Justin Robinson's Blog, page 17

Now Fear This: Cube

Yes, that is Death from Supernatural.

One of my favorite filmmaking stories centers around the production for the movie Saw. Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell had five thousand dollars to make a movie, but no idea what to make. With such a small sum, they kind of threw their arms up and were like, “Guess it’s a movie about two guys in a room.” After shooting began, executives saw they had something and added money to that microscopic budget and produced the first in what would become one of the more lucrative horror franchises in recent memory. As the budgets got bigger and the sequel numbers higher, the movies declined in quality, forgetting the spare, sadistic inspiration that made the first one interesting. A strong argument could be made that budget size is inversely correlated to quality: just look at Lord of the Rings versus The Hobbit. This isn’t true across the board — historical epics sort of have to be big budget and they’re often quite good — but unlimited money has never translated to a better film.

As you might have guessed, I have a special fondness for low budget filmmaking. That’s one of the reasons I love the (generally fairly reviled by fans) first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a half-length, low budget horror flick with sharp writing and creative takes on classic monsters. I am far more interested to see how filmmakers can work around a limited budget, and if they can make a fascinating movie out of “two guys in a room,” then they have my respect. This week’s entry, the 1997 SF-prison horror film Cube is fiendishly inventive and has a premise almost as limited. Despite the sprawling nature of the locale, only a single 14×14 set was built.

Six strangers wake up trapped in a series of perfectly cube-shaped rooms, with doors on every wall, plus the floor and ceiling, leading to other nearly identical rooms, some of which are trapped. These basically look like the inside of a combination Rubik’s Cube and Lament Configuration. The main characters, who have no memory of how they got there, naturally decide they should try to get out, but this place doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Through often deadly trial and error, they learn to navigate the maze, while the stress breaks each one of them down. The best part of the film is that at no point is the prison explained. There are several debates over who is behind it, and even one compelling (if nihilistic) theory, but there is no confirmation. Writer/director Vincenzo Natali (co-writer/director of the queasy horror coming-of-age Splice, a storyboarder on Ginger Snaps, and frequent director of the incredible Hannibal) has pledged never to reveal what’s outside of the titular cube, and he is absolutely correct in this.

The first clue that there is some method to the madness in the cube-creators comes with the selection of the people imprisoned. Though we only have their stories to go on, and there is evidence that at least one of them is lying, we learn enough to know why each of them is here. We’re venturing into spoiler territory, so FYI if you’re planning to watch it (and you totally should). There’s Quentin the cop, who is used to high-stress situations, is physically formidable, and can calm and motivate those around him. Holloway the doctor can can treat the injured, knows the long-term hazards of starvation and dehydration, and perhaps most importantly is willing to coddle Kazan even before his utility is discovered. Leaven the math student can decipher the numeric codes on the threshold of every door, which turn out to not only be indicators for traps, but coordinates on a cartesian map. Rennes the convict has escaped seven prisons and is ideal for teaching the basics of getting out of there. Worth the cynic and Kazan the autistic at first appear to have no purpose beyond weighing them down, but Worth designed the shell of the cube and thus knows how large it is, and Kazan can do insanely complex math in his head, helping Leaven navigate. In addition, all six characters are named for prisons, with each name giving some clue as to their personalities.

So the mysterious makers of the cube gave them the perfect crew to get out, they just have to figure out what everyone can do. Or not. There are a couple problems with this, and that ambiguity makes the movie more than the disposable bit of entertainment it initially appears to be. Holloway was some kind of conspiracy theorist on the outside, and she instantly chalks this up to the actions of the military industrial complex. Quentin thinks it’s the work of a crazy rich guy looking for kicks. The idea of aliens gets floated, though dismissed mostly because if it’s aliens, they’re fucked anyway. When Worth’s background comes out (in a room dyed in red light for maximum discomfort), he offers the most terrifyingly nihilistic take of all: that the cube has no purpose, no designer. It was built relatively on accident because everyone wanted a job and no one was going to question a source of money. Now it’s being used because to do otherwise would be to admit failure. There is no conspiracy, just a bunch of drones lurching blindly in the dark. Worth seems to be there only to give Leaven the size of the cube, which is far less than any of the others. Was he placed there as punishment? To tie up a loose end? It’s never revealed.

Meanwhile, Quentin grows more and more unhinged, eventually exploding into violence. When I first watched the movie, I was convinced that Quentin was a plant, as the only one of the group who did not have a clear and necessary skill set. I believed his story about the rich asshole using this for entertainment, except Quentin was that rich asshole, tagging along for a close up look. Now I’m not so certain — and that is the mark of a good movie, or at least one that stays with you, constantly being able to re-evaluate it for new meanings and interpretations. His leadership is extremely useful in the beginning, getting everyone motivated and moving them along (although a third act twist renders this deeply ironic, leading me to question whether or not he is a plant). Maybe it was an experiment? Maybe they wanted to see how an unbalanced man could guide the perfect team through the maze?

“Hello? Pinhead?”

Huge spoilers now, but what the hell. My favorite part, although it is a gut punch, is that the only one to make it out is the severely autistic Kazan. He is barely capable of understanding what is going on around him, and is the only one who could not comprehend finding something even mundane on the outside. Worth says the world is full of boundless human stupidity, so it’s perfect that the one to make it out would be mentally handicapped. Kazan is entirely unable to communicate what he’d just seen, so even letting him go would keep the cube secret. If it has a master, and I lean toward Worth’s interpretation that it doesn’t, this is an acceptable loss. The theme of the film is fundamentally one of bleak nihilism, where there is no understanding simply because there is nothing to understand. Empathize with the void, and you come back mad, even if you’re following Kazan into the light.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: banality of evil, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cube, Ginger Snaps, horror film Cube, nihilism, Now Fear This, Vincenzo Natali

UNDEAD ON ARRIVAL and EVERYMAN for 99 cents!

My publisher, Books of the Dead has hit a whole bunch of milestones. In celebration, they're offering kindle versions of their titles for 99 cents!

http://www.amazon.com/Everyman-Justin...

http://www.amazon.com/Undead-Arrival-...

Yakmala: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

That’s a… masculine silhouette for Chun-Li.

There are three kinds of people who give me bad movie recommendations: the devotees, who have seen all the usual suspects, and can name something from the stranger hinterlands I’ve never heard of; the dilettantes, who have a well-meaning if casual approach to bad cinema; and the haters, who can’t even understand why anyone would want to watch a bad movie. This is why when I get a bad movie recommendation from a hater, I take it seriously. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was one such recommendation.

Tagline: Some fight for power. Some fight for us.

More Accurate Tagline: Some fight for real estate. Some fight for pianos.

Guilty Party: This is a tough one, since it reeks of soulless studio calculation. Hell, it feels like Warner trying to play catchup with Marvel’s cinematic universe, yet it came out in 2009, when the latter was nothing but a dollar signed-shaped gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye. I’m going to go ahead and blame director Andrzej Bartkowiak, though. He’s a reasonably respected cinematographer, but his directing resume is littered with Uwe Boll also-rans.

Synopsis: Chun-Li has to have some kind of magical racism powers right off the bat. When she’s little, she’s obviously Chinese, but when she grows up, she somehow becomes more Caucasian. Is she slowly turning into Meryl Streep? Sadly, the world will never know for sure.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the first lady of American cinema throw a helicopter kick.

Anyway, she’s moving around with her businessman dad and rich lady mom, training to be a classical pianist, and in her spare time learning kung fu with dad. And in case we miss anything, she tells the whole story in voiceover. It’s… exhausting. So one day dad is getting something out of the fridge when he gets attacked with arrows and Michael Clarke Duncan. I know, right? Every goddamn time.

Sadly, dad’s kung fu is no match for Balrog’s (that’s MCD) martial art, which appears to be HGH-Fu. Seriously, he’s got so much bull semen in his bloodstream, he can get a cow pregnant by scent alone. While Balrog beats Chun-Li’s dad like he just told that joke, creepy Irishman Bison (Neal McDonough) walks in, tells Chun-Li to go upstairs, then kidnaps her dad.

Fast-forward to now, when Chun-Li is a lot whiter and being played by Kristen Kreuk with every ounce of gravitas that the former star of Smallville can muster. So like one. One ounce. Her mom dies of Movie Cancer, and Chun-Li gets this creepy scroll in the mail. She’s like, fuck it, time to go on a quest. She then fires the large staff of her father’s mansion because fuck them I guess. The scroll will lead her to Gen, who is the master of the Order of Web, this shadowy organization whose chief goals appear to be affordable street food and hand tattoos. Gen used to be a criminal, but now he helps people. At least that’s the story he’s using. Anyway, he’ll train her to… do something, I guess. It’s not too clear. It’s not to rescue her dad either; later in the movie she’s shocked he’s still alive.

Meanwhile, Bison is the head of an organization named Shadaloo (pronounced Shadalao for no reason I can determine) based out of Bangkok, and he’s attempting a real estate scam. Seriously, his big plan is to drive up crime in the waterfront slums, buy the land at a low price, then turn it all into middle class housing. It’s probably the most mundane scheme any kung fu supervillain has ever had. I really wanted the scene where he was cheating on his taxes.

“HAHAHAHAHA! NOW I CLAIM BALROG AS A DEPENDENT!”

Bison’s first task is having masked assassin Vega murder the heads of all the Bangkok crime families, who are the most multinational group outside of a Captain Planet team. These dead guys are found by the local Bangkok PD in the person of homicide detective Maya Surnee (O-hoarder Moon Bloodgood). But then the movie makes a turn for the magical when Interpol agent and total fucking lunatic Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) rolls up. He’s on the trail of Bison, and is the only one who believes Shadaloo is more than a myth. He’s also the only one who has apparently been mainlining tiger shark adrenaline.

Chun-Li finds Gen — well, he kind of finds her — and says he’s been watching her. Weirdo. The training begins, and that’s really what you want in a movie about crazy martial artists who throw fireballs. You want endless scenes of them not throwing fireballs. Gen reveals that he used to be Bison’s pal, but realized he was a dick. Also, he claims Bison wanted Chun-Li’s dad because the guy had relationships that could be used. So… while being held captive, Chun-Li’s dad is schmoozing his old contacts? That’s a scene I want to see. Bison is also totally preoccupied with a package arriving from Russia called the White Rose, which manages to make even less sense.

Chun-Li follows Bison’s henchwoman Cantana to a nightclub, and then with the power of sexy dancing, gets her into the bathroom. There they have a really clumsy fight. Imagine wire fu, if the guys operating the flight harnesses had crippling vertigo. Nash and Maya were staking out the club but because they’re completely incompetent, only notice something is wrong when people start running out. They rush in, and catch a glimpse of Chun-Li before she escapes.

Gen relates Bison’s origin story, and the important part was that he wanted to get power, so he went to a cave. This is seriously the line of reasoning. I like that the writer of the film thinks that’s where you get power. Want to be president? Gotta find a cave, young man. Maybe he thinks the electoral college is entirely composed of bats? So Bison took his pregnant wife into this cave, karated their baby from her womb, then magically put his conscience in the baby. In this movie, those words are sentences that have meaning, and not something a crazed hobo whispers right before putting you in his chili pot.

Balrog and a bunch of goons show up at Gen’s hideout and shoot it with a rocket. I guess they knew where it was, but hadn’t gotten around to killing the guy. Like it was on Balrog’s itinerary, but he kept forgetting, or running out of time at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

“I told you, Bison, Sundays are Balrog time.”

Bison sends Vega after Chun-Li and she just rolls him up. It’s embarrassing. It can’t help that Vega’s mask looks big enough for three guys. She finds out when and where the White Rose is coming into port as well. Unfortunately, this is a lie and she’s captured. Bison reveals that he has her dad, but then kills him, then he and Balrog leave Chun-Li with two mooks, trusting that they’ll kill her. Well, we all know what happens next. She gets out, and at the end of a chase, Gen rescues her. So he’s alive.

Chun-Li reaches out to Nash for some backup, and they all raid the cargo ship with the White Rose. For that one person that hadn’t figured it out, the White Rose is Bison’s daughter. I have no idea why she’s being shipped anywhere. He was able to keep Chun-Li’s dad in prison for what, ten years? He can’t look after his own daughter? Gen fights Bison and wins by stabbing him to death with a steam pipe. Then Bison kicks the shit out of Gen. Chun-Li shows up, uses her fireball and then straight up breaks Bison’s neck in front of his horrified daughter.

Good triumphs.

Life-Changing Subtext: Conscience is your weakness, so you should keep it in Russia until the moment before the culmination of your schemes. Then bring it back.

Defining Quote: Bison: “Your father has been the milk of my business.” Bison says this like it’s a thing. It’s totally not. Nothing has ever been the milk of anything.

Standout Performance: This was why the film was recommended to me. Chris Klein does some truly incredible work as Charlie Nash. He’s this unholy mashup of Nicolas Cage and Keanu Reeves I am forced to christen “Cageanu.” He somehow manages to look completely disengaged and psychotically intent in every scene. He consistently appears to be making aggressive eye contact with someone offscreen, mentally trying to figure out if he plans to fight them or fuck them, or some bizarre combination of the two. This is one of my favorite terrible performances in any movie ever.

What’s Wrong: Bartkowiak went with a gritty aesthetic, and if there’s one thing the Street Fighter franchise is not, it’s gritty. Guile’s hair alone violates every law of taste and physics with the glee of a clown discovering canned ham. Chun-Li never once wears her iconic costume, and somehow manages to be a less convincing kung fu fighter than Drew Barrymore. Lastly, no one cares about origin stories. Just tell the actual story.

Best Scenes: Everything with Nash. In one scene, he and Maya are staking out Balrog to tail him to a meeting. Balrog steps out of a hotel, and even though Nash and Maya are a good fifty feet away and Balrog never once looks at them, Nash does the “let’s kiss for cover” routine. They promptly lose Balrog, but a supremely smug Nash is like, “It had to be done.”

It’s a plot point that Bison grew up in the Bangkok slums, yet he has the kind of Irish accent not commonly found outside of bogs, fairy circles, and Lucky Charms commercials. In a stab to explain this, they say he’s the child of Irish missionaries who died when he was young, but then they show a baby… implying that he was a baby when his parents died. Sure, the kid looks Asian, but this movie has already shown that ethnicity is something that can be grown out of. So the Irish accent is genetic apparently. Good to know.

Because of the cop subplot, there has to be a scene where they’re thrown off the case. This happens, and Nash walks into an entirely empty office, all, “What happened?” Maya tells them they’re off the case. But the office is empty? Does the Bangkok PD change offices every time they wrap up a case? That might be the cause of some budgetary woes.

Transcendent Moment: After seeing Chun-Li at the club, Nash wants to track her down. When a cop behind him offers a totally reasonable suggestion, Nash, total madman that he is, does this:

Eat him? Kill him? Fuck him? All three?

Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun-Li was obviously positioned as the first of a series of films each starring one of the characters. Since it’s terrible, this never materialized, but I will always hold out hope for a Nash movie. He’s awesome.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Cageanu, Chris Klien, Kristin Kreuk, nash, street fighter, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Yakmala!

Lifetime Theater: The Assault

Normally, when I’m looking for a Lifetime movie to review, I head over to the channel in question and flip through the options until I find a synopsis that sounds agreeably bananas. Of course, it’s common knowledge amongst my friends that I’m the Lifetime Guy — and believe me, that’s led to at least one long, dark night of the soul — so if they happen across something they like the sound of, it gets sent my way. That’s the extent of the vetting process. Not that this week’s entry, The Assault, is bad by the standards of the network. It’s just that it’s Lifetime’s version of the Steubenville rape case, and writing a funny review about a rape movie isn’t exactly easy. I don’t want to seem like I’m making light of the real problem of sexual assault, but in my defense, Lifetime created a fucking hashtag for this one, so I’m at least at their level.

That… that doesn’t help my case.

I’ve tackled rape before on my Very Special Journey, with the Afterschool Special “Did You Hear What Happened to Andrea?” It wasn’t really anything I was eager to come back to, but since this particular movie begins with a sobbing girl walking out onto a football field in the middle of a game, dousing herself in gasoline, and attempting a gritty reboot of the Human Torch, it was sent my way. The scene is totally worth it, just a gonzo moment where the Lifetime network threw up its collective hands and were like, “Yeah, we set girls on fire now here. Lifetime… TO THE EXTREME!”

It’s a shame they couldn’t get the rights to that Cult song.

The young lady putting herself on trial for witchcraft is cheerleader Sam Gleason, and she’s saved by QB Reed Johnson, who full on tackles her. Two things here. One, good on the coach for teaching his quarterback how to tackle. That lack has bit a certain Texas team in the ass before (too soon, Dillon fans?). Secondly, Johnson really plows into Sam, to the point that it’s mildly surprising when Johnson gets up, and he’s not in the middle of a blasted crater filled with splattered cheerleader parts. He doesn’t even spike her severed head. As it turns out, Sam and Reed used to date, but they broke up. At one point, a character is like, “Why did you save her? You were broken up.” So, yeah… that’s the kind of monsters you’re dealing with in town.

Sam has an injured arm, and the doctors uncover evidence of a sexual assault, which leads me to believe these doctors don’t know what arms are. Don’t they cover that on like day one of med school? “These are arms. Notice how they are not inside the vagina? Note that down, it will be on the test.” Sam fingers the guy responsible (not like that), the tailback Christopher Burch. However, punky girl Frankie shows up at the hospital asking Sam why she only dropped the hammer on Burch and not “everyone else.” That’s pretty much the worst scenario to hear those two words in.

This town is one of those places that revolves around high school football, and that is never a healthy kind of community. Elevating a bunch of hormone-crazed kids whose chief pastime is head trauma to the level of gods is guaranteed to cause trouble. So when Sam accuses first Burch and then “everybody else” of raping her, she’s the problem. Not the rapists. It’s strongly implied that the only reason anything gets done at all is because Detective Jodi Miller (Newsradio’s Khandi Alexander) is a newcomer, and that she has some assault in her past. She’s also the sister of the coach, Tim Miller (Malik Yoba, who will always be bounty hunter/party planner Ice from Arrested Development), further complicating matters.

You can’t have a… actually, let me pull the ripcord on that joke right now.

It initially comes down to he-said she-said. Burch says it was consensual and Sam can’t remember anything from that night (she was extremely drunk). Coach’s position is that he has college scouts coming to the next game, and players shouldn’t lose their careers over whatever happened, which was due to poor judgment and alcohol abuse on everyone’s parts. Sam watches her friends dwindle to nothing — literally, this installment features yet another ersatz Facebook, and it makes a hilariously sad booping noise when she loses a friend. I kind of want Facebook to adopt this. I’d post more political/religious/gardening rants just to hear the noise. Sam loses pretty much everyone, other than Frankie and Reed.

Frankie, though, knows the conspiracy goes all the way to the top. By which I mean Burch. Basically, there were a bunch of posts on Twitter and Fakebook with the hashtag #cheerleader detailing that night that suddenly got taken down. Frankie saved every bit she could, because as it turns out she and Sam used to be best friends, but Sam went the popular girl cheerleader route, while Frankie went the awesome internet vigilante way. They try to build a timeline of the night and fight a disturbing dead period between 2 and 3 in the morning. Sam begins a blog reaching out for more information, doing her best to own the hashtag, which she does by getting it tattooed onto the back of her neck. I feel like that’s one you’ll regret later on, just because no one is going to know what a hashtag is in twenty years, and everyone will think she wants a number of cheerleaders to be specified later.

Things get really bad when a vine surfaces of Sam saying “Take on all of you. Every single one.” One look and we know it’s out of context. That’s how the Lifetime network works. Sure enough, it is. Eventually, one of Sam’s cheerleader friends who initially abandoned her, leaves a phone in the police station with the full version of the video. This one clearly has Sam saying, then shrieking, “No.” So that’s pretty cut and dried! Not so much. The rapists get arrested, but it’s unlikely anything too bad is going to happen to them. Sam decides to play the audio of the rape over the PA system at the game to make some kind of statement. It’s better than setting herself on fire. In true Lifetime fashion, everyone stands up at this powerful moment rather than what would really happen: a bunch of disgruntled football fans wondering why their game is being interrupted.

The role of Anonymous is entirely cut out, instead served by Frankie. And unlike reality, Frankie doesn’t face any legal reprisal for supplying the incriminating information. Lifetime wanted something that was a little less soul-crushing than reality, and can you really blame them?

What did we learn? Always be nice to your tech-savvy friend from fifth grade. You never know when she’s the only way you’re getting justice.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Lifetime Theater, The Assault

A Now Fear This Roundup

I’m planning to spend most of this week digesting, and frankly, that gets in the way of long, rambling, and expletive-filled reviews. Fortunately, in the four years Now Fear This has been alive and well, I’ve written a lot of long, rambling, and expletive-filled reviews. So this Thanksgiving, if you’re looking for something terrifying to watch that maybe you haven’t heard of, browse through this list of (mostly) horror gems.

28 Weeks Later: A lesser film than its predecessor, though it still has plenty to recommend it.

Attack the Block: Aliens attack a London slum, and it’s up to an embryonic street gang to save the day.

The Bay: The ‘80s meets the ‘10s in this disturbing found footage gem.

Bad Milo!: A touching horror comedy featuring a butt monster.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon: A mockumentary on the making of a supernatural serial killer in the tradition of Jason, Freddy, and Michael.

Breakdown: Kurt Russell vs. JT Walsh. Nuff said.

The Brood: Having kids never seemed so fun and easy in this Cronenberg classic!

Brotherhood of the Wolf: Possibly the finest horror romance period piece kung fu action flick ever made.

Bubba Ho-Tep: Elvis and JFK fight a mummy in a Texas rest home.

Cellular: A fun thriller featuring Captain America and the Transporter.

Centurion: Extremely sexy people battle it out in Iron Age Scotland.

Changeling: A baroque docudrama about the nature of corruption.

The Changeling: A truly creepy and atmospheric ghost story.

Chillerama: Highly offensive and extremely funny horror comedy anthology.

The Company of Wolves: Neil Jordan’s fairy tale phantasmagoria that’s probably his way of dealing with sexual abuse.

Dark City: Director’s Cut: A new edit transforms a good film into a great one.

Deep Rising: A creature feature in the tradition of the best b-movies.

The Descent: A modern classic of survival horror so scary it barely even needs its monsters.

Dick: A comedy about Dick (Nixon).

Dog Soldiers: Werewolves hunt British soldiers through the Scottish highlands.

Drop Dead Gorgeous: A pitch black comedy finally getting its cult due.

Fido: The story of a utopia or dystopia. Or zomtopia.

The Ghost and the Darkness: Building a bridge is tough when you’re dealing with two of the worst serial killers in history who also happen to be lions.

The Gift: A creepy Southern Gothic gem from the minds of Sam Raimi and Billy Bob Thornton.

Ginger Snaps: Lycanthrophy serves as a metaphor for puberty for a pair of gothy Irish twins.

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed: A symbol-happy sequel with a stunning twist.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch: The anarchic sequel/parody of the horror blockbuster.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters: So much better than it looks.

High Tension: A French extremism homage to classic horror of the ‘70s

The House of the Devil: An ‘80s homage so loving it’s a wonder I didn’t dream it.

The Innkeepers: A slow and moody film that accurately captures the realities of the workplace.

Insidious: An eerie gore-free ghost story from the guys behind Saw.

Joe Versus the Volcano: A sweet romantic fantasy about the importance of dreaming big.

May: An indie dramedy gone horribly awry.

The Missing: An Apache sorcerer kidnaps a girl to sell her into slavery, Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones to the rescue.

The Mist: Though adapted from a Stephen King novella, this is one of the best Lovecraft movies ever made.

Mute Witness: Hitchcockian yarn about a mute girl targeted for death by Russian snuff film makers.

My Boyfriend’s Back: It’s a one joke picture, but you gotta admit the joke is pretty funny.

Outlander: Alien Jesus + Vikings vs. Dragon.

Predators: Basically an episode of Deadliest Warrior with fucking Predators.

Rare Exports: A truly original Christmas horror film.

Ravenous: You are who you eat.

Series 7: The Contenders: An early satire of reality television.

Session 9: This whole goddamn movie is haunted.

Splice: Why you should never use metaphor with your mutant.

Stake Land: A survival horror movie with indie cred.

The Strangers: Lock the doors, bar the windows. Doesn’t matter. They’re already in the house.

The Stuff: Are you eating it, or is it eating you?

Teeth: A young woman makes friends with her mutation. Say cheese!

Them!: ‘50s atomic horror classic about giant ants.

The Thin Blue Line: An Errol Morris classic that doubles as a terrifying horror story.

Trollhunter: The best found footage movie ever made.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil: Ingenious hicksploitation parody that gives us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from Leatherface’s point of view.

You’re Next: An inversion of the classic home invasion horror thriller.

Enjoy your terror!

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: 28 Weeks Later, Attack the Block, Bad Milo!, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Breakdown, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Bubba Ho-Tep, Cellular, Centurion, Changeling, Chillerama, Dark City: Director's Cut, Deep Rising, Dick, Dog Soldiers, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Fido, Ginger Snaps, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, High Tension, horror comedy, House of the Devil, Insidious, Joe Versus the Volcano, May, Mute Witness, My Boyfriend's Back, Outlander, Predators, Rare Exports, Ravenous, Series 7: The Contenders, Session 9, Splice, Stake Land, Teeth, The Bay, The Brood, The Changeling, The Company of Wolves, The Descent, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Gift, The Innkeepers, The Missing, The Mist, The Strangers, The Stuff, The Thin Blue Line, Them!, Trollhunter, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, You're Next

Now Fear This: Ravenous

David Arquette gets third billing. There’s no joke here. Well, other than that.

Not long ago, Ryan Murphy claimed to have invented the concept of horror/comedy. This might be the first time a TV writer has ever tried to take credit for evolution. The prevailing thinking is, determined by studying our closest primate relatives and showing them Will Ferrell movies or something, is that laughter is done to relieve tension. A chimp sees something that might be a snake, but when he finds that it’s just a stick, the laugh is the signal for all the other chimps to be little Fonzies. Comedy is funny specifically because it subverts expectations — that’s why old jokes aren’t funny anymore. Horror is also about subverting expectations, because they spring from the same place. So when Ryan Murphy thought he created horror/comedy, he would have had better luck saying he invented verbs. Because that second one happened later.

Horror and comedy are also inexorably linked because they are the most subjective genres. I mentioned Will Ferrell above because while he owns the address to my funnybone, some people find him obnoxious and loud. It’s not like they’re wrong, either. If something’s not funny to you, it’s not funny. There’s no right or wrong about it. Unless you think Airplane! isn’t funny, then it’s time to quit the human race because you’re clearly not good at it anymore. Setting out to make a horror/comedy has a degree of difficulty numbering in the insane, like a gymnast deciding to do her floor exercise while simultaneously eating a deep dish pizza and being attacked by ninjas. The balance is nearly impossible, so when it’s done well, such as with Behind the Mask, or Ghostbusters, you end up with a legitimate classic on your hands. This week’s movie, Ravenous, has dodged the burgeoning cult of the former and the universal acclaim of the latter, but it richly deserves a second life.

The film opens on a pair of quotes, which lets us know what sort of movie we’re going to watch. Nietzsche lingers on screen first, to make everyone but high school-aged douchebags roll their eyes, then following it up with something from Anonymous (not the hacktivist collective): “Eat me.” Presenting something allegedly high-minded and then instantly undercutting it is the movie’s playbook. The quote turns onto war hero Captain John Boyd (Guy Pearce) getting a medal for valor for his service in the Mexican American War, then instantly revealing via flashback that he only survived by playing dead. General Slauson (John Spencer, in his final film role), the man pinning the medal on Boyd, even knows the man is a coward. It’s the classic refuge: reward a bad thing to avoid punishing it and thus looking even worse. Slauson dispatches Boyd to Fort Spencer a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevadas where Boyd won’t cause any more trouble.

It looks like the Army has been using Fort Spencer as a dumping ground for all its undesirables. There’s the commander, Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), an overweight nebbish who would rather eat walnuts and read books than do anything militarily, Major Knox, the hopelessly alcoholic second-in-command, Private Toffler (Jeremy Davies) who is maybe the Jeremiest Daviesest character he’s portrayed in a career full of them, Private Cleaves (David Arquette), the fort’s stoner, Private Reich (Neal McDonough), the violent one, and George and Martha, a pair of Native American siblings. Of the group, really only Reich and Martha — it’s funny that despite them all being in the Army, Reich is the one Hart refers to as “our soldier” — are apparently useful.

The fort is shuttering for the winter, the skeleton crew of burnouts, discipline problems, and goldbrickers waiting around for the new wave of pioneers in the Spring when a bloody and exhausted man collapses on their doorstep. He claims to be a traveler named F.W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), and he tells a harrowing tale. Along with five others, he was crossing into Oregon when a snowstorm stranded his party in a mountain cave. Led by the evil Colonel Ives, they resorted to cannibalism, and Colqhoun only barely escaped. Because Ives was left alone with a woman, Hart considers it their duty to go rescue her.

Before going, George attempts to warn Hart about the legend of the wendigo. Essentially, cannibalism gives you superpowers, but at the price of your sanity. You turn into a heroin addict who is also Wolverine. Unlike the trailer, I’ll leave off the synopsis here only to say that George’s warnings are not lightly fucking given. Wendigo are bad news.

The film strikes its balance between cannibalistic horror by acknowledging the ridiculousness at its core. As soon as your food has a name — “Mmm, this is good… who is this?” — there is comedy to be mined. The movie also plays with mood dissonance with the score co-written by Blur’s Damon Albarn. At times its a lonely frontier melody with the twang of a single guitar, while at other times, it’s a banjo-pickin’ flesh-eaten’ carnival of sound. As the film goes on, and more and more characters either fall to the curse or to the cooking pots, the superpowers kick in. During the final battle, when the living wendigo attempt to find something heavy and sharp enough to kill each other, the production actually ran out of fake blood. That in itself is funny, and at a certain point the goriness of the battle tips from intense to unlikely then to flat-out hilarious.

The best Yakmala films are those that wear their hearts on their sleeves. Troll 2 was made by people who hated vegetarians to the point that the only way to express their rage was to make a nonsensical movie about it. Horror is the same way, in that we are better at expressing our own feelings of fear and disgust, and the skill comes in making those accessible to those who don’t share our pet peeves. Ravenous was made by vegetarians and stars a vegetarian, and yes, Guy Pearce chowed down on actual meat for some shots (he spit it out later, but still, that’s rough for them). The medal ceremony is followed by a steak dinner, and these slabs of beef look like they were held up in front of the grill before slopped on the plate. It’s a long table digging into nearly-raw still-bleeding meat making the animal sounds of an active banquet. When Boyd vomits in response, it’s the filmmakers underlining what they think of meat. This disgust fuels the rest of the film, and while it never turns into a polemic, the purpose is crystal clear.

Great. You undercooked Knox.

Ravenous never concerns itself with good and evil. Morality is central, but the contrast exists between cowardice and survival. How far every character is willing to go directly informs everything about them and often authors their fate. Since that is the ultimate source of the vast majority of opportunistic cannibalism, it’s the perfect contrast on which to hang a movie.

Ravenous is a rare treat, no pun intended, a period piece horror/comedy with an incredible cast and a righteous yet subtle point of view. Just don’t watch it with dinner.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: cannibalism, David Arquette, gory, Guy Pearce, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, John Spencer, Now Fear This, Ravenous, Robert Carlyle, ryan murphy, wendigo

Yakamala: The Spirit

“My City Yodels” was the first draft of that tagline. Didn’t test well.

The quickest way to get clicks on the internet is to say something blatantly stupid. This is why we have lately been suffering through a wave of revisionist film criticism in which rightly reviled movies get reassessed and we learn how we really got it all wrong, you guys. Ang Lee’s Hulk isn’t an unwatchable mess where Hulk transforms through the power of angst and fights CGI dad splooge, it’s a lyrical… actually, no. I can’t even say it. The most recent recipient of this nonsense is Frank Miller’s The Spirit and hoo boy, if you liked this one, see a doctor immediately, because your brain is visible through that crack in your skull.

Tagline: My city screams. She is my lover. And I am her spirit.

More Accurate Tagline: What are you, dense? Are you retarded or something? I’m the goddamn Spirit!

Guilty Party: Frank Miller chose to announce his insanity with the comic All-Star Batman and Robin, also known by its alternate fan-given titles: “ASSBAR” and “The Goddamn Batman.” As the writer and illustrator of what is generally considered to be the second-greatest graphic novel of all time, it was a little jarring to see what he had become in his dotage. The hardboiled noir narration, what seemed so fresh in the ‘80s had become a hollow parody of itself two decades later. The odd quirks — dinosaurs, Nazi imagery, butts — which once provided the spice of originality had warped into obsessions. It really seemed like if Miller could have written an entire comic about Nazi dinosaur butts, he would have. After Robert Rodriguez made Sin City, and managed to walk the tightrope of straight-faced homage and affectionate parody, Miller tried his luck with Will Eisner’s iconic The Spirit. Miller’s id, unchained by age and I’m guessing a ton of prescription drugs, took it over and made this.

Synopsis: Remember when your screenwriting teacher said “show, don’t tell”? Good, neither does Frank Miller.

Anyway, the Spirit, a mannequin whose favorite pastime is weird misogynistic rants about his city delivered to cats, rushes off to the mudflats to fight a super criminal and egg enthusiast named the Octopus (Sam Jackson). The Octopus, along with sexy-clothes-owning thief Sand Serif, are after a pair of trunks that are sunk in the bottom of the harbor for no reason. The Spirit arrives in time to mudwrestle the Octopus, while Serif escapes. After a brutal, gritty fight that somehow employs cartoon sound effects and lug wrenches sized for kaiju, they have an argument over who won the fight. Sadly, they never manage to get to the “nuh uh, yuh huh” portion of it, because the Octopus has to go.

Serif got one trunk, the Octopus got the other, and here’s the kicker: they got the wrong trunks. Serif wanted the one with the Golden Fleece (you know, from mythology) and Octopus wanted the one with a vase of the blood of Heracles. Yep, we’re in a gritty, hyper-stylized noir reality in which Greek mythology actually happened.

The Spirit gets patched up by his doctor girlfriend Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), and I have no idea why she’s even in this movie. The point of the scene is that the Spirit can regenerate from any damage, which is an excellent way to make sure that your movie has no stakes.

The Spirit got a locket from a murdered cop at the scene, and with this locket he knows that Sand Serif was there. See, they were childhood sweethearts and he gave her the locket because that’s what fictional characters do. She left town after her father, a beat cop, got killed protecting a drunk. This makes Sand hate cops because Frank Miller never passed basic psychology.

Anyway, Sand realizes that her fence sold the location of the artifacts twice, and she then blackmails the guy into killing himself because he’s a closet homosexual. It’s more than a little disturbing, but don’t worry, Serif never gets her comeuppance. During this scene, she photocopies her ass for no reason, and despite not having seen her since she was fifteen, the Spirit is able to identify her by her ass. I just lost fifty IQ points writing that fucking sentence. He uses this ass picture to track her to her hotel where they have a conversation. After he reveals that he’s her childhood love, she pushes him out a window. If it’s starting to sound like things happen for no reason and everyone acts like they’re off their meds, good. Means I’m describing it well.

Using industrial salt on one of the Octopus’s cloned minions (yes, he has cloned minions and it’s… painful), the Spirit finds the evil lair. Unfortunately, he immediately gets captured by the Octopus’s right hand woman, Siken Floss (Scarlett Johansson). The Spirit wakes up tied to a chair to find that the Octopus and Floss are dressed as Nazis. That’s right, this movie features Black Hitler. He tells the Octopus their shared origin story. The Octopus was a city coroner who also developed a regeneration serum. He injected it into slain cop Denny Colt — that’s the Spirit — as a test. It works! But for true immortality, the Octopus needs to drink the blood of Heracles. Because who fucking cares at this point?

Then Plaster of Paris, the assassin the Octopus hired for no reason, comes in dressed as a belly dancer. Come on guys, we had a Nazi theme going and now there’s a belly dancer? She’s not even a Nazi belly dancer. Also, she’s French, and not even Vichy French. It’s just a mess. And yes, I’m complaining about not enough Nazis, because if you’re doing to do something that stupid, at least stick to the theme. The Octopus tells her to cut the Spirit up, and instead he seduces her. And why the hell hire her in the first place? He’s tied to a chair. Floss can cut him up. Or the Octopus. Or one of the clones. Anyway, she gets him out but also stabs him. Chicks, am I right?

The Spirit falls in some water, but the Spirit of Death resurrects him. Yep. That also happens.

Sand and the Octopus meet up for an exchange which the Spirit and the cops also show up to. This degenerates into a massive gunfight. Eventually, the Spirit shoves a grenade into the Octopus, and Sand rescues the Spirit using the magical Golden Fleece. They have a romantic kiss — right in front of the Spirit’s girlfriend — and Sand leaves. Floss finds a single finger of the Octopus and leaves with that, planning to regenerate him.

Life-Changing Subtext: Women are psychopaths! But it’s cool, though. They can’t help it.

Defining Quote: When you watch an Ed Wood movie, you think, “There’s no way anyone will ever write dialogue this bizarre and redundant ever again.” And then this happens:

The Octopus: “Free range chickens with their big, brown, ugly-ass eggs. They piss me off. Every time I think about those big brown eggs they piss me off.

Yeah, the Octopus has a thing about eggs. It’s… off-putting.

Standout Performance: This could only go to Stana Katic as the rookie cop Morgenstern. Whenever she’s onscreen, whether she’s squawking in her put-on Baltimore accent or just silently watching other people talk, you cannot look anywhere else. And it’s not just because she’s gorgeous, either. She is made of eye magnets.

“I’m just super-psyched to be here you guys!”

What’s Wrong: It starts with the casting of Gabriel Macht as the Spirit. Maybe Miller is a bad director — wait, what am I saying, “maybe.” Macht is straitjacketed by his performance, doing nothing but going off on his wooden rants. His tie upstages him on more than one occasion.

The biggest problem, though, is tone. The movie doesn’t have one. It has no idea if it wants to be a lighthearted parody that features cartoon sounds, silly clones, and dad jokes, or a stonefaced neo-noir where people are chopped up with machine gun fire. So it settles for doing both. Badly.

Doesn’t help that the “comedy” consists of people being hit with toilets and Sam Jackson screaming about how toilets are always funny or references to movie taglines from the late ‘70s.

Best Scenes: So the Octopus is a genius who created an injection that can bring dead men back to life. He’s going to be real disappointed when he realizes that the circulatory system stops at the moment of death. I wish there had been a shot of them, with a chyron that said, “6 hours later,” with Floss checking her watch, and the Octopus all, “Okay, one more hour and I’m getting another dead cop.”

Frank Miller doesn’t trust his audience. Maybe because he knows we’re dumb enough to have paid to see a Frank Miller movie. He’s also a douchebag who can’t resist throwing in references to his time of being culturally relevant. So when the Spirit and the chief are trying to explain Sand Serif’s motivations, Morgenstern loudly chirps that Sand has an Elektra Complex. Just in case someone in the cheap seats missed it, she proceeds to repeat herself eight or nine times. Get it, guys? Miller had a character named Elektra? Huh? Remember?

When the Spirit raids the Octopus’s hideout, all the clones have guns. The Spirit starts up his noir narration about how the city provides weapons for him. And what’s the first weapon he uses? A snowball. Next, he’ll break out the crazy shit, like snowmen, Indian burns, and purple nurples.

Transcendent Moment: Early on in the movie, the Spirit starts up his narration. It’s intrusive and jarring, but it’s tough to have a noir movie without the first person voiceover. The audience is conditioned to ignore it. Until a cat meows. Turns out it’s not narration. It’s the Spirit talking to a cat. So through the rest of the movie, whenever he’s trying to be a tough guy, he’s basically just that old cat lady who doesn’t have any company except for like a hundred cats.

“My city screams, Mr. Whiskers.”

The Spirit is terrible, but in a fun, unique, and utterly crazy way. Miller has since said he always intended it as a parody, but contrast that with his statements at the time. That’s the surest sign of a Yakmala movie: the desperate backtracking of the truly exposed.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Batman and Robin, Frank Miller, Gabriel Macht, Sam Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, The Spirit, Will Eisner, Yakmala!

Lifetime Theater: PopFan

Lindsay Lohan’s name has become shorthand for the tragic way Hollywood chews up youth and spits out dead-eyed husks intent on flashing genitalia and punching paparazzi. But also, there’s a negative side. Like any fan of movies, bad movies, and trainwrecks, I watched the unfolding making of coverage of her possible comeback The Canyons with rapt interest. I couldn’t decide — and this does mark me as the worst kind of person, so, you know fair warning if you decide you want to be/remain my friend — whether I wanted her to rise like a pill-addled phoenix from the ashes or if I wanted to see if her career could implode hard enough to make an actual black hole. It was an irresistible story: three former A-listers, Paul Schrader, a highly-acclaimed director whose career hit a brutal slump, Bret Easton Ellis, noted douchebag who was finding less of a market for that one story he keeps telling, and Lohan herself, the cheapest and best name they could get for the film that would revitalize all three of them. It’s a bit like resting the hope of the American Space Program on one of those Florida residents that’s trying to shoot the moon down with meth-powered bottle rockets.

The flashiest bit of casting — and it’s with brutal irony that Lindsay Lohan, at the Lindsayest Lohaniest point of her career couldn’t even be the biggest curiosity in her own movie — was porn star James Deen. Mrs. Supermarket and I decided to check the movie out. It’s terrible, in a very empty way like a lot of Ellis’s work, and not even salvaged by a director who can find the core of ridiculousness within. The funniest part was James Deen was not the worst actor in it. Neither was Lohan. No, the worst performance belongs to a bro-faced slab of beef by the name of Nolan Funk. So not only does he have a better porn name than Deen, Mrs. Supermarket was convinced he was the porn star until she checked the IMDB.

Fortunately, terrible actors who stay in shape will always have work, either on the Lifetime network or starring in movies about the special needs X-Man Gambit. Funk stars in this week’s Lifetime Theater, and while he’s marginally better here, that’s not really saying a whole lot. He plays a deranged lighthouse-dweller (already my favorite character description ever) who “rescues” a pop singer from a horrendous car accident, takes her to his remote home, where they stay partially due to inclement weather, and while nursing her back to health steadily grows more and more unhinged. In the last act, he graduates to full psycho killer. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s the basic plot of Stephen King’s Misery, a book that I rank as one of his best. Granted, PopFan is more Lifetimey, but the changes aren’t entirely what one would expect.

“I’m only doing this because my husband is addicted to internet porn.”

For one thing, the accident is less severe. Paul Sheldon breaks both his legs, while Ava Maclaine only suffers one of those bumps on the head in fiction that put you to sleep for a few hours but don’t suddenly make you forget math. Funk’s Xavier is also more proactive; while Annie Wilkes finds Sheldon in the kind of unlikely coincidence that only happens to set plots in motion, Xavier actively sabotages Ava’s car to insure the crash. His motives are also more romantic or venal, depending on how sympathetic you want to be about some creep who causes a terrible crash to to kidnap a woman. While Annie was a genuine (though psychotic) fan, Xavier really just wants to shack up with Ava. In the lighthouse. I only bring that last part up because he lives in a fucking lighthouse and that’s never not funny.

Meanwhile, Ava’s boyfriend Curtis and her manager Damon do their best to track her down. Since the movie opened with her slipping out of town for a little me-time, it’s difficult. Then New England gets hit with a Nor’easter and I find I have to digress. I love when regional slang gets adopted for a specific thing, especially when that slang happens to be ridiculous. I generally just assume that a Nor’easter is a storm so severe that pronouncing the “th” would take too long and result in some deaths. The Nor’easter in question is accomplished with some of the worst digital FX work outside of a Syfy original movie. They apparently could not get storm stock footage. So I’m left to assume that a sharknado is brewing, and I can understand why Xavier might not want to go out in that.

In New England, they call them “sha’nados.”

This is a Lifetime movie, and it needs to take some kind of stand. Predictably, these stands come from a place that would appeal to the tongue-clucking set, or who I like to imagine Lifetime thinks their core viewership is. At this point, I need to accept that I’m part of Lifetime’s core viewership, and let’s just say that my concerns are a wee bit different than theirs. Anyway, Xavier’s biggest lie, or at least the one that horrifies Ava and proves to her he’s not what he seems, is that he’s a former marine. He claims to have served in Afghanistan, but in his psycho room — a section in the lighthouse because if you have access to a lighthouse, and need a psycho room, you’d be stupid to put it literally anywhere else — he has forms revealing he was 4-F. Later, Damon correctly susses out Xavier’s lie when the kid says “hoo-hah” rather than “oo-rah.” Also, “hoo-hah” is my mother’s generic noun for anything she can’t think of. So it was even funnier here.

The second stand is somewhat harder to parse. In the opening, which is a party to celebrate Ava’s sexy new video, some throwaway dialogue establishes her origin story. And you know what? It’s pretty good writing for what it is. They don’t hit the viewer over the head with it, and if I weren’t taking notes, I might have missed it. Ava is implied to be a Miley Cyrus type, a former child star who is doing her best to shed that image with some over-the-top sexuality that plays like what a sheltered kid might think grown-ups do in the bedroom (my wife assures me that this is limited to making pillow forts). She starts sexy dancing with a guy and a girl, doing her best to piss off conservative boyfriend Curtis. While this happens, the whole party films her on their phones. It’s like one of those racist old stories about primitive tribesmen being afraid that pictures steal souls, only presented utterly without irony. Later, the scene is referenced again when creepy Xavier wants to film Ava doing stuff. It’s a pretty dark scene, and entertaining the way Lifetime dances around the actual words.

In the greatest missed opportunity of the film, Ava escapes to Xavier’s truck. She tries to get it started, and can’t, and suddenly he’s just there. He says the line, “It’s an old truck. You have to use the choke.” Mrs. Supermarket, who was out of the room getting a drink, comes charging back in and demands to know, “Please tell me he choked her!” So that’s what this movie turned us into. And here’s the thing, I was thinking the same thing and was disappointed when he didn’t. You can’t set that up and not deliver.

What did we learn? Well, for one, when impersonating a marine, it’s “oo-rah.” Also it’s apparently okay to pretty much rip off an entire Stephen King novel. He’s not very litigious, I guess.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Bret Easton Ellis, James Deen, Lifetime network, Lifetime Theater, lighthouses, Lindsay Lohan, Misery, Nolan Funk, Paul Schrader, Paul Sheldon, PopFan, Stephen King, The Canyons

Now Fear This: The Bay

Chew with your mouth closed, Skeleton Dave.

Horror movies depend on two factors: plausibility and proximity. In many modern horror films, these are the first two things to go right out the window. Compare any relatively recent remake to the original. What used to be nondescript suburban homes have become spiderwebbed neo-gothic manors, filled with Satanist symbols and cannibal ghouls. Since no one has one of these houses on their street — unless you’re neighbors with a serial killer, and then you have bigger problems — this removes proximity from the horror and makes it less scary. The second factor, plausibility, is inherently subjective and has some give regardless. Alien isn’t really plausible, but put it on that realistically beaten-up ship and recognizable crewmen and suddenly it is. The audience has to buy into the threat of the horror, or it’s not scary, it’s just some stuff that happened to a bunch of idiots. 2012’s innovative found footage The Bay has both of plausibility and proximity.

The Bay has a surprising pedigree. Barry Levinson, director of The Natural, Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam and like every movie from the ‘80s, both directed and provided the story to it. I have gone on record before as defending found footage horror movies, and though I acknowledge that the genre is more open than most to both hackery and abuse, The Bay circumvents most of the standard criticisms just by the way it’s structured. The most common — and valid — complaint about found footage is that the main characters might want to drop the cameras and think about running from the giant monster that’s eating them. The film has to figure out a way to justify the camera being present, and The Bay is by far the best of these at that. Instead of following a single protagonist navigating the kaiju distaster/terrible camping trip/slumber party in the old asylum, The Bay is cobbled together from a news footage, a reporter on the scene, Skype calls, text logs, Facetime, a few amateur videos, police dashcams, security footage, and so on. If the film cannot justify a camera being present, then there isn’t one, which ends up producing the most skincrawling scene where the horror is only auditory.

The Bay exists in its own universe as an expose cobbled together to tell the story of a mass outbreak that occurred in Claridge, Maryland on their Fourth of July festivities in 2009. Its framing device is a young woman, who at the time was an intern at a local news station, covering the festival as the kind of low-key fluff reporting newbies get to cut their teeth on. Pretty soon, it looks like there’s a murderer on the loose as horribly mutilated people keep showing up. At the same time, the footage is intercut with images of some kind of disease outbreak. People go to the hospital with blisters, boils, and lesions, and pretty soon the baffled doctors are just amputating limbs willy-nilly. As soon as the film finds a more effective character to tell a specific aspect of its story, it switches over. It’s not completely chronological either, as some later revelations include the first deaths nearly a month before, including some local kids and a pair of oceanographers looking into the pollutants in the titular bay.

The oceanographer scenes invoke the environmentalist horror of the ‘70s and the ‘80s, a genre once again becoming relevant with the rising temperature of the planet. What they determine is that 40% of the bay is dead. Just completely dead. No fish, no plants, no nothing. They believe this is due to the runoff from local factory chicken farms, which dumps steroid-loaded chickenshit into the bay by the ton. Oh yeah, there was also “a small radioactive leak” that made it into the bay as well. None of this would be a problem except for the desalinization plant, shown ominously spewing white smoke in several shots. This plant has not only provided enough water to allow those chicken farms, it also provides drinking water to the town at large.

As it turns out, the problem comes down to parasitic isopods. Isopods are like those adorable roly-polies you find in your yard, except like everything else, the ocean has transformed them into nightmares. There are the giant isopods that live in deep water and more horrifying, there are the ones who eat the tongues of fish and then stick around, figuring that if the fish ever wants to scream in agony, the isopod will be there to make the words. The idea is that the pollution from the bay has mutated a strain of these little monsters, the steroids have made them grow quickly. While adults can’t make it through the filters of the desalinization plant, the larvae sure can, and they’re eating the people of Claridge alive.

This is a real creature. Repeat: THIS IS A REAL CREATURE.

The biggest flaw with the movie, from the standpoint of traditional storytelling, is the lack of a clear protagonist and antagonist. The aforementioned intern, Donna Thompson, is the closest thing to a heroine the movie has, though in keeping with the realism, she runs away at the end of the second act. As soon as it’s no longer realistic to have her stick around, she’s gone. It transfers over to a young couple who has been sailing to Claridge through the movie in a bit of slow-burn suspense, yet the sympathy they garner is more for being a young, attractive family than because of character development. Likewise, Mayor Stockman, who ignored the findings of the oceanographers and thus helped bring about the disaster, is the closest thing to a villain. He is barely a character, to the point that when he does get his comeuppance, it takes a moment to realize who he is.

The film is, however, very good at tracking its various characters. Because the cast is so sprawling and the method of telling the story so organic, the film will concentrate on a character intensely for a few minutes and then move on. This makes for effective moments later when these same characters are found mutilated and dead. It shows the real cost of the horror going on around, and it provides a quick and effective end to the character’s arc. They’re not abandoned. They were killed by the impersonal nature of the tragedy itself.

Assuming the movie’s goal is to scare, The Bay is the most effective found footage horror movie I have ever seen. Claridge is everytown enough to have proximity, and the parasitic isopods feel plausible enough. The way it’s told — as a documentary for something like Vice or Wikileaks — the action unfolds the way we as viewers are used to seeing it in the real world. The FX are organic, often shot out-of-focus, as they would be by panicked camera operators.

Nothing could recommend it more highly though, than one simple fact. I watched it yesterday. My skin still itches where I imagine the isopods running over me.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Barry Levinson, found footage, isopods, Now Fear This, skincrawling, The Bay

Yakmala: Next

“You… you see that right?” “Giant Nicolas Cage head? Nope.”

This is kind of embarrassing. When picking movies to review, I look through various providers to see what they have to offer. I saw Next was available, and thought, “Hey, Nicolas Cage sees the future, plus Rose Byrne! That sounds great!” What I didn’t realize was that I had an entirely different “Nicolas Cage Sees the Future” movie in mind, 2009’s Knowing. So, yes, I recorded the wrong movie. Luckily, this one was pretty terrible too.

Tagline: If you can see the future, you can save it.

More Accurate Tagline: Nicolas Cage owes the government millions of dollars. Let’s see what he’ll do now.

Guilty Party: Whatever part of Nicolas Cage’s brain that decided he needed a castle, an island, a dinosaur skull, and a collection of genuine shrunken heads. Ever since he learned he owned approximately one Scrooge McDuck-sized money tower worth of back taxes, Cage will appear in whatever movie you want, just as long as you meet his price tag. Since recognizable names get movies greenlit, this is a reliable way to get a mid- to low- budget thriller made on a studio’s dime. It’s not going to be the movie you wanted, but at least Cage might go apeshit at some point.

Synopsis: Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage, presumably insisting that the extraneous H be taken out of his character’s name) is a hard-drinking magician in Las Vegas, performing under the name Frank Cadillac. I was a little annoyed that the character’s name wasn’t actually Frank Cadillac, just because Nicolas Cage’s characters should always be named things like Flame Swordington, Martini Explosion, or Fistfight Karateface. Anyway, he’s a magician who can see two minutes into the future, who uses this ability to amaze tourists, win at gambling, and occasionally to thwart casino robberies.

Here’s the thing though: assaulting a man with a gun is really easy to misinterpret. So Johnson goes on the run from casino security. The FBI, headed up by Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore, dusting off her Clarice Starling impression and making me wonder what addition she needed on her home to take this role) is tracking Johnson. They’ve figured out he can see into the future, but don’t know the limits of his power, and they want to use him to track a missing nuke.

Johnson, however, would rather bang Jessica Biel. It’s worth noting here that Cage was born in 1964 and Moore was born in 1960, making them age-appropriate love interests (plus, Moore is still gorgeous, so it’s not even like that’s an excuse). Biel was born in 1982, so naturally, she’s who Cage will be oozing all over in the romance subplot. Anyway, the one thing Johnson can see farther than two minutes is meeting Biel in some diner at 8:09. He makes the meeting and somehow tricks a woman half his age and who looks like Jessica Biel into getting into a car with him, and remember, he’s Nicolas Cage. I’m not saying Cage is ugly, and the man has kept it admirably tight, but he does look like he’s about five seconds from setting literally everything on fire at all times.

The terrorists who stole the nuke also somehow know about Johnson, and they want him dead. Everything comes together at this little hotel on the Grand Canyon. Johnson seals the deal with Biel (I really wanted to say that), and the terrorists and FBI show up at the same time. The FBI tries to use Biel to turn on Johnson, but apparently, she’s into twitchy guys old enough to be her father and sides with him. Using his superpower, Johnson escapes, but when he saves Ferris (without the power of late ‘90s pop-ska) from some falling logs (don’t ask), the FBI catches him.

They Ludovico him in hopes to get some information, and he gets a vision of Biel hooked up to a bomb in Los Angeles. He agrees to help the FBI, and Biel’s already been kidnapped. You know, you’d think he might have wanted to do something about that before it happened. Oh well, anyway, he gets the license number of their white windowless pedophile van, and tracks the terrorists to this waterfront warehouse. There’s a giant shootout and the good guys win.

Or do they? Nope, he screwed up and a nuke goes off, killing everyone.

Then he wakes up just after sex with Biel and calls up Ferris, telling her he’ll help out with that whole nuke thing.

Life-Changing Subtext: Nuclear armageddon is fine and dandy, just as long as it doesn’t interfere with creepily stalking young women.

Defining Quote: Cris Johnson: “Here’s the thing about the future. Every time you look at it, it changes, because you looked at it, and that changes everything else.” This attempt at profundity is the entire message of the movie: nothing matters. In fact, you’re better off not watching the movie at all! It’s like the screenwriter’s conscience suddenly gained free will and frantically attempted to warn hapless viewers of what was coming.

Standout Performance: Nicolas Cage gets this in every movie he’s in. He even gets it in a few movies he’s not in. I don’t even know how this is possible, but it is.

What’s Wrong: The essential problem with this movie is the whole central conceit. Cage’s character sees two minutes into the future, which lets him head off disaster before it happens. The problem is that this gives us multiple scenes where he’s killed — shot mostly, but he’s also hit by a train, which is how I’m pretty sure the real Cage will go out — so the audience is conditioned to assume any time Cage dies, it’s not real. And it’s not! This turns into the worst twist-ending of all time in the end: It Was All A Dream. So I sat through 45 minutes of bullshit for nothing? Are you fucking laughing at me, Cage?

Flash of Competence: When Cage initially ducks casino security, he does it with a series of deft moves, knowing how both they and the crowd will react. There are no fakeouts, just smooth motions to hide his presence. It’s well-choreographed, and while not particularly thrilling — we know he’s getting out of there — it’s undeniably cool.

Best Scenes: Biel’s character takes Johnson to an Indian Reservation because she teaches there. He instantly starts rambling on about how he wants to meet their shaman, and it’s… uncomfortable. In his rant, he thinks they have power over the atmosphere and can see the future. It’s the kind of well-meaning racism you see out of any white person who owns more than one piece of turquoise jewelry. I wanted her to take him over to some trailer, and be like, “Here’s Jerry, he’s the shaman,” and it’ s just this guy watching Wheel of Fortune and drinking Budweiser.

Cris Johnson tells Biel’s character an old joke, and he gets it wrong. “What did the Zen master say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything.” That’s how the joke goes. Not “I’ll have one with everything.” That doesn’t make a single bit of sense, you nutball.

Johnson briefly escapes FBI custody through karate. It’s the only time Cage busts out any karate — which is good, because if too much karate builds up in your system, it can cause karate-related blood poisoning — and it’s hinted that he’s using his future-sight to do this. And, sorry, that’s a better movie. Nicolas Cage plays a man who can only see one punch into the future? And it’s called Future Punch? Do not be shocked if Rodrick Rand makes that flick in the Blankverse.

Transcendent Moment: As any student of cinema knows, the various brown peoples of the world exist to tell white people the painfully obvious things that, for some reason, white people can’t see for themselves. In this case, some of Biel’s students want her to know that Johnson is totally into her. They can tell because of the way he looks at her. And it cuts over to Cage, and he has this confused and sleepy look on his face, like someone just woke him up by screaming, “MARTIAN COLONOSCOPY!” and he’s still trying to process what the fuck that means.

“I had one of those. It was delightful.”

I might not have recorded the correct Nicolas Cage, but Next is the next best thing. That really should have been the tagline.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Jessica Biel, Julianne Moore, karate, Next, nicolas cage, precognition, Yakmala!