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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Paranormal Activity

I doubt it's possible to not have heard of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY by now... yes, it's the latest BLAIR WITCH PROJECT variant, sneaking into theatres sans credits of any kind, posing as 'found footage' and using saturation ads and word-of-mouth to build itself up into a legitimate box office hit.

And by and large, short and sweet? It deserves it.

As I said, it's essentially BLAIR WITCH with (excellent) special effects. Protagonist Katie allows that she's been haunted by some form of spectral force for quite a while--and now it's followed her into the luxurious San Diego digs of her wealthy day trader boyfriend Micah (it's an important and relieving detail that he can afford state of the art camera/computer equipment and that we don't have to endure the 'shaky' stylistics of BWP yet again).

Creepy things happen, and they get worse every time Micah leaves the camera on overnight in the bedroom. Details unnecessary and spoilsome.

Being long-experienced in this style of filmmaking, I never completely fell for the "it's all real" business, but it's certainly realistic enough, and it certainly scared the people in the theatre with me (even though we had some yappity yahoos to deal with, I could tell that it was even getting to them and forcing them to exhibit some sort of macho bravado). All I wanted was for the film to end with a knockout punch.

It does.

Here's a fine, simple, effective and believable shocker--and that's all you need to know.

6:12 PM

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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Zombieland

My wife and I celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary by thumbing our noses at the STEPFATHER remake (it didn't tank as horribly as I hoped it would, but it was nowhere near as successful as PROM NIGHT, so that's something, I guess). We had saved ZOMBIELAND as a special treat.

I doubt you need any details about the setup... we follow the adventures of an eventual team of survivalists in a world suddenly overrun by "mad human disease" (read: flesh-eating zombies--the running kind). Survival tips and tricks are efficiently pointed out as our protagonists (usually identified only by city of origin, hence "Columbus," "Tallahassee" (Woody Harrelson) and "Wichita,") eventually start to form the semblance of an actual family (Harrelson and Little Miss Sunshine herself, Abigail Breslin, are particularly terrific) in between hilarious, juicy bouts of violence, gore and the quest for the final Twinkie.

There's more than enough rollicking good fun here to make the film rather easy to recommend, but I hope you'll pardon me for letting my inner critic loose all the same? I've got to tell you--there was SO much hype about what was allegedly "the greatest celebrity cameo of all time," for example. And it IS fun, and I've always liked the guy. And yet it was at this point that the movie took a serious swerve for me... almost right off the tracks. It became a different sort of comedy altogether--to the point where our resourceful survivalists suddenly started behaving like utter buffoons... for no particular reason that I could divine. Well, unless you consider "plot resolution" reason enough. Now be fair to me here before you shoot me down with "only a movie, only for fun," okay? I had NO problem accepting this world and I LIKED all of the characters. They were great fun to spend time with and they DO make the movie worth watching. But tell me that I'm wrong to raise my eyebrows when they go out of their way to set up a spectacular climactic conflict by suddenly turning into absolute idiots. Yeah. Let's activate everything in an amusement park in the dead of night ON OUR OWN... and suddenly act surprised and unprepared when a horde of zombies ACTUALLY SHOWS UP???!!! Am I not allowed to file that under "What the HELL were you THINKING?"

ZOMBIELAND is a fun time at the movies--but that's about it. We do NOT have anything as insightful and clever as SHAUN OF THE DEAD here--what we have is a whoop-em-up in desperate search of an ending. Just don't get the impression that I said it was a 'bad film' or that it wasn't entertaining. I never said that. You'll still want to see it.

Fair?

6:01 PM

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Saturday, October 03, 2009

Pandorum

Guess what, folks--I'm not seeing ZOMBIELAND this weekend! Not seeing it NEXT weekend, either! You see, I'm not worried about that one. It's going to be a big hit, and it will still be around in two weeks... it's not the sort of film you can "spoil" for me... and it's what I'm taking my wife to for our anniversary!

So I'm going back on part of my word--to hell with JENNIFER'S BODY, but the prospect of PANDORUM still held my interest, mainly because nobody could really get me to comprehend what this thing was supposed to be about! I knew that Dennis Quaid was in it, and that there were monsters. Hell, I didn't even know that Paul W.S. Anderson was one of the producers!

Okay, have you heard the one about the last man on Earth continuing to meet more people? That's sort of what we have here. Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid awaken from hypersleep aboard a gigantic space vessel which is supposedly on the mission of transporting sustainable life to a new Earth-like planet (our own planet is overloaded, overtaxed and ready to blow, don't you know). But something is dreadfully wrong aboard the "Elysium." There's no navicomp pointing out where they are, there's no communication from the bridge (or from anywhere else), AND there's just been a major power failure. Someone's going to have to fix the reactor... trouble is, both of our protagonists are trying to get their memories back after their hypersleep.

Uh-oh... the ship is in bigger trouble than anyone thought. People have been popping out of their lifepods seemingly at random, dead bodies keep popping up, and a horde of nasty monsters (they look like the DESCENT creatures in ROAD WARRIOR getup) is tearing up everyone they can get their claws on.

Oh, the title? "Pandorum" is a form of space madness (even worse than that suffered by Ren and Stimpy) that may or may not be afflicting certain cast members.

Top-billed Quaid mainly gets the "sit and wait in the control room" part while Ben Foster (and the allies he picks up along the way) get most of the action. Quaid DOES get some good scenes, though.

All right, here's the breakdown. I'm essentially glad I saw this. There's actually a great story and some intelligence at this film's heart... it aspires to SUNSHINE and MOON in many respects--but with monsters and gore. And while it doesn't live up to either of those examples, it's a hell of a lot better than, say, SUPERNOVA.

The problem is (yet again), a director and an editor who think they're making a CRANK movie. The action/horror scenes are hopelessly muddled with frantic, rapid-fire cuts, and I don't think I've ever heard quite so many WHAM! effects (characters getting thrown bodily against a flat surface) in a single movie before (though nobody so much as breaks a bone in any of this action). People! It only works if it really IS a CRANK movie, okay?

And while some of the monster business is actually quite scary (especially a scene in which Foster is required to somehow infiltrate their ranks)? If there WAS a good explanation as to what they were and how they got on the ship, I missed it (which is entirely possible). On the other hand, the "Pandorum" subplot itself is very nicely handled and even offers a surprise or two.

A valiant, hopeful effort that tries too hard to be something it doesn't need to be. It's definitely worth a matinee or an eventual DVD rental and it certainly doesn't belong in the slag heap with a lot of this year's crop.

10:03 PM

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Saturday, October 03, 2009

Missing review: THIRST

Well, I officially threw in the towel this weekend. I've been one genre film behind for the past couple of weeks (thanks to WHITEOUT), but I thought I could do a decent job of keeping up all the same. Caught SORORITY ROW last week, make it JENNIFER'S BODY this week, perhaps PANDORUM next and then catch up with ZOMBIELAND, right?

Oh, so wrong. Our local arthouse decided to throw a spanner into the works by FINALLY releasing Park Chan-Wook's THIRST in my 'neck' of the woods.

Let's face it--I may like to be as much of a 'completist' as possible, but I haven't seen a good movie since INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Since then, I've sat through THE FINAL DESTINATION, HALLOWEEN II, GAMER, WHITEOUT and SORORITY ROW.

Do I REALLY need to see JENNIFER'S BODY that badly? Can anyone ELSE give me a heads-up on PANDORUM? Sorry, I want to see a GOOD movie, so those two and SURROGATES are just going to have to wait for DVD (or even cable). I'm not turning down a vampire film from the director of the VENGEANCE trilogy on the big screen!

Kang Ho-Song (of THE HOST and both MR. and LADY VENGEANCE) is a sympathetic priest (known as Sang-hyeon) who volunteers for a dangerous medical experiment. Supposedly, he's willing to put the power of prayer to the test against a deadly hemmorhagic virus (and an experimental vaccine). Is he trying to do genuine good? Or does he wish for martyrdom (or failing that, plain old death) for reasons of his own?

Our hero succumbs to the virus (after a visually shocking moment in which his solitary woodwind play is interrupted by a huge, heaving gout of blood), but the transfusion used in an attempt to save his life just HAPPENS to be infected with... vampirism! The virus is (temporarily) restrained, and the priest revives as the only survivor--and thus as a "miracle man" to the populace, who swarm to him, begging to be healed...

We are twenty minutes into the movie and ALREADY it's offered up more thoughtful and provocative material (both visual and cerebral) than the rest of the films I saw over the last month put together. And things are only warming up...

Having never lost his Catholic faith, Sang-hyeon convinces himself that he can be that exceptional vampire who can exist without ever harming or killing another human being. But his new state of existence inevitably leads him into a fetishistic relationship with young Tae-ju (Ok-vin Kim), the disturbed and frustrated spouse of a cancer patient supposedly 'cured' by the priest. Tae-ju has no such faith and no such scruples (we see where she's coming from with her nightly fantasies of jamming a pair of scissors down the throat of her sleeping husband... and those scissors WILL come into play eventually, fear not). Simply put--complications ensue.

THIRST acknowledges some of the 'fun to be a vampire' LOST BOYS/TWILIGHT vibe with some fine special effects involving leaping from building to building--it's only fair to mention this when everyone knows what the most popular vampire franchise is likely to be for a while, but the resemblance ends there. And comparisons to LET THE RIGHT ONE IN are inevitable but similarly unhelpful--that film was a masterpiece of childhood fears and uncertainties, while THIRST is frankly and unapologetically adult (obviously, not a simplistic reference to graphic on-screen content, though it certainly IS there).

Perhaps Park's latest may not quite live up to the soul-crushing intensity of OLDBOY--nevertheless, it's still one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, shocking (and yes, even HUMOROUS) releases to which I've been treated this year.

It took long enough to reach me, so if you still have a chance to see it, SEIZE it.

9:44 PM

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Saturday, October 03, 2009

missing reviews: WHITEOUT, SORORITY ROW

Here are TWO reviews that Myspace ate...

WHITEOUT

Forget nostalgia... there was a time where I would have rolled my eyes and saluted the guys who got me to see something like this on the pretense that it was something else. Today, I'm just annoyed.

When I first saw the trailer for WHITEOUT, I was convinced that I was seeing a preview for the long-threatened remake of John Carpenter's THE THING. Soon enough, it became clear that this wasn't literally the case, but still, it was Dark Castle, and it was obviously SOME sort of horror movie, right?

I should have gone to SORORITY ROW instead. It might not have been good, but at least it would have been a HORROR film, and I'm still mildly curious as to how a nominal 80s remake becomes a IKWYDLS ripoff and whether or not it gets away with it.

WHITEOUT? Nothing but a murder mystery set on an Antarctic research base. See, there's a mysterious MacGuffin of a treasure that went down in the area on a Soviet aircraft back in 1957. Is it weapons material? Political dynamite?

Eh, there's gore. Mangled frostbitten bodies, a throat slashing, you know. But try to guess who the bad guy is, and you're still left with nearly an hour to go in this thing--it's THAT obvious and THAT dull, though Kate Beckinsale isn't to blame for that, and though it IS nice to see Tom Skerritt again.

I wouldn't have believed this was a Dark Castle production at all if it weren't for the credits. Hell, even production designer Graham "Grace" Walker is back in action... and he's the guy who designed the haunted asylum in GOTHIKA and the newfangled HOUSE OF WAX... but once again he's denied the central setpiece that defines the look of the film. This is Antarctica and all that that entails. Lots of snow, majestic mountains... climactic fight scene in which everything's so blurry that you can't tell who the hell's doing what to whom... and I guess that's the idea (WHITEOUT, get it?). But it doesn't make for exciting cinema.

And it SURE as hell doesn't make for horror. I guess that with ORPHAN, Dark Castle decided they'd done it all and that they were going to branch out into other genres. We've got NINJA ASSASSIN coming up next, but you KNOW where you stand with THAT one. At least, I THINK you do.

But pushing WHITEOUT as horror was a screwjob, and frankly, I hope this thing TANKS.

SORORITY ROW

Okay, I'm still a week behind in my horror viewing, largely thanks to the deceptive ad campaign for WHITEOUT. SORORITY ROW is the one I SHOULD have seen LAST week, whereas JENNIFER'S BODY opened THIS week. But I decided to take a pass (that's PASS, with an "A") on JENNIFER'S BODY (despite it coming from the Academy Award winning screenwriter of JUNO, hee hee) and snag SORORITY ROW before it disappeared completely.

I was mildly curious about this movie because it seemed to be an earnest 80s retread (and the 80s was my most informative and revelatory decade when it came to truly learning about the genre on the big screen). It was a nominal remake of THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, but it seemed to be much more of an IKWYDLS ripoff this time around--and the "R" rating at least guaranteed something stronger than PROM NIGHT. And it WAS a horror film, unlike WHITEOUT.

Folks who caught SORORITY ROW ahead of me told me it was one of the year's very worst... and they made an excellent point. And yet I found it (somewhat) more watchable than Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN II--but only on the strength of one or two isolated sequences.

I imagine you saw enough from the ads. Sorority sisters set up a mean-spirited prank to get revenge on a cheating boyfriend (who just happens to be the brother of one of the Theta Pi girls). His girlfriend pretends to die, but he gets carried away when it comes to the "disposing of the body" stage and kills her for real. Everyone freaks out, but the Theta Pi girls agree to cover it up (by blackmailing the one holdout who wants to go straight to the cops). But their dirty little secret doesn't remain a secret, and people start getting popped off, one by one. Is the dead Megan (Audrina Patridge) back for revenge? Or is it some sort of sinister plot?

The story is par for the course--you simply can't ask for much more from a retro-80s slasher. The photography is appallingly bad (this isn't atmospheric darkness, this is just SLOP), but even that is outdone by the acting. Especially offensive is Leah Pipes as "Jessica," the princess of the group (looking to marry into a wealthy Senator's family)--I could never tell if her lackadaisical attitude was supposed to be satirical or not. Sorry, but not even a princess could be so unaffected by so much death and murder around her, whether or not she was personally implicated. "That's Mickey! I'd recognize his ugly-ass shoes anywhere!" "Is he dead?" "Uh, he's got a tire iron through him... looks like someone really pimped it out!" Most of the remaining characters are just as artificial or even worse; such as the whimpering wallflower and even a "sex for pills and booze" addict known exclusively as "Chugs." Oh, and we also get several repulsive male characters, just to try to thwart accusations of misogyny. Briana Evigan's guilt-wracked Cassidy and her boyfriend are the only seemingly 'okay' people at the center of all this sleaze--everyone else is there to drink, party and steal each other's boyfriends. And while it may be sad to see an aging Carrie Fisher in the role of the house mother, she's EASILY the best thing in the entire film.

Okay--the bits that worked? I've already given you one. Carrie Fisher. And there WERE two murder scenes that got a response out of me. One in the early going (featuring a bottle of booze) really stopped me in my tracks with its abrupt savagery (this is before you realize that women getting it through the mouth is going to be a continuing theme... see, it's supposed to represent silencing them so they won't talk about the secret... THAT's the only significance there, right?). And the one scene that focuses on a whimpering, terrified MAN also works (simply for the choreography and the innovative use of the murder device).

With HALLOWEEN II, you get likable characters played by worthy performers made to suffer horribly and unjustly. But I still can't defend that film when superior works such as the LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake (and even Zombie's first HALLOWEEN) already got the brutal point across more than efficiently. SORORITY ROW, on the other hand, gives you loathsome characters (you even have to agree with the killer when this point is spelled out near the end), awful performances, sloppy filmmaking and barely a hint of genuine 80s flair. It's hardly a choice worth making.

9:38 PM

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Saturday, October 03, 2009

What the HELL, Myspace?

I've posted quite a few blogs since HALLOWEEN II. Where did my reviews of WHITEOUT, SORORITY ROW and THIRST go, for instance?

I never thought I'd have to do this here, but I'm going to go ahead and post a link to my FACEBOOK profile in retaliation... if you want the latest movie reviews, go to my notes THERE, okay?

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/profile.php?id=1574833105&ref=profile

6:09 AM

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Sunday, September 06, 2009

Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN II

Let me get one thing clear from the start: I am not in the least concerned with whether or not Rob Zombie honors "John Carpenter's vision." It's Rob Zombie's vision now. I don't give a damn if we hear Michael speak as a child, or if we see him without his mask as an adult. If Zombie makes it work in HIS movie, then kudos to him. And if he fails to make it work, well, that's his to deal with, too. But "he's not SUPPOSED to" isn't an effective argument where I come in.

As far as I'm concerned, Carpenter's vision was sullied when they did the first HALLOWEEN II way back in 1981. I didn't need to know that Laurie was Michael's sister or any of that stuff. Michael was scary because he was the "boogeyman," pure and simple. The more plot you give him, the less scary he gets. Law of diminishing returns and all that. I didn't like Rosenthal's H2 much at all. I thought it was ugly, slow-paced and over-written... but of course I already knew going in that there was no way that it would be SCARY like the original.

I liked III, but that's another story altogether. I continued to weary of Michael Myers and his convoluted family tree over 4, 5, and 6, and I wasn't overly impressed with the "reboot" of H20, either. Believe it or not, the only Myers sequel that managed to engage me was Rosenthal's RESURRECTION! Most people hated it, and I certainly didn't find it legitimately frightening, but by that time I had more or less resigned myself to it and found myself enjoying the movie's look at the place of the series in pop culture. It wasn't profound, but for once it was actually FUN. For me, anyway.

Okay... then came the controversial Rob Zombie remake. I wasn't interested in a remake of Carpenter's film at all, but I WAS interested in seeing what the man who made the legitimately impressive DEVIL'S REJECTS was going to do with the material. And at the very least, he made things sufficiently different to hold my attention... even if the last third of the film was pretty much the rehash I was dreading. I was suitably impressed with Zombie's look at Michael's childhood, I thought Sheri Moon Zombie was more than sufficiently sympathetic and effective as his mother, and I also felt that Malcolm McDowell was a fine replacement for the late Donald Pleasence (no faint praise, that). And most significantly, I noted that Zombie clearly intended his remake as a "one-off" story and not as a franchise reboot. The "surprise" family relationship of the original H2 was covered the remake, and the story came to a definitive end. At least it COULD have been definitive.

But Dimension and the Weinsteins wanted a sequel anyway. The guys who made INSIDE were going to do it, and Rob Zombie was to move on to his pet project TYRANNOSAURUS REX. Except it didn't work out that way. For some reason (guess), Zombie was "persuaded" to do the sequel he didn't originally want to do... to the remake he originally didn't want to do. So what were the results?

The very first thing we get in Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN II is a textbook "dream psychology" explanation for the significance of a white horse. See, in most cases, a white horse in the movies signifies heroin. But this time, it doesn't. And Zombie (or SOMEBODY at Dimension) realized this and made sure the audience understood that the white horse they were about to see represented repressed rage and power. THEN they gave them the white horse. And Sheri Moon Zombie as the ghost of Mommy. See, THAT'S what's driving Michael now.

Zombie then plays to the people familiar with the original series and sets us up to expect an actual remake of H2, set in an understaffed, underlit hospital. For twenty minutes or so, Michael (Tyler Mane) stalks the wounded Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) around Haddonfield General Hospital... but when he catches up to her, she wakes up. Yeah, it was all a dream. We're almost half an hour into this thing and now the REAL movie starts. Laurie's living with Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif), and the surviving Annie (Danielle Harris) now. McDowell's Sam Loomis has also survived, and he's on a major book tour, exploiting the Michael Myers story for everything he can get out of it. And Michael comes back home to find his sister because his ghost Mommy (and his younger self, and the white horse) want to be a family again.

Here's the breakdown.

Cameos are mercifully restrained. Nice to see Margot Kidder as Laurie's therapist, and Howard Hesseman has a nice bit as the owner of a hippie-themed music/java spot (named for Frank Zappa's "Uncle Meat"). Weird Al Yankovic shows up, but he's playing himself on a talk show, so that's not a "hey, look at me!" cameo such as Zombie routinely indulges.

Michael's homicidal rampage has been made more brutal and ugly than ever before. Relentless butchery set to grunts, groans and human leftovers--far more than has ever been necessary for any of these films. The point, undoubtedly, is that real-life murder isn't about Hollywood slickness or suspense. It really IS brutal and ugly, imagine that! Except... didn't we cover that in the first one?

McDowell has become a cartoon character in his zeal to sell books and exploit the Michael story (I kid you not, he actually uses the Chuck Norris line "When I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you" on his agent!!!). Towards the end of the film, he realizes (largely thanks to his humiliation by Weird Al and the talk show host) the error of his ways and returns to the scene of 'his' crime to try to make amends. Wait a minute... isn't that exactly what he did in the first one? Minus Weird Al and the ridiculously exaggerated dialogue? Well, I guess that's what happens when you sell the "sizzle" and not the "steak," eh?

Now, Scout Taylor-Compton I'll defend, and I'm not impressed by anyone who complains that she's not Jamie Lee Curtis. She's not supposed to be Jamie Lee Curtis. She's a bright, charming actress who really does engender sympathy as her character tries to regain her happiness and some sense of normalcy. Of course, the story offers her nothing but the experience of being cruelly driven out of her mind while she watches her friends and loved ones get hacked to death. But for the love of God, DIDN'T WE ALREADY DO THAT IN THE FIRST ONE???

Do we get ANYTHING in this sequel that wasn't adequately (and more realistically) covered the first time around? Yeah, we get the white horse. And we get Sheri Moon Zombie as the ghost mommy popping up all over the place. And since we already know that Laurie is Michael's sister, the revelation here is that, thanks to Loomis, Laurie finds the truth out for herself. Except that we've also already established that she has a psychic link with her brother. So she gets sick when he eats a dog. And she's constantly dreaming of putting on a Halloween mask, killing her friends, and appearing on a Satanic music video altar under the watchful eyes of young Michael, grown-up Michael and the ghost mommy (words such as 'overwrought' don't begin to describe this business). It's not that John Carpenter didn't deal with psychic links, ghost moms and white horses. It's that this material simply fails to WORK.

Carpenter's original worked because it was scary. Zombie's original worked (for a good while, at least) because it was well-acted and interesting on its own.

Rosenthal's HALLOWEEN II failed to work for reason I've described above.

And Zombie's HALLOWEEN II fails for all of the above and then some. It's not scary--it's simply sick and completely unnecessary.

So you might imagine what I've got to say to this film... but I must admit that there has NEVER been a better opportunity to follow that up with "...and the horse you rode in on!"

9:55 PM

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Saturday, September 05, 2009

Gamer

You know, I'm frequently nonplussed when people complain about the CRANK films. They're chaotic, they're incomprehensible, they're outrageous, they sacrifice story for lunacy, they're for people with short attention spans only, etc. etc. Hey, I've SEEN films that fit that description, and I didn't like them, either. I just never thought that CRANK qualified. I thought the Neveldine/Taylor team did, indeed, tell a story; that they created a great character and that they raised "outrageousness" to an art form. I recall a good friend telling me that if I liked CRANK, I was bound to like SHOOT 'EM UP (he hated them both). So I checked it out. Nope. SHOOT 'EM UP (despite the fact that I like Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti) was so utterly mannered and predictable that it left me completely flat. Not a patch on CRANK, though it attempted to hit the same "vibe."

Now comes GAMER, which is everything the detractors claim CRANK to be. Noisy. Confusing. Well-nigh incomprehensible at times. Headache inducing, frustrating and almost excruciating. Too bad Neveldine/Taylor didn't make THIS one--THEY could have put a handle on this material!

Oops. Never mind.

This got my attention as the latest NEW GLADIATORS/RUNNING MAN knockoff of sorts, only this time the condemned prisoners (including Gerard Butler as "Kable") don't fight on their own--they're "played" by gamers indulging in the latest nano-technology supplied by designer/villain Castle (Michael C. Hall gets some good moments--and a musical number--in the role). Kable, for example, is controlled by a sixteen-year-old wunderkind he's never met, and the world's beating a path to the kid's door, attempting to buy control of the SLAYERS "superstar" combatant for themselves. Other than that, it's the same old setup. If your character dies, the con playing him dies for real. If he survives combat thirty times, he's allegedly set free with a full pardon.

Meanwhile, Kable's wife Angie (Amber Valletta) scrounges a miserable living as a volunteer "sim" for the pleasure of perverts ("Society" is the precursor to "Slayers," and this material has some good potential, too).

Well, you get action, you get violence, you get constant computerized visual distractions, but there's virtually nothing and nobody to care about. There's the difference. CRANK was insane, but it had Jason Statham as Chev Chelios, giving "heart" to BOTH films and anchoring them unforgettably. Gerard Butler's no slouch as an actor, but his character is nothing but a cypher (his best bit involves the revelation of just why he chugs an entire bottle of vodka en route to combat). John Leguizamo is thoroughly wasted in one of the most pointless appearances ever committed to celluloid, and Kyra Sedgwick looks like she's having fun, but scarcely contributes anything that nobody else could have.

There are some good ideas floating around, but GAMER, all in all, is a noisy, pointless, uninvolving MESS.

Let the haters have at it. But I'm still putting CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE down as one of 2009's best. So there.

10:54 PM

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Saturday, August 29, 2009

The Final Destination

Well, there's not too terribly much to say about this fourth installment that you don't know already. It's got everything you can expect from a FINAL DESTINATION film (except for Tony Todd). It's got everything you can expect from a 3-D movie (remember when the THIRD one was supposed to be the 3-D one, though?). It's complete and total formula all the way, with a few elements worthy of note...

As you might imagine, the opening disaster is super-spectacular... and this time, so are the opening titles (all the best 'accidents' from previous entries seen in X-ray mode!).

There's quite an interesting emphasis on racism this time around... the characters involved are utterly stereotypical, but the method of dispatch (and the tune on the soundtrack) are pleasingly confrontational. Too bad that they didn't quit while they were ahead... later on, a peripheral character berates a Chinese extra ("Do you know how many of your kind I killed in Korea?") for no apparent reason whatsoever. There aren't any more inspired/tasteless soundtrack selections, and they've apparently run out of horror directors to name characters after, too.

For the first half, the "accidents" are as clever and splattery as you could wish, but as I hinted with Part Three (remember, this isn't Part Four, it's simply "THE" movie... sheesh...), the well has come dangerously close to drying up completely. The movie's biggest mistake is an ill-advised attempt to recreate the "bus" moment from the original... this time, it simply CLUNKS, as do other would-be-startling moments. There's an attempt to regain the bravura, and at least one more ultra-sick demise, but it's all for naught, as we know that the filmmakers are just going to reboot the movie any time they feel like it. Nor, after all this time, have they mastered the art of the satisfying ending (Part Two excelled by making the sickest joke possible out of it).

That said, it's still probably going to whale on Rob Zombie's H2, and despite being the resident chronicler of all things Zombie, I'm all for that.

Just do yourself a favor and ONLY see TFD in 3-D.

9:52 PM

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