guy has to be close enough for you to sense danger. But a sniper? He can be a half mile away, and those bullets can still tear your head off. Freaky shit. I guess I can blame dying due to snipers in Halo and Call Of Duty (or even going back to Battlefield 1942) a lot.

Also the killer looked just like my buddy Dave, which didn’t help calm my nerves. Now next time we go bowling I'm just gonna see the face of a guy who might lie prone on top of a giant gas tank and shoot me in the neck while I drive down to Target.

“Luckily”, the movie takes a while to get going. If he snapped early on and started picking people off in the first reel I might not have been able to handle the entire movie. But we spend a lot of time with him as he makes the switch from gun enthusiast to cold-blooded murderer. His story seems to be influenced by Charles Whitman, in that he just sort of wakes up one day and decides to start killing folks (he even starts with his mother and wife, as Whitman did), rather than get too much into his psyche or provide a motive for his actions. And running parallel to these scenes, we get Karloff, who has tired of the film business and wants to quit, but is convinced/humbled into making one last (previously promised) appearance.

And this is where the movie sort of falls under the HMAD rule that it would only appeal to horror fans, because if you don’t know Karloff and the type of movies he made, the whole point of the movie wouldn’t work. Basically, Karloff/Orlok feels that his brand of scary doesn’t work anymore, because the real world is far more frightening than anything in his movies – but the movie doesn’t really depict those movies in a meaningful way. We just get a few clips of The Terror, hardly the best example to use since it’s actually kind of gory at times. It would have been better if they used his Universal Monster flicks or even a few of his corny 40s programmers to make the point, but those would be expensive.

See, Targets actually began life as a cheap way to make a few more bucks out of The Terror; the story goes that Karloff owed Roger Corman two days’ worth of work, and thus the plan was to film a few new scenes and recycle as much Terror footage as possible. But Peter Bogdanovich (making his debut here) deviated from that plan and came up with this script, which Karloff loved so much he worked the extra couple days it would require for free. So obviously this was not a big budgeted film (even by Corman standards it must have been pretty low), so licensing clips from Karloff’s body of work as a whole couldn’t have been an option. Thus, anyone who didn’t watch horror films probably wouldn’t understand how a sniper is any scarier than whatever “Orlok” did in his films, especially if they were the type of ignorant schmoes that assume all horror films are “blood and guts trash”.

Horror fans can also really appreciate Karloff’s performance here. Having played so many monsters and villains, you can easily forget that he’s actually quite a charismatic and even somewhat elegant kind of guy, so it’s great to see him wearing a nice suit and chatting with normal people, even making a few jokes. And he has a great chemistry with Bogdanovich, who plays the director of The Terror and spends the whole movie in a panic because Orlok wants to retire (Bog’s character needed him to star in his next film in order for it to get greenlit). The rather light touch of these scenes (a drunken hotel conversation borderlines on screwball comedy) makes the switches back and forth to the sniper a bit jarring, though it certainly helps clarify the point of the two different worlds.

I just wish they either had the dough or the idea to make the sniper spree more logical. The police chase him for a few minutes, but seem to disappear when he ducks into the drive-in. Even if they “lost” him, he just took out half a dozen people on the freeway – shouldn’t there be some sort of manhunt? Bogdanovich also repeatedly shows the sniper’s “evidence” (guns and ammo dropped or left behind), but there’s nothing to it; it’s not like the cops find it and trace the guns back to him or anything. So why bother showing it? The chaos at the drive-in once people finally realize that they’re in danger is also rather silly – they all try to drive out at once and cause massive gridlock, but no one thinks to get out of their car and run. It’s not like their cars made them safer (just about everyone that was shot was sitting in their car when the bullet hit); if anything running might be safer since you wouldn’t be sitting in a stationary position.

Especially when you consider that right after Targets, the New Bev showed Two Minute Warning, which features one of the most chaotic and violent mob/panic scenes ever. As it is a 70s movie that is very much in the mold of Irwin Allen disaster films (all star cast forming a big ensemble from all walks of life), we spend 90 minutes getting to know a bunch of folks – a family led by Beau Bridges, a gambler in debt to the mob who befriends a priest, a middle-aged couple who still haven’t gotten married, etc – and then the sniper starts doing his thing and kills or maims someone from pretty much every group. It was actually kind of shocking to see how much of the cast was decimated in such brutal fashion, especially when these moments were sandwiched in between scenes of random people being trampled, falling over railings, etc. But it was a pretty realistic mob scene, with a real sense of panic, which Targets never quite pulled off. Still, nothing in Two Minute Warning (which I quite enjoyed) was as awesome as the sight of Karloff slapping the kid around at the end of that film, so it evens out.

I should also note that TMW seemed to be directly influenced by Targets, as it not only also had a motiveless sniper taking out people at a big outdoor event (in this case a big football game), but both killers also had a fondness for Baby Ruth candy bars. And TMW’s killer is seen staying at a hotel right off the 405, about 5 minutes further down the road from where Targets’ sniper was perched. Thus, it made for a pretty great double feature. Check em both out!

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Medium Raw: Night Of The Wolf (2010)

AUGUST 13, 2011

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

You all know how much I love Shocker, but it wasn’t until the New Bev screening that I realized why people give it so much shit – the pacing is atrocious. It takes almost an hour for Pinker to finally get “shocked” in the chair, because there’s just too much back-story to cover. The same problem plagues Medium Raw: Night Of The Wolf (only the first part of the title appears on-screen), which someone would probably describe as a movie about a bunch of folks trapped in an asylum where the patients have gotten loose, but that doesn’t happen until the halfway point of the nearly two hour movie.

Hey, and it also has an X-Files cast member! Much like Shocker had Skinner, Medium Raw has The Cigarette Smoking Man himself, William B. Davis, as the head of the institute who seems to be enjoying the idea of his patients being loose. Could he be harboring some secret? (Yes.)

Sadly, the pacing isn’t the movie’s only or even worst problem. Obviously I can deal with a wonky structure as long as it’s good once it gets going, but I can NOT handle a terrible lead actor, which is what Medium Raw gives us. The supporting cast is pretty good (if a bit miscast in some cases; Mercedes McNab as a tough lawyer?), but the guy playing the hero is just terrible, trying to sound tough/witty as well as portray a broken, obsessed man. It’s a role for someone like, I dunno, Eric Bana or maybe my boy Michael Fassbender, but instead we get Andrew Cymek, who is also the film’s writer, director, production designer, and editor (and he’s married to the producer, so he probably had a hand in that as well). On the commentary he talks about how hard it was to get the film going financially – maybe if they secured some sort of name (it’s a Canadian production so hell, why not just grab a guy from a Syfy show?) they might have not only had an easier time getting their money, but they also would have had a better film. Not only does his acting all but wreck the movie, but by doing that he was taking time away from focusing on his writing/directing (and possibly letting Andrew the actor boss Andrew the editor around in editing).

Another, less troubling but still puzzling issue is the strange tonal shift in the 2nd act, where the film not only loses focus but also becomes a bit of a black comedy. I dig that they decided to do a sort of Don’t Look In The Basement meets "Arkham Asylum" (the graphic novel, not the game) movie, with 4-5 different nuts to deal with in addition to the main one, but the movie’s first hour is entirely humorless (save for Cymek’s occasional attempts at one-liners), and then all of a sudden there’s a crazed cannibal making cooking puns, a religious nut, and a fetishist who wants to lick everyone’s toes taking up most of the screentime, with the “Wolf” (the movie’s main villain, who killed the hero’s sister when they were kids) being reduced to just another supporting character instead of the focus. It’s not that the humor in these scenes doesn’t work, it just doesn’t FIT; it belongs in a different movie, one that had this sort of tone throughout and also didn’t spend the first hour painting one guy as the real villain only to more or less forget about him later. It’d be like if halfway through a Friday the 13th sequel, Jason goes MIA and our campers have to deal with bears or something for a half hour until Jason comes back.

And I know he knows how to do this, because the team's previous film Dark Rising (which also had a wonky structure, now that I think about it) had humor throughout, so it was never an issue. On the commentary he explains that they needed something light to break the tension, and maybe he’s right, but this isn’t how to do it. Se7en’s little running gag about the loud subway train was a perfectly decent “tension breaker” that didn’t seem too out of place; the cannibal character here literally seems transplanted from another film entirely. And since her scenes are so disconnected from the others (she never interacts with or even mentions the Wolf, I think), they all could have been excised from the movie and helped reduce its ridiculous 111 minute runtime.

It also could have cut down on the movie’s most obnoxious subplot – the little girl who is at the asylum for the dumbest reason possible and continually gets lost, found, hides, gets lost again... a cycle that repeats itself throughout the entire second half. I honestly lost count of how many times an adult character tells her to “stay put” or “go hide” (including in the extended cannibal sequence), and the fact that she shouldn’t even have been there just makes these moments more obnoxious. I understand the need for her character – giving the hero a chance to make up for failing to save his sister (who was about the same age as this little girl), but they should have come up with a better reason for her to be there than “visiting her grandmother” (one of the nurses). Hell, why not just make her one of the patients? Or some homeless girl that snuck in to stay warm on the winter night?

And that’s the problem with the movie as a whole – they had a good idea and a great location, but just did everything “wrong”. It’s not without entertainment value, and it looks terrific despite the low budget (though the CGI snow is grating – it’s Canada, you couldn’t just wait for it to snow for real?), but throughout the movie I just kept seeing ways that it could/should have been better. For example, the aforementioned clunky pace – why do we spend so much time on the pre-institution part of the movie, when all of it just amounts to “a serial killer is caught and institutionalized”? Half of this stuff could have been covered in voiceover. John Rhys-Davies plays a cop who was looking for the killer since Johnny was a kid, and his scenes are fine, but they don’t really serve much of a purpose in the long run, since (spoiler) he dies 25 minutes in and is never mentioned again. It’s like they had enough ideas for 2-3 movies and decided to cram them all in instead of simplifying things. Or perhaps wanted to make a more attractive movie for distributors regardless of how it hurt their narrative; who cares if the scenes are worthless if you can boast having a Lord of the Rings cast member in your trade ads?

Hilariously, on the commentary we learn that these scenes were extraneous to the production as well, shot a couple of years (!) before the rest of the movie. Apparently they had John for a few days and wanted to shoot his parts of the (presumably finished) script before all of their financing was in place, and for one reason or another that dough didn’t come through for quite a while (if I am understanding Cymek correctly, Dark Rising was shot in between these scenes and the film’s asylum-set 2nd and 3rd acts, which also might explain why the directing gets a lot less “showy” there – Dark Rising perhaps taught him a few things). He also admits on more than one occasion that the movie didn’t quite turn out the way he wanted, which is admirable, and perhaps that’s why he frequently goes into long stretches of silence; either he was afraid of making too many excuses, or he WAS and the track got re-edited later. Either way, it definitely seems like he could have used a co-participant, such as Brigitte Kingsley, his wife who is the aforementioned producer as well as the film’s female lead. She definitely has more screen charisma than he does, and as the producer could probably have a lot of good insight to share, but alas she has no presence here or on the other bonus features, which are just a bunch of extended/deleted scenes, with forced commentary by Cymek explaining why they were cut (no explanation necessary; I’d rather hear about why he didn’t cut MORE). There’s also an alternate ending, which probably should have been used (and he prefers it), but apparently test audiences hated it so out it went. Way to stick to your guns, man.

I really wanted to like this one, and at times it works really well (I particularly dug the crazy suit the Wolf wore), but the erratic pacing, tonal shifts, and Cymek’s lousy performance constantly kept me from ever really getting into it. And sadly, it’s too long to even recommend as a fun “background” viewing (I just realized it actually shares Shocker’s running time as well), though if some bored kid with Final Cut Pro had the initiative, he could make an 85-90 minute version that comes closer to being a worthy time-killer. Get to it!

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Grave Encounters (2011)

AUGUST 12, 2011

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, MOCKUMENTARY
SOURCE: DVD (SCREENER)

A frequently requested “non canon” review round these parts is Session 9, and eventually it’s going to get to the point where it qualifies for one of those “been so long I can’t remember anything about it” regular reviews. But I remember enough to know that the makers of Grave Encounters must have seen it, as not only does it involve an abandoned asylum infamous for its radical treatments (i.e. lobotomies), but at one point they seem to even directly reference the film, as a blue collar supporting character talks about a team that was hired to renovate the place, which is exactly what the main characters in Brad Anderson’s film were doing.

And while it’s nice that they have seen the (underrated/underseen) film, it unfortunately just reminded me of its existence and also that it was a lot better. Encounters isn’t a bad film, but it leaves no impact; I just finished watching and I can already sense it slipping from my memory (I’m already blanking on a few of the character names). Much like Paranormal Activity 2, it functions as a perfectly acceptable “funhouse ride” of a movie, offering a few jolts and creepy images, but it lacks that unnerving quality that keeps me coming back to movies like Blair Witch or the original Paranormal.

Ironically, the thing that kind of kept it “at bay” was also one of its more original ideas – the fact that they are not only trapped inside the building (the caretaker has locked them in while they do their investigation – more on that later), but also “lost”, in that the main door that should open to the outside world now leads to another hallway, and the very concept of time seems to be abandoned; it’s supposedly 8 am but it’s still dark outside, their food has become rotten even though they haven’t even been there for 24 hours, etc. Unfortunately, this potentially exciting/scary idea is not only never explained (the film really could use a “real world” epilogue, i.e. the caretaker returning in the morning), but it also kept me from getting caught up in the events of the film, because I had no real world experience with such a thing.

In Blair Witch there’s the whole “it’s the same log!” bit that suggests (but does not PROVE) that they have somehow been going in circles. It’s left up to your interpretation – maybe they’re just shitty at walking in a straight line. Here, there’s no such gray area – we see the door that they entered at the beginning of the movie is now another hallway, and later they find that a staircase to the roof simply leads nowhere. This makes it harder to buy into the reality of their situation; it actually worked better when they were simply having trouble telling hallways apart. To me, the further a found footage movie drifts from known reality, the harder it is to buy it as a “real” thing. Even a ridiculous idea like a giant monster in Cloverfield worked better, because everything else was grounded in reality - but here, there’s nothing to latch on to.

I was also baffled why the caretaker actually locked them in, as we learn early on that the folks on the ghost hunting team are a bunch of frauds, faking back-stories and even personas (the psychic guy who’s really just some hammy asshole). Seems to me that they wouldn’t have actually gone to the trouble of really being locked in if they weren’t legitimate hunters (and this being their 6th episode, they’re obviously used to nothing happening). Indeed, my favorite thing about the movie was not only how well they recreated the tone of these terrible ghost hunting shows that are all over basic cable (I’m not a big fan, if you haven’t been able to tell yet), but also that they make such a mockery out of them. Early on, the douchey host pays a groundskeeper to make up a ghost sighting - a funny sequence that is probably the most realistic scene in the film. But it’s a missed opportunity to draw out the tension a bit; we know that they’ve probably staged some events in their other episodes, however they quickly come to the conclusion that the things they are seeing are real. There’s a quick “are you guys screwing with me?” conversation, but it’s only about a half hour into the movie that the shit hits the fan and they all know they’re in real danger, which means that the rest of the movie is just a bunch of running around and yelling. I think having one skeptical character could have helped keep up the tension a bit, as well as make it more terrifying when even they couldn’t deny that they were truly fucked.

But again, it’s a fun enough spook-fest, with surprisingly good CGI ghouls that work much better than that awful thing at the end of the new/worst Paranormal Activity ending adding a bit of flavor. I also was impressed by the acting across the board; Sean Rogerson in particular is terrific as the arrogant host, perfectly nailing the persona of guys like the schmuck on Paranormal State (one of the most insufferable people I’ve ever had to listen to in my life, at a Q&A a few years back where State was previewing during a film festival). Ashleigh Gryzko and Merwin Mondesir are also believable as the most freaked out of the group, though their primarily “oh shit” based dialogue can get a bit grating after a while. Nothing can kill one of these movies easier than bad acting (or familiar actors), so if nothing else the filmmakers (dubbed The Vicious Brothers for some reason, as if living in a world where we already had The Butcher Brothers wasn’t obnoxious enough) have excelled in this area.

The film will be released via VOD and that sort of nonsense on August 26th, as well as (I think just) two theatrical bookings, one in NY and the other in LA. I think it would be a fun movie to watch with a crowd, since it doesn't take long to start with the jump scares and such, so if you dig these sort of movies I'd definitely recommend seeing it that way. If that's not an option, it will make a great rental, since it's not the sort of thing you'd want to watch over and over anyway. It's well made, but since it doesn't offer up anything new (well, this is the only one in which someone eats a rat, I think) or a really strong hook, I think it will just get lost in the shuffle, with so many other (better/meatier) found footage movies as of late. But I think the duo has some promise; hopefully their next project finds them in less well-traveled territory.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...