Flatliners (2017)

SEPTEMBER 30, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Full disclosure, right off the bat - someone pulled a fire alarm during my showing of Flatliners and we had to file out with about twenty minutes left in the film. As I was not particularly enjoying it to that point, the idea of going back to watch it all again just to see what I missed seemed absurd (especially at this time of the year), so I had someone fill me in on how it ended up. If that means you cannot accept my opinion of the film, then feel free to shut the page now. But don't tell me I'm being "unprofessional" - I paid to see the movie and since the whole theater had to file out there were like 1000 people waiting for their complimentary tickets, and I had less interest in waiting in that line than I did in seeing the rest of the film. The following critiques are still valid, and seeing the ending instead of having it described in detail would not have made a difference.

Anyway, your guess is as good as mine as to why Sony opted to remake Flatliners, of all the things in their library. I know they've pulled some questionable moves in the past, such as with Total Recall, but at least that was a much bigger hit in its day, had room to explore (it was based very loosely on a short story, so they could have tried a straighter adaptation), and if nothing else could let Len Wiseman do his action thing with a big budget and appealing cast. Flatliners, on the other hand, was a minor hit from that same year (the Total Recall remake was five years ago already, if you can believe it), so it doesn't have the same longevity or name value. All it really had was the hook - med students purposely dying to see what's on the other side, then being revived to share their experiences - only they all bring back the ghosts of their haunted pasts. A great concept to be sure, but not one that needs to be retold in a PG-13 manner (and, curiously, on an even lower budget, which has to be a first for a studio remake).

In fact I wouldn't have even bothered with it at all if not for the fact that it was actually designed to be a stealth sequel of sorts to the original, as opposed to a traditional remake. Kiefer Sutherland was cast in the film as the same character (Nelson) he played in the 1990 film, so I found that to be an interesting angle and figured it was worth a look on the strength of that alone. He appears a few times as the Chief of Staff (or whatever, I'm not good with job titles - a guy in charge at any rate) that's guiding our new heroes through med school, but I kept waiting to see when he'd be like "Hey, you guys are hacks - me and my friends did this 27 years ago!", as there was seemingly no reference to his past or even that their experiment had been done before. It wasn't until Monday morning that I got my answer; apparently, test screening audiences found the connection too confusing (apparently he didn't make his history clear until the end of the film, which even I have to admit is a bizarre approach to take), and so it was dropped. I believe someone refers to him as Nelson at one point, but I might have just misheard as he is credited as Barry Wolfson (and that's the name on his labcoat), so let's just assume I heard it wrong and that they have successfully scrubbed the final cut of any connection to the original, making it the straight up remake I didn't want to see in the first place, with Sutherland's casting now just appearing as a gimmick, like Andrea Martin playing the house mother in Black Xmas, or Sean Connery showing up as the King in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

So now it's just a remake, and a rather dull one at that. As with the original, the students are all plagued by visions of people they've wronged in the past when they come back from the dead, though they're at least slightly different stories (and the characters themselves are different, though Diego Luna's character never flatlines, much like Oliver Platt's in the original). However, the changes aren't really that drastic; there's another bullying incident, but this time it was cyber-bullying where one of our heroes shared nude photos of a rival classmate in order to humiliate her. And instead of one guy losing his fiance due to his sexual habits, our William Baldwin stand-in is wracked with guilt over one of his many one night stands resulting in a pregnancy that was aborted (and he was too chicken to even go to the clinic with her). Julia Roberts blamed herself for her father's death, and here it's Ellen Page blaming herself over her sister's death. The only exception is Nina Dobrev's character, who screwed up at the hospital one night and killed someone by giving him the wrong medication, and I can't help but wish they tied ALL of their regrets into their life as med students, as it would help differentiate between it and the original.

Another big change is that when they come back they've also unlocked parts of their brain a bit. Page's character is able to recall everything she's ever learned, Kiersey Clemons' character becomes uninhibited, and another guy starts being more intuitive and "seeing" people. But then they inexplicably drop this idea once everyone starts having their visions, and it ultimately has zero bearing on anything. It reminded me a bit of the Rob Zombie Halloween in that way, where even if it wasn't all working they were at least trying something new, but seemingly got cold feet and decided to just copy the original more and more as the film went on. There is one major change (spoiler ahead, but without specifics!), in that one of them is killed for good at a certain point, whereas all five of them survived in the original, but while it's a good shock when it occurs, as with the "unlocked brain" stuff it fails to have any real weight on what happens after.

But don't worry, if you haven't seen the original or completely forget it*, you'll just be merely bored by the damn thing. It's not even really a horror movie for the most part; they have some freaky visions in the back half but there is very little immediate danger, and there's a disconnect that makes some of the scares just a total cheat. For example, the guy haunted by his cowardice re: abortion is haunted by the ghost of that one-time lover, and at one point she stabs his hand - but later we learn she's not even dead, so I'm not sure how she has a vengeful ghost to chase him around (or, exactly why it came back when he flatlined). Dobrev gets the bulk of the scare scenes since her visions are of someone who is actually dead and has a reason to be mad at her, but they're all the generic kind of modern studio horror scares where a creepy person will suddenly appear next to our hero and then disappear again - it gets tiresome, even in a movie that has limited such occasions. In fact many of them seem like they were just added in to give the trailer editors something to work with.

The acting is equally inconsistent; Luna's character is all "We must stop this, this is insane!" one minute, and then laughing/dancing with the others to celebrate the latest successful flatline the next. Though that might be the result of what seems to be a hasty post-production and/or reshoots, as they obviously had to tinker to remove the sequel aspect to it, and there are other signs of sloppiness - there are at least two scenes where the aspect ratio changes a bit, as if they forgot to apply the same masking to every shot. There's also a sixth med student, Brad, who seems like he was supposed to play a bigger role at one point, but disappears for so long that I forgot who he was when he briefly reappeared in a later scene. Maybe for Blu-ray they will have a longer cut or deleted scenes that flesh out some of this stuff, but I don't think it will be enough to save it.

Then again maybe there isn't anything else except for Kiefer's reveal. The trailer doesn't have anything that didn't end up in the movie (almost a guarantee for such occasions - see Diego Luna's last big film - Rogue One - for an example), so it's very possible that the script (by Ben Ripley, who wrote the engaging and entertaining Source Code) was more interesting at first and it got rewritten to the point of having no identity by the time they started shooting it. Either way it's a shame; the cast is good and even if he's not exactly an iconic character it would have been cool to see how Nelson was living his life all these years later, but for whatever reason, the film we got is the worst kind of remake: there's not enough difference to justify its existence, and everyone's too competent to make it an entertaining fiasco. It's just THERE, as indifferent as the audience who barely seemed to care when they were asked to leave before it limped to its conclusion.

What say you?

*I'm not a huge fan of it either; it's fine, and the dead kid beating the shit out Kiefer scared me a lot when I was eleven, but I've barely thought about it since.

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Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017)

SEPTEMBER 26, 2017

GENRE: MONSTER, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Much like Cropsey, the Creeper is a cool villain that deserves better vehicles to show what they can do, as Jeepers Creepers 3 continues the series' tradition of being better on paper than in execution, forever trying to recapture the magic of the first film's first act. That 30-35 minute stretch of the original, where it's mostly just the two kids in their car being pursued by the Creeper, is nearly perfect, but the next hour, and its first sequel, are handicapped by weird narrative choices, clunky pacing, and an abundance of characters. For a while, it seems like the 3rd film would stick to what worked about the original and deliver on the promise (to the best of the filmmaker's abilities when working with a lower budget this time around), but alas the usual issues start rearing their ugly head.

All except for one, which I might as well get out of the way now - it's thankfully not as skeevy as the other two, or the director's other films that I've seen. No shirtless boys, no gross metaphors (I'm still somewhat repulsed by JC2's "he can get in through the backdoor!" sequence), etc. An early cut of the film apparently included a brief reference to the heroine being abused by her stepfather (and another character saying something like "Can you blame him?") but thankfully they were excised (the backstory was changed; the stepfather is now said to have disliked the girl, prompting to her to live with her grandmother instead), leaving the film free of anything that would remind you of the filmmaker's abhorrent past. And on that note, as always I will simply remind you that he plead guilty and was imprisoned for a while (unlike some others who deny their crimes and walk free), that many people who have worked with him since have sworn that there was nothing uncomfortable about their production(s), and that he is but one of the many people who worked on the film and deserve to see their hard work recognized. I don't condone what he did, but I'm not going to take it out on, say, Jonathan Breck (the Creeper), either. I matched the cost of my ticket to support the GoFundMe for his victim, who is trying to spread awareness of what happened to him and child abuse as a whole - I urge you to support him as well if you have the means to. It's also worth noting that he volunteers at a workshop for juvenile sex offenders, encouraging them to do as he does and work his issues out through creative means - i.e. going out and actually working on problems, as opposed to just tweeting how much you don't like that they exist.

If you care about the film at all you probably have heard by now that it takes place in between the first two films, which has two benefits for the production: they don't have to make it look like the future of 2024 (now a lot closer than it was when the first two films were released) and they didn't need to bring back Ray Wise and (likely) kill him off in order to explain how the Creeper got away from the makeshift prison he was in when we last saw him in JC2. But I figured it'd take place on some random day in the middle of that 23-day spree, so I was surprised when the film began (after a 1978 prologue that I'll talk about in a bit) right at the end of JC1, with the surviving cops regrouping and trying to figure out what the hell just happened after Darry (Justin Long's character) was taken from their "protection". Only one cast member (besides Breck) really returns, Brandon Smith as Tubbs, the high-strung desk sergeant who spent most of his screentime in the first film just kind of growling and muttering at the psychic lady - but he was the only one of the cops that had a distinct presence so I doubt anyone will notice/care that his fellow officers aren't the same, and it's pretty admirable to do the "immediately picks up" sequel thing for a movie that was made sixteen years later.

As for Gina Phillips as Trish, she's top billed on IMDb, but it's practically a spoiler to announce that she's in the movie at all, since she doesn't appear until the film's closing shot, in an epilogue not unlike JC2's: she's basically waiting around to fight the Creeper when he returns in 2024 (I'm not sure what year her scene takes place in - she has a modern laptop, so I'm guessing it's just some form of "present day". The slow pan up to reveal her face is treated as a major surprise, so I don't know why they announced her return for what's basically a twist cameo (oddly, another sequel coming around soon did the exact same thing with its most famous survivor, but knew better than to put that person on the damn cast list), but hopefully no one was only interested in the movie to see her grand return, as it seems we will have to wait for Jeepers 4 to see what Trish has been up to all these years. Unlike Smith (already an older guy) there's no way Phillips could pass for her 16 years younger self, and thus it was obvious that she wouldn't be in it all that much once the 2001 setting was established, so hopefully the next film finally cuts to the Creeper's next spree so she can take an active role in the proceedings.

Speaking of the timeline, as I mentioned the film opens with a prologue set during a different Creeper spree - 1978's, to be exact. At first I figured it was just a way to get a kill in the movie, but not only does the victim have a role in the main part of the film (as a ghost/hallucination/whatever), but it's also a fun little bit of connective tissue - it's the victim that Darry and Trish talk about in the first film, when she realizes they're on the same road as "that old story". It's a throwaway detail that doesn't mean anything, but it's a nice little nod to the first film that registers as the kind of thing you'd never get in a series that kept changing hands like the Friday the 13ths, where such world building is a total mess due to people coming in without respecting what came before. Using the whole buffalo is always a surefire way to win me over, and I like that it's a little detail that won't bother anyone who doesn't remember or never even saw the original. This is the best way to do a callback, in my opinion - it's fun for the people who'd notice, but doesn't hamper the ability for a newcomer to enjoy it.

Unfortunately, the flipside of the "in between" approach is a major one - you're watching the whole movie knowing that the Creeper won't be killed or even stopped for any meaningful amount of time, as he's up and about in Jeepers Creepers 2. I mean it's not like I ever think Jason or Freddy is truly dead at the end of their films (even in the ones that promise as much), but there will at least be the catharsis of seeing the heroes triumph over them and walk away thinking the nightmare is over forever (and those guys are usually down for some time - Jason was in the bottom of Crystal Lake for at least a decade at one point). It's practically a guarantee from the start that the movie won't offer that, and (spoiler?) it doesn't - I'm still not even sure how to describe the Creeper's final moment in the film, and the heroine never gets any major victory over the damn thing. At one point she uses one of his own weapons against him (a very crowd-pleasing moment, actually) but it barely even phases him - he's after her again moments later, so it's about as much of a victory as Laurie stabbing Michael with the knitting needle.

The other big problem is that the movie is very disjointed. There are basically three separate plotlines going on, two of which would be perfectly enjoyable if fleshed out to their own movie, but hurt by the constant cutting around as they very rarely intersect. One is basically a redux of the original - two teens (potential lovers this time, not siblings) have caught the Creeper's eye, and he's going after them. After the usual setup stuff they find themselves trapped under a car as the Creeper stalks/kills a few people around them, and later the girl is trapped inside the Creeper's trademark "BEATNGU" truck (p.s. we learn that his license plate is a homemade one, killing sixteen years of "Creeper at the DMV" jokes), giving it some claustrophobic flair that recalls the best moments of the first sequel, and here's where the prequel element also pays off somewhat - we're never sure that she's "safe", as she isn't around in the "next" installment, giving the director license to kill her off (not unlike Platinum Dunes' Chainsaw prequel). Their scenes are the best in the film, and mostly why it's overall at least on par with JC2, making me wish that they just stuck to them the whole time - it might come off as a remake of the original with such a limited cast, but at least it would be focused and suspenseful, and a marked improvement over the other followup.

The second storyline revolves around Tubbs and a group of hunters led by Stan Shaw, who is basically just Creighton Duke with a team. These guys have apparently been tracking the Creeper and have professional versions of the truck-mounted weaponry Ray Wise used in the other sequel, but given the low budget there is precious little time devoted to them actually doing action-y things. Worse, those scenes suffer the most from the film's bad CGI - the Creeper himself always looks great, but his weapons look like cartoons in some shots, particularly these Mario Kart-esque bomb-shell things that he shoots from his car and can apparently track their targets. My friend said they looked like the Langoliers from the miniseries, and it's pretty apt - plus the fact that the Creeper now apparently has Thor-like powers over his weapons (at one point he literally has his axe fly from the ground into his hand as if by telekinesis), something I don't recall in the others. His truck is also booby-trapped, which results in a few interesting moments, but again is one of those things that makes me wonder why he didn't use them the day before - the harpoon that can puncture vehicles would have been handy all those times he was chasing Darry and Trish, no?

The third subplot involves Meg Foster, who plays yet another crazy old lady that lives in this town. Her son is the guy who dies in the prologue, and his ghost keeps coming back to tell her to get out of town because the Creeper is coming to get "it" back and kill anyone nearby. After a while we finally learn what "it" is - one of his old hands, which is buried in a pot in her field. When someone touches the hand they will spazz out and see the Creature's origins, I guess? Anyway, it's a subplot that's just as interminable as it is goofy, and it doesn't even have a payoff - the Creeper finally comes across it near the end, but he doesn't need an old hand (he's already grown a new one), so he just crushes it and howls at the moon, as birds drop from the sky around him. I don't know what the point of any of this nonsense is, but I DO know if it was all cut from the film it would barely make a difference, and seems like it's there only to keep the director's tradition of including goofy, unexplained supernatural subplots in his films. As a result, Foster's role is limited to either screaming at a ghost (we occasionally see it from other people's POV, showing her yelling at nothing) or standing around watching people touch the hand or whatever. She's the grandmother of the girl that's trapped in the Creeper's truck, so I kept hoping she'd mount a rescue or something, but alas - the two barely ever interact in the entire film, adding to the disjointed feeling.

But for a movie that was practically willed into existence after a number of false starts over the years, the fact that it's decent is kind of a miracle. The budget is lower but not to the extent that it can't deliver what fans want (in fact, I think we see the Creeper more than ever), and while it eventually loses its luster, it's interesting to see how much of the film is set during broad daylight. With some tighter editing (the director's usual editor Ed Marx, who has cut all of his films dating back to 1999's Rites of Passage, did not return this time) it could have worked fairly well, but the jarring shifts between characters who rarely interact, and the fact that you know the movie is building toward an anticlimax (though there is a nice little twist that ties into JC2) is something the movie never fully overcomes. It's worth a look for series fans, for sure (and you can get another chance on October 4th if you missed this "one time" screening), but don't expect to be converted if you weren't on board with those.

What say you?

P.S. I left his name out on purpose. People are on a witch hunt this time for some reason, and I don't get why since it's not exactly a secret and has been widely known since Powder (before the internet), but I'm not in the mood for a bunch of anonymous assholes to blast me - a father, by the way - for "lining the pockets of a monster" after finding this review by searching for his name (I can't very well leave the name of the movie out, alas). Does me seeing the film mean it's more likely he'll make another film? Maybe. I don't think it means he'll go out and hurt someone else, though, and besides, the kid's mother has said she has no problem with him continuing to work, so I don't see why I should feel any different than her. At any rate, comments are moderated (as they always are for every review) and won't get posted if they're vile, and if you're so offended by me seeing the film I encourage you not to yell at me on social media, which does nothing (except raise more awareness of the film's existence - several people told me they only knew it was playing because of tweets blasting the filmmaker), but instead match my $12.50 ticket price to RAINN or a similar organization, or donate to the GoFundMe I linked above.

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Friend Request (2016)

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

GENRE: GHOST, REVENGE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I've seen a couple people make the joke that Friend Request looks like something one might mock up for a film that needed a cheesy horror movie playing in the background (you know, for the two or three movies per decade that don't just use Night of the Living Dead), but for what little it's worth, it's actually the best of this year's crop of college kid-centric horror flicks. Unlike Rings, Bye Bye Man, and Wish Upon, I didn't spend the running time rolling my eyes or trying to keep track of how many plot holes it already racked up - I was actually enjoying it in a low-key, timekiller way until its endless and misguided third act. Props for trying something a little different in one of these things, but it didn't quite work due to not being properly set up, and probably accounts for the film's low grades more than anything else.

And by "one of these things" I mean yet another movie where our heroes get freaked out by a vengeful ghost for an hour or so and then decide that the only way to stop the thing that's been killing their friends is to drive to the old _____ (burnt out commune, here) and put the body to rest or whatever. It's amazing how these places are always a couple hours' drive away from where the protagonists live - just once I want to see one where they discover the old factory/asylum/warehouse/whatever is actually located in another country and they can't find a flight. OR, less jokingly, they discover the place is a full day's drive away, but relatively early in the film, and turn the 2nd half or so into more of a road chase, so that we can at least get a change of scenery and a kind of ticking clock scenario that you don't often get in these sort of movies. But alas, they follow the template of The Ring fairly closely, which might have worked better if we didn't have a genuine (well, technically genuine) Ring movie just six months ago.

Hilariously, like Rings, this one's been on the shelf for a while - it was actually shot in early 2014, and released in Germany last year. Why it took so long to come here is unknown, but oddly enough the movie's approximation of Facebook is a pretty close match to what we have now*, so it didn't feel as dated as you might expect for a nearly four year old production about the internet. They never actually use the name "Facebook" (I call it Fauxbook), but the social media site that the ghost uses to spread her terror is pretty much identical, with little variations in the terminology (like "Spread" instead of "Share") to keep them from being sued I guess. It's a good choice, I think - previous films have built their versions from the ground up, which automatically disconnects the audience its catering to as we instantly recognize it as phony. Here, you might just assume it's the real FB, and so the movie's central concepts - accepting strangers as "friends", the jealous rage one gets when seeing their friends having fun when they weren't invited, etc. - work as intended, without the usual distraction of seeing all the characters being obsessed with a social media app the audience recognizes as fake.

Anyway, for those uninitiated, the central conceit is that a fairly popular college sophomore named Laura accepts a friend request (hey, that's the title!) from Marina, a "weird" girl in her class, feeling sorry for her as she has no other fauxbook friends. Marina's nice at first, but then becomes overly pushy, tagging Laura in all her posts and messaging her nonstop about hanging out, missing her, etc. After Laura has a birthday party that she doesn't invite Marina to, the latter freaks out and kills herself - but she films herself doing it and posts the video on Laura's wall. And then continues doing so, from beyond the graaaaaaaaaave! Or, you know, whatever. Anyway, Laura's social circle starts shrinking as the friends begin dying off one by one in mysterious ways, and videos of their deaths are also posted on her timeline. Because of this, the 800 or so other people start defriending her (after leaving comments like "U R SICK!" and such), and Marina's plan becomes clear - she wants Laura to be "friendless", like her.

It's not the worst concept for a movie, really (plus it's not just a generic online ghost - she's actually a witch!), and if they really dug into the psychology of our obsession with social media and used the ghost-y stuff as more of a backdrop, it might have been a really great little slice of social commentary. The 800+ randoms is something that they don't really explore; we get graphics every now and then showing her declining friend numbers, but who are these people? We only ever see Laura with her five besties and her mom - were the others just complete strangers as well? Does she care that these people, who can't even really be called acquaintances, aren't going to see her statuses anymore? There's a minor subplot about how they can't delete their profiles (Marina's ghost won't let them), but it would have been interesting if she simply WOULDN'T delete hers, because she'd lose all her virtual friends. I myself never take anyone on Facebook that I don't actually know, but I know a number of friends who accept every request they get and somehow notice when one of these folks drop them ("Who unfriended me? I had 895, now I have 894!"), so I wish the movie took more time on the idea that these "friends" aren't actually friends at all and Marina is just one of many who were inadvertently scorned by conflating real life friendship with a virtual one.

But instead we just get the usual shit: someone dies, it looks like an accident, there's a suspicious cop who wonders why our protagonist knows two recent victims of tragedy, then another one dies, lather, rinse, repeat. While I was grateful that their phones had nothing to do with their demises, none of the deaths are particularly interesting (or graphic; the film's R rating is mostly for the six or seven F bombs), and you can easily guess the order in which they occur to boot, so it makes it an even bigger bummer that they didn't spend more time on the online obsession angle. Laura is even enrolled in a psych class that is currently on the topic of social media dependency, and the professor has this John Hurt/Jared Harris kind of authoritative presence, making it seem like he might be a more important character down the road, but he's largely dropped from the proceedings after a while. To be fair she's eventually suspended due to being a seeming liability for the school (even though it happens every few minutes it seems, she never thinks to take out her phone or laptop and show the police that she isn't the one posting snuff films and that her account can't be deleted, so the school thinks she's nuts), but again, it seemed like a missed opportunity not to include this guy on the action, if they wanted to *say* something about the very thing the teenagers in the audience will likely start looking at before the credits roll (the opportunities for a meta sequel are RIPE!).

Now I gotta get into spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you want more surprises.

All that said it's really not all that bad until the third act, where they make a choice that is laudably unexpected and even somewhat daring (for this brand of horror, I mean), by having one of the friends realize that they can be spared Marina's wrath if Laura isn't alive to be alone. So he tries to kill her, and the finale becomes more of a slasher film chase climax, with Marina just hanging out on the sidelines I guess. I admit I didn't see it coming, but that's largely due to the fact that it's not really set up at all. The would-be killer is her friend-zoned buddy Kobe, who is also the requisite hacker type who offers up exposition like "These posts aren't written with any kind of code that I've ever seen before!", i.e. the kind of shit that means nothing in time that they maybe could have spent hinting at his out of nowhere villain turn. He even kills one of the other friends, which makes even less sense, and this all goes down during an endless climax that has Laura travel to the aforementioned commune, but then to another location after discovering the commune is a dead end. When she's not being pursued by Kobe she's just wandering around dimly lit hallways, with Marina making precious few appearances - so when they have Laura go through these motions again at a different place, I felt my last bit of goodwill toward the movie fade away.

It's not a total failure like its aforementioned peers, however. For starters, they believe in James Wan's rule about fake scares, in that there shouldn't be any - two 'classic' ones are set up (a refrigerator door being held open for an unusually long time, and a fogged mirror about to be wiped away) without the expected BOO! moment after, and there are no sudden doorbell/phone ringing kinda ones, either. In fact, the closest the movie gets to one is not only kind of effective in its carnival funhouse kind of way, but it's also thematically appropriate - Laura watches one of those "Hey look at this cute video" things where the subject (a cat, in this case) suddenly morphs into a possessed demon and shrieks. And then there are a few subtle scare moments without any attention being drawn to them, like when a character turns away from his laptop but his reflection on the screen stays frozen in place. Nothing particularly earth shattering, mind you, but it at least shows they were trying to avoid the pratfalls of so many others, and not wasting the audience's energy on false scare moments. It also makes good use of the fauxbook layout/function to introduce us to all of the primary characters quickly, showing their profiles and an assortment of pics/statuses that inform us what they're like and how they relate to one another in a few seconds of mostly dialogue-free screentime, as opposed to awkward expository dialogue that takes a lot longer. It's a shorthand I've seen in other films, but since this one's actually ABOUT this social media platform, it also works as introduction for how *it* works, for the non-computer types in the crowd who might have little idea what Facebook even is, i.e. the parents that will have to bring their kids to this inexplicably R-rated movie.

So basically it's not a good movie but it's also not as bad as many reviews will have you believe, the ones that will be an unfortunate product of the tendency to grade everything on a "fresh/rotten" scale with no room for the middle ground that it actually occupies. Sure, in the wake of It it might seem like the bottom of the barrel, but comparing this kind of thing to that juggernaut is highly unfair. The film actually belongs in the same class as Bye Bye Man and those others I mentioned, and to my eyes it's an improvement on those (though not quite up to par with the similar Unfriended, which took full advantage of its cyber-scenario and didn't skimp on the death scenes, not to mention fleshed out all of its characters as opposed to just the lead), and after Annabelle: Creation I appreciated something a little quieter that didn't seem to have a mandate to throw a scare at the audience every five minutes. They were putting some effort into making an effective horror film in the vein of the 2002 Ring, so even though they missed the mark I can at least appreciate that I wasn't spending 90 minutes feeling like the filmmakers thought I was an idiot. Much obliged!

What say you?

*Unless they updated it digitally - there was an inordinate number of VFX companies listed in the credits, despite the fact that there aren't a lot of obvious CGI effects for the ghost or kill scenes, which are also very brief anyway. So it's possible they went back and updated the Fauxbook screens to be more timely, as we all know how often they change it.

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It: Chapter One (2017)

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Like pretty much everyone in my generation, I have vivid memories of watching the ABC miniseries of Stephen King's It, rewatching the taped broadcast enough to even remember some of the commercials that played during it. Given its length (3+ hours, plus commercial fast-forwarding time) I'm surprised I watched it as often as I did, as I revisited the film on Blu-ray earlier this year and found myself remembering tiny details (like Ben breaking his newly won award when he stumbles out of his limo) as if I had just watched the movie the day before. However, I've only found the time to read the book once, in I think 2004 when I lived in Boston and was making a dent in my backlog of unread novels during my 45-ish minute per way commute, so it wasn't "special" as it is to many of my peers. But in a way I think this was ideal for approaching this long-awaited theatrical adaptation - I have more nostalgia and connection to the flawed miniseries than the novel that is frequently cited as one of King's best, and certainly the favorite of many of his fans*. Thus, it's easier for me to see what this movie "fixed" as opposed to "ruined", which is how I'm sure some people will describe the deviations from the source material.

Now in the wake of The Dark Tower I must assure you that this is, for all intents and purposes, a very faithful adaptation of the "past" parts of the book. Georgie's murder is pretty much recreated to the letter, and every major beat is accounted for - it's just the details that are different. Some of the kids' individual fears have been changed, so Richie is afraid of clowns instead of the Wolfman, and Stan is terrified of a creepy ass painting in his father's office instead of that mummy/corpse thing. I don't think this matters in the long run, but I've had too many conversations over the years with book fans who get angry when a movie adaptation changes a character's hair color or whatever, so they might get angry at these variations. For the rest of us normal people, if you want to see a movie where seven "losers" band together to defeat an unspeakable evil that appears every 27 years, one that manifests itself as their fears but most of the time takes on the form of a clown named Pennywise, you should be pretty happy with the results.

It's funny, I was running a bit late this morning when trying to get to the theater in time and didn't bother inspecting my shirts before grabbing one, and I happened to pull out my Shining shirt - the most polarizing King film due to the fact that it's an unnerving and terrifying piece of entertainment but also makes many (too many, for some) changes from the novel, i.e. great movie, terrible adaptation. But while Kubrick was changing things to fit his own worldview, director Andy Muschietti and a number of screenwriters only change details in order to keep things fresh, while retaining King's overall tone and atmosphere in a manner few of his films have ever quite mustered. I'm talking Frank Darabont levels of "getting it", where you get the idea anything they changed King himself would probably agree was a good idea (as opposed to Shining, where he still seems annoyed by the changes Kubrick made), and if your memories of the book are just as hazy as mine, you probably won't even realize there's much of a difference at all.

Except, of course, the timeframe. The book starts in the present day and frequently cuts back and forth, a format that was retained for the miniseries, but there is no framing device or flash forward or anything of that nature here. If you've never read the book or saw the other movie, you'd have no idea that we're due to meet these kids again in thirty years - which added a lot to the suspense. The movie runs 135 minutes or so, and by the time they enter the sewers to confront It, it's been made clear that they aren't afraid to make some changes, so it's very possible to think that some of them might not survive the battle, allowing for some terror that was impossible in the other versions as we'd always be seeing the present day version REMEMBER these things, as opposed to how they're presented here, which is "now" (now being the summer of 1989). I wouldn't dare spoil whether or not that occurs, but the fact that I was sitting there, for the very first time, worried that Richie would die? That was kind of unexpected, and a big part of why I enjoyed the film - it was these rather simple and innocuous changes that really helped draw me into the movie.

So let's talk about 1989, since that's probably the most noticeable difference. The original book was published in 1986 and the setting was 1957-1958, so the change fits - it's roughly thirty years ago for the audience it's intended for, just as King's book was, making it a perfectly acceptable deviation, allowing folks my age to smile at the (thankfully few) little period details, such as the theater showing Burton's Batman, and kids talking about Michael Jackson without it being an icky thing (this was pre-accusations). My favorite, surprisingly, was a little running gag about Ben being a fan of New Kids on the Block, a secret only Bev knows and keeps to herself, while teasing him about it whenever possible (one pun seemed to go over the heads of everyone else in my audience; not sure if I'm just "old" or if I'm the only one who found it as funny). Usually I groan at these kind of things, but the screenwriters kept it to a minimum and used them for character moments like this, as opposed to just having them reference every single late 80s property they could cram in just for the sake of appeasing folks who get hard reading Ready Player One.

One such reference actually helped hammer home something that was working subconsciously on me. As the summer wears on, Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 are replaced by Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (the theater only shows WB/New Line movies, naturally), and at the sight of this throwaway little detail it fully clicked: this is basically a big budget, "classy" version of a Nightmare sequel, with Pennywise standing in for old-school Freddy, who would talk and maybe make you grin, but wasn't a full blown jokester like he was in the later sequels. Like Freddy, Pennywise uses the kids' individual fears against them, and the big scare setpieces work as standalone slices of terror that will likely warp the minds of anyone who shares similar paranoia (such as blood, corpses, and of course clowns). Indeed, one of my few complaints about the film is that these sequences are often just kind of presented sans setup, like they will just cut to one kid at home or riding their bike right before something scary happens. In the Elm St movies this disconnect made sense - the kids were dreaming, after all (and usually ended up dead at the end), but here it's like they could be re-arranged in the edit without it really mattering, as it takes a while for them to start confessing to one another that they've seen some freaky shit. I wouldn't say it was a crippling flaw or anything, but there was definitely more than one occasion that I wondered how much time had passed since the previous scene or where the character was going in the first place when they encountered It.

Another thing that gave it some unexpected Elm Street flavor was the minimized adult presence. The Elm Street kids often had single parent situations (if we ever met them at all), and here we only get the barest glimpses of any of them besides Eddie's mom and Bev's dad (who is more terrifying than Pennywise, I think). Bill's mom is only seen once in the entire movie, silently playing the piano, and even though Mike's grandfather (instead of his dad, who is now dead - they kind of mix and match Ben and Mike's stories for whatever reason) is played by the only recognizable adult actor in the movie (Steven Williams), we only see him once as well. It makes sense - it's the kids' story after all - but I wish they could have at least spent a little more time with Bill's parents, since the loss of Georgie hangs over his every move (I actually teared up when he explains how it's easier for him to walk into a house where Pennywise might be than it is for him to walk into his own, knowing his little brother won't be there), and yet his parents never seem to care that he's seemingly never home. A quick scene showing that they're so numb to Georgie's death that they don't even notice if Bill is there or not, OR a scene where we see that he has to sneak out or lie about his whereabouts, might have helped a bit. But maybe that's just my overprotective dad shit kicking in, hahaha.

My only other issue was the CGI for a few of Pennywise's other forms. Bill Skarsgård is terrific as the clown and makes the role his own in the same way that Heath Ledger made us forget about Jack Nicholson for two hours, making it all the more disappointing when he appears as a CGI ghoul of some sort (it's an issue that plagued Muschietti's previous film, Mama, where his practical creation got "fixed" by subpar visual FX). Pennywise's... I dunno what you call it, freaky fast shuffling thing (you see it on the trailer where he tramples through the flooded basement) also got a bit tiresome after awhile - he's at his best/scariest when it's simply Skarsgård talking and making expressive faces without really moving much at all, honestly. The film is otherwise gorgeous to look at, for the record - they got Chan-Wook Park's usual DP Chung-hoon Chung to shoot the film, and it not only nails the period look but lets Skarsgård's eyes do the heavy lifting in darker scenes. There is no question that his sewer introduction will cause just as many, if not far more, nightmares as the miniseries did with its own version of the scene.

The kids are all great too, to the extent that I almost wish they could just wait 30 years to shoot the 2nd half with them reprising their roles instead of recasting, likely with familiar faces. Apart from the kid playing Richie (who was in Stranger Things, though I forget which character he played since I never finished it) I didn't recognize any of them and the movie was the better for it. There's a push for Jessica Chastain to play the adult Bev, and while I normally would never argue with hiring Jessica Chastain for anything, I'm just going to see the awesome actress I've loved in a dozen other movies, as opposed to "Beverly Marsh", which is how I see the girl who played her here, as I've never seen her in anything else and she is absolutely wonderful. Ditto for the kid who played Ben, who might be my favorite character and thankfully got plenty of screentime (and encountered the movie's creepiest one-off visual, one of the dead kids from the Easter Egg hunt disaster). I kept expecting familiar faces to pop up as the parents, but apart from the aforementioned Williams I had just as much of a blank slate with them as I did the kids, and I hope they find a way to retain that for the sequel, allowing us to fully believe in the world instead of seeing people we already know from elsewhere. The movie's gonna make something like 90 million dollars this weekend - they clearly do not need big stars to sell tickets, and it'd be cool to see that kind of feel recreated.

But even if they rope in the biggest stars in the world, I'll be there on day one for the followup, since the creative crew is said to be returning and they clearly have a strong handle on the material. It's not a perfect film, but it's a damn good one and one of the best Stephen King movies ever. And before you say "That's a low bar", it really isn't - if you strip out the sequels that weren't using his material, unnecessary redoes (Carrie 2013, anyone?), and anything Mick Garris was involved with, it's actually a pretty solid collection of movies, most of which are just as good as their source material even if things are changed. I mean, it's not like Lawrence Kasdan was the one to make Dreamcatcher as fucking batshit as it is - it's actually a pretty faithful adaptation! And despite more scrutiny given the book's popularity, not to mention the switch in director from someone people really love (Cary Fukunaga, who apparently wanted to have a scene where Henry Bowers molests a sheep) to someone whose sole film was overshadowed by its producer (Guillermo del Toro), had some people worried that this could be a disaster or, at best, another forgettable misfire like last month's Dark Tower. But no - this is gonna terrorize a generation of kids and win over their parents as well, so now the only fear is if the second half can live up to it.

What say you?

*Mine is The Long Walk, which ain't ever getting made into a movie, I suspect.

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The Dark Tower (2017)

AUGUST 3, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

If there's one benefit to my depressing lack of free time, it's that it leaves next to zero opportunities to revisit even a movie that I love, let alone a book. And so while I consider Stephen King's series of Dark Tower novels to be among my favorites of the form, I've only read them once, over a span from roughly 2001-2005 (and I still haven't gotten around to the 8th entry, The Wind Through The Keyhole). And - as memorably/ridiculously depicted in King's own Dreamcatcher - the more stuff I take in, the more I have to unwittingly purge from my memory, which means keeping recollections of the stuff I watched last month resulted in my memories of those books (especially the first ones) being reduced to almost nothing. Long story short, if the movie version of The Dark Tower left me cold or angry, it wouldn't be because they changed the name of a supporting character or skipped over a subplot, because I can't remember those things anyway - it'd just be because it wasn't a good movie.

...The Dark Tower isn't a good movie.

Let's get the positives out of the way. Idris Elba has been a magnetic screen presence for quite some time now (I never watched The Wire; my introduction was as Hillary Swank's partner in the OK but largely forgettable The Reaping, and even that thankless role was enough to know he was someone to watch) and he was a fantastic choice to play Roland. I mean he's a fantastic choice to play pretty much anyone (a compliment I rarely bestow on an actor; incidentally one of the few others is Ed Harris, who was my dream choice for the character when I first read the book, but obviously that was nearly 20 years ago and now he's probably "too old" for a studio), but his particular skill at commanding your attention is invaluable here, in a movie that races past things like "character development" or even "introductions". Even someone who had never read the books or even heard of Elba before would likely know he was going to save the world the second he appeared on screen, so his casting paid off in multiple ways.

And... well I guess that's it. I mean I guess I can talk more about Elba, like how gets to show off his rarely utilized comedic chops in a few scenes when his character enters "Keystone" (read: our) Earth, being confused that animals "still" talked (off a commercial featuring talking raccoons) and offering a coin to the ER nurse who rattles off his list of ailments. But honestly, no one beyond racist assholes thought Elba would be to blame if the movie didn't work, and it's a waste of typing breath to point out that he's the main reason the movie has any value at all. I wish I could say the same about Dennis Haysbert, who plays Roland's father Steven, but if you've seen the trailer you've already seen a good chunk of his appearance (he's only in that one scene) and the movie doesn't firmly establish that it's his father until Jake says so later, rendering their scene a total misfire unless you know who the character (never introduced by name; someone said he does indeed say "son" at some point but I didn't catch it) is and what significance he has to the storyline. Given that the actors are only 18 years apart in age (and Haysbert has aged well, so they don't even look that far apart), and the character in the books died when Roland was fairly young, I myself wasn't even sure if it was supposed to be his dad or just some friend of his - can't imagine what a newcomer would think.

In fact, that's largely the entire problem with the movie: it bends over backwards to not be impenetrable to newcomers, and yet it still pretty much is, because nothing is clarified or given any weight. It's only my spotty memories of the books that allowed me to keep up at times; for example at one point Matthew McConaughey (as the Man in Black) picks up one of the fabled colored spheres from the books (collectively known as Maerlyn's Rainbow) and uses it, but at no point are their function explained (let alone his quest to obtain them). He just picks one up and does magic-y shit and Joe Moviegoer is, I guess, expected to just assume he has different colored ones because he likes to mix it up a bit. Now, if they have a different concept for the spheres in this version of the story, that's fine - but tell us what that is! I shouldn't have to be filling in blanks myself, especially when they've established how much different this version is from the novels.

Before I go further I should stress that changing things from the novel is not something that angers me, as long as it's done right. As Quint from AintitCool pointed out, if Spielberg made Jaws exactly like the book it would not be the masterpiece film that it is, and I find a number of adaptations flounder the more they try to cram in every single line/character just to appease fans, rather than do what works for a movie. Even if I knew the book inside and out I wouldn't care that they were "remixing" it; if anything I'd be happy about it because it would allow me to be surprised at its developments. The Walking Dead takes the right approach, I think - they use the comics as a very loose road map ("OK, time for Negan to show up") but the specifics all change, allowing comics readers to be surprised when, say, Andrea dies on the show when she was still alive in the comic that was further ahead.

So, again, my issues with the film are not because they changed things - but that I was never sure if the blanks I was filling in still applied. If this version of Man in Black killed Jake's mom and stepdad (his real father is dead and not a business tycoon, another book change), was he still involved in Roland's mother's demise? Could that be something that Roland and Jake bond about? Well who knows, as Roland's mother isn't mentioned - but that's the kind of thing I kept wrestling with throughout the movie, while also wondering if a non-reader could even understand the Man in Black's importance beyond "Well it's Matthew McConaughey and he dresses in black so he must be the villain." The film offers him no real introduction; we first see him in a quick, wordless shot watching some other unexplained events in an opening scene, and his quest to kidnap gifted children to help destroy the titular tower is hastily explained at best. Jake plays zero role in the final battle since he's tied to a chair, so there's no arc or revenge to the whole "dead parents" subplot, beyond (spoiler) making it OK for Jake to stick with Roland at the end instead of going home to his mother. It's not the worst idea to make Jake the central character and let us see the story from his eyes, but doing so robs both Roland and The Man in Black of the time that should be spent explaining who they are, why they are enemies, etc. When they show up, it's really only our attachment to the actors that gives them the weight they deserve.

Another huge problem is that they fail to establish Mid-World as the strange and vast wonder we've come to know from the books, and to a non-reader audience it will just look like some generic post-apocalyptic desert world. The movie is only 95 minutes with credits (so, really probably under 90) and a big chunk is set in New York, so there's not a lot of time spent in Mid-World anyway, but what we see isn't exactly impressive. A decaying amusement park, a little outpost with huts/tents, and one isolated city that reminded me of New Otherton from Lost is pretty much all we see of it, and no one seems to be taken aback when they travel from their native world to the other. Roland has some brief fish out of water moments when he goes to New York, but the Man in Black seems pretty much right at home when he goes there, and Jake has literally no reaction when he goes from Earth to Mid-World. For an epic fantasy, the movie is totally lacking in anything that inspires awe; Roland looking around New York has more gravitas than anything else, and we've seen Times Square a million times.

Frustratingly, the filmmakers skip over all of this stuff, but go out of their way to shoehorn in references to other Stephen King books. For the uninitiated, most of King's books share a universe not unlike the Marvel films, and the Dark Tower series is the backbone of that continuity. So it makes sense that they'd throw in a few nods, but most of them are just completely extraneous and downright insulting when you consider everything from THIS story that got excised. Cujo walking by is a fine little gag, and Jake's sensory powers referred to as "the shine" is acceptable, but why the hell would a 15 year old kid have a toy car (i.e. Christine) in his room? Why would a New York gun shop have a Rita Hayworth poster? I wish I was there when a prop guy was told to make a sign saying "Barlow & Straker's" in a movie that can't bother to include the rose in any meaningful way. Due to studio rights these things aren't going to pop up in sequels (if it gets any, which is doubtful), so I am baffled that they went out of their way to sneak in all of these references instead of focusing on the story they were actually telling.

I realized later that the movie felt like it was on 1.5x speed. It's got all of the elements and beats for a successful story, but it races through them so quickly that nothing really registers. Roland doesn't want Jake around at first, doing the whole "Leave me alone kid, I have a mission and you'll slow me down" kinda thing that we've seen in 80,000 other movies. Watching them bond over the course of the film might not be original, but it would at least be enjoyable... if he wasn't being a father figure like, seven minutes later. He flat out HUGS the kid roughly thirty minutes of screentime after they meet, which might work if those thirty minutes focused only on them and no one else, but in that period we cut to McConaughey a few times (he's in the movie way more than he should be; he actually gets top billing for the crawl), some folks in the town they visit, etc. Ditto for the villainous plan - it's all explained, but in bursts of exposition that fly by so fast you're not sure if they're important or if it's just filler dialogue before the real meat of the conversation begins. At one point I checked my watch not because I was bored, but because I had to verify that the movie really was almost over as it seemed to be based on where the story was headed, because it actually seems to go by faster than the brief runtime already had me prepping for. When it ended my initial feeling was "That's it?", which in some ways is worse than "Jesus what a disaster!" or even "Worst movie ever made!", because at least that would be memorable.

The saddest thing is that I knew it was doomed right from the second it began. Even the most casual fan of the series would probably remember "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed..." as the opening line and sort of rallying cry, and would expect it to be the first line in the movie. Even if they changed everything else, you'd think they'd get that much right. But no, it kicks off with gibberish exposition via text crawl (never a good sign), and the "man in black fled..." line appears later, tossed in at random just to appease fans I guess (I'm not sure if we ever see the Man in Black in the desert at all, let alone fleeing). So I knew right away to drop my fanboy appreciation for the novels and just let the movie take me where it wanted to go for this particular incarnation. Alas, it didn't take me anywhere; it just raced through a bunch of half-assed moments from the books, staged with almost zero energy (you've seen every cool action moment, trust me), and stopped to throw in a King-related Easter Egg every five minutes, most of which are from novels that got turned into far better movies than this. A crushing disappointment no matter how you slice it.

What say you?

P.S. No, it's not horror, but my other site has covered the movie plenty and I hadn't updated for a while, so you get a bonus "non-horror" review. Ironically one of its only decent scenes involves a monster, though.

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Wish Upon (2017)

JULY 14, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, TEEN
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I know I'm not the target audience for teen horror movies, so all I really ask of them is that they're OK enough timekillers and something I can watch with my son in a few years when I deem him old enough for PG/PG-13 fare. But I'd rather he went out and got laid than stayed home wasting his time and insulting his intelligence with Wish Upon, a hopelessly sloppy "Monkey's Paw" variant that can barely get the basics right, let alone what little it adds to the table - I'd wait until he was old enough to get drunk with me and "appreciate" nonsense like this. And by that I mean also laugh at (not "with") all of its clunky writing, at times abysmal direction, and shockingly horror-lite approach to this sort of thing.

In fact, one of the two nice things I can say about the movie is that it doesn't have any fake scares or even that many BOO! moments at all - everything just kind of happens with a shrug, usually telegraphed (poorly) long before it actually occurs. At times, director John Leonetti (Annabelle) and screenwriter Barbara Marshall (co-writer of the pretty good Blumhouse "Tilt" release Viral) throw in some mild Final Destination-y suspense to the proceedings, but otherwise it's only a horror movie in the technical sense - there is only one or two moments in the movie that might make even the least discerning teenage audience shriek, but even they might just laugh at it instead (like I did, sober and by myself at a 10:30 am screening). I give them credit for not falling prey to the "We need to get them jumping every five minutes!" mentality that has sullied any number of horror films aimed at the younger set, but they went too far in the opposite direction.

And that would be fine if the story and characters were involving enough to not even notice, but the script (or, at least, this representation of it - more on that soon) never gives its solid cast anything to work with, and everyone is a stereotype. Our heroine (Joey King) is a high school outcast with two friends of similar social standing, and since she's brunette her class nemesis is a blonde girl of no other distinction, and pretty much everyone else exists only to serve as a victim to the wish box's hazily explained rules. See, this isn't the usual "Monkey's Paw" kind of thing where the wish comes back ironically (like, you wish for someone to be alive and they come back as a zombie) - she gets her wishes and they work as intended, but later on (there's no rhyme or reason to when) the box will open and play some music, at which time it kills someone who had nothing to do with her wish, and in some cases is so unnecessary to the narrative that no one notices they're dead for a few days. There's no real reason for this other than to ensure it takes her most of the movie to figure out the connection between her wishes and people in her life dying, and Marshall botches what I guess was an inadvertent cause and effect scenario: her wish for a crush's returned affections leads to her uncle being killed, and then she wishes to get everything from his will. It'd be ludicrous, but at least kind of cool, to have the box - an old hand at this by now - continue this sort of chain, so that each death inadvertently inspires the next wish in order to keep things moving along, but that's the only time there's any sort of relation (and again, it's not acknowledged anyway).

The other nice thing I can say is that her wishes are typical teenager nonsense: she wishes to be popular, she wishes her dad (Ryan Philippe!) wasn't such an embarrassment (he's a dumpster diver, even though they own a big house), she wishes her bully would "just rot" (not "die", notice). She doesn't go big (a friend admonishes her for not curing cancer) or even particularly "bad" - she just asks for stuff any selfish 16 year old girl might wish for. Since the deaths have no relation and she doesn't even notice most (even her uncle's barely registers much of a reaction) you could remove them from the first hour of the movie and it wouldn't even really change anything; it'd just be a movie about a girl making her life better thanks to some Chinese box her dad found in a dumpster one day. By the time she actually notices (actually, she doesn't - her would-be boyfriend does the legwork and flat out tells her) that her wishes have deadly consequences, the movie is far past the point of being saved, with only the idiotic death scenes to occasionally give it some unintentionally hilarious life.

Now, we all know that horror movie characters have to occasionally act stupid for the plot to work. It's just how it is, and it's something we just accept, like sound in space or everyone in a musical knowing the words to a seemingly spontaneous song. But the Wish Upon creative team forces its actors to at times even unnaturally contort their bodies to make their not-great (and not even original) death scenes work, in particular Sherilyn Fenn's garbage disposal one. Like all disposal scenes in horror movies, something goes down the drain and we get a bunch of shots of their hand reaching around in the drain cut with shots of the switch that will turn it on - except this switch isn't on the wall like a normal one - it's BY HER WAIST BELOW THE COUNTER! I can't imagine anything more idiotic, or at least I thought I couldn't - because 30 seconds later she goes for a closer look at the drain and starts awkwardly shaking her head around just to get her long hair in there, and then awkwardly moving again in order to bump the switch and send her to her doom. There's also a bit where Philippe is changing his tire and one of the lug-nuts goes under his car - does he use the tire iron to pull it back? Of course not, he climbs completely under his car (it never occurs to him to just go to the other side of the car to get it, since it's clearly closer to it) so that we can get some half-assed suspense about whether or not the car will fall on him. Another character is also encouraged to awkwardly lean far from his ladder while cutting a tree branch, to the extent where I began wondering if these characters were all suicidal.

Speaking of suicide (my transitions are on fucking POINT), the film begins with a woman hanging herself after throwing away something wrapped up so that we can't see it, but the dog is afraid of it and she gives about forty seven worried glances at the trashcan before going inside to start noosin'. If you've never seen a movie (hell, if you're not even sure what a movie IS) you can still know instantly that the thing is the wish box that will soon wreak havoc on our heroine's life (said woman is her mom, by the way), and yet the movie treats this as a big reveal for some reason, and it's never clear what exactly mom wished for. We can assume it has something to do with the aforementioned uncle character, who Philippe doesn't like much and even tells his daughter not to talk to him, but the reason for his excommunication is never explained. The box also gets one tragic backstory too many, as we learn about its origins from a Chinese woman during the bubonic plague in the 14th century, but then our exposition dumper throws in a few seconds' worth of what I'm betting was originally a full prologue scene starring Jerry O'Connell (think Drew Barrymore or, more recently, Billy Burke in Lights Out), a man who used the box to get a car dealership or something but then his life was torn asunder - it was hard to get the details because I was too distracted by Jerry O'Connell (and Rebecca Romijn!) suddenly appearing in a flurry of random wordless shots, 75 minutes into a movie that had already burned through two other "Older star cashing a paycheck" performances (Fenn and Elizabeth Rohm being the others).

There are other sloppy bits as well; there's an establishing shot that looks like they grabbed it off a VHS tape, and for some reason the main house King and Philippe live in changes each time we see it - when they first move in and throughout the film we can see it's a two or three story white mansion, but then at other times the house is established as a single floor extended ranch kind of deal. King freaks out over her friend (Barb from Stranger Things, basically playing Barb here as well) taking the box from her, but it's not until about 30 seconds after her reaction and subsequent tirade that we even see the box to know what she's talking about, because Leonetti didn't bother to include a cutaway to the damn thing. I know the film had its death scenes trimmed for a PG-13 rating (why they'd shoot R rated deaths for a teenager's wish-fulfillment thriller is beyond me), but there is plenty of evidence to suggest they cut more than the gory bits, and I'm curious if the promised extended Blu-ray will make more sense out of some of its subplots.

Long story short, it's another one to add to the pile of this year's "Not even as good as the "eh" I was expecting" efforts like Rings and The Bye Bye Man, though this at least has a slight edge over those thanks to its unintentional hilarity (there's a bit involving someone getting hit by a car that rivals Meet Joe Black for its misguided excess), and again, I appreciated that they weren't trying to make me jump out of my seat at doorbells and dogs barking and things like that. The idea of getting your actual wishes but making something else awful happen is intriguing (it's not dissimilar from The Box in that regard, sans all the alien shit Richard Kelly added to the scenario), but the aforementioned sloppiness and bad-even-by-teen-horror-standards characterization make it impossible to care about anything that's happening any more than King's character does.

What say you?

P.S. Stay for halfway through the credits for the most obvious and eye-rolling sequel setup ever! Or don't bother since you'll know exactly what it is once the movie has its first ending anyway!

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The Mummy (2017)

JUNE 25, 2017

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Much like DC (which is only now getting it right with Wonder Woman), Universal is going about their idea to create a new shared movie universe based on all of their classic monster characters - Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, etc. I'm all for the gamble - the old ones crossed over anyway, and successful big budget horror (or, "horror") films can only help the greater good. Things were supposed to kick off with Dracula Untold, but pre-release press for The Mummy suggested that one has been retconned out of the grander plan for some reason. Well, I mean, the reason might be that it was not a big success nor was it liked all that much, but same goes for this goddamn movie (in fact it got even worse reviews), and Dracula didn't have one of the most dependable actors in the world starring in it, so in some ways Mummy is an even bigger flop (both films managed to make back their money thanks to overseas grosses, for what it's worth). The next one is Bride of Frankenstein, inexplicably coming before any actual Frankenstein film, so it seems to me they really don't know what the hell they're doing.

(For more evidence: they've also cast Johnny Depp in one of the proposed films.)

Anyway, I can't say I would be opposed to the idea of Tom Cruise going against the other monsters down the road, because he's Tom Cruise and I will watch him do anything, but this film does not inspire much confidence for their franchise or even a straightforward sequel. There's a great video online of Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking to a film class about how they hate big budget movies that can be broken down with "And then this happens, and then this happens" (as opposed to "This happens, which causes this to happen, which results in this happening", etc), and even though it's a few years old they might as well be talking about this movie, which is never boring as far as "stuff is happening!" goes, but I couldn't tell you much about WHY any of it was happening, and I certainly never cared about a goddamn person in it. The movie was so weightless that at one point I woke up without realizing I had ever fallen asleep, and couldn't tell if I had missed 30 seconds or 30 minutes based on how little engagement the film had provided until that point anyway.

Sadly, per the Wiki synopsis it turns out that what I missed (it turned out to be about five minutes, maybe) was a scene with Russell Crowe, who is the only good thing about the movie as he's clearly having fun and using a goofy accent on occasion for good measure, so I was at least charmed by his scenery chewing silliness. He's playing Dr. Henry Jekyll, a character that has been inexplicably refashioned into a sort of ringleader for a secret society of folks who take down supernatural entities. So he's a good guy in theory, but since he wants to kill Cruise (which will allow the film's female villain mummy, Ahmanet, to complete a ritual that will allow Jekyll to kill HER in turn) and also turns into Mr. Hyde for a few minutes the movie treats him as a secondary antagonist, which was a boneheaded call. Worse, we in the audience have to try to figure out how much of the actual Jekyll - i.e. the one moviegoers are familiar with - is still part of this character's story, since he's basically playing the exact same role as Colin Farrell in last year's Fantastic Beasts (he's even introduced the same way, waltzing into an area where workers are trying to clean up and throwing his weight around) instead of the usual scientist, and thus his split personality has no bearing on anything. You could cut his Hyde freakout entirely and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.

In fact you could cut any chunk out and it wouldn't matter. The editors (three of them credited) certainly did, as Annabelle Wallis' character has an awkward introduction that seems recreated with looping in order to hide what was an actual intro that got lost along the way. I also doubt Courtney B. Vance was hired to play such a thankless role as Cruise's superior (one of many things that suggest Cruise's role was written for someone younger; Vance is only like 3 years older than him but he treats Cruise like a rookie he'd like to kick in the ass) who has less than five minutes of screentime, and several other scenes seemingly come out of nowhere, as if there was more connective tissue (read: slower dialogue scenes) that got excised in order to ensure the audience never had to go more than 16 seconds without seeing another CGI effect. Once Cruise is "killed" (as seen in the trailer) and revived, the movie is little more than an endless chase scene where Cruise and Wallis dodge CGI (they even outrun a flood at one point) while trying to... well, I have no idea. They don't have any particular goal, no "We must return the stone to the tomb" or any kind of silly ticking clock scenario to deal with - they're just basically trying to not die, and run until the movie has reached a runtime that is acceptable for a film that cost $125m (at least).

One thing I can give it some credit for, however: it's closer to horror movie than the Brendan Fraser version. Ahmanet is constantly sucking the life out of dudes (it's very Lifeforce) and conjuring zombie minions and the like to do her bidding, and director Alex Kurtzman keeps things fairly dark unlike the more sun-drenched Stephen Sommers films. It's still more of an action-adventure film than horror, but the balance is better than I expected, so for that I can give them some credit. I'm not sure why Universal is hellbent on creating a "monster" universe that downplays the monstrous side of things, but at least they're not totally dropping the genre angle. There's a bit where Cruise gets swarmed by bugs that's genuinely unnerving, and the scenes with Jake Johnson (as Cruise's best bud) are mostly lifted straight out of American Werewolf in London, as Johnson is a zombie/ghost thing that shows up to tell his still-living friend what's going on. I can't see how Bride of Frankenstein (from Bill Condon, no less) will be anything but a gothic romance/horror, but hopefully if this series goes forward it they embrace the horror elements as much as possible - I get that they can't go full R with these big budgets (and future installments being planned), but there's no need to turn all the monsters into superheroes. We have those in the other cinematic universe movies - make this stand out!

I also hope future films have zero involvement from Alex Kurtzman, who has proven time and time again that he is a simply awful storyteller. I can't imagine anyone trying to make sense out of this film if they had no previous knowledge of (and, more importantly, affection for) these characters, and more than once I was reminded of the Transformers films that he co-wrote. Everything is a big climax, everything is spectacle, and there's nothing holding it all together - the "slow moments" exist for no other reason than to provide the characters with an excuse to change locations before all the chaos starts again. He's one of the many filmmakers of modern times who seem to have never learned that action can't continue to be exciting when there's never any break from it. Even a movie like Speed, which is literally "non-stop" (since, you know, the bus can't stop) takes time to just let the bus be driving along without obstacles so the characters can talk, or cut back to Jeff Daniels (or even Dennis Hopper) doing non-action stuff, before they get back to the next impending disaster. Kurtzman's version of Speed would be an endless series of "Oh no the bridge isn't finished!" moments with zero dialogue beyond "Oh no!" and "Get down!" type of shit, and we'd be rooting for the bus to explode after 20 minutes.

Unfortunately he's set to produce them all, so unless they drop him like they did Dracula Untold, there's little reason to be hopeful. I mean, separate from all this shit I can't think of a better potential director for a Bride of Frankenstein remake than Bill Condon, but I also don't know how much influence Kurtzman will have over it and if Condon will have to acquiesce to including any of this film's characters and/or shoehorning in some introductory roles for ones from the next films (Depp's Invisible Man and, presumably, a new Dracula, since it'd be weird to leave him out). After some missteps in the middle there (Iron Man 2 being the worst offender), Marvel finally figured out how to keep their films from feeling like extended previews for the upcoming ones, and it seems DC has gotten it under control as well since Wonder Woman saves such crap for its bookending scenes (basically just a reference to an unseen Bruce Wayne), so there's hope Universal can follow suit. They'd be best to just let Condon be and figure out how to tie them together later, i.e. once they've gotten to a point where they've made a movie or two that people actually like. You know, like they did in the 1930s and 40s anyway.

What say you?

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Rings (2017)

FEBRUARY 3, 2017

GENRE: GHOST, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

With the arrival of each new late-coming sequel (Blair Witch, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, etc.), I become more and more worried about the new Saw and Friday the 13th films that are coming in October. It seems our Hollywood overlords are having trouble reviving old franchises as of late (and audiences aren't fooled, either), and Rings doesn't do anything to change that course. Originally slated for late 2015, the film has been clearly reworked some over the past year and change, and now finally hits theaters as counter programming for the Super Bowl instead of making the easy money it could have made in October (Of 2015 or 2016; it was once dated for both), and even the biggest sports hater in the world will probably wish they were watching the game after about 20 minutes of this lifeless attempt at reviving a series that never should have gotten a sequel in the first place.

To its credit, it doesn't ignore the events of Ring Two - the Sissy Spacek character is a major part (though not played by Spacek, as we just see quick shots of her as a younger woman) and, as the title suggests, the "Rings" club from the same-named short film (which was a prequel to Ring Two, if you recall) makes an appearance. Considering the entirely new cast and creative team, it wouldn't be crazy to assume that this would be a kind of stand-alone entry (or pseudo-remake, even), so as a fan of continuity and the like I'll at least give them props for not doing a reset. Oddly, it might be better to go in blind, because if you know the reveals from the first two films, you'll be far ahead of our heroes for most of the runtime, so if it's been a while I'd suggest skipping the Wiki recap if I were you. It won't save the movie by any means, but at least it'll give you one less thing to roll your eyes at while silently (or not, if the theater is empty) pleading with the film to stop being so goddamn boring.

A big part of the problem is our two leads are total blank slates. They're very nice to look at, sure, but I couldn't tell you a goddamn thing about either one of them, and I just spent 100 minutes watching them make their way through a not particularly complicated movie. It's also not particularly SHORT, clocking in at around 105 minutes, so there's no reason the film couldn't have included a few basic identifying traits for the main characters. The male, Holt, might like Afghan Wigs because there's a poster of them in his room, but that could be his roommate's for all we know. And we know even less about... *consults IMDb because I literally forgot already* Julia, who is an 18 year old who isn't going to college (like Holt is) because she has to take care of her mom, a character we never see and possibly doesn't exist. Julia seemingly sleeps at Holt's, which his dad doesn't seem to mind, and when Holt goes missing she up and takes off to find him hundreds of miles away, seemingly without informing the mom she supposedly has to take care of "after what happened" (your guess is as good as mine as to what that was), nor ever calling her during the week ("SEVEN DAYS!", you know) that she's in/around Holt's college.

But this plays into a larger issue, which is that absolutely nothing in the film feels genuine in any way. It's like every character in the movie came into existence the second the cameras were turned on, giving everything a vague, cold veneer that the film is powerless to overcome. It's also just plain phony and half-assed, and I'll give some examples that may sound like nitpicking, but hear me out, there's a point. In the first 15 minutes:
- Holt and Julia agree to a 9:30 Skype (specifically Skype), and then they cut to a generic chat app and the time is 9:07 (call already seemingly far in progress).
- A character says he had to find a VCR in order to watch the cursed tape when someone gave it to him. Later, he has other VHS tapes, like Aliens and Jurassic Park, in his belongings.
- Julia enters a classroom she doesn't belong in. For no reason, she cuts across a row of seats and... stands in the opposite back corner, a move that exists only to draw attention to her.
- Holt stops answering his phone. After six days, she drives to the school - instead of asking his dad if he's heard from him, or calling the school, or anything a normal person might do.
- Someone uses a screwdriver to hook up a VCR.

Now, yes, any one of these things on their own are fine - movies are movies, this isn't the point, etc. But when you add them all together (and again, all in the first reel), it just tells the audience that this is a sloppy, very phony movie - which makes it harder to buy anything the movie wants to sell us when it really gets going. If I can't believe any of the normal, non-scary stuff, how the hell am I supposed to accept the supernatural goings-on that will occur later? Again, these aren't interesting characters - the least the movie can do is make us believe they're just regular, average kids - and you can only do that by placing them into a normal, believable world. Not one where parents don't care about their minor children sleeping together and a girl takes notice of a VCR at the flea market by studying the BACK of the damn thing (seriously, she spies it from like 10 feet away and just stares at the console's rear panel. Big fan of AV jacks, I guess).

It's possible some of this stuff made more sense or had a different context in an earlier cut, but as with Bye Bye Man, I am not going to give the movie a benefit of the doubt when they're not charging audiences any less to make up for it. However, I WILL note that lots of things in the trailer do not appear; most curious is a line from Vincent D'Onofrio explaining a mark that appears on Julia's hand - in the finished film, the translation of the mark is saved as a reveal for the film's final scene (and does not involve D'Onofrio at all). We also see Julia watching the tape under different circumstances, so I'm curious just how much of the movie was overhauled and if it was actually good at one point. Considering how slow-paced it is (not usually something you say about a re-cut movie - they tend to speed things up, trading away coherence in the process) I am going to guess this one was never in any good shape, but if I were presented with an original cut I wouldn't be opposed to seeing for myself. Funnily enough, I COULD have seen an earlier cut, on several occasions - the theater I saw the film at, which is the one closest to my house (though I usually go to one a bit further away as this one doesn't have coffee or a rewards program), is where they hold a lot of the test screenings in the area. In fact it was a bit of a running joke of how many times the film tested (sometimes paying people to do it, which isn't always the case); I dug through my emails and found at least three invites for the film dating back to its original release date of October 2015. And that's just how many times I happened to get the invite (to my old AOL account, where I signed up for one of these lists ages ago), which means there were almost certainly more.

If I had to guess, the testing audiences didn't warm to the film's back half, because that's where it starts to feel less like a new concept (which is how it starts) and more like a remake of the original. And it's a shame, too, because there are some interesting ideas floating around in that first act, such as the Rings group. Basically, Holt's professor (Johnny Galecki) is trying to prove the existence of a soul, and to do so he has his students work extra credit by first watching the tape and then assigning them "tails" (someone that they can pass the curse on to). But obviously he can't do that if no one is dying, so (we have to infer this much, the movie doesn't bother clarifying and he's written out of the narrative by the halfway point) he lets some of the kids die by purposely botching their "tail" assignments, or at least, that's how it read to me. He also has this like, club (?) for all of them? It's on the 7th floor of the college (dorm? study hall? who knows) and you need a special key to access it, and all these kids are just chilling, like it was a bar or something. I couldn't tell if they were waiting to be tails, or under observation (for the whole week?) or what, but it seemed like it'd be a bigger element going forward. Alas, details are not this movie's strong suit, so whatever its actual function was didn't matter, because the movie shoots itself in the foot, dropping all of the "Rings" stuff shortly afterward to focus on, sigh, another goddamn proper burial plot.

Yep, I don't mean to spoil anything, but I shit you not - the movie eventually becomes another attempt to stop Samara's curse by giving her a proper burial, because her body was moved (and put in a wall) for reasons the movie clunkily clarifies in its third act. I don't know how many supernatural horror movies I've seen where the climax comes down to someone prying apart a wall or floorboard and finding a skeleton or mummified corpse, but I hope that whatever that number is (let's say 30) that it never gets much higher. All it does is remind me of superior films (like the first Ring) and practically guarantee that it won't work, because the damn ghost always comes back after being "properly" disposed of anyway. Speaking of the first Ring, new director F. Javier Gutiérrez tries to ape Gore Verbinski by drowning the film in blue, but he also lights like Peter Hyams, so get used to squinting your way through scare scenes. There's a shot late in the film where a decrepit room de-ages around Julia (broken objects repair, peeled wallpaper plasters itself back to the wall, etc.) and you can barely see the effect, which seems like a silly waste of money for a complicated CGI shot.

Regular readers of the site might be thinking that I levied a lot of these complaints at The Bye Bye Man (bland characters, phoniness, etc.), but ultimately even that one rises above this, because as bad as it was, it was at least goofy enough to give it a pulse. There aren't a lot of big horror scenes in the film (the trailer spoils the two best ones - the airplane and the hair), so you'd assume that when they DID come they'd be worth the wait, but no - they're just as indifferent as everything else, and Gutiérrez and his writers (including Akiva goddamn Goldsman, so you know you're in trouble) can't be bothered to deliver anything even remotely as insane/memorable as the first film's horse freakout on the boat, or even the first sequel's much lambasted deer attack. Even D'Onofrio can't save it; he's by far the best thing about the movie, but he's only in two or three scenes and spends most of them just spouting exposition while sitting in a chair. Even the obligatory "Samara climbs out of the TV" bit is botched, and no one thought to have any fun with the idea of the analog-driven Samara adapting to an all-digital world. Sure, the tape spreads through Quicktimes instead of VHS tapes (there's an honest to god plot point about the file size of a copy being larger than the original), and when she climbs from the TV it's a nice big HDTV set, but it's only in the film's obligatory sequel set up (good luck with that) that they think to do anything like spread it through social media and the like.

While I was fighting to stay awake (I saw the movie at 11 AM, I should mention), I tried to think of the last movie I saw that was this uninvolving, and oddly enough I think it was Shut In, starring ex-Ring lead Naomi Watts. If The Cure for Wellness (from Gore Verbinski) is a snoozer as well, I'm going to start seriously plotting out a meta-Ring sequel where the real curse is that no one can seemingly ever live up to it when they try to go back to the horror/thriller genre (and yes, there's a "back to the well" joke to be made, but I just refuse to). I didn't love Ring Two by any means (I never felt compelled to watch it again after opening night), but at least it was just your typically underwhelming sequel, whereas this is a straight up bad movie, and a bizarre approach to trying to revive a long-dormant "franchise" to boot.

What say you?

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