Sarah Hates Your Movie

Urban Explorer (2011)

2012-01-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

Nazi-themed horror seems to be in fashion at the moment, which is probably why there’s a swastika on the UK DVD cover of Urban Explorer, since the film doesn’t really have anything to do with the Nazis.

It starts out promisingly: a group of strangers pay a tour guide to take them on a tour of the abandoned underground network beneath Berlin. Apparently, somewhere deep below the city is a forgotten Nazi bunker, which was recently rediscovered and then bricked up again to prevent neo Nazis gathering there; but when the intrepid explorers venture below ground, they quickly run into some violent creeps who very well might be neo Nazis.

Spoiler alert: they aren’t. They’re just one of the many, many red herrings this absurd piece of sub-Hostel nonsense has to offer.

As is traditional in this sort of horror movie, the victims soon make a succession of bad ideas – straying into parts of the underground that haven’t been properly explored before, building makeshift bridges out of debris – putting themselves in danger. After one spectacularly stupid move on the part of the group’s photographer, the group is forced to split up to seek help, and, naturally, soon fall prey to the monster lurking in the shadows. Despite the tour guide’s fanciful campfire stories of Nazi piano-playing and super-soldiers, the actual threat turns out to be much more recent: an ex-military psychopath who relished his border guard duties so much that he continues to enforce them from a drug-filled bunker in the bowels of the earth. It could almost, maybe, work as a concept… unless you stopped to think about it for a second.

In the utter absence of logic, then, what Urban Explorer delivers instead is some very nasty gore. It starts out pretty tame, and there’s a scene that appears to have been directly lifted from Hostel, but it builds to one particularly nasty scene that is, at least, reasonably original, and deeply unpleasant. You’ll need a strong stomach to get through it. That’s the only glimmer of originality to be found in this film, though, and its extreme gore sits oddly alongside its occasional moments of pure slapstick. All your standard horror movie tropes crop up, including the botched calls for help, the lack of cell phone signal, and the killer who’s never quite dead no matter how many bullets you put in him. It’s a frustrating mess that spoils itself by promising something interesting and then backing off, lapsing into cliche and boredom.

Apart from frustration, though, the main feeling this film provokes is déjà vu. We’ve seen spooky underground spaces lit by flares in The Descent; we’ve seen those dirty, dimly lit rooms full of torture instruments in Hostel; and we’ve even seen someone fall down a shaft and break their legs in The Ruins. It feels like this film should’ve come out five years ago; now, it seems a bit anachronistic. And while most horror movies are derivative in one way or another (and if you’re going to borrow from other films, you’re better off borrowing from half-decent ones!) it really does feel like this one doesn’t have anything new to offer.

Which is a shame, because if it’d delivered the winged Nazi super-soldier it suggested in its first half hour, it could’ve been amazing. But no. Most of the things that are set up at the beginning fail to pay off: there’s no Nazi element to the murders or the murderer; the piano doesn’t come back into play; even the creeps lurking in the underground don’t have any bearing on what happens later. In a better film, this might feel like deliberate misdirection; here, it just feels like carelessness. The sort of complaints that can be levelled at Urban Explorer – that it doesn’t quite make sense, that the characters have no depth, that the gore is purely sadistic and serves no greater purpose – are the same complaints that have been made of many other, better films over the past decade; it’s just kind of boring.

One final minor gripe, too: the young explorers are all different nationalities, which could be interesting, but only really means they each have a different accent. Most of the dialogue is in English, but it’s so heavily accented that it’s frequently difficult to understand, so it’s a relief every time the film lapses into (subtitled) German. Given that none of the group has a discernible personality, there doesn’t seem much point to their differing geographical backgrounds, other than making the (not particularly sparkling) dialogue that much harder to follow.

Basically, this is another one for the “why bother?” file. There’s some nice photography in the first reel, and the location is intriguing, but beyond that there’s absolutely nothing to recommend it.

IMDB link

Wake Wood (2011)

2011-06-08T02:30:00.000-07:00

I really don't enjoy hating new, low budget, British horror films. I'd love to champion Wake Wood and tell you how brilliant it is. But I can't, because it's awful - in an oh-God-I'd-rather-peel-my-face-off-than-keep-watching-this kind of a way.

The Wake Wood of the title is actually Wakewood, a small town in Ireland that's got some serious idiosyncracies. Bereaved parents Patrick and Louise move in after their young daughter is tragically killed by a dog, and are quickly offered the traditional monkey's paw: by using the remains of a recently deceased townsperson, they can conjure just enough life force to bring Alice back to life for three days.

This is, apparently, something all the townsfolk do whenever someone dies, and despite the obvious Pet Sematary parallel, it's usually totally okay. There are rules, though: the person to be resurrected must have been dead for less than a year, and during their three days they mustn't cross the town's boundaries. After their three days are up, too, Patrick and Louise will be bound to the town, and must never move away. You'd think warning bells would be ringing already, but the promise of seeing their daughter again is too much, and the couple go ahead with the ritual, using the corpse of a farmer who was recently crushed to death by a cow.

Something's off about Wake Wood from the beginning. Partly it's the ugly way it's filmed; it looks like it's been filmed on an iPhone and then passed through half a dozen filters in an attempt to make it look cinematic. Partly it's the awkward dialogue, and the way characters seem to react as if they can't quite hear each other. Mostly, though, it's the strange way it feels like this wasn't written as a movie. The death-by-cow is a prime example - it looks faintly ridiculous seeing a man squished between a cow's backside and a metal gate, but it feels like it was an idea that might have worked in print. There's a discrepancy between the way the film's been shot and acted - trying to wring every last drop of pathos out of Alice's admittedly tragic death and her parents' subsequent grief, for example - and the inherent campiness of the script. Some of the characters' stranger decisions would make more sense if the world they inhabited was less familiar-looking; if they were in a slightly more stylised, gothic universe, it might be easier to accept that, yeah, there's this whole community who can resurrect their dead people for three days at a go, and they've been doing it for generations, and it's all cool. As it is, it's tough to swallow that any rational adult could buy into this, and the film doesn't seek to address any of the issues built into a system like that before everything goes horribly wrong.

Which of course it does, because Patrick and Louise break both of the fundamental rules of this game: not only do they take Alice outside of the town's limits, but she had been dead for over a year in the first place, which means she came back wrong. Yup, we're back in creepy little girl territory: Alice starts by murdering animals and quickly moves on to killing people and generally being a terror. Why? God knows. Somehow, in the three or four extra weeks she'd been dead, something terrible happened. (It's difficult to know the exact chronology, because the beginning of the film is intentionally muddled to prevent you from figuring out that Alice had been dead too long; actually, what this muddle does it make it really difficult to understand quite what's going on for a while, because although Patrick and Louise are supposed to be outsiders in Wakewood, just learning about its weird traditions, we've seen them both working in jobs that are pretty well embedded in the community.)

There's a logical and emotional leap that the film makes that leaves its audience behind; when Alice comes back, her parents seem to revert to their normal, happy, pre-dead-child state, ignoring the fact that they've only really got three days with her. I mean, if your child had been killed by a stray animal while you weren't around, and then you got to spend just three more days with her alive, would you really want to go playing hide and seek in the woods? There's no sense of urgency to their interactions with her; they're desperate to have her back and then, when she is back, seem to forget what's going on, not finding it in the least bit strange that she's come back with someone else's eye colour or that she frequently disappears only to come back with bloodstained hands.

The film ends with one of the most stupid - and yet painfully obvious - scenes ever committed to celluloid (or digital video; whatever). By this point, though, it almost doesn't matter. Wake Wood is terrible through and through. It wants to be a cross between The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now, but can't manage it, resorting instead to heavy-handed references to both. Where those films had emotional resonance - or, at least, gorgeous photography - Wake Wood has a daft scene with a cow and a magic town of rural stereotypes. If the new Hammer Films can't do better than this, they might as well give up.

IMDB link

My Soul To Take (2011)

2011-04-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

Dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality disorder, is a controversial condition: it seems that it's linked with traumatic events in a patient's life; it doesn't have easily definable symptoms; and according to some clinicians, it might actually be caused by the therapists themselves. So what better topic to make a terrible, dull, confused slasher movie about?

My Soul To Take is not a clever film. It starts, as all slashers must, with a bit of backstory: a man, Abel Plankov, is working on toys for his young daughter when his pregnant wife interrupts and says that the news is scaring her with its reports of the Riverton Ripper, a local serial killer. In the background, a psychiatrist named William Blake - and I'm going to pretend I didn't notice that, because, ugh - tells the news reporter that the killer might be suffering from mental illness, and might not even be aware that he's the killer. Surprise! It turns out Plankov is the killer - or, at least, one of his other personalities is. He calls Blake with his worries, but it's too late, and he kills his wife before the police arrive. And then he kills some of the police. They shoot him, but like all slasher movie villains he's not going down that easily. Even when they get his corpse into an ambulance, it's not over; the ambulance crashes into the river, and we fast-forward 16 years.

On the night Plankov supposedly died, something strange happened in the maternity ward. Pregnant women spontaneously went into birth, even when they weren't due, and seven babies were born that night. Improbably, a legend sprang up around them: that Plankov's personalities were in fact separate souls, which had passed into the babies. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, the seven kids gather at the scene of the ambulance crash and carry out a bizarre ritual that involves someone dressing up in a "Ripper" costume (which bears no resemblance to anything, but you've gotta have a mask in films like this) and being symbolically "killed". Apparently, this ritual will stop the Ripper from rising again, but this year, it's interrupted by the police. And so the killing starts again.

There's a ton of extra symbolism thrown in haphazardly: lots of stuff about mirrors, and a Native American myth about the condor being a bird that can absorb souls, but even that can't save the majority of the film from becoming a dull exercise in watching daft teenagers get butchered. The dialogue is embarrassingly bad, and the plot is convoluted without ever actually being interesting. It's obvious what's going to happen, and even the identity of the killer isn't really a surprise. There's no reason for the audience to become invested in any of the characters, there's no real tension at any point, and the ending is just too stupid for words. The idea that someone with a mental illness might be possessed is horribly outdated, offensive, and amateurish; there's just no excuse for falling back on that ugly trope in 2011.

Worse, the movie was shot in 2D, then converted to 3D for its theatrical release, which is the only way to make something this stupid even more painful.

IMDB link

Season of the Witch (2011)

2011-01-14T01:03:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Cage is capable of making brilliant films. Last year's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans was magnificent, and Kick-Ass was great, too, so it's not like he's given up on trying to make good movies. But he seems to be bizarrely determined to destroy any goodwill generated by those performances by appearing in crap like Season of the Witch. It's frustrating.

Season of the Witch lays its cards on the table early. We open on a witch trial, where three women are found guilty of witchcraft by virtue of, basically, being female, and are promptly killed. For a moment, it looks like the film might be condemning their prosecutors for their cruelty, but then - aha! - it turns out the women really were witches after all, and through the power of shitty CGI they come back to life to claim their revenge. The film immediately marks itself out as stupid, ugly, and deeply offensive, all before Cage even appears onscreen.

But it doesn't get any better when he does. Cage plays Behmen, a seasoned soldier in the Crusades who suddenly decides he doesn't want to kill any more people. He and his best mate Felson (played by Ron Perlman) become deserters, riding round half the world on their trusty horses before arriving at a creepy-looking town where everyone's dying of the plague. Because no-one understood germs back then, they hang around until a member of the clergy spots them and has them thrown into jail. They're offered only one way out: the Cardinal believes that the plague was caused by a witch, and the only way to cure it is to take the witch to a monastery miles away, where the monks have a special plague-curing witch-killing book of some kind.

It's all a very, very complicated way of setting up a quest, basically: Behmen and Felson, along with a ragtag assortment of untrustworthy locals, must accompany a young girl who may or may not be a witch through a series of Tolkien-esque obstacles to get to Mordor, where the monks will use their magic ring to cure the plague. Or something.

Already, the script is being pulled in a number of different directions. Behmen is apparently the hero, even though we know he's massacred hundreds of people, so we're supposed to invest in him and share his disapproval of the Catholic church and its methods. The Cardinal certainly doesn't appear to be a sympathetic figure, and there's something suspicious about the priest who goes along on the mission; it's implied that he's been mistreating the girl/witch, possibly sexually abusing her. The Church is wrong about the Crusades, and since we, the audience, know that the plague wasn't caused by witches, we think they're wrong about that, too, and logically should assume that the girl is innocent. Except that we've just seen that this is a film in which magic and witchcraft exist, because we just saw an old woman come back to life.

Season of the Witch can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a serious movie about the ways in which religion can lead people to do awful things to each other, or whether it wants to be a swords 'n' sorcery style epic about brave men fighting monsters. That first scene kills all the film's attempts at ambiguity, and renders them merely confusing instead. Any attempts to build dramatic attention are skewered by that first scene; we know the girl's going to turn out to be a supernatural entity, otherwise the first appearance of a CGI witch doesn't make any sense.

But the film's too stupid to realise that it has already shown its hand. Its wobbly internal logic collapses completely when the travellers arrive at the monastery to find that all the monks have died of the plague. And when the priest tries to exorcise the witch using the Big Book of MacGuffin, two entirely separate endings attempt to happen at once: the girl initially starts speaking out against the cruelties of the Catholic church, and then reveals herself to be a demon. There's a possibility the film could resolve its problems by making her a demon that's come to punish the Church for its sins, in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for kind of a way, but it doesn't even do that. No, instead, it turns out that the girl has been possessed by a devil the whole time, and the trek to the monastery was so that it could kill the monks and destroy all the remaining copies of the magic book that could defeat it. The demon takes on its true form - a bat-like gargoyle thing - and starts killing everyone in the hope the audience won't notice that none of that makes any sense: why would the demon need anyone to transport it anywhere, if it had wings? Why would it need to go to the monastery to kill everyone when they were all already dead from the plague? Why bother with the whole 'witch' disguise in the first place? And why kill so many of its entourage along the way if what it wanted was for them to take it to the monastery? Either this is the stupidest demon ever committed to celluloid, or someone started rewriting this movie halfway through.

To add one final insult to injury, when the battle is finally over, the vanquished demon turns back into a girl - so apparently it was a demon possessing a girl, rather than a demon disguised as a girl - who's completely innocent and remembers none of what happened. As she and her one remaining knight ride off into the sunset, there's a voiceover in which she tells us she wants to tell the story of all the brave men who died to rescue her. Except that they didn't, they were trying to kill her, and she just said, right in that scene, that she doesn't remember anything that happened. It's like there are two, or maybe three or four, movies running simultaneously here, and all of them are terrible.

Without Nicolas Cage, this movie would never have seen the inside of a cinema. There isn't a single part of it that's well-made, and its stupidity is offensive. Hundreds of women really have been murdered throughout the ages because someone accused them of being witches. None of them were actually demons. The Crusades actually happened, and people really got killed. Making a film in which all of it comes down to a giant CGI bat is about as insensitive as you can get.

IMDB link

Nicolas Cage is a shouty man

2010-11-24T13:27:00.001-08:00

Oh yes he is.

Anyone else feeling the need for a Nicolas Cage movie marathon now?

Let Me In (2010)

2010-11-08T10:37:00.001-08:00

Not all vampires live in castles. Since Dracula’s day, vampires have had to downsize significantly: but while Louis and Lestat might’ve had a gorgeous big house in New Orleans, Let Me In’s Abby has to make do with a poky flat in a suburb of a small New Mexico town. The walls are so thin that her neighbours can hear every time she raises her voice, and the windows are covered over with cardboard. Even a thick blanket of snow can’t make her Los Alamos home look anything other than rundown and dreary.

Let Me In is a wonderfully real vampire story, based – of course – on Swedish novel, and film of the same title, Let The Right One In. As remakes of foreign horror movies go, it’s by far the best. In fact, it might even be superior to the much loved Swedish film (though suggesting that is regarded as blasphemy in some circles!). Let Me In pares the story down to its most essential elements, disposing of almost all of the subplots and extraneous characters that populated the world of the novel and focusing right in on the main relationship of the story: the weird love affair that blossoms between vampiric Abby and her next-door neighbour, a sad, bullied 12-year-old called Owen.

Owen’s life is, basically, miserable. His parents are getting divorced: his father is absent, and his mother isn’t much better. (To the point where we never quite see her face in the film, and only hear his dad’s voice over the phone.) He’s bad at sports, addicted to sweets, and mercilessly bullied by a gang of boys at school – to the point where he takes up afterschool strength training in a hopeless effort to stand up to them. When a mysterious family move in next door, he’s determined to make friends with the girl, despite her warnings. They bond over, um, a Rubix cube, and the lack of anyone else to talk to, and she encourages him to stand up to the bullies. But as they grow closer, Owen discovers that Abby really is strange: she doesn’t feel the cold, sometimes smells funny, and turns into a monster when he attempts a blood-bonding ceremony with her. Ultimately, though, she’s the only one who seems to understand him (or even pay him attention that doesn’t involve beating him up) and he becomes fiercely loyal to her, even as the body count starts to rack up.

The novel is littered with subplots and background characters: there are the town drunks, two of whom are repurposed in Let Me In as Virginia and her boyfriend, though they get have a much smaller role to play here; there’s Oskar’s neighbour, Tommy, who only gets a passing mention this time round; and all of the other characters, particularly Hakan (who doesn’t even get a name in Let Me In) are far more fleshed out. There’s also a brief historical interlude in the novel where we find out a bit about how Eli became a vampire, including the revelation that she’s actually a boy – he was crudely castrated as part of the ritual that presumably made him a vampire. This is only fleetingly referred to in the Swedish film, when Oskar spies on Eli getting changed and spots the scar; it’s kind of confusing, and not something the film had time to really explore. Without that complication, Abby’s line “Would you like me if I wasn’t a girl?” means something slightly different: because she isn’t a girl. She’s a vampire. Let Me In changes the story by choosing which elements of the novel it retains or discards, but it’s still a great story.

And it’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful. The movie borrows some visual elements from its predecessor – though they’re also things that are important in the novel, like the dismal housing estate the characters live on – but adds its own style. It uses the ubiquitous teal and orange colour palette, but for once, it’s for a good reason: the film is full of fire and ice, and the colours in every scene seem to reflect that contrast. There’s the cool blue swimming pool, and the orange glow of the bonfire; the cold blue snow, and the warm orange living room. Almost any shot from the film could be frozen and used as a poster, it’s just gorgeous to look at.

The acting, too, deserves a mention: it’s fantastic. The two children, in the absence of almost anyone else at all, have to carry the movie, and they’re both brilliant. Chloe Moretz’s Abby is just as weird and cold as Eli in the original, while Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Owen is by turns creepier and more sympathetic than Oskar.

The only problem with Let Me In is that the action sequences largely don’t work. The choice to use CGI to make vampiric Abby freakishly fast feels strange, and her spidery form is the only thing in the film that doesn’t look real. It’s also unnecessary plotwise: every time Abby is forced to attack someone, things are set up to allow her to do so easily. She doesn’t need to move so fast – she arranges her attacks deliberately, coaxing her victims to lift her in their arms, or dropping onto them from a tree branch above their heads. The only time her strength and speed is necessary is in the final swimming pool scene – which we don’t see, anyway, watching from Owen’s perspective under the water’s surface. And the non-CGI action sequences aren’t much better, generally seeming comical rather than disturbing. The scenes where Abby’s “father” goes out to hunt for her could be creepy, but seem instead to be played for laughs, which is kind of a shame. Let Me In is more of a horror movie than Let The Right One In was, but neither comes close to approaching the brutal, disturbing darkness of the novel.

It’s strange, because Let Me In is exactly what fans of the original most feared: it’s simpler, glossier, and frequently more obvious with its themes. It’s clearer what the stakes are, too. But that doesn’t stop it being a great film. It’s visually stunning, well paced, and frequently horrifying. Matt Reeves is, in my book, two for two: Cloverfield and Let Me In are radically different films, but they’re both excellent.

One final note: the repeated use of the Now & Later theme might seem out of place at first, but when it recurs at the very end, it’s downright chilling. Brrr.

IMDB link

Saw Week: Saw 3D

2010-10-30T03:07:00.000-07:00

Maybe Saw 3D was inevitably going to be a disappointment. It's the final instalment, and so needs to wrap up the entire franchise in a satisfying way, while showcasing plenty of new and elaborate traps ... and it's in 3D. It's a lot to pack into one movie, and ultimately, it doesn't really work. Which is such a shame, because there are parts of it that are really promising, but it just doesn't quite deliver.

The main problem is that it introduces too many new elements when, really, it needed to spend its time and effort tying up existing loose ends. We open on a trap, but a trap unlike any we've ever seen before: instead of being hidden away in a grimy basement somewhere, this trap is in a shop window, on a busy street, in broad daylight. Two men are chained to a workbench with three circular saw blades on it, and suspended above them is a woman: apparently she'd been cheating on one of them with the other, or something, it's not quite clear. Billy the puppet tricycles in to tell them that only two of them can possibly escape this trap: either they push the saws all to one side and murder one of the men, or they leave them in the middle, and let the woman perish. There's something particularly ugly about this trap, a hint of misogyny that hadn't really been present in the franchise before. But what's worse about this trap is that it doesn't tie into the rest of the film at all. Is this the work of John, or Hoffman? Who are these people, and why are they relevant? At what point in time is this happening? It doesn't matter, as it turns out. Not even slightly. So let's forget about that and get on with the story.

At the end of Saw VI, we saw Jill carry out John's final instructions by putting the reverse bear trap on Hoffman's head and locking him in a room, supposedly to perish without a hope of survival. But Hoffman did survive, albeit with a nasty facial wound. Saw 3D picks up from there, with a panicked Jill fleeing the scene as Hoffman chases her down. There's an obvious Halloween reference in this sequence, and that pretty much sets the tone for the rest of Hoffman's storyline. He's become a stalk'n'slash killer, a Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees character, walking slowly but inevitably towards his victims ... and killing them with a knife. There's none of Jigsaw's characteristic twisted morality to this: Hoffman's on a killing spree, and there's no subtlety to his methods at all.

While the previous films were complex, this one's just messy. There are at least two new stories running simultaneously here: there's a police plot, where Hoffman takes his revenge on Gibson, an internal affairs officer who previously turned Hoffman in for brutality, and there's a maze trap, where fake Jigsaw "survivor" Bobby Dagen must try to rescue his publicity team and his wife by actually going through some of the things he's become famous for claiming to. This trap's actually quite clever, but it's overly elaborate: Dagen is being punished for lying, for turning himself into a celebrity by pretending to have overcome a Jigsaw trap, and so the various stages in his maze are labelled with the steps from his self-help book, S.U.R.V.I.V.E. (Start your live anew, understand your problems, redefine your priorities, verify your self-worth through commitment, ignore your detractors, value your loved ones, and embrace every day as if it were your last.) That's further complicated by the addition of the themes of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And while Hoffman's trying to force Gibson to hand over Jill, he's also setting up some elaborate traps at various significant locations from his own past. There's a hell of a lot going on here.

The twist that slightly unravels some of this tangle is that there's yet another Jigsaw accomplice to be unmasked: and, if you've seen any of the publicity for this movie, this is hardly a spoiler. It's Dr Lawrence Gordon. After he dragged himself out of the bathroom at the end of the first movie, Jigsaw took him in, built him a prosthetic foot, and brought him into the rapidly growing cult of Jigsaw. So all those incredibly intricate, surgical elements in many of the previous traps? That was Gordon's work. I'd like this twist a lot more if I didn't know Cary Elwes was returning; it would've been excellent if we hadn't seen him until right at the end, but he's been way too prominent in the publicity campaign for this twist to hold any real shock value.

So, while Gordon's running a trap for Dagen, Hoffman's leading Gibson around by the nose, and Jill is ... mostly just running away from Hoffman. Saw 3D commits one of the most obnoxious cinematic tricks when it gives us a dream sequence fakeout: while all of the previous films have tried to mislead and trick the audience in various ways, none of them have done it in such an obvious, clichéd and tired way. (Plus, in the dream sequence Jill is inexplicably wearing very little clothing, and an awful lot of lip gloss: really, guys? Really?) I think I just expected more.

There are lots of opportunities to do interesting things in this movie: Dagen's support groups for Jigsaw survivors are the perfect opportunity to give fans a little continuity porn by bringing back everyone who'd previously survived a trap, and while there were a couple of familiar faces back (Tara, Addy and Simone from Saw VI, and Mallick from Saw V), there was also a completely new trap and survivor thrown into the mix, which ... what? When was that supposed to have happened? It would've been better to stick to existing survivors, as few of them as there are. And the trailers for Saw 3D hinted that the audience would be implicated this time, which was really the only way to make sense of the opening trap. I expected some element of accusation - an invitation to consider what's wrong with me, personally, that I want to watch these movies? - but there was nothing.

Another major issue with Saw 3D is the relative lack of Tobin Bell. I know. John Kramer's been dead since Saw III, so continually bringing him back is getting a little tired. But we only got two new scenes with him this time round, and the film really suffered from his absence. Saw 3D focuses on Hoffman, a relative newcomer to the mythos, and all the new characters, even sidelining Jill Tuck in favour of bloody Gibson. (Chad Donella is my new least favourite Saw actor. He's terrible.) Jill's been lurking in the background for three movies now, and this was the filmmakers' last chance to really do something interesting with her, but they didn't. After their rehabilitation of Amanda in Saw VI, I really had faith that they'd give us some much needed insight into Jill, but sadly not.

I'm being overly negative now, I know. Saw 3D isn't terrible (it's certainly not as gutwrenchingly awful as Hostel Part II; it's more disappointing in the way that The Wire season 5 is disappointing). It's entertaining enough: it's camp, occasionally funny, and frequently disgusting. It's watchable. It's just not the high note I thought the franchise was going to go out on. This week has been an interesting experiment, though, and even taking the disappointing final instalment into account, I still hold the Saw franchise in far higher regard than I did even a week ago. I'm especially excited to see what creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell will do next.

Saw Week: Part VI

2010-10-28T12:55:00.001-07:00

I think Saw VI is my favourite. Finally, everything makes sense (well, almost everything); the main story is just as engaging as the mythology stuff – and that gets an added dimension that retroactively improves the earlier movies – and it even has a serious political point to make. The editing is less distractingly awful, and the writing is as strong as in the previous two. It’s … really, really good.

That, or watching this many Saw movies in such a short space of time has utterly destroyed my brain, but I think it’s just good.

Saw VI’s centrepiece is another big maze trap, like the ones in Saw III and V. William Easton, a health insurance executive at Umbrella Health (that’s gotta be a Resident Evil reference, surely?) is an awful, smug man whose algorithm for determining individuals’ health risks has meant the death of countless people – including, indirectly, John Kramer. Jigsaw met Easton at a party (and let’s just take a moment to imagine what it would be like to get into a drunken conversation with him at a party, shall we? Urghhhhh) but he also had health insurance with Umbrella, who turned down his desperate request to be part of a Norwegian trial for an experimental cancer treatment. Tobin Bell does some amazing work in these flashback scenes; I particularly liked his “Pirahna!” non sequitur.

Anyway, Easton is a pretty nasty piece of work, which makes rooting for him almost impossible. Luckily, Saw VI’s traps are designed in a particularly cruel way: each of them requires him to choose between several people, letting some die and others live. Jigsaw wants to show him that no mathematical equation can truly measure the value of a human life, and Easton learns the lesson pretty quickly, choosing to save a middle-aged housewife over a young, healthy but unattached file clerk. These traps do sort of make a mockery of Jigsaw’s idea that everyone should get the chance to make a choice between life and death for themselves, since in several of the traps – particularly the carousel – not everyone can survive, no matter what. That’s the first time that’s happened, since in all of Jigsaw’s previous traps (not Amanda’s rigged ones) there’s always been the possibility that everyone can survive. But since all of these people are Easton’s employees, mostly his most heartless favourites who spend their working lives trying to find reasons to deny people the healthcare they so desperately need, it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for them. And since this is Jigsaw’s final game, we’ll just have to cut him a bit of slack.

At the end of William’s maze, there are two cages: one containing Pamela Jenkins, a journalist we briefly glimpsed at a press conference in Saw V, and the other Tara and her teenaged son Brent. Without spoiling the twist too much, the end of Saw VI is another exercise in showing us not to make assumptions, ever. It’s kind of similar to the twist at the end of Saw III, really, but even more effectively executed.

Outside the trap, the police are closing in on Hoffman. Special Agent Perez, Strahm’s partner, turns out to have survived the injuries she suffered back in Saw IV, and she doesn’t believe that Strahm was Jigsaw’s accomplice. The tape Hoffman made in his first trap (the unwinnable pendulum game) is being analysed by a techie who unscrambles the distortion on the voice and reveals … Hoffman! Sadly, he’s in the room when that happens, and wastes no time in killing Perez for real, along with Erickson and the hapless tech. (A particularly nice touch: the soundbite that’s being unscrambled is “right now you’re feeling helpless”, and it plays over and over again during the scene where Perez confronts Hoffman. It’s maybe a little heavy-handed, but at this point, it really works.)

Revelation is piled on top of revelation as the final pieces of the story start to slot into place: Jill Tuck has been in on Jigsaw’s schemes since at least Saw III, if not earlier; Hoffman and Amanda were always jealous of one another and constantly jockeyed for position in Jigsaw’s affections; and most devastatingly, it emerges that Amanda was with Cecil, the junkie who caused Jill to miscarry Jigsaw’s child, on that fateful night - and Hoffman used that information to blackmail her, forcing her into failing her final test in Saw III. That last revelation at least partially redeems Amanda, changing the franchise’s treatment of her; she wasn’t just stupid after all, she was just a woman whose life took a really, really bad turn. Her desperation for John’s approval was her undoing, finally, but it wasn’t just because she was an idiot, or evil. Saw VI makes her more tragic, but also more sympathetic. It feels like a more dignified ending for her character than the previous one, and I’m really glad it happened.

It’s interesting: over the last couple of films, the new writing team have created a weird nuclear family for Jigsaw where Jill and John are the parents and Mark and Amanda are the squabbling kids. It’s perverse and twisted and … weirdly moving. Like any long running horror franchise, the villain eventually becomes the point, the one consistent element through all the films that, despite their undeniably evil intentions, the audience can’t help but sympathise with, at least a little bit. No-one remembers the eighth person Freddy Kruger murdered, or who Jason kills in Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning, but Freddy and Jason are indelibly burned into our brains. Jigsaw slots effortlessly into the canon, but he’s exponentially more nuanced than any of the other mass murdering horror icons out there. We can’t entirely identify with him, or condone his actions fully, but there’s a sense there that, on some level, what he’s doing makes sense. It’s vigilante justice that he dispenses, but it’s not madness without method.

The final moments of Saw VI bode well for Saw VII: as Hoffman completes Jigsaw’s final game, he finds himself thrown into his own test, as Jill carries out the final instruction John left for her. Will he pass or fail the test? What’s the lesson Jigsaw needs him to learn – and will he learn it, or will he ignore it like so many of the other things John tried to teach him?

The attention to detail is probably my favourite thing about Saw VI, and it’s what gives me hope for Saw VII. There’s a particularly jaw-dropping bit of coffee cup continuity in Saw VI that’s so nerdy I wanted to stand and applaud, and the tiny, almost insignificant detail about Hoffman using an inferior kind of blade in Saw V that leads to his undoing in Saw VI is bloody beautiful. I’m simultaneously really excited to see Saw VII/3D, and terrified. I want it to be a fitting end to this franchise that I’ve somehow, unexpectedly, come to really love; I’m afraid that it’ll get too caught up with doing crazy 3D stunts to deliver the in-depth character exploration I crave. 3D has the same writing team and director as VI, which I’m hoping means it’ll be as good. Oh, please let it be as good.

Saw Week: Part V

2010-10-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, Saw V opens with a trap. A convicted murderer, who escaped a life sentence on a technicality, is chained to a table beneath a swinging blade. A slightly strange Billy tape tells him that in order to stop the pendulum from slicing him in half, he must crush his hands in vices – but when he does, nothing happens. The pendulum continues to descend, slicing him in half. Although it looked like a Jigsaw trap, it wasn’t: it was the work of Detective Mark Hoffman, and it took place several years ago. Saw V is about to significantly rewrite Saw history, and in a shockingly skillful way.

Since the first one, the Saw movies have been teaching us to be careful with the assumptions we make about what we’re seeing: people aren’t who they seem, and things may not be happening the way we think they are. Jigsaw’s ex wife, Jill Tuck, even explicitly tells us, more than once, not to take anything for granted: “John’s life defies chronology and linear description”, she says in Saw IV. That’s only going to seem more significant as things progress. Because it turns out that everything we thought we knew wasn’t quite true.

The action of V picks up at the end of III. Special Agent Strahm finds Jigsaw’s lair just as Jeff murders Jigsaw, and shoots him … but soon finds himself in a trap of his own, a box filled with water where the only way to survive is to punch a hole in his trachea with a helpfully supplied tube. Ouch. He does survive, though, as backup arrives just in time to see a soggy Hoffman carrying Jeff’s daughter to safety. Hoffman is lauded as a hero; Strahm is taken off the case for forging ahead without backup (and, sensibly, because he obviously needs some time to recover from his ordeal). Like everyone else who ever comes into contact with Jigsaw though, Strahm is obsessed, and no orders could ever really take him off the case.

Finally, a good 20 minutes in, the movie’s main trap is revealed: six people are chained by their necks to a winch, with the keys to their collars in glass boxes in front of them. But by struggling towards the boxes, they pull one another’s shackles tighter – and there are nasty blades behind each of their heads. Jigsaw’s video tells them that the reason they’re there is that they’ve all squandered advantages of birth by selfishness, and the only way to win is to work together. Naturally, they don’t listen, and as they progress through the maze, each trap kills another one of them, so that, at the finale, there are only two of them left. The twist? Co-operation was the only way to win, and by killing each other, they’ve thrown away their chance to survive. (Or, maybe: it’s not clear whether the two final test subjects actually die or not, though it doesn’t look good.)

That’s not the interesting bit, though. What's interesting about Saw V is the way the stories of Detective Lieutenant Mark Hoffman and Jigsaw’s ex wife Jill Tuck unfold. See, it turns out that Amanda wasn’t Jigsaw’s only accomplice – she wasn’t even his first. Hoffman created the pendulum trap to punish someone he thought had escaped justice, the man who murdered his sister. But because he wasn’t really on board with Jigsaw’s “everyone deserves a chance to chop bits of themselves off to discover their purpose in life” manifesto, he made an unwinnable game, and Jigsaw wasn’t impressed. He kidnapped Hoffman, forced him through a game of his own, and then basically adopted him. Hoffman was there from the beginning, supplying Jigsaw with the police records to select his victims and helping him build the traps. Hoffman is instrumental throughout; every time in a previous movie where something seemed like too much physical exertion for a terminally ill cancer patient to perform, it’s because Hoffman was doing it. Every time Jigsaw seemed to be in more than one place at the same time, it was Hoffman helping him. And now that John Kramer is dead, it’s down to Hoffman to finish Jigsaw’s final games – including trapping Agent Strahm and framing him as Jigsaw’s accomplice in the process. It’s breathtakingly daring, the way he pulls it off, and Strahm’s end is one of the franchise’s nastiest moments.

Stylewise, Saw V is littered with Argento references, but they’re far more subtly integrated than the franchise’s earlier horror references (e.g. in Saw II, Jigsaw directs Det Matthews to “the last house on the left”). The pendulum trap is straight out of The Black Cat, and the close-ups on Hoffman’s black leather gloves recall … well, most Argento films, really, but neither of these things seem particularly obtrusive in context. Director David Hackl doesn’t bother with Bousman’s obnoxious green and yellow palette, instead going for a more common teal-and-orange colour scheme for most of the movie, and the quick cutting has calmed down considerably. So far, Saw V is probably the best photographed film of the series, and the cleverness of the writing is astounding.

Honestly, I expected to be flagging by the time I got this far; I usually find it an uphill battle to get beyond the third movie in any horror franchise, because by most franchises have degenerated into exercises in making money off established names. But after Saw V, I was excited to revisit Saw VI … and even more excited to see Saw 3D (or Saw VII, as I may start calling it, in defiance of its actual, confusingly numbered title).

Saw Week: Part IV

2010-10-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

Saw IV opens with John Kramer's naked corpse lying on an autopsy table. Just in case there was any doubt that he really did die at the end of Saw III, the film spends a lot of time with his dead body as it's dissected. Piece by piece, Jigsaw's body is taken apart. But the games aren't over yet. Not by a long shot.

Like Saw III, Saw IV is better than I remembered, but it's also massively flawed, like all the Saw movies. The first trap in Saw IV is utterly nonsensical: two men are chained together, their chains attached to a crank. One man has his eyes sewn shut, the other his mouth. Soon, the crank begins to turn, and apparently both of them perish. There's no handy tape to explain to us who these men are, or what they did to deserve their predicament. It's very, very gory, and very, very badly edited. All of the Saw films are fond of the rapidfire, epilepsy-inducing montages, but Saw IV is actively difficult to watch because of the nauseating way the camera moves. The colours look even more exaggerated, too, to the point where some scenes almost look like they're in greyscale. Bleurghhh.

It takes a little while for Saw IV's characters to emerge. Once again the police aren't just investigating the murders, they're actively involved. The only cop left from the original investigation, Rigg, is at the heart of this movie: because everyone around him has been murdered, he's become obsessed with the case, to the point that it's destroying his personal relationships. Unfortunately, because he's the only one left, he's also the prime suspect. FBI agents Strahm and Perez have been brought in to investigate, and the complexity of some of Saw III's traps has tipped them off to the existence of a second accomplice. Someone else was helping Jigsaw, and all the signs point to Rigg. When he discovers that Detective Matthews is still alive (while poor Kerry isn't!) Rigg has to submit to Jigsaw's tests to save him ... but unfortunately for Matthews, the lesson Jigsaw wants to teach Rigg is that it's impossible to save everyone.

Saw IV sits kind of strangely alongside Saw III. In III, Jeff had to put aside his personal grudges to save the lives of some pretty terrible people. In IV, Rigg must set aside his personal saviour complex to allow people to try to save themselves - or, if they can't, he needs to learn to let them die, and accept that he can't save everyone. Rigg has to actually put some people into their traps, though, and the film flirts with the idea of setting him up as Jigsaw's accomplice - though we've already seen that Jigsaw often uses people to do the physical labour that he can't manage, and has done ever since he made Zep in the first movie kidnap Dr Gordon's wife and child. (Actually, that might make the whole idea of a second accomplice nonsensical, because there will always be someone Jigsaw can coerce into doing his bidding, even if they aren't wannabes like Amanda -- but there is a second accomplice, so let's not think too hard about that.)

Ultimately, just like virtually everyone else before him, Rigg will fail his test and doom various other people to death in the process. What's more interesting about Saw IV, though, is the sizeable chunk of Jigsaw backstory it offers us. For one thing: Jigsaw had a wife. He nearly had a child, too, before a drug addict accidentally caused his wife to miscarry, and set in motion the whole Saw thing. That addict, Cecil, was the first person to be tested by a Jigsaw trap, the first time John had used his engineering skills to create torture devices. The origin of the pig head mask is also explained (though it's ... still kinda random) as well as the origin of the Billy doll. Everything that had previously been a mystery (or just a cool image without any explanation) gets explained in Saw IV, and unlike the awkward, stupid backstories that later sequels offered horror movie villains like Freddy and Jason, Jigsaw's backstory resonates. He's a very human kind of monster, and while much of his philosophising doesn't really hold water, it does make sense to him. His motivations suddenly come into focus; he's actually a cohesive character. This feels like a significant revelation, somehow.

Saw IV is the first Saw movie not to be written by Leigh Whannell (though it is still directed by Darren Lyn Bousman, which explains why it looks terrible) and it seems like the new writing team really has a handle on this stuff. It'll be interesting to see what they do with the Hoffman character over the next couple of movies, and whether they can create a more worthy successor to Jigsaw than Amanda turned out to be.

Saw Week: Part III

2010-10-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Last time I watched Saw III, I hated it. This time, I … actually rather enjoyed it. I think there are several reasons for my different reaction this time, but it all boils down to context. Since Saw III was released, horror movies have become even more gory and even more incoherent. At the time, Saw III seemed offensively badly structured, filled with pointless torture and nastiness. Now? It seems almost tame. Also, when I saw Saw III at the cinema, it’d been a year since I’d seen Saw II; this time, I’ve watched Saw and Saw II over the last two days, and I’ve already seen V and VI, so the character development seemed a lot better thought through. In particular, I enjoyed seeing Det. Hoffman lurking creepily in the background at the beginning … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In Saw III, Jigsaw tests three different people in a series of interlinked tests: Jeff, a grieving father whose desire for vengeance on the man who accidentally killed his son is preventing him from living his life; Lynn, a doctor who’s been sleepwalking through her career, spending more time with dead and dying people than her own family; and Amanda, whose efforts to help Jigsaw have become weirdly twisted. While Jeff fights his way through a maze of people he hates and has to learn forgiveness, Lynn must work to keep Jigsaw alive, or risk losing her own life in the process. And Amanda? Well, she has to learn what Jigsaw’s methods are really all about: according to him, it’s all about giving people choices and forcing them to appreciate their lives more fully. It’s a warped philosophy to begin with, and Jigsaw’s tests are rarely fair anyway, but through a series of flashbacks, we see that Amanda has taken it upon herself to murder all the test subjects who survived their trials anyway, leaving herself as the sole survivor of Jigsaw’s games.

Saw III doesn’t really work properly as a standalone movie. It’s not structured well enough, and concerns itself mainly with explaining what happened behind the scenes of the previous movies as well as setting things up for those that’ll follow, and as a result the main narrative suffers from underdevelopment. Jeff is ultimately kind of pointless, and the traps he has to rescue people from aren’t very inspired. The first time I watched it, this meant I considered the film a failure. But this time, having spent time with some of these characters, it worked a lot better. Det Kerry’s fate seemed genuinely upsetting, having had her around for two movies, and Jigsaw’s final trap for Jeff is really rather nasty.

In fact, Saw III ends on just about the most downbeat note imaginable. Jeff fails his test. Lynn passes, but then Amanda fails it for her. And Amanda fails her test. Adam from Saw and Eric Mathews from Saw II are brought back and tortured some more; Adam is killed off. At the end of the movie, almost everyone we know from the previous movies is dead or dying. The body count in Saw III is sky high: Amanda’s unwinnable traps finish off several victims, Jeff fails to save anyone from his maze, including himself, and Jigsaw and Amanda are also killed. None of Jigsaw’s lessons have been learned, so there’s not even that perverted silver lining to cling to; really, Jigsaw turns out to be a really, really bad teacher. His protégé completely fails him, on every level: Amanda betrays him by going behind his back to kill people; she secretly self-harms, one of the things that led Jigsaw to test her in the first place; and before she dies, she denounces him, shouting “Nobody changes, it’s all a lie!” and “I’m just a pawn in your stupid games.”

It’s almost a shame to say goodbye to Amanda, in the same way it’s a shame to say goodbye to Kerry. Both of them felt like interesting characters who weren’t quite developed enough – Kerry more than Amanda, since the more screentime they gave Amanda, the more ridiculous she seemed. And that’s a shame, too. As the first person to survive a Jigsaw trap, she was in a unique position, and she was the only possible example he, or we, could point to to show that his techniques were effective. If Amanda lived through a Jigsaw trap and found a renewed enthusiasm for life, changing her junkie ways and doing something worthwhile with her life, then there’d be some fascinating ambiguity there; she’d be a powerful argument that Jigsaw isn’t just a psychopathic murderer, but some kind of ultra-violent vigilante. (okay, it wouldn’t be a great argument, but it’d be something). Instead, Amanda attaches herself, like a baby duck imprinting on a cat instead of its mother, to Jigsaw, and becomes his accomplice. She helps him kidnap people, helps him devise and build his traps, and guides people to their doom inside the poisoned house in Saw II. Which, if she really had changed her attitude to life, would make sense; she could argue that she’s helping other people come to the same realization she’d had.

But no. No, poor, stupid Amanda doesn’t get Jigsaw’s masterplan at all. She’s just a nasty piece of work who enjoys inflicting suffering on people she doesn’t like, including Lynn. She spends most of Saw III weeping uncontrollably at the prospect of losing John – someone who views her emotions as a weakness. It’s a disturbing, twisted relationship the two of them have, and surely even she couldn’t really consider herself his equal. On second thought, maybe it’s better that she doesn’t live to see another sequel (except, inevitably, in flashbacks). Saw III took away her reason for existing when it introduced Detective Hoffman.

Kerry, on the other hand, I’ll truly mourn. Only one of Amanda’s cheating, unwinnable traps could have conquered Kerry, because Kerry learned the rules early. She figured out the rules: do what Jigsaw tells you, and you’ll live. Try to outwit him, and you’ll lose, because Jigsaw always has another trap up his sleeve. Unlike Amanda, though, Kerry was a force for good, not evil; and, so, inevitably, she got killed. Of the original investigating team, only Det Rigg remains.
Bring on Saw IV!

Saw Week: Part II

2010-10-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

Well, that didn't take long. After being strangely impressed with the first Saw movie, I found that Saw II is just as bad as I remembered.

It opens with a trap: a police informant wakes up in a room with a kind of variant on the bear trap on his head. But while last time, Amanda had to cut her key out of someone else's body to win her freedom, this guy needs to retrieve his key from behind his own eye. The editing goes crazy as he attempts to do so, and the lighting is garish yellow and green, a colour scheme the film won't let go of for the rest of its runtime. The soundtrack has some quiet shrieks built into it, so as our nameless snitch takes a razor to his own face, the music screams for him. It's already far more extreme and gory than the first Saw movie, but sadly, that extra edge comes at a price. Saw II is nowhere near so clever or well written as the first one.

The main story, in this case, is about Detective Eric Matthews (played, amazingly, by Donnie Wahlberg, who never quite seems comfortable unless he's fiddling with a cigarette). Jigsaw has kidnapped his teenage son and locked him in a house with a selection of decidedly unsavoury characters, including - dun dun dun! - Amanda herself. Again, it's tough to watch this movie without remembering what's to come, and knowing the end of the film killed pretty much all the tension for me. While the criminals inside the house battle against time (and nerve gas) to win their freedom through a series of increasingly nasty traps, Det. Matthews is asked to just sit and talk to Jigsaw, watching what's going on in the house via a series of monitors and letting the timer in Jigsaw's lair tick down to zero.

Since it's pretty well established that Matthews is a dirty cop who gets his results by planting evidence and beating up witnesses, he's incapable of doing so, and ends up walking into his own trap. When the timer hits zero, he's chained to a wall in the bathroom from the first movie, while a safe in Jigsaw's house pops open to reveal that Matthews Jnr was "safe" all along. The monitors weren't showing a live stream at all, but rather events that happened several hours ago. It's a fairly neat trick that's spoiled by the lack of action outside the house: all Jigsaw wants is to sit and chat, spouting off about how most people don't deserve to live because they don't appreciate their lives (and, bizarrely, recounting an accident he had after he was diagnosed with cancer where he drove his car off a cliff and survived despite being impaled on a pole). And that's spoiled by the fact that already, Jigsaw doesn't really make sense. According to him, he never really kills anyone, he lets them make a choice. But in Saw II, most of the choices aren't choices at all.

The trap that I really remembered from this movie is the pit of needles. It's a wonderfully nasty idea, but it's sort of nonsensical. The first few traps are labelled with the names of the people in the house (Obi, apparently pronounced "Abi", and Xavier, pronounced like Professor Xavier; either Whannell or Bousman is apparently a massive nerd). The traps are supposed to relate to their particular weaknesses, like the way the informant at the beginning is forced to destroy his eye, or the way the wristcutter from the first movie has to fight through razorwire. But this time round, they don't really work. Who's supposed to go into the oven, and why? What's the deal with the wrist trap that Addison gets herself caught in? The idea that the only way through the maze is co-operation is one that'll recur in the later Saw movies, but it's not properly developed here.

What's weird is that I remember there being a lot more explanation and characterisation in this movie than there actually is. The film doesn't explain, for instance, why most of the characters were in jail; it establishes that that's what they have in common, but not why, beyond the fact that they were framed by Matthews. It's also not really clear why Amanda decides to put herself in harm's way; she's almost killed several times in the course of the film, and for no real benefit. She reveals herself at the end as Jigsaw's accomplice, but her only motivation in getting involved is, apparently, to trick the audience watching at home. Which is a bit silly, really.

The one bonus is that the acting isn't quite as bad in Saw II as it was in Saw. The script, unfortunately, is worse, though, and the concept is messier. It doesn't bode well for Saw III.

Saw Week: Part I

2010-10-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

The final Saw movie is released this Friday, and to mark the, um, occasion, I'm going to watch the six previous instalments this week, and then go and see the final one on the weekend. (It's gonna be a long week.) The mythology has become so elaborate and tangled that I want to be able to see Saw 3D in context; whether you love or hate the franchise, it's become an institution, as influential as any of the other long-running franchises, and I feel a strange obligation to see it out properly.

The first one is both better and worse than I remember it being. The main setup - two men are chained up in a disgusting underground bathroom somewhere and have to figure out a way to escape before their time runs out - is pretty effective, and the script is full of twists and turns. Initially, Dr Lawrence Gordon seems like the villain: he acts suspicious and creepy and generally seems like a complete asshole, but as the film progresses, it seems like the other man, Adam, has something to hide too. Through a series of flashbacks, we slowly start to piece things together. There's a sort-of serial killer on the loose who hates people wasting their lives and wants to force them to recognise their blessings via a series of elaborate and extremely violent traps; his habit of carving a jigsaw-shaped piece of skin out of his victims' bodies has led to the media dubbing him "Jigsaw". There's a creepy hospital orderly (played by Michael Emerson, aka Ben from Lost) who's got something to do with it; there's an obsessed ex-cop who's convinced Gordon is Jigsaw; and there's a corpse on the floor of the bathroom that might not be as dead as it seems...

Saw also introduces us to Amanda, a drug addict who finds a new purpose in life through her encounter with Jigsaw. She's only in a handful of scenes, and it's difficult to watch them without remembering everything that's to come. The Saw theme also makes its debut in this movie, sounding instantly iconic, as creepy and evocative as the Halloween theme, or Tubular Bells. The Saw mythology has grown so much since this movie that it's difficult to really see it for what it is, or what it was then; everything seems imbued with extra significance.

In 2004, Saw seemed like the scariest, most disgusting, most extreme film imaginable. I actually didn't see it in cinemas because I'd heard so much about the extreme torture in the movie, but now, looking back, it seems almost tame. There's not very much gore after all: and not counting the main chained-by-the-ankles trap at the centre of the film, we only see three of Jigsaw's elaborate mantraps. (There's the reverse beartrap, there's the room of razor wire, and there's a prototype of the drill chair that we'll see more of later.) All of them rely more on the audience's imagination than on showing too much too clearly (although Amanda pawing through a man's intestines to find the key to her trap is a little much). Saw does a lot with a little; Jigsaw's traps are horrifying because they play on your mind and make you wonder what you'd do if you had to face one of them, but there's very little actual torture going on. There's none of the prolonged suffering that will characterise some of the later movies in this series, or some of the later torture porn movies that cashed in on Saw's phenomenal success. And a lot of the scares (mostly to do with Gordon's wife and child, but also the sequence in Adam's apartment lit entirely by camera flash) really work. The writing and structure of Saw is a lot better than I think I ever gave it credit for.

But, and there had to be a but, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Mainly, the acting is appalling. Cary Elwes, in particular, is awful. He's overly sinister to begin with, but it's when he's forced to show some emotion that everything falls apart. He's utterly unconvincing as a man afraid for his family; he's utterly unconvincing as a man afraid for his own life; and he's ... oh, he's just useless, really. Gordon's bizarre backstory, where he may or may not be having an affair with someone he works with, makes very little sense, and Elwes fails to sell any part of his emotional journey. Leigh Whannell isn't a particularly good actor, either (he demonstrates any kind of heightened emotion by getting really high-pitched) but he's passable, whereas Elwes almost ruins the film on more than one occasion by turning what should be a touching or frightening moment into squealing melodrama.

The editing, too, is horrible. The film's aesthetic is overdone now, but works nicely here; it's just the crazy quick-cutting that threatens to spoil it. There's a car chase near the end that consists of quick cuts between the two drivers' faces - it's presumably because car chases are difficult and expensive to shoot, but this weird cobbled together mess is just comical. The film is full of overly stylised quick cuts; it aims for slick but lands somewhere around "amateurish" instead. But it's forgiveable in a film as cheap and inventive as this one.

Saw is certainly a flawed film, and it's flawed in frustrating ways, because there's a fantastic idea at the heart of it, and lots of clever and creepy ideas packed into it. It could so easily have been brilliant, but instead it's just pretty good. Horror films have changed a lot since Saw's release, partly as a result of the success of Saw and Hostel, and it hasn't been for the better. It's difficult to see Saw with fresh eyes, without seeing the zillions of imitators that have used and reused every part of this movie. But if you can forget all that (and somehow ignore Elwes's inability to act) it's really pretty decent. I feel like I owe Saw an apology ... for now, anyway. At least until I get as far as Saw III.

Buried (2010)

2010-10-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

The central conceit of Buried is daring, to say the least. Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), a truck driver delivering supplies to a community centre in Iraq, is captured by insurgents (or terrorists, or someone) and buried alive in a box with only a mobile phone and a Zippo lighter for company. The entire film is set inside the box with Paul while he negotiates with his captors, his employers, and the head of a hostage rescue organisation. With such an unconventional premise, the movie could only ever be amazing or terrible.

And sadly, it’s terrible.

It starts off strongly, with a few minutes of complete darkness and silence before we hear Conroy’s laboured breathing. He finds his lighter and the inside of the crude wooden box is illuminated; using the end of a nail, he saws through the restraints on his wrists and removes his gag. Then a phone rings, down at the bottom of his makeshift coffin. What follows is 90-odd minutes of increasing ridiculousness.

Conroy calls 911 and finds the super-calm operator little help. He calls his family but only gets through to voicemail. He calls the State Department, calls his employers, calls everyone, and has a series of awkward, expository conversations with dead voiced people. The point, then, is that no-one cares about what’s going on out in Iraq; that the US military is pretty useless; and that big corporations are more interested in protecting themselves from bad publicity than looking after their employees. A conversation with his aged mother attempts to wring some pathos out of the proceedings; a subplot involving one of Conroy’s colleagues hammers home the fact that his captors mean business, in case the whole being-buried-alive-in-a-box thing wasn’t enough to convince us. Ryan Reynolds does an admirable job of trying to carry the movie – since he’s the only person we see for the entire film, everything rests on his reactions – but the script is too upsettingly awful for him to succeed.

It’s just not plausible that none of the people he speaks to would get even slightly emotional. There’s no urgency in any of their voices, so the outcome of the movie is a forgone conclusion from the very beginning. No-one seems to disbelieve him when he screams that he’s buried in a box in Iraq, despite being on a very clear mobile line to a phone operator in Ohio, but no-one seems to be interested either. The dialogue is awkward, stagey; the conversation Conroy has with Dan Brenner at the hostage rescue organisation about other hostages who have previously been rescued is like no conversation two human beings have had with one another, ever. And the editing is painfully amateurish. There’s a scene where the camera zooms ominously and distractingly in on Conroy’s face while he talks; later, there’s an upwards zoom where the camera moves further and further away from Paul’s prone body, wooden box walls on either side of him, until we’re a good 20ft above him … but somehow still inside the box, still in the dark, still penned in by that box which is now inexplicably, for onscreen effect, twenty times the size it was earlier. It’s a weird thing to do, destroying your audience’s suspension of disbelief – we know Ryan Reynolds isn’t really alone in a box, we know there’s a camera crew there and after this scene he’s gonna get out and stretch his legs, but for the purpose of watching the film, we choose to forget that. By /actually showing us/ something that couldn’t possibly exist in the film, the filmmakers throw the artificiality of it all in our faces, and for no good reason.

The problem is that, having come up with the concept for a movie that’s all about dialogue and claustrophobia, the writers weren’t up to delivering: they weren’t seem capable of writing that dialogue, nor holding the audience’s attention. Thus we’re treated to a scene in which Conroy suddenly discovers that there’s a snake /inside his trousers/ and, when it slithers out and hisses at him from the bottom of his coffin, he douses it in alcohol from his hip flask, then sets it on fire with his Zippo. The snake slithers out of a hole in the side of the box, never to be seen again – the snake, or the hole. Conroy doesn’t even seem to register it, and somehow, that scene makes the casting of Ryan Reynolds seem bizarre.

Conroy, we’re told, has less than $700 to his name, which is why he took this awful job driving a truck in Iraq. He’s not a soldier, and he’s not much of anything, really; he’s not particularly clever, not particularly interesting, and his only other distinguishing feature is that he has to take pills to ward off anxiety. He doesn’t try to break out of the box, and after the initial wriggling around to cut off the ties on his wrists, he doesn’t do anything except lie in the box and make phone calls. So why cast someone as famously muscular and athletic and attractive as Reynolds? It seems like it would have made more sense to cast someone who looked less capable; someone who didn’t look like they could punch their way through the crappy wooden box. (Alright, depending on how deeply he was buried, the weight of the sand on top of the box might have caused that effort to fail, but we know he’s not that deep because his phone still works.) Towards the end of the film, the box starts to collapse anyway, and Conroy still doesn’t try to get out, instead wasting his last few breaths on stupid conversations with his ex-employers.

Nothing about Buried really works. Conroy is drawn with the broadest of strokes (his mum’s ill! He’s got a young son! He takes anxiety pills!). The dialogue is stilted. The pacing of the film is off – it’s far too long for what it is – and there’s no structure to speak of. The awkward attempt at turning Conroy’s captors into sympathetic, if desperate, people rather than monstrous terrorists utterly fails. And the ending is brainmeltingly stupid. Come on. This is nonsense. This is satire for morons. It’s first draft, badly written, poorly conceived crap designed to give people without any political awareness something to talk about.

IMDB link

The Last Exorcism (2010)

2010-08-31T00:46:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-08-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-05-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-03-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-02-08T14:04:00.001-08:00

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)

2010-02-07T07:16:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-11-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-10-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

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.

IMDB link

Bunny and the Bull (2009)

2009-08-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

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.

IMDB link

Day of the Dead (2008)

2008-09-02T00:58:00.000-07:00

What's in a name? Well, quite a lot, really. By appropriating the title of one of George Romero's seminal zombie movies, Day of the Dead (2008) will manage to sucker in more viewers than it would have if it just carried some generic zombie-related title. Throwing Ving Rhames into the mix - especially since he was in the Dawn of the Dead remake, albeit as a completely different character - just compounds the trickery. Because no matter what the filmmakers might claim, this isn't a remake, nor is it a sequel. It's barely even a film.

Okay, it's managed to lift a couple of elements from the 1985 classic: there are zombies, there are military personnel, and there's even a zombie who's sort of friendly, or at least not actively trying to kill people, called "Bud." Which is sort of close to "Bub." That's as far as the similarities go, and even they're half-assed. Basically, the film is set in a small Colorado town which, for some reason, has become overrun with zombies. The military is trying to contain the infection by quarantining the town, although they're not doing a very good job.

Mena Suvari, slumming it to an extent previously unheard of (seriously, didn't she used to be in real films?) plays Sarah, possibly a Corporal, who has some kind of issue with guns and thus doesn't carry a loaded one. Handily, too, she's actually from the town suffering the zombie infection, so she both knows her way around and also has plenty of local family members to get killed or threatened throughout. Other characters of note include Sarah's brother Trevor and his girlfriend; a dodgy scientist who engineered the zombie virus in the first place; a rubbish radio DJ; a vegetarian private named Bud; and another army guy of unknown rank named Salazar. Or, alternatively, person 1, person 2, person 3... any characterisation that sneaked in was incidental, since everyone's just there to up the body count.

Quite honestly, it feels like either this script was dashed out the night before filming started and no-one bothered to notice it was crap, or it made perfect sense but then the director dropped it in the bath and half the pages were too soggy to read, but they ploughed on with the production anyway. It's just gibberish. No-one acts like a human being; no-one talks like a human being. And it really would have helped if someone, somewhere along the line, had done some research into how the military operates and how they speak to one another. (Incidentally, Ving Rhames only shows up for one scene where he delivers a couple of lines woodenly and then wanders off. Later, his character re-appears as a zombie, but it seems unlikely it was actually Rhames under all that CGI. He was, clearly, cast only so that his name could appear on the box.)

But in spite of all the logical holes, the lack of characterisation, the completely shambolic portrayal of the army (be honest, guys - you just wrote dialogue and then decided to put the actors in uniform, right?) the worst offence the movie commits, by a long shot, is to do with its zombie special effects. The merits of running zombies over shambling ones can be argued until we're all blue in the face, but there can't be anyone on earth who'd argue that Day of the Dead took the right approach to zombies. For about the first half an hour of the film, I couldn't quite work out what was wrong - the zombies were running, but there was something unnatural about their too-fast, too-jerky gait. All suddenly became clear a few scenes later: the footage had been sped up. Many of the zombies were actually lurching about in the manner most people associate with zombies... it's just that the film's editors had sped the film up until they looked like they were running.

And it gets worse.

At one point, there is a blatantly CGI zombie that crawls up the wall, skitters across the ceiling for a bit before dropping back onto the ground. At another, we watch someone transform from a living, perfectly normal human being into a zombie - using liberal amounts of CGI, again, their eyes change colour and dodgy computer-generated welts open up on their skin. Did anyone involved with this movie even stop to consider why it is that zombies look like that? Here, I'll clue you in: it's because they're walking dead people, and since they're corpses, they rot. That's why they look like they're decomposing. It's not an instantaneous process.

At yet another point in the movie, our heroes are crawling along an air vent (presumably just because it was on the checklist of horror movie cliches) when a zombie leaps up, presses its face against the vent, and just hovers there. Later, dozens of zombies throw themselves through windows, fall several stories to the ground, and get up and start running. Or lurching. There's very little film that hasn't been sped up, and as a result it all looks awful. Everything's too sharp-edged, too hyper-real. But not in a deliberate, stylistic way - more in the manner of someone who's just learning to use their DVD editing software and pressed a button to see what would happen.

Even the type of masochistic horror fans who deliberately set out to watch films they know will be bad couldn't enjoy this. It's too cynical, too joyless; it's clearly been made in order to make money, as evidenced by the titling and the casting. No-one involved in this wanted to make a good movie, they just wanted to make a fast buck. It's pitiful. Do yourself a favour and watch something - anything! - else, other than this.

IMDB link

Definitely, Maybe (2008)

2008-06-24T04:52:00.000-07:00

Definitely, Maybe plays like a film that's in the middle of being rewritten. You get the sense that there was an original version of the script, someone recommended a structural change, and the writer started to implement it, then time ran out and they just filmed what they had. It's messy.

The film's only saving grace is Ryan Reynolds, who is supremely watchable in just about anything. Which doesn't say much for Definitely, Maybe; Ryan Reynolds would probably be more entertaining if he were reading out a phone book than starring in this. Sadly, the DVD of Reynolds' rendition of The Yellow Pages hasn't been released yet, so Definitely, Maybe will have to do. Reynolds plays Will Hayes, a political consultant whose life didn't quite go the way he'd planned - he's getting divorced, and he isn't the president yet. Hoping to gain some insight into why her parents are splitting up, his 11-year-old daughter asks Will to tell her the story of how he met her mother, which launches him into a very, very long account of every relationship he's ever had. Including lots of intimate details and incriminating anecdotes of the kind you really would never tell a small child, particularly if they were your own offspring.

Essentially, then, we get to watch each of Will's relationships blossom and then fall apart, interspersed with brief moments of Will tucking his daughter into bed, making her a hot chocolate, or awkwardly answering her questions about what exactly a "threesome" might be. That's the main problem with the film, right there: it just doesn't make sense. The idea of a father explaining to his child how he fell in love with her mother and, in the process, gaining his own insight into what went wrong with his relationships and how to put them right could potentially work; playing around with subjectivity and the idea of the unreliable narrator shouldn't be too much of a stretch, either. But Definitely, Maybe is too stupid to play it off like that. Instead, Will apparently recounts every single thing that happened - every awkward bit of flirting, every alcoholic drink consumed and illicit cigarette smoked, and every tiny tiny detail of everyone's mannerisms and speech patterns. (Including every time his so-called friends make jokes about suicide whenever anything bad happens to him - hilarious, guys! Or, you know, really really fucking inconsiderate.)

As an added bonus, we get to watch as a young Will gradually becomes more and more disenchanted with politics, eventually abandoning his dream of becoming the President of the United States as he's disappointed with Bill Clinton, to the point where he calls his earlier ambitions stupid. But that's not the story he's supposed to be telling; it just doesn't make sense. What seems more likely is that the film was originally supposed to be just a straight account of Will's life and relationships, but somewhere along the line someone suggested having it be a story he's telling his child - but no-one saw fit to rewrite any of it. It's awkward. And it doesn't help that actually it's all quite boring; Will's daughter tells him off a couple of times for being a "slut", but in reality he's had two relationships with women, both of whom he's proposed to, and fallen in love with his best friend along the way. That makes the term "slut" not only offensive and outdated but also kind of nonsensical - are we just supposed to go "ah, kids - what do they know?" and laugh here, or what?

To add insult to injury, Definitely, Maybe isn't even a comedy, because it's not funny. With a less charismatic actor in the leading role, it would be virtually impossible to even get through to the end of this film; as it is, well, Reynolds deserves better.

IMDB link

Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Snake Eyes (1998)

2008-06-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

When Nic Cage plays sleazy, he really goes all out. In Snake Eyes, he's Rick Santoro, an Atlantic City police officer with a gambling habit, a wife and kids plus another woman on the side, and some rather, um, unusual methods. With a large amount of money riding on a big prize fight, he's angry when the champion appears to throw the match - but he soon has more important things to worry about, as the Secretary of Defence has been assassinated and there appears to be a conspiracy afoot...

Snake Eyes is kind of strange because Cage is definitely off the leash here - he orders martinis and makes an Elvis reference in the space of about 30 seconds, and I can't believe that outfit came from anywhere other than Cage's own wardrobe - yet because of the bizarre structure of the film and because there are so many other characters vying for attention, he doesn't completely steal the show. Which is really strange, because there are very few lines of dialogue he doesn't deliver by shouting them. It's a bit of a weird film, actually; it's really well put together technically and visually, with lots of long long long dynamic tracking shots and well-used musical score, and the structure of the narrative, which keeps revisiting the same events from different angles and from different subjective points of view, is really interesting, but it doesn't quite pay off properly. According to the IMDB, that's because originally the film was supposed to end with a tidal wave wiping out the casino, but for some reason this was cut in post-production. Thinking about it, that would really help tie up various loose ends - as it stands, the tropical storm raging outside doesn't really have anything to do with anything, so the subplot with the news reporter filming outside doesn't go anywhere, and Nic Cage's rambling final speech about dreaming about drowning is completely irrelevant. Which is a shame.

Snake Eyes isn't one of Nic Cage's really great films, and neither is it a really great or even particularly memorable Cage performance. Disappointing.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: The Weather Man (2005)

2008-06-23T00:02:00.000-07:00

The Weather Man is a painfully mismarketed film. The tagline on the DVD calls it "a comedy to brighten your day", but if you were having a bad day prior to watching this film, it'd probably finish you off. There are a couple of funny moments, sure, but it's essentially a film about a horrible man who has grown to hate his life and can't find a way to fix things. Not really all that cheery, then.

Nic Cage has played some utter bastards in his time, and David Spritz really doesn't compare - he's not a con artist, or a terrorist, or a gun runner, or a murderer, or even a criminal of any kind. He's just not a very nice man. He's incredibly selfish, and seemingly incapable of summoning anything remotely like empathy: his ex-wife can't bear him, he's rubbish with his kids, and he barely pays any attention to his dying father, choosing instead to obsess about, well, mostly, sex. His successful career as a minor TV personality - a weather man with a particularly grating persona - makes him an awful lot of money, but no respect (in fact, people regularly throw things at him in the street) and instead of this being one of those feel-good movies where everyone grows and learns and cries and hugs, it's just... not. At the end, Dave is just as alone and just as pathetic as he was when it started, if not more so. There's no neatly packaged moral here. It's just all a bit miserable.

Which isn't to say this is a bad film. Far from it, actually. Gore Verbinski keeps Cage firmly on his leash (I didn't spot a single Elvis reference in this film, which indicates that this was a very restrained Cage performance), making him actually act, actually play a character, rather than swanning around being Nic Cage. The cinematography is gorgeous; The Weather Man feels like an indie film, only with a much higher budget, better actors, and a slick of Hollywood gloss. It's definitely one of Cage's better films, but whoever stuck that tagline on the box really ought to have been sacked. The urge to make a weather-related pun of some kind is entirely understandable, but The Weather Man is really more of a drizzly, grey film than any kind of bright spell.

IMDB link

The Eye (2008)

2008-06-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

The Eye is the epitome of mediocrity. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not great; it's just there. And pointlessly so, since the original Pang brothers version of the film was better, though The Eye is at least better than other recent Western remakes of Eastern movies like Pulse, because it manages to be coherent. It's just sorely lacking in oomph.

Jessica Alba stars as Sydney, a musician who has been blind since she was involved in an accident at a young age. The wonders of modern technology mean, though, that her vision can be restored using donor corneas. Sydney's efforts to adjust to life with functioning eyes again are vaguely endearing, but she soon realises that something's gone horribly wrong - she can't only see, now, she can see dead people. Dun dun dun!

All the scare scenes are lifted straight out of the original movie, but either because they're old hat now, or because some elements of them have been lost, altered in the process of removing them from their cultural context, they don't work nearly so well. It's not that they're badly executed or anything; they just don't quite have the same effect here. Something that has remained the same, though, is the transition the film makes halfway through from a spooky ghost story into the sort of quest narrative that The Ring and The Grudge succumbed to, as Alba seeks out the family of her organ donor in order to try to find out why she died. In both versions of the movie, this section ends up weaker than the rest of it, because we know full well what the outcome will be; we're just going through the motions.

Without giving away too much, the ending has been slightly altered for the remake, which isn't a terrible idea, but it's also... not great. There's nothing really notable about this film - it manages to take both Jessica Alba, known for not being a particularly skilled actor, and Parker Posey, who is usually much more interesting, and render them both okay, but not especially good. There's no pace to this movie, no urgency; nothing at all to get your pulse racing or to engage your intellect. It's not that it's bad, and I don't have any particularly damning criticisms, it's just that there's nothing to recommend it, either.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)

2008-06-16T03:10:00.001-07:00

Nic Cage is a retired car thief who just needs to pull off one last heist to prevent an evil gangster killing his daft younger brother. Lots of high speed car chases ensue, and it's all delightfully silly - though Cage is mostly behaving himself, and rarely even raises his voice. The scene where he tries to seduce Angelina Jolie using car-themed metaphors for sexual intercourse is priceless, though.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Matchstick Men (2003)

2008-06-16T03:06:00.001-07:00

mMatchstick Men lets Nic Cage be a complete and utter bastard whilst remaining a sympathetic character and being more than slightly crazy - Roy Waller is a con man with a catalogue of phobias and obsessions (including some OCD tendencies) who's forced to re-evaluate his life when he discovers he has a teenage daughter.

Or something like that. I don't want to give too much away about the plot, since it's actually one of Cage's genuinely good movies, but suffice it to say that since it's a movie about con men, nothing is ever going to be quite as straightforward as it seems.

Cage is on brilliant form here - twitchy and nervous with several spectacular blowups (the best of all, without question, being the part where he shouts at a guy who tells him off for cutting a queue: "Have you ever been dragged to a sidewalk and beaten till you PISSED BLOOD?") yet somehow still rather endearing. It's Cage under control, too; very few overtly quirky Cageisms creep in, though there are martinis involved, and the shouting all seems to be scripted rather than improvised, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are alternate versions of the "...pissed blood" line floating around out there. So, hats off to Ridley Scott for channelling Cage accurately and effectively; this isn't a movie that's good in spite of Cage, or a bad movie that's improved because of Cage; it's actually really quite good, and Cage is great in it. Hurrah!

IMDB link

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

2008-06-13T03:35:00.000-07:00

There are some superheroes who really don't need much by way of introduction. We all know that Superman's from Krypton; that Spider-Man was bitten by some kind of scienced-up spider; and that Bruce Banner, when he gets angry, becomes the Hulk. So it's hugely refreshing when, instead of rehashing the same old tired origin story all over again, The Incredible Hulk dispenses with the pleasantries and gets all that gamma ray stuff out of the way during the credits sequence.

However, while it's very cool that the film acknowledged that what's cool about superheroes is what they do after they've got their powers, it's kind of unfortunate that instead the filmmakers spent most of this film telling the origin story of Abomination instead.

I'll hold my hands up here and admit that I know precisely sod all about Abomination from the comics - and I'm not sure I'm any the wiser after the movie. A loose three-act structure falls into place around Abomination's (or, in his human form, Emil Blonsky's) encounters with the Hulk/Bruce Banner; some other stuff happens along the way, but the three fights between Blonsky and Banner are the tentpoles that the rest of the film is draped over. Um, but to just stretch that metaphor a little further than it can comfortably go - they're crooked. Obviously, each fight is bigger and more destructive than the last, but each successive fight is also much less involving because there's more and more CGI every time the two of them face off.

And, oh, the CGI. If you've seen the trailers or posters or promotional images for this movie, you already know what it looks like - and it's not pretty. It's all very accomplished, and there are scenes involving rain just to show off all those not-quite-realistic-looking textures, but the fight scenes never look like anything other than a computer game. It never looks real, and there's never anything at stake; admiring the technical skill of the graphic artists is about as close as you'll ever get to feeling any real emotion during this film.

Ang Lee's Hulk has mostly been criticised for including too much drama and not enough superhero. This version of The Incredible Hulk features plenty of the green guy, but there's never really any point to it. Edward Norton might as well be sleepwalking through his scenes as Bruce, and Liv Tyler as Betty is completely devoid of personality - she's supposed to be a doctor, she's General Ross's daughter, there's plenty of material to work with, but she only ever gets to play the generic teary-eyed love interest for the anti-hero here. And a curiously lacking in chemistry love interest, at that. Ross's maniacal vendetta against the Hulk is supremely unthreatening, and Abomination's motives for wanting to fight seem to have been ripped straight out of Dragonball Z. Actually, the final fight scene is very reminiscent of that particular anime series: it's just two obscenely muscular men, with muscles piled on top of muscles where no human being should have muscles, facing off against one another purely for the sake of seeing who's stronger. I'm amazed neither of their power levels approached nine thousand, but I guess the inevitable "Hulk smash!" moment was a decent substitute for that.

There are a couple of very geeky nods to the fanbase in this movie - from the Nick Fury and Stark Industries name checks during the beginning credits to Bruce's refusal to even try on his iconic purple trunks - but then even Fantastic Four did things like that. And sometimes The Incredible Hulk gets it wrong, anyway; in the movie, Samuel Sterns is a highly intelligent scientist (even if he is a bit misguided, and working with substandard equipment) whereas in the comics he was, at best, an inept menial worker. Stan Lee's obligatory cameo was just bizarre (who was he supposed to be, and what was he doing there?) and though it's pretty cool of them to get Lou Ferrigno involved, the fact that I can remember more about the cameos and geeky winks than anything else about the film can't be a good sign.

It's only been a couple of hours since I saw The Incredible Hulk, and already the memory is fading. In the grand scheme of Marvel superhero movies, this was never going to be Spider-man 2, but I thought it might at least give Ghost Rider a run for his money. Actually, this probably should be placed underneath the Fantastic Four movies in the stack: it's not particularly clever, it's not particularly entertaining, and it somehow lacks any kind of emotional resonance whatsoever. Really, I wasn't expecting a Hulk movie to be anything other than a bit of brainless, fast-paced entertainment, but at a whopping 114 minutes in which virtually nothing real happens, it fails even at that. It's a damp squib.

Finally, at the screening I attended, the scene featuring Tony Stark came right before the credits, which seemed weird since the final, please-let-us-do-a-sequel moment had already happened and the screen had faded to black. I stayed until all the credits had rolled, and there was nothing afterwards, so I wonder whether, in the proper theatrical release, the random, pointless Tony Stark part will come after the credits? Personally, I don't think I could be bothered to go and see it again to find out.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Raising Arizona (1987)

2008-06-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

Raising Arizona was a bit of a disappointment, Cage-wise. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he was bad in it - on the contrary, he was really rather good - but he wasn't playing Nic Cage in it. This is one of the few films where he actually acts, rather than doing that drawling, whole-arm-pointing Elvis impression he's liable to do whenever a director doesn't have a tight enough hold on his leash. It's probably because this was quite early on in his career, though, and Cage does sport some spectacularly crazy hair and incredibly sharp cheekbones, which went some way towards making up for it.

Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, an ex-con who ends up marrying Ed, a police officer played by the ever-wonderful Holly Hunter. Everything goes about as well as such a match could be expected to go until they learn that they're barren. Coincidentally, in the news that week is a story about a couple who've just had quintuplets. The couple decide to steal a baby, and from then on the film is pretty much your standard farce.

The Coens' movies seem to be something you either get or you don't. It's not quite the Marmite effect, because although I'm not sure I really got this movie, I certainly didn't hate it, it just didn't quite click with me. The most interesting part was how much it seems to presage Cage's later career. (Okay, I'm talking about Ghost Rider again, but the Leonard Smalls character, about whom H.I. has nightmares, practically is Ghost Rider. There's even a shot where Smalls rides his bike past a lizard in the desert and it burns up and dies, which I'm certain recurs in Ghost Rider.) Cage's accent, the fact that he's playing an ex-con, and some graffiti on a toilet wall all point towards Con Air, and there are plenty of seeds sown for the kind of quirkiness and insanity that will later characterise Nic Cage as a movie star. There's definite promise here.

IMDB link

Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Con Air (1997)

2008-06-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

Con Air was nominated for two Oscars in 1998, and though it didn't win either of them, it did win a Razzie for Worst Reckless Disregard for Human Life and Public Property. That sums this film up better than I ever could, really. And any film that starts with Nic Cage stalking around in a military uniform with How Do I Live playing in the background can't be anything less than awesome.

Cage plays Cameron Poe, a US Ranger who accidentally murders a man who was harrassing his wife and ends up doing 7-10 years for his trouble. On the day he's due to be released, he, for some ridiculous reason, ends up hitching a ride on a private plane which is being used to transport highly dangerous prisoners from one prison to another. Finding himself in close quarters with every famous serial killer and rapist in the country is pretty unpleasant, but it's about to get worse, because some of those prisoners have hatched a plot to hijack the plane and fly to freedom. The exact details of this plan are kind of sketchy, and it doesn't really make sense, but when you're packing as many explosives as this movie is, who needs a well-thought out plot anyway?

It's difficult to pick the best Nic Cage moment in Con Air - the number of times he ends up running in slow motion away from an explosion, his long hair streaming behind him in the breeze, is incalculable - but the line that's destined to be most quoted is certainly "Put the bunny back in the box."

Brilliant.

IMDB link

Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Next (2007)

2008-06-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

Although Next's opening credits claimed that the story was based on a Philip K. Dick story, a tiny bit of digging around on Wikipedia revealed that, er, well, that's not really true. The only bit taken from a Philip K. Dick story is the idea of seeing into the future just far enough to see the consequences of any one single action. Next resembles, more than anything else, a computer game - actually, it's more reminiscent of a computer game than most computer game adaptations.

Nic Cage plays a man called Cris Johnson. Cris has the power to see into the future, but only for about two minutes, and only events which are directly related to himself. So, for example, he might forsee that, when he changes the channel on his TV, there'll be a movie on that he wants to see, but if it started more than two minutes ago, he has no way of switching over quickly enough to catch the beginning. He also wouldn't be able to forsee any kind of natural disaster happening on the other side of the world, since he wouldn't be directly involved, and let's face it, with only a two minute headstart, he'd be pretty useless at avoiding a catastrophe anyway. There's only one exception to this two minute rule: he has a recurring vision of meeting the woman of his dreams in a diner. He looks at his watch, and it's 8:09, but he doesn't know the date or even whether it's a.m. or p.m. All he knows is that he'll meet this woman one day, and it'll be just gone 8 o'clock when it happens. Unfortunately, while he's arsing about drinking martinis in a diner, his future-seeing antics have been spotted by an FBI agent who wants to capture Cris and use his abilities to predict when a terrorist group will use a nuclear bomb they've stolen to blow up Los Angeles. (This is in spite of the fact that she knows he's limited to two minutes and that he can only see things that concern him; she's just wacky like that.)

The film sort of wants to concern itself with issues of free will and predestination, but given that Cris can avoid any unwanted consequences of his actions (and does so, frequently) that's sort of moot. Or paradoxical, I guess. Not that it really matters, because Next is a brain-meltingly stupid film. The plot makes no sense, whatsoever - the terrorist plot doesn't actually hold water, the FBI randomly resort to illegal acts and arsing around with psychics rather than actually doing their jobs, and Cage... well, he's actually kind of subdued, by his standards, though he's by far the star of the show because no-one else is even bothering to phone in a performace. It's more like they've texted it in. Julianne Moore seems to be under the impression that she's supposed to be playing Jodie Foster circa Silence of the Lambs, Jessica Biel is pretty but totally pointless, and, um, was there even anyone else in this movie?

The only thing that makes Next worth watching is the final third, where everything goes utterly batshit. In order to visually depict Cris's foretelling of the different outcomes of his actions, you get multiple Nic Cages onscreen at the same time, and there's one bit where he sort of becomes a CGI Cage blur as Cris figures out exactly how to duck in order to avoid getting hit by a bullet. It's beautiful, but completely insane. But my favourite bit, which surpasses bullet-time Cage and the Clockwork Orange homage, is the moment when Cris realises that he's made a wrong move somewhere along the line, and rewinds half the movie, as if he were a character in a computer game returning to the last save point before everything went wrong. I've long said that I'm desperate to see a computer game movie that uses that device - a character getting something wrong and dying only to restart again from the last checkpoint - so seeing it here was an unexpected but delightful surprise.

Sadly, there's very little shouting and no whole arm pointing whatsoever in this film, so it never quite matches the dizzying brilliance of Ghost Rider. It's still good clean Cage fun, though.

IMDB link

June is Nic Cage Appreciation Month!

2008-06-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

I know, we're already more than a week into June, which makes it a little bit late to declare it anything-month. But I am, right now, declaring June to be Nicolas Cage Appreciation Month.

Once upon a time, I really didn't like Nic Cage. I couldn't tell you why, exactly, but I found him really off-putting and would deliberately avoid watching movies he starred in.

Then, Ghost Rider happened, and my Nic Cage movie viewing history was immediately divided into two distinct halves: BGR (before Ghost Rider) and AGR (after Ghost Rider). In the latter part, I acknowledged that Nic Cage is, after all, a complete and utter fucking genius. The man can turn any role and turn it into an Elvis impression - he can take any script and turn it into a winking, smirking Cage comedy. He's brilliant.

So, to celebrate, I'm laying in every Nic Cage movie I can get my hands on, watching them, and then writing about 'em here. I possibly need a brand new ratings system to implement for this, but I'll work out the wrinkles as we go along. (If you want to play, feel free! Please leave me a comment with a link to any Cage-related insights you make this month. Or don't. Y'know, it's not obligatory - it's just awesome.)

Let the Cage commence!

House of Fears (2007)

2008-06-07T06:25:00.001-07:00

Watching House of Fears was an object lesson in not judging a movie by its IMDB tagline. The one sentence available on the movie ("Six friends sneak into a haunted house the night before it opens for Halloween, only to find that their evening of fun has turned into their worst nightmare") made it sound like the worst kind of boring, formulaic dross. However, it turned out to be, well, actually, kind of good. Not brilliant, but solid.

Admittedly, things didn't start off well, with a generic sequence featuring a cursed African statue and overly sun-bleached visual, but the action quickly moves on... to Salem, Oregon. Which isn't the Salem of the witch trials, but is, according to Wikipedia, famous for its historial cherry industry. Scary.

Anyway, in Salem, it's the night before a haunted house Halloween attraction is due to open, and so a group of teenagers decide to break in and try it out before it's open to the general public. The characters aren't particularly original: there's Samantha, the obvious Last Girl (played by an actress I vaguely recognised from 2006's Unrest); there's her new stepsister Hailey, with whom she doesn't get on; there's Carter, a supposedly attractive boy Hailey is sort of dating; Zane, the wacky friend no-one actually seems to like; and a couple, Devon and Candice, who also don't really seem to get along with anyone, but are there because Zane fancies Candice. There's a bit of drama as Zane refuses to be paired up with Samantha, the only other single member of the group, and proposes a date-swap with Carter, but mostly the fact that no-one really likes any of the others is enough to cause tension later on. Zane is an employee of the haunted house, so to begin with he's able to guide the others around, but things quickly get out of control...

The inexplicably evil statue from the opening sequence is at the root of all the supernatural goings on, having been unceremoniously dumped at the House of Fears, but it's mostly irrelevant once things kick off. The titular House of Fears attraction looks like a really, really cool place to visit: it's made up of various chambers, each of which houses a common fear, and visitors pass through each chamber in turn, facing their worst nightmares. The house also has lots of secret passageways between the chambers so that the staff can move around to scare the unsuspecting visitors, which is obviously going to become an important feature later, and though many of the props look fake (the mummies, for example, aren't all that authentic), by Halloween attraction standards, it's amazing. If a House of Fears like that existed anywhere near me, I'd go there all the time. The beauty of the conceit, too, is that the film's low budget doesn't really matter; if parts of the set look a bit wooden or like they're made of papier mache, that's because they are; they're supposed to be.

The fun starts once the fears all start coming to life. Helpfully, the group all shared their worst fears with one another before embarking on this adventure, so the House knows exactly what to throw at them, no matter how unlikely (getting struck by lightning in the crotch, anyone?) they might sound. Despite Zane's listing off of all the fears the House contained at the beginning, we don't get to see all of them (spiders, notably, didn't make an appearance) but the ones we do see are great. Maybe it's my low expectations talking, but I really enjoyed most of the scare scenes here. It wasn't terrifying, but there were enough bizarre things going on to make things interesting, and although picking the Last Girl was easy enough, judging which (if any) of the others would also make it out of the House wasn't as simple as I'd thought, with strong contenders offed early on.

Ultimately, House of Fears is the most dangerous kind of movie for me: it looked like it should have been terrible, but actually turned out to be decently watchable. It's films like this that keep me watching terrible, crap-sounding low-budget movies by giving me that seed of hope. Damn you, House of Fears.

IMDB link

I'm a Cyborg But That's OK (2006)

2008-06-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy fell victim to the laws of diminishing returns: Sympathy for Mr Vengeance was far and away the best, Old Boy was good, and Lady Vengeance was, y'know, okay, I guess. All of them were super-violent, so I'm A Cyborg But That's OK, which can be roughly classified as a sort of romantic comedy, seems like a pretty radical departure - but a welcome one. Mind you, Park still hasn't quite let go of the revenge motif: I'm A Cyborg's titular cyborg is dead set on getting revenge on the medical profession for its perceived mistreatment of her schizophrenic grandmother. And there's still some violence, it's just contained within some wacky fantasy sequences.

The basic plot, then, is that Young-goon's grandmother went crazy, believing herself to be a mouse and eating only radishes. When she was carted off to a mental institute, her dentures were left behind, causing Young-goon some pretty intense angst about the fact that her gran now wouldn't be able to eat her beloved radishes. Young-goon's own sanity deteriorates pretty quickly, though, as messages from the radio tell her that she's a cyborg, able to communicate with machines, unable to eat human food, and tasked with killing all the "white'uns" that took away her grandmother. Before long she, too, ends up in a mental hospital, where she meets a whole host of weird and wonderful characters, including a man who assumes the blame for everything that ever goes wrong, a woman who believes her socks will let her fly, and a strange man in a mask who steals everything and anything, including the personality traits of other inmates. Played by Korean popstar Rain, this last patient, Il-soon, finds himself rather taken with the bizarrely endearing Young-goon, and sets out to save her from her self-imposed starvation...

It's all very light and fluffy, which, considering it's a movie about mental illness and death, is a bit difficult to adjust to at times; the ridiculously ineffective group therapy sessions are more Rainbow than One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and while we're told that Young-goon is three days from death's door, there's no real sense of urgency. The fantasy sequences are inventively bizarre (my personal favourite is the yodelling, which Rain pulls off with startling aplomb!) and the visual style of the film is wonderful, brightly coloured and gorgeous to look at, but it's difficult not to feel ever-so-slightly emotionally short-changed. The film as a whole, and in particular the relationships between characters, could have benefited from a bit more weight, a bit more darkness. Young-goon's plight never quite seems real, and her threats to kill all the doctors and nurses never actually seem likely to be carried through. She's tiny and fragile, but almost always still beautiful and endearing; that Il-soon could fall in love with her doesn't require much of a stretch, but then you almost take that for granted; that their romance will blossom and she'll be okay and he'll be okay and everything will be okay. (Possibly because the title of the film says so.)

It seems strange to complain that a Park Chan-Wook film is too lightweight, but this really is. It's a shame, because it's still beautiful, but it could have been so much more powerful had it been a little more grounded in reality. The mental hospital seems more like a holiday camp for the endearingly eccentric than a hospital treating real human beings in mental and physical pain, and almost everything is played for laughs, which just makes it difficult to take it too seriously. That's clearly a conscious decision, but I just wanted a bit more... something. As it stands, I'm A Cyborg But That's OK is cute and sweet and watchable, but also rather forgettable and fluffy.

IMDB link

Originally published at Den of Geek.

The Wig (2005)

2008-06-07T06:16:00.002-07:00

Given the proliferation of soggy dead girl movies in which the villain is marked out by the long, bedraggled black hair that hides her decaying face, a film that was about the evil hair itself seemed almost inevitable; The Wig, arguably, just takes the trope to its logical conclusion. Yet at the same time, The Wig has more to offer than most of the recent bandwagon-jumpers. It's really a lot more intelligent than you could reasonably expect a film about a killer wig to be.

Admittedly, the premise isn't encouraging. Su-hyeon, a terminal cancer patient, is taken home by her sister, Ji-hyeon, who doesn't want to let her waste away in a dingy hospital. To encourage her, Ji-hyeon brings her sister a wig to hide her vulnerable bald head; but the wig does more than restore Su-hyeon's confidence in her looks. With the wig on, Su-hyeon looks healthier, and more attractive. She has buckets more energy, and although she stops taking her medication, the cancer seems to be retreating. She begins to believe the lie that she's been brought home because she's cured, rather than just because the hospice was too depressing a prospect for Ji-hyeon, and starts going out partying. But when Su-hyeon's parted from the wig, it all goes horribly wrong -- and when a friend, who stole the wig in a desperate attempt to win back her ex-husband, turns up dead, Ji-hyeon realises that the wig is... um, well, evil. There's no way of putting that without sounding stupid, which is frustrating given how seriously every other element in the film is taken.

One of the revelations about a central character's past near the end of The Wig veers dangerously close to territory already covered a million and one times, but before I had time to finish rolling my eyes the film flipped the script, throwing in a completely unexpected element and completely changing the dynamic at the centre of the film. The problem always comes back to the villainous wig, which gets several chances to fly through the air and molest people, or else grow beyond all control and sneak up on people. It's a shame that there's so much CGI nonsense, because it detracts from all the character work and emotion threaded through the narrative.

Although, obviously, there are any number of soggy dead girl movies I could liken The Wig to, the one it's most reminiscent of is A Tale Of Two Sisters. It has that same dreamlike quality -- or, rather, nightmarelike -- and the same sense that there's a lot you won't figure out the first time through. The central relationship between two sisters is the most important component in both films, too, and the main feeling evoked by both movies is sadness rather than fear. The Wig isn't a scary movie, despite borrowing many of the now well-known conventions of the genre, and it's not the sort of thing you'd want to watch with friends or alcohol -- it demands more of your attention than that. The horror element sometimes complements the more sentimental aspect of the film, and sometimes doesn't; there are some absolutely brilliant set-pieces, including one Final Destination-esque car crash, and a scene involving pills in the hospital, that are beautifully pulled-off and deliciously creepy, and there are some utterly daft moments, including one where Su-hyeon's reflection in a train window comes to malicious life, that break the mood entirely.

The real triumph of The Wig is its visual style, which, okay, isn't vastly different from the visual style of films like the aforementioned A Tale of Two Sisters or even Ring, but it's careful and considered and shot with an eye for beauty and detail. Early on, there's a shot of Su-hyeon sitting naked and bare-headed in an empty bath, crying, utterly alone and vulnerable, and while this could easily have been played for exploitation or turned into the obligatory shower scene of slasher movies, it isn't. It's just upsettingly sad. Making Su-hyeon so fragile and sick before visiting all sorts of supernatural nasties on her feels cruel, somehow -- and you have to think that Ji-hyeon had second thoughts about destroying the one thing that gave her beloved sister health and strength again, even if it was evil -- and, well, when's the last time a horror movie made you feel for its characters?

There's a shot in The Wig of the titular hairpiece hung up above a cardigan on a coathanger that looks creepily like the ghost in every other movie in this genre. It feels almost knowing, that shot, almost like it's winking at the audience. Ultimately, where The Wig falls down is when it tries to fit into that soggy dead girl convention. It's better than most of the films in that genre, undeniably, but it's also not quite a brilliant film simply because it really is difficult to take seriously a bunch of evil CGI hair flying about. Shame, really.

IMDB link

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Pathology (2008)

2008-04-20T04:21:00.000-07:00

Remember when gore in a horror movie actually made you feel something? Sick, disgusted, scared, revolted -- anything, at all, besides amused or vaguely bored? Recent "extreme" films like the Saw franchise, Frontiere(s), Hostel Part II, et al, seem to have turned gore into a spectator sport, where the audience is complicit in the torture and grue, baying for blood, enjoying it rather than dreading it. Pathology, on the other hand, is gory in a completely different way. It's disgusting. There's no way to glory in Pathology's rotting corpses; it's just really, really gross. Which, oddly enough, is probably the strength of the movie.

The film's rather high concept premise is that a group of talented medical students, bored and sickened by a general public they percieve as beneath them, devise a twisted game. Each of them takes a turn at murdering someone, and then when the corpse reaches the pathology labs it's up to the other players to figure out how -- with the result that each person playing the game must come up with a more ingenius, less detectable way to off someone. New boy Ted (played by Milo Ventimiglia, presumably in an attempt to make him slightly likeable) gets drawn into the game, seduced by both the intellectual challenge and by Juliette, one of the other pathologists. Soon, things are spiralling out his control, with one member of the group enjoying playing God a little too much. When Ted's unknowing fiancée gets a little too close to the action, the rules are thrown out of the window, and complete and utter chaos reigns. Almost every type of depravity imaginable is thrown at the screen, often all in the same scene. It's a breathless, pacy film that doesn't let up for a second -- which, given that it was written by the same guys behind Crank, perhaps isn't particularly surprising.

This isn't a criticism I'd level at many films, but at just 93 minutes, Pathology is rather too short. There's not enough character development: Catherine and Chip, two of the less essential med students, get almost entirely forgotten about, and there's nowhere near enough closure for Juliette, who's one of the more interesting characters in the film. Oddly, the subplot with Ted's fiancée is almost completely pointless, and it's one of the major let-downs of the film that it's so obvious from the outset what's going to happen between them. The rest of the film is much more inventive than that, and the last act sags slightly because in spite of the ostensive urgency of the situation, everything ends up precisely the way we all already knew it would; it's something we've all seen far too many times before. There's not quite enough development of any relationship in the film; Pathology relies a little too heavily on cinematic shorthand and casting choices to carry much of the characterisation.

At the same time, that cinematic shorthand does its job, so that nothing feels like its come too far out of left field, but it would have been nice to see some nuance - and let's face it, you're not going to get that out of Milo Ventimiglia's performance. The cinematography, too, is often a little amateurish (particularly in the first scene where Ted gets drunk - oh, dear) and the editing is choppy, so that as soon as a character has finished his or her lines, he or she will be swiftly cut off and the next scene will start. That suggests to me that maybe the film was originally longer and has been cut for time, as there's so much left out that should have been included; mere speculation, of course, but I wonder if another cut exists that fills in some of the blanks?

If not, it might just be that the extreme gore in the film is expected to be enough to bring in an audience. And judging by the number of "Extreme Editions" of horror movies cluttering supermarket shelves right now, that supposition might be correct. The bloodshed in Pathology is much, much nastier than anything else in recent memory -- probably because all the butchery is carried out on corpses, rather than living people, so it can afford to be rather more graphic in its depictions of dismemberment. What really makes Pathology so shocking, though, is the lack of respect for humanity demonstrated by its principal characters; there's a scene in which one of the students smashes a trolley into a wall, sending a corpse tumbling to the floor, and reacts with just an "oops." The idea that medical students -- who are training to be doctors, to whom we all regularly entrust our health and wellbeing -- could be such utter sociopaths is chilling.

Although it's nowhere near so eloquent, Pathology evokes Donna Tartt's The Secret History. As in the novel, Pathology's students get carried away by their perception of their own brilliance, imagining themselves as existing beyond the laws of regular society, with disastrous consequences. By the end of the film, it's impossible to like anyone; they've all revealed themselves to be total sociopaths. On the other hand, isn't this what horror movies are supposed to be like? Wise-cracking killers and daft teenagers are tired clichés now -- the genre desperately needs something new and original, preferably something scary, and gross, and that makes you want to hide your eyes behind your hands (though you'll still peek through the gaps between your fingers, because despite everything you still can't stand to miss a moment of it). Pathology is by no means perfect, and I'm not sure I've got the stomach to sit through it again any time soon, but if an extended cut were to surface, I think my curiosity would, ultimately, get the better of me. And since I can't think of many films I actually want to see more of, in the end, I think I've got to consider that a resounding success.

IMDB link

Frontière(s) (2007)

2008-03-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

If you believe the hype, Frontière(s) is one of the most brutal, gory, and savage films you'll see all year. If you believe the hype, this is the movie that pushes torture porn to its logical conclusion, breaking all previous boundaries and, quite possibly, your mind along with it. If you believe the hype, you'll need a cushion to hide behind when you watch this movie - and then you'll need to take that cushion with you to see a psychiatrist.

But you shouldn't believe the hype. You should believe me when I say that Frontière(s) is nothing more than a waste of everyone's time.

The movie opens with roughly cut footage of French riots, establishing a backdrop of political unrest and fascism. You might as well go grab a cup of tea while this is on, though, because it has no bearing on the rest of the movie, which soon cuts to the actual story: a group of criminals/political rebels on the run head out to the middle of nowhere and hole up in a shabby little motel, where they intend to regroup and figure out where to go next. The general consensus is that they should go to Amsterdam, but since this is a horror movie, we already know they're not going to get there. The first clue that something's amiss at the motel (or is it - dun dun dun! - a hostel?) is that as soon as the first two rebels check in, the girls at the counter start hitting on them, pushing them into a half-hearted orgy. When mystery meat and a half-dead old woman show up at the dinner table, it's obvious, even to the braindead protagonists, that something is very, very wrong here.

And then it's just a case of going through the motions. You know the score: a group of young people roll up to a deserted location only to discover that the locals are inbred freaks intent on butchering them, one by one, till at last only one girl is left to avenge everyone else by becoming improbably invincible. Yawn.

The list of movies that Frontière(s) rips off is almost endless; it'd be impossible to count every movie that's already made better use of all the tropes rammed in here, but just off the top of my head: Hostel, Saw, Saw III, The Descent, Hannibal, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, Wolf Creek, Switchblade Romance, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, The Hills Have Eyes remake... I could go on, but that's enough to be going on with for now. Basically, if you've seen any of those movies, you've seen this; all Frontière(s) adds to the mix is about two minutes in which the bad guys pretend to have some kind of Neo-Nazi sympathies before reverting back to their "evil hillbilly" archetypes. Everything from the sped-up film to the stylised rain storm to the freezer full of bodies to the awkward dinner table scene to the various formulaic gore scenes - all of it has been done before, and much more effectively. When the final girl manages to run out to a road and flag down a car, you'll have to be careful that your eyes don't roll out of your head when it turns out her "rescuer" is yet another member of the lunatic family, and that he's about to drive her right back to where she started...

It's exhausting to think that someone bothered to make this movie. Xavier Gens might as well have just chopped up the films he's liberally plagiarising and edited them together for all the originality he brings to the endeavour. There's literally nothing new here; no creativity whatsoever. The marketing is really pushing the idea that the torture is really extreme and explicit in this movie, but honestly? It isn't. It really, really isn't; there's nothing here that you couldn't see in any of the Saw or Hostel movies. Where this differs from a film like, say, Hostel, or even the dreadful Wolf Creek, is that those movies understood that a horror movie needs to establish its characters before it starts killing them off. Hostel spent the first 45 minutes or so of its runtime just hanging out with the characters, letting its audience get to know them, before anything bad happened. Frontière(s) does away with all those niceties and assumes its viewers just want to get down to the nitty gritty - but then it doesn't even have anything new or innovative to offer in terms of gore. We've seen people suspended on meathooks before; we've seen people getting their Achilles tendons cut before; and we've seen people's heads exploding before.

Frontière(s) is essentially a greatest hits compilation of the crap horror films of the last three or four years. If you missed every single one of them, you might be shocked by this. If you caught even half of any of them in a drunken stupor, you'll find yourself plagued by déjà vu throughout this. And if, like me, you sat through most of that previous dross, eternally optimistic that the genre might pull its finger out and produce a halfway worthwhile movie, you'll just want to kick Gens in the shins for unleashing this on the world.

IMDB link

7 shots horror filmmakers should never be allowed to use again

2008-03-26T06:06:00.000-07:00

Horror is a difficult genre to love; even I'm finding that it's a struggle lately. It's generally reviled - even now, horror movies that are good enough get called "psychological thrillers" instead - and seen as a quick, cheap and easy way for filmmakers to get their foot in the door. It's rammed with cliches, and still revels in sexist and racist attitudes that should have died out several decades ago (except now they're "ironic", as if that makes anything any better). This is a list of shots, or scenes, that drive me completely insane every time I see them - if they could somehow be banned, that'd be great:

The silhouette against the basement door

You know the one - someone opens the door to the creepy basement, and suddenly we're looking up at them, silhouetted against the light, from the bottom of the basement stairs. It's supposed to imply that there's something nasty lurking in the basement, and that the unsuspecting protagonist/sidekick/completely expendable token minority character is about to get attacked. What it actually implies is that the filmmaker in question read too many Stephen King novels as a child and hasn't got an original thought in his or her head.

The spiral staircase

A character stands at the bottom of the staircase - the camera moves to the top, and looks down at them, using the spirals of the multiple flights of stairs to frame them. I've got no idea what they think this one does, apart from make the viewer think "wow, that's a lot of stairs, I bet I'd be out of breath by the time I got to the top", but it turns up in pretty much any horror film not set in a bungalow or a wood cabin.

A mystery shape flits past the camera

Oooh, spooky! Something just moved past the camera! But it was dark, so we couldn't see what it was! Neither could the characters! But there's totally something out there! Depending on the run time, it's either the murderer or a random teenager showing up late/playing a trick on his/her friends, but no matter what point in the film this happens at, it always totally sucks. Find a new way to imply that there's something lurking outside, guys. This one is played out

The spin-around scare

Someone facing the wall will always be dead, mutilated, or the killer in disguise. To the point where, now, if I walk into a room and find the person I'm looking for unresponsive and turned away from me, I'll just leave the room. This is so, so cliche that it hurts. The point of scares like this is to build suspense, but when you've seen the shot in question a million times already, it just becomes boring. Yes, that person will probably have their eyes gouged out. Yawn!

Hand grabbing a tree

Can every axe-murderer out there really be that incapable of running through the woods without having to grab onto a tree for support? Maybe the axe throws off their balance.

Driving scenes with unseen dialogue played over the top

Look. Conversations between characters where useful information is exchanged are worth watching. Someone driving a car in silence is not worth watching. If a conversation goes along the lines of "You need to go to X place on X street" and then the next scene is supposed to be in X place, it's a safe bet that your audience is smart enough to realise that the character travelled there somehow. We don't need to SEE them driving. We do need to see the conversation. Smushing the two things together is senseless. Please stop.

Fucking around with the exposure of the film

Okay, I admit that I don't know exactly, technically, how this is achieved, but I know what it looks like and I know I don't like it. A lot of bad horror films tend to lapse into this weirdly grainy or hyper-sharp look that's usually accompanied by manically shaking the camera in order to try and amp up the drama of the scene. (Lost does this a lot, too.) What it actually does - and you can file this along with splashing blood or water onto the camera lens, too - is shake the viewer out of the film by making them notice that you're fucking around with the film stock. No-one's eyes see like that. It's not clever, and it's not impressive, and you can just stop it now and film properly, okay?

I'm sure I've missed some, but if I never have to see any of these tired, old, seen-it-a-million-times-before camera angles ever again, that'll be quite soon enough, thank you.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Other movie-related stuff you really should check out at Den of Geek (I'm an editor there, don't you know!): 30 upcoming sequels you didn't know about; 38 remakes you didn't know about; 23 TV shows heading to the big screen; Halloween: 30 years of terror.

Black Sheep: Jonathan King interview

2008-03-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

Jonathan King's Black Sheep was the opening film at the Film4 FrightFest last year, and it was, in a word, fan-fucking-tastic. Funny and scary in just the right amounts, it was clever and fast-paced and silly and probably one of the best cinema experiences I've ever had. If you didn't see it on its (limited) cinema run, you missed out. But it'll be out on DVD soon, so don't worry too much. In the meantime, you can read this - I got my fangirl on talking to Mr King about the movie...

SD: The obvious question - why sheep? Did you have a bad experience with a sheep at any point in your life? D'you think there are any other farmyard animals who are ripe for a horror movie makeover?

JK: Why sheep? Because that's always been pretty much New Zealand's only claim to fame (besides the All Blacks and Lord of the Rings -- and there's already a film of the latter and I certainly wasn't going to make a film about the former!). Wherever you go in the world as a New Zealander people ask you about one of those three things. The day my subconscious put together sheep and the splatter and horror movies I grew up on I smiled, and knew that it was a combination that would work.

SD: People have compared Black Sheep to early Peter Jackson movies; how do you feel about that comparison?

JK: Well, it's fine by me! I liked Bad Taste and Braindead very much when I saw them. I was equally influenced by things like The Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead and American Werewolf in London ... but I'm inspired by filmmakers like Peter Jackson (and Sam Raimi) who were able to start with fun horrors movies and keep widening the envelope of what they're doing to include some fantastic (and very successful) films.

SD: The special effects in Black Sheep by Weta Workshops are fantastic - do you prefer that kind of style to CGI gore?

JK: For this kind of film, I certainly do. I would by lying if I said budget wasn't a factor in the approach we chose, but having gone the practical route, I do think it's best for the film. Pretty much everything you see in Black Sheep is something that happened in front of the camera rather than on a computer. We had the advantage of digital technology to remove rods, combine elements together or enhance the odd moment -- but I think audiences have responded to an old-fashioned approach to our creatures and gore. Even if you know it's not real, you know it was something we made and really filmed ...

SD: Black Sheep mocks various people fairly equally - from the evil scientist types to the rabid animal-welfare guys - what's your actual feeling on genetic modification etc?

JK: Well, I think kinda where the film ends up sitting on the debate would be something like my own views ... but the film is primarily entertainment, rather than a enviro-political statement. Like you say, the film is pretty even-handed in finding humour in all sides of the debate: I find extremists of all colours funny.

SD: There are some very heated debates going on in the IMDB message boards for the film - do you follow online reviews/forums at all? Isn't it tempting to wade in?

JK: I think anyone who posts to a message board probably has extreme opinions anyway ... and it's a lot easier to say you hate something and that anyone who disagrees with you is a moron than it is to say something real. For everyone of those, someone rebuts it ... and round and round it goes. I don't think I'd be adding anything to join in. Listening to audiences in a dozen different countries laugh, scream and cheer at the film as been a much more direct and real connection with the public for me.

SD: A lot of critics didn't seem to get Black Sheep for one reason or another - d'you think there's some genre snobbery going on there?

JK: Well, I'm amazed how many did get it in exactly the spirit it's intended -- having esteemed journals like The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Salon and Time Out all seeming to enjoy it tremendously was beyond my hopes and expectations for the film. I think if there is genre snobbery, it's from hardcore horror audiences who may not have found it mean or stoopid enough for today's tastes. People who aren't sure if it's their cup of tea or not often seem to come out enjoying it more!

SD: You're obviously a fan of American Werewolf in London; are you a horror fan in general? Will you be making more horror films (or films with horror elements; Black Sheep obviously wasn't a straight horror film) in future? What's your next project going to be?

JK: Yeah, I do love horror films ... but I'm not a fan of the recent spate of torture porn. I would love to make a scarier film than Black Sheep one day; I'd love to make something as eerie and elegant as I Walked With A Zombie, as atmospheric as (the original) The Haunting or as visceral as The Thing. My next film is a scary and dark fantasy adventure called Under the Mountain -- based on a book, it's influenced equally by things like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Amblin films of the 80s like ET and Poltergeist.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Diary of the Dead (2007)

2008-02-21T05:17:00.000-08:00

George Romero is responsible for the three seminal zombie movies. His "holy trilogy", Night, Dawn, and Day, have yet to be matched, despite the hundreds and hundreds of zombie movies that have been made in the intervening decades. What made them so great was partly the biting social commentary contained within - and partly the fact that they were just damn good horror movies.

In 2005, the fourth entry in the series was, well, something of a disappointment. It's not that Land of the Dead is a spectacularly bad film - I've seen far worse - but it certainly wasn't very good, especially not by Romero's standards.

Which brings us to Diary of the Dead.

Diary of the Dead is a crushingly bad movie. It fails on every single count you can think of. Obviously, it has a hell of a lot to live up to, and it's fair to say that it would be almost impossible for any film to meet the expectations of the generations of horror fans who've grown up with Romero's past works, but even taking that out of account, it's difficult to find any merit in this movie. Last year, I reviewed an independent British movie entitled The Zombie Diaries and criticised it on various fronts; yet nearly every criticism I levelled at that movie can also be directed at Diary of the Dead, and George A. Romero is hardly a first time director working on a shoestring budget. Diary of the Dead's handheld camera conceit also suffers from unfortunate comparisons to Cloverfield - but, again, even taking that out of account, Diary of the Dead is still rubbish. It's just that with Cloverfield providing a shining example of how to use the found footage conceit, Diary of the Dead's hamfisted attempts look even more amateurish.

The film starts with an explanation: a voice over explains that the film we're about to watch has been edited together from footage captured during the first days of a zombie virus outbreak, including footage downloaded from various Internet sources. One of the survivors, Debra, drones on about how she's adding voiceover and music in order to make it more scary. Then her edit, entitled The Death of Death, starts. The basic premise is that a group of filmmakers were out in the woods making a terrible horror movie about a zombie when the outbreak started. For whatever reason, the crew decides to stick together, setting off in a Winnebago on a mission to get "home". There's a lot of discussion about whether or not the news reports they're hearing about the dead getting up to attack the living is true or not, and a lot of discussion about why Jason is so insistent on continuing to film everything that's happening.

Obviously, in order for there to be a film for us to watch, he has to keep filming. And, I don't want to keep harping on this comparison, but in Cloverfield, the motivation to keep filming made sense; and yes, YouTube and MySpace are indeed full of random people's videos of random stuff happening, from videos documenting their everyday life and anxieties to survivors' eye views of huge and significant events. Actually, The Blair Witch Project made a pretty decent case for continuing to film even when you have every reason to believe your life is in great danger - it's a compulsion, a way to separate yourself from the atrocities happening to you, and a way to make sense of events. Or, as a last resort, a way to let someone else know what you were going through. It's not that much of a stretch for a movie to get away with, but Diary of the Dead really strains to make the point. And while Cloverfield often cut away, or switched the camera off during moments of extreme stress, Diary of the Dead's Jason never does. There's one absolutely ludicrous moment early on when the cast find themselves in an abandoned hospital, and the camera's battery is running low. Jason finds a plug, plugs it in to charge up, and then, while everyone else tries to find a doctor, or a survivor of any kind in the hospital, he stands and delivers a little monologue about how useless he is, how much he can't help, because he's plugged in.

Because putting the camera down is clearly not an option.

Debra finds another camera in the hospital, which is handy because it means the film can now use both viewpoints to give us those closeups and reaction shots we'd otherwise miss using only one camera (and which Cloverfield did quite well without); later, security camera footage will be stolen in order to provide wide shots of rooms before any cast members wander into them. Using all these different angles, as well as the voiceover and music, completely destroys the illusion of reality the film is so desperately trying to get us to buy into. It also makes it difficult to understand why Romero bothered to use the technique at all, since he clearly hasn't gone into it wholeheartedly. In the end, it just looks like any other horror film - everything is professionally lit, for example - but with a shaky camera. Nothing is gained from the supposed first person perspective, because it's not used properly. The person behind the camera disappears - usually, I suspect, because the footage is being shot by a cameraperson rather than by the actors. Often, it's difficult to remember who's holding the camera, or even that there's supposed to be a character there at all. There's a chase scene near the end of the movie in which Jason films Tracy running away from a zombie; instead of helping her, he just keeps filming. Often, he's closer to the zombie than she is, yet the zombie never turns to attack him. The immediacy and impact that having someone actually in the situation filming events can have is utterly lost to the void.

Nothing about any part of the film feels real, though. The characters are too two-dimensional; you never form any kind of emotional connection with them. The self-conscious dialogue ("dead things don't run!") only makes it worse; it feels like they're reading from a script. The professor character is bizarre; he just doesn't hold together as a character at all. The special effects - never a particular strong point of Romero's zombie movies - are appalling. Everything seems to be done with CGI, and one sequence in which a zombie is attacked with hydrochloric acid is just painfully fake-looking. There's always been humour in Romero's movies, but here it's jarring and nonsensical. Scenes that would be funny in another film either fall flat, or are funny, but not in the way they should be; they just serve to remind you that you're watching a scripted movie being filmed by professionals, rather than absorbing you into the illusion of a real experience.

It's difficult to know what this film was supposed to be. On the one hand, being awkwardly postmodern, it's possible that the dreadfully heavy-handed editing and awful voiceover are intentionally bad, because this is supposed to be a film made by students. But the image quality is too good for that; the lighting's too good. Plus there's a sequence in which there seem to be altogether too many cameras and not enough characters to hold them, so it's difficult to write off any other mistakes as intentional since a lot of the production feels careless. The satire and social commentary present in Romero's other films isn't absent here, it's just far too muddled to be effective. One minute he's presenting the mainstream media as deceitful and corrupt (probably true); the next he's pointing out that because the Internet gives everyone a voice, it's difficult to tune out the dross and find the truth, which is also true, but the two points don't sit comfortably together. There are other digs at the military and the government and pretty much everyone and everything else, but the lack of focus means that none of Romero's undoubtedly valid points actually sticks. He just seems to be lashing out, but without much idea quite what he's lashing out at. The scene in which Jason uploads his footage onto MySpace is almost embarrassing; footage on MySpace and YouTube just doesn't look the way Diary of the Dead thinks it does.

It's depressing, but this movie is a complete abomination. It's a terrible last entry into the Dead franchise, but I honestly couldn't face watching another one.

IMDB link

Shutter (2004)

2008-02-21T05:10:00.000-08:00

After a party with his friends, a young photographer and his girlfriend are involved in an accident. Their car hits a girl standing in the middle of the road and, panicked, they drive home, leaving her for dead. But the next time he gets some photographs developed, there’s something weird in them – a swirling white light hovering in most of the photos, occasionally obscuring faces or forming ominous nooses around their necks. One by one, the people who were at the party that night start dying, apparently killing themselves, until the main couple are the only ones left. Menaced by a ghostly woman with long black hair who crawls all over the place, including on the ceiling, the couple try to piece together the last days of the dead girl’s life in order to put her to rest, and save themselves.

I’m going to save that paragraph to my hard drive, ready to bring it out and copy and paste it into a review of the next time I put myself through one of these tedious Ring-clones. See, I didn’t put any character names in, or even any nationalities, so it’s ready to serve as a plot summary whether I’m reviewing one of the American remakes, or the newest soggy dead girl movie out of Japan, Korea, or Mexico. Shutter is actually a Thai film, but you’d never know; it’s virtually identical to Ring or Ju-on. The ghost looks identical; the plot is identical; and the death-in-the-photo device is old, old, old. It’s even been overused in movies without the ghosts of wronged women in them (The Omen and Final Destination 3, off the top of my head) so it’s got to be about time to retire this particular trope.

There really is nothing new here at all. Shutter boasts a sequence in a darkroom that’s been replicated in The Grudge 2, which is either because someone working on that movie saw Shutter, or because there are only so many places in everyday life where a soggy dead girl could realistically manifest before things start getting silly (argh! Drinks machine! Contact lens solution! PUDDLES!). There’s another moment that could have been cut and pasted straight out of Kairo, or Suicide Club, or The Grudge. Actually, there’s a sequence in the movie that has actually been depicted in stone on the outside of Bath cathedral a couple of hundred years ago, that’s how stale it is. The kept-for-last revelation that not only did the protagonist kill the ghost, but also dated her, humiliated her, and let his friends rape her when she was alive, is just overkill – the rape-revenge device is even older than all the other conventions Shutter trots out.

It’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like working on this movie: making films is a long and arduous business, so how can you justify to yourself working that hard to make something so painfully derivative? The only possible driving force must be money; any sane person would think that the soggy dead girl trend has been going on for so long that surely, surely the well must be dry by now, but the film release schedule for 2008 paints a different picture. Remakes of The Eye, A Tale of Two Sisters, and One Missed Call jostle for position, along with a remake of, you guessed it, Shutter itself.

Thing is, I’ve actually got a lot more patience for this particular type of horror than most, so when even I don’t find a crawling, creaking, messy-haired ghost scary any more, how can this many movies find a market for themselves? It’s been six years since The Ring, people. Let’s let that poor dead girl dry herself off and rest in peace now, yeah?

IMDB link

Hack! (2007)

2008-02-21T05:06:00.000-08:00

It’s not a criticism that will often be levelled at films in general, but Hack! is a movie that needed to show its hand earlier. The first two-thirds of the film comes off as heavy handed, self-conscious, and completely lacking in style and intelligence. The final third, though, lets everything become openly farcical, and some of the humour starts to actually hit the mark. Horror comedies are hard things to pitch, and the horror in this movie doesn’t work, at all. The comedy is hit and miss, which does at least mean there are a few hits. Those few make it hard for me to really lay into Hack!; it’s a screenplay desperately in need of an editor that nonetheless manages to have a couple of great moments.

The story isn’t what you’d call original: a group of students head off to an island for the weekend and end up getting massacred. There’s some nonsense reason to get them there – they all seem to be film students, or at least film buffs, but apparently they’re on a biology field trip – which is soon abandoned in favour of doing what teenagers left alone always do in movies: drink, drugs, and casual sex. And getting killed.

Things start to get slightly more interesting when the killing starts, though, because it soon becomes apparent that the killer is deliberately recreating iconic moments from horror films through the ages. The movie scene recreations are about as faithful as those rubbish karaoke CDs you find in supermarket bargain bins; there’s some enough resemblance to the original to be recognisable, but the cover version is so laughably poor you’d never mistake it for something proper. They get more and more outlandish as time goes on (the samurai one is ridiculous, while the recreation of a scene from Ring sails right past ridiculous and somehow ends up at sublime) to the point where they’re spoofs rather than homages, and that’s when Hack! really shines. But that really would have worked a lot better if the characters and dialogue hadn’t been so dire from the beginning, or if it’d been made clear earlier on that things were about to get wacky. As it is, there’s a massive tonal shift partway through that’s jarring and, considering how annoying everything else in the movie is up until that point, not particularly welcome.

There are other flaws in Hack!. There’s a point where the sound goes screwy and everyone sounds like a Dalek, which is obviously down to some technical problem, but, um, shouldn’t that have been fixed prior to the film’s release? The lighting is pretty terrible throughout, and the acting is pretty abysmal – it’s great to see Juliet Landau in a non-Buffy the Vampire Slayer role, but she soon slips into Drusilla-isms, and even ends up in a Drusilla-style costume at one point, which is unfortunate. But those things probably could have been forgiven were it not for the dire script. And it is dire. The dialogue is painful, the characterisation non-existent, and it’s often unclear what’s going on or what’s supposed to be going on. There’s one well executed in-joke early on (“We’re going to need a bigger boat”) but that’s it, and it really stands out because it’s the only line that works. Everything else is hamfisted and feels scripted; someone really needed to read over it and turn it into words that people might actually say.

Another major annoyance is the fact that everyone is named after one horror icon or another. At some unspecified point in time, young filmmakers seem to have got it into their heads that character names should all be significant, and preferably contain references, and subtlety apparently doesn’t enter into the equation. Thus Hack! contains a Mr Argento, a Mr Bates, a Sheriff Stoker, a Mr Carpenter, and Mr and Mrs King, the latter of whom is actually named Mary Shelley King. That would be a painful set of names in any horror movie, but in one where the whole conceit is about copying horror movies, and in which the characters are supposed to be horror movie buffs, it’s just stupid. Even more so because “Mary Shelley” is commented upon, yet all the others aren’t referred to. Every time one of the kids says “Mr Argento” I just wanted to scream. It’s just so irritating.

On the whole, this movie is a waste of time. And yet something makes me want to not write off the writer/director as a complete failure; he might yet make a decent movie. He just desperately needs to get someone else involved at the writing stage, because this? Was bilge.

IMDB link

Ghost Game (2006)

2008-02-21T05:04:00.000-08:00

Imagine a version of Big Brother in which contestants stayed in a German concentration camp, and deliberately disrespected the dead - by wearing their uniforms, sleeping in their beds, goading their ghosts to come back from the dead, and smashing up their bones. Kind of repellant, isn't it? Some of Big Brother's recent tasks have verged on the torturous - the one where contestants had to lie in a swimming pool filled with dead fish on a hot day, and then were denied access to the bathroom, springs to mind - but you can't imagine any real reality TV show locking people up in a prison and forcing them to confront the remains of the people who died there. That's sort of the premise of Ghost Game, though: eleven contestants are locked inside a war museum that used to be a Khmer Rouge prison where some 17,000 people were tortured and killed, then forced to play games that will supposedly invoke the wrath of the dead. The idea is to push people to the limits of their sanity by forcing them to confront extreme fear - the last one standing wins an exorbitant amount of money, and the viewing public gets to watch people going slowly insane. Nice.

If anyone actually tried to make anything like this, I suspect OFCOM would be shutting down the production within about 5 minutes. But perhaps that's why Ghost Game has apparently been banned in Cambodia.

There are two aspects to the film, really: one is the reality TV show schtick, with all the insanely bad taste shenanigans that go with it, and the other is a ghost story. The first part might be intended to be a sort of parody or indictment of the kind of reality TV show that does actually get produced; the second is just woefully generic. I imagine that something has been lost in translation, though; I don't quite feel like I have the relevant cultural framework to slot this movie into. Obviously, watching foreign movies is always a bit like that - some of the nuance will always be lost, and some of the cultural resonance will always be missing. Ghost Game seems rather more baffling than most, though.

Part of the problem might be that there are eleven contestants, so it's reminiscent of the first couple of weeks of Big Brother in which there are just far too many people to remember, and you just have to wait it out till some of them have been voted out so that only a manageable number remain. Part of it was that I couldn't figure out whether the contestants in the game really believed in ghosts or not - on entering the prison at the beginning, contestants are asked to remove any protective amulets they might be wearing in order to fully expose themselves to spirits, which would suggest yes, but on the other hand, surely no-one would be daft enough to sign up to this kind of mental torture if they really believed ghosts might come to get them? Part of it, too, was that the concept of the reality game was a little too far fetched - Battle Royale seems realistic by comparison, because while it's just about possible to accept that people might happily watch a group of kids killing one another, it's not so easy to swallow a viewing audience watching genocide victims being disrespected. Quite apart from questioning the motives of the filmmakers, it's hard to suspend disbelief that, in the film, some censor wouldn't show up to halt production.

And the other part was that I couldn't stop running down a mental list of where I'd seen everything before. The film's quite long, for what it is (100 minutes) and nothing really happens until the final 20 minutes: just a lot of white-faced ghosts showing up to go "boo!" It's a lot like The Grudge, really - lots of spooky imagery not really tied together properly or justified by anything. And yet it's still sort of scary, if you're the sort of person who's spooked by soggy dead girl ghosts (and I am). The first ghost shows up 14 minutes in, and from then on they just don't stop, sometimes showing up in their dozens. Bizarrely, the more ghosts there are, the less scary they become; I'm not sure why, but I'm reminded of a scene in a Korean film called R-Point, where a group of soldiers end up stranded at a cursed base. There's one part where someone does a head count and discovers there's one more person than there should be - they've been walking around with a ghost in tow! The ghost doesn't look scary - he just looks like one of the men - and there's only one of him, but that moment is absolutely terrifying. Yet show me ten or so ghost soldiers sitting on a man and holding him down, and somehow, I'm not scared.

Mostly, I just feel a bit battered now. Ghost Game doesn't really let up: you see ghosts right from the beginning, and you keep seeing them all the way through; no-one dies and nothing gets violent until the final 20 minutes, by which time I was counting the seconds off till the credits rolled. There are actually some really nasty, gory death scenes in those last few minutes, but the pacing is so bizarre it just threw me off balance. For most of the film, there are scares which aren't exactly fake-outs, because ghosts show up, but no-one dies until the final scenes, so the ghosts just feel sort of impotent. Some really standard, seen-it-a-thousand-times shots show up (the shadow that flits in front of the camera suddenly, ghosts hiding around every corner - and even under the table, a la The Grudge, again), and the bog standard spooky ooky music played almost constantly. But there's no time to relax, no time to process anything, no chance to get to know any of the characters; it's as if there wasn't a sturdy enough framework to hang all the scares on. Reality TV would make a great subject for a really terrifying story, and yet despite many attempts - My Little Eye, Ben Elton's Dead Famous - no-one has quite, yet, pulled it off. Ghost Game doesn't manage it either, but if you'll settle for an unrelenting stream of Ring-wannabe ghosts, you might be happy with this.

IMDB link

Originally published at Den of Geek.

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane (2007)

2008-02-09T02:11:00.000-08:00

All the boys love Mandy Lane. Well, why wouldn't they? She's a high school student of the impossibly gorgeous type you only find in movies: slim, wholesomely pretty, with long, artfully tousled blonde hair, she's also alluringly innocent. At parties, she doesn't drink or do drugs; she's unwilling to flaunt herself in a bikini, preferring to stay covered up; oh, and she's a virgin. She's perfect yet unattainable - just the combination to send hormonal teenage boys into a right old tizzy. But loving Mandy comes at a price: one particularly insistent suitor has already turned himself into a corpse trying to impress her. When Mandy's new friends invite her to a sleepover party at a secluded ranch, you just know their life expectancy has just plummeted spectacularly; this is a teen horror movie, after all.

Well, sort of. All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is a strange movie in a lot of ways. It's a lot cleverer than most of its contemporaries in a lot of ways, except when it isn't, and the eventual stupidity seems more glaring because the film started off so strongly. The first scene is absolutely brilliant: perfectly put together, establishing its characters well, particularly Mandy's chillingly cruel best friend, and that first death brought my heart into my mouth. That kind of dread in a teen horror movie is hard to come by in an age where audiences routinely clap and cheer at the gory deaths of onscreen teenagers, and that it came so early in the movie suggested that this was a film made by a man who knew what he was doing. And for the most part, he does.

The film's main characters fit neatly into your standard teen stereotypes, but they're all fairly well drawn nonetheless. The only one who's difficult to fathom is Mandy; we're never allowed into her mind, never allowed to know what she's thinking. She's as unattainable to us as she is to the boys trying to get into her pants, and the film does a good job of drawing us into the high school politics. (Though the opening shot which focuses on Mandy's breasts is a little hamfisted, really.)

Other good things about this movie include its intelligence (with some caveats, but I'll come to those later); the dialogue is good, the set ups believeable, and there are plenty of knowing nods to horror movie conventions. Rather than flaunting them in a desperately post-modern kind of a way, these nods are mostly unobtrusive; just brief acknowledgements of the conventions before Mandy Lane neatly overturns them. The film's visual style - sort of deliberately unpolished, slightly aged - is nice; it's not too glossy, not too show-offy, but not cheap either. The director clearly has an eye for composition, setting up plenty of shots that just beg to be screencapped. Everything seems to be going really, really well - there's a compelling story, there are believeable characters, and there's some really inventive gore - and then you hit the ending. And it all sort of falls apart.

The twist is, admittedly, pretty obvious from quite early on. There's no mystery to who's committing the murders (and I'll have to tread carefully here if I don't want to give too much away) but the final scenes just don't really make sense. The groundwork has been laid, but there's something missing; something that just doesn't work. It's baffling, because the rest of the film is so careful, so measured, but ultimately there's a pretty big piece missing from this puzzle. Which is frustrating, because Mandy Lane could have been brilliant. There's an ending available that could have worked much better, and been far more powerful, but instead things just get ... well, ridiculous. The final showdown is so stupid it hurts, and I just wanted to excise it from the film entirely. It's like a scene from another, far more stupid film accidentally got slipped into the last reel, and if only I could unsee it, I could endorse All The Boys Love Mandy Lane more fully. As it is, it'll have to be filed in the "promising failures" box. Shame.

IMDB link

Originally published at Den of Geek.

8 things about Cloverfield

2008-02-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

Cloverfield finally opens in the UK tonight. Hurrah! If I had my way, everyone I know, and everyone I've ever met in my entire life, would go and see it, and love it as much as I do. I'm definitely going to go and see it again while it's on its theatrical run here; probably more than once. I'm just that obsessive.

Anyway, to mark the occasion, I'm going to sum up some of the more interesting things director Matt Reeves said at the Cloverfield press conference last week:

# Those echoes of 9/11 are intentional

"It's a horror movie of its time in the way that Godzilla was a reaction to the anxieties of that time - post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki. We felt that, in doing a monster movie for our country and our time, it would definitely be reflective of the anxieties we all feel since 9/11 and so that was definitely something we were aware of from the beginning. Although, at the end of the day, we were aware that what we were making was a fantasy. I think that all really interesting genre films tend to reflect the anxieties of the time in which they were made – horror films and sci-fi films reflect our deep-seated fears and are often very reflective of the time in which they were made."

# Cloverfield was the first movie to put out a trailer without a title on it.

"We went to the MPAA, who are the people who rate trailers and determine whether or not it's suitable for an audience, and we said "We want to talk to you about not putting a title on. What are your regulations regarding that?" And they said "Regulations? No-one's ever done a teaser trailer or trailer without a title." They're advertising. It's like putting out a commercial without actually what the thing is."

# It's really more about the characters than the monster.

"The idea was to take something completely outrageous, something that was enormous, but do it from a very intimate point of view, and a very naturalistic point of view. Even though it was a visual effects movie and it had a 350ft tall monster that was going to destroy New York, it was also going to be from the point of view of one of the people who would be running down the street in a Godzilla movie. I mean, in a Godzilla movie, all those screaming people, one of those people would have a Handicam and they'd make this movie. This isn't about the president who puts in the call to the military and says "We're going to take this strike and take out the monster"; it's about people and the experience of it."

# But the monster's fun too. And there are lots of elements of its design that you won't even see in the movie.

"The monster was designed by a man named Neville Page who's a creature designer. He's just amazing. There are actually things that he designed that are part of the monster that we never got to use. He had these feeding tubes which were just wild - he would come up with these crazy ideas that were just amazing and very creepy. Within the course of the movie, we could only reveal certain aspects of it, so that never got released."

# And another thing about the 350ft monster that destroyed New York - it's only a baby...

"The secret that we had was that the monster was a baby. Having just been born it was going through separation anxiety and had no idea where its mother was and was freaking out and was in a completely foreign place, didn't understand a thing and that that would be sending it into a kind of infantile rage."

# ... but it's more frightened of you than you are of it.

"The thing that was also frightening to me was the idea that not only was it going through an infantile rage but, because it was suffering from this separation anxiety, it was spooked. It was really afraid. And as the military started shooting at it, I started thinking, like if you were attacked by a swarm of bees for the first time, it wouldn't necessarily kill you but you'd be terrified, you'd be like, "What are these things doing?!" And for me there's nothing scarier than thinking of something that big that's spooked. Like if you're at the circus and suddenly the elephants are spooked, you don't want to be anywhere near that, you'll be crushed."

# The viral marketing got out of control.

"We never guessed that there would be this level of response so early. In fact, we all turned to each other and said, "This is building so fast, we better shut up. I don't think we should say anything for a while because if we do people will be incredibly sick of us by the time the movie comes out.

"We had people at Bad Robot who had been working on some of the creative side stories that do connect in because they did have the script and they did know all the conversations we had about the sources of things so there is some viral stuff that does connect into us, but a lot of the stuff didn't have anything to do with us, it was just because people were so interested to make any connection they were making connections to things that didn't have anything to do with us. So the thing started to take on a life of its own, much bigger than we had anticipated."

# Finally - it's not a lion.

"In the teaser trailer, we wanted to let people know that it was a creature of some sort. So we put in some references on the roof, somebody saying "What kind of animal sounds like that?" And I jumped up to the mike to put one last one in, and I said "I saw it, it's alive, it's huge!" Apparently, I speak rather quickly and even played slowly I guess it sounded to some people like I was saying "it's a lion". So there was all this speculation that we were making a giant lion movie. And I thought, "there's no way people think we're making a giant lion movie!"

You can read the full transcript of the press conference at Den of Geek.

I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

2008-01-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

I Know Who Killed Me has been nominated for 9 Razzies. It deserves to win every single one of them. This isn't one of those movies that gets bad reviews, but is actually quite good; it's one of those movies which everyone tells you is bad, and then turns out to actually be worse. It's dreadful. It just sucks.

And it hurts me to say that, because I wanted it to be good. I don't hate Lindsay Lohan; I don't particularly like her any more, either, but Mean Girls is one of the greatest films of our time. I like horror movies. I loved LonelyGirl15, and was all excited about seeing Jessica Rose making her big screen debut. And director Chris Sivertson made a movie once upon a time with Lucky McKee, who is one of the most exciting horror directors currently working today. So, y'know, the signs were pointing in the right direction, and the fact that every other critic in the world has poured scorn on a film doesn't usually put me off. But on this particular occasion, popular opinion was bang on the money: this movie is dross.

The plot is bizarrely convoluted from the outset: there's a serial killer out there who likes to chop up young girls, so when Lindsay Lohan's character, Aubrey, goes missing one night, everyone fears the worst. Then she turns up on the side of the road one night: mutilated, but alive. Cause for celebration? Well, not quite. Because this Lindsay Lohan doesn't remember her life; she won't answer to Aubrey, claiming instead to be a girl called Dakota. And instead of being an aspiring writer and pianist, Dakota is hard-done-by pole dancer. And instead of being kidnapped and chopped up by a lunatic, Dakota's injuries have all just... happened. Spontaneously.

A quick search on Ask.com suggests that what Dakota is experiencing is a kind of non-religious stigmata; Dakota theorises that she's Aubrey's long-lost twin sister, and that the killer still has Aubrey. She's merely experiencing what her twin's being put through... which means Aubrey is still alive, still in danger, and Dakota is the only one who can save her.

That, or Aubrey's traumatic experience has caused her to create this bizarre alter-ego and become convinced she's actually someone else.

The whole these-two-people-are-actually-multiple-personalities-of-the-same-person has been played out to the point of tedium, but I Know Who Killed Me plays it from a slightly different angle: the viewer is always allowed to see both narratives at the same time. Either Aubrey is less than sane, OR she's a twin. That duality is what's at the heart of the movie, but it's clumsily done. It gets to the point where you know that either outcome will actually be unsatisfying, because it's not a cleverly executed twist; you're just given two options and a promise that one of them will turn out to be the truth.

And then the ending comes, and you still don't know what was going on. Is the film using the conceit of the unreliable narrator (all we have to go on is Aubrey/Dakota's version of events; she's always alone when she sees anything that might consistute "proof") or is it playing around with the psychic link some twins claim to have? Who knows? And more importantly, who cares? By the time you've ploughed through this film to its conclusion, you won't. The script is clumsy - it's hard to know whether Lindsay's really bad at acting or if the writer is just really bad at writing - and the direction more so. Someone somewhere thought that ripping off Dario Argento would be a good idea, and thus colour becomes important in the movie: everything connected with Aubrey is blue, up to and including the roses she gets from her boyfriend and the knife she's tortured with, while everything connected with Dakota is red. But the colour themes are overdone - they hurt your eyes after a while. Sometimes, you can sort of squint and see what the filmmakers were trying to do, but they failed. Spectacularly.

Plus it just looks cheap. The CGI is appalling, particularly the scenes where bits of Dakota fall off. It's just... ludicrous. That's the only word I can think of to describe it. If the lead actress was some complete unknown, I could understand it - but somehow they got Lindsay Lohan. It's just mindboggling. I can't understand how this film happened. It's depressing. The scenes where Lindsay "dances" onstage at a seedy strip club are probably the worst: she looks ill, and she barely moves. She steps and twirls in slow motion, looking for all the world as if she really doesn't want to be there. And she probably didn't. And neither do I.

IMDB link

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Cloverfield (2007) (virtually spoiler free!)

2008-01-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

Back in 1999, there was a lot of buzz about a movie which claimed to be true. It featured a group of kids who went out into the woods to investigate an urban legend about a local witch - and never came home. Some time later, their footage was found, edited, and broadcast to audiences around the world; websites were set up detailing the mythology of the Blair Witch, or about the lives of these poor, unfortunate young filmmakers.

Surely not many people could really have believed that The Blair Witch Project was real. But it was a massively successful film nonetheless, imitated and parodied endlessly for years. The film divided audiences; some people loved the rough, handheld camera footage and improvised dialogue, while others were frustrated by the ambiguous ending and always wobbly visuals. While no-one is going to believe that Cloverfield is a true story, that whole debate is about to kick off all over again, because this is another film shot entirely with handheld cameras with an extensive viral marketing campaign behind it. Clues about Cloverfield have been dropped for months now, none of them actually giving very much away, so anticipation is pretty much at fever pitch right now.

And within the next couple of weeks, everyone's going to find out whether the hype was justified.

Honestly, I think some people are going to be disappointed. Cloverfield is a very, very simple story based around a very, very simple idea, so anyone who's been following a series of clues on a series of viral websites might feel somewhat short-changed. There's not a lot to work out in Cloverfield; it just is. But what it is, is brilliant.

The plot is that of your basic monster movie - a monster attacks, and people run away. In Cloverfield, instead of being handed an omniscient view of the attacks unfolding, you're only given the perspective of one small group of people. The genius, though, isn't in the storyline, or even really in the technique - it's in the writing. Cloverfield's script is word-perfect. The film introduces a group of characters, all but one of whom are impossibly gorgeous young people (but it's okay, the one who isn't attractive mostly stays behind the camera). There's half an hour's worth of not much happening as we figure out who's who, and what their relationships to one another are, and then, suddenly, everything kicks off. There's a huge explosion in Manhattan; the Statue of Liberty's head goes flying across the sky; the streets are in chaos. The only available escape route, across the Brooklyn Bride, is quickly cut off. Things get scary, and fast.

What really sets Cloverfield apart from all the other horror movies that use exactly the same elements - a group of people, an isolated place, and something scary lurking around the corner - is that it makes so much sense. The characters are brilliantly observed; they're not all likeable, exactly, but they all seem real. They all act like people - rational, reasonably intelligent people, at that. Most horror films feature at least one moment, if not several, where you want to scream at the characters to stop being so bloody stupid. Cloverfield manages to avoid that. Every decision they make, makes sense. Maybe I'm over-stressing this point, but it seems so rare that a film gets something this right. And in order to be scary, you need that. It's no good throwing monsters into a film with characters so stupid they constantly run into danger; the audience can't empathise, can always see a way out, and get frustrated when the characters don't take it. When you feel like you'd do everything in the same way as the people onscreen do it, that's when it starts to feel scary.

It's also useful that the characters act like real people when the film tries to make you feel something. There are so many moments I want to write about, at length, and describe how great they are, but at the same time, I don't want to spoil them for everyone else. So I'll just say that there are several absolutely heartrending moments in this film. There are also some brilliantly funny lines along the way - my favourite, I think, is when someone asks of the monster "What's that?" and gets the reply "That's a terrible thing." Everything just works; the conversations flow like you'd imagine real conversations would, in the circumstances.

There is, admittedly, one moment where you'll roll your eyes in disbelief. Something happens (I know, I'm being annoyingly vague, I'm sorry) that you know, from having seen films before, has to happen, but at the same time, you can't actually believe that would happen in real life. It's okay, though, because there's only one moment, and it's not so outrageous that it couldn't happen. It's just one ever so slightly faltering step in what is otherwise a note-perfect script.

(Actually, there's one more thing - why is everyone in this movie so bloody gorgeous? It's the Lost effect - how come there just so happened to be a plane filled with people with movie star looks? I guess we'll never know.)

Another part of what makes this movie so great is that the monster design is completely unlike anything you've ever seen. (Unless, maybe, you've seen The Host.) It's not a recognisable monster of any particular existing type; it's just something weird. (And terrible.) It's scary because it's so weird - it's just a monster, and it doesn't have any obvious weaknesses, and it's huge, and it wants to eat you. Having glanced at the credits on the IMDB, I'm not sure who to congratulate on creating that thing, because there seem to have been an awful lot of people involved, so you can all give yourselves a good pat on the back. And then give Drew Goddard a good pat on the back, too, for writing such a great script. And maybe Matt Reeves. And the entire cast.

Weirdly, I think Cloverfield will play just as well, if not better, on DVD as it does on a cinema screen. Because it's all shot on handheld cameras, it sort of feels like a small screen movie, even though the production design and sheer scale of the monster and the destruction it wreaks makes it feel like a big screen movie. It's hard to categorise Cloverfield, actually, but then, why bother? It's brilliant. And that's enough.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

The Den of Geek interview: Lloyd Kaufman

2008-01-17T02:47:00.000-08:00

Troma Entertainment prides itself on being a truly independent movie studio. Even if you’ve never seen one of their movies, you’ll definitely have seen movies by one of their alumni – people who’ve begun their careers at Troma include James Gunn, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Eli Roth, and lots and lots of others. Lloyd Kaufman has over thirty movies credited to him as a director, but dozens more that he’s produced, and more than a hundred that he’s appeared in. He’s a busy man, then. I caught up with him briefly in London for Den of Geek:

Your recent MySpace blog mentioned that Troma is about to move into a new building in New York…

Yes, indeed, we have bought a new Troma building; we have renovated it, and it’s going to be a whole new era! It’s in an even crappier neighbourhood and a crappier building, we managed to find an even worse building…

And the neighbours are worse? [The old building was next door to a McDonalds, to which Lloyd attributes the building’s rat infestation]

That’s why we moved! We wanted to get away from McDonalds!

So you’ve checked out the rat situation at the new one?

The area is so unusual, there’s nothing there. Nothing lives. But there is the Museum of the Moving Image, which has rats of a different sort. And there’s two big movie studios very near us, one of which has the name Kaufman, too. So it’d be kind of fun to call our building Kaufman, too. It’d be funny if Robert De Niro was directed to the Kaufman building and it was the Troma building. That’d be great! His first movie was a Troma movie called The Wedding Party directed by Brian De Palma.

Let’s get to why we’re here: you’re one of this year’s Zone Horror Cut competition judges…

Yes, I had the honour of judging last year’s competition and the movies which were submitted were terrific. I’m hoping that this year there will be more sex and violence… er, that the movies will be even better!

What will you be looking for in a winner?

I think, basically, originality. But, you know, horror has traditionally been a way in to a very, very closed and elitist industry. Horror has been the most democratic genre - other than porno, of course, but I have never seen a porno so I wouldn’t know. In terms of the elite and in terms of prestige, horror and comedy ride the back of the bus. But what a great way for young people to break into an industry which is still fairly sexist and racist and elitist! It is an industry controlled by a small number of devil-worshipping international conglomerates. So horror is a way in for young people and if there’s any way I can be a part of democratising our industry, I would like to do it.

For Cut, the movies must be 2 minutes long, or thereabouts, and they must have references to what a warm and sensitive person Lloyd Kaufman is – be sure to put that in the rules, that’s very important!

[At this point, a member of the Groucho’s staff asks us to move into another room.]

So what’s going on with Poultrygeist now?

Poultrygeist had a test screening in Peckham, and since they didn’t burn the theatre down, and because the audience liked it so much, there’s going to be a tour. It’ll start in Northhampton, and then go to, I guess, mostly university towns, and then presumably end up back here, at the Prince Charles. The test was very successful, so the film will be hatching around May, maybe. Something like that.

Do you still feel it’s the best movie Troma’s made?

I would say so, yeah. It’s the most daring, that’s for sure, it’s the most intelligent, too, I think. And it’s got singing and dancing, which is great. The film clearly is not going to be for everybody, but our fans will love it, and I think if intelligent people come and see it, they will find that they learn a lot and have a very entertaining 95 minutes.

Which is what matters, at the end of the day.

Indeed, yeah, it’s about entertainment. But also, it has very provocative themes. I’m not a big fan of fast food, but the satire is not only about fast food, it’s also about the millionaire phoney left-wing people too, it satirises the corporate side as well as the phoney Al Gore types who are using the populist movement to further their own millions of dollars. Even though it’s full of chicken Indian zombies and explosive diarrhoea and people getting their faces grinded off in the meat slicer, the movie has a lot of very, very interesting points to make. And that’s why Troma’s been around for 35 years.

Warner Brothers choosing to go Blu-ray exclusive was just big news, but more importantly – which way is Troma going to go?

Well, we are more homosexual ourselves, but we could be persuaded to go another way… I don’t know, really. You know, I’m just trying to make the movies.

So you don’t have much interest in the high definition formats?

Well, certainly it looks great, but the bigger issue for us is that we are economically blacklisted. The television markets are blacklisting independent movies unless those movies come in through the vassals of the major conglomerates - Disney Miramax or Fox Searchlight, and these feel-good independent movies like Juno, which is of questionable moral theme, but that’s the kind of stuff that will get on TV. The real shit-disturbing independent movie won’t get on TV because it’s not coming in through the strainer of one of the divisions of one of those conglomerates. So that’s really our concern.

I was just elected the Chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance, which is the trade association for all the independent movie companies. The reason I got elected is that I ran on a platform of fighting industry consolidation and trying to protect net neutrality on the Internet, because the Internet is the last level playing field. Nobody thought I’d win because it’s a very controversial platform; many of our members live off the crumbs that fall from the table from the cartel that runs the industry. But I won and we’re going to try to see if we can insert ourselves into the process in Washington and, to some extent, here; to see if we can make the media and the public aware of the fact that we are really getting our art through the strainer of five or six giant conglomerates. We are not really getting the information to find the truly independent art, we are being denied access to it - not just Troma, but many many other important artistic creations. That’s a big deal, really, and I’m very serious about that.

Blockbuster has never had a Troma movie, not even the South Park guys’ Cannibal the Musical, which has sold a couple of hundred thousand DVDs with no advertising and yet it’s never been in a Blockbuster. We’re blacklisted, and it has nothing to do with the content, it’s because we’ve committed the sin of being truly independent. We want to own our movies, we want to own our intellectual properties, we don’t want some studio to come along and take the library and start censoring and chopping up the movies for some kind of silly TV thing. It’s a tough world. The Internet is the last way and we have to fight for net neutrality because the phone companies and the big media companies are trying to create big media and they’re already colonising MySpace and Facebook and YouTube.

MySpace has been useful for Troma, though, hasn’t it? There are so many Troma promotional sites out there; the official ones and the fan ones…

There are many, many fan websites. Even my Lloyd Kaufman website is fan-based; it’s fan-driven, it’s fan-created. The fans do it, I don’t do it. The Tromadance website is by fans - the Tromadance festival which is starting next week. Oh, by the way, very important announcement: the winner of this year’s Cut competition will have automatic acceptance into the 10th Anniversary Tromadance festival in Park City, Utah, which takes place at the same time and same place as Sundance. So that’ll be a nice thing in terms of getting exposure for the winner.

Is there any possibility of having a Tromadance festival in the UK?

Well, again, it’s all fan-driven. In Utah, it’s very expensive so Troma and our fans have contributed the money to do it. Here, you could do it easily, you just get a venue somewhere – it’s very simple and it doesn’t cost a lot of money. But unfortunately in this small town where Sundance is, because there are so many perfume companies and jewellery companies and Mercedes Benz, they’ve rented all the space, so it’s like $20,000 for one day to rent a venue to show your movies. It would be wonderful to do something in the UK; actually, there was a Tromadance in Edinburgh for a couple of years called the Troma Fling and it took place during the Edinburgh festival. It took place for two years but I don’t know if they’re doing it again. In the States, there’s Tromadance New Mexico, there’s a Tromadance Canada, Denver… and then there are the Tromapalooza concerts which raise money for the festivals. We had the third year this year of Tromapalooza concerts in Las Vegas, and in Dallas, Texas. Basically, bands donate their time and then they get publicity. And if any money is made, then Tromadance gets it. Because Tromadance is all free – there’s no entry fee, the tickets are free and there’s no VIP policy, so it’s not a very good business model. We need sponsors and we need the fans also donate money to make the budget.

How would you feel about potential remakes of Troma movies?

If Eli Roth or James Gunn wanted to remake The Toxic Avenger, I’d probably give it to them for free. But Brett Ratner wants to remake it, and remake Mother’s Day, and a guy like that has to pay big money.

So it would all depend on who it was that wanted to remake the movies?

Absolutely. You know, I’m an auteur director and it would all depend. It wouldn’t be about money, it would be about making sure it would be interesting. By the way, Poultrygeist is actually a shot for shot remake of another gore slapstick comedy called Schindler’s List.

While we’re on the subject of Toxie, what’s happening with the Toxic Avenger comics?

Devil’s Due Publishing out of Chicago has created a graphic novel and it’s Toxic Stories from Tromaville, and it’s very good. That just came out about a month ago. I’m sure you’ll be able to get it off the Troma website, it shouldn’t be hard to find.

There was a previous Toxic Avenger comic done by Marvel, right?

Yes, Marvel did Toxic Avenger and Toxic Crusaders, they were very successful.

But there was never, like, Toxic Avenger vs Spider-Man?

Well, they wanted to do something like that but then they went bankrupt. Ron Perlman bought them – not the actor Ron Perlman but the billionaire, the bald guy with the many rich wives. He bought them and drove Marvel into the ground. So that was the end of that. And they wanted to own Toxie, they want to own everything, so that’s a big problem. I was buddies with Samuel Arkoff, who founded AIP and started Roger Corman and so many others and he told me his biggest mistake was to sell his company to a bigger company because they totally chopped everything up and the whole identity, the whole interesting patina of his library was destroyed. He says that’s his biggest regret, even though he got a lot of money. Except for meeting me, having to have lunch with me was worse. He was a good guy.

Has the WGA strike affected Troma at all? What’s your position on the strike?

Well, it certainly hasn’t affected Troma, we’ve never had any writers. I don’t know how to write. I’m actually on strike against myself because I don’t pay enough, and I don’t even give myself a decent health plan. I did write a blog where I pointed out that the writers do have a gripe, most of the writers are eating dog food and they do need more money and they’re not getting a fair shake and they should not be excluded from internet sales. But the problem is that they are marching side by side with actors that no-one wants to see who are making a million dollars a movie or more. I can understand that Bruce Willis would be profitable, or Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks, but there’s two hundred other actors and no-one wants to see them in a movie and they’re marching side by side in the picket line so they can get their faces on TV. The writers ought to be picketing these useless actors who are well overpaid and if they weren’t so overpaid then the writers could get more money. So that would be my advice. But the Writers’ Guild has no affect on us. We’re so blacklisted that nothing can affect us.

Do you think that’ll ever change?

The blacklisting? No. Never. If I get hit by a bus then they’ll swoop in and try to buy all our movies for, they’re hoping we’ll go out of business so they can get their hands on Toxic Avenger and have Michael Bay direct the remake. They’d love to have Brett Ratner steal Mothers Day and make it into X-Men.

Doesn’t bear thinking about really, does it?

Well, hey, if he wants to pay us a lot of money, or not even a lot of money, just some money, fine we’re desperate, we need money, but for us to give the rights away? They talk about “nack end”, what’s back end? These guys never pay you, it’s almost an insult to suggest it. But if Eli Roth or James Gunn or Neil Marshall, or someone like that wanted to do a remake, any of those guys, I’d give it to them. It’s just about the only movie of that type that hasn’t been remade. They want to remake Class of Nuke’Em High, Toxic Avenger, Mother’s Day, there’s about four of our movies that they want to remake and it would just be awful. We’ve got a fairly high price just to prevent that. And we need money, so it would be wonderful if someone paid us that.

Do you think the original movies would become more available if they were remade, though? Would it help with getting them on TV and into Blockbuster and all that?

That would be the good thing, yes. All the little nerdy fanboys who’ve never heard of Class of Nuke Em High, when they do Jason vs Class of Nuke Em High then they might say, hey, what was the original…? That’s the one good thing about all these crappy remakes, a lot of young people who didn’t know the original Halloween will go and look at it. Although actually the Halloween remake was pretty good. Did you like it?

I didn’t see it.

It was pretty good! Rob Zombie, good for him. Because Devil’s Rejects was not terribly great and the other one, the first one, was unwatchable.

That was what put me off.

Halloween was good, it was well written, it was very good. So then these Jason vs robots and Jason vs Freddy, whatever, those things are horrible, awful, but if they get young kids to go and look at the old movies, hey, nothing wrong with that.

Had you considered doing that kind of thing with Troma characters? Toxic Avenger vs…

When I was on my book tour for Make Your Own Damn Movie, every time I did a Q and A, someone would ask what would happen if Sgt Kabukiman fought Toxic Avenger? So it’s in Citizen Toxie. Except they’re both good guys, so they would never fight each other, and we had to create the alternate universe with Evil Kabukiman. That allowed us to satirise that whole genre. That was very cool, our fans basically came up with the plot for Citizen Toxie. We do have the Troma universe, so our characters do meet each other but not like that kind of stuff, not Freddy vs Jason.

[At this point, Emily Booth and the Zone Horror crew come in and start setting up cameras on the other side of the room. I’m concerned about time, but they tell me to just carry on…]

I’m about to go to meet with the Minister of Culture right after this, that’s why I have to leave early. I’ve been told not to bring the Toxic Avenger mask, which I do have with me.

What’s the meeting about?

Because I’m chairman of the IFTA, we want to discuss the issues of industry consolidation and net neutrality. The MPAA, which is the trade association of the big studios, state that they are the representatives of the entire movie business. Well, they’re not. Everything they do hurts the independents, they do nothing to help us or the public. Our association is 25 years old and I felt it was time that we present ourselves to the public and the media as representing the independent film industry and we embed ourselves into the process.

We have a lobbyist in the States, the same one that Google has actually, and the lobbyist has set us up with various congressmen, we met with the chairman of the Federal Communications commission to explain to them that Miramax is not an independent movie studio; HBO is not independent, it’s owned by Time Warner, that NBC, Universal, and General Electric are all the same company and they don’t know that and they don’t know that all the regulations against monopoly have been done away with in my country. Because most of them were elected since Clinton and his phoney populist wife and administration did away with all that stuff because they accept massive donations from the Hollywood film studios. As do the senators from California.

If we can create a little bit of noise, maybe we can frighten them – the one thing that the conglomerates fear is the US government, so if we can create hearings or maybe get the attention of the media, and get the story out that independent art and commerce is basically blacklisted in our country and in most of the world, it might embarrass the big boys so that they won’t blacklist independents any more. Troma owns almost a thousand movies, we probably have one of the biggest library of films outside of the majors, and yet ComCast, which is our big cable company, won’t talk to us. We have to go through a middleman, which is owned by the majors. And then if there is any revenue, they will take most of it. That’s the problem.

Are you hoping the situation will be easier to sort out in the UK than in the US?

Well, you guys have better treatment of your independents, because you have the lottery and your government and I think that you encourage more independent – you have movies like This Is England. Did you see that, by the way?

Yeah.

That’s a great film, huh? That kid is great. It’s wonderful, it’s so original. It’s terrific. So in fact I think the United States is the only country that does not subsidise in any way the true independent. They do subsidise the major conglomerates with the tax system and most of the incentive system is for the big, big, big, big guys. And they throw out a few crumbs if you make a movie, you know, about left-handed lesbian mattress workers, you know something that’s politically correct but has no commercial opportunity, then you might get some money.

Speaking of politics, you’re working on a documentary, Splendour and Wisdom, about George Bush?

Yes! How did you know about that?

Well, because I looked it up on the IMDB this morning.

Oh, thank you!

There’s virtually no information about it, though, which is why I wanted to ask you about it today…

It’s about the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, he was a blue blood, a rich guy, who was in the CIA and then he switched around to become…

... And that’s where we ran out of time, and Lloyd had to go and film his stuff with Emily Booth. So – thank you, Lloyd Kaufman, and also huge thanks to George Hills for arranging this interview for us!

Interview originally published at Den of Geek. I also interviewed Lloyd around this time last year, too; you can find that interview here.

Death By Engagement (2005)

2008-01-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

All forms of media have been democratised. Nowadays, anyone can write a book, run a website, or make a movie, and this can be a great thing - after all, it's highly unlikely that anyone would actually pay me to write damning reviews of the abysmal films I'm all too fond of watching, and then what would I do for fun? Bringing entertainment out of the domain of the big media moguls is also a good thing - there are some great writers on the Internet who would struggle to get published anywhere else, and independent movies can tackle subjects movie studios would never dream of touching.

But. And it's a big but. In an age where anyone can make a film, it is still absolutely true that not everyone should make a film. Death By Engagement is the best argument I've ever come across for being absolutely honest with your friends or acquaintances when they ask you what you think of their film/book/poetry/etc. It is unredeemably dreadful. It's embarrassing to watch. It's terrifying to think that any distributor would think it worthwhile to make this available to the general public. It's actually offensive that someone somewhere had to make the decision to inflict this on the world at large. It's not even a movie. It's practically home footage.

It's crap.

The basic plot of Death By Engagement is that, after being jilted at the altar by his bride-to-be, a violent psychopath becomes obsessed with retrieving the antique engagement ring he'd given his fiancée. Luckily, his mother is a deranged hippie-type who keeps him on life support even after he's shot and killed by police, so death doesn't have to be a barrier. Unluckily, for some reason, the ring keeps getting stolen by unscrupulous types and presented to a never-ending parade of new brides-to-be, all of whom then have to be tracked down and killed in order to regain the ring.

That summary credits the movie with more coherence than it actually has. The story isn't really a story when you're watching the film; instead, scene after scene plays out with badly-written, uninteresting, badly-acted characters going through the necessary motions to get to a point where a ring gets put on a finger. Then the inexplicably-masked psycho turns up and gets his murder on. It feels like a porn film, insofar as it's a string of vignettes which have no point other than to get to a certain point - only instead of the climax being explicit sex, it's off-screen violence. The acting and dialogue are porn-standard, too; as if time is just being filled until the film gets to the important bit, except there is no important bit. It's like the person who wrote the script set out to make a horror movie without ever having watched anything other than porn in his whole life. Or having ever talked to any human beings in his whole life. Which is strange, because since no-one in this film can act, and because none of the scripted descriptions of the characters comes close to describing the person playing the relevant role, I'd assume that the director just phoned up his friends to come round and read some lines for him.

Even from a technical standpoint, Death By Engagement is dreadful. The pacing is painfully slow. The camera angles are uninspired. It's shot on HD DV, which doesn't quite look like film, and it seems to be mostly handheld footage, which means whenever there's a long, lingering shot of something (and there's a lot of them, because this film is 99% padding) the camera shakes slightly.

It depresses me that the people who made this monstrosity can think of themselves as filmmakers and be credited on the IMDB. Looking at the box cover depresses me, because some poor schmuck had to design that. And it's good - it's a really good cover, and it's quite a good tagline. It's just that inside that box is a DVD on which is something which is not a film. If you happen across this anywhere, please don't buy it. Don't rent it. Don't watch it. I know you're contrary bastards who'll watch anything if you're told not to, but if you sit through this, you'll only have yourselves to blame. (And the distributor and the camera-holders. But you can't say I didn't warn you.)

IMDB link

Satan's Little Helper (2004)

2008-01-06T03:11:00.000-08:00

If you're worried that violent computer games might be rotting the brains of the people who play them, this film will only make you even more convinced that teaching kids to kill people onscreen for fun is a bad idea.

Satan's Little Helper is about Dougie, a strange little boy who's obsessed with playing a computer game of the same title, in which the player aids Satan by killing people and generally wreaking havoc. He's also obsessed with his older sister, who's coming home from college to visit, especially to take her brother trick-or-treating. So far, so good - except that the older sister has brought her boyfriend home with her. Determined to rid himself of his rival for her affections, Dougie sets out to find Satan and become his helper - in exchange for Satan taking the unwanted boyfriend to Hell, clearing the way for his incestuous fantasies about his sister to continue.

It's a weird premise for a movie, and it's quite a weird movie. Most of the film plays out in sunlight, and every scene is excessively bright and colourful. It's a really good-looking film for the most part, especially considering the budgetary restraints. Visually, then, it doesn't look like your average horror movie. Structurally, it's even more bizarre, and tonally... well, you can imagine.

For the first part of the film, the silliness and the horror are nicely balanced. When Dougie heads out to the costume shop with his sister's boyfriend and returns hand in hand with a masked stranger, his sister and mother don't notice that anything's amiss. Their daft role-play and incessant picture-taking is funny, because the mask looks so absurd, and also just because it's funny, but because we as viewers know that underneath that mask is a serial killer, it's also uncomfortable to watch. Seeing a lovestruck young girl cosying up to a man she thinks is her boyfriend, but who is actually a murderer, makes your skin crawl. And it's great. But that delicate balance doesn't last. Before long, the masked 'Satan's' killing spree starts to seem ridiculous, and the fact that Dougie continues to think it's all a game starts to become irritating - surely no child could be that stupid?

The camel's back finally breaks when 'Satan' kills all of the town's policemen, causing complete chaos as law and order breaks down. Even on Halloween, even without any law enforcers at hand, would people really start killing each other and looting everything in sight? It's obviously not a film overly concerned with realism, but the creepiness relies on the silliness not getting too out of hand. As soon as the balance tips too far into absurdity, the film loses most of its appeal.

Ultimately, Satan's Little Helper should have been about 20 minutes shorter, because the perfect ending presents itself ... and then everything carries on for a bit longer. The actual ending is completely unsatisfying, which is really disappointing given how strongly the film started off. In terms of originality and style, Satan's Little Helper scores highly, but by the end, too many superfluous characters have been introduced and everything has just gotten completely out of hand. Shame.

IMDB link

Right At Your Door (2006)

2007-12-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

Right At Your Door is an intensely stressful, aggravating film - and mostly not for the reasons it was intended to be.

Looked at in the broadest possible strokes, it's brilliant; the basic concept, that in the aftermath of a dirty bomb going off in Los Angeles people would turn on one another and fail to trust even their most loved ones, is great, and telling a story about an enormous terrorist attack from such a small scale perspective is great, particularly if you're working with a low budget. But, and there's always got to be a but, as soon as the film started to move from the conceptual stage to an actual script and then to a finished film, things just seem to have gone more and more desperately wrong.

For starters, the lead character is incredibly stupid and selfish. Brad's every action is informed by his perception that he's somehow entitled to something more than everyone else, that he's a special case. That initally seems intentional: he's an out-of-work musician, apparently planning a busy day of sitting at home resenting his wife for having a job and actually making money. When the bombs go off, his reaction is irrational, but given the extraordinary circumstances, he can be given the benefit of the doubt. To begin with, anyway. Unfortunately, Brad rapidly destroys any goodwill we might be willing to afford him by being a complete and utter asshole: he steals from a shop, he attempts to drive into the city to find his wife despite the police roadblocks, and he drives so erratically that he puts multiple people's lives in danger. It's generally accepted that in post-apocalyptic movies the usual rules of society can be suspended, but given how quickly Brad resorts to looting, you have to wonder how law-abiding he was in the first place.

Which wouldn't be a problem, were it not for the fact that his character is completely inconsistent during the rest of the movie.

After repeatedly ignoring warnings and running around in the toxic ash falling from the sky, our hero finally - on pain of being shot - does the logical thing and returns to his house. (Seriously, how did he think driving around like a lunatic was going to help his wife, even if she were trapped somewhere?) On the way, he spots a small child wandering around, and gets out of his car to warn the child that it's dangerous to be outside and tell it to run along home. Nice, Brad. Once he gets home, he discovers a man sheltering inside - he was working in the neighbour's garden when the bombs went off, and sought cover where he could. There's a moment where it really seems like this hapless old man is going to be turfed out into the mayhem outside, but Brad apparently has a smidgen of humanity left, and lets him stay. An emergency radio broadcast informs listeners that the blasts were from dirty bombs, and that anyone within a 20 mile radius of an explosion should seal themselves inside their houses, closing all windows and doors with duct tape. The shots through the window of the toxic ash falling menacingly from the sky are nicely done, and there's a real sense of danger and urgency here as Brad and the gardener seal the house. (Although - why do they need to put plastic over the windows? Isn't glass pretty good at keeping air out by itself? Aren't they just limiting their visibility?)

Just when they seem to be safely holed up inside Brad's house, his wife reappears. Staggering and coughing, it seems she was in close proximity to one of the explosions. The radio is telling people to quarantine anyone who'd been outside in the toxic ash, to keep them away from untainted people until medical aid can be procured. And here's the first completely nonsensical bit: Brad looks out of the window at his desperate wife and tells her he can't let her into the house; that she's infected and needs to stay away from him.

Obviously, this is meant to be tense and poignant and to make people question what they'd do, in his situation. The problem is that we've just spent the entirety of the film so far watching Brad risk his life by running around outside. Opening the door, briefly, in order to let in his terrified and injured wife, seems much less of a risk to his health than everything he's already done; he's been outside breathing in the fumes plenty of times already, and given how ready he was to drive his car maniacally into police roadblocks in an attempt to find her earlier, you'd think he'd be willing to take one final risk to welcome her home.

Except, no, because that would ruin the tension in the movie. So instead, he lets her sit outside, getting covered in grey ash, coughing her lungs up, and generally looking like she's about to drop dead.

Now, you could maybe argue that when Brad was trying to get into the city earlier, he didn't know how toxic the ash was, and now that he does, he's only taking precautions. You could argue that earlier, he was panicking, and now he's rational, he's being more careful. You could, but all those arguments would be complete bollocks since there's another, really obvious solution to his problem: he could tape up one room of the house, cutting it off from the rest of the property, and then let his wife into it. That way, she wouldn't come into contact with him, but she also wouldn't have to sit outside all night.

He doesn't do that till much, much later on, though.

It seemed that maybe the film would be more affecting if, instead of experiencing events through Brad's self-obsessed, stupid worldview, we saw his wife's, Lexi's, POV. Sadly, nope; she's just as bad. Her situation is pretty dreadful - she was in an accident, she awoke to find the city on fire, and when she finally made her way home, her husband locked her out. Unfortunately, Lexi is apparently the perfect partner for Brad, because she's just as self-obsessed and stupid as he is. There's a lot of conflict to be mined in their relationship at this point: Brad should be torn between wanting to let her into the house and being afraid, while Lexi should be torn between wanting to get home and not wanting to endanger her beloved husband. Except, no, they each only care about themselves, to the point where Lexi breaks a window (and lets in toxins!) in her desperation to get inside. Which is kind of stupid, too, because if she's trying to get to a clean, safe place, she's just ballsed it up by letting the fumes get inside. Sigh.

Right At Your Door is the kind of movie that wants you to know it's got something up its sleeve. By this point, it became clear that there would be a twist ending of some kind; that everything wasn't as it seemed. That's pretty much all that kept me watching, because I just found everyone and everything in this movie utterly infuriating. Initially I thought it was an intentional decision on the part of the filmmakers, to make the characters unsympathetic; eventually, the plot holes started to eclipse everything else that was going on to the point where I was forced to accept that, no, it's just badly written. Both Brad and Lexi make one stupid decision after another, constantly endangering not only themselves but other people around them; instead of building up tension, it eventually becomes laughable, watching them do things no sane person would consider. When they're supposed to be keeping quiet and hiding, they shout and run around; when the police turn up, Brad gibbers incomprehensibly at them; Lexi continually goes back outside, even when she's been allowed inside the house. The twist, when it arrives, is good for a brief moment of schadenfreude, but that quickly fades because it doesn't actually hold water.

At the end of the day, Right At Your Door thinks it's an intelligent, politically aware thriller ideally situated in a culture terrified of terrorism and its own government. Actually, it's just a badly written, incoherent slice of post-September 11th hysteria.

IMDB link

N.B. I used this image instead of the UK poster because I love the massive spoiler they used as a quote. Brilliant!

Somebody Help Me (2007)

2007-12-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

Somebody Help Me is really nicely packaged. The DVD box comes inside a cardboard slipcase, which is nice - if a little excessive - especially since it's sort of metallic and shiny. If I were giving out stars, I might have to give the film an extra one just for the packaging.

Sadly, having watched the film, it wouldn't be an extra star so much as, er, the only star. This film is dreadful. It's your generic slasher movie, employing every single cliché it could get its hands on, without an ounce of coherence.

It opens with a darkened room in which some girls are apparently trapped - and then abruptly skips three years into the future, to a long sweeping shot over a forest. Some truly awful R'n'B plays as a van drives (and drives, and drives) through the woods, and we're introduced to the main characters. There's a romantic, good-looking, likeable couple, and a slightly less good-looking couple who argue a lot and are generally irritating. It emerges that they're a group of friends travelling from LA to a cabin in the middle of nowhere to celebrate the better-looking girl's 21st birthday. As you do. It seems that they're going somewhere completely isolated and out of the way, except that when the scene changes to the party, another three couples have magically turned up. Plus we go with the boys to pick up food in the nearby town, and see their creepy next-door-neighbour spying on them, so, y'know, maybe not all that cut off from civilisation after all. All the couples proceed to get very drunk, and some of them go outside into the woods to have sex. Cue the scary music, because as we all know, if you're having drunken sex in the woods, you're going to get murdered by a psychopath!

From that point onwards, everything goes insane. The two couples who went outside to have sex disappear. Another couple goes to look for them. They don't come back, either. The two remaining couples - the ones in the van at the beginning - split up, and the girls disappear. At seemingly random times, we're treated to badly edited scenes of a surgeon cutting off random bits of the missing people's bodies. Meanwhile, everyone panics. A lot of time passes, nonsensically: everyone who didn't go missing on the first night spends the entirety of the next day wandering around in the woods, except it only takes about five minutes (they go outside in daylight; then they comment that it's 4pm and they've been looking all day; then it's suddenly dark) and no-one ever seems to need to eat, drink, sleep or use the toilet. After about half an hour, the sheriff says it's been 36 hours since the kids disappeared; the two surviving girls comment that they haven't eaten or slept for two days because they can't find their friends, which seems a bit stupid to me.

Lots of other slasher movie clichés get rolled out - there's no mobile phone service in the woods, for example. Every time anything happens, generic horror movie music (think I Know What You Did Last Summer) plays. The killer randomly pops up in the background then disappears again, even when all the doors are locked and there's someone standing directly in front of the entrance. There's very little characterisation, beyond the initial likeable couple/irritating couple assessment, which is mostly due to the fact that the dialogue is terrible. It's unnatural, repetitive, and nonsensical. The worst part is probably when the sheriff initially asks the kids why they're in town, and they claim that they're staying at the annoying kid's uncle's cabin. His uncle, he says, is "Charles Bronson." It sounds like a joke, like they're lying to the sheriff, because Charles Bronson is so blatantly a famous name, but no, apparently we're supposed to take him seriously - his uncle's name really is Charles Bronson. Give me strength. (Runners up for worst lines of the movie: the fact that everyone at the cabin insists on saying "On behalf of me and my beautiful [insert girlfriend's name]"; the description of the missing kids given by the irritating girl to the police - "White.")

Race is obviously an important part of this movie. It was produced by Codeblack Entertainment, a company which specialises in the urban market, and stars Omarion and Marques Houston. And that should be really interesting: most slasher movies feature a group of privileged white kids going out into the woods to get killed by underprivileged white hillbillies, with, if you're lucky, a token member of an ethnic minority who'll either get killed first, or make quips about how he (... I can't think of an example where it was a she) is going to get killed first. Because that's how wanky postmodern filmmakers roll, using all the tropes of the genre in a knowing, self-referential, winking way without ever thinking about why films work that way or how the stereotypes might be subverted. Sticking a group of urban black kids in the same situation should provide scope for some kind of social commentary, or, if you don't want to get overly heavy, there's at least an opportunity to do something different with the genre, because chances are they wouldn't react in the same way as your typical privileged white kids. In Somebody Help Me, though, all that happens is that the girl from the irritating couple continually talks about white people in a derogatory way. Beyond that, nothing's different.

And there's not really a lot else worth talking about here. Somebody Helps Me just picks up the most memorable images from recent horror films - the Hostel-style torture chamber, the creepy little girl - and plunks them down in the middle of a complete non-story. People get kidnapped, there's a few seconds of low-budget gore as they get their ears or fingernails removed, and then the survivors panic a bit more. The killer, when the final guy gets to confront him, wears a mask and moves slowly. He gets stabbed, then disappears as soon as the heroes have their backs turned. He gets shot, then disappears as soon as the heroes have their backs turned. The little girl on the cover is a complete waste of time: she shows up in a couple of nightmares singing creepy nursery rhymes, and then pops up to help rescue the kids who haven't died yet, which doesn't seem to strike anyone as strange, and then at the end there's a bizarre attempt at a twist, or maybe just a final scare, as the 'real' girl sings the song she was singing in the nightmare. For ... no apparent reason, because that doesn't make sense.

As well as there being no sense of time passing properly, there's also no sense of space or location, because the cabins are always framed one at a time, with no clue as to how they connect to one another. Ditto on the sheriff's station and the town's shops. According to the sweeping fly-over shots, it's all just forest, but that doesn't make sense since there's apparently a cabin "just over the street." Nobody has thought about this, at all, and the more I think about it, the more annoying it gets. As far as the explanation for the killer goes, there's a lot of fuss made about the date (March 6th) and that there were previous murders three years ago (hence that very short scene at the beginning) except then the creepy little girl says that the killer goes out looking for fresh victims "every night." So the date had nothing to do with it, then? And why does there always have to be a precedent? Why are films never made about the first time maniacs go on killing sprees, only the times they apparently escape and do it all over again in exactly the same way?

The only explanation is that it's that way because it's always been that way. There's nothing original in this movie - it's just a bunch of kids going out to a cabin to get murdered by a guy in a mask on March 6th instead of Friday 13th. The most positive thing I could say about it is that you can't really tell that the two male leads are musicians, rather than actors. They've done a fairly good job with an absolutely execrable script. Which, in the end, doesn't make for anything worth watching.

IMDB link

The Condemned (2007)

2007-12-06T13:45:00.000-08:00

Hold the front page. Something is wrong with the universe. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) is producing decent movies. That ... just doesn't seem right. But See No Evil was, surprisingly, one of the best horror films of last year, and The Condemned is, well, better. Both movies transcend their allotted genres, which, considering they both initially seem to be nothing more than vehicles for wrestling superstars, really shouldn't be the case. See No Evil was a glossy, surprisingly entertaining slasher that easily balanced its darkness with humour without becoming exploitative; The Condemned manages to be a great action flick with plenty of gratuitous explosions and, at the same time, a spirited evisceration of the current cultural climate. The government, the media, the military, and finally the voyeuristic audience itself are each bludgeoned over the head with the movie's political standpoints - hardly subtle, but then it's not subtlety isn't the point.

The initial set up sounds like a straight lift from Battle Royale: a group of people are dumped on a remote island, with explosive devices strapped to their bodies, and told that only one of them will get off the island alive - and only if they manage to kill everyone else first. Except that where Battle Royale used schoolchildren, The Condemned plucks its contestants from third-world prisons. Only the nastiest, most murderous criminals - those who are already facing the death penalty are selected (including ex-SAS McStarley, played by Vinnie Jones and mystery man Jack Conrad, played by Stone Cold Steve Austin). The sole survivor will be granted a second chance at life and the whole thing is filmed and broadcast live over the Internet to some 40 million paying subscribers. The whole thing is the brainchild of a maniacal millionaire whose morality stretches only as far as he can make a profit off of it.

The only sympathetic characters in the whole mess turn up in the shape of Conrad's all-but-widowed wife back home, and in a couple members of the reality TV crew who actually have some degree of humanity left. Everyone else is ripe for the grisly, gory picking.

Considering that, of the ten people dumped on the island, two are women, both of whom is required to wear a cleavage-flaunting vest top, and that within 45 minutes there's been one attempted rape and one off-screen rape and murder, you'd expect the whole film to turn exploitative fast. But as the cinema audience, we're always at least one degree away from it: much of the action is viewed through the eyes of the film crew, and sometimes we actually watch their reaction instead of witnessing the brutality they're reacting to for ourselves. It makes a surprising change to see any film, particularly in the action or horror genre, actually acknowledging the moral repercussions of its subject matter, and though it's a fairly obvious route to take, the moment when the whole production room goes quiet as McStarley beats a woman to death is startlingly effective. And that's just in the first half.

As the film continues, the message behind it all becomes more and more blatant. There's some real anger behind this movie, and it's directed towards practically everyone: a government that mistreats its soldiers; a military that's become dehumanised; and the mass media which has become first desensitised then completely morally bankrupt. If the film weren't so well made, this could come off as incredibly sanctimonious, but thankfully the filmmakers know what they're doing - it's stylish and entertaining enough that the moral of the story doesn't stick in your craw. Plus they, y'know, have a valid point. When Breckel, the man behind the whole show, makes an appearance on a chat show and proclaims that it's up to the parents to safeguard their children, and that the media doesn't create the demand for ultra-violent content but only supplies it, it's hard not to feel slightly uncomfortable. After all, The Condemned is a very violent movie.

There are all sorts of touches throughout the film that just work. The shots of the live feed on the website, for instance, which all films of this nature tend to get horribly wrong, look entirely convincing. The chat show host, delivering her verdict of sadness about the whole horrible fiasco, is note-perfect; The Condemned is incredibly media-savvy, so self-aware it hurts. The acting - given that this is, after all, a WWE movie! - is of a consistently high standard, though Rick Hoffman is worthy of particular mention. He's the highlight of anything he appears in, and here he plays against type as a neurotic, ultimately soft-hearted and conscience-ridden nerd. He's completely believable and might actually be more sympathetic than Conrad's mostly pointless woman-back-home.

Everything, right down to the lively photography and well-chosen soundtrack, comes together seamlessly in this movie. Its obvious agenda will rub some people the wrong way, but somehow, I don't think the WWE is going to feel the least bit remorseful about that.

IMDB link

Planet Terror (2007)

2007-11-12T09:14:00.000-08:00

Planet Terror is better than Death Proof. That needs to be said, though it would mean more if Death Proof weren't shit. Planet Terror is the much more enjoyable half of Grindhouse, although bizarrely it's also the less coherent half - and that's no mean feat. The meagre plot wanders all over the place, vital scenes are (deliberately) missing, and the characters are mostly as developed and nuanced as cardboard cut-outs; in terms of narrative, structure, and general ability to hold together, Planet Terror is a hopeless mess. But at least it's not boring.

The thing about Planet Terror, though, is that the original idea for the Grindhouse double bill - to use expensive digital effects in an attempt to recreate some of the atmosphere of the exploitation movies of years gone by - is horribly flawed. It's a joke. And it's a one-dimensional joke that's really only funny to the two filmmakers who came up with it. Planet Terror and Death Proof are really just attempts by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to out-wank one another - to use more clichés and in-jokes than the other, to show off their extensive knowledge of the less respectable genre films in existence, to amuse themselves onscreen. And while an intentionally bad movie isn't quite the same thing as an unintentionally bad movie, it still isn't anything like a good movie.

What makes it all so, so much worse is that both Death Proof and Planet Terror had potential. Each of them could have been made into a decent action/horror movie if they'd only been played straight: the first half of Death Proof is great, and should have been restructured into a real movie, while Planet Terror was littered with brilliant ideas and excellent moments that couldn't really stand up after all the shit that was piled on top of them. Neither Tarantino nor Rodriguez is really a bad director. It's just that instead of applying their talents with any seriousness, they've reached a point in their careers where they can release movies that are nothing more than pointless chunks of self-indulgence and expect to get away with it.

Hasn't really worked, though, has it? Grindhouse flopped in America; the re-edited Death Proof flopped in the UK; and the re-edited Planet Terror has had such a low-key release you'd have to be actively looking to know it was out at all. Originally, each movie was around 90 minutes long, which was already too long for a grindhouse/exploitation movie. The re-edited versions are even longer, making them far, far too long for anyone not to notice that the joke has worn very thin indeed. The fake movie trailers that were supposed to be sandwiched between the two movies unfortunately highlight exactly how lacking in content Death Proof and Planet Terror are - they could each have been effectively edited down into 5 minute trailers that would be just as full of cool images as the feature-length versions, and virtually nothing would be lost in the process. Except the admittance fee.

Film students will inevitably have a field day with both movies, and their lack of mainstream appeal will probably only increase the wank value, but as films in their own right - well, it's not even that they fail, is it? It's that they weren't ever trying. And that's just not good enough.

IMDB link

30 Days of Night (2007)

2007-11-12T04:49:00.000-08:00

30 Days of Night is a painfully long, painfully boring film with nothing to offer to any horror fan, or indeed film fan, because we've all seen this a million times before. Sure, it has a brilliant premise - a group of vampires prey upon an isolated Alaskan town which, due to its geographical position, endures 30 days of straight darkness in the winter- but it wastes it. Somewhere with no sunshine whatsoever for a month sounds like a prime location for an all-you-can-eat vampire banquet; the film should also be given points for trying to make vampires into big scary monsters again, instead of faintly effeminate angstmongers. But unfortunately, that's all that's good about it.

Despite the obvious superficial differences, the snowy Alaskan landscape might as well be random woodland. An isolated house is an isolated house, no matter what the weather's like outside the window; the climate isn't relevant to the plot, even though it should have been. The vampires could easily be swapped out for zombies, or cannibalistic rednecks. The idea, brilliant though it was, isn't exploited to its full extent; or, indeed, at all. 30 Days of Night is survival horror, plain and simple. It doesn't deviate from the formula at all, except to throw in some really random deus ex machina ending that makes no sense whatsoever, and to blip through extended periods of time pointlessly with no indication what happened in between. The 30 days of the title might as well be just one night, for all the thought that's gone into pacing this film.

If you've never seen a survival horror movie before, knock yourself out. If you have, there's nothing new here, and the tired old formula isn't even done well enough to be worth sitting through it again.

(Plus, can people please stop casting Melissa George in horror movies? She's so incredibly boring it's like there's a black hole of nothingness right through the middle of the film where a character should be.)

IMDB link

Beowulf (2007)

2007-11-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

Computer generated imagery, or CGI, tends to get a bit of a bad rap. And it's not entirely undeserved, because when it's used badly, it can be very, very bad indeed. But when it's used well, you get something like Sin City, or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, both of which used CGI to create a world totally unlike anything you could create with just sets and a camera. Beowulf takes things one step further.

The entirety of Beowulf has been created using computers. The A-list cast were filmed using motion capture techniques, then digitally rendered and inserted into a completely computer generated environment. The amount of effort that's gone into creating this movie is mindboggling. So it's a pity that it doesn't entirely work.

If you read Beowulf at school and can't really remember the details, or if you've never read the poem at all, it's probably not worth refreshing your memory. The first third of the movie, up until the battle with Grendel, more or less adheres to the poem's version of events, but beyond that, we're into unknown territory. Rather than playing Beowulf as a straightforward hero, he's instead a bit of a boaster, given to flights of fantasy and constantly exaggerating his own stories, much to the amusement of the men. And when Grendel's mother turns out not to be a monstrous old hag, but rather a gold-painted Angelina Jolie who promises him unlimited success and immortality, Beowulf's heroism fails him. And in the end, it's his own hubris that leads to his downfall - in the mould of the traditional tragic hero, really, his own vanity and obsession with building his legend ends up being his undoing.

That's all the plot you're getting, really. The film is built around three main set-pieces, each more stunningly rendered than the next - and if you're watching it in 3D at an IMAX cinema, you'll quickly have to get used to making your eyes really work for it. There's so much going on that it's difficult to take it all in, which is a shame because most of it looks great. There's a slight issue with the eyelines of many of the characters, which tends to make their faces look a bit squashed, or at least makes them seem slightly cross-eyed; although you can make out the pores in the characters' skin and see every individual hair in the men's beards, there's something still slightly off about them, something that undermines the illusion that you're watching real people. Not that that stops several of the actors looking like, well, themselves, though: Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie, particularly, could almost, but not quite, really be there on screen.

The problem is mostly to do with the tone of the movie. It swings wildly between dark and serious (the massacre in the mead hall, for example) to wacky slapstick (Beowulf's naked battle with the monster) and though a lot of the jokes hit their mark, sometimes it's hard to be sure if you're supposed to be laughing or not. That kind of uncertainty permeates the movie - the animation makes it look almost like a children's film, though all the violence and nudity kind of negates that; the comedy undermines much of the epic nature of the story, but it's not played straight nor for laughs, really. Neil Gaiman commented that it was originally imagined as a low budget, Terry Gilliam-esque movie, and the script bears that out, except that the visual style doesn't really mesh with that sort of writing.

It's hard to decide what I thought of this movie. I can't decide if I like the changes that were made to the segment dealing with Grendel's mother, because it doesn't quite seem to make sense (what does she do for all those decades between seducing one king and the next, anyway?) and because it makes Beowulf into a very, very flawed man, rather than a hero. Some of the historically accurate touches are handled very nicely, only to be contradicted by an enormous anachronism in the next scene; considering this is essentially fantasy, that shouldn't matter, but somehow, the fact that some nods to reality were given makes it confusing. I can't persuade myself to like the rewrite of the final battle, and Beowulf's attitude to the women in his life, which matches the attitudes in the original text, somehow jars because the film is very obviously a modern (if not postmodern) take on the story.

That image of a naked Angelina Jolie emerging from the water dripping gold liquid kind of sums up the whole film. It's Angelina Jolie naked, except it isn't really. It's neither one thing or another, and something doesn't quite add up. Looks pretty, though.

IMDB link

Beowulf: interview with Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary

2007-11-10T03:00:00.001-08:00

These two don't really need much of an introduction, do they? Didn't think so...

You started writing this movie 10 years ago now…

Gaiman: 10 and a half! May 1997.

So what made you think: hmmm, Beowulf, that'd make a good movie...
Gaiman: I can't remember running into the story and not thinking it would make a good movie. I first ran into Beowulf in a comic called Look and Learn, and I was a 7-year-old, and I remember thinking "that looks cool." And later I found a copy of the Penguin translation and read it and – it was monster-fighting! It was dragon-baiting! It was absolutely Tolkien-esque and amazing!

Avary: I was taught Beowulf in high school. I was given the book and I slogged through the text, and as difficult as it was, the first thing I noticed was - guys with swords, monsters, dragons, demons... and as a guy who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons - Excalibur was one of my favourite films - I couldn't believe that a movie at that time hadn't been made from the material.

We had study aids, like the Peter Brook movie of Lord of the Flies, and that was being shown to us when we were studying the Golding novel, but why was there no Beowulf? I couldn't understand it. So I kept sticking with it - you know, this was 25 years ago - and sitting and reading it but there were certain suspicious deficiencies in the text that were really bothering me. Questions about the motivations of the characters; questions about Grendel's motivations in particular. Why does Beowulf emerge from the cave after the fight with the mother with the head of Grendel and not the head of the mother, after battling her for eight days? - which is an awful long time to be battling…

These things were plaguing me, so cut to about 10 years ago in May, I had just walked off the Sandman movie because I had had a disagreement with John Peters, the producer of the film, on whether Dream should be throwing punches and beating up the Corinthian, and I didn't want to be the guy to ruin Sandman, I didn't want to be vilified for the rest of my life. So I walked off the movie after working on it for a year and a half and so I'm sitting at home thinking, "what am I going to do next?" and I started going over my Beowulf notes, and then the phone rang.

Gaiman: And it was me.

As if by magic.

Avary: He was glad that I wasn't going to ruin his baby and he asked me what I was up to and I started explaining to him these theories that I had about Beowulf, all these, what I felt were, some radical ideas that I hadn't seen addressed in academia, in all the books that I had read on the subject, and Neil said, "well, Roger, if what you say is true, if this, this and this are true, then so too must this be true..." and he came up with a revelation that was not insignificant at all. It was something that cohesively unified the fractured two halves of the Beowulf epic in a way that made it possible to utilise a traditional three-act structure for a movie. And so with that, I jumped up and I said, "when are you available?"

Gaiman: And I was available in May, so we went off and wrote it.

Avary: We flew down to Mexico…

Gaiman: And did two weeks of mad writing.

When you originally wrote the movie, how were you envisioning it? As an animated feature, or live-action…
Gaiman: We were thinking live action, something along the lines of Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky. Very, very low budget with a lot of shit thrown everywhere.

Avary: A very dirty film. That's one thing Gilliam does so well, he shows the medieval times as they likely were.

Gaiman: And that was really the plan.

Avary: But for one reason or another, the movie never actually came together. I mean, I had only done a small movie, Killing Zoe, that cost like $1.4 million to make and we were looking - even for a small Gilliam-esque type live action film - we were looking for $20-30 million and it was just not possible, so the project eventually kind of died on the vine. The option reverted back to us at a certain point, and I just figured I would do it in the future. And I went off and did Rules of Attraction and Neil went off and wrote several books, and one day the phone rang and it was Zemeckis and Company calling and he was impressed with our script and our specific take on it and these ideas that we had come up with, and simply had to make the movie himself.

He wanted to direct it himself, and he started to explain to us what he was going to be able to do, and how far digitally enhanced live-action, the process, had come, and how he was going to be able to make the movie in 3D, and in IMAX, and how it was going to be able to reach the entire world, and, you know, it would be seen in schools by people. And so we made the movie.

That must have given you a licence to add in all sorts of things that you couldn't previously have done…

Avary: Sure! Because originally when I was going to direct it, it was a much more talky ending, I think. We had all sorts of dialogue.

Gaiman: Also, we had all sorts of long conversations between the dragon and Beowulf…

[Neil Gaiman's phone rings - his ringtone is the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - he apologises, and the PR wraps things up. Bah, and indeed humbug.]

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Beowulf: interview with Steve Starkey, producer

2007-11-10T03:00:00.000-08:00

Even if you don't recognise his name, you'll know plenty of the movies Steve Starkey has produced - Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future Part II and Part III, Forrest Gump, Cast Away ... and now, Beowulf. I caught up with him at the Dorchester Hotel this week to talk about motion capture and working with Robert Zemeckis...

How did you first get involved in Beowulf?

Well, I’ve worked with Bob Zemeckis for the last 20 years, and our company - Jack Rapke, Bob Zemeckis and I - acquired the screenplay for Beowulf that Roger and Neil wrote and we’ve been trying to make it into a movie these last ten years. Finally, Bob was making Polar Express and realised the potential of performance capture and decided to move ahead and make the movie. It gave him the ability of realising the characters that he saw, and, at the same time, getting the great actors to bring the characters to life.

Will Robert Zemeckis be predominantly using this technique in future, then? You’re making A Christmas Carol next, will that also be done using the motion capture technology?

You know, Bob’s committed himself to this art form and to seeing where it can go. As a director I think he likes the idea that he’s able to separate the performance, which is working with his actors, and not have to worry about, "well, is the camera right? Did they get the wardrobe, and the makeup right - is there a boom in the shot?" All that stuff goes away and he can just get the performance. Then he gets to go and do the perfect camera move later. So, I think, as a director, there’s less compromise. You know, he really gets the image and he gets the performance that he’s looking for all in one. So I think that’s why he loves the art form.

That form of filmmaking must throw up some different challenges and difficulties than traditional filmmaking, though?

The biggest challenge in making a movie of this style is that you can do anything, but the bad news is that you can do anything. So what that means is that, you know, you don’t go on a location scout and find the perfect mead hall, and then go shoot your movie there - every detail in the mead hall has to be constructed and designed in the computer. So if you see a sky, you see a sunset, or you see the lighting in a certain way, it’s not like, you know, there’s a gaffer and everybody shows up and it’s perfectly lit and you shoot it and you’re done. You have to light every scene. All the detail that you see like this, it all came from some artistic vision. And it had to be depicted in the film. So that is a hard unseen aspect of making a movie this way, it’s all a part of the vision of some filmmaker, or a group of artists.

How did you get all the cast together? It’s really an all-star cast...

Casting on a Bob Zemeckis film becomes a much simpler process because a lot of people want to work with him. But even with Monster House, with Gil Kenan, we got everybody that we wanted to work on the film.

Bob just usually starts with “so, in a perfect world,” - those are the words he uses - “in a perfect world, if I were going to have King Hrothgar, I think it would be Anthony Hopkins. Well, let’s call him and see if he wants to do it, send him the script!” You go down the list and each of your favourite actors, you know, for each part, said, "yeah, okay, when do we start?" And usually there can be some kind of scheduling conflicts that might prevent actors from coming in and doing a role, but the beauty of this process is that there’s no sets and there’s no facial hair, so it’s not like “oh my God, if I’m doing that movie I can’t grow a beard because I have to cut it for that one.” You just come and act any day you’re available. So with Angelina, I could just say, "look, Angelina, here’s a four month block, just pick the best four or five days in your life and we will make it work for you." Right away, that amount of flexibility that opens up the possibility for someone like her to say, "you know what, I think I would like to go and play that character, and now it’s possible in my life schedule."

Robert Zemeckis is known for being experimental – what’s it like to work with him?

It seems like when Bob makes movies he’s exploring a lot of different things, but he’s usually looking for a new type of story to tell, and also a new form of filmmaking. Like the making of [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit, that was the challenge of bringing a cartoon character to life in the real world. In this particular case, it was advancing this new form of cinema. It’s made it possible for him to make movies that he otherwise didn’t think that he could make. It’s almost like the chicken and the egg – is it Bob’s idea that’s driving the new technology, or is it the technology that’s catching up with his ideas? But I think that since he pioneers so many types of technologies and explores new styles of film that they’re both kind of working hand in hand with one another. It keeps you young, working with a filmmaker like Bob Zemeckis.

Originally published at Den of Geek.

Lie Still (2005)

2007-11-07T04:09:00.000-08:00

When was the last time you watched a film that really scared you? I mean, really, really scared you – to the point where you had to go and double check that the front door really was locked, and that there really wasn’t anyone hiding under the bed or inside the wardrobe? I’m betting it was a while ago. Lately, horror movies seem to either be laughably stupid, or just gross, packed with torture as if buckets of gore and a liberal dose of misogyny could make up for the lack of scriptwriting talent. With the very, very rare exception – The Descent, for example, was terrifying – fear has been a rare commodity in horror movies. So Lie Still (or The Haunting of #24, as the DVD was re-titled for America) is a real shock to the system.

Unsettling from the very outset, the film carefully layers on tension over generous dollops of creepiness - and then chucks in some more tension and creepiness for good measure - until you're too scared to go to bed. Or to the bathroom. Or to turn out the lights.

It's brilliant.

Granted, haunted house stories aren’t anything new, but it’s been a long time since the trope has been used to any great effect. Usually, you just get slapped with a standard-issue soggy dead girl story. There’s none of that here. Without giving too much away, the plot follows John - unemployed, newly single, and desperately low on cash – as he reluctantly moves into a run-down bedsit as a temporary measure while he sorts his life out. Unfortunately, his new neighbours are about as undesirable as you can get, and the landlord - well, there's just something a bit off about him. (I can't put my finger on it, but I think it's the curly hair.) Before long, John is being thoroughly terrorised - and, worse, starting to lose his grip on reality...

Saying much more would give too much away and lessen the impact of the film for anyone who might want to watch it. And while I don't mind ruining rubbish films, spoiling something like this would just be cruel. Suffice it to say, there are moments that recall M. R. James, The Shining, and Kairo, amongst other things. The big scares work; the smaller ones, the subtle background touches, work even better. And everything looks fantastic. Ambitious camera shots and weird angles are pulled off so effectively that they look easy; the cinematography is accomplished, every shot set up and framed perfectly. The house is great, too; properly scary-looking, with dark walls and endless corridors, and the villain of the piece is perfectly cast. Most low budget productions, particularly British ones, are damaged by sub-par actors – thankfully, that’s not the case here. While there’s no-one hugely famous on the credits, the two leads are recognisable from real TV programmes, and the acting is uniformly great.

Even the soundtrack is bang-on, quietly and unobtrusively racking up the eeriness in all the right places. The only criticism I can possibly bring myself to make is that it possibly goes on a tiny fraction of a smidgen too long; it’s possible the impact of the ending would have been greater if the credits had abruptly rolled at the very climax of the story, without the neatly rounded-off scene that follows. (I’d be tempted to bump the scene where another new tenant moves into the fateful house to a post-credits scene, but that’s just me.)

If you thought 1408 was a let-down - and let's face it, it was - then track this down instead. You won't be disappointed.

IMDB link

BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007)

2007-10-31T04:34:00.001-07:00

The first BloodRayne movie had lots of blood and gore, a moderate amount of sex, and several big name stars including Ben Kingsley, Billy Zane, Michelle Rodriguez, and Michael Madsen. The second BloodRayne movies has virtually no blood or gore, no sex whatsoever, and a cast only a die-hard Uwe Boll fan could love.* The biggest name on the cast list is probably Jodelle Ferland (who single-handedly saved Tideland from being a complete waste of time). Basically, everything that made BloodRayne fun has been stripped out and replaced with, er, nothing.

The sad thing is that it really should have been awesome. It's about cowboy vampires in the Wild West - how could that not be awesome? Well, the first problem is that it was filmed in Vancouver, in the middle of winter. In almost all of the scenes, there's either snow on the ground or rain falling. Early on in the movie, the inclement weather is mentioned by one of the characters, but that doesn't quite excuse it; a Wild West movie pretty much demands a hot, dusty backdrop, and muddy Vancouver just doesn't quite work. It's also clearly very, very cold; you can almost always see the actors' breath on the air, even in some of the indoor shots. It looks really unpleasant, and distinctly uncomfortable. Couple that with the fact that the crew had just finished filming Seed and Postal back to back, and I'm guessing you don't end up with the most enthusiastic set in the world. I'm tempted to attribute the failure of the film entirely to tiredness and bad weather, but there's an even bigger problem than that. The script sucks.

For a change, it doesn't suck because it's incoherent. Actually, it's fairly straightforward: Billy the Kid wants to take over America, and he's waiting for a railway to be built to give him better access to more remote parts of the country. While he's waiting, he's enslaved the town of Deliverance by kidnapping all the children, forcing their parents to comply with his wishes. Rayne rolls into town and fights him. Job done. But there are some very odd choices made along the way which, somehow, take all the fun out of it.

See, for some reason, Billy the Kid isn't actually a cowboy. He's rubbish at gunfights, and ... he's from Transylvania. And that's never explained, it's just Zack Ward doing an accent. And standing around a lot, and never really doing anything that would make him genuinely scary. Usually, Zack Ward is good value in a movie, and he's actually the highlight of BloodRayne 2, but he's just not given enough to do. It needed to be better established that he's the Big Bad here; he needed to be given a threatening presence. But he wasn't. And if your villain's not scary, then it's really not very impressive when your hero overcomes him.

Which brings me to my next criticism: Natassia Malthe. Yes, she's very pretty. No, she can't act. She does a good line in rolling her eyes like a crazy person, but that's about it. Also, her corset doesn't fit properly, which takes away from the sexy somewhat. The complete and utter lack of action in the movie hurts Rayne's character, too, because she just doesn't do anything. No-one does anything. There are a whole bunch of random people walking around, and virtually none of them do anything, at any point. Chris Coppola's sole purpose in this movie seems to have been to stand in the background with his mouth open.

I hate that I didn't like this movie. Despite knowing about the circumstances surrounding its creation, I was still hopeful, because I love watching Zack Ward and I love Uwe Boll. But this ... was just boring. It needed more action, it needed more gore, and it needed scriptwriters who'd actually written a full-length movie (or at least watched some) before. It also, I think, needed to be filmed in summer. And maybe some bullet-time effects thrown in for good measure; it desperately needs to be livened up, one way or another.

Roll on Dungeon Siege, that's all I can say.

IMDB link

* I'm not the only one who gets excited when the credits include Michael Eklund, Tyron Leitso, and Zack Ward, right? Right?

Paradise Lost (2006)

2007-10-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

Paradise Lost was originally titled Turistas, and I have to say, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the retitling was. It seems a bit misguided to me - for one thing, how many people who want to watch derivative horror movies are familiar with Milton? And for another, nice work, marketing guys, you just made your movie way, way less Google-friendly. A quick search for Turistas brought up the IMDB page for the movie first, and the rest of the first ten results were also connected to the film. Try that with "Paradise Lost", though, and you get the full text of Milton's epic poem, courtesy of Google Books, then a site about a 'dark rock band' called Paradise Lost. Nothing related to the movie shows up till the second page; it's the 14th result.

So, not smart. Then again, neither is the movie.

Packaged variously as an American Pie-style sex comedy or a Hostel-wannabe torture movie, Paradise Lost falls down the (vast, gaping) crack between the two. The first two-thirds of the film are spent introducing a group of largely forgettable young people who've managed to get themselves very lost in Brazil. When their bus breaks down and they're told there won't be another one for at least 10 hours, things are looking pretty dire ... until they discover there's a bar and a beach not far away, and decide to enjoy themselves.

So far, so good. Filmed on location in Brazil, the movie does at least look good. The location is absolutely stunning, and there are some nice set-pieces; the underwater caves are a particularly inventive touch. But it's not long before everything goes wrong, both for the characters and for the film itself. Seems the over-friendly locals are actually involved in the black-market organs trade, and our gormless protagonists have just walked straight into their trap. Cue running, hiding, and gore.

Actually, to give it its due, Paradise Lost isn't a torture movie. There's really only one scene with gore, and the victim seems to have been pumped full of painkillers, which makes a nice change. But the whole thing seems to lack any kind of purpose. The characters are paper-thin, defined mostly by their nationality; both heroes and villains are only really distinguishable by their accents. The good guys are from America, England and Australia; the bad guys are from South America. The good guys speak English; the bad guys don't. The only two locals who aren't evil are the ones who speak English. While, on the one hand, I want to applaud the fact that when the bad guys are speaking amongst themselves, they use Portugese, rather than the heavily accented English most bad movies go for, I'm also not comfortable with the Anglophone/non-Anglophone good/evil line that the film has drawn. It doesn't help matters that there's a sliding scale of evil in the film that seems to be based on the amount of melanin in a character's skin, either.

Paradise Lost is, essentially, a waste of time. It's pretty, but it's also stupid, and there's a worrying amount of xenophobia bubbling away beneath the surface.

IMDB link

Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007)

2007-10-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

The sequel to a remake no-one ever wanted to see, Return to House on Haunted Hill delivers exactly what you'd expect: unrelenting shit. Almost everything that's wrong with modern horror movies is crammed into this film; the only box on the List of Crap it didn't tick was the "torture porn" one, thankfully. But everything else - incoherent script, bad dialogue, quick cutting, girls with long wet hair, no characterisation whatsoever, and way, way, way too much CGI - that's all there. In abundance.

The only survivor from 1999's House on Haunted Hill was Sara Wolfe, played by Ali Larter. Larter's career prospects have improved somewhat since then, so for the sequel, her character is bumped off and her sister - a successful fashion magazine editor, not that that has anything to do with anything in the movie - is drafted in, instead. See, it turns out that the fact that the house used to be an insane asylum where the inmates were tortured before they were all killed wasn't enough to create the ghosts: there's something else in there, too. That something else is an evil McGuffin - a Baphomet idol, worshipped by, er, someone or other. (Clearly, the writers of the film didn't have access to Wikipedia when they wrote that bit, or they might have picked another deity.)

The evil McGuffin is worth millions of dollars in certain circles, so an obsessive university professor is trying to find it, as are a group of thugs, and everyone's backstabbing everyone else in what I can only assume is a failed attempt to emulate the convoluted interpersonal politics of the first movie. Basically, there's a lot of really complicated manoeuvring which only serves to get a group of people into the titular house so that they can get killed off; although all sorts of relationships between characters are set up, the characters are so badly drawn that it kind of doesn't matter and becomes just meaningless noise. (Unfortunately, the line about "they say people who believe in ghosts should be on Prozac" stuck with me, because, um, I kind of get what the writer was going for, implying that people who believe in ghosts are mentally ill, but Prozac is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It's an anti-depressant. Is seeing ghosts a symptom of depression, now?)

There's another wrinkle to the problem of poorly defined characters, too, in that several of the actors look the same. The two female characters are dressed alike to begin with, and then fail to have any further distinguishing characteristics as the film progresses; the thugs all look the same, even though one of them is supposedly a minor celebrity within the world of the movie; and there are two lank-haired skinny boys running about. When each lanky boy gets paired with a bald thug and the group splits up, it's quite hard to keep track of which one is which, and when the killing starts, there's a moment where it actually looks as though one group is reacting to their own death in another part of the house. Giving the characters some personality might have helped clarify this. Alternatively, they could have cast some less generic-looking actors.

I'd noticed that the box art looked weirdly minimalist when I first looked at it, until I realised there weren't any actors' names mentioned. The only person worth mentioning, really, is Jeffrey Combs, but it isn't worth sitting through this to see him. He's playing Dr Vannacutt, again, just like in the first movie, but really it could have been anyone underneath the moustache and lab coat. The doctor just blips onscreen, makes a bizarre facial expression that makes him look like a cross between Bruce Campbell and Ben Stiller, and then blips off again. He has no dialogue, and no presence whatsoever. He's not even slightly baleful.

As far as the body count goes... well, it's pretty high, I think. The aforementioned problem with not being able to tell people apart makes counting problematic, but there's a lot of splatter. It's just that it's all so poorly executed. Anatomy just doesn't work like that. It's all so far-fetched (particularly when people die of things that just wouldn't kill you) that it wouldn't be scary even if you cared about the characters, but you don't. The set ups aren't clever enough; they basically consist of characters wandering off by themselves into darkened rooms, a few ghost blips, and then a daft, splattery death. Half the time, it's a daft, splattery CGI death, possibly done on a ZX Spectrum. Combined with the complete ignorance of anatomy on display, the cheap CGI just makes the death scenes even more pathetic.

And I know I've mentioned them a few times already, but the ghosts in this movie are awful. Dreadful, really. The first movie was stylish; this one looks like the director saw The Grudge and Silent Hill a few too many times. Every new creature that pops up looks like you've seen it before, except that this is the Hyper Value Halloween costume version of it. There is no originality here, and no intelligence. Apparently, the high definition versions of the film (I don't want to think about how bad the effects will look in high definition, considering how laughable they were in standard definition) will include the kind of choose-your-own-adventure options that the Final Destination 3 DVD offered. Usually, that's the kind of feature I'd lap right up, but even with four alternate endings, I can't think of any way this film could be improved, bar scrapping the whole lot and starting again. It's a lost cause.

Honestly, I'd recommend you watch Flesh for the Beast instead of this.

IMDB link

50 Reasons I Love House of the Dead

2007-10-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

Because I really, really, really love House of the Dead.

I know. You're looking at the title of the site, you're looking at the IMDB score for House of the Dead, and you're thinking "but isn't that an Uwe Boll movie? She can't be serious, surely?"

But I am. I really love this movie. I like most of Uwe Boll's films, actually, but this was the first one I saw. At the cinema. Twice. So it has a special place in my heart. Plus, it's awesome.

If you know me, you might be experiencing some vague déjà vu here. That's because I first published this list on a personal blog in September 2006, but I thought it was worth dusting off and bringing out to play again. So let's get to the reasons:

1. The acting in the movie is only marginally better than the acting in the game of the same title. I would wager most of the voice actors for the game did not actually speak English. And yet I have still slightly obsessively followed the careers of most of them. (Especially Will Sanderson. Who kicks ass!)

2. The whole movie is littered with in-jokes, usually Star Trek related. Jurgen Prochnow's hat, the name of the boat, and the pile of Zombie Flesh Eaters references are all great.

3."I don't like no Captain Kirk jokes."

4. Clint Howard over-acts for the entire movie.

5. He also tries to embody an in-joke. See: his yellow raincoat, his hook-for-a-hand fake out.

6. The rave on the island that gets destroyed by attacking zombies was at 5pm. In broad daylight.

7. The rave appears to have been sponsored by Sega.

8. They actually filmed a lot more of the rave, and the subsequent massacre, but it's all been cut. I love the dedication involved in that.

9. "It's like something out of a Romero movie. You know, the holy trilogy: Night, Dawn, and Day. They say he's going to make Twilight of the Dead someday, but I kinda doubt it."

10. The characters all have completely ridiculous names: Captain Kirk, Casper, McGivers, Liberty, Karma, etc.

11. Casper's pistol is far more effective at killing zombies than her BFG.

12. The character of Simon was originally written as a slightly older guy, who was financially successful. That's why he was able to hand over so much money to Captain Kirk to persuade him to take them to the island. However, somewhere along the line it was decided they needed a "name", a familiar face -- Tyron Leitso was starring in Dinotopia, so they roped him in. Without bothering to change the script, or anything.

13. All character development was cut down to two minutes of Rudy explaining who everyone is.

14. Greg's girlfriend is referred to as "pure eye candy." Even though, er, no. She's just not.

15. Greg gets seasick on the boat. Instead of turning around to vomit into the sea, he vomits on his girlfriend.

16. Who promptly goes below deck and strips off, resulting in gratuitous breasts.

17. [Salish offers a crucifix] "For your protection." "It's okay, I'm on the pill."

18. The shoot-out is the worst misappropriation of bullet time, ever. It's also visibly done cheaply -- and with equipment so dangerous it's now illegal to use it. The whole sequence is also one big continuity error.

19. Way, way too much effort went into designing the zombies. There are new, fresh zombies who can still run about; there are old ones who presumably came over on the boat with Castillo; there are moss zombies; there's pretty much everything apart from the annoying little flying guy, the worms and the frogs from the games.

20. Actual footage from the game is used as screenwipes, or sometimes just cut into scenes at random.

21. None of the actors playing zombies bother to pretend they're zombies. They just run about. Sometimes, extras in the background just stand around looking bored.

22. A zombie on the boat is visibly grinning insanely. This is how excited I would be, if I was in a zombie movie. Actually, it's about as excited as I was when I was in an Uwe Boll movie.

23. There's a huge set-up for Liberty to get killed quite early on, except, subversively, she doesn't. Only, erm, she originally was supposed to, but everyone liked Kira Clavell so much they kept her around a bit longer. Without bothering to change, or cut, the big lead up to her death, which now has no pay off.

24. Mark Altman, the scriptwriter, uses his commentary on the DVD to rant about how much his story got fucked up.

25. Uwe Boll describes Rudy and Alicia's longing looks thus: "This is my Gone with the Wind moment."

26. When Greg's being chased through the woods by zombies, you can very, very clearly see the springboards they're using to jump on.

27. All zombies grab trees to introduce themselves.

28. In spite of the fact that they're all nobodies, the actors seem to have had far too much input into the film. (See: Jonathan "Final Destination 2" Cherry refusing to have any funny lines because he's sick of playing comic relief; the rubbish "our best friend just died!" scene.)

29. None of the actors involved with this movie appear to have done anything afterwards.

30. Except Will Sanderson, who continues to be in every movie Uwe Boll makes.

31. And Ona Grauer, who's in Alone in the Dark.

32. And, er, Tyron Leitso, who's in Wonderfalls.

33. Ellie Cornell is in the sequel. Even though her character doesn't survive this one. Did I mention I'm a bit obsessive about following the careers of the actors in this movie?

34. Uwe Boll on why he keeps casting Will Sanderson in his movies: "He needs the money."

35. Will Sanderson does an awesome impression of Uwe Boll on the commentary. (Which isn't on the R2 DVD, by the way.) The box also claims it's a commentary with Jonathan Cherry. It's not.

36. There are lots, and lots, and lots of candles in the house. Apparently, the zombies lit them, because there's no-one else there. There's also what appears to be an electric lamp.

37. The house blows up. I love explosions.

38. The front door to the house blows up twice.

39. When they blew up the eponymous house, Uwe Boll got all his friends round to watch the explosion. The cast members went home to bed.

40. Time on the island has no bearing on real time. It's completely arbitrary whether it's light or dark at any given time.

41. Jonathan Cherry injured his hand. A scene was inserted to explain why his hands were covered up -- except he was already wearing leather gloves in the movie prior to that moment.

42. None of the sets look even remotely realistic. Everything was clearly built for the movie. Out of cardboard.

43. In the middle of the big fight scene, Rudy has a flashback to everything that's happened so far. Even though the whole film is actually Rudy's flashback to everything that happened on the island.

44. During the flashback, there're the infamous 11,000 cuts in 13 minutes. It's one of Uwe Boll's reasons why he's a better filmmaker than anyone else -- well, you don't see Tarantino using that many cuts, do you?

45. When the first two characters die, they get a spinning shot that fades to red. Sadly, there's no "game over" text, but there really should be. After that, they don't bother to mark character deaths.

46. "Isn't it nice to know someone wants you for your body?" "Yeah. Depending on what they want."

47. Alicia is about the only girl not to get her tits out. Mostly because Ona Grauer had just given birth, and was lactating.

48. Alicia is actually rational at the beginning of the movie, reasoning that the zombie attack must have been "some kind of stunt." She doesn't play Scully for long: "These are zombies, pure and simple!" By the time they're actually in the house, she's totally playing the horror movie game. See: "This book looks old. Maybe it can help us!"

49. Castillo's whole backstory, explaining why he's so obsessed with Alicia, is completely cut. It exists, though, which is what matters.

50. "Why do you want to be immortal?" "To live... forever."

... Not convinced, are you?

IMDB link

The Hamiltons (2006)

2007-10-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

What has Lionsgate done with its mojo? And has it checked down the back of the sofa? Seriously, there was a time when Lionsgate's marketing just worked. Whatever you think of the Saw movies, you've got to admit that their posters are powerful and distinctive; the posters for both Hostel movies were pretty damned impressive, too. But both of those franchises delivered on the promises made by their marketing. But now every horror movie Lionsgate puts out seems to get the same treatment - see Blood Trails, Paradise Lost, Snuff Movie, and The Hamiltons. It's like someone at Lionsgate HQ has a formula they're sticking rigidly to - a certain quantity of blood, and certain quantity of grime, and a certain amount of implied torture.

And in fairness, it was working, for a while. Torture movies, at least until very, very recently, were selling like hot cakes; cashing in may not have been a noble or admirable thing to do, but it was certainly understandable. What's not quite so understandable, though, is slapping one of those formulaic covers on a movie that doesn't fit the mould. Sure, you might shift a few copies to the dedicated gore hounds, but what's the point? They won't enjoy it, they won't recommend it, and anyone who might actually have enjoyed the film won't pick it up because of the cover. Not smart.

That was quite a lot of blather to just convey how horrendously mismarketed this movie is. Thing is, I don't want to talk about the plot at all, because it'll give too much away. So I'll just talk around it.

The Hamiltons is a low budget movie. It's shot on video; the lighting, particularly, highlights the fact that this isn't a slick and polished production. There's a bit of silly messing around with pretend camcorder footage, which is really just the same footage with a frame around it. And the acting ... really isn't great. But the script is clever - subtle enough that I didn't figure it out, sensible enough that everything fitted easily together once the ending had been given away - and though the special effects have clearly been done on a shoestring, they're not particularly ambitious and so the no-frills approach is perfectly adequate. At 84 minutes, there's no time to mess around; just a neat little horror story. It's even, dare I say it, pretty original and refreshing to see a low budget movie that understands its limits and works with them this well. (Hint: it's all in the writing, guys.)

It's just that I'm finding it really hard to get past that box art. It's like buying caramel Snack-a-Jacks instead of cheese ones*, because the packaging is a similar colour - it's not that you don't like the product you got, it's just that it wasn't what you thought you were getting. In the case of The Hamiltons, the product actually far exceeded my expectations, it's just that they were so far of the mark, and it's all because of that stupid, stupid cover.

The movie is definitely worth watching. Just chuck the box away, first.

And maybe jump up and down on it a couple of times for good measure.

IMDB link

* Why, yes, I have done this recently.

Snuff Movie (2005)

2007-10-21T01:25:00.000-07:00

Snuff Movie is yet another on a rapidly growing list of movies that contains a good idea at its core, but somewhere along the way forgets all about it to become a huge pile of incomprehensible drivel instead. Trying too hard to be post-post-post-modern, Snuff Movie forgoes any semblance of sense or logic -- even before all the nonsensical twists kick in -- and so it's just dross.

The film revolves around a reclusive film director who's come out of retirement to make a new movie. He was driven out of the movie business when some obsessed fans murdered his wife in an effort to recreate a scene from one of his films, but now, for whatever reason, he's back. Only in the intervening years, he's gone a bit loopy. So he invites several fame-hungry, but not very good, actors to his house to audition overnight, with the caveat that they stay in character the whole time. However, it soon emerges that the film he's making is about his wife's murder, in an almost neat art-imitates-life-imitates-art circle, and some of the violence is a little too real...

Only, then, it seems, it's not real after all. But then it is. And then it isn't. And then it is. And then there's the requisite nonsense reveal at the end just to really ensure there is no possible interpretation of events that will accommodate all of the evidence (see also: Dead End).

There are so many problems with the film that it's hard to know where to start. There are too many logic holes, for one thing, even before any of the twists - the actors aren't in character the whole time, and the director keeps talking to them out of character anyway. Their characters aren't consistent, and at least two of the cannon-fodder types just don't make sense. They don't have any motivation for acting the way they do. It's pointless trying to figure out which parts are 'acting' and which parts are 'real', because none of it makes sense; they're either playing badly written parts, or ... they're playing badly written parts. And at no point does an actual movie get made.

Because of the bigger, overarching logical flaws in the film, it seems almost daft to try to point out the smaller ones, but some of them include the fact that British police really, really wouldn't be carrying those guns; the boyfriend really wouldn't bother to go to the police station in person before trying to call them first; you'd need a hell of a lot more cameras than they had if you wanted to track a person's eye movements and see what they were seeing; if you had that many cameras, why would you then pick up a handheld and walk around with it?; why is this director so well respected given that the footage we're shown of his best-known film looks like a really shitty Hammer Horror ripoff?; if 'Jack' had been a part of the fake-out and knew everything was done with props for the film, why does he then proceed to do what he does to his girlfriend?; why does his girlfriend do what she does, other than to up the nudity content of the movie?...

It just goes on and on and on and it's really, really not worth it. No thought or intelligence has gone into anything in this movie. There are some quite interesting ideas somewhere deep, deep down, just to make the film really frustrating rather than just stupid, but they're not followed through, they're not taken to their logical conclusions, they're just slapped on film and forgotten about.

And that's what I'm going to do with this movie. Forget it.

Oh, but, finally -- Lionsgate? Please sack the idiot who put that massive spoiler on the menu. There was one really, really nice moment near the beginning that it ruined, and considering how bad the rest of the movie was, I'd've liked to enjoy that one tiny glimmer of cleverness.

IMDB link

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

2007-10-09T04:22:00.000-07:00

Movies based on computer games need a genre all of their own. They're not like anything else. They aren't supposed to be high art, or to create great characters or great stories or anything else - they're supposed to be cheap, fun, and over within 90 minutes.

They're also, it has to be said, pretty self-indulgent. Game movies assume that their audiences have played the games and will recognise the characters' names and locations. They'll use hopeless CGI that looks like PlayStation graphics, give their characters quests and have them pick up daft objects along the way. And if you're an avid gamer, you might feel frustrated at the lack of interactivity; if you've never played a console game in your life, you'll probably be enraged by the lack of logic. But if, like me, you love the idea of computer games but suck horribly at actually playing them, then there's a lot of voyeuristic pleasure that can be got out of watching them.

Resident Evil: Extinction is kind of a silly movie. But then, if you've watched the first two, you wouldn't expect anything else. The indestructible Alice is back, and in fine ass-kicking mode. Carlos Olivera is back, and Code Veronica's Claire Redfield has shown up, in the place of Resident Evil: Apocalypse's Jill Valentine. The three of them head up a convoy of survivors hoping to escape the zombie hordes in a world completely overtaken by the undead. Filmed in a Mexican desert, this looks very much the part of the post-apocalypse movie, right down to the survivors's bizarre post-apocalypse fashion choices.

Because 95 minutes of rusty old trucks ploughing through zombies would have been a bit dull, the Umbrella Corporation is, as usual, up to something nasty - Dr Isaacs, immediately singled out as the evil scientist by his tendency to pronounce the word 'flesh' as 'flessssssh', has been working on a cure for the T-virus. Only, in order to do so, he's been cloning Alice left, right and centre, and his efforts have met with only limited success. Specifically, he's managed to create a Romero-homaging sentient zombie that can use a mobile phone and a digital camera but still wants to eat your brains. He's determined to re-capture the original Project Alice, and so starts unleashing his super-zombies back out into the wild.

Oh, yeah, and there are zombie crows, and someone gets turned into the Tyrant, and the zombie dogs are back for a cameo appearance.

Resident Evil: Extinction is just balls to the wall video game nonsense. There's plenty of blood and gore; plenty of zombies wandering around; and plenty of explosions. There's very little dialogue and virtually no characterisation. But who cares? You will, I admit, need to be feeling fairly affectionate towards the movie to let it get away with some of its antics - the CGI birds and zombies look rubbish at times, not to mention the extreme airbrushing done to Milla Jovovich's face that means her skin changes colour by about three shades between a long shot and a close-up. Everything is very, very silly and the zombies in no way represent a plausible threat. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is that Milla Jovovich is running around, being awesome, shooting zombies, kicking zombies, slicing up zombies with enormous blades, and then standing around looking cool. Things explode. Heads explode. Bullets pass through zombie skulls in slow motion and CGI blood spurts out the other side. And the ending... the ending is preposterous, but at the same time, awesome.

Resident Evil: Extinction knows what it is. It knows who its audience is. And it's out to have fun, safe in the knowledge that as long as Milla keeps kicking things, people will keep buying tickets.