The Graveyard (2006)

I’ll say this for The Graveyard – it knows what you’re there for.  It knows you want dudebros and criminally dumb chicks having sex and then getting slaughtered, and it loses no time in giving it to you.  Other, lesser movies may spend valuable screen time screwing around with piddly things like plot, character development, dialogue not written by drunken chimpanzees, suspense as to who the killer is, and realistic portrayal of the passage of time; but not The Graveyard.  It even goes so far as to introduce random characters for thirty seconds for no other reason than to kill them off.

In the setup, Dudebros 1-4 and Dumb Chicks 1-4 (this is an estimate; I couldn’t keep them straight to count them) go to a graveyard to play hide and seek.  No, they’re adults at this point.  Dudebro #4, being It, goes to look for the others and is suddenly!  chased by a knife-wielding man in a mask!  This causes him to trip and land on a rusty gate, impaling himself.

A few years later – after Dudebro #2, who took the rap, has gotten out of prison – they all meet back at a convenient sleepaway camp by the graveyard for “closure.”  And, well, things proceed from there, without a single unpredictable moment – and, sadly, not much in the way of imaginative or entertaining kills.

Well, toward the end of the movie the killer actually utters the words “I’ll take my revenge!”  And not once, no.  That would be insufficient for a movie of this caliber.  He says it no less than four times.  In a row.  Then there are a couple of  “Oh look!  The killer’s not dead!” scares foiled only by the fact that the killer was painfully obviously not actually dead to begin with.

The end holds great promise that everyone involved will die, though.  And since the whole idea behind movies like this is seeing extraordinarily unlikeable people get theirs, I guess that’s something.

So what’s the verdict?  On one hand, I kind of want to give this movie one star because Dudebro #2 was vaguely hot in that horrifying Dudebro way.  On the other hand, “one guy was sort of hot if you ignored his entire personality” is not really a point in a movie’s favor, and God knows this one didn’t have any others.  On the third hand, I feel like the 0-star rating should be reserved for movies so offensively awful that their mere existence makes me despair of the human race, and The Graveyard isn’t that bad.  It’s just, I don’t know, the movie equivalent of those awful orange and black toffee Halloween candies.  So one star it is, I guess.

The Baby’s Room (2006)

“The Baby’s Room,” one of six films on Spain’s Films to Keep You Awake compilation, is an entertaining and worthwhile (if not entirely satisfying) film from director Álex de la Iglesia.  I mention the director off the bat because the only other movie of his I’ve seen is the incoherent and tedious The Oxford Murders, so now I consider myself compensated for having sat through the latter movie.

In all honesty, the storyline in “The Baby’s Room” is not a model of coherence either.  I’m still not quite sure how exactly everything happened that happened.  (Ghosts?  Demonic possession?  Quantum physics? What?)  Fortunately, though, it’s an entertaining enough journey that I didn’t feel like I enjoyed the movie less for not having had a cast-iron grip on every single plot detail.

Sports writer Juan, his wife Sonia, and their new baby – walking away with a hands-down victory in the Most Adorable Family in the Horror Canon competition – move into a very large, very old house that should be expensive but wasn’t because (a) it needs renovating, and (b) no one lives there for very long.  I keep trying to find a house like this myself but have thus far been unsuccessful, so I guess people in horror movies are better at house-hunting on Craigslist than I am.

Soon, though, things start falling apart.  Juan and Sonia hear voices from the baby’s room over the monitor, but there’s no one there.  Juan buys a video baby monitor, sees a man actually sitting by the crib, and justly freaks out.  He becomes more and more obsessed with burglars, then with the idea that the house might be haunted, until Sonia gives up and packs the baby off to her mother’s.  This leaves Juan at the house with a wall full of baby video monitors – through which, in a wonderfully creepy set piece, he watches a man murder his wife and baby, in real time, while in the world outside the video camera Juan is alone in the house.

(While all this is going on, by the way, Juan is also having to cope with the demands of his day job.  This is a rather wondrous departure from American horror movies, where hauntings seem to be largely a problem afflicting the independently wealthy.)

Half the fun of The Baby’s Room is trying to figure out exactly what’s going on.  Is Juan seeing an old murder enacted by ghosts?  Is it a recording of the murder stored somehow in the house’s very walls?  Is it a portal to a parallel universe where Juan is actually seeing some sort of mirror-Juan with more than a few screws loose?  Is Juan just cracking up and having hallucinations?  You only actually find out the answer to one of those questions, in a Twilight Zone-ish ending that feels more satisfying than it objectively should; but if you resign yourself to going “Enh, sometimes things are ineffable,” it’s a fun ride anyway.

So what’s the verdict?  Three stars.  I think half the reason I enjoyed this as much as I did is that Juan and Sonia are so engaging.  I’d probably have been a lot less forgiving of the film’s few weaknesses if it was framed around the typical, vaguely off-putting WASP couple beloved of most horror-movie directors, living a life of suspect affluence rudely interrupted by ghosts.  (Disclosure: I watched part of 1999′s In Dreams yesterday before Annette Bening and Aidan Quinn so got on my last nerve that I had to turn it off.)  I can deal with the occasional movie where even the people we’re supposed to sympathize with are pretty unpleasant, but not a steady diet of them; so the charming and unpretentious family in “The Baby’s Room” were a welcome breath of fresh air as well as just being enjoyable to watch.

Anyway, rants about unsympathetic main characters aside, “The Baby’s Room” is definitely worth the watch.  I may have to check out the other five movies in the release.

Right to Die (2007)

And the 2007 Ed Gein Award for Least Competent Body Disposal in a Work of Film goes to… Dr. Cliff Addison!

Pity poor Cliff (Martin Donovan).  (Or don’t.  He’s a real dick.)  His wife Abbey (Julia Benson) gets hideously burned in a car accident that happened while he was driving.  He’s very sad about that, but he’s also going to be ten million dollars richer once the lawsuit against the car company goes through – unless his mother-in-law scores it with her media campaign to stop the Do Not Resuscitate order Cliff requested out of what, in fairness, certainly seemed to be a genuine desire to do right by his rather shallow wife.

Of course, that’s before he figures out that every time Abbey’s heart stops she slips the leash and starts killing people.  That realization’s a real game-changer.

“Right to Die” delivers the gory hilarity that “The Washingtonians” aimed for and missed.  Any show that gives me the glorious visual of severed body parts falling off the top of a SmartCar like plywood bits out of a broken IKEA crate pretty much wins that game; not to mention the sheer satisfaction of watching thoroughly unpleasant people die in creative ways.

Actually, I’m only assuming Abbey was an unpleasant person before the events of the movie.  I don’t even care.  I love her.  I want to have a standing Sunday brunch with her and watch her drown the barista in a terrible steamed-milk incident if he accidentally gives her soy instead of 2%.

So what’s the verdict?  Three stars.  Three and a half, let’s say.  I almost gave it four just for the sheer hilarity of the last ten or fifteen minutes.  If you like horror comedy, you’ll want to watch this one.

The Washingtonians (2007)

Here is a thing that bugs me: why are movie cannibals (Hannibal Lecter excepted, of course) all such sloppy eaters?  I mean, seriously.  Like, I get that it’s a foot, but you can’t eat it with a knife and fork, really?  And wipe your mouth once in a while?  Having your cannibals devour human flesh like pigs at a trough is not actually more disturbing than having them devour it a little more neatly, and the trough thing grosses me out for reasons you probably don’t want me focusing on while you’re trying to disturb me with cannibalism.

Anyway.  “The Washingtonians” centers around the idea that Washington and various other of the founding fathers were actually heinous cannibals.  The Franks family finds this out by accident when the father inherits his grandmother’s house with various historical artifacts inside – such as a fork made out of bone and a note from Washington saying something to the effect of “I will eat your children and make forks out of their bones!  Because I don’t have enough forks.  How is it that forks always disappear?  I swear they’re like socks in the dryer.”

(I can’t help but think that the plotline would have had more shock value thirty or forty years ago.  If there’s an American alive today who would put baby-eating past a politician, I don’t think we’ve met.)

Anyway, finding the letter puts the Franks in danger from a bewigged, weirdly powdered secret society sworn to protect the secret of the cannibalism, and things sort of deteriorate from there.

The Franks family is comprised of a wife I felt really sorry for (Venus Terzo), an annoying husband (Johnathon Schaech), and the whiniest, most timorous offspring I have seen in I don’t even know how long (Julia Tortolano).  My god, that kid irritated me.  By ten minutes into the show I wanted to lock her in a dark basement full of clown dolls until she either died of fright or kicked open the door, newly equipped with a spine and a chainsaw and ready to mow down zombies.

“The Washingtonians” is an episode of the made-for-cable Masters of Horror series, so it really wouldn’t be fair of me to fault it for the microbudget makeup and effects, or the bargain-basement actors (with the exception of Hey-It’s-That-Guy extraordinaire Saul Rubinek, whom I love in pretty much anything he does), but honestly those things really do diminish the enjoyment value of the episode.  Seriously, I’ve seen better production values in Supernatural episodes, so don’t tell me it can’t be done.

Further guilt about judging the episode harshly is brought on by the fact that it was directed by Peter Medak, otherwise known as the director of one of the few movies I will unstintingly give five stars to,  horror masterpiece The Changeling.  Either it’s amazing what a budget can do or Medak was just doing the paycheck walk through this one.  Either way, about the best that can be said for “The Washingtonians” is that it’s unobjectionable and mildly entertaining if you can get past the fact that not a single watchable character appears onscreen until Saul Rubinek shows up to save the day in more ways than one.

So what’s the verdict?  Two stars.  It’s okay.  It’s moderately amusing in a sort of lukewarm way. I wouldn’t watch it again, but it’s not terrible.  It was an interesting idea that fell down in the execution and then, as it was lying in the street, got run over by a clown car full of unimpressive actors and peed on by the Pomeranian of low-budget scripts.

Also, it turns out that the guy who plays Sam was in Cats and Dogs, a thing for which I am judging him in this world and God will judge him in the next.  Just saying.

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.

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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The Strain (2009)

Reading The Strain is weirdly like reading an alternate-universe version of Blade II, sort of like Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is an AU of Card Captor Sakura.  So many of the same elements are there that in a way it’s impossible for the book to surprise if you’ve seen the movie:  vampirism as virus; the physical description of the vampires; the stingers on the tongues; the way they congregate underground like rats; even the UV hand grenades and the World Health Organization have cameos.  So it’s fortunate for the book, and for us, that Blade II was, hands-down, the best movie of the series.

The Strain is the first in a trilogy, the basic plot of which is this: a European vampire, one of seven “original” vampires in the vaguely Anne Rice-ean sense, comes to America on a 777, brought over by Douchebag Rich Guy;  Douchebag Rich Guy, of course, wants to live forever and has apparently never seen any of the 1023980983 horror movies on the theme of “Sucking up to powerful supernatural creatures because you want to live forever is only going to end in tears, honest to god.”  The plane lands on the runway at JFK and promptly goes dark, triggering some of the best and most tightly suspenseful scenes in the book as all sorts of government security agencies respond to what initially appears to be some sort of terrorist attack.  It’s like a 20th-century, high-tech re-envisioning of the landing of the Demeter at Whitby.

Enter the main characters: Ephraim Goodweather, CDC; his colorless girlfriend and co-worker Nora, who may be given things to do in subsequent books but is deadweight in this one; his son Zack; and Abraham (no, really; yeah, I know) Setrakian, Holocaust survivor and vampire hunter.  Ephraim is hard to convince on the whole vampire front, but it doesn’t take more than a handful of reanimated corpses trying to eat him and his loved ones before he comes around.

The book has two authors – Guillermo del Toro, director of the aforementioned Blade II, and Chuck Hogan – and it shows.  Del Toro as a filmmaker has a wonderful eye for the visual composition of a scene, a thing rarer among filmmakers than one might expect; Del Toro as a writer has a distinctly cinematic style.  I have no way of knowing who wrote what prose, but the quality is variable.  The first scenes, as mentioned, are stunning – tight-wound and brilliantly visual, superbly blocked and paced.  Unfortunately, the writing falls down in the last few chapters; it becomes clunky and weirdly mannered, as if it were written by someone who has read a lot of skilled writing and a lot of really atrocious writing without really understanding the former or having enough skill himself to avoid picking up bad habits from the latter.  The Strain would have been good for four stars if it had gone on as it started.

And if it had had a better villain, honestly.  The Big Bad here is a shadowy archetype, nowhere near as effective or charismatic as B2‘s Nomak.  He’s more reminiscent of the villain in The Keep, less a personality than a vague embodiment of OMGEVOL. It’s a shame, because of the humans, even the minor characters are immediately engaging and fully fleshed out.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  If whoever wrote the first scenes writes the rest of the books, that rating might go up; either way, though, I’m interested enough to continue the series.