12/12/12

Let me start out by saying that I had never heard of "12/12/12" until I ran across it on "OnDemand".  It sounded intriguing - I love "bad seed" stories a la "The Omen", "Rosemary's Baby", "The Good Son", etc.  I like the idea of evil kids.  Sorry, but it's true.  So the premise got me.  A story about a mother who, after being surrounded by dead bodies, determines that it's possibly due to her kid.  Interesting, no?  Anyways, I was suckered in and I now want my money back.

The characters in "12/12/12" were seriously monodimensional.  They were barely characters at all and were instead the basic idea of characters.  The mother, Veronica, is either stupid or possessed.  Either way she should have died much quicker than she did.  The cop could have been either intensely bad or intensely good.  Instead he was just kind of a dumb guy with a serious Kojak infatuation (who has that many lollypops?  And isn't six with a serious dental bill?).

And once again, horror movies serve as a sort of important lesson to us all:

1. Babies should not look like shaved Ewoks.  And if they do, check to see if they can fly. 
2. Babies, at least HUMAN babies, do not fly.  Nor do 9 day old infants have a way to propel themselves from the floor onto a normal humans neck.  
3. Human babies generally do not have fangs.  If your baby can fly and has fangs perhaps you should take him to a church.
4. If your baby is so horrific that it causes the mailman to kill himself with a boxcutter (again with the box cutter - what is the freaking deal with these as weapons in horror movies - see my review of "Evil Dead" for more on boxcutter madness) you may need to consider an exorcism.
5. And lastly, if your 9 day old baby can fly, dresses in strange hooded costumes and has killed pretty much everyone he's come in contact with - he's just not a nice baby.  Kill him.  He deserves it.

Suffice it to say there's a reason none of us have heard of "12/12/12".  It sucked.  It likely was a "direct to video" gem and there it should stay.  I give it 0 skulls. Yes.  You read that right.  ZERO.  This movie should never see the light of day again.  I watched it so you don't have to.

Evil Dead

There are a variety of important lessons to be learned from the remake of Sam Raimi's classic "Evil Dead".

1. Don't do drugs.  If you do your friends will take you out to the woods, you will become a demon and everyone you know will die.  And it will be all your fault.
2. If you must go running through the woods, wear jeans.  And if you MUST wear a dress, at least have the decency to wear underwear.  Underwear could solve the entire problem of being raped by a strange evil braided vine thing that a demon vomits.  Seriously, get your ass to Victoria's Secret and buy a g-string at least.  Something.  The entire world, especially your friends/victims, thanks you.
3. If you find dead cats hanging in the cellar, simply leave the cabin.   You didn't put them there, you don't really know why they are there (is it a decorating scheme we haven't yet heard of?) so just simply leave.  It's okay.  You can find another creepy backwoods cabin to do your intervention.  
4. If you find a package carefully wrapped in plastic bags and secured with barbed wire there is likely a good reason it's been wrapped that way.  Don't open it.  It wasn't just a backwoods Martha Stewart wrapping project.  
5. If, after all good advice has fallen on deaf ears, you decide to go ahead and clip the barbed wire and open the fancy plastic wrapping and you find a book made out of human skin, don't open the book and for gods sake don't read it.
6. Sigh... okay, you opened the book.  You read where it said "don't read this aloud or say it in your head or even think it" okay, it may not have said anything about thinking it... but I know that it definitely did say "don't read this aloud" - don't FUCKING read it.  Don't read it to yourself.  And don't sound it out just because you were a phonics whiz kid.  The book made of skin is warning you.  When a book made of skin says not to do something - you don't fucking do it.  
7. If it becomes apparent that your little druggie friend/sister may have become something altogether different (a DEMON) leave her in the cabin.  Light it on fire and high tail it out of there.  She's a demon.  She'll understand.
8. If you are given the options for killing a demon of:  Fire, dismemberment or burial alive - pick fire.  It's quicker, faster and less work.  Come on, dismemberment isn't even an option.  It doesn't say how many pieces and what do you do with the parts once you've done it.  And burial alive?  Seriously?  First you have to dig the hole, then you have to coerce the demon into the hole and then you have to fill the hole back up.  That's a lot of work.  So just go with fire.  A little gasoline, a nice match and poof - no more demon.  
9. If you decide to go with your second choice and bury your demon alive, don't bother with changing it's clothes.  It's a fucking demon.  It's being buried alive.  I don't think it cares if it winds up on "What Not To Wear".  
10. And lastly, if you are trying to hide from a demon it generally helps to be quiet.  Starting a chainsaw is not quiet.  Don't do it.  Use a nice quiet tool like a hatchet, or a nice stealthy machete.  Not a freaking chainsaw.

This is not to say that "Evil Dead" is all bad.  It has it's interesting parts.  It is packed with gore and blood and has a character who can survive almost anything (stabbed with a huge shard of glass, stabbed repeatedly with a syringe (once almost in his eye - YUCK), shot many times with a nail gun and then beaten with a crowbar - what finally kills him?  A boxcutter... sigh).  It also has one of the most obnoxiously bad continuity errors I've ever seen.  And I am not good at finding these... so if I say it's obvious it is practically screaming "Hey look at me - the directors really effed up this scene!" in giant neon letters.  It's fun but it does seem to take itself far too seriously - it might have been a better movie if it had accepted it's foibles and camped it up a bit more.

2.5 skulls

Paranormal Entity/8213 Gacy House

So today I watched a pair of "found footage" films that seem best reviewed together.  I have mixed feelings about these found footage movies.  In some situations they work to develop fear and a connection to the "filming character".  In other situations they seem to rely of jerky camera work and a lot of screaming and/or panting.  Sometimes the jerky camera work and panting works - see "Blair Witch Project" for an example (though still not my favorite of this genre - the film style actually makes me a bit motion sick).  Sometimes the jerky camera work and panting does not work - see "8213 Gacy House" as an example of what not to do.  So much time is spent running and scanning rooms and "seeing" ghosts that I simply couldn't ever find (honestly I ran the film back at least ten times to try to see the shadow/ghost image everyone freaked out about in the bedroom... I never did see it) that I never really established any relationship with the characters at all.

And characterization is what, in my opinion, makes these movies sink or swim.  The movie that all "found footage" films seem to be trying desperately to emulate is "Paranormal Activity".  The reason that movie worked for me was that I truly felt like I got to know the characters.  To this day I still can feel my annoyance (I didn't say you had to like them, you just had to KNOW them) at Micah when he decides it's a great idea to start whacking around with a ouija board.  Note to people who think they may live in a haunted house, or may be possessed by an angry demon (or hey, maybe the demon doesn't even have to be angry... it IS a demon afterall) - DON'T play with ouija boards.  Did "The Exorcist" not teach you anything??  Anyways, characterization is very important and that's where "Paranormal Entity" and "8213 Gacy House" veer off in very different directions.  In "Paranormal Entity"  (or "PE" for short) there were a total of three characters - Thomas (the lead guy who carried the camera for most of the camera scenes), Samantha (the victim) and Ellen (Thomas and Samantha's mother).  The characters were simple to keep track of and I actually liked them all.  Again, not a prerequisite for a movie, but in this case I found myself rooting for the ill-fated characters all the way through.  In "8213" there were a bunch of 20-30 somethings.  For awhilPe I wasn't sure who all the guys were but here's how I broke them down - there's Franklin - the older professor guy who seems to call the shots, Mike - the annoying main guy (I think) who keeps telling everyone to stay in the house even when it becomes pretty freaking obvious they should get the fuck out of there, Robbie - the guy who looks a lot like Mike but is doing Lena (one of the three blond chicks in the movie), Gary - the slightly geeky guy who is a prerequisite character in any haunted house type movie with more than five characters.  Now for the girls.  There are three blond girls - one with straight hair named Lena who screams a lot and fucks Robbie, a curly haired girl named Janina who is some type of psychic or something (it's never really explained what the hell she's doing except maybe pissing off spirits who would be better left alone -- see "ouija board" for more information) and another blond curly haired girl named Tessa who seems to be nothing more than a filler for another body.

The camera work is another major part of these types of films and, again, "PE" does a much better job with it.  It's easier to see what is going on, there are more still scenes and there is really only one cameraman.  In "8213" there are at least four cameramen/women and it's very hard to see much of anything.  It's not scary it's just spastic.

In the end, I really enjoyed "Paranormal Entity".  I found it to be enjoyable and while not jump out of your seat scary, it was still spooky and suspenseful.  I especially liked the scenes with the bells.  "8213 Gacy House" was anything but scary.  It was a chaotic mess of a movie and I seriously didn't understand or care what actually happened.  Here's to hoping there are more movies like "Paranormal Entity" and a lot fewer "8213 Gacy House" in the future.

Paranormal Entity

8213 Gacy House

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"

            About ten minutes into this ghastly film, I turned to my wife and asked “I wonder if all the dead women will be listed in the credits.”  The only reason I kept watching the movie was to find out, and to save you from having to repeat my sorry example, permit me to assure you that yes, the dead women are listed in the credits.  There’s the “Murdered Family,” the “Murdered Woman”, the “Floating Woman,” the “Strangulated Woman”, the “Dead Hooker #1”, the “Dead Hooker #2” and so forth.  The movie is desperately short on speaking parts – I can only think of seven.

            Three are played by Henry, Otis and Otis’s sister, whose name I don’t recall.  Henry is a psychopath, Otis is a leering, drug-dealing, vile, incestuous, easily-led buffoon.  The sister at first seems sympathetic and likable, but when you remember that she abandoned her kids and ran away from home, well, it strikes you that she’s only sympathetic and likable because she’s surrounded by people so incredibly vile they make Doctor Mengele seem suitable for a guest appearance on Captain Kangaroo.  They’re all knuckleheads.  When Henry says “I don’t know,” you believe him because he doesn’t, in fact, know anything at all.  Ditto for Otis, who is, if anything, even viler than Henry.  At least Henry didn’t rape his own sister.  Yes, it’s that kind of movie, a movie so full of such wretched people that we are forced to judge them on the basis of whether or not they’ve raped their own family members.

            The movie is flat, direct and unemotional.  The most horrendous things possible are depicted with the kind of flat, detached style one expects from a documentary.  It’s as though This Old House directed the movie, not John McNaughton.  "Now, what we're doing here, Bob, is strangulating some people, and after that, we're going to nail up the wainscoting in the dining room."  It isn’t really that gory, at least not compared to sanguinary geysers like Death Spa, promoed on the same tape, but it isn't exactly Spongebob Squarepants either.  I think it’s the sheer coldness of it all that got to me.  People, mostly women, are tortured and murdered in various ways and the tone from the movie is quite neutral, as though people kill women all the time and it isn’t anything special.  I guess the sad news is that people really do kill women all the time, but the real horror is that John McNaughton can make a movie about it without managing to interpose any sense of outrage or horror.  If he were making a movie about people mowing a lawn, this detachment might be appropriate.  He didn’t, however.  He made a movie about people being brutally murdered, where such detachment is either a sign of a deep-rooted sexual dysfunction or nothing more than artistic posing.  I suspect a little of both.

            The high point of the movie is when Henry finally kills Otis.  But just as you cheer this delicious relief from Otis, Henry then kills the halfway likeable sister, so you don't know what to think any more.  I kept waiting for Henry to be killed, but it never happened. 

            Henry isn’t the worst movie ever made.  There are worse things out there, but just because Henry isn’t the worst movie ever made is no reason to actually go out and watch it. 

1 Skull.  Read it and weep.

"Jacob's Ladder"

                I notice that I have a tendency to spend a little more time than I would like poking fun at bad movies (where "bad" is defined as "I didn't like it").  Sometimes, though, it's just so easy:  you sit through something like Jason X and what else can you do but snark?

                But I wouldn't want it to be said that all I do is carp.  So with the intention of showing that I'm not just a cultural vandal (or, perhaps, not always a cultural vandal) permit me to talk about Jacob's Ladder, a vintage movie from 1990 that remains to this day one of my favorite horror movies.  Scary?  Check.  Emotionally exhausting?  Check.  Food for thought?  Check.

                I'm not sure how to go about producing a synopsis of the plot, so I won't.  Suffice it to say that the movie flits from one apparent reality to another, to the point that you aren't quite sure what's real and what isn't.  And neither does the protagonist, Jacob Singer, played admirably by Tim Robbins.  And though it isn't particularly horrific in the usual sense, it's still nightmarish as hell.  To this day, that frantic high-speed head-wobbling of people in the background gives me the willies, and the whole sequence where Robbins is wheeled through the derelict hospital on an old gurney and has his conversation with the surgeon is perhaps the most chilling vision of the fear of personal dissolution I've ever seen.

                To say nothing at all of the party scene, where Robbins begins to hallucinate wildly about Elizabeth Pena and that strange reptilian tail.  Or is he really hallucinating?  And somehow the notion that Tim Robbins receives the vital piece of wisdom he needs from Meister Eckhart by way of his chiropractor (!) seems both risible and entirely appropriate. 

                I know people who just loathe this movie on the grounds that it "doesn't make sense."  It's true, it doesn't have a linear plot, and most of the time the viewer isn't entirely sure just what the hell is going on.  At times, it isn't even clear what kind of movie it is.  It could be a horror movie, a conspiracy movie, a movie about war and PTSD; who can say?  But if you pay attention to what the chiropractor says to Jacob, the whole movie comes into focus, and reveals itself as a superbly written, superbly acted, and satisfyingly disturbing movie experience.

Five Skulls

"Event Horizon"

            Event Horizon represents an odd subspecies of horror movies - namely, movies that seem to straddle the line between science fiction and horror.  You can view it as a science fiction movie with elements of horror, or as a horror movie with the trappings of science fiction.  Another example of this sort of movie is Pandorum, though I think that movie is more strongly rooted in science fiction than horror.  I think that on principle I'm going to stay away from movies of the Pandorum ilk, but Event Horizon is just sufficiently recognizable as a horror movie to make the cut.

            So.  An experimental spacecraft named Event Horizon vanishes without trace sometime in mid 21st Century.  About seven years later it reappears, and a search-and-rescue crew is duly dispatched to render what aid they can, taking along with them the nerdy egghead who designed the spacecraft in the first place (played by Sam Neill).  Turns out that the spacecraft used a new and hitherto untested kind of "gravity drive".  The idea is that it is supposed to open trans-dimensional pathways to other stars, but instead it opened a trans-dimensional pathway to Hell (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).  Nearly every member of the crew dies horribly in this dimension before going on to suffer unspeakably in the next dimension, with lots of flash-cut images of barbed wire and insect larvae.  One imagines the engineer clapping his hand to forehead and saying whoops, guys, sorry about that!  My bad!  Guess I should have tested that thing first…

            The movie frankly doesn’t make much sense.  I could not, for example, figure out who the woman with no eyes was, or what she had to do with anything.  Nor could I readily discern why Sam Neill spent so much time flipping back and forth between nerdy egghead engineer and Maximally Bad Spirit From Hell.  And the movie’s cynical ending makes one wonder if the movie even had a stinking point at all.  I conclude that, in fact, the movie had no point whatsoever.  It was stupid, gratuitous, gory, pointless and dumb, an apparently conscious remake of Hellraiser that stopped just short of bringing in Cenobites and puzzle boxes.

             But for some strange reason I like this movie.  This movie is, for me at least, very much like a banana split – it isn’t good for me at all, but I still like it.  As long as you recognize that it's full of empty calories and won't provide you with any essential nutrients, it's harmless fun. 

3 Skulls

"Elsewhere"

Almost more of a cautionary tale of internet stalking, "Elsewhere" is a movie that seemed 60% Lifetime movie and 40% suspense thriller.  While the first 30 minutes of the film seemed slow and felt more like a "very special episode" of a 1980's sitcom -- the tale of two friends and the one friend's dangerous foray into internet voyeurism -- once the "wild" friend disappears the movie begins to feel more like the suspense thriller it is billed as.

Anna Kendrick is excellent as the lead character, Sarah.  She plays the role as one part good girl and one part crazy loyal friend willing to do whatever it takes to find her missing best friend.  I liked her.  And I especially liked her friend Jasper, played by Chuck Carter.  I don't know that I've ever seen Chuck Carter in any other movies, but I quite liked him and his character in "Elsewhere".   Sarah's friend, Jillian, is tragic even before she winds up missing.   Though she's less of a fully fleshed out character, I think a lot of that is due to the fact that for about 70% of the film she's missing.  The other characters, mousy Darla and asshole Billy are    done as well as peripheral characters in a film like this can be.  Paul Wesley, late of "Vampire Diaries" is especially fun as Billy and I found him comical (hopefully purposely funny) in the scene with Jasper and the paintball gun.

With very little blood or violence, this is a suspense (in the last half, anyways) movie and not so much a horror flick.  That being said, I enjoyed it and give it a solid three skulls.