Carny is about a travelling carnival that manages to get hold of a (the?) Jersey Devil for one of its exhibits. The beast looks about as dangerous as a fat old bulldog with stumpy wings. Think Pete’s Dragon. Of course, it gets loose. Local sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips has to deal with the creature, which is what local sheriffs do all the time in horror movies. Furthermore, Lou Diamond Phillips has experience as a local sheriff dealing with creatures. You saw the Bats, right? That was about bats, as you can probably tell from the title. When I was a kid, killer bat movies had much better titles. For instance, Arthur Hiller’s Nightwing. Would you rather see a movie about killer bats called Bats or Nightwing? I rest my case.
So Lou Diamond Phillips does some forensics work with a tape measure. He says the line, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”. Finally, he uses his pick-up truck and a ferris wheel to kill the Jersey Devil. I think he falls in love with a fortune teller, who rushes to his side as he’s dying. She says to him that he didn’t have to do this, and with his dying breath he basically says that, yes, he did. “I did what I had to do,” he says while letting fake blood drool out of his mouth. What a jerk. She was trying to be nice and he shoots her down like that.
The real sin of these Syfy creature features is how little craft or even attention is put into them. They reek of made-for-TV. And that’s a very different quality than low-budget. Low budget almost necessarily means there’s going to be a degree of care, if not craft, in a movie. Low budget is often passionate, or at least charmingly oblivious. But made-for-TV is just product, slapped together, quick and dirty.
At one point, Lou Diamond Phillips punches the villainous carnival owner. The punched actor snaps his head to the side and sprays out a mess of fake blood across the side of a trailer. The stuff spatters and drips down. Did they mean to use that much blood? It’s like Lou Diamond Phillips just punched a gallon jug of red syrup. They’re really going to use that take? Yes, they are, because this isn’t just low budget. It’s made-for-TV. Oh, and the point of this movie, is that the real monsters are…us! It’s kind of depressing that someone wrote a script and intended a message, yet it gets made with all the care of an actor spitting far too much red syrup on the side of a caravan.
(Carny is available on DVD. But so are plenty of other movies you’d be better off watching. Such as Chupacabra Terror.)
One of the minor things that bothers me about Inception is that it’s so high concept that it doesn’t afford much room for characters. So you get tremendously talented actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, and Ellen Page, but you come away from the movie with no inkling how talented they are.
After the jump, Super to the rescue Continue reading →
There’s a drawn-out scene in Bitter Feast in which a woman goes about her business. She’s being stalked by an evil force, played here by James LeGros, a chef upset at the bad reviews he’s gotten from the woman’s boyfriend, a food blogger.
She opens the medicine cabinet. Then she closes it and, there in the reflection, standing behind her, is…no one! Gore Verbinski closed the medicine cabinet on this gag with the unsettling opening of his Ring remake, in which two girls are stalked by a mysterious presence we never see. Amber Tamblyn opens the refrigerator, obscuring our view of the rest of the kitchen, and then when she closes it, we see standing there…nothing!
It’s the fake-out, based entirely on the audience knowing the usual horror movie tricks. It’s about other horror movies. This works in The Ring, which is a movie about watching a movie. But unless you’ve got some sort of meta commentary going on, it’s just pointless filler. Which pretty much describes Bitter Feast, a borderline torture porn, borderline comedy, and borderline commentary on the role of the critic.
The most fascinating thing is the moment that you realize — this might not happen until you look it up on IMDB after having watched Bitter Feast — the guy playing the victim is Josh from Blair Witch Project! The other fascinating thing is how awful James LeGros is as the prissy murderous psychotic TV chef. Oh, James, really? It’s come to this?
Actually, you could do far worse than this stylish English indie horror movie, because those are four words you don’t often see clustered together in front of the word “movie”. The plot, about a working-class English family coming to terms with a missing child, is pretty predictable. But for such a predictable movie, it doesn’t seem to think it’s tricking you. It understands that you’ve figured it out. Despite its similarities, this is no Sixth Sense or The Others because of how it lays its cards on the table without having to announce them. And although the resolution is oh-so-pat, it has just enough lack of resolution to be memorable.
The great thing about The Disappeared — and this is a really great thing if you watch as many bad actors in bad horror movies as I do — is the lead actor, Harry Treadaway. If you saw last year’s Fish Tank, you’ll recognize him as Katie Jarvis’ boyfriend. He looks like a sullen hoodlum, with a bit of Toby Maguire’s nondescript good looks. But he’s incredibly expressive, intense, and sincere. I get a strong River Phoenix vibe watching him act. The Disappeared’s director knows he’s got something special in Treadaway’s performance, and he fixes it front and center throughout the movie. Come for the bad horror, but stay for the fantastic lead actor.
The Disappeared is available on DVD or Netflix’s Instant Watch.
Sybil Danning, who looks great for a 90-year-old, is running some sort of secret program to make a deadly H1N1 virus. People get kidnapped and infected to cultivate the virus, which is then studied by a crack team of scientists, who aren’t hip to the kidnapping part of the endeavor.
These scientists are played by the sorts of handsome young actors who pass for scientists these days. Remember when scientists used to look like the actors in The Thing or the original Andromeda Strain? They tended to look fifty, sleep-deprived, and intelligent.
Anyway, our young scientists are obliviously lunching in the break room when an abducted prostitute who’s been infected escapes from her cell. A freaky assassin dude with an accent and a blonde wig for no good reason* (pictured) gives chase. In an unintentionally hilarious scene, the prostitute bursts in on our young lunching scientists. When the assassin dude shows up, he shoots the escaped prostitute, which sprays blood on all the young scientists, putting them off their lunch and infecting them with a deadly strain of H1N1 virus. Oops. Sybil Danning orders the doors locked so they can be studied. Now they have three days to find a cure and hook up — there are couple of sex scenes — before they all succumb to the H1N1 virus, which apparently makes you bleed from your eyes and act kind of like a zombie.
For a far better movie about handsome young people dealing with a virus, I recommend Carriers, starring Chris Pine and Piper Perabo. No joke. That’s a great movie. Virus X, not so much.
* I blame Dan Brown for putting a deadly albino monk in DaVinci Code.
From the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson…
In a world…
where the day’s catch from gambling is all that matters…
where hideous chuds have no problem landing smoking hot women…
comes a criminal with a score to settle…
Philip Baker Hall. Philip Seymour Hoffman. John C. Reilly. Samuel L. Jackson. Gwyneth Paltrow.
Haddo Eight!
Netflix
IMDB
Movie Club
The Google results on this site for this flick are not to my satisfaction, so it’s time to add to them. Enjoy.
[Ed. note: The Quarter to Three Movie Club is a monthly-ish event in which someone picks a movie for folks to watch — or re-watch, as the case may be — and then discuss. Then a magical random picking machine chooses the picker for the next movie from the participants in the discussion. We’ve been going strong — if by “strong”, you mean “off and on but never totally out” — for 33 movies and we show no sign of letting up. Join us for the Hard Eight discussion here and check here for the history of Qt3 movie club, along with your odds on the magical picking machine.]
A couple on their honeymoon in China takes a wrong turn and gets chased by naked bald men coated in talcum power. Or “moon demons”, as the movie calls them. Of course, it’s moon demon-infested rural China, so there’s no cell phone service. However, Seventh Moon does something I’m seeing more often in horror movies. The cell phone without any reception becomes a source of light, as Amy Smart has discovered above. This is way better than a flashlight for a horror movie. The unfocused light from a cell phone illuminates the actor and it also makes for a more unsettling and unpredictable effect, because something scary could be just outside that soft sphere of light. Like, say, a moon demon!
Director Eduardo Sanchez makes the moon demons “scary” by lighting them poorly, shooting them out of focus, and jerking the camera around. Splice in footage of people running through the woods and, voila!, you’ve got a horror movie.
Sanchez got a lot of mileage out of people running through the woods when he made Blair Witch Project. But that running through the woods was given context with an eerie backstory, good actors, and masterful use of its unique twist (the “found footage” concept was novel back then). None of that is present here. Instead, we have a production that managed to get Amy Smart for a quick shoot in China and, uh, not much else.
For the better follow-up to Blair Witch Project, see a movie called The Objective by Sachez’s co-director, Daniel Myrick. It’s a flawed low budget horror movie, but it demonstrates that Myrick knows what made Blair Witch Project good and he’s capable of doing it again from a very different perspective.
One of the prerequisites for being a zombie fan is that you must have low standards, because you’re going to be watching a lot of junk. Take, for example, Wicked Little Things. Please. The twist in this zombie movie is that it’s zombie kids, out for revenge because they were exploited for their labor in Appalachian coal mines. Now that’s not the most outrageous zombie twist I’ve ever seen. That distinction goes to a British movie called Devil’s Playground, where the zombies do Parkour.
To its credit, Wicked Little Things tries to be about three strong female characters. Unfortunately, two of those strong female characters are played by the wooden Lori Heuring and the sullen Scout Taylor-Compton. The movie’s best claim to a redeeming feature is a young (well, younger) Chloe Moretz. She plays the equivalent of the little girl in Poltergeist who’s in tune with all the scary stuff the adults don’t grok. She ends up being an emissary between the kid zombies and the grown-up humans. It’s pretty stupid and it involves pouring a lot of blood on the actors for no good reason.
Another thing this movie has going for it is the title. Wicked Little Things is about as good as horror movie titles get, even if it does put me in mind of Denise Richards and Neve Campbell making out in a swimming pool. Speaking of which, is it weird to feel protective of Chloe Moretz? I cringe to think of all the pitfalls in store for an actress with her talent. Hopefully, it won’t get any worse than last year’s Let Me In.
So, yeah, uh, The Green Hornet. Another January release. If you’re worried about The Green Hornet spoilers, such as how terrible it is, skip ahead to this week’s 3×3 at the 44-minute mark for our discussion of the best meal scenes in movies.
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Days of Darkness is a no-budget horror movie (Netflix instant view here) about a comet that turns people into zombies whose penises fall off and are replaced by baby zombie embryos. The movie manages about ten people to play its zombie horde [sic] because, I presume, most of the budget went to raw meat for a handful of gross-out autopsy scenes.
After this 2007 bit of dreck, writer/director Jake Kennedy will go on to do the truly tasteless Penance, which is sort of like Showgirls meets Hostel. But in Days of Darkness, there are signs that he doesn’t take himself so seriously. For instance, the token minority is a car salesman who, at one point, takes off his shirt to tend to a wounded survivor. Later in the scene, he asks if anyone has a clean shirt.
“I do,” says the straight-laced young girl who will, of course, take her shirt off later in the movie.
Cut to him dressed as above. You’ll note that he’s weilding the blade from one of those paper cutters like they have at Kinko’s (I believe a movie called Operation Endgame — think The Office meets Battle Royale — will use that same trick a few years later). There’s almost nothing to recommend Days of Darkness, but the above taste of Dead Rising nearly made it worth my while.
If you’ve ever thought our podcasts were too long, the Season of the Witch episode is the episode for you!
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In The Hive, some dudes suit up (pictured) and shoot a blue laser gun at killer ants from outer space attacking a Third World country where it’s really cheap to shoot a low budget movie. During an early scene, as the dudes sally forth to zap ants, someone proclaims, “Okay people, let’s liquify some endoskeletons!”
Now I’m no ant-ologist, but I did take two years of Latin in high school. So I know that an endoskeleton is something on the inside, like people have. Ants, on the other hand, are bugs and therefore have skeletons on the outside. Exoskeletons. It probably takes about a hundred people to make a movie like this, yet none of them knew the difference between endo- and exo-? “Okay people, let’s liquify some endoskeletons!” made it all the way through production, and then all the way through post-production where someone could have dubbed in the correct syllable?
But that’s not the best line in the movie. That comes during the scene when an exposition man is explaining the situation. People are being massacred by ants! “Ants killing humans in large numbers is almost unheard of,” one of the ant killing dudes observes sagely.
Almost unheard of. Because we’ve all heard of the Great Ant Massacre of Borneo back in 1984, when ants did kill humans in large numbers. I believe upwards of 1,000 humans were killed by the ants. But other than that, the guy in the movie is right. Ants killing humans in large numbers is almost unheard of.
The Hive is on Netflix instant view.
Join us for a discussion of the best movies of 2010. And then stick around for this week’s 3×3 of the best sporting events in movies.
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What have the Coen brothers done with True Grit, an adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel instead of John Wayne’s movie? Find out for yourself by seeing the movie, at which point you can listen to the podcast without us spoiling anything. Until then, this week’s 3×3 of weapons we’d like to use starts at the 52-minute mark.
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Tron Legacy. Hmm. Well, it’s no Clash of the Titans. If you don’t want us spoiling Tron Legacy for you, jump to our 3×3 of best uses of poetry in a movie. It starts at the 57-minute mark.
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