Bloodrayne: The Third Reich (2010)

NOVEMBER 11, 2011

GENRE: VAMPIRE
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Is there any worse way to honor the veterans than watching a DTV video game movie about vampires in World War II? One directed by Uwe Boll, no less? Now, to be fair, I was actually in Boll’s corner for a while there (like 2006-2007 or so), but what little progress he was making as a filmmaker seems to have stalled, and if Bloodrayne: The Third Reich is any indication, his first few video game movies were actually BETTER than what he’s doing now – at least those were jaw-droppingly, hilariously bad, whereas this (and its predecessor) are just plain boring.

In fact this one might even be worse than Deliverance, which at least had a fun villain and some decent action. Here, Rayne (Natassia Malthe, reprising the role and thus doubling the number of times the character was played by Kristanna Loken) does the same damn thing every time – spins a bit, slices a guy with her sword, and then makes a pose before going off to the next one. Only her brief battle with main villain Michael Paré (his third character in the series) has any variety to it, with a pretty awesome killing blow, but it’s so short and blandly shot that it doesn’t really make much of a difference.

It’s also distractingly cheap and obviously made quickly. I’m sure you’ve seen the trailer for Blubberella, which has most of the same cast and the exact same locations – I suspect that Boll was given the money/time for one film and opted to make two. Thus, scenes play out almost entirely in hand-held master shots, they never seem to move beyond the same three locations, and the action is insultingly unsatisfying. When guys get shot they just sort of clumsily fall over – no squibs or anything to show that they’ve actually been shot (even a major villain character gets this half-assed treatment for his death scene), and even though there are a ton of vampires, they never really use their powers (or show their makeup). I can’t imagine this thing took more than two weeks to shoot (if that), which would be fine for some anonymous DTV slasher but not for a sequel in a once theatrical franchise, one with a fairly cool concept to boot.

See, each film takes place in a different time, and if nothing else they do a decent job selling the period settings on each. So the original was 16th century Romania or something, and the last one was a 19th century Old West tale, and now we have World War II. I like the idea of a series that can literally do whatever the hell it wants as long as it keeps the central character, and assuming the series keeps going, they have free “Rayne” (arrrrgghh) to go back and forth, covering different wars in different countries. It’s not like there’s any real continuity among them anyway – we’re not told how she ended up in Europe or what she’s been doing for the past 100 years or whatever it’s been since she fought vamps in the old west.

Speaking of continuity, there’s a brief flashback to the original where we see her “origin” (the death of her mother), which pays off when she has a nightmare that Hitler himself was the vampire that caused her affliction. Sort of like in Batman Forever when Bruce dreams that it was actually Two-Face who killed his parents, or in that made up Spider-Man movie where they try to make you think Sandman was responsible for the death of Uncle Ben. Except infinitely more hilarious, because, you know, it’s Hitler, with vampire teeth. I kept hoping he’d pop up in the film for real (the plot has something to do with his getting some of Rayne’s blood to him), but alas, Paré is as villainous as the movie gets.

There are two minor improvements over the last one, keeping this from being a total waste of time and energy. First (actually this one might be a MAJOR improvement in your eyes), Malthe disrobes this time around, engaging in minor lesbian activity with an anonymous masseuse and then later having a romp with Brendan Fletcher on a train. Personally, I think she looked better in the last movie than she does here, but it’s still worth noting for those who were massively disappointed that she kept her clothes on in Deliverance. The other improvement: no Chris Coppola! I don’t know if he’s moved on from the Boll troupe or if they just couldn’t afford to fly him to Croatia, but while Paré, Fletcher, and Clint Howard are on board, that unfunny distraction is kept away, and that’s all that matters.

I also appreciate the practical FX work. There’s not a lot, but with so many movies overusing digital blood these days (especially on quickie productions), seeing genuine splatter is always a nice “bonus” of sorts. At first I was thinking this would be a huge makeup movie, since the (laughably overlong) opening credits had two separate full screen cards for “Prosthetics” (with two names each!), but apart from some mutated vampire thing early on, there’s nothing here beyond teeth and the occasional impalement. But they’re done in camera instead of on a computer, which is enough to forgive their abbreviated usage.

If you take out those credits and the slowed down end titles, plus the worthless flashbacks to the original, the movie would only be an hour long. I wonder if Boll would fare better with a syndicated TV show? Obviously he couldn’t do the different time periods every week, but maybe one setting per season would work, and with a variety of writers (and Boll largely kept to a producer role) it might actually be kind of fun. A weekly show about a vampire woman who can “day” walk (the entire movie is set during overcast daytime hours) and uses her powers/strength to fight Nazis or whatever? I’d watch that. But a fourth film that continues this downward trajectory? No thanks.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Curse Of The Cat People (1944)

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

GENRE: GHOST
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

I know I said Cat People was barely horror, but it’s Dawn Of The Dead compared to The Curse Of The Cat People, which has no cat people, but MIGHT have a very benevolent ghost, depending on your interpretation (keeping with the original, Val Lewton kept the more “horrific” elements up for debate). Even the “Lewton Walk” scare scene is incredibly brief and timid, with only the fact that it centers around a child giving it any sort of suspense – if it was Jane Randolph again it wouldn’t even qualify.

It’s also not as interesting. Even with the horror elements kept to a minimum in the original, I still enjoyed the sad love triangle at its center, and dug the (subdued) “curse” plot that ran throughout, starting with the strange woman who appeared at Ilena and Ollie’s wedding. There was a minor mystery there, hints at something quite unique and strange – but those elements don’t really play a part in this one. The closest they get to something along the same lines is a mother-daughter pair who live a few houses down from the Reed family. The mother is an elderly ex-actress who believes her daughter is an impostor, something that I bought because the actress was in Cat People! She played the aforementioned mystery woman at the wedding in the original, and I spent most of the movie assuming that we weren’t supposed to make the connection and it would be “revealed” later. But as the movie neared its conclusion and it became obvious that it was just a really odd casting decision, I realized that I had subconsciously given this movie more of a plot than it actually had.

Because really all there is to it is the story of Ollie and Alice’s daughter, Amy, who is “troubled” in that she believes in fairies and such, and ruins her own birthday party by dropping the invitations in a “magic mailbox” (a hole in a tree). So of course when she sees the ghost of Ilena no one believes her, but when you consider that the ghost doesn’t DO anything (if Ilena was out to get revenge on Ollie for dumping her for Alice, maybe…), coupled with Lewton’s insistence on leaving it vague, it certainly doesn’t provide enough tension or even curiosity to sustain a feature film, even one that’s only 70 minutes long. Amy sees a ghost and… the ghost is nice to her. Near the end she “saves” Amy from the vaguest danger ever seen in a movie, and that’s pretty much it.

Hell, Lewton and returning screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen even go out of their way to introduce potential scary/interesting stuff, only to drop it. The characters now live in the town of Sleepy Hollow, and the “Headless Horseman” story gets mentioned now and again, but it amounts to nothing. The photos of Ilena that Amy finds seem to have appeared there on their own since neither Alice nor Ollie know where they came from, however neither of them seems too concerned about it (Alice is actually remarkably calm about photos of her husband’s ex lying around). And again, they “bring back” the weird Cat Person from the original and cast her in a different, vastly less interesting role. I know Lewton liked to fight the studio (who wanted a lurid, eye-catching follow up), but did he have to go THIS far in the other direction? Especially when it’s not very satisfying as a drama, either?

In a way it almost feels like fan-fiction. People who love a particular work of fiction will often write their own sequels and spinoffs, but often miss the point of what made the original special. They will also often shoehorn in stuff that they care about or is specific only to them, which is why you can probably find a story online where the brothers from Supernatural fight the ghost of someone’s bitchy mom who just doesn’t understand her daughter and wouldn’t let her go to Mark’s party. Once I realized that the actress from the original was playing a different character, I actually wondered if her and her mother’s storyline was being continued from another movie of Lewton’s that I hadn’t seen, because their story had these very specific beats to it that were never fully explored. Indeed, as the commentary explained, this story WAS very close to Lewton (the invitations thing was something he himself did as a young boy), so perhaps the movie was a bit too personal? Especially for a sequel?

At least it’s well made, all things considered. The original director was moving too slow and thus editor Robert Wise (yes, that one) was given a promotion, taking over and shooting the rest of the film, as well as a couple of reshoots that occurred later when the ending was changed and also the studio demanded at least ONE cat in their Cat People sequel (the scene is so arbitrary you probably wouldn’t even need to be told that it was an insert). But apart from that little excursion, it doesn’t feel like a movie that had a lot of trouble getting completed.

Plus, Kent Smith and Jane Randolph slip back into their roles with ease; she’s still a bit sassy, he a bit of a dick (he basically tells his young daughter that she’s a weirdo). It was very rare to see human non-villain characters return in sequels to horror films back in the day, and in fact, the wholly different approach would be even more obnoxious if not for them giving us some sort of anchor. I remember Pierce Brosnan pondering why Bond couldn’t be used in a horror movie or something, because the character was strong enough at that point for people to follow him even if he wasn’t saving the world while banging chicks with silly names – this “sequel” sort of has that same mindset. “This is what happens when Ollie and Alice have to deal with a weird kid instead of a wife who can turn into a panther. Sorry about the title.”

As with the original, Greg Mank provides a commentary that is mostly summarizing the on-screen action while listing off the credits of the new actors (he also repeats some of the info on the returning actors; we once again get a complete description of Randolph’s role in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). He does explain the nature of the reshoots and a general idea of which footage was Wise’s and which was original director Gunther Fritsch, as well as providing some decent insight here and there, but overall it’s not really necessary – the IMDb page will fill you in on most of it. The only exception is when he edits in part of an interview with Simone Simon (top billed for less than 10 minutes of screen time), where she explains that she was offered a role in a bigger movie but did this out of loyalty to Lewton, which is nice. Shame it probably wasn’t worth it though; I suspect that only those who own the box set or this double disc set have the movie in their collection. Highly disappointing.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Interplanetary (2008)

NOVEMBER 9, 2011

GENRE: ALIEN, COMEDIC
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

If nothing else, writer/director Chance Shirley certainly appreciates his John Carpenter movies. The opening of Interplanetary felt a lot like Prince of Darkness’ own opening, where we’d get some movie intercut with credits (similar music too), in a sequence that felt almost like we were being dropped into a movie already in progress. Then the plot itself is a bit Thing-esque, with the jaded/tired crew in a remote station (albeit on Mars here) getting picked off by a creature. And overall, it has the same sort of low budget, laid-back sci-fi/horror/comedy blend of Carpenter’s first film Dark Star.

And like that film, you have to go along with the movie’s off-kilter sense of humor (and obvious low budget trappings), because otherwise there’s no way to enjoy the film. A bad Friday the 13th movie or something can be “saved” with frequent kills and appearances of its iconic killer, but Interplanetary – which had a surprising amount of blood, actually – is not a “body count” movie. Its goal is to make you laugh, and thus if its sense of humor doesn’t jive with yours, there’s nothing else here to enjoy for you. Fast forward until the final 10 minutes so you can see what the monster looks like (he’s wearing a spacesuit for most of the movie) and be done with it.

As for me, I admit a lot of the jokes fell flat, but there were a number I did quite like (“Windows 98… it’s an operating system from like 2003.”). The main joke of the movie is that even on Mars and even when guys attack you out of nowhere with rocket launchers, there’s still paperwork and bureaucracy to deal with, not to mention inter-office squabbling. It’s not a documentary type (though a little 50s style training video offers some of the film’s most spot on satire), but the humor is not unlike The Office’s first couple of seasons (before it just turned into an increasingly weak and generic workplace comedy – they might as well just add a laugh track at this point), or Office Space in some respects.

In fact I couldn’t help but wonder if it might have been funnier to actually shoot it like The Office, with an unseen “camera crew” documenting what we see, and having the actors talk directly to camera in confessionals. Part of my issue with the film was that I felt I didn’t really get to know any of the characters well – they’re under attack like 20 minutes in, giving us no time to understand their group dynamic. You can tell their basic job (mechanic, cook, etc) but that’s about it; the most backstory we get is that one of the girls is passing time by trying (and succeeding) to nail everyone on the base (male or female). Part of what makes this style of humor work is getting a firm grasp on the characters first – that’s why the first couple episodes of Community aren’t that funny. Once the dynamic was established and individual bonds were formed, it made their interactions and dialogue much more amusing. Here, they don’t really give them that time – I don’t even think you ever see more than three characters in one room.

But you gotta love the ambition. They clearly didn’t have much money, but damned if they didn’t put every dollar of it on-screen. Nearly every set in the film was built from scratch, and the homemade feel of the props and such actually works in the movie’s favor; it’s like they’ve gotten the bare minimum resources to work with. There’s no CG in the film either; everything is done in camera (and on 16mm, woo!), from rocket launchers firing to the monster. Their space buggy was made from a Volkswagen, and they even gave the guys those full comic book style fish-bowl helmets that you don’t often see in movies (since they reflect too much of what should not be seen in camera). And while we don’t see too many on-camera acts of violence, the resulting prosthetic work was quite impressive – I particularly liked the bloody spine stump of a guy who was ripped in half while sitting on the toilet.

Shirley and his producers provide a commentary that serves as the disc’s only extra besides a trailer reel. The others barely speak, but Shirley covers pretty much every base – how some of the actors were found, building the sets, minor issues during production, losing some of the budget, etc. I was also mildly amused by the fact that they recorded the track while watching the movie on a PS3, as Shirley warns the listeners that it’s about to start getting loud – I myself watched on my PS3 when the disc wouldn’t play in my DVD player, and cursed myself for turning on the machine 20 minutes before I started watching, which meant the obnoxious whirring* would be heard over 20 minutes more of the movie than it had to be. Just one of those nice bits of synchronicity, and also one that probably would have been edited out if they edited the track, something Shirley looks down on (which is why we get to hear him leave the room to grab a beer at another point). There are a number of gaps, however, and the movie’s audio is muted throughout, so I wish it was a more lively track.

Ultimately I think I wish that they had put their money into making a really kick-ass short version of the movie, one that could play at festivals and attract attention (read: money) to make it into a feature with more dough and resources at their disposal. The concept was great and the money was spent wisely, but with a few better actors and maybe another pass at the script, this could have been a top 10 of the year type movie for me. However, if you start watching and find yourself laughing a lot in the first ten minutes, I think you’ll be just as entertained for the 75 that follow.

What say you?

*If you don’t have a PS3 then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Basically after 40-45 minutes the thing turns on a fan or something inside and becomes about 10x as loud, almost like hearing a vacuum cleaner in the next room. It’s part of why I haven’t fully moved over to Blu-ray yet; there are too many dialogue heavy (or just plain quiet) movies that I love that would be obnoxious to watch that way, and even though I barely use it for games I don’t have room (or inputs) for a dedicated Blu player.

PLEASE, GO ON...

Swamp Shark (2011)

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

I caught an ad for Swamp Shark when I watched Ice Road Terror earlier in the summer, and meant to record it, but forgot all about it until I saw it on the shelf at Blockbuster. And yes! The shelf! They’re actually stocking DTV/Syfy junk again (I got Mothman there last week, too), which is either a good sign (they can afford to stock stuff besides the A titles again), or a bad one (I’m their last customer and they’re trying to keep me). Either way, it was a nice surprise to see it there; usually these things take a year or so – Mothman aired over a year before Swamp Shark but they seem to have been released on DVD around the same time.

Anyway, like Ice Road, it’s the type of movie that would probably bore the usual Syfy audience, as the body count is much lower than they are used to. Swamp Shark kills less than 10 people in the movie I think, and almost none of them are just random swimmer/boater types that get introduced only to get eaten moments later before the commercial break. Hell even the rare teens that DO fit that bill last quite a while (relatively speaking) – the movie was not apparently designed to ensure that channel surfers wouldn’t stray, fearing that they’d miss a kill.

As if to even things out, the movie offers the most ridiculous version of the “close the beaches” plot I’ve seen in quite some time. This time it’s “Gatorfest”, an annual event that celebrates the gators, which are something of a tourist attraction. Human villain Robert Davi even explains that the town can’t afford to close it, too many businesses depend on it, etc. And that would be fine, if the festival didn’t amount to four tents with carnival games and a bounce house with a gator head at the top. Plus, there’s only like 17 people attending, so I suspect they lost money anyway. That they kept it running and thus caused the death of 2-3 people is just salt in the wound, really.

I really think it’s time to retire this subplot in monster movies. It worked in Jaws because they had the dough to pull it off (and an earlier beach scene that showed the vast difference between a normal weekend and the 4th of July holiday crowd), plus it wasn’t an “event” – it was a national holiday. Seems like any reasonable person could agree to merely postpone their localized traditional festival for a week, instead of being cartoonishly ignorant. Plus, they always build these things into the end of the movie. Even a low budget Syfy movie created mainly to entertain drunks/stoners on a Saturday night won’t have the balls to end a movie with a giant CGI shark killing families at a town fair or whatever, so why always save it for the end? Again, in Jaws, this wasn’t even halfway through the movie, and we got the death of that one guy as a motivating plot point for the mayor to pay Quint and have the team go out. These things all just have the “Oh no, he’s heading toward the (whatever event)!”, and then they show up and save the day. Piranha 3D is the only recent movie I can think of that actually let the monsters create some real carnage at one of these things, but they had the money to do it. Syfy movies? Not so much.

At least they sprung for a real head for closeups, sparing the amount of terrible CGI that usually plagues these things. Since Swamp Shark doesn’t really appear all that much, they apparently had the time/money to make halfway decent CGI shots for the bigger kills (including a hilarious decapitation that seems to be paying homage to the famous Free Willy shot), so it’s a quality over quantity affair, for once. The blood is nice and practical too; said decap shot spills a ridiculous (read: awesome) amount of Karo all over the dock where the poor sod was standing.

They also apparently had a little extra dough for actors – there are three decent names in this! Kristy Swanson, Robert Davi, and DB Sweeney are certainly no strangers to this sort of thing (this is actually the 2nd killer shark movie for Swanson), but all three in one? Plus Wade Boggs, for some goddamn reason? That’s basically an Irwin Allen-esque all-star cast for one of these. And it’s a good thing, because as you might have guessed from the fact that there’s not a lot of Swamp Shark action, this one is more focused on character, so having people who can act is quite a blessing. Sweeney in particular is an underrated performer; in an alternate universe, he’s the one who broke out of rom-coms and indie junk to become a big star, and Paul Rudd is the one starring in Syfy movies (I like them both about equally, for the record).

In fact, it’s so focused on character that it actually provides the most unique reason yet for a bunch of folks to go out on a boat and stop a shark in a B-movie: clearing their name for murder! The first death in the movie is chalked up to the gators owned by Swanson’s family (specifically her brother), so they all go out to catch Swamp Shark to clear their name. I actually wish they had gone further with this; maybe had Swamp Shark lawyer up and get away with it for a while, only for them to go rogue in the 3rd act and take him down. Jokes aside though, at least there’s more to it than the usual financial or revenge reasons. I also liked that Swamp Shark was actually brought there (in a truck!); I missed the exact explanation but it was somehow part of Davi’s evil plan, which went awry when Swamp Shark busted loose from the truck in the movie’s opening sequence. And (spoiler) his demise is pretty great too, involving a wench, a tied up Swamp Shark, and buckets of blood and Swamp Shark bits being tossed on the supporting actors.

Not Swanson though; she inexplicably does almost nothing in the finale, even though she’s the heroine and is also BUFFY (to older folks like me at least). I would have thought she’d get in the last kill shot or something, but instead the men do most of the work while she just sort of crouches nearby. She also doesn’t seem to care much that her boyfriend died; she’s flirting with Sweeney at the end even though her beau got eaten only like a half hour before. Sure, he was douchey, but you’d think she’d still be at least a little upset about it.

The DVD doesn’t have a damn thing, not even a trailer, making this two movies in a row that made the timing on my Badass Digest article all the more impressive. Granted, the movie is destined (designed?) for Wal-mart’s five dollar bin, but who is going to buy it even at that price, besides ironic wiseasses needing a gift for a Yankee Swap at Christmas time? At least with some bonus features (and a low price) the folks who enjoy these movies might be enticed to pick it up. Especially on a monster movie – a few minutes on the design of the thing would be awesome. But alas, Swamp Shark is not going to save DVD. And given its low “Let’s put this part on Youtube” potential, it’s just going to be forgotten about in a few months. It’s a shame; I would actually like to see MORE movies like this (i.e. character based, FX shots kept to a minimum so that they don’t look too terrible), but I understand why Syfy might want to commission more in the Sharktopus vein than this. It’s not that it’s a bad movie, but the low body count coupled with the low budget means it doesn’t really please anyone – guys who just want to laugh at crazy attacks will stick to Dinoshark or whatever, and if you want a real monster/predator movie that favors character over action, you can just pull out Jaws again. Swamp Shark sort of sits in the middle of the spectrum: not GOOD, but not bad ENOUGH to work on an ironic level, either.

What say you?

P.S. Another check in the plus column – the movie has one of the quirkier variations on the obligatory “Bigger boat” reference. I’ll let you find it for yourself.

PLEASE, GO ON...

Ghost Month (2009)

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

GENRE: GHOST
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

If you’ve read my article on BadAssDigest today, you’d know the peculiarity of the Ghost Month Blu-ray – there was no chapter selection or breaks of any sort on the disc. If you fell asleep (and guess what? I did) or merely wanted to bring up a certain scene, you’d have to fast forward your way through the entire movie. Perhaps this was the intention of writer/director Danny Draven, thinking he was David Lynch or something (Lynch refused to allow chapter breaks on Mulholland Drive), but I’m actually pretty sure that the distributor just doesn’t know what the hell they are doing.

Or they just assumed no one would care. Despite winning Best Director and Best Cinematography at the 2007 Chicago Horror Film Festival (grats!), this is not a very good movie, nor does it seem to have found much of a fanbase in the past 4 years. In fact, my rating of a 4/10 on the IMDb will actually IMPROVE its average of 2.7, which is quite low for a movie not even shown on MST3k or directed by Uwe Boll. Not only was it dull and overlong, but it also reminded me of two superior horror films that dealt with a similar backdrop of Chinese ghost traditions (They Wait and Seventh Moon) while constantly feeling like the result of a guy who saw the success of The Ring and The Grudge and decided to make his own “a ghost vs a girl” movie to cash in (albeit a few years too late).

The most obnoxious thing about the movie is that it’s set up like a mystery in which there is only one suspect. Our heroine arrives at her new job to replace the old housekeeper of a very odd Chinese woman and her mother, and on her tour of the house she finds a half renovated basement. News flash – no one in a movie ever has a new wall up in their basement unless they’ve been involved in a murder, so here we are pegging the identity of the killer before we even knew there WAS a suspicious death. Draven tries to hide this by making the neighbor out to be a creepy jerk, but it’s a failed enterprise. Nothing about the mystery holds up to even the loosest definition of logic (which would be the one that we use for low budget horror movies), so you as the viewer are left with 100 minutes of waiting for the heroine to catch up to you.

Besides the neighbor, who is possibly the most fascinatingly baffling character in recent movie memory (he acts suspicious for no reason whatsoever even though he’s apparently trying to hook up with our girl), there is no one else to possibly suspect as the killer. The only other characters of note are the lady’s mother, who doesn’t even seem able to talk, and Alyssa’s insane ex-boyfriend, who wouldn’t possibly have anything to do with it since she just got the job and the girl has been dead for some time. Which of course is the other giveaway – when you have a mystery in a bad horror movie, the guilty party is the one you’re supposed to suspect the least. So is it the invalid, the crazy ex, the weird neighbor… or the seemingly kind woman who occasionally gets really weird about the silliest things? Come on Draven, we’re not stupid.

So with the mystery a total failure, all that’s left are the jump scares, some of which are OK enough but most just fall as flat as everything else. Cheap CGI is the order of the day here (I got nervous right off the bat when I saw a credit for “Digital makeup” – what the hell?), and of course such things are never going to be scary to anyone but skittish cats that watch TV, but damned if folks won’t start trying. But even if they were done practically they wouldn’t work, because there’s no follow-through to ANY of the scares in the movie! I’ve never seen anything like it – Alyssa will see, for example, a door suddenly turn all “scary” (dark, cracks around it, etc), shriek, and then they cut to black. Picture comes back, and it’s the next morning (or week – the passage of time in the film is very difficult to comprehend), and the incident is never mentioned again. Even when it’s a human based scare they don’t have any sort of connective scene – at one point she sees the neighbor burying something in the yard, he catches her watching him… and then, again, it just cuts to the next morning as if nothing happened.

And what the hell is up with the way that the climax plays out? The villain is left to die in the basement, and it takes the ghosts like 10 minutes to crawl over to her and finish her off. Meanwhile, the movie should basically be over, but then the psycho ex shows up, and (quite amusingly) bitch slaps the jerk neighbor guy for a while as they fight over her, as if this was somehow the REAL main thrust of the movie. Maybe if he showed up BEFORE the villain had been subdued and momentarily played hero before showing his true colors, fine, but showing up after just drags the movie out even longer than it already was. Christ, I certainly hope this wasn’t even NOMINATED for an editing award at that film festival.

Speaking of which, I was a bit amused by the two awards it won: best direction and best cinematography, since the movie looked like ass on this Blu-ray. Rare (and laudable) for a low budget indie, it was actually shot on 35mm film, but the high definition transfer and whatever else was done to the film in between being developed and being put on this disc did it no favors – it actually looked like a soap opera more than anything else. I was even more amused by how I came to learn about those awards: the “Festival Laurels” graphics with those and other award/“official selection” notifications were actually edited into the end credits! Usually these things are kept to posters and trailers, since they are meant to draw attention and get you interested in a movie. I have never seen them put onto the movie itself; think about it – if it won an award or showed somewhere, that means the movie was already completed! Draven and co. actually had to go back to their finished film and enter this information, as if to somehow silence any critics who had just finished disliking the movie. “What a lousy mov- hey, wait a minute? It won a few awards? Oh, maybe I am wrong.”

Weirder, the standard def DVD has a commentary and some other extras, whereas this Blu-ray didn’t even need a menu – the screen just has “Play Movie” (and again, there’s not even a way to skip forward in 10 minute increments like most budget discs). So it’s the rare case where the Blu-ray actually did a disservice to the film; not only was the standard def cheaper AND more worthy of a purchase (assuming you liked the movie, I mean), but the lesser quality of the picture probably would have made it look less garish. Oh well. Check out They Wait though, seriously. Underrated little flick.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Doghouse (2009)

NOVEMBER 6, 2011

GENRE: BRITISH, COMEDIC, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Despite a recommendation from HMAD reader Rob Spalding, the deck was stacked pretty high against Doghouse: it was from the director of Pumpkinhead 3, it stars the "overused in British horror movies" Danny Dyer, and it’s yet another damn zom-com. But I was pleasantly surprised by it; an imperfect but charming take on the “heroes go to a town where something’s not right” plot, infused with a surprisingly solid male bonding tale and even a nicely underplayed metaphorical slant concerning men’s innate fear of women. Add in the nearly all practical FX work and the most colorful group of zombies assembled in a movie since Dawn of the Dead, and you have a winner.

Key to the film’s success is the realistic camaraderie among the six guys, who have gotten together in order to cheer up one of their number who has just been divorced. The plan is to go to one of their hometowns, which is mostly populated by women, and have a sort of “return to bachelor” party, and for once I actually believed these guys were friends. I enjoyed the Hangover movies, but I spent the entire time wondering how/why Phil and Stu were friends in the first place – even though the Alan character was supposed to be the odd man out, I could see him and Phil being buddies a lot easier than I could see Stu hanging out with any of them on a regular basis. But here, even with some minor age differences, I instantly bought them as a unit; even the obligatory “nerd” fit in in his own way.

And because of that, I didn’t mind that they all remained un-killed for over an hour of the film – I was actually starting to wonder if ANY of them would die when the first one got taken out. If I had any real complaint about the movie it would be that things are too hectic by the time any of them die, and thus there’s no time for anyone to really reflect or even PAUSE when one of them goes down. It’s an unusual problem for a horror movie – it’s rare you as the viewer care about the deaths of the characters – it’s even rarer when you seemingly care more than their friends do. They make up for it in the film’s final sequence (involving a rescue), however, and the closing shot again reaffirms the strong bond among the group.

But don’t get me wrong – just because they don’t start getting picked off one by one until the third act doesn’t mean the movie lacks action. Indeed, they’re only in the town for about five minutes of screen time before the first attack, and the pace rarely lets up from that point on. It’s just not body count action – the group runs, gets split up, and then each group has their own little mini-adventures as they attempt to reunite and escape. Even better, there’s not a single anonymous zombie in the movie – they’re all quite distinct and memorable. It goes against Darabont’s philosophy regarding “hero” zombies (the one I usually agree with), but it works here, given both the fact that this is a comedy after all (unlike Walking Dead, which uses humor so sparingly that it’s almost distracting when they bother to include it), and the back-story that explains how they turned in the first place.

They never get in to too many specifics (plus the bulk of the exposition was delivered by the guy with the thickest British accent), but the gist of it is that a certain detergent created by the army has caused the women who used it to turn into “zombirds”. It only affects women, biting doesn’t turn you, and apparently we have to assume that every single woman in the town used this soap more or less on the same day. But in that respect, it makes sense that they’re all in their work outfits, so you have a crossing guard zombie, a hair-dresser, a chef, etc. If you look at the credits, there’s no “zombie extras” credit with a giant block of names – every one of them has a “name” (job description, usually). And even though you only meet one character before she turns (the impossibly gorgeous Christina Cole), they’re all distinct enough to know which one they’re referring to in the listing for “The Dentist” or “The Vicar”.

Of course, this provides the film’s basic metaphor; the title refers to the fact that every one of the guys (except for the divorced one) gets in trouble with his significant other when they head off to join the others at the beginning of the movie. The joke is, their “bitchy” wives/girlfriends (and one boyfriend) are nothing compared to the army of women who LITERALLY want to kill them, and those who survive (we assume) have discovered that they should be happy with what they have and all that good stuff. The sheer number of protagonists keeps it from getting as detailed as Shaun of the Dead, but it’s still a lot more interesting than the usual “Let’s just cast a bunch of diverse looking folks and hope the audience can’t guess which one of them will die first” approach to modern zombie movies, where caring about the characters and/or even having a primarily character based narrative is incredibly rare; even Romero barely bothers with strong characters anymore.

It’s also unusual to have an all-male group of heroes; Cole’s character has a sort of “I can give it as good as I can take it” attitude that might have been fun to play off of for a while, but she gets turned pretty early on. Which is just as well; had she been around, they probably would have made her into a love interest for the divorced guy (Stephen Graham, who is terrific), and given the movie a bunch of boring clichés to play with instead of the far more amusing (and rare for horror) “old friends busting each other’s balls” approach. There’s a great bit where they find out that there’s a certain frequency that only women can hear, to which one of them jokingly asks the gay guy if he can hear it too – it’s not mean-spirited, it’s the genuine sort of loving mockery that only a real group of friends can pull off without offending. If I play back the conversation during a car ride or something with 3-4 of my friends, and 75% of it is probably just jokes at each other’s expense. It’s what we do, dammit!

The DVD comes with a few standard extras, including an extended making of that covers the usual bases but also just ends randomly, without any sort of closing statement (the last words are from director Jake West talking about the music – which is quite good, I must say). A lengthy outtake reel hints that the chemistry among the guys wasn’t just acting; they seem to genuinely get along like old friends even when an actor flubs a certain line for the 5th time (I don’t care if you’re my own flesh and blood; you blow 5 takes in a row I’m not going to laugh anymore). There’s a few deleted scenes of no real use, and a couple of trailers, all of which blow the movie’s best line (I won’t do so, but the trailer’s below if you want to hear it without the 65 minutes of previous context that make it a lot funnier). Sadly, no commentary – West is a fun guy to listen to even on his own, and with a few of the actors it could have been a riot, but alas.

If you’re sick to death of zombie comedies I doubt this will change your mind, since it’s never as laugh out loud funny as Shaun or the recent DeadHeads, nor is there even a lot of zombie action (very few of the zombirds are dispatched for good). But what it lacks in “highlights” it makes up for in admirable (and increasingly rare) good natured charm – I don’t know about you, but I’ve had just about enough of unpleasant horror films (I’m not even sure I’m ever going to bother seeing Human Centipede 2), and thus any movie that makes the attempt to make them fun again is a good thing.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Exorcismus (2010)

NOVEMBER 5, 2011

GENRE: POSSESSION, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Once again, I have to thank some of my pals for seeing a movie before me and trashing it, lowering my expectations enough to discover that the movie was actually pretty decent. The worst thing about Exorcismus (original title: The Possession of Emma Evans) is that it follows the structure of The Exorcist a bit too closely at times (even bringing in an acting vet in the 3rd act to assist), but there's enough changes to the story to forgive the sense of deja vu.

For starters, Emma is a few years older than poor Regan, and thus the initial "is she possessed or not?" section of the film is a bit more suspenseful, as some of her behavior seems to just be a troubled girl acting out against her parents. Regan was a sweet, innocent girl, so when she got possessed the change in her behavior was immediately obvious. But here, Emma's a typically sullen brat, so when she tells her mother that she hates her, it's hard to tell if she's just being a jerk or if the devil is speaking through her. And like with Emily Rose, they toy with the idea that it may be mental illness for a while; we see two versions of key scenes, one with what Emma thinks is happening, one with what is REALLY happening. For example, she thinks she's just harmlessly (if somewhat unusually) tickling her little brother as he takes a bath, but she's actually trying to drown him.

And that's not the only technical matter worth commenting on; I was also quite impressed with the film's overall visual style, which resembled the Friday Night Lights TV show more than any typical horror movie. The movie was shot all hand-held, with very little standard coverage - the camerawork almost seemed improvised. Even during the few FX scenes (Emma floating), the camera had that "live" feel, which of course makes the visual effects work more difficult but also more impressive (as opposed to locking the camera down to make things easier), and also becomes more believable - if not for the scope visual, one could walk in on a given scene and assume this was a first person/found footage movie.

It's also unusually quiet, something I can appreciate even in a bad modern horror movie, since so many of them are intent on scaring the audience with nothing more than loud noises or music stings every couple of minutes. Music is used sparingly, and as it's a very talky movie (like just about every movie of its type, including Friedkin's), it's refreshing to just take in the conversations without bells and whistles. On that note, I was actually surprised to find that it was in English, given that it was a Spanish production.

On the other hand, sadly, it doesn't really offer anything new. There's a couple of third act surprises of the downer variety, but it follows the basic template and ends pretty much how you think it will from the first minute or so. Given the surprise/huge success of Emily Rose a few years back (75 million! More than any horror film this year save Paranormal 3), you'd think there would have been a revival of exorcism movies, but apart from The Last Exorcism (which was more a response to the success of found footage films), there haven't been many at all, nor have any of them been any good - this is easily the best of those, but it doesn't really make much of an impression on the storytelling level. The slow pace is also a hurdle - I personally didn't mind it (I was actually surprised to see how QUICKLY they got to the first exorcism scene), but today's audiences don't have much of an attention span. The DVDverdict reviewer*, in fact, was seemingly angry that he had to wait a whole 45 minutes to get to the "action", as if they should have been spewing pea soup before the opening credits were through. If anything, I thought it dragged a bit AFTER that point - once the priest got involved it should have picked up a bit, but the girl still carries on a lot of her normal life, slowing things down some.

It also fails to use Doug Bradley in any significant way; in fact it almost seems like they were trying to hide his contribution. For one thing he's billed as "Douglas" Bradley, which I've never seen in any of his other films. Also, even though he's the biggest genre star in the film by far, his credit isn't set apart with an "And" or even a "With" as is tradition for this sort of thing; it's unceremoniously buried in between two other names. At any rate, his role in the film is very brief, and mostly in flashback, centered around the obligatory "previous exorcism that went wrong" that serves as the motivator for the main priest, played by Stephen Billington. In fact, it's the sort of largely unnecessary role that horror icons usually play in these sort of things for seemingly no other reason than to add some name value to the film, making his "hidden" billing all the more puzzling.

Final note - also leading me to believe that the film was in Spanish was the fact that "Exorcismus" is Spanish for Exorcism (it's also probably the name of at least one metal band). Certainly a much better title than yet another "The possession/exorcism of (character's name)" moniker, but I wonder how many folks have skipped the movie thinking it was in a foreign language?

What say you?

*Looked it up to see if there were any bonus features - apparently just a making of piece. Wouldn't have minded listening to a commentary on this one.

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Dread (2007)

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

GENRE: SLASHER, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

After about a half hour or so of The Dread had passed, I paused the film to go check and make sure that director/co-writer Michael Spence was not a student making an ambitious feature film, as just about every single element of the production reminded me of the "movies" I would shoot with friends when I was that age, and thus I could cut him some slack for making such a (sigh) dreadfully wooden movie. Sadly this was not the case; not only was this his third feature film, but he's been part of the business for well over 20 years - he even shot 2nd unit and edited Silent Night, Deadly Night!

So what the hell is the excuse for this movie being so damn amateurish and inert? I'm sure he will blame the budget, but it doesn't cost money to move the camera every now and then. And given the fact that it appears to have been shot on ugly consumer-grade video, I have to assume it would have been cheap enough to get a second take after telling the "actors" to actually react to things like corpses or the appearance of a ghost-like slasher monster. Instead, they usually just stand there and go barely above a monotone to say things like "Son of a bitch", as if they just dropped a slice of toast butter side down.

Plus the story itself just limps along without any urgency. For a movie that is ostensibly about a girl who visits the mental institute that houses the brother she never knew existed, it takes an awful long time for her to get there, leaving us with a first half primarily filled with scenes of her looking at her computer while her boyfriend urges her to look into it. Since we know she DOES (otherwise there's no movie), all of this just wastes our time. And it's intercut with mostly useless scenes at the institute, including a hilariously stupid bit where an orderly and his girlfriend sneak in to have sex, because she "always wanted to do it in a nut house". Who has these sort of ambitions? I get people that want to do it outside or in a car, but why would anyone have a longstanding desire to fuck around in a regular room (in this case, a basement) of a particular building? Had she not died, what other buildings would she seek to engage in carnal activity? Hardware stores?

And when the story DOES move, it barely makes any sense. For a while they make it look like the Michael Myers ripoff brother (the reason I was drawn to the movie in the first place - it sounded like a version of Halloween where Laurie finds out who Michael is and goes to see HIM) is just a red herring, since folks are being offed by this demonic thing while he's still in his cell, and at the end of act 2 he even dies at the hands of the monster. But then it turns out he IS the killer, as he has these ill-defined, not particularly coherent "powers" that allow him to morph, I guess. Nothing is ever explained about this; the closest I can figure to an explanation is that his obsession with some Super Mario type game starring a wizard has given him the same powers as the game character?

Speaking of the game, it's almost cute how pathetic it is. We see an old-school Xbox being used, but the game itself has graphics that would barely be acceptable on a Sega Genesis. I never got why people make up games for movies - there are plenty of 3rd party game developers who would probably let you use their game for free (especially on an outdated system). Instead people are always faking them, and they just suck you right out of any reality the movie might have mustered up until that point (in this case, that wasn't much to begin with). And it's not like the game was particularly complicated or even original - it's just some guy that looks like Pierce Hawthorne in his Cookie Crisp outfit jumping around a Mario/Donkey Kong Country type platform level.

Oh, while I'm referencing Community - a girl actually walks out of the movie because she has Coldplay tickets, the same excuse Josh Holloway's "Black Rider" character gave for his premature exit in the first part of Season 2's paintball finale. But whereas his exit was funny (he's a badass, but he likes the blandest band in the world), here it's just yet another example of this movie's rampant halfassery - she literally just leaves; it's not an excuse for her to go off by herself and die. On the other hand, I'll give it props for one thing - the African American orderly character survives far longer than I'd expect, even outlasting the heroine's boyfriend. Usually this sort of character would die early, as he'd be the one they send to check on the patient and he'd die in the process, so I like that they turned him into a hero of sorts.

But no, the boring girl is the hero, of course, and even gets to engage in the most ridiculous part of the movie (yes, consider the above, and THEN realize it gets stupider. And I had to WATCH this thing). When she becomes the only one left, she has the usual "Now it's time to FIGHT!" moment, and tapes a metal "sword" to her arm. They make a big deal out of it, but then when she actually goes to fight the thing, she just swings at it a few times as she would if the sword was in her hand normally - he never even does anything that would have caused her to drop it if it wasn't taped up. As with the 90 minutes before it (yes, this thing is over 90 minutes long, including super-fast credits), Spence shows that he has no understanding of how to stage or shoot action; a good director would have figured out a way to tie this element into the action (perhaps having the taped up sword actually cause her problems - getting stuck or something), or simply realized that the whole thing was pointless and skipped it.

Back to what I was saying about the possibility that Spence was a film student or something, the film features the lovely Ellen Sandweiss, prominently billed for an extended cameo as the head of the institute. 30 years ago, she played a similarly brief role in a movie by an ambitious young filmmaker (one that certainly yielded better results), so I was thinking it would make sense and even be sort of charming that she would do so again. But since Mr. Spence is NOT a young kid starting out (if he edited SNDN he'd have to be at least in his late 40s), it just makes her (and, to a lesser extent, Tom Sullivan's) appearance all the more pointless - why would you go out of your way to remind your audience of Evil Dead - one of the most frenetic and creative independent horror films of all time - in a movie this clunky and dull?

Luckily, it seems the film barely exists; I can't find any information about a DVD release, and the only video on Youtube related to the film is a promotional piece about its production (no trailer or full clips). And there are only two reviews on the IMDb and one of them is a 404 dead link. The message board is also a ghost town, most of the posts are people asking when it was coming out (probably intrigued by Sandweiss' appearance, as she didn't act in films for over 20 years after Evil Dead), as it sat on the shelf for a while in between filming and its "release". Gee, can't imagine why.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Chamber Of Horrors (1966)

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

GENRE: REVENGE, SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Despite starring in The Manitou, Tony Curtis’ strangest horror association is actually his random, unbilled cameo in Chamber Of Horrors, in which his character is summoned to a gathering of some sort, he makes an odd joke about having a full house (he’s playing poker), and then is never seen or spoken of again. To say its extraneous is being too generous – I rewound it twice because my brain couldn’t process just what in the hell it was doing in the movie. I even toyed with the idea that it WASN’T Curtis at all but some other actor who might appear later, but no.

As I later learned, the real reason for his appearance was part of the attempt to turn this movie, which originated as a would-be pilot for a TV show about a House of Wax (not THE House of Wax), into something more suitable for theaters when it was (quite incorrectly) deemed too intense for television. So they added some cameos and also a William Castle-esque gimmick called the Fear Flasher, which would alert you when something really terrifying was supposed to happen. That they tell you right at the start that it’s only going to be used four times in the 100 minute film is a pretty clear indicator that the bulk of this thing is a snooze.

It doesn’t help that every aspect of its plot was done better before or since. As with House of Wax, you have the lengthy prologue in which the villain is thought killed, only to resurface some time later with a revenge plan. The "expert in some field helps the police solve a crime" story can be a lot of fun, but here it just feels like a lazy way to get a few more actors involved and pad the runtime, since I'm not sure how the cops can be so slow to put together the pieces (murder victims are all tied to the incarceration of a killer who escaped and was never found? Gee, who could it be?). And his creative killings might have inspired Dr Phibes or Theatre of Blood, but those movies also gave us a lot more to chew on and a faster pace to boot. I love the revenge driven killer plot as much as the next guy, but when he is only seeking to get back at three guys, that leaves a lot of movie to fill.

Plus I was unsure who we were supposed to be rooting for. Patrick O’Neal as the killer is somewhat in the Price tradition (albeit not nearly as delightful; he’s got more of a no-nonsense, Jason Robards-y presence), and we spend a lot of time with him as he sets his plan in motion – as a villain, he becomes highly un-threatening after a while. However the good guys simply aren’t as interesting, and it becomes deadly dull to watch them try to solve this mystery that doesn’t exist for us audience members – we know who the killer is and what the connections are, so watching a couple of older dudes try to figure it out is not what I call top notch entertainment.

One thing I did like was that he had different weapons for each kill. As with Shocker, the first act is all about the killer’s initial capture, before they get to the part of the movie anyone remembers. So 35 minutes into the movie, he escapes capture by cutting off his chained hand, and gets fitted with a metal “stump” that allows him to attach different devices to it – the standard hook, a claw, a knife, etc. Being 1966 the killings aren’t particularly gruesome (one has a very awkward attempt at a match cut, from his swinging hook to the waving baton of a conductor), but at least there’s a fun sort of “what will he use next?” angle to make up for the film’s lack of actual suspense or tension until the final showdown in the wax museum (which features a particularly wonderful denouement for the villain).

There’s also a bit of humor that helps some, mostly of the dry wit variety. I particularly liked when O’Neal is talking to a girl who he plans to use as his “assistant” and asks her what she does. After she gives a vague explanation of her work as a dancer and such, he gets to the point: “You’re a tramp.” Heh. I also liked the goofy final shot, which I guess was left over from the original “This will be a TV series” design, as our amateur sleuths/wax museum owners find another body. Off to the next theoretical case!

And while it was a bit intrusive, I love that Warner included the cheesy Fear Flasher (which pauses the action and flashes the screen red) on this DVD, with no option of shutting it off or anything. There’s some sort of charm in putting a very theatrical gimmick on a DVD after 40 years of horror movies will have left even the most casual fan completely numb to this movie’s attempts at terror – even without the warning, the scares would barely even register. It’d be like flashing the “put on your 3D glasses now!” icon on a 2D presentation of a movie or something. But apparently for years it was unavailable on home formats, so it’s cool that they went back to the original theatrical version for the DVD. Nice transfer too, softening the blow of the fact that they didn't include the trailer (nor could I embed the only one I found on Youtube, hence this random home video that came up instead).

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Zombie Diaries 2: World Of The Dead (2011)

NOVEMBER 2, 2011

GENRE: MOCKUMENTARY, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

I don’t know why, but I’m strangely optimistic about sequels to movies that I didn’t like in the first place. It’s like I believe EVERYONE was as disappointed as I was and that they’ll get it right the second time around. That, along with the fact that they actually put it into a few theaters a few months back, meant I was somewhat hopeful for Zombie Diaries 2: World Of The Dead, assuming that if nothing else it would improve on its lousy predecessor. Sadly, if anything it's even worse.

Now, since I didn’t care much for the first film, I don’t remember much about it, either, so I might be wrong when I say that they’ve actually managed to get WORSE at realistically staging the film as an actual character’s first person filmed perspective of its events. They certainly haven’t gotten better –in the original they goofed on things like cutaways, but I don’t recall ever completely forgetting that it was supposed to be a first person movie. Here, if you watched several key scenes without context, you wouldn’t even know it was supposed to be a character’s perspective on events. The camera guy, Jones, barely ever talks or interacts with anyone, and since most modern horror movies are shot shaki-cam anyway, it doesn’t really look much different than Generic Zombie Movie 459 for a hefty percent of its runtime.

Worse, he shoots it like he’s purposely making a dramatic horror movie! In one late scene they hear a giant booming sound, like a far off explosion of some sort. Any normal person would spin in that direction, hoping to get an idea of what happened, but not Jones! He instead pans over to each of his companions in closeup, getting their reactions to this event. Ditto most of the zombie scenes (of which there aren’t nearly enough; there are almost as many rape scenes as there are zombie attacks), in which Jones always makes sure to get a good shot of his buddies shooting at off-screen undead, rather than look at the impending danger. Or, you know, put the fucking camera down and help – apparently he prides himself a true documentarian, seeing as he just sits there and films his friends being killed rather than ever make any real attempt to save their lives.

The directors are just as bad, inexplicably presenting the movie in 2.40 scope and mixing the sound like a normal movie, so when our guy cuts from one character to another, the room tone, music (?), and even dialogue on occasion all blend seamlessly, where there should be a noticeable “pop”. I guess it evens out with all of those Beneath The Mississippi type (non-found footage) movies that don’t bother to do that when they should? Again, if this was an issue in the original as well, it didn’t seem to register on me, but either way – this is insulting to the sub-genre, and unforgivable for directors doing this for a second time.

But even if it was shot like a regular movie, it would be pretty dull. At least the first film had different characters to follow, but here we’re stuck with the same group of folks for nearly the entire runtime, and the extended time doesn’t make them more sympathetic or important to us. One of them is actually a character from the original, something that didn’t even register in the film (she is played by a different actress), but she spends most of the movie barely speaking and merely wandering around with the soldiers that make up our core team of heroes (halfway through the film she basically BECOMES one), and thus I don’t quite understand why they even bothered making this connection. If you’re going to bring someone back with a different actor in the part, shouldn’t there be a good reason to do so? Shouldn’t the part be meaty/significant?

Along with a misleading cover (featuring a burning London and what looks like a zombie wielding an assault rifle – neither of which are even suggested in the film, let alone shown), they also bring back the requisite “evil humans” from the first movie, which does nothing but make it feel even more like a 28 Days Later ripoff than it already did. But I guess that’s actually a good thing, because it’s the only real menace in the entire movie – the zombies are the most vague and unthreatening lot ever assembled for a movie. The “zombie” versions of Pierce and Annie in the Halloween episode of Community were more terrifying than any of the ones here, and with better makeup to boot. In what I assume was a “genius” money saving technique, just about every zombie scene in the movie takes place in near total darkness, or shot in blurry night-vision, and thus it’s not even possible to tell who is human and who is a zombie most of the time. Plus they’re even slower than Romero’s original 1968 ones – most of the deaths seemingly could have been avoided if the humans just walked briskly away.

Some of the darkness works in the movie’s favor, to be fair – there’s actually a good little bit in a graveyard with our heroes sneaking around the undead, who are basically blind in the dark (whereas they have night-vision). And as it borders on survival horror at times, the dark, cold exteriors do provide a nice sense of how lousy their situation is. But it doesn’t help the fact that the movie has no real plot to it besides getting from point A to B, without any exciting action or interesting characters to make up for it. You can remove chunks of the movie or re-arrange them in editing and it wouldn’t really matter.

And what the fuck is with the ending? Suddenly they don’t even bother pretending to be a verite flick anymore, with a standard-shot epilogue featuring our last survivor talking to some new characters on a beach. This comes after we finally get the resolution of a recurring storyline in the film where we get glimpses of some past event, featuring a team of guys in hazmat suits. Who they are and what they’re up to is fully revealed at the end, but it means nothing, and I just started wondering if we were seeing these scenes edited into the main story for our benefit, or if the “found” tape had them spliced in like that. Again, there’s no internal logic whatsoever to the way the film is presented.

The DVD has about 25 minutes of interviews/making of footage featuring writer/directors Kevin Gates and Michael Bartlett, producer Rob Weston, and the cast. It’s the usual sort of dull junk, save for the horrifying reveal that they plan to continue the franchise. But that’s the only feature – not even the trailer for it or any of Dimension’s other releases. Fine by me though; it’s bad enough I made the mistake of returning to this dull, sloppy “franchise”, it’d be worse if I had to endure a commentary or something. And I think I’ll save the 3rd one (if it happens) for that possibly unattainable time in HMAD history where I am down to the last handful of qualifying horror movies to watch. I’d sooner watch Dark Ride 2 than another one of these things.

Actually I take that back. See, at first I was kind of hopeful, because we see a family get eaten and then they switch to the soldiers, who tell us that they found the tape or something. Since the original had multiple perspectives, I was kind of hoping this would be like a long-form horror version of Mr. Show, where you get all of these 5-10 minute vignettes that are sort of “handed off” from one piece to the next. Or maybe they can do like that movie Twenty Bucks, except instead of an Andrew Jackson the movie’s “main character” would be a camera that would go from person to person (via trade, or found after having been killed, or merely left behind by someone who thought running away from zombies would make more sense than filming them, and present a large, sprawling tale of the zombie apocalypse. If they do that for ZD3 I will come back. But I’d be pissed they stole my idea.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

Silent Scream (2005)

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

If there’s one thing I can comment on with some authority, it’s slasher movies. I’ve watched nearly 300 just for HMAD, and if I could be assured I wouldn’t go insane, I wouldn’t watch anything else BUT slashers for the remainder of HMAD’s existence. Thus, I hope you all take my word that Silent Scream is better than most of the indie slashers from the past 10 years – granted that’s saying next to nothing, but I feel it’s one of those movies that someone who hasn’t been subjected to the Graveyards and Dark Harvests of the world will dismiss as being a total failure – even the film’s own actors have badmouthed it.

For starters, the pacing is surprisingly solid until the final 20 minutes (more on that later), with a death roughly every 5-7 minutes – even some of the Friday the 13th movies don’t offer up that much carnage! The killings also start much earlier than expected, due to the fact that (spoiler) they successfully pull off the “introduce a bunch of kids, then quickly kill them all before bringing in the REAL group” approach that the Friday remake tried and most failed at. One nice thing about indies like this is that the cast of no-names (though the Final Girl is apparently from some pop band called Dream) makes it a lot easier to pull this sort of thing off, whereas the Friday remake had several known stars that weren’t in that (too small) first group, making them impossible to buy as the real group. Here, they do it the other way – like 8 of them go off to the cabin first, most of them die, and then 5 more show up the next morning.

Also, the deaths are actually pretty good, and nearly 100% practical (just a few CGI enhancements). Nothing on the level of Hatchet or Laid To Rest, but there’s a fun spark of creativity to many of them. My favorite involved a girl who was slammed into the “V” part of a tree – we only see her head, stuck in the tree as she struggles and then finally dies, as we hear the sounds of the killer doing his thing. Then there’s a pause, and just when you think they will just cut to the next scene, we see the killer, now way off in the background, carrying her headless body. Heh, awesome. It’s the ol’ Texas Switch, but used for a beheading death! Win.

I also liked the relative lack of kids sitting around goofing off and never noticing the disappearance of their friends until much later (i.e. when all but two of them were dead). The first group are all sex addicts, so they go off instantly and die right away, and then when the other group shows up they are instantly concerned that no one is around and thus keep their hijinks to a minimum (there’s still some sex though – this movie makes even Final Chapter’s teens look chaste). And their cells sort of work, which is like the filmmakers meeting us halfway – obviously they can’t have too much “safety” at their disposal (and they’re on an island anyway so it’s not like the cops can just drive up), but we’re spared the usual “I can’t get a signal!” stuff even though someone says early on that they might not be able to make calls (which, again, makes some sense since they’re on an island with inclement weather).

Hell, even the damn twist isn’t TOO bad (spoilers again!). It’s sort of an “all a dream” thing, but it’s closer to Final Destination in that the dream is a premonition of what is actually going to happen. So think of it like the opening scene of an FD movie stretched out for most of the running time, and then just showing the first death in the sequence to let us know that it’s all going to happen as previously shown. This also helps explain some of the minor plot holes and apparent supernatural powers of the killer, so, you know, fine. The movie had at least built up some goodwill before then, making it easier to accept.

A couple of things weren’t so forgivable, however. For one thing, the killer’s identity is too damn easy to figure out, which is worse when you consider his lame-ass costume. The big winter coat thing was already used in Urban Legend, and that movie’s killer was much harder to pinpoint after a half hour. Here, the guy is so obviously behind it all that he didn’t even NEED a costume (like in the Prom Night remake), so to give him one that was so uninspired was just salt in the wound. One or the other, filmmakers!

Also, even for these things, the dialogue was painful. Dream or not, no one says “There’s going to be some ass TAPPING tonight!”, or any of the other brain dead bits of dialogue that occur in those rare moments when folks aren’t running or being killed. There are a few decent lines here and there (the seeming cheating boyfriend character had some nice hero shit in the 3rd act, with a few good lines to match), but most of it just sounded like a 40 year old trying to write dialogue for teens, which it probably was (I can’t find the birthdays of any of this movie’s inexplicable THREE writers).

Finally, the movie’s insistence on killing off the kids as soon as possible means they run out of victims too early, giving it a very clunky final “reel” (not an actual reel, this was shot on ugly digital video). Our final girl runs around for too long, and then once the twist is revealed we have to re-watch a few scenes and listen to a bunch of exposition (see above paragraph re: the dialogue in this movie). Even though the twist is actually foreshadowed quite obviously in the first scene, the way it’s written STILL manages to feel like they made the movie, realized it was too short, and made up a final 20 minutes to pad things out.

The disc’s only extra besides some 5 year old trailers (The Descent! See No Evil! Fucking Dark Fields!) is a collection of brief interviews with the cast, all of whom loved the script and their characters and found Michigan to be quite cold. There might be something in the world that is less useful even to people who loved this movie, but at this point in time I cannot think of it, nor would I want to.

So no, it’s not a good movie or minor gem, but they were clearly putting SOME effort into it, which is more than I can say for at least 100 of the slashers I’ve watched over the past (almost) 5 years. And it was the first feature for the directors, so there’s something to consider. Plus the snowbound setting is almost always a recipe for disaster for slasher movies (Iced, Shredder, etc), so that it was even watchable was something of a minor victory. Thus, if you’re like me and consider slasher movies to be the equivalent of comfort food, or if you’re simply in the mood for a harmless, “fair enough” little horror movie (and you’ve seen all the legitimately good ones I’ve recommended), this should more or less get the job done.

What say you?

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