47 Meters Down (2017)

JUNE 18, 2017

GENRE: PREDATOR, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

If it were up to me (and nothing ever is, for the record), Universal would re-release Jaws every other summer, in honor of it not only being the original summer blockbuster that paved the way for everything else currently playing at the multiplex but also of it being JAWS, goddammit. On the other summers, some studio would release a new sharksploitation movie like 47 Meters Down, which of course owes some of its existence to Spielberg's classic, but also provides some thrills on its own accord and, unlike the comic book/franchise wannabe films clogging the other screens, is refreshingly simple for a summer movie. When even the low-budget horror films can't help but be bogged down in world building (Annabelle 2 has a clunky setup for the upcoming Nun spinoff), there's something kind of novel about the idea that I'll never need to remember plot points or characters from this movie ever again, as there won't be a "48" Meters Down.

Well, I mean, there probably would be if the movie was a giant smash, but like last year's The Shallows and several others before it (including Jaws, but no one was smart enough to prevent three sequels), it's an open and shut story, and a very simple one. Our heroines (sisters played by Claire Holt and Mandy Moore, who couldn't look less like sisters if they tried and honestly wasn't a necessary plot point - they could have just been besties) are on a cage-diving jaunt, where they don scuba gear and are lowered into the water to see some sharks up close, when the line breaks and their cage sinks... you guessed it, 47 meters down, to the bottom of the ocean floor (for you non-metric folk, that's about 150 feet). From then on it's a more or less real-time account of them trying to figure out how to survive when their oxygen tanks are running out and communication with their boat requires dangerous trips outside the relative safety of their cage, as the sharks continue circling the area.

So basically it's in the vein of Frozen or Thirst, as our heroes try to survive the elements as well as a natural predator doing its thing (as opposed to a human murderer and/or a "monster" like Deep Blue Sea's super-intelligent sharks), inviting the audience to play along with "Why don't they try ______?" questions that are usually answered by the film itself. For example, you might wonder why they don't just swim for the surface, as 150 feet isn't THAT far and the sharks can be warded off with flares and the like. Well, since they dropped so far, they're now at risk of getting nitrogen bubbles in their brain (known as "the bends") if they don't depressurize properly, which requires them to ascend a bit and then wait five minutes for their body to adjust before ascending again (and then stopping again). By keeping the situation simple and also unquestionably dangerous (as anyone can be afraid of sharks and also running out of air), it also restricts the amount of armchair quarterbacking the audience can reasonably bother with, unlike say Frozen, where everyone was pretty sure THEY could survive jumping off the chair and snowboarding away from the wolves. OK, maybe you could do that, somehow - but can you stop nitrogen bubbles from invading your brain, genius?

At its best, the movie offers terrific thrills that you don't often see in these shark movies. Folks tend to be on boats or some other structures (such as the rock in The Shallows), i.e. above the water, but our heroes are submerged for the bulk of the film, and director Johannes Roberts ties one hand behind his back by refusing to cut to the boat on the surface. Even when the girls make contact with their boat (captained by Matthew Modine in a role that amounts to a cameo) Roberts keeps his cameras underwater as well, allowing us to wonder if Modine and his mates are truly trying to save them or if they're leaving them behind on purpose for one reason or another. It's a fun little trick; the film takes place in Mexico and our protagonists are vacationing Americans, so decades of horror-watching has us trained to believe that the "locals" are out to rob and/or rape and/or kill them since no one can travel in a horror movie without running afoul of scary foreigners. It's really not until the last few minutes of the film that we know if they're villains or not, making a solid way to add tension to the proceedings without really doing much of anything.

It's a shame, then, that the horrendous dialogue keeps sinking the movie's chances of being a classic example of the sub-genre. When everyone shuts up and tries to carry out some life-saving action that requires considerable risk (like when Holt gets out of the cage by sliding between the bars - which requires her to take her oxygen tank/mask off first), the movie works like gangbusters, and I kept cackling at every new setback (personal favorite: when Moore's character pulls on a lodged speargun and manages to shoot herself with it - not only causing an injury but giving the sharks fresh blood to smell). But whenever things settle down and the girls chat, it's borderline painful to listen to their generic, half-realized backstories. Apparently Moore's boyfriend just left her before the trip began (he was supposed to join, if I'm understanding correctly) because she's pretty boring, so part of the reason she's taking the trip at all is because she wants to post pictures that proves she can be fun and take risks. Since we never met the guy I don't know why we should care much if she manages to win him back with her new Facebook profile photo, and the dialogue itself is cringeworthy, doing it no favors. Somehow Blake Lively talking to a seagull was more natural than anything these two alleged sisters manage to say to each other. There is also a poorly implemented bit of foreshadowing that spoils a minor twist about the finale (which recalls the original ending of another movie featuring women who are trapped below the surface), though there is some fun in trying to figure out when that particular plot point came into play.

It also felt strangely held back at times, as if it was originally an R rating and someone cut it back to PG-13 at the 11th hour. There are two attack scenes that are borderline incoherent, as if they were trying to avoid showing shark-munch action, and a later very serious injury is noticeably cut around as much as possible. There is also a lone F-bomb relatively early in the movie; I know you're always allowed one in a PG-13 but having it come so early seems to suggest there could have been more at some point (because in a movie where you're trapped with sharks, you're likely to say OH FUCK! or WE'RE FUCKED!, but they don't - Moore just says it casually in one of the first scenes, saying "I fucked up" re: her relationship). I poked around and couldn't find any evidence of this being the case, so perhaps it was designed for PG-13 and they were being overly cautious? Either way, it felt like the movie was trying to avoid the B-movie carnage were showed up to see. Roberts' other films (including the HMAD book-worthy The Expelled) were all rated R, and I honestly didn't realize this one wasn't following suit until I checked real quick during a bathroom trip (it was like 90+ on Sunday so I was chugging water), so now I can't help but wonder if it'd be a better film if he was in a position to indulge.

But look: there's Jaws, and then there are the other shark movies, and among them, this ends up somewhere in the middle of the pack. It lacks the maniacal flourishes Jaume Collet-Serra brought to The Shallows, but it's a lot better than your average Syfy thing (and, not that it's a high bar, but it's better than two of the actual Jaws sequels), and I'm glad it got a big-screen release after it was nearly sent direct to DVD/VOD last summer. It's not a movie you'd probably want to watch over and over, but for the one time you DO watch, the big screen is the place to do it, and honestly if it went VOD I probably never would have seen it unless I had to for work. The sharks look good (for the record, this is likely the lowest budgeted movie you'll see in a multiplex all year) and the pacing is nearly breakneck at times, as they're pretty much screwed within minutes of going into the water (itself a scene that occurs before the 20 minute mark). It might feel a bit handicapped at times, but it got the job done and scratched my shark movie itch until I have time for Chief Brody and his pals again.

What say you?

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The Pack (2015)

JULY 21, 2016

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

I like home invasion films, but they need to be relatively rare due to the fact that they're even more limited than the slasher film, which is saying something. The location trapping alone boxes in filmmakers, and since the best ones tend to offer stripped down plotting, copycat attempts often follow suit - the focus remains on the intensity and scares, not plot twists and long speeches. Needless to say, you don't have to worry about The Pack being any different, since it's a home invasion film where the attackers aren't masked strangers, but a pack of feral and very hungry dogs. They haven't been "sent" there, there's no voodoo curse or anything at work - they're just hungry, and our hero family of four... well, they're home.

But swap the dogs for the usual guys and there's really not much separating this from any number of others that have cropped up over the years, which is a bummer. It's an Australian horror flick, which are usually more than just serviceable, but that's all this one is, really. It goes through the motions established by Ils, The Strangers, You're Next, etc - just with dogs instead. We get the opening scene kill of the neighbors, the ominous buildup, the "let's run for the shed to get help", the doomed police officer who arrives and is killed before he can help... it's all the same things you've seen before, so once the novelty of the dogs wears off it gets a bit too routine. The only momentum is, grim as it sounds, wondering who, if any, of the family unit will die. You can assume the two kids will be OK, but the Kiefer Sutherland/Sean Pertwee looking dad or the Essie Davis-y mom are fair game for sure. Plus, again, it's an Aussie movie, which means NOT a Hollywood studio one, so even the kids MIGHT get chomped if the filmmakers want to risk angry viewers.

I won't spoil which of them die (again, if any), but I will thank the screenwriter for adding in some obvious dead meat in the form of a suit who comes to their home to tell them that the bank is about to take back their house and farm due to lack of payments. It's a standard horror movie character beat (I swear I've seen "Final Notice" in more horror movies than all other genres combined), but I like that it actually has something to do with the plot - the reason that they're not making money is because their livestock keeps getting killed by the damn dogs. Anyway, you know this asshole is a goner, but I like that they don't keep him in the house when the attacks come, because then it'd just lead to even more cliches. He'd lock the door behind him and leave one of the family members to die, or waste their limited ammo by firing wildly, or whatever - you just know one or all of those things would come into play. Instead, he leaves after giving the bad news and gets killed after stopping on the side of the road to piss, sparing us the antagonistic human character for the bulk of the proceedings.

This decision also cuts down on the film's amount of dialogue. I swear there are like 40 lines in the movie, most of them during that guy's scene with the parents. I watched a lot of it with "subtitles" (actually closed captioning, because no one knows the difference) because of the AC, and nine times out of ten that text appeared on-screen it was of the "[wind rustling]" or "[dog growling]" variety (also a lot of "[sheep bleating]", which I somehow never knew was the word for the sound sheep make. I am learning!). The family gets separated throughout the house fairly shortly after the dogs show up, and the characters go against horror movie tradition and don't even talk to themselves all that much - it's kind of nice to see people go get bullets without saying "OK, I need bullets" like many of their horror movie peers have done in the past. Since the dogs are kind of a known problem they don't even really have to explain things to their children (read: the audience) when they show up. Opening text tells us that feral dogs are a problem in the area, and that's all we ever need to know - there is no need for further explanation once they show up at the family's farm, so our heroes can spring right into action.

And by action I mean they hide for a bit, then run for a shed. Overhead shots show that their place is HUGE, but alas it's underutilized; I wish they could have done more with its hallways and nooks and crannies. There's a nice bit where the mom tricks one into a room and shuts the door (thankfully, they're not as smart as raptors), and a tense scene where another dog (there are four or so, I think?) finds the kids' hiding spot in a closet, but too much of the action is given to the shed or the immediate area around the window that looks out at the two available vehicles (and that damn shed). I can see the logic when picking these locations: bigger the house, the more potential for the scare scenes, but more often than not the budget and actual shooting logistics (lighting, equipment, etc.) keep them from actually getting to use that space to any meaningful degree. That's why the house for Strangers was perfect - it was mid-sized, allowing them to use almost all of it and thus maximize the suspense that could be generated. We in the audience knew our way around their place after 15-20 minutes - we never get that sense of the geography of this house, making the "invasion" of it less terrifying.

The dogs are good though. As I suspected, and later confirmed on the brief making of, they are a mix of the three obvious elements: real dogs, puppet dogs, and CGI dogs, with the filmmakers careful to use the two fake versions sparingly and maintain the illusion, rather than say "Hey we got this CGI dog that can do anything!" and blow it. Amusingly, the CGI dogs were mostly used for shots where it'd be dangerous for the real ones, standing near fire or whatever - I'm not sure if there are any CGI dogs in a shot with a human. And the puppet heads look real good but would probably fall apart if used extensively, so everything works together to create a pretty realistic depiction. Of course, that means we don't see them exactly tearing someone's face off, but there's a tangibility during the encounter scenes that keeps them threatening. There's a great face-off near the end, with both actor and growling dog in the same frame (possibly a split screen effect, to be fair, but a convincing one if so), and it's legitimately scary in that Roar kind of way, because they didn't cheat with a digital animal. Like Burning Bright, an underrated (and HMAD-book certified!) flick that similarly combines the home invasion movie with killer animals, the minimal action involving the animal actually causing harm to the characters is more than offset by wow factor of just seeing them in the same shot, something that you can't replicate with CGI beasties no matter how good they look or how well the direction/editing is for that scene.

I can't help but think the movie needed another threat, however. Like Cujo; the kid is sick and they're trapped in the hot car - there's something else to worry about besides the title character. Not the case here; their financial issues aren't exactly pressing once the dog shows up, and no one needs to get to any medication or anything like that. It might even be told in real time, more or less, now that I think of it - it's almost TOO straightforward, which I think works better when you're less certain about the safety of the cast (a real-time slasher or Descent type, with a group of pals instead of a family unit, could be terrifying if done right). Even the rare injuries they get aren't severe; no one gets incapacitated and in turn gives them a major hurdle in escaping or anything like that. Dammit, movie - complicate matters!

But hey, for "blue collar" horror, it's a winner. There's nothing BAD about the movie, it's well made and checks the boxes, and the characters are likeable (and actually kind of look like a real family, which is worth a letter grade on its own). Weightless and even routine in spots, sure, but again, the home invasion movie is as boxed in as their characters, and within those parameters (plus the limitations of using live animals as much as possible), it should satisfy its intended audience. Plus, it's been a long time since I've seen a modern killer dog flick (the woeful The Breed is the only one coming to mind, but I'm sure there's another), and it's always good for me to be reminded that man's best friends can also be ruthless killing machines, because I can't help but instantly try to pat any dog I see. Movies like this can help me learn!

What say you?

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The Shallows (2016)

JUNE 24, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Considering how much I love Orphan (and really like House of Wax), I was starting to get nervous that Jaume Collet-Serra might have left the horror forever in favor of Liam Neeson(s); a would-be master of horror who didn't seem interested in cementing his status or even adding to the defense for it. Orphan was seven years ago, and since then he's made three action films (and a fourth is on the way) with bigger budgets and (usually) higher box office returns - why would he come back? Well, maybe he just needed a killer idea, which he got with The Shallows, in which a woman is stuck on a rock with a hungry shark endlessly circling her, waiting to make its move. That's pretty much it - it's a home invasion movie where the home is a small (and not stable) bit of the ocean, and instead of a guy in a mask we get a hungry Great White.

Luckily, Collet-Serra knows precisely how to pace the movie, never letting it get boring but also not jumping the gun and straining credibility too early either. The movie is barely over 80 minutes with credits, and he makes them all count, giving us just enough character development time before heroine Blake Lively grabs her surfboard and heads into the water. A quick lunch break offers a little more backstory (and allows for a Facetime cameo from Brett Cullen, playing her dad - a Lost vet safely at home is a cute casting choice, if it was intentional), but then she goes back in and gets in trouble right around the 20 minute mark, giving us nearly an hour of woman vs. shark action. She utilizes three "locations" to stay safe, each with their own major setbacks - the first is a dead whale that the shark doesn't plan on leaving intact for long, the next is a rock that will be submerged once the tide comes in, and the third is a buoy that the shark can easily tip over if he gives it a big enough headbutt.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything to lay all of that out - the trailer does that anyway. At first I was annoyed that the trailer shows her making it to the buoy after setting it up as a sort of main goal (akin to showing Tom Hanks leaving the island on the Cast Away promos), but it's clear that Collet-Serra (I'm going with just Serra from now on, that OK?) knows staying too long in any one spot will kill the movie's pace and also have us start picking apart the logic, so he keeps her moving and thus even if you haven't seen the trailer you'd know she got to here or there. She's the only main human character - we know that if she's going to die at all that it won't be until the runtime has nearly expired, so the trick is to keep giving her new injuries and obstacles to deal with (and that said injuries will keep her from Open Water-like water treading, as she'd be dead instantly with the blood loss). Like, sure, she gets to the rock before being eaten, but NOT before she scrapes her foot up on the coral - the fun doesn't come with seeing whether or not she'll survive, but how she'll managed to get out of her latest predicament. I should note that the trailer does wreck some of the fun by showing a moment that probably should have happened earlier in the movie than it does, because it involves a character who leaves fairly early on and thus we know he'll come back later - it would have worked a bit better for her to be isolated for good earlier on, I think.

But as a whole it still works better than it has any right to, though we can't chalk the success up just to Serra and/or Lively (who I never liked much, but acquits herself nicely here) - they are assisted greatly by Steven Seagull, Lively's closest thing to a major co-star. He's one of the many gulls flying around and pecking at the whale carcass, and gets a broken wing during one hectic scene, grounding him on the rock with her for the bulk of her time there. I can't recall ever seeing a seagull "act" before, but if I have that one wasn't nearly as good as Steven (yes, that's how he's credited), who gets closeups and everything. With Lively's survival not in question anytime soon, he provides the bulk of the movie with its "Will they make it out?" suspense, and damned if I didn't tense up every time it seemed he might be served up as bait or just to give the movie a horror jolt whenever it had been a while since the last one. I wouldn't dare reveal his fate here, but suffice to say his time onscreen, and "chemistry" with Lively, more than made up for the movie's paper-thin narrative and eventually ridiculous spectacle.

On that note, I should stress that for the most part this is more like Jaws than any of its sequels, but near the end - particularly when she's in the buoy, which functions not unlike Hooper's shark cage - I started wondering if the thing had a personal vendetta against her, a la Jaws 4. I know we need a big finale, but when it starts chewing through metal to get at her after it had eaten three people in less than 24 hours (plus whatever it got out of that poor whale), it starts coming off more like Jason Voorhees than a regular ol' shark. For his part, Serra dives headfirst into the silliness, with a money shot I am so happy the trailer didn't spoil (as I was with an earlier one that gave the movie its best jolt), but if you were enjoying the more grounded aspect of the film, you might want to duck out as soon as she leaves the rock and make up your own ending.

(Speaking of ducking out, a guy went to the bathroom and missed the climax, even though it was obviously time for one or both of them to meet their maker - you couldn't hold it for another minute, guy?)

As he did in Non-Stop, Serra spices up his single location imagery with graphic overlays, like a 32 second countdown that times out how long she can jump into the water to retrieve something before the shark can swim back to her, Facetime calls, and pictures of her mother, whose memory she is honoring by traveling to this remote beach (as she went to it when she was pregnant with her). But unlike that film, which was in a sterile, boring environment, he really didn't need the assist - the film is GORGEOUS, and no not because it stars a beautiful woman. He gives us these great (way) overhead shots of the crystal clear water and its various rock/plant formations under the surface, big widescreen vistas showing how far she is from this or that safe spot, etc. - I can't recall the last horror/thriller that looked this lovely. Even the horror stuff has its own sort of beauty, like when she is first attacked and the water turns crimson red around her - Argento will be proud, if he sees it. Such shots more than make up for the film's sometimes lacking CGI - there's a pretty terrible shot of a victim who has been cut in half where the bloodstain on the bottom of his torso seems to be floating around the screen, and the facial replacement for Lively on her surfing shots will have you yearning for the relative perfection of the CGI Myers in H20. With such a minimal cast and lack of location changes, roughly half of the film's credits are for VFX folk, so I'm not sure who is to blame for the bad shots, though at least the ones of the shark all look good to great. Still, its such a technical and aesthetic marvel 98% of the time, it makes those blunders really stand out as laughable.

Ultimately, the singular nature of the film means it won't be one I revisit often, if ever, but that's fine - it's just great to have another Jaume Collet-Serra horror movie again. I think it's a must-see on the big screen to appreciate the scenery and the major shark scenes, however, and certainly a better use of your summer moviegoing dollars than Independence Day 2, which feels like everyone involved is just doing it out of obligation (even Goldblum seems bored more often than not, and Emmerich couldn't even be bothered to destroy anything you didn't already see get blown up/knocked over in the trailer). Those who wanted more alien action in the first one will be satisfied, I think (we see them a LOT this time around) but otherwise if you want big silly fun at the movies this weekend, this is the movie that will provide it - along with some genuinely good editing and craft. And it's been a long time since there was a "serious" (by comparison) shark movie after all the Syfy/Asylum stuff, so it's worth seeing just for the sheer fact that it's daring enough to lend itself to more Jaws comparisons than Sharknado ones. And it pays off - I think Spielberg would have fun watching it without feeling like he should sue someone.

What say you?

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Lake Placid vs Anaconda (2015)

APRIL 29, 2016

GENRE: MONSTER, PREDATOR
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

"Unless [another entry] is somehow conceived, produced, and released in the next 5 months (when HMAD ends), I'll never see it. For me, this truly is the Final Chapter. Adieu, mostly lousy series!"

That's from my review of Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, posted a few months before the daily part of HMAD ended in March of 2013. The thinking was, while I still planned to update the site a couple times a week (I know, it's usually more like once at best), I wouldn't be bothering much with sequels to movies I never liked much to begin with. Alas, I was "forced" to watch Lake Placid vs. Anaconda for one of my freelance jobs, and when I was surprised to discover that it actually had some continuity with both of the series, I looked up my own reviews and realized that I had reviewed all eight previous movies - I figured I kind of had to post a review.

And yes, EIGHT - four Lake Placids, and four Anacondas. In terms of vs. movies, it's rather squarely matched - Jason had more movies than Freddy, Alien had more movies than Predator, but these guys are on even ground - except when it comes to money and theatrical success. The first two Anaconda films were released theatrically and were successful (especially the first - outgrossing the likes of Starship Troopers, LA Confidential, Jackie Brown, and The Game, among far too many others), but only the first Lake Placid was given such treatment - and it was technically a dud, grossing a mere 31m on a 35m budget. In fact, I'm kind of confused Lake Placid went first in the title, as not only is Anaconda a bigger brand name but it also comes first in the alphabet, giving it better placement in VOD menus (whereas L is pretty much right in the middle). But either way I think it's a pretty stupid title, since Lake Placid isn't the name of the crocodile. I mean it'd be cool if the snakes all decided to just fight a large body of water, but that's obviously not what happens - it'd be like if the 2003 film was called Freddy vs Friday the 13th.

Anyway, back to the continuity - I wouldn't say you HAD to watch the other movies, but I was surprised to discover that the writers clearly had, bringing back elements from the Lake Placid series (like the giant fence that encircles the area, letting these animals live peacefully) and the Anaconda series (like the Blood Orchid) in equal measure. The two characters that return are both Lake Placid vets (Yancy Butler and Robert Englund, who survived being eaten in the last film), but the main evil business lady is the daughter of John Rhys-Davies' character from Anaconda 3, so they reward people that have memorized those movies (or, like I did, took a second to look at a Wikipedia entry to understand the connection after she kept referring to unseen father, which is sequel shorthand for a dead character). Again, it's not like you'll be confused if you go in blind, but it tickled me that the movie actually seemed to care more about the two franchise's history than Freddy vs. Jason or Alien vs. Predator did about their respective series.

I was also tickled that the movie's production company was Destination Films, which I thought had went belly-up years ago. For horror fans they're probably best (?) remembered for Bats, the Syfy-level movie that somehow got a theatrical release in 1999 (a not entirely unsuccessful one! It outgrossed Idle Hands and Teaching Mrs. Tingle, for what it's worth), but to me they're the gods who gave us Drowning Mona, one of my favorite random comedies of all time ("Demoted mother"). Alas, my enthusiasm quickly vanished, as the very first shot of the croc was hideous - not even PS2-level, more like PS1 cut-scene, made additionally sad/hilarious by the fact that the shot was behind the VFX supervisor's credit. Supervising what, exactly? A Windows 95 computer running After Effects 2.5? FX are cheaper these days and more people know how to do them - it shouldn't be this hard to get an at least halfway decent shot of your title monster(s), especially in the first few scenes.

However, some of that hope returned a few seconds later, when an unexpected bit of wit intruded on an otherwise cliche and dumb scene. Early on, Englund (sporting a hook hand, metal foot, and eye-patch to explain his survival) has been hired by the shady scientist types to get them past the fence so they could steal eggs or whatever the hell, and he's trying to back out, so one of them has a gun on him. And they're going through the motions, muttering "Not so fast..." "I won't say anything, let me go!" sort of dialogue that no one actually listens to. Meanwhile, the non-gun-toting scientists are still going about their work nearby (everyone's in one of those mobile labs, like the one in The Lost World), and one of them needs to get to a microscope next to the guy holding a gun on Englund, so he just totally ignores their own personal problems and sighs "Watch the gun..." as he casually strolls between them so he can get on with his work. Like, I love the idea that the real scientists are so used to their employers pulling guns on each other that it doesn't even faze them anymore.

As for the "vs" aspect, as expected they don't spend a lot of time on it. They meet up around the halfway point and the croc gets destroyed pretty quickly, and then near the end another croc (there are several of each monster) flings a snake into the blades of a helicopter hovering above, killing the snake (duh) and sending the chopper into an off-screen crash. No, as usual, they spend most of the movie just going after random humans, following Lake Placid sequel traditions and pitting a group of Bulgarian-as-American teens against the beasts as one of their parents tries to rescue them. This time it's a bunch of sorority sisters/pledges, naturally led by a horribly bitchy girl who, just as naturally, will be one of the last to die (after pushing one of her friends into the monster's path to save herself, of course). But director A.B. Stone bungles the moment we've all been waiting for, opting to cut to the other girls' reactions before we see the croc actually chomp on her. He cuts back to at least show her (already dead) in his jaws, but still: personal foul, movie - ten yard penalty. The only reason to keep these awful kind of characters around for the majority of the runtime is to give them a really satisfying death (even with the MPAA cuts, the bitchy girl in New Blood is a fine example - axe to the head AND he throws her across the room!), so to not actually do that is kind of a huge betrayal of our trust.

But, you know, it's fine. I got paid to watch it so that might factor into my "excitement", but they've paid me to watch others that I wished I could pay them back to STOP watching, so I guarantee it's at least tolerable. Englund seems to be having a little more fun than he did in the previous film, and I like how Yancy Butler has a different job in every movie - she was a poacher in Lake Placid 3, then an EPA Agent in Final Chapter, and now she's the sheriff (Corin Nemec plays the obligatory EPA rep). The end of the movie sets up another sequel of course, so I hope if she returns she's the mayor or something. It also offers plenty of carnage (and an impressive amount of blood being tossed on our heroes during the climax as giant monsters explode around them), and even if they're brief the titular battles are at least funny to watch, bad CGI and all. I also loved (ironically) the bit where Butler comes across some wrecked vehicles and says "What the hell happened here?" as if she hadn't already seen this sort of aftermath in two other movies - maybe she has her memory wiped every time she takes on a new job?

The crocs get more human victims than the snakes, for the record. They're the ones who kill most of the sorority girls (only one dies by snake I think - he/she crushes the car the girl's hiding in), so between that and the two characters it seems that the producers favored Lake Placid over Anaconda a tiny bit. I think the problem with all of the modern vs. movies is that they're born out of two different studios (Jason was Paramount for majority of his run, so it made sense that "The House That Freddy Built" would prefer Krueger for FvJ), unlike the old Universal ones like Frankenstein meets The Wolfman that were all under Universal's umbrella from inception. They had the characters, the sets, the history... the team-ups were more satisfying, at least on that level, than these newer ones ever manage. I think we'll be seeing a shift toward more shared universes (like Marvel) as opposed to straight one on one matches. Take Civil War - a movie that was just Captain America vs. Iron Man would have been fine on its own, but it's the fact that it's part of this ongoing series that makes it truly exciting for everyone, because it's Cap 3, Iron Man 4, Ant-Man 1.5, plus a prequel to Black Panther (and Spider-Man). Marvel is the franchise, not any one character, giving them license to do whatever but also keeps favoritism at bay - you can guarantee if Fox agreed to temporarily lend them the X-Men characters for one "AvX" film that fans of the X-films wouldn't walk away as satisfied as Avengers fans. That said, there are enough junk franchises on Syfy (including Bats, now that I think about it) that they could probably build up some sort of half-assed universe going forward. Maybe Anaconda and Lake Placid can fight Sharknado. A man can dream.

What say you?

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Zoombies (2016)

APRIL 21, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

I'm not sure *when* it happened exactly, as it was probably a gradual thing, but somewhere along the line The Asylum actually figured out how to make their movies enjoyable. Sure, every now and then they would luck into a movie that didn't make me wish I was dead, like Mega Piranha and the (legitimately fun) Zombie Apocalypse, but everything I've seen of late has been at least watchable, often rather amusing. And I can't believe that it's just coincidence and I just HAPPEN to be seeing the "best" of the lot - I truly think movies like Zoombies are what they're often producing; the rule, not the exception (I saw another called Night of the Wild that was a killer dog flick - also pretty fun for what it was). I'm sure they still churn out some stinkers, but it seems the days of Monster and Paranormal Entity are behind them, thankfully.

They've also shied away from straight up mockbusters, opting for something inspired by a big budget movie but not copying it right down to the title. So while this movie is clearly taking cues from Jurassic World (our business-savvy heroine is trying to keep her zoo fresh, she has a kid with her, etc, etc.) and the original Park (it's not open yet), it's not about dinosaurs - it's a traditional zoo with standard animals, except that they've all turned into zombie like predators due to some experiment gone awry. So instead of getting variety via dinosaur types (a T-Rex attack, then a raptor chase, etc.) we get setpieces with different animals entirely - monkeys, giraffes, an ape, birds, even elephants get in on the action, usually with one big sequence of their own. This actually creates a pretty fun smorgasbord of dangers and tasks - the bigger animals are of course dangerous anyway (zombie or not, watch out for a stampeding elephant), and the otherwise harmless birds pose the biggest threat of all as they can fly to populated areas and infect the rest of the world.

It's also got a better script than Jurassic World, though that bar isn't exactly a high one. The characters are all cliches, but at least they behave consistently from scene to scene and never really act like they're brain-damaged in order to advance the plot, like the JW ones did (i.e. walking into a pen with a monster dinosaur to look for it, rather than check the tracker it supposedly has). Things pay off, such as the tough animal control lady who berates an intern for not knowing how to shoot, and later he's able to fire the same comeback (something like "then you better learn quick!") to her when she confesses a weakness, a far cry from World's baffling decision to spend a giant chunk of its first act on the older brother's obsession with girls when it in no way influences anything on what happens to them later. And the interior logic more or less works - it's B-movie nonsense, of course, but I can't recall an instance where I literally yelled "WHAT?" at the screen as I did during what would become the 3rd highest grossing movie of all time (for a few months anyway, Star Wars knocked it down a peg. It's still about 9000 spots too high).

Of course, a better script probably means little to people who just want to see carnage, and on that front it delivers - as long as you accept that the FX are gonna be bad. I mean, I've seen worse, and in movies with far less of them to boot, but they're still a long way from looking good ("decent" would even be stretching it for a few). But there's an energy to the scenes themselves and the movie as a whole that makes them easier to deal with - sure, two giraffes tearing a guy apart isn't going to win the animators any awards, but consider the fact that it's TWO GIRAFFES TEARING A GUY APART! Bad FX tend to really sting when you can think of all the times you've seen it done right, but it's not like I've ever seen a photo-real shot of two giraffes tearing a guy apart, so it's fine. I mean, the movie is called Zoombies and the Asylum likes to put their name in big block letters at the top of the film - I was not expecting Oscar-level work here, and if anything incredible FX would almost be a detriment - it might be less fun in a way.

That said, it actually DOES offer one creepy/kinda scary bit, which I wasn't expecting. First there's a parrot who keeps repeating his victim's final words over and over, and then we see an eagle (I think? Some bird like that) who has made a nest out of a victim's intestines - and she's still alive to relay this information ("it's nesting in meeeeee!"). It was almost kind of disturbing, and certainly not what I was expecting to see at any point in this movie. I'd even go so far as to say that it didn't really belong in this particular movie, but I think part of the reason it played like that is because the bird FX, for whatever reason, were better than those of the larger animals. Strangely, the absolute worst FX shot in the entire movie was animal-free - it was a sequence where some characters finally use the zipline that had been foreshadowed twice already, shot by clearly just putting the actors on a harness and not even actually dangling them in front of the green-screen. If you look at their arms they're not even being stretched, so the director didn't even bother having them hang and just let them stand on something while they said their lines in front of the green backdrop that would be (poorly) added in later. I almost had to laugh that they somehow managed to take the only part of the movie that they could have possibly shot for real and make it look faker than any of the fantastical nonsense around it (you can also hilariously see through actress Kim Nielsen's striking light blue eyes during a commercial for the zoo, as they got filtered out along with the colored screen behind her).

Another thing I enjoyed is that the main building for the zoo was the same shooting location from Dead Heat and Brain Dead (and other movies), which prompted me to finally look into its actual location as I knew it had to be Los Angeles somewhere. And by look into I mean emailed my friend Jared, who did the legwork while I just tweeted nonsense or whatever it was I did until he got back to me. Oddly enough, while I figured it was in one of the more isolated areas of the county (like Santa Clarita, where they shoot almost every low budget horror movie), it was actually in Van Nuys - and I had driven past it on my way to work that morning! I mean it's far enough off the road that I probably wouldn't be able to see it from my car window anyway, but I don't usually drive that way in the morning, it just happened that the traffic patterns elsewhere had Waze send me on that road (which happens maybe 1 in 20 morning commutes). And I had no idea I'd be watching Zoombies today either, so it was just the lamest and least consequential form of fate in human history.

Oh, and the guy who ignores his friends' pleas and puts himself in grave danger to save an endangered animals gets killed by said endangered animal, which is the kind of mean-spirited outcome I really like. But if mean-spiritedness ain't your thing, it's also worth noting that the movie offers two heroines; Nielsen's Bryce Dallas Howard stand-in plus the head guard (the Chris Pratt, I guess?), and neither of them have heels on as far as I know.

Look, I'm not saying you need to track this down or put it on your must-watch list or anything, but all things considered, I found it to be a pretty harmless and enjoyable little slice of B-movie nirvana. Everyone involved (well, maybe not all of the actors) knew exactly what kind of movie they were making and were smart enough to know that simply offering amazing shots for a trailer isn't going to win anyone over (looking at you, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus). The characters were largely likable (even the obligatory bitchy girl had an appealing moment or two) and despite their probably very limited budget, they delivered - in their own way - exactly what I wanted from the concept of "zoo animals turn into zombies" (indeed, even my half-jokey tweet demanded zombie elephants and monkeys - and they offered both!), as opposed to their many, many films that barely live up to the title let alone the concept. You don't even need to "turn your brain off" to enjoy the movie - you just have to meet it on its own terms.

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Shark Lake (2015)

APRIL 13, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

A few years ago, Dolph Lundgren said he was retiring from acting (no jokes), and like everyone who isn't Sean Connery or Gene Hackman, he didn't really mean it - he was back making movies within a few months if memory serves. But to his credit, he has taken on more diverse projects over the past couple years; he still does the usual "CIA operative finds himself a target" kinda DTV nonsense like all of his peers, but in between those ones he'll pop up in something like Shark Lake, which is a Lake Placid-y (but humorless) approach to a shark movie, setting a couple of them free in a lake where they don't belong. We have the local officer, a shark hunter, and a scientist to give it that proper Jaws ripoff flair (though the cop is a woman!) - but Dolph isn't playing the hunter or the scientist (which would be amazing in the latter case), he's playing... a dad trying to reconnect with his daughter?

In the movie's far too rushed prologue, some cops investigate Dolph's house, which is filled with exotic animals and his 3 year old daughter, alone in bed as Dolph races away in his truck, presumably to avoid getting arrested for animal smuggling. He gets caught anyway and goes to jail, and now five years later he's out - and the daughter is now with Meredith, the officer who found her. Since animal smuggling isn't really the worst thing a man can go to jail for, we're not too worried that Dolph's gonna be the bad guy or anything, but we DO learn that it's his fault that the sharks are in the lake, because he set one free instead of forking it over to the local tycoon/mob/whatever "heavy" that ordered it. This subplot is nowhere near as ridiculous/fun as it sounds, I assure you, and seemingly only exists to give Dolph an excuse to fight some dudes every now and then since he can't really kick the sharks all that often.

Nor does it take up much of the movie. Dolph gets top billing, of course, but there are long stretches without his character (sometimes they just cut to him driving his boat or something just to remind us that he's there), and we spend most of our time with the adoptive mother/only cop who seems interested in killing the shark. She's the first to suspect shark, she's the only one that goes out to find it, etc. There's a funny subplot early on where they think a bear attacked someone (it was real close to the shore), so they kill a bear and are having this press conference about their victory when someone in the background gets their leg bitten off by the shark (good call to have the press conference with the lake behind them!), but the movie's title kind of prevents this from ever being an acceptable ruse. Still, it beats the usual "We got *a* shark, not *the* shark" stuff, giving the movie slightly more personality than the usual Jaws clone - and there's no close the beaches equivalent subplot, either.

But there IS a Matt Hooper! I find Hooper tends to be the least ripped-off character of the three, but this movie almost singlehandedly balances the boards on that one, as the only real difference is a. he flirts with "Brody" and b. dies, though even that can be construed as a book reference. He's even got the glasses and is supposed to leave town to study something else! The actual Matt Hooper showing up in Piranha 3Dfelt less inspired by Spielberg's version of the character than this guy. As for the "Quint" guy, it's a typically cheesy/fake Steve Irwin wannabe guy who wants to catch the shark for his laughably low-rent (but supposedly successful) reality show, which apparently has a crew of one. He gets offed earlier than expected, which was a minor surprise but also kind of a foregone conclusion when you realize that the movie didn't hire Dolph Lundgren to mope about his daughter in non-shark scenes - eventually he's gotta take over as the movie's tough guy.

When it finally gets to this stuff, it's fine. I like that Dolph has no ill-will toward Meredith, saving her life a couple times and quickly reuniting her with the little girl (he even refers to her as "your daughter", which is nice), and their faceoff with the shark is set in the dead of night so it's dark enough not to see how bad the CGI is, but getting there takes way too long. I just mentioned the CGI, and it's not limited to the attacks, which can be expected since no one can bother doing prosthetics anymore. No, we get hilariously bad underwater footage with the shark hunter and his cameraman clearly superimposed into it, off-scale and not even moving naturally across the footage - it reminded me of that insanely terrible shot from Jaws 3D where the shark crashes into the control room. That there isn't even any sharks in some of these shots just makes it look all the worse, and there are still frame establishing shots and other cheapo blemishes that made me wonder if it was really worth blowing the entire budget on Dolph. Clearly they coulda gotten a lesser name (Jeff Speakman?) to handle this stuff and put that dough toward making the other parts of the movie at least halfway respectable, no?

For the most part, the only really interesting thing about the movie to me was how rather unlikable the heroine was. She's mean to the Hooper guy, and she's totally disrespectful to her boss - he even comments that she's the only one who calls him by his first name instead of "Sheriff" (or chief, or whatever he was). I think she even dismisses her own mother at one point, and doesn't seem to care much that their dog got chomped (insanely bad scene by the way, featuring kids who are delighted by setting off dud fireworks). And she won't let the kid see her dad, which seems rather extreme considering he wasn't a violent murderer or whatever - he just wanted to help some local rich folks own snakes or alligators (he also got paroled, it's not like he escaped or anything). I mean I'm all for more female heroines, but ultimately I don't care what sex/color/race/etc they are, I want to actually LIKE them in these things, at least more than I do the damn sharks. I was far more endeared by the random old people who get sharked early on (the one the other cops think is the work of a bear). The husband is panning for gold in the lake while his wife goes to get her iPad so she can take pictures for her friend in some sort of weird passive aggressive way (they go on and on about how jealous the lady will be because her lake isn't as nice or something?), and he's sadly killed off before we can enjoy any more of their batty old people yammering. That other lady is never going to know how clear Lake Tahoe is, and that's the real tragedy of the film.

Somehow, this ISN'T a Syfy original; I couldn't find exactly how it was first released but the IMDB lists a US release date of October 2nd of 2015, which was a Friday. That usually means theatrical (new DVDs come out on Tuesdays), but it also says "internet" next to it, so maybe it was straight to VOD? At any rate, it's an OK enough time-killer for the non-discerning, though the promise of "Dolph Lundgren vs sharks!" is only technically (and very briefly) realized, with too many 3rd rate FX and lazy Jaws swipes to deal with along the way. With more odd touches like that old couple this could be elevated into must-see weirdo entertainment, but for the most part it's as bland as it is derivative, and even Dolph in a horror movie isn't that novel anymore - he also joined Scott Adkins against a monster in Legendary, and fought zombies in something called Battle of the Damned (he's also got Don't Kill It on the way, which has the most promise of them all as it's been described as Indiana Jones meets Evil Dead). We can all do better, folks.

What say you?

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Dark Age (1987)

MARCH 29, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

When John Jarratt appared in Rogue, I figured it was just Greg McLean recruiting his Wolf Creek star for a bit role, something to amuse fans of that film since he was such a vicious killer in Creek and then in Rogue he was probably the sweetest character in it (he was the guy who wanted to leave his wife's ashes on the river). However, I now realize that while that may have been part of it, it was probably McLean tipping his hand to Dark Age, an Australian killer croc movie that preceded HIS Australian killer croc movie by twenty years. Jarratt (looking a bit like Simon Cowell, right down to the white t-shirt) is the star here, playing a hybrid of Brody and Hooper as he works to stop a giant "Numunwari" from killing any more people.

And in case you weren't sure of the Jaws influence, like that film it offs someone a bit older in the opening scene (a couple of poachers, in fact) before setting its sights on someone smaller - MUCH smaller. Alex Kintner comparatively lived a full and well-rounded life compared to the little toddler that gets munched in the first 15 minutes, and director Arch Nicholson doesn't risk anything crazy like ambiguity or subtlety - we get a shot of the croc's giant mouth crushing the little boy, which was horrifying enough for me but made worse by the audience laughing/cheering it on (it WAS a grindhouse night, so I can't fault them or be high and mighty - two years ago I would have been cheering the loudest). Nicholson then twists the knife, showing the kid's little toy boat floating in the water nearby, now sans its tiny little owner. I mean it wasn't exactly Pet Sematary, but good lord, that one was rough for me (you can see it on Youtube if you like, though it cuts out before the boat "coda").

But in a way, this horrifying (to me) sequence makes the movie's 2nd half even more insane/kind of incredible, as Jarratt joins forces with some local Aborigines to SAVE the baby-eating killing machine, because it's a rare animal and the Aborigines respect it as some sort of god. The plan is to tranquilize it and bring it to an isolated lake where it can eat the fish or whatever and not bother anyone, so the movie switches from Jaws to Free Willy and we kind of go along with it. It's a lot easier to do this when you consider the evil poachers, including one who survives the opening scene attack AND another one later (though he loses his arm that time), as him and his drunken fellow poachers spend the whole movie drinking, shooting every croc they see (and some of these shots seem pretty realistic to me - if they were all puppets/animatronics then the FX team was terrific) and also terrorizing our human heroes for good measure. Without them, you might just think Jarratt is insane and that the creature should be killed, but these guys are all mustache-twirling evil bastards, making it a lot easier to just side with whoever or WHATEVER they're against (it helps that we never meet the family of the little boy who was killed - no slaps in the face from a grieving mother here).

Because of this switcheroo, the movie kind of loses steam as a monster movie and feels like more of an action thriller in its 3rd act, with Jarratt and his Aborigine friends driving a truck with the (tranquilized) croc through some swamps and such, the poachers in pursuit. It's got shootouts, car wrecks, even a goofy bit where they stop to weigh the thing at a highway weigh station (complete with nailbiting suspense as the weigh station employee nearly discovers what they're really hauling). The evil poacher guy finally gets his just desserts in the closing minutes, but otherwise there's probably a solid half hour where it's easy to forget that the movie was once traditional Jaws-y fare. Such genre-swapping isn't uncommon in "Ozploitation" fare, but I certainly didn't expect any of our heroes to get shot to death in this giant crocodile movie.

Then again, by that point the movie had offered a little bit of everything; there's a pretty sizable amount of screentime given to Jarratt and his on/off girlfriend's relationship struggles, with possible infidelity, her housekeeping skills, his workaholic ways, etc. all given their due, to the point where it could have turned into a romantic film just as easily as a Free Willy precursor. The local assholes (there are more than the poachers; Jarratt has a wino buddy who gets chased by a trio of standard punks) give the movie some Mad Max flavor as well, and then the Aborigines offer the genuine Aussie flavor that I don't recall being much of a part of Rogue. And I hope none of this sounds like a complaint - on the contrary, it made the movie quite delightful (seeing as it was part of a double feature with Alligator, it could have looked terrible by comparison if it didn't follow its own playbook), not to mention more engaging - you were never quite sure where it would end up next. At one point Jarratt, the asshole poacher, and about ten other guys go off to look for the best, making me think it might turn into a Dirty Dozen kinda deal where they'd be offed one by one as they try to take it down, but it ends up being a fairly quick sequence where they kill pretty much every croc BUT the one they want. I only point out all of the plot turns for those who might be expecting wall to wall carnage, since the first 15 minutes don't hold back at all - it's just one of the script's many examples of setting up familiar beats only to go off on a different path.

As for the croc itself, it looks pretty great. It's a silent, slower stalker - often floating just high enough to break the surface of the water with its tail scales or maybe the top of its head, and making its fuller appearances count. After just seeing Alligator on the big screen for the first time, I was happy that they didn't go with any miniatures - Alligator is a great goddamn movie (and even better with a crowd), but man those miniature shots are painfully bad at times, so seeing more in a movie that presumably had less money to work with would have been a bit too much to bear. So yeah, he doesn't DO much in a lot of his shots (especially near the end when they're bringing him back to the water - he had woken up by that point but it sure didn't look like it), but when he does I never doubted they were dealing with a real animal. As much as I love Alligator, I can see all the tricks on display (miniatures, forced perspective, etc.) but here, for all I know it was a real giant croc.

All in all, a terrific double feature. It's been a long damn time since I was able to go to the Bev for a Grindhouse night (and I don't think I was able to stay for both movies last time), and I'm not sure if I've ever (yes, EVER) stayed awake throughout both movies in their entirety. Usually I'm fine for the first one but by the 2nd or 3rd reel in the second movie I'm fighting off sleep (and often losing that battle), but I was totally alert throughout, likely a mixture of the high brought on by a big-screen viewing of Alligator (seriously, that movie is infinitely more entertaining and well-written than it has any right to be; I wish John Sayles had stuck around in the horror genre forever) and the coffee I drank in between the two movies that kept me awake until 2 am (I didn't have any in the morning, so my system probably let the caffeine work as intended for a change). But also, I suspect it's because the movies, while seeming very similar on the surface (Jaws wannabes with very similar creatures - to this day I can't tell a croc from a gator at a glance), were textbook examples on how to take a basic story and make it your own. It's always saddened me how similar all those Syfy movies are, because there is clearly a lot of ways you can go about writing/directing the parts in between the giant monster eating people. Look to these films, monster movie makers - Jaws may be the king of such fare, but that's not the only one that can inspire how you make yours.

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The Curse (1987)

MARCH 1, 2016

GENRE: ALIEN, PREDATOR
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Thanks to Scream Factory, I have become privy to a brief wave of Italian/American co-productions that peppered (some) theaters and (more) video stores during the late '80s and early '90s, many of which they've released as double features (such as Witchery/Ghosthouse). The partnership made sense - with the decline of drive-ins hurting indie schlock producers here in the US and the Italian film system facing its own crippling problems, it was mutually beneficial to work together. The Italians found a way to keep working, and the Americans got names like Lucio Fulci or Umberto Lenzi to rope in horror fans that might otherwise overlook such fare. The Curse is probably the most famous of the lot (it opened in the top 10 at the box office!) and offers the most curious list of credits - Fulci and Ovidio G. Assonitis (of Tentacles/Beyond the Door fame) from the Italian side, with the Americans offering up a pretty great cast: Claude Akins, Wil Wheaton, The Funhouse's Cooper Huckabee, and even a post-Dukes John Schneider.

You'll also see familiar tough guy character actor David Keith (not Keith David) in the credits, but he doesn't appear on camera - he actually directed this thing, his first time calling the shots and the only one of his three directorial efforts that he didn't give himself a nice role. At first I figured it was just the poorly-chosen pseudonym for Assonitis or some other Italian (as most of them used aliases), especially since all the others I've seen had Italian directors while the casts were predominantly American, but nope - it was Jack Murdock himself calling the shots. Apparently it was also his own farm that was used for the film's exteriors, while the rest was shot in Rome (which you can kind of tell because the dubbing is pretty bad whenever they're inside*), and there's a pretty even split between the two - 50/50, like the crew itself.

The American side of things is probably why the script is based on HP Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space", since very few Italian horror films are directly adapted from anything like that. Lovecraft isn't even credited, though the film is actually pretty close to his narrative for the first hour or so, before FX and action mostly take over. The biggest change is how much the hero of the story is sidelined in the movie - Schneider's Willis fills in for Pierce (the hero in Lovecraft's story) but he's only in like four or five scenes, with the focus given almost entirely to the family on the farm that is primarily affected by the alien meteorite. Schneider doesn't even meet them until the climax, if memory serves, spending his scenes either alone or with the local realtor/greedy bastard who is trying to make sure Schneider's surveyor character will give the go-ahead for some big construction deal (as always, whenever the movie's dialogue concerns real estate shenanigans, I tune out. Probably because I'll go to the grave without ever owning any land/property). I don't know if Schneider was busy working on something else and they could only get him for a few days, or his scenes were cut for one reason or another, but he feels very disconnected from the narrative/main characters, making his rescuer role in the climax really awkward.

The folks are rescuing are Wil Wheaton's character and his sister (played by Wil's real life sister, who the credits "introduce" for what would be her first/last big role in an intermittent career peppered with a lot of short films and "Female Student" type roles), as the rest of their family has gotten infected and turned into pretty gross looking monsters. Akins is their dad, a very religious man who quotes Bible verses while shunning his wife's affections, i.e. the sort of guy you can't wait to see get messed up good. I was surprised to see Akins being so game for the makeup FX work - this is a guy who had been acting for nearly forty years for guys like Howard Hawks, so you could easily see him scoffing at the idea of being done up like a zombie with neurofibromatosis. But he's totally into it, and it's kind of awesome to see him going through those motions. It's also awesome to see Wheaton literally headbutt his jerk brother to death. I mean, technically the fall kills him (they're near a railing), but still - amazing MO for fratricide.

Now you might hear those examples and think that this is a crazy, action-packed movie, but that is far from the case. In fact, had they credited Lovecraft I might not have been so surprised at how relatively slow-paced it was, coming from the Italians I always count on for the wackiness. I didn't recognize the HPL connection for a while; as the plot starts with an alien element crashing in the Midwest, I just took it as any old 80s horror that starts the same way - Killer Klowns, Critters, Invaders from Mars (plus, again, the hero of the story was turned into a random supporting character). There are a few isolated incidents along the way (most memorably an attack on the little girl by some deranged chickens), but otherwise there isn't much gore or violence until the final 15 minutes, when all hell has broken loose (at least, at the farm). Here we get some pretty delightful miniature work (where it's obvious that it's a miniature, but not laughably so) and some crazy FX sequences, like all of the wood panels inside the house curling themselves away/off the walls as the structure collapses. The infected family members also prove to be hard to kill, giving it a vague zombie movie feel for a bit too. It's perhaps a bit TOO slow at times, with too many characters being jumbled about, but if you came for the same sort of nuttiness those other Italian/American movies offered, you'll certainly find it here.

What you won't find is Wheaton or anyone else offering comments on the film - the only bonus feature is the trailer, which has one of the clunkiest segways in voiceover history. It's a pretty standard 80s horror trailer, but near the end movie trailer voice says "Wil Wheaton from Stand By Me, now stands alone against... THE CURSE!" The fact that he doesn't notwithstanding (he stands with his sister! And Pa Kent!), how much of a reach can you possibly make before you're just being incoherent? At least the shorter trailer for video (not on the disc; I found it when looking for the full trailer below) goes with a standard "Stand by Me's Wil Wheaton" instead of trying to make it a thing. Reminds me of that awful blurb for Joy Ride that said something like "Paul Walker goes for an even bigger ride than he did in Fast and the Furious!" It was on one of the home video boxes! So awful/amazing.

The disc also has the sequel, which is apparently completely unrelated (as are Curse 3 and 4, the existence of which I am only now aware of), but it DOES have Shiri Appleby in one of her first movies, and stars horror royalty Jill Schoelen. It also has the plot description "After a young man is bitten on the hand by a radioactive snake, his hand changes into a lethal snake head," so you can be assured that I'll be finding the time to watch it soon. Hopefully Scream will get the rights to the other two; I am kind of charmed that there's this little franchise of goofy movies that I had almost zero awareness of their existence. Maybe someone can get the survivors of each one together, Fast Five/Avengers style, and catapult this franchise into the stratosphere. The Curse Shared Universe (TCSU) must come together!

What say you?

*Many Italian studios aren't sound proof (with at least one major one right by an airport), so even though everyone is speaking English they had to be redubbed anyway.

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Backcountry (2014)

AUGUST 29, 2015

GENRE: PREDATOR, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

On the bonus features for Backcountry, one of the producers proudly explains that they wanted to make this movie to show the woman becoming the hero and (spoiler) surviving, in a manner that suggests that such a thing never happens. Which is odd, because while I liked the movie, all but one of the ones it reminded me of while watching also had the woman survive, to the point where I actually had to stop and think if there was EVER one where the male lived when the female did not - even The Reef, which is based on a true story in which the male survived, was changed to let the female live. Needless to say, it's pretty standard in this sub-genre to keep the female lead alive (if battered), or just kill them both like Open Water, so I have no idea what the hell he was talking about.

But after 16+ years of DVD supplements, I'm used to listening to/rolling my eyes at producers who assume every horror movie is misogynist garbage (and that they're reinventing the wheel), so I won't hold it against the film. I AM a bit puzzled that they hide their bear for so long, even trying not once but twice to suggest that a human villain might be the thing that turns our hero couple's idyllic vacation into a nightmare. I mean, they had to have known that the film's marketing would be BEAR! BEAR BEAR BEAR! BEAAAAAAAAAARRRR! so the fact that it's treated as almost a surprise in the movie is kind of odd, and also puts the film dangerously close to "boring and padded" territory. I mean, sure, we expect (need!) some time to get to know our characters and establish the possible threat, but it's literally an hour into the movie (almost to the second) before he finally shows up, and then after some business he exits again for the final 15 minutes. And I don't mean they hide him, like Jaws ; there isn't an opening attack on some randoms, or a warning from a local - there's just no bear.

Then again, it's a real bear, in real shots with the actors, so you can understand why his presence had to be reduced (why they couldn't crib from Jaws and just have him doing stuff off-screen, I'm not sure). The editing is frustratingly quick-cut during the more exciting scenes, and I'd like to think it was just cutting around whatever safety measures they had in place, or because they could only get a few frames, but it's just as obnoxiously hyper-edited during non-bear scenes, like when our hero Jenn (Missy Peregrym) tumbles down a hill and we get something like half a second of GoPro footage tossed in as she falls. I can't and won't understand what the appeal of this sort of editing is when you're obviously sending the actor (or her stunt double) down a hill anyway - zoom out a bit and show it in longer takes! It denies us the experience of feeling each crunch and smack.

That said, the big bear attack is pretty tense, and surprisingly gory - director Adam MacDonald does not shy away from blood or prosthetic makeup in this sequence, allowing us a glimpse of a half torn-off face, a mostly eaten leg, etc. Some of the things he tries don't really work for me (muting the sound at random points, for example), but it's still a pretty harrowing sequence that is worth the wait - I just couldn't help think if it should have came maybe 10 minutes earlier. See, apart from the boyfriend poopooing Jenn's insistence on bringing bear spray along for their camping trip (it might as well be called Foreshadow Spray), there isn't much of a hint at a bear presence at all until the half hour mark, at which point you get little clues: a footprint, a possible bear howl, etc. And those are good to buy the movie some time, but the give and take is slightly extended too far - it's basically a spoiler to say the bear shows up at all, considering where it happens in the film. This movie will forever be described as "A couple encounters a bear" and based on when that happens it'd be like describing Halloween as a movie about a babysitter who leaves her kids alone to check on her friends across the street.

And the couple's standard relationship woes aren't all that novel, either - Jenn works too much and emasculates him! He doesn't hit the marks on boyfriend quizzes from a magazine! It finally gets interesting when Alex gets them lost and she starts shouting at how he always fucks everything up and he's a loser... and then he admits he was going to propose to her. Again, this is nothing new - horror movies are littered with engagement rings being put on after the would-be groom has been killed, but I can't recall one where the guy was called a loser right before it would have happened. I only wish the bear had attacked right then and there and REALLY killed the moment. However, they DO introduce an amazing wrench in the works via Eric Balfour, as an Irish (huh?) outdoorsman type who takes a liking to Jenn and engages in one of the longest pissing matches in cinema history with Alex - it's like 10 straight minutes of Balfour baiting this guy at every other line (right down to overruling his choice of potatoes or veggies to cook along with the fish he made), and at one point it gets just as tense as the damn bear scene. Again, it's part of a bizarre attempt to make us think that Balfour might be a serial killer or something, but even though their ruse failed it didn't make the scene any less interesting (it's certainly better than the equally bungled bid to make the park ranger look suspicious too).

So as far as these kind of movies go, it's not as good as Frozen or Open Water, but it's a lot better than The Canyon and Open Water 2. If you saw Thirst, which was this but in the desert instead of the woods (and wolves instead of a bear), it's on par with that - a harmless, well-made movie that will remind you why you should never ever travel anywhere. Also, hilariously, in that review I mentioned my weird theory on how a couple's position in bed determines their fate, and this movie is another piece of evidence that my theory is correct, something I had noted long before I re-read my Canyon review (I didn't even remember that I had written this goofy idea down at all, let alone in a review I'd be namechecking). I think the key to enjoying these survival movies depends on how likely you are to find yourself in the situation depicted, which is why I loved Frozen (I ski!) but had more issues with woods/desert ones, since I'm the kind of guy who prefers family campgrounds with electricity and running water than "roughing it".

Oh, most of the bonus features are pretty standard; the commentary has the director and the actors so you get a little bit of everything, though some of it is repeated on the making of piece, and it's far from a must-listen. However, I flat out LOVED "Bear Shots", which is a collection of homemade footage showing the kinds of shots that the director needed of the bear, which was requested from the bear's trainer. Playing the bear in these shots: the director's cats, with accompanying growls and scary music - if you're a cat owner like me it will probably be pretty damn amusing to you. The trailer and a still gallery is also included, because by law they have to be on a Scream Factory release, I think.

What say you?

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