The Last Exorcism (2010)

The Last Exorcism is yet another in a long string of recent movies dressed up to look like cheap documentaries or found footage: the conceit here is that Rev Cotton Marcus, a preacher popular for his showmanship, wants to expose exorcism as the massive scam that it is. He's got a young son and is disturbed by the stories of children being killed mid-exorcism by the people supposedly trying to "save" them. So, with a small documentary crew in tow, he sets off to an isolated farm where the Sweetzer family is battling all kinds of demons, determined to show the world that exorcism is nonsense.

Of course, it all goes horribly wrong.

The first half an hour of The Last Exorcism works pretty well: one of the challenges for this kind of movie is setting up why things are being filmed, and Rev Marcus's motivations for wanting to get out of the exorcism game are believable enough. The point where it all starts to fall apart is when the crew arrive at the Sweetzer's farm, and the father of the family, Louis, tells him to turn off his camera. There are several minutes of argument in the film, including the screen fading to black for a little while, and a conversation we can't hear between Marcus and Louis Sweetzer being filmed from behind glass. But the film we're watching is supposed to be a documentary, and it's been edited - it's not continuous found footage like in Cloverfield, there are cuts and captions and music added in - so why has this scene been left in? It's awkward, and it's the first sign that the filmmakers haven't entirely got a handle on what exactly they're creating here. And it only gets worse as the film progresses.

The Last Exorcism is, at least, reasonably careful not to commit itself to any one explanation for the weirdness that's going on at the farm: Nell Sweetzer, the supposedly possessed girl, appears to be sweet and innocent, while her brother is sullen and obnoxious, and her father is a scarily over-protective religious zealot who drinks too much and, possibly, sexually abuses his daughter. The film offers us two explanations for all the violence and spookiness that's going on: either Nell is really possessed by a demon, or she's a damaged girl who's been unbalanced by the death of her mother, extreme isolation, religion, and abuse. Because the initial premise of the film is that Rev Marcus wants to prove that exorcism isn't real, though, it seems fairly reasonable to expect that the film will show us that sometimes, demons are real - otherwise, what's the point? In that case, The Last Exorcism would join the ranks of horror films where young girls are abused by their parents for their own good (and the good of everyone else) because they're evil/demonic/possessed, a trend that uncomfortably appropriates the hallmarks of abuse and justifies them. If the demon isn't real, then it's a sad story of a girl punished by her community for imaginary sins and mental illness in a way that feels too medieval to be happening in 2010, a condemnation of small town zealotry.

But the film can't seem to make up its mind, and rather than commit itself either way, it concocts an ending that makes gibberish of the whole endeavour. After conducting a second exorcism, during which Nell contorts herself into all sorts of painful positions (something that might have been a little more shocking if it wasn't used in the marketing campaign) it emerges that Nell is pregnant by a local boy, and the shame and fear of punishment from her puritanical father, combined with everything else she's had to go through, seems to explain her mental breakdown. A self-satisfied Marcus and crew prepare to leave town, but when they realise that Nell's story doesn't hold up, they decide to return to the farmhouse (instead of, at this point, calling the police, or some kind of social services) and ... it's difficult to explain what they find, it's so utterly nonsensical. When the crew get to the Sweetzer's farmhouse, they discover that the place is covered in pentagrams and other arcane symbols, daubed on the walls in blood. Outside, they discover some kind of Satanic ritual is in progress, with Nell screaming on an altar as she gives birth to something or other and Louis lashed to a pole. Among the hooded figures standing around the pyre is a local priest, who tosses the newborn baby into the fire. For a moment the film threatens to become The Wicker Man as Marcus musters what's left of his long-dead faith to break up the ritual. Brandishing a crucifix, he walks into the flames, a symbol we've already seen represented in Nell's primitive artwork. And the documentary crew, despite protesting numerous times about wanting to leave because things are getting too dangerous, hang around long enough to film all of this before finally, finally, turning tail and running, only to get murdered in the woods themselves.

And that's the end. It doesn't work. Nothing about the film works. Was Nell possessed? Who was the father of her baby - and why did the townsfolk kill it? An effective twist ending makes you reconsider everything else that happened in the film, viewing everything through the lens of the new information you've been given. The ending of The Last Exorcism is nonsense; it doesn't add anything, it actually makes the film even more incoherent. If Marcus and the crew were all killed that night, who put the documentary together? How did they get hold of the footage? And why did they edit it so badly? The structure of the film is a mess. If you're going to use sound as a plot element - Marcus rigs up speakers to emit demonic grunting during his fake exorcisms, Nell plays the recorder discordantly and creepily from inside her locked bedroom - then adding in extra sound cues during tense scenes ruins all of that. If you're going to try to make the film feel naturalistic, including moments where the camera is switched off and back on again, then you can't use quick cuts or multiple cameras to cover both sides of a conversation. If you're going to have your camera held by an actual character in the story (not that poor cameraman Daniel really got to have much in the way of characterisation or screentime) then you need to give them a convincing reason to keep filming when things get dangerous or difficult, and you can't use multiple angles on the same scene, or you destroy your audience's willing suspension of disbelief. It's just sloppy to mash up elements of traditional horror movie filmmaking with documentary making and figure no-one will notice - it's disrespectful to your audience. That faux documentary style gimmick is over-used already, and while The Last Exorcism initially seemed to have a pretty decent reason for employing it, it wasn't well thought through enough to work. The best thing about the movie is the acting, but while all the actors are great, they're let down by a weak script and a badly executed concept. Less of this kind of crap, please.

IMDb link

F (2010)

Every generation thinks the one after it is doing it wrong. The kids of today are always more irresponsible, more violent, less educated, and generally less civilised than the generation who went before them. Johannes Roberts’s F crystallises that attitude, with the added bonus that this time, the kids actually aren’t alright.

Robert Anderson is an English teacher whose life effectively fell apart when he was attacked by one of his students. He gave the kid a failing grade, handed out with a dollop of verbal abuse, and got a bloody nose for his troubles. When the school took the student’s side, suspending Anderson until the end of term and forbidding him to give out “F” grades anymore, Anderson lost his confidence – and, apparently, everything else. Separated from his wife and unable to keep control in the classroom, Anderson turns to drink. He’s paranoid, calling the police so regularly that they recognise his voice, and he’s one mistake away from getting the sack.

Anderson’s daughter, Kate, is a typical teenager: she rolls up her school skirt, smokes in the toilets, and sends text messages during class. She’s distanced herself from her father, leaving her mother to carry messages between them, and even in his classroom she barely acknowledges him. It’s a familiar situation; she’s not a bad kid, but she’s rebelling against his overly strict rules in every way she can, and the more he tries to rein her in, the further he pushes her away.

One winter evening, Anderson keeps Kate back after school, giving her a detention on spurious grounds – mostly just so that he can spend time with her – but even then, he can’t communicate with her. He confiscates her mobile phone, sparking yet another argument, but this time things go too far. His relationship with Kate – and with his wife – may never recover. The two of them are so effectively pushed apart from one another that they’re completely isolated when the killing starts.

The deserted school provides a great setting for some stalk ‘n’ slash action: it’s big enough that the few people who are still there are too far apart to hear or help one another, but connected enough that the killers can move from one area to another quickly and easily. There are plenty of places to hide, and, like any location that’s usually filled with people, an empty school is inherently creepy.

The killers are the embodiment of Anderson’s worst fears: youths in hoodies who have no respect for authority. There’s no apparent motive behind their killings, and none of the hoodies ever show their faces; whether they’re even human is up for debate. They move quickly and silently through the school, climbing the walls, running along shelves, hiding above eye level only to drop down and kill. The violence they perpetrate is random, and quick: they don’t linger over their victims, and they don’t appear to take any pleasure in their work. They just strike and kill, in a series of increasingly nasty ways. F holds back a lot of its gore; most of the killing is done off screen, with only sound effects or blood spatter to feed the audience’s imagination. The one moment in which we’re allowed to see what they’ve done to one of their victims, it’s shocking, almost incomprehensibly awful. These are some scary baddies.

The fact that the hoodies aren’t given names, faces, or motives makes them blanks onto which the audience can project their fears. They’re, literally, just hoodies; they’ve become dehumanised, not characters but symbols. There’s no need for them to have back stories or motives; just the fact that they’re wearing hoodies makes them frightening. And the relationship between Anderson and Kate makes us care: Anderson is far from being a hero, but F makes us feel for him, makes us experience his desperation to save Kate. To not to fuck up again. After all, the only reason she’s even in danger is because of him.

F is a film with almost no fat on its bones: there are only a few characters, even fewer who really matter, and it doesn’t linger over explanations. After the unrelenting tension of the previous scenes, the ending seems rather abrupt, but give it a moment: let it sink in. There’s maybe something slightly off with the pacing, but that ending seems to work better the further away you get from it. Downbeat, no-win endings are common among a certain strain of modern horror movies, and F couldn’t have ended any other way. This isn’t a gung ho revenge flick. F is a film about loss of control; a film about the breakdown of relationships; a film about the unbridgeable gap between one generation and the next. It’s a film about choices, and sometimes, there is no right answer.

IMDb link

Zombieland (2009)

You probably already got the memo, but zombies are cool now. A lot of the most painful hipster nonsense surrounding the undead can be blamed on Max Brooks, who wrote both the fake instructional Zombie Survival Guide and the novel World War Z. Probably some of the blame can also be laid on Zack Snyder's head, for directing the dire remake of Dawn of the Dead. And quite a lot of it attaches to Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright for the wonderful Shaun of the Dead. Whoever's fault it is, though, the fact remains that zombies are cool. Zombie-related merchandise is everywhere and, since zombie movies are virtually guaranteed successes, they're being cranked out at a rate of knots. The revival started in 2004 and, somehow, it hasn't ended yet.

But if there was any justice in the world, the release of Zombieland would mark the exact moment everyone realised how incredibly stale this genre has become. Because it's not a zombie movie, nor is it a horror movie. It's one of those sub-Apatow films about a neurotic misogynist nerd who, somehow, incredibly, ends up with a beautiful woman on his arm for no good reason. The zombies -- who, actually, aren't even zombies, despite the film's insistence on using that word constantly throughout -- are never a credible threat. They're just backdrop. They could be anything. They're just there because it's cool. Zombieland takes the most basic, superficial elements of zombie movies, and a stack of the most tired cliches, and jams them into a story about an awful manchild who never had any friends or understanding of how to relate to another human being eventually learns to get over himself. Sort of.

What's really difficult to work out is whether we're ever supposed to like or empathise with "Columbus". Given that he's the main character and also narrates most of the film, it'd be nice if he had some redeeming qualities, but he doesn't. In place of a character, he has a string of cliched quirks: he plays WoW, he doesn't like going out, he's a bit germphobic, he's scared of clowns, and he doesn't understand that "hot girls" are actually people. And he's the most fully developed character in the movie. Zombieland also gives us "Tallahassee", the obligatory hardman with a heart of goo and a sad backstory about a dead son we'll only bother to hear about for five minutes; "Witchita", the love interest for Columbus who, we're told, is smart and independent but barely acts like it; and "Little Rock", Witchita's kid sister who's just there to remark on how she doesn't get the cultural references everyone else insists on making.

(In case it's not blindingly obvious, I find it intensely irritating that the characters in Zombieland aren't given actual names, just places they're trying to get to. It's not cute.)

None of these characters really develop over the course of the movie. Columbus does a little bit, just enough to provide a sickening closing monologue on the nature of humanity, but that's no hero's journey. And he's no hero. His motivation for most of the film seems to be finding a girl who'll let him touch her, and that's when he can bring himself to stop referring to women as bitches. The film's low point is either when Columbus describes Witchita as "not your typical hot stuck-up bitch" or when she refers to the girls who didn't ask him to the dance in eighth grade as "those bitches," outraged that anyone could ever have found his awful, immature whinging anything less than irresistible. The film's tagline, "nut up or shut up", pretty much sums up the movie's attitude towards women. They're either evil or helpless and in need of rescue.

It's not the worst offender in the sexism stakes, but it's pretty bad. And since Zombieland doesn't have any redeeming qualities, it's hard to ignore. Structurally, the film is all over the place. It has no beginning-middle-end. It has no real conflict, since it utterly fails to ever put any of the characters in any kind of danger. It doesn't even have the good grace to be funny, although it tries desperately, with recurring "jokes" about Tallahassee's love for Twinkies, and the excruciatingly awful Bill Murray cameo. Nothing happens in this movie. It's difficult to summarise the plot, because there wasn't one. Some movies can make that work, but usually only when they have strong characters, relationships, and themes to play with instead. Zombieland has none of the above. It doesn't even have a solid central premise, because the "zombies" in the movie aren't zombies, and "Zombieland", which is used to refer to the post-apocalypse America, is a false conceit because the whole world is overrun with the infected.

The thing is, I wasn't even expecting it to be good. I was expecting it to be your typical post-2004 lazy zombie movie where forgettable characters battle the usual zombie horde and end up saving the day, somehow (or at least surviving to live another one). It's not even that. It's a horrible mess that uses the trappings of zombie movies to disguise an utter lack of ideas, story, or intelligence. It's a waste of time, life, and celluloid.

IMDB link

The Graves (2010)

During the Great Plague of London in 1665, holding a bunch of flowers to your nose was thought to protect against the disease. In 2010, covering your nose to avoid a bad smell can apparently prevent you from becoming possessed by a demon. Well done, everyone.

The Graves was part of the After Dark Horrorfest 2010, a now annual celebration of low-budget, low-quality horror movies. Virtually all of these movies are unwatchably shit (the exception being The Hamiltons, which is rather good) so, in order to market this low-end slop, they've been bundled together and called a festival. Since there have now been four After Darks, it's apparently a tactic that works. It's just depressing, really, because the fact that there's a market for these films means they'll keep getting made, and the existence of The Hamiltons means that I'll keep watching them, forever hoping to find another diamond amongst the shit.

So, The Graves. The "Graves" of the title aren't holes for burying dead people in, but rather a pair of sisters, Meg and Abby. We're introduced to them filming one another in a Forbidden Planet style comics and memorabilia shop: they live in Arizona, but Meg is about to move to New York, so the sisters decide to take a road trip together, as one last hurrah. Amusingly, they decide to go and see the world's largest thermometer but get lost and end up in Skull City, a mining ghost town.

(Googling facts about this film is actually way, way more entertaining than watching it. Apparently the world's largest thermometer is located in Baker, California. And the Skull City of the movie is actually Vulture City, a real ghost town in Arizona. The Vulture gold mine was discovered in 1863, and at its peak, the city was home to nearly five thousand people. The hanging tree - shown in the movie - was used to hang at least 18 men. The mine was closed in 1942, and the town became a ghost town. A quick Flickr search shows up dozens of photographs o the ghost town - which, incredibly, you really can arrange a self-guided tour of. Googling Vulture City has actually killed the one thing I enjoyed about the film, which was its location and set details, because all of those things were in situ when the film crew showed up. It's testament to the incredible ineptitude of the filmmakers that, despite the wonderful location, they still managed to make a film this bad. But I digress.)

Meg decides that taking a tour of the ghost town would be an awesome way to make the best of getting lost, and so the sisters set off to look around. But almost immediately, they discover that something's horribly wrong: trapped in a tumbledown hut, they're forced to listen as another tourist is brutally murdered by a hammer-wielding, bearded man in dungarees and dark goggles. Bizarrely, after the murder, there's a horrible, deafening, weird noise - but there's no time to dwell on that, because now the goggle-wearing madmen is coming after the Graveses.

Right, and here's the major problem with this movie: its structure is all over the place. The girls manage to dispatch the first killer only for another one to show up, and then another one. Random characters show up just to increase the body count, with no indication of where they might have come from. Plot elements are introduced and then forgotten about for no apparent reason. It's impossible to gauge how long the film might be while you're watching it, or how far through you might be, because there's no structure to events, there's no sense of escalation or an approaching climax. It's just a string of events that don't even entirely make sense. Meg cuts her forearm open to make a fake trail of blood to distract the killer, but her wound is gone in the following scene. Abby seems to have died (off screen) but her lifeless body gets up again after a little while. The townspeople appear to be part of some bizarre cult, but the religious imagery doesn't go anywhere. Horror movie icons Bill Moseley and Tony Todd show up, but while Moseley gamely gives it a go, strapping on a plastic pig's snout (for no apparent reason), Todd is clearly just phoning it in. The film is just a succession of stuff, with very little thought given to what any of this stuff has to do with any of the other stuff in the movie. Characterisation is virtually non-existent: the girls, at the beginning of the movie, are unconvincing goths who are obsessed with comics (if you've not done so yet, have a close look at the movie poster, and try not to punch anything once you've read it) but that lasts for five minutes and is then irrelevant.

The other main issue is that the acting is dreadful. Just dreadful. The two girls are passable to begin with, when they're just messing around and hanging out, but as soon as the tension attempts to ratchet up, it all falls apart. They stand awkwardly, deliver their lines awkwardly, and generally aren't believeable in the slightest. When anyone gets possessed (by inhaling the stench of, er, oh, I dunno, something) they demonstrate that they're possessed by tossing their heads about and gnashing their teeth. The first time Meg becomes possessed, it isn't even clear that that's what happening. She's just ... snapping at the air with her teeth, and going "raaaaarrrghh" a bit. It's ridiculous.

And then there's the CGI. Oh, the CGI. It's ugly stuff. The ghosts look ridiculous, and the flies look worse. The only thing that looks good in this movie is the location and, as previously discussed, that's got nothing to do with the filmmakers. There's nothing clever about this movie, nothing inspired, nothing interesting. There's just no point in it existing. And to add insult to injury, there's a fucking sequel in production.

IMDb link

It's behind youuuuu!

This is aces. Thanks to many of the movies in this video, I am actually permanently afraid of bathroom mirrors.

The House of the Devil (2009)

There's a lot of debate about The House of the Devil online: some people claim it's an arty, intelligent, slow-burning exercise in tension that goes a little awry at the end, while others claim it's so dull they fell asleep halfway through.

The second camp is right.

The House of the Devil starts out promisingly: it's a pitch perfect imitation of 80s horror movies, right down to the font used in the credits. It really does look great. There's been so much care and effort put into making the film look fantastic that, it seems, there was nothing left to make it, y'know, actually good.

The plot, such as it is, is familiar enough: Samantha is a poor student who urgently needs to find the means to move into her own apartment, and a babysitting job for the admittedly creepy Mr Ulman seems like a great way to generate some cash. There's something seriously off about his house when she arrives, and when it emerges that this isn't actually a babysitting job at all - there is no baby, only an elderly woman - Sam's ready to leave. But Ulman makes her an offer she can't refuse (an outrageously over-the-top $400 for an evening's work) and she agrees to stay. Naturally, it turns out that the elderly woman she's there to take care of is, well, some kind of scary mutated thing, and the Ulmans don't want a babysitter so much as a vessel for the devil.

It's tediously predictable, but many widely acknowledged horror classics don't offer much more than that. Suspiria, for example, doesn't have much more of a plot than that. But Suspiria had brilliant visuals and interesting set-pieces along the way, while The House of the Devil has, um, a scene where Samantha has a very long conversation with a pizza place, one in which she breaks and subsequently clears up a vase, and one in which she talks to a goldfish. Beyond that, nothing happens for the entire first 70 minutes of the film, and it's achingly boring.

If the payoff was worth it, I might have been able to forgive the film's utter inability to create a character with any depth, or a believeable situation to put her in, or any actual tension. But it isn't. For one shining moment, it looked like The House of the Devil might actually have some guts; like it might actually stray off the well-trodden path it had been mindlessly wandering along all the way through. In the film's final moments, after escaping from an uninspired Satanic ritual, Samantha realises that there's no way for her to win. Ulman chases her down in a nearby graveyard, and it becomes clear that it's too late for her now; she's thoroughly infected with evil. She turns the gun on herself and blows her brains out.

... Except that she doesn't. It would be better if she had; it's the first time she shows any kind of intelligence or strength of character or ... well, anything, really, and it was the first time the film got close to being shocking. It's not a happy ending, sure, but when you're battling the Devil, things don't often turn out rosy. Instead, the film went for a much more predictable ending, leaving a bandaged Samantha resting comfortably in a hospital bed, having somehow miraculously survived, with her devil-baby intact. It's a cop out, and worse, it's a predictable cop out, and even worse than that, it's a boring predictable cop out that thinks it's clever.

There is absolutely no depth to this movie. It has nothing to say, nothing to contribute to the genre, nothing to offer the viewer except some flickering lights to stare blankly at. The central female character is a complete blank canvas; the film is never scary because you can't invest in her, you can't believe in her, she's nothing but an actress walking around and saying words. She's offered dozens of ways out of the situation we're supposed to believe is hopeless, and she takes none of them. She doesn't trust her own instincts, or those of her friend who's trying desperately to get her to see that the babysitting job is creepy as all hell, but there's no sense of an inner struggle, any sense that she's doing this out of desperation, or anything other than ennui. Although even that would make more sense than what the film presents us with. This film is so dull that you'd almost want to find a Satanic cult to hook up with just to shake off the crushing boredom.

I've actually had the misfortune of watching -- or trying to watch -- another of Ti West's movies: Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. That one is unwatchable shit in a whole different way than The House of the Devil: it's lowest-common-denominator toilet humour, and I couldn't sit through it. I'm afraid I've just added another director to the list of filmmakers whose films I just won't watch. I value my time and sanity far too highly for that.

IMDB link

The Fourth Kind (2009)

The Fourth Kind is a prime example of the two most pernicious trends currently plaguing the film industry: it purports to be based on a true story, and it's being marketed as a real film when, in reality, it's a cheap, lazy, studenty pile of wank.

The movie opens with Milla Jovovich introducing herself as actress Milla Jovovich, and explaining that the film we're about to watch is based on real people and real events. In fact, she tells us, the filmmakers are so keen to emphasise that this is based on things that actually happened to people that actually exist that every scene in the movie can be backed up by archive footage or audio, or came from interviews with the people involved, and real footage and audio recordings have been threaded through the movie.

Milla's speech is cut off as she repeatedly interrupts herself, and even during this brief introduction, one of the biggest problems with the movie becomes apparent. The editing is appallingly amateurish. Beyond amateurish, actually; it feels like an exercise in learning to use Final Cut. Throughout the film, the supposedly real archive footage is sandwiched alongside the acknowledged recreations starring Jovovich, often using split screen techniques to underline just how rooted in fact the movie is. The film is rendered unwatchable as a result, particularly as the filmmakers insist on moving the line between the two different scenes. It's impossible to watch both versions of the same scene at once, and the dancing black line down the middle of the screen inevitably becomes the focus of your attention instead. In one particularly awful sequence, there are four different images on the screen at once, as two different perspectives of the same scene in both the "archive" footage and the "dramatised" footage play out at once. The thick black dividing lines move constantly throughout this scene, robbing every single version of the event of its impact and watchability. Instead of being moved by the tragic events unfolding onscreen, I felt a vague sense of motion sickness and an urgent need for the film to be over.

The thing is, instead of emphasising the truth of the story, what this bizarre conceit actually does is re-enforce the sense of falsehood, and prevent any suspension of disbelief. Milla Jovovich, despite the list of terrible films on her IMDB profile, is actually a pretty good actress, but when she's reading her lines at the same time as another actress who is supposedly the real version of the same character, you can't invest in her performance. She's right there on screen telling you that she's acting, and no matter how convincingly she cries or screams or begs or argues, the film won't allow you to forget for a moment that she's playing a character. The Fourth Kind is only 98 minutes long, and every single one of them outstays its welcome.

The worst part of all this is that The Fourth Kind actually has a pretty terrifying premise. Alien abduction is a great subject for a horror movie - how scary would it be if there were creatures out there who were so technologically advanced that they could run experiments on us without us ever even knowing they were here - and the owl/alien grey imagery in the trailer (noticeably absent from the film itself) looked promisingly frightening, and original. Unfortunately, the film totally failed to deliver on all fronts: it's dull and pretentious and, ultimately, insultingly stupid.

As is so often the case in horror movies with clever concepts, The Fourth Kind falls down particularly hard when it comes to dealing with the human drama aspects of the story. No-one in The Fourth Kind behaves like a real person would; the worst offender is probably the policeman who is, for no apparent reason, desperate to arrest Jovovich's character for murders it's overwhelmingly obvious she did not and could not have committed; who speaks in bizarrely stilted cliches and nonsenses; and who randomly takes it upon himself to smash her furniture and then confront her with photographs of her dead husband while she's lying paralysed in a hospital bed. It's gibberish.

I don't have any evidence to support this theory, but I suspect The Fourth Kind's fake documentary footage was originally a student production - a straightforward fake documentary about alien abduction. And then someone somewhere along the line suggested it'd sell if only they had a star involved, and so they hired Milla Jovovich for a week to bash together the "dramatised" sequences. It certainly doesn't feel like much more time or effort went into it than that, based on the awkward acting and abysmal editing.

The Fourth Kind is not a real movie. What it is, is a total waste of your time and money. Fuck this film. If the movie industry is in trouble, as it keeps telling us that it is, it's because it insists on peddling this kind of crap to unsuspecting cinemagoers.

IMDB link

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

It's not really fair to judge a movie without seeing it, I know. But - can we talk about the trailer for the Nightmare on Elm Street remake? Bluntly, it looks terrible.

The fact that it starts out with a mob of outraged parents chasing Freddy to his fiery death immediately suggests that this film is going to get everything all wrong. Fred Krueger, child murderer, is not what's interesting about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and whenever the movies have previously tried to explain his origin story, it really hasn't worked. What makes the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise different from every other horror movie is the whole nightmare schtick; the clue's in the title, really. The idea that your nightmares might actually be dangerous is a brilliant one, and the franchise is always at its strongest when it finds interesting - and personalised - ways to off its victims. What's scary in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie is, obviously, Freddy, but also the contents of one's own subconscious. Dwelling on Fred Krueger pre-barbecuing seems like missing the point.

The aesthetic of the film also seems uninspired. Blue filters, way too much CGI, flashy quick-cutting... yawn. Aren't there enough films that look like that already?

I wanted to be open-minded about this remake. If I'm honest, as much as I love Robert Englund as Freddy and don't really want him to be replaced, the original Nighmare on Elm Street hasn't aged well. It's not a perfect film, and it's possible that someone could have made a great remake of it. But based on that trailer, it doesn't look like they have.

IMDB link

Gamer (2009)

What would it be like if your MMORPG character was a real person? What if, instead of customising your avatar to your tastes, you could pick a human being to dress up, pose, and respond to your every command? What would that do to your interaction with your character? What would it say about you -- and what would it do to them? Neveldine and Taylor's latest movie, Gamer, poses those questions, and while it's not entirely successful at answering them, it's nonetheless a startlingly original movie that makes an angry statement about pretty much everything about contemporary Western culture.

Set in the not-so-distant future, Gamer stars Gerard Butler as Kable, a (wrongly) convicted murderer who has become the star of the new gaming sensation, Slayers. In Slayers, prisoners on death row are given a chance to earn a reprieve by playing through a series of Call of Duty-style battles: their brains, implanted with nanotechnology, allow gamers to control their every move. No "i-con" has ever made it through more than 10 battles, but Kable has survived 27, and is coming dangerously close to achieving the 30 wins he needs to be set free. So far, so Running Man, but Kable - aka John Tilman, an ex-soldier with a wife and kid on the outside - is the least interesting character in the film, his story a straightforward revenge plot on which the rest of the insanity is hung.

See, Slayers isn't the first game in Gamer's world to use real people in place of computer generated avatars. Before Slayers came Society, a not-even-thinly-veiled take on Second Life. Attractive young actors turn over their bodies to players who dress them up in ridiculous costumes, give them explicit user handles, and control their every move, usually using them to fulfil bizarre sexual fantasies. Among the actors working in Society is Kable's wife, Angie, who is played by a grotesquely fat man confined to his chair, constantly slurping some unrecognisable junk food while feeding Angie crude dialogue and making her bend over so he can ogle her scantily-clad backside. From a short scene in some kind of government office, it's clear that working in Society is considered prostitution -- and due to both Angie's job and Kable's incarceration, their child has been removed from her custody and given to a foster family. Because this is a movie, it's not difficult to figure out who that foster family might be: the kid has been adopted by eccentric billionaire Ken Castle, the creator of both Society and Slayers.

Castle, played with relish by Michael C. Hall, isn't content just to have created the media sensation of the age and amassed billions and billions of dollars. His ultimate goal is to enslave the entire human race by having them implanted with the nanotechnology used to control the avatars in his games: the technology rebuilds brain cells, promising adopters a brain that will never succumb to age or illness, but it also turns them into cells in a network that can be used to broadcast information or to receive and respond to commands. Castle's own brain has been modified to turn it into the ultimate transmitter, theoretically putting him in control of everyone else, though it has a flaw that really needed to be further explored in the movie. As he puts it: "I think it, you do it," which isn't as powerful a scenario as it sounds when you realise how little control you sometimes have over your own thoughts, and how open to suggestion our minds are.

Opposing Castle is an organisation calling itself Humanz, a small group of cyberpunk hackers determined to expose Castle and alert the general public to the threat he poses. By contacting Kable's player, the geeky 17-year-old Simon, and convincing him that the only way to win the final battle is to sever the connection between Kable and his controls, allowing him full control of his own actions and freeing him from the "ping" lag between a command being issued and its execution, Humanz set Kable free. But Castle's got a lot invested in making sure Kable never does really walk free, and the rest of the movie is a madcap power struggle between Castle and Kable.

There's a lot to mull over in Gamer, and I suspect a second viewing will reveal even more ideas and details I didn't have time to catch the first time around. Its 95-minute runtime is absolutely jammed with ideas, and while that's refreshing when contrasted with all the dozens of movies coming out every week that don't have any ideas at all, it probably would have benefited from being pared down somewhat. There are several extended scenes set inside Slayers that don't serve much purpose, since we know Kable's always going to triumph. And sure, seeing an ultra-violent computer game made flesh and blood is shocking to begin with, but the way it's shot, all shakycam and rapid zooms, makes it difficult to really know what's going on. The idea of making people play games to earn their survival has been pretty thoroughly explored on film before, and perhaps the more interesting game is Society, which ventures into territory Joss Whedon's Dollhouse can only allude to. What happens when people hand over their free will to someone else? They've volunteered for this, consented to it, even, and yet they're still being forced to do things they'd never truly choose to do. How can the players bring themselves to subject people to the kinds of torture they force their Society avatars into? It's obviously a science-fiction scenario, and yet the way the actors are treated as less than human by their players isn't too far removed from the kind of exploitation that really does go on in the world, all the time.

Gamer also asks us to question the kinds of games we already play: sure, our onscreen avatars aren't really people, but does that mean we're entirely absolved of our actions when we're playing through them? When so much of our interaction with other people occurs online, can we really tell the difference between a person and a character? I'd argue that for the most part, yes, gamers are perfectly capable of telling fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, but Gamer captures some of the unease that surrounds the more sadistic or sexually explicit games out there at the moment.

Unfortunately, Gamer doesn't really have the time or scope to really get its teeth into any of the questions it raises. It comes across as an incredibly angry movie, railing against a lot of different things all at the same time, and while it's still a coherent film, it maybe isn't as powerful as it could be. Still, I don't think there are any other filmmakers out there producing anything even half as interesting and innovative as Neveldine and Taylor's films.

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Bunny and the Bull (2009)

Bunny and the Bull is a deceptive film. Superficially, it looks like a gentle, surreal comedy in the vein of director Paul King's TV work: the quirky set design, including hand-drawn furniture, and the bizarre character and costume designs recall The Mighty Boosh. Actors Edward Hogg and Simon Farnaby even look remarkably like Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt.

Unfortunately, though, scratch that surface and you're looking at a British take on Apatovian bromance movie, complete with uncomfortable grossout scenes and a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (or the "Because, ummm...? Girl, if you prefer). Described as a "road movie set entirely in a flat", Bunny and the Bull is about Stephen, an agoraphobic who hasn't left his house for nearly a year since something traumatic happened on a tour across Europe with his best friend, Bunny. Hallucinating wildly, Stephen relives the trip - handily for the audience, in chronological order, without much missed out - and, goaded on by an imaginary Bunny, by the end of the movie he manages to come to terms with what happened and move on. This might actually be the first movie about an imaginary/remembered bromance, rather than a current one, but it manages to show just as much disregard for women as human beings as the rest of the genre.

At the beginning of the film, Stephen is rejected by a woman because he's apparently passed into the "friend zone." His depression over this - typical "Nice Guy" angst - provides the impetus for the European jaunt, and the first part of the film takes care to spell out just how diametrically opposed Stephen and Bunny are. In spite of borrowing Noel Fielding's hair, Stephen is a socially inept nerd whose idea of fun is visiting every obscure European museum he can find; Bunny, meanwhile, is frivolous, stupid, addicted to gambling, and a complete womaniser. It's never clear why the two of them would ever spend any time together at all, and they don't really seem to even like one another very much. It's almost a buddy cop movie set-up, except the two of them aren't brought together by circumstance, they're supposed to actually be friends.

Anyway, Stephen and Bunny find themselves in a terrible chain seafood restaurant in Poland, where they meet Eloisa, a beautiful Spanish girl who, it is immediately established, is dating a complete asshole. Well, breaking up with him, anyway. Stephen's Nice Guy instincts kick in and he awkwardly strikes up conversation with her, only to discover that she's intending to head home to Spain. Bunny decides they should give her a lift, so they acquire a car and the three of them set off to have wacky adventures.

Predictably, on the way, despite being Stephen's best friend and knowing full well that he is attracted to Eloisa, despite the whole set-up being his idea with the express purpose of setting Stephen up with Eloisa, Bunny ends up having sex with her himself. (There's an excruciating scene in a bizarre hotel where Bunny hands Stephen his dirty underwear and then embraces him; a scene which only works if you assume a) that penises are inherently funny and b) hugging a naked dude is, like, totally gay and hilarious.) The rest of the film is about the sexual competition between the two men, something that's made explicit when Stephen finally beds Eloisa and she tells him his penis is far nicer than Bunny's, and the catastrophic consequences of letting a woman come between you and your dudebro best friend. Eloisa is barely even a character: she's an exotic foreigner with a sexy accent, weird customs and laughable beliefs who's sexually available to both men, and is eventually given as a prize to Stephen for, um, no reason at all, really. He doesn't even seem to like her very much, but she's beautiful, and he's a Nice Guy, and thus they end up together, because that's the way it works in movies.

Bunny and the Bull is far from the only film to revolve around exactly that idea, but unfortunately it's also chronically unfunny, which is a massive flaw in a comedy film. Virtually every joke is stale; most notably, when dedicated vegan Stephen goes on a rant about how a lucky rabbit's foot wasn't very lucky for the rabbit, which is just a total waste of two minutes, and a cringeworthy scene in which Stephen attempts to confess to Bunny that he has feelings for Eloisa and is so vague about it that Bunny interprets it as a come-on. The only funny moment is Richard Ayoade's brief cameo as a guide in a shoe museum, but even that's an Ayoade performance that you've seen before if you've ever seen him in anything else. Everything else comes off as humourless attempts to replicate the Mighty Boosh, but unfortunately neither Noel Fielding nor Julian Barratt manage to bring any of the charm of the early episodes of that show to the film when they appear. (Barratt's turn as a dog-loving - and I mean loving - tramp is particularly painful.)

The resolution of the film isn't even satisfying: there's nothing there you won't have worked out from the first 20 minutes or so, and Stephen's recovery is brought about by, basically, his decision that Bunny's death wasn't his fault after all. It doesn't really make sense that he'd hole up his flat for almost an entire year and then randomly, one day, decide to hallucinate that Bunny told him it wasn't his fault and immediately get better, but by that point it's difficult to care about anything beyond the overwhelming relief that it's nearly over. The only thing Bunny and the Bull has going for it is its aesthetic, but it's not as imaginative or colourful as The Mighty Boosh, and since you also have to endure 101 minutes of awfulness, it's not even worth it.

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