Ninjas vs Vampires (2010)

Ninjas vs Vampires juuust misses greatness by, say, 35 minutes.

I didn’t know anything about it going in and was, to put it mildly, not expecting much; but the movie got on my good side in the very first scene, which was a vampire slaughtering a girl wearing an “I ♥ Edward” t-shirt, and for a while it just went uphill from there.  The main action starts out with…

…Okay, let me see how much of this I can keep straight with almost no cast pictures on IMDB.  I’m so awful with names that I just don’t even try anymore.

Anyway.  The action starts out with the lead guy, who is probably Aaron (Jay Saunders), proposing relationshiphood to his best friend, whose name may or may not be Ann (Melissa McConnell, possibly, but whoever it is has a thankless role that largely consists of pretending to forget what everyone was talking about two seconds before).  The proposition does not go well, so it’s probably just as well that they’re abruptly attacked by the most hilariously scene-chewing vampires since Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  But!  Suddenly they’re saved by ninjas!  Well, sort of ninjas.  It’s two white frat guys, a female vampire who doesn’t drink human blood for some reason, and a witch who looks like her role ought to be just to stand there and remind us of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  But they do martial arts a lot.

Wanting to figure out what’s going on, Aaron winds up hooking up with the sort-of-ninjas just in time to get sucked into some sort of ill-defined war between them and the Vampire Overlord (P.J. Megaw, who manages to recite the most absolutely inane dialogue in a way that… well, okay, it’s still wooden.  But it’s highly glossed and beautifully carved wood, wood that gleams in the lamplight as if to say “Look what an awesome example of the woodcarver’s art I am.”  It is wood with no higher goal than to be the very best wood it can be, and it does a pretty damn fine job).  His sidekick, I swear to God, is like The Vampire Snooki.  I love her.  The whole movie could have been about her and I would have been happy.

Aaron, as I say, hooks up with the ninjas, manages to become a ninja himself through virtue of some unconvincing special effects on the witch’s part, and follows them through a number of ridiculous fight scenes and glorious geek in-jokes until the vampires kill one of the ninjas and kidnap Aaron’s girlfriend, kick-starting the Final Battle.  I don’t know, it’s not one of those movies you can describe.  It has to be experienced.

On most levels the movie succeeds beyond the wildest expectations that could reasonably be attached to its $15,000 budget.  The acting is a sight better than I’ve seen in a lot of movies with ten times the money to blow.  The special effects are less heinous than might be expected.  The jokes are actually funny.  The plot is inane, but if you are expecting deep plot from a movie called Ninjas vs Vampires then I do not know what to tell you.  The real problem is that at a run time of 89 minutes, the movie outstays its welcome.  If it were a 30-minute short then it would be an invaluable gem, partly because there wouldn’t have been time for the obligatory Scenes of Great Pathos which are frankly almost never a good idea in comedy and don’t work here either.  To be honest, I’m not sure why it wasn’t a 30-minute short; it’s not as if it was going to open on four screens in every cineplex in the country.

Despite its mild drag, though, the movie is great fun, and definitely worth a watch if only for the first 30 minutes or so.

So what’s the verdict?  Two stars.  It would have earned another one if half the length and all of the Srs Bizns scenes had been edited out.  Still, I was entertained enough by it that I might try to track down Ninjas vs Zombies, the first film in the franchise, which is sadly on neither Netflix nor Amazon Instant Video.

 

Haunting of Winchester House (2009)

I spent a lot of time looking at this movie in genuine bewilderment and saying, out loud, “Are you serious right now?”  I never got an answer.  I suspect the answer was no.  That suspicion is in fact the only thing saving this movie from the coveted zero-star rating; that and the conviction that everyone involved in the movie had a lot more fun making it than I had watching it. In fact, I was left with many more questions than answers.  Deep, philosophical questions such as:

• Why does Ghostbuster Dude recite all his lines as if he were being badly dubbed over a kung fu movie from 1978?
• Wait.  Why does that ghost know what they’re looking for?
• Is that supposed to be a puppet?  An alien puppet?
• Does Tuberculosis Guy think that boxes become different boxes if you turn them sideways?
• What does any of this have to do with people who were killed by Winchester rifles?
• Why are there teenagers in roles that appear to be written for six-year-olds?
• Does that woman seriously think a cop with a knife through her throat is going to answer questions about where her kid is?
• This looks like someone thinks it’s going to be a twist.  Is it supposed to be a twist?
• Okay, I got the “twist.”  Can you stop explaining it to me now, please?
• How is that greenscreen so bad?  This movie has the worst effects I have seen in I don’t know how long.
• What is that woman even doing right now?  What are they supposed to do, wander around there forever?
• And finally but most pertinently: what in blue hell were the filmmakers trying to do with this?

I fear none of these questions will ever be answered.  That’s okay.  I’m not all that interested in the answers, to tell the truth.

So what’s the verdict?  One star, but I honestly feel a little bad about it.  The goofiness level in this movie is so high that I can’t imagine anyone involved with it took it seriously.  It didn’t even insult my intelligence; it just sort of… refused to engage with my intelligence. It’s like this movie exists in a happy little world where intelligence does not exist, nor things like coherent plots and well-done CGI, and the worst thing ghosts ever do is wander around in bad rubber masks going “RARR!” half-heartedly at you from across the room.  I feel sort of bad for introducing criticism into that good-natured, inoffensive place.

On the other hand, this is a really damn terrible movie.  If you’re in the mood for something like this, dig up that old Disney movie, Child of Glass.  I loved that shit when I was a kid.

Insidious (2010)

I loved Insidious, but man, does that movie ride on a catastrophe curve.  I can easily imagine circumstances under which it would really have pissed me off.  Without giving too much in the way of spoilers, the third act takes a pretty sharp left turn from the ghost-story genre to something closer to the dark-fantasy genre, and also switches POV characters. If you’re willing to take that left turn along with it, you’ll probably love the movie too, or at least not hate it.  If you’re not, Insidious will leave you in the dust with no real resolution to the great ghost story you were watching, and you’ll probably be pretty annoyed.

In a lot of ways the film feels like watching a sort of updated re-envisioning of Poltergeist with younger kids and creepier ghosts.  Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) and their three kids are the suburban Everyfamily, just moved into a new house; Josh is a high school teacher and Renai is a songwriter.  (Apparently a successful one, because no way did they afford that house on a high school teacher’s salary.  Five high school teachers living in sin with a Maserati salesman could not afford that house.)  I liked the Lamberts – they’re immediately engaging and have enough chemistry with each other that they feel like a real family.  And man, could I ever relate to Renai’s battles with voice-driven menu systems on customer service lines.  Those things hate me too, Renai.

Then the oldest boy, Dalton, falls off a ladder in the attic and whacks his head.  He seems fine, but in the morning he won’t wake up, despite the inability of doctors to figure out what’s wrong with him.  And then creepy things start happening in earnest, and man, are they creepy. I can’t even really describe them without spoiling them, but there are not just jump scares but some terrifically scary set pieces.  Eventually it reaches a point where the Lamberts are so freaked out that they do what I swear no horror-movie family has done before or since: they move out of the damn house.

Unfortunately for them, the creepy happenings just follow them.

Almost everything in Insidious just plain works.  The effects are good.  The sound work is amazing.  The scares are scary.  The soundtrack cost me a lot of money when I had to go buy Ludovico Einaudi’s entire collected works.  The Lamberts are sympathetic and convincing.  Barbara Hershey is amazing in the unexpectedly important role of Josh’s mother, and Lin Shaye brings a presence to the Obligatory Quirky Psychic role that somehow manages to minimize the role’s resemblance to Tangina in Poltergeist.  There’s a plot point reveal scene involving Josh looking through photos from his childhood that is genuinely one of the creepiest moments I’ve seen in a movie.

Unfortunately, what does not work – and it really does not work – is the main villain.  I, too, loved Darth Maul.  I just don’t know that I’d put a tribute character in the central bad-guy role of a movie in a completely different genre.  I’m just saying.

Still, the rest of Insidious works well enough to overcome even that not inconsiderable handicap.  And when your movie is working well enough to get people past not only the déjà vu caused by the resemblance to Poltergeist but also that moment of “What the hell is Darth Maul doing in this movie?” then overall you’re probably doing a whole lot of things very right.

So what’s the verdict?  Four stars.  I might even have given it five, but I felt like something really needed to be deducted for the Darth Maul misstep and the abrupt switchover in POV characters.

Actually I almost deducted another star for the costume designer or whoever it was in the special features talking about how the creepy old woman was actually played by a man.  Because it’s creepy!  You can’t tell if it’s a woman or a man!  IT’S A MAN IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES, OMG, WHAT COULD BE ICKIER AND CREEPIER?

Well, you and your gross transphobic issues, is what.  But that’s on you, not on the movie, so the rating stays where it is.

The House of the Devil (2009)

I remember when House of the Devil first came out.  It seemed like every horror blogger in existence went nuts over it.

“Watch it!  You’ll love it!” they said.

“Scariest movie that was ever scary!” they said.

You guys.  I did not love House of the Devil.  Also, I am pretty sure that at some point in my life I have seen scarier Kleenex commercials.

I mean, for about the first ten minutes it has a certain retro charm.  (“OMG, she’s using a phone booth!  How quaint!”)  But even quaint needs a good lead character as a hook to hang from, and Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is just.  Boring.  Wow, is she boring.  I couldn’t even concentrate on her long enough to dislike her.

Even if you can get past that, you run into the second problem: the movie is a tribute to 80s movies, and it’s a little too good at it.  Some people see that as a plus.  I myself do not see it as a plus unless you’re willing to not only suspend disbelief but also pretend that you’ve never seen another horror movie in your entire life.

The problem is that the movie just contains too many elements that it’s impossible to view unironically in a post-Scream world.  The characters are not only dazzlingly stupid, they’re dazzlingly stupid in exactly the ways that have been lampooned so many times and so effectively that now they’re just tedious, like a joke that was funny every time you heard it until you heard someone explain it in excruciating detail.  House of the Devil really requires you to completely suspend your sense of irony for 95 minutes, but it never gives you a reason to other than “Hey, let’s watch an 80s-style horror movie unironically!”  If I wanted to do that, I’d watch an honest to God 80s horror movie.  I’m sure there are some I haven’t seen, and a lot of them are probably even good ones.

And speaking of 95 minutes, Judas priest.  This was the longest 95 minutes I have ever sat through, including my college graduation and that time I gave birth.  Of those 95 minutes, I swear at least 50 are devoted to Samantha wandering aimlessly around the house where she’s supposed to be babysitting (where, of course, there actually is no baby and Strange and Evil Things are going on instead).  No, I’m serious.  I got so bored watching her wander around the house that I got up and started wandering around my own doing chores.

I went in the kitchen, loaded up the dishwasher, started it running, and came back.  She was still wandering around the house.

I shifted a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer, started another load of clothes, and came back.  She was still wandering around the house.  Oh, wait, now there’s going to be a Tom-Cruise-in-Risky-Business montage where she bops around the house to bad 80s music.  Okay, at least I wasn’t bored during the thirty seconds where I was cringing in horrible embarrassment for everyone involved with this movie, but at a terrible price.

I grabbed the clothes from the dryer, folded them, put them away, and came back.  Samantha was still wandering around the house I am not even joking right now.

Now, it’s possible that while I was off doing more entertaining things like laundry, things happened that – had I been present for them – would have contributed to a growing atmosphere of creepiness and dread.  It’s possible.  It’s possible that if you pay very close attention to a wall full of drying paint, every now and then messages from Elvis in the beyond will fade briefly into being and then vanish.  I don’t know; I’ve never met anyone who had the patience to actually watch paint dry.  I can’t believe in my heart of hearts that anyone has ever had the patience to sit and watch House of the Devil all the way through, either.

The end at least has a faster pace, in that there’s a fair amount of blood and a flurry of activity that would probably be more memorable had I actually had even a modicum of interest in anyone involved, and if I hadn’t already been paralyzed from boredom and Downy inhalation.  If I recall correctly, it has one of those ambiguous 80s endings that worked very well in genuinely good movies like Halloween or Friday the 13th, but here just adds to the annoyance.

So what’s the verdict?  One star.  Yes, I gave House of the Devil the same rating as The Haunting of Molly Hartley.  In fact, it should probably have gotten a lower one, because Molly Hartley at least had enough oomph to make me actively want to beat every character in the movie with a claw hammer; but that would have put it at the same rating as Frayed, and no horror movie I have yet borne witness to is as bad as Frayed, or if it is then I’ve repressed the memory.

House of the Devil is an endurance test, the Marathon des Sables of boredom tolerance, surpassing even the tedious Paranormal Activity in the sheer depth of its need to be edited down to a five-minute short like the Pixar lamp cartoon.  If you watch it, which I can’t recommend, be sure you’re stocked up with knitting, good books, and Angry Birds on your phone.

Fragile (2005)

One of these days I’m going to make a list called “Movies that scared the bejesus out of me and I can’t even figure out why,” and Fragile will be somewhere very close to the top.  Maybe it’s the combination of the inherent creepiness of abandoned hospitals and the fact that the ghost, when you finally see her, is so freakishly hideous that if she popped up in the mirror behind me I would genuinely have screaming hysterics.  She’s not quite as terrifying on a second viewing once you’re braced for the horror, but my God was she a nasty shock the first time around.

Fragile stars Calista Flockhart, who to her credit never gives off the vibe that she’s slumming in a genre film, or seems anything less than engaged with the story and her character.  She plays Amy, a nurse recovering from some sort of traumatic incident that resulted in a child’s death, and for which Amy blames herself.  (This incident is never completely elucidated, the filmmakers – in a show of restraint rare in the breed – having refrained from telling us about it in five minutes of “As you know, Bob” exposition.)  Apparently looking for somewhere quiet to recover, Amy takes a temp job as a replacement night nurse at a nearly-deserted hospital that’s being shut down and retains only a handful of pediatric patients on one floor.

Of course, there are Creepy Things going on at the hospital.  We know this because everyone is scared shitless of noises in the night.  Or at least the women and children are; hot doctor Richard “I know I’ve seen that guy before but out of Van Helsing and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which one do I least want to admit to having seen?” Roxburgh pooh-poohs all night-bumping things.  Soon Amy makes friends with Maggie, a little girl of unspecified illness who claims to have seen Charlotte, the “mechanical girl” who lives on the abandoned upper floor.

(Maggie is played by Yasmin Murphy, who is that rarest of cinematic unicorns: a child actor who can convincingly display all the emotions the script calls for, and who is adorable without inducing diabetes.  At some point, someone seems to have made the radical decision to direct and film her as if she were an actual person, as opposed to the more usual tactic of treating kids in movies like Generic Moppet #3 bought sight unseen from the Toys R Us catalog.  Actually, to their credit, the filmmakers made more than one unusual and gutsy decision about her character.)

Charlotte spends a lot of time being really pissed off.  Also, she can make people’s bones break, and does with alarming frequency.  Initial poking-around by Amy seems to indicate that Charlotte was a patient there decades ago, who had osteogenisis imperfecta – brittle bone disease – and had to wear those braces that are actually screwed into your flesh and don’t tell me those aren’t a bad idea because I saw what they did to that guy’s leg on Downton Abbey.

The bulk of the movie follows the “But what does it want?” plotline.  Charlotte is clearly angry, and gets angrier and more violent as the movie goes on.  Bones break.  People get flung out of windows.  Blocks with letters on them form irate messages.  Alarming things happen with elevators.  Amy tries to figure out what the hell’s going on.  Well, what’s going on, of course, is easier for the viewer to figure out than for Amy and the Hot Doctor:  Charlotte wants Maggie to stay in the hospital.  Forever.

I love ghost stories.  There aren’t enough of them.  Not real ghost stories like this one, that depend not on gore and jump scares but on the idea that the dead have come calling and they’re really pissed and couldn’t tell you why even if they wanted to.  Fragile does a wonderful job of evoking that slow, creeping unease of abandoned hospitals and asylums where misery seems to soak into the walls and hang around long after all the people are gone.  The build-up is both slow and interesting, unusual in a world where you generally get one or the other but not both, and the climax, which could easily have degenerated into “Rocks fall and everyone dies,” instead remembers that the movie has been focused on the relationships among the characters and keeps the focus there where it belongs.

[REC]‘s Jaume Balagueró directed Fragile, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised at its quality.  But I was, pleasantly.

So what’s the verdict?  Four stars.  That might seem high for what on the surface seems to be a fairly conventional genre film, but I think it deserves them for creepiness, atmosphere, not a few genuine scares, and stubborn refusal to take the path of least resistance and fall back on genre cliches.

 

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Paranormal Activity has more in common with The Blair Witch Project than just the found-footage conceit.  Like BWP, PA has exactly one effective moment, right at the very end; the rest of it consists of twelve thousand four hundred and six grinding hours of tedium and motion sickness, so that by the time the effective moment rolled around I was so pathetically glad to see it that the effectiveness of the moment was lost in my appreciation of its effectiveness, if that makes sense. It’s hard to be scared when you’re sitting there going “OH THANK CHRIST AN EFFECTIVE PIECE OF FILM-MAKING AT LAST, HOW DID THAT EVEN ACCIDENTALLY HAPPEN.”

This is an old enough movie that you probably know the plot.  Smug Marrieds – or, in this case, Smug Living-Togethers – Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) take to carrying a camcorder around with them, even under circumstances where it is wildly improbable that any reasoning human being would be carrying a camcorder, in order to record the bumps in the night they’ve been hearing.  The bumps turn out to be a demon who is righteously pissed off by the blatant attempt to turn his existence into an episode of Jersey Shore – as, bless, who wouldn’t be – and disaster ensues.  Sort of.  Eventually.

Well, okay, boredom ensues.  But it’s disastrous boredom.  More like ennui.

Nothing happens for enormous chunks of PA.  I spent a great deal of time going “Yep, there they are sleeping again,” and “I’m not going to have to watch douchebag sex, am I?  I don’t want to watch douchebag sex.”  That’s the first problem with PA, and the most serious (other than the fact that the characters are so utterly unsympathetic that I couldn’t even sustain interest in them long enough to hope they’d die) – it was made by people who don’t understand that suspense is not an end in and of itself.  Suspense has to have a payoff or it dies fast.  An audience in suspense is an audience who expects something noteworthy to happen at any moment; an audience who has been trained by the last half hour of the movie to expect that nothing interesting is going to happen in the near future is an audience in about as much suspense as someone watching laundry tumble in the dryer.

No, the interesting thing about PA, to the extent that anything can be salvaged from the wreck, isn’t the haunted house.  It’s the feminist subtext, almost certainly inadvertent.  It’s not bad enough that Katie has a malevolent supernatural entity out to get her.  On top of that, she’s saddled with a  boyfriend who patronizes her, trivializes both her fears and her boundaries, and dismisses her completely when he’s not whining for her attention like a cranky five-year-old.  Micah does not even make a token attempt to hide the fact that he thinks Katie is a pretty piece of furniture whose function is to dispense sex and adoration on demand.  He constantly refers to the house as his house, even though they both live there; even more disturbing is when he’s ranting, righteously indignant, about things messing with “my house and my girlfriend” without a single change in inflection to indicate that he sees a difference between the two things.  They’re both his property.  The demon’s bad for Katie’s mental health, but I’m not sure it doesn’t take a decided back seat to the utter toxicity of her relationship.

Either way, it’s an interesting commentary on how hard it is, as a woman in a patriarchal stronghold, to reclaim your power if no one will take you seriously long enough to concede that you might have had any power to begin with. The demon thinks it owns Katie.  Micah thinks he owns her.  She’s caught in the middle in a way that would be heart-wrenching if she weren’t so intolerable, and still manages to be icky and faintly disturbing.

So what’s the verdict?  I don’t actually know what the purpose of PA was.  If it’s a feminist allegory, it’s very well done, though it’s one of those movies that only becomes interesting in the abstract after you’re done with the horrific tedium of sitting through it.  If it was a horror movie, it was an epic failure on pretty much every level.  Either way, it only gets two stars, and only the last thirty seconds or so got the rating up even that high.

Dead Island: Or, I cannot stop watching the trailer long enough to come up with a clever title.

So by now everyone’s seen the Dead Island trailer that hit the internet like a barrage of zombie-carrying SCUD missiles yesterday.  But what’s the word on the gameplay?

The trailer had me dying to play it, and just about everything else I’ve heard only made that craving worse.  You can play it solo, so it doesn’t require you to deal with gore-crazed fourteen-year-old boys as the price of gameplay.  You can also play with up to four PCs, which – coincidence! – is exactly the number of people in my family who will be willing – nay, champing at the bit – to suit up and spend quality bonding time bashing the brains out of zombies.  According to this article at ps3.ign.com, it will feature honest to Jesus skill trees and a leveling system so you can level up your zombie-slaying abilities and gain new skills as you go along.  And your weapons are basically whatever you can pick up and swing at a zombie, and they break eventually.  I was foreseeing a lot of “Shit, I loved that axe!” going on in my future.

Until Bomb #2 dropped on me, and not in the good way this time: it’s a first-person shooter.  I fucking hate first-person shooters.  They look ridiculous and I can’t play them for five minutes without teetering on the edge of both migraine and projectile vomiting.  They’re worse than rendered-on-the-fly backgrounds.  (Don’t even get me started on Soul Reaver II.  I was honest to god sick for days.)

Still, I may give it a try if the initial buzz on the game is any match for the trailer.  We’ll have to see.  It’s been in development at Techland for a disturbingly long time; there’s an article at pc.ign.com that talks about Dead Island‘s E3 debut back in 2006.

In the meantime, I’ll just watch the trailer a lot.  And wait for the official site to come back up.

 

Social Media FTW?

American Gothica is now on Twitter at @americangothica.  And also here, I mean, but there I can retweet funny things other people say.

My Bloody Valentine (2009)

Sometimes there are these fleeting moments, so brief and subtle that I always wonder if I’ve imagined them afterward, when I suspect that buried deep in Jensen Ackles’ psyche is a modicum of acting ability that sometimes gets away from him and manifests onscreen for a split second before he stamps it ruthlessly back down.

No, I know how that sounds.  I didn’t say it was a rational suspicion.  It’s like that thing where sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep on Christmas Eve you have that weird moment where you’re like “Hey, but what real reason is there, honestly, why Santa can’t exist?  HUH?”  Then you wake up in the morning and realize that by God there’d better not be some fur-wearing fat guy sneaking down your chimney in the middle of the night, and also that Ackles’ sole discernable talent is for reciting some of his lines louder than others and managing to look like an American Apparel model while his character is supposedly sleeping in his car.  In short, he’s an utterly bland presence (Ackles, I mean, not Santa), and when your movie is already laboring under a brain-sludgingly dull script, poor pacing, and astoundingly unappealing characters, by God you better suck it up and pay Steve Buscemi to stand out in front of that shit diverting people’s attention.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the original My Bloody Valentine (1981).  I love it.  It’s a triumph of the schlocky filmmaker’s art, full of glee and ridiculousness and people getting shot in the forehead with nail guns,  with some genuinely scary moments thrown in for good measure.  In the original, a mining town has declared a moratorium on Valentine’s Day dances, because back in the 60s there was a mine cave-in on Valentine’s Day that resulted in the sole survivor, Harry Warden, cracking under the strain of his enforced diet of Soylent Green.  Warden decrees that there will be No More Dances Ever, because that’s what the townspeople were doing when the mine exploded and he’s a little miffed.  Twenty years later a group of middle-aged teenagers decide to hold an illicit rave in the mine on Valentine’s Day, with predictable and gory results.

Well, the 2009 My Bloody Valentine is sort of like that.  Except without the dances.  Or any real tie-in to Valentine’s Day.  Or any explicable reason for the original Harry Warden to go off the deep end and cause hospital carnage so improbable that in order to make sense of it you have to pretend the movie is a crossover with Predator.  There’s a mine explosion, okay.  In this case it’s caused by Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles), the owner’s whiny son, forgetting to do something technical I can’t even care about long enough to describe it.  Hanniger disappears for a few years and comes back to sell the mine.

Unwisely, the creators of the remake chose to make the grindingly tedious selling-the-mine aspect the main plot of the movie.  Even more unwisely, they spend what feels like ten thousand hours trying to get us to care about it.  This involves endless, astonishingly boring conversations between Hanniger and his unwashed ex-girlfriend (Jaime King), who is now married to the town sherriff (Kerr Smith).  Eventually, of course, people start dying, but without the whole arc with the Valentine’s Day dances they’re basically dying for no other reason than to give the movie a body count, which brings a certain sense of anticlimax to the whole thing.

The movie itself is unrelentingly glum and humorless.  It’s filmed under constantly cloudy skies.  Everyone is dressed like the only fashion game in town is the clearance rack at K-Mart.  Lines like “I lost my way!” are uttered with apparent seriousness.  Ackles plays Hanniger like an even flatter and less nuanced Dean Winchester, and it’s not like Dean Winchester has nuances to spare; while he did achieve brief shining moments of creepiness in Devour, he misses it by a mile here and winds up looking like the crazy eye-rolling opera diva in an Abbott and Costello movie.  The killings are pro forma, uninspired, and mostly require everyone involved to behave like absolute morons.  The 3D, which so rarely adds anything to a movie, adds nothing to this one either.

Was anything good about it?  Well… Irene (Betsy Rue).  Irene was fucking awesome.  This movie needed way more people with enough panache to charge out naked into a parking lot and wave a gun in some skeevy trucker’s face.  Aside from Irene, the only watchable element was Kerr Smith, who trudges grimly through the movie all but wearing a t-shirt that says “I don’t care how many varieties of shit this movie is, I’m going to goddamn act so I can look myself in the face in the morning.”

So what’s the verdict? One star.  The only way to make watching this movie entertaining is to pretend it’s some sort of arthouse Fellini-tribute commentary on the grinding poverty of the decaying American infrastructure, and everything is all symbolic and stylized and you have to figure out what it all Really Means and how it relates to Derrida.  And even if you do, you’re just going to wind up feeling like you’re watching two hours of people smoking at each other in black and white with flies landing portentously on ice cubes, and all you know is you’re bored to tears but you have a paper due on this shit in thirty-six hours and you want to shoot yourself for ever thinking “Metaphor in Cinema” would be a good elective to take.  Watch the original instead.

The Morgue (2008)

See, this is an example of an effective movie poster.  It’s effective because I actually want to see the movie it’s advertising.  Which, strangely enough, does not seem to be the one I just watched.

Despite its title, The Morgue does not actually take place in a morgue.  It takes place in an improbably large and ornate funeral home.  It also does not feature Heather Donahue (The Blair Witch Project) in enough screen time to warrant first billing, which is a matter of not looking gift horses in the mouth because Heather Donahue is an unconvincing actress whose sole talent is for unobjectionable blandness.

The setup is fairly obvious from the beginning, intentionally.  Margo (Lisa Crilley, the sole watchable element in the movie), is a night janitor at the funeral home who suddenly finds herself saddled with an out-of-gas family of three and two random blood-smeared guys.  It’s obvious from the outset that, somehow or other, they’re all dead.

This adds a certain lead-balloon element to the fact that no sooner are they all assembled than Random Old Guy (Michael Raye), who was once a worker at the funeral home until he offed himself in the bathroom for no explicable or relevant reason, starts stalking and killing them one by one.  Well, “killing.”  I mean, honestly, they’re already dead.  Is he making them deader?  (The answer, apparently, is yes.  No, we don’t know why.)

There’s a big “OH NOES WE ARE DEAD” scene rendered marginally effective by Brady Matthews as Margo’s cop ex-boyfriend, who has a minor breakdown over finding her body at the scene of the mass accident that killed the lot of them to begin with.  Mostly, though, the movie is unsuspenseful (They’re ALREADY DEAD), has a thoroughly unscary killer (I have no problem with the geriatric population, honest to god, I just don’t think they make effective slashers), and ends on a moderately clever though somewhat pointless note.

So what’s the verdict? One star.  The performances are just good enough that I’m not judging the moral character of everyone involved, but it’s a bland movie, not anywhere close to good but not full enough of bad-movie energy to be fun.  Don’t pass up something better on your Netflix queue to watch it, and by “better” I mean “up to and including that 80s slasher that appears to star Vanna White, what in the actual fuck.”

 

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