tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44075817210170795822024-03-27T17:53:01.161-06:00HorrorMusemistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-43079503148381530862013-04-22T10:18:00.000-06:002013-04-22T10:18:42.277-06:00Horror Episode Review: Bates Motel, Episode 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAoQR1PBPPsRin5pwixothsDK5SVLOIJO9K0kfHxZLQF7Sfx2O3oBVbFgBx1Yp3tklXIWoBGy-lVtX8wpoz_pFoQ_rzWdoe147PvWgZcX7DbYY5fu0Kn9y-4qmpmZ_sdF0dkW2HAVufYlv/s1600/BatesMotel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAoQR1PBPPsRin5pwixothsDK5SVLOIJO9K0kfHxZLQF7Sfx2O3oBVbFgBx1Yp3tklXIWoBGy-lVtX8wpoz_pFoQ_rzWdoe147PvWgZcX7DbYY5fu0Kn9y-4qmpmZ_sdF0dkW2HAVufYlv/s320/BatesMotel.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Episode 3: What’s Wrong with Norman
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2657030/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paul Edwards</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Freddie Highmore</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Vera Farmiga</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Max Thieriot</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nicola Peltz</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Olivia Cooke</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mike Vogel</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Particular trigger warnings: creepy incest vibes, images
of/implied slavery, mentioned rape</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Passes the Bechdel test? No.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
plot continues to thicken. As was fairly obvious from the last episode, Dylan
(Max Thieriot) is now working guarding the pot fields. Emma (Olivia Cooke)
confesses to Norman (Freddie Highmore) that she hadn’t initially believed that
the sketchbook described anything real, but had just wanted to spend time with
him; however, now she realizes it is true and feels like they have to do
something about it. Norman tells her to give the book back and forget about it.
Norman then has a blackout in class, and is hospitalized. Bradley (Nicola
Peltz) visits him, and Norma (Vera Farmiga) checks him out early. The police have
searched the house, and Norman confesses that he kept Keith Summers’ belt after
they disposed of his body, and the belt is now missing. Norma meets with Deputy
Shelby (Mike Vogel), and he tells her that he took the belt and is willing to
protect her. Later, Norman hallucinates his mother blaming him for the danger
they could be in from the police, and she tells him to go to the Deputy’s house
to retrieve the belt. While there, he finds a locked room in the basement, and
a terrified Chinese girl locked in; apparently one of the girls depicted in the
sketchbook.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This
is one of those times I feel somewhat conflicted, this time about pacing. I’ve
complained a lot about shows that feel like they’re plodding along without
progress toward a goal (see pretty much every review of an episode of The River.) This time
it feels like it’s racing along too fast, especially where Norman is concerned.
The hint of crazy during his attack on his brother (defending Norma’s honor)
was good. And the reveal in this episode that he didn’t remember doing so is
also good. But adding in the scene where he’s envisioning his teacher in
bondage, that he’s full-on hallucinating conversations with his mother… seems
like it’s jumping pretty far forward. The allure, in my opinion, of a “prequel”
of sorts to the Psycho story that we know, is in seeing how he got that way.
And the controlling, manipulative actions of Norma’s in the first episode
especially, though continuing into the second, really make sense as the kind of
thing that’ll fuck a kid up, considering the codependent/near-incestuous
relationship they have. But now we’re being shown a Norman who is clearly
already all the way crazy, not one who is slowly slipping.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There
could also be complaints regarding how convenient it is that all of our
characters find ways to be tied to each other. The Deputy with the enslaved
women, Dylan with the drug ring, etc. But hey, it’s a show with a relatively
short guaranteed run, so I’m willing to forgive that. (Though I think it’d make
more sense if they also did more to capture the small-town feel in other ways.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Once
again, I found it jarring when we’re given scenes that really look like they
could be set decades in the past (the old-style TV, a lot of the wardrobe, the
rest of the sets in the Bates’ home) and then someone whips out their iPhone. I
don’t know if it’s some kind of deliberate anachronistic choice, if I’m supposed to be
inferring great meaning from it, or what.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
acting was pretty all over the place. Freddie Highmore is great, I think, and
there were a couple scenes where he looked very much like Anthony Perkins. And
I still really like Vera Farmiga as Norma. Most of the rest was pretty
serviceable. But Nicola Peltz had some badly delivered lines… she’s
seemed shaky to me on and off since episode one, but this one was not her best.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Otherwise,
everything seems pretty unremarkable, in a not entirely bad way. Nothing about
the sound direction or filming or effects sticks out in a bad way, but nothing
being done makes me think “oh, that’s amazing” either.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
bad things (some lousy acting, weird pacing) bugged me a little more this
episode, but not in a way that makes the show unwatchable or anything. I’ll
keep tuning in.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-50894887018429734102013-04-02T09:51:00.000-06:002013-04-02T09:51:34.566-06:00Horror Episode Review: Bates Motel, Episode 2<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAoQR1PBPPsRin5pwixothsDK5SVLOIJO9K0kfHxZLQF7Sfx2O3oBVbFgBx1Yp3tklXIWoBGy-lVtX8wpoz_pFoQ_rzWdoe147PvWgZcX7DbYY5fu0Kn9y-4qmpmZ_sdF0dkW2HAVufYlv/s1600/BatesMotel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAoQR1PBPPsRin5pwixothsDK5SVLOIJO9K0kfHxZLQF7Sfx2O3oBVbFgBx1Yp3tklXIWoBGy-lVtX8wpoz_pFoQ_rzWdoe147PvWgZcX7DbYY5fu0Kn9y-4qmpmZ_sdF0dkW2HAVufYlv/s320/BatesMotel.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Episode 2: Nice Town You Picked, Norma
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: B-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: B-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2491012/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Tucker Gates</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Freddie Highmore</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Vera Farmiga</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Max Thieriot</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Nicola Peltz</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Olivia Cooke</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Mike Vogel</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Particular trigger warnings: creepy incest vibes</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Passes the Bechdel test? Yes, barely.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Episode 2 is an episode mostly
devoted to thickening the plot, it seems. Norman’s (Freddie Highmore) older
half-brother, Dylan (Max Thieriot) shows up to stay, despite his obvious hatred
for Norma (Vera Farmiga). One of Norman’s friends, Bradley (Nicola Peltz)
witnesses her father crash his car, after he’d been burned alive. The
authorities are more deeply investigating Keith Summers’ disappearance. Deputy
Zack Shelby (Mike Vogel) starts to reveal to Norma that there are some… odd and
less-than-legal practices common in the town, beneath its “small-town charm.”
And when Norman starts a project with another friend, Emma (Olivia Cooke), she
finds the sketchbook he’d found in the house, and investigates the drawings of
tortured women, and she comes to believe that the drawings describe real
events. Later, Norman and Emma stumble upon a field of weed in the woods, after
which they’re pursued by armed men. And apparently the “eye for an eye” justice
that Deputy Shelby described has led to another man being burned.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I liked this episode more than I
liked the first one. There’s at least some sense of an ongoing plot forming. We
get to see how Norman himself is already a little unhinged, especially
regarding how other people may treat his mother, yet how naïve he seems in
other regards, like with Emma when she kisses him. Norma still switches back
and forth between “good mother” mode and “oh-so-creepy” quite well. (I
definitely laughed at the “It’s not like it’s weird!” line.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I’m not sure yet how I feel about
the characters we’ve been introduced to. The addition of a brother seems odd,
though his absence from prior canon can probably be easily explained by how
unwelcome he seems in the family. I’m wondering if we’re going to be stuck with
an obnoxious love triangle plot in the future with Bradley, Norman, and Emma,
but I suppose we’ll see. (It’s fairly obvious that nothing will really work out
in the long run, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to drag it out.) I'm also skeptical about their skill in handling Emma's cystic fibrosis; this episode already seemed inconsistent regarding it. One scene she's gasping for breath walking up the hill, but then she's able to run away from the men chasing them without too much visible trouble.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
hints so far about whatever underbelly the town’s economy is based on are
interesting enough, though it's apparently pot, which was maybe revealed a little too quickly. (Dropping hints about the town's dark side is well and good, but they could have gotten a little more tension out of it.) I do wonder just how “small” this
“small town” is supposed to be. It seemed like it was supposed to be pretty
small, both to fit Norma’s idea of a new life with Norman, and from comments
made about how everyone knows everyone… yet much of it feels larger to me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
technical aspects are all still pretty good. The effects have been good, too,
even if it’s not an effects-heavy show.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
I
probably liked this episode a little better than the first one, so we’ll see if
the trend continues.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-65772055509412870732013-03-22T09:57:00.002-06:002013-03-22T09:57:30.591-06:00Horror Episode Review: Bates Motel, Episode 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8G641s6pGpe3cf83q_ZRGJ7AelNx8xOGEByHBTXkjdePSghNnDCffI6teNzwlOZyQVYIZn0uTsrE5C65akFuscO678wIiCjMQ1MLi9s9BlhW1eHRazRTQrrNVEdSN8QWIKm0WxS6fCum-/s1600/BatesMotel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8G641s6pGpe3cf83q_ZRGJ7AelNx8xOGEByHBTXkjdePSghNnDCffI6teNzwlOZyQVYIZn0uTsrE5C65akFuscO678wIiCjMQ1MLi9s9BlhW1eHRazRTQrrNVEdSN8QWIKm0WxS6fCum-/s320/BatesMotel.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Episode 1: First You Dream, Then You Die
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2491002/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tucker Gates</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Vera Farmiga</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Freddie Highmore</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Particular trigger warnings: rape, family being
manipulative, creepy incest vibes</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Passes the Bechdel test? no</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
After the death of her husband,
Norma Bates (Vera Farmiga) decides to move from Arizona to Oregon with her son,
Norman (Freddie Highmore), to purchase a motel. They arrive in Oregon and begin
to fix the place up, but the previous owner of the property, Keith Summers (W.
Earl Brown), begins harassing them. <span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers follow</span>: Norma tries to keep Norman
from going out, especially once it’s clear that some of the popular girls of
the town are befriending him, but he sneaks out to party with them anyway.
While he’s gone, Summers breaks into the house and rapes Norma, though Norman
arrives in time to rescue her. She kills Summers, and convinces Norman to help
her hide his body. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
All right, I have my reservations
about this show, which is an absolutely <u>TERRIBLE</u> pun that I didn’t intend at
all, but now I can't bear to remove it. I’m sorry. It’s a contemporary prequel to <i>Psycho</i>, which is... meh. I’d
prefer it be set in the correct time period to fit with the original story, and
it’s odd because parts of it feel like they are. It’s not until the girls whip
out their cell phones that it really feels like a modern piece. It comes across
almost as if it was originally intended to be set decades ago, and then they
just decided that was too hard to maintain. So hey, iPhones for everyone! BUT,
since that’s personal preference, I’ll try not to let it cloud too much of my
opinion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
It doesn’t quite feel like the same
sort of horror as <i>Psycho</i>, though I can see it setting it up… maybe. I will say
that Norma is written pretty well, alternating between almost girlish, giggly,
creepily girlfriend-ish behavior toward Norman, and her controlling and
manipulative side. It’s seriously creepy (and I think Vera Farmiga pulls it off
very well.) The manipulation and guilting is very “real” feeling, to the point
of almost being upsetting (especially the scene at the dinner table where she
tells him that of course he can join track; she’ll just do everything herself,
like she always does.) Plus, of course, the immensely creepy, obsessive,
pseudo-incest vibes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
I’m not very impressed with their
decision to include a pretty graphic (for something airing on a basic cable
channel) rape scene. (Not that it really would have been any better if it’d
been less graphic.) Yes, it’s a subject I’m touchy about, but it’s the kind of
thing that it just shitty to throw in as “motivation” for something else. (In
this case for Norman to stay closer to his mother and to help her hide the
body.) It’s not a topic that should be used purely as a plot device, and it’s
used that way far too often across just about every kind of media. That shit is
not cool.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
The episode also felt a bit rushed,
which is maybe unavoidable. The series didn’t get a true pilot, but this was
still the episode intended to establish the characters and setting. It does
that, but it has to do so and have a self-contained story in 45 minutes or so.
As a consequence, the development isn’t especially subtle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
The tech is fine, though not especially
revolutionary. I did like the overhead shot of the officer in the bathroom. The
set design is very good, especially with the house. It very much looks like the
original house from the <i>Psycho</i> film, even if it’s been transplanted in time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
There isn’t much in the way of
effects, so that’s hard to judge. There’s some blood and it didn’t look bad.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
So yeah. It was… okay. It’s
probably worth it to me to stick through a couple more episodes, at least. I am
curious to see where it goes, and there’s enough done right that I want to see
how it progresses. But I won’t say that I’m amazingly impressed or that I’d be
heartbroken to miss an episode and catch it later. I do hope some of the issues
improve when they have a little more room to devote to development rather than
just establishment.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-31488833400473946862013-03-18T10:01:00.001-06:002013-03-18T10:01:53.983-06:00Horror Movie Review: Scourge (2008)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlXviFmA0zK8oB4eXskmzW5eXyoqBIuSjnCBd9dHLTjSMF6YFWtKAOlIe30XIA9UO1GCgi0j1ubBmRuQ2HAEUvAIvXKUihEvmvGjn00ybWl4WFRg2WL3WgK6JezTYVMZvI8f9t6Bkz4-V7/s1600/scourge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlXviFmA0zK8oB4eXskmzW5eXyoqBIuSjnCBd9dHLTjSMF6YFWtKAOlIe30XIA9UO1GCgi0j1ubBmRuQ2HAEUvAIvXKUihEvmvGjn00ybWl4WFRg2WL3WgK6JezTYVMZvI8f9t6Bkz4-V7/s320/scourge.jpg" width="227" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: D
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1137477/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jonas Quastel</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Russell Ferrier</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Robyn Ledoux</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nic Rhind</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Particular
trigger warnings: nothing I can really remember</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Passes the
Bechdel test: also not that I remember</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This
whole thing has a “the worst of Syfy original movie” all over it. But maybe I
just have a difficult time taking “Ultimate Evil” seriously when it expresses
itself in belches and farts. Also, this is a bit more of a synopsis than a
summary, because you should not feel at all compelled to watch this movie, so I
feel no guilt in telling you exactly why it sucks.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So
basically the plot is that an ancient evil called “The Scourge” was locked up by
priests a long time ago in the foundation of a church. In a fire, said evil is
released, and possesses a fireman. We get some gross-out scenes as the young
fireman suddenly begins eating everything he can – sticks of butter, cartons of
expired milk, mayonnaise, etc. He goes to shower, starts belching and gurgling,
and acting somewhat zombie-ish.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meanwhile,
our main character Jesse (Robyn Ledoux) runs into our other main character
Scott (Nic Rhind.) Apparently, the two were friends at once point, but Scott
got in trouble with the law and with Jesse’s uncle, the sheriff.
He was in prison for a while, but has since gotten out, and he was of course
never a bad guy, but had simply taken the fall for someone else, now just wants
to move on, etc. Jesse is a bit interested in him, but Scott already has a
girlfriend.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Later,
the zombie-ish belching firefighter shows up at Scott’s hockey game and causes
some chaos. He ends up wandering into the locker room, where Scott’s girlfriend
joins him. Naturally she’s been cheating on Scott with the fireman, and is
planning on a quicky in the locker room. (At her boyfriend’s hockey game…
obviously.) So the fireman kneels down, and belches up a badly CGI’d evil squid
bug thing that invades her bellybutton and possesses her. She goes through the
same zombie-changes as the fireman, but presumably because she’s a hot chick
there’s less eating and belching.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She
winds up going to a club and passing on the evil infection thing to a new guy
in the bathroom. Scott has followed her, and he confronts her just in time to
watch her spontaneously hemorrhage and die. Scott is assumed to have killed
her, and since the fireman’s body turned up at his hockey match, the sheriff is
after him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Blah
blah, they figure out how to kill it, though I’m not sure <i>why</i> they need to do what they do (it
involves electricity and alcohol.) Meanwhile the evil keeps getting passed from
person to person, before it eventually gets passed to an obese photographer
guy. Jesse sets out to seduce him and bring him back to a motel room where she
and Scott can try to get the evil out of him. They attempt this, and it jumps
to Scott. And because he’s the hero, he’s immediately aware of this, and rather
than making him do unsexy things like belch and ravenously eat, he just tries
to kill Jesse.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A
secret order priest type shows up at the end to conquer the evil and save Scott
and Jesse, and the obese photographer is taken to the hospital. The priest man
explains that they’ve gotten rid of most of the Scourge, but he’s always
hunting down any remaining ones.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then
insert one of those stupid “the end… or is it?” endings, letting us know that
the horror isn’t really over!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What
a stupid movie. The acting is average, and is probably what can be complained
about least. And don’t get me wrong, because the acting isn’t good. It’s just
not as bad as everything else. The story itself isn’t unforgiveably awful, the
idea of an ancient evil parasite jumping host to host, but it’s hard to find a
way it could be more poorly executed. The most obvious thing wrong is the
belching, farting, zombie-hosts. It’s just stupid. It’s consistently stupid.
And if this were supposed to be a horror-comedy or a parody of some kind, it’d
still be stupid, but understandable. But no, it’s played straight. And it’s
clear that the writers <i>realize</i>
that it’s stupid, as the hot girl that gets possessed and the hero both are
spared the gross/stupid bits of the possession. The effects look awful – it’s
bad CGI, and when it’s bad, it’s bad. And a maybe petty complaint when there’s
already so much wrong – but the bellybutton is not an orifice! It doesn’t
stretch to accommodate something entering the body through it and then return
to normal immediately! It’s just… stupid.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s
really no serious gore in their violence, minus the girl bleeding out in once
scene and the pretty non-explicit electrocuting of the guy in an attempt to
draw out the Scourge. There’s only moderate sexuality when a girl showers and
the fact that the parasite being passed from mouth to belly button usually is
accomplished by implying oral sex is going to happen. It gets an R rating
mostly due to language, meaning the younger pre-teen male audience that would
probably appreciate the bodily humor couldn’t actually see it. It seems like it
would have been better cut to PG or PG-13 and left to cable television and
late night timeslots on SyFy, because it certainly didn’t deserve a DVD
release.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-25698501695955486372013-03-14T10:09:00.000-06:002013-03-14T10:09:48.181-06:00Horror Movie Review: Forget Me Not (2009)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwClmvvCZtp504APIde0f4ur647PqY_tDpsqi8BnFJgeymodFkUX0iQUEnEFBXzSdzSzfUrKeRItyNGsSUh0a4qojHx5boWzdj5Vsb15FlbXwK82Bnc2zWHW10ifVbRjDFdshY1H5tcR6C/s1600/Forget_Me_Not_Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwClmvvCZtp504APIde0f4ur647PqY_tDpsqi8BnFJgeymodFkUX0iQUEnEFBXzSdzSzfUrKeRItyNGsSUh0a4qojHx5boWzdj5Vsb15FlbXwK82Bnc2zWHW10ifVbRjDFdshY1H5tcR6C/s400/Forget_Me_Not_Poster.jpg" width="270" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1147684/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Tyler Oliver</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Carly Schroeder</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Cody Linley</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Micha Alberti</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Brie Gabrielle</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Jillian Murray</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Zachary Abel</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Sean Wing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Chloe Bridges</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Brittany Renee
Finamore</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br />
Passes the
Bechdel test? Yes</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Particular
triggers: nothing I can really think of</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
In this review,
the summary and my reactions and opinions are all lumped together. So spoilers
abound through it all.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Forget
Me Not</i> jumps right in,
showing us our cast of 20-and-30-somethings playing unlikable teens doing
unlikable things. This movie suffers incredibly from the problem of having too
many characters introduced that are more or less physically and characteristically
indistinguishable from each other. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took
me almost to the halfway mark to even learn all of their names. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
So
we have Sandy (Carly Schroeder) the class president, who is dating supposedly
bad-boy Jake (Micha Alberti), though he’s never shown to do anything more “bad”
than the rest of them. There’s Sandy’s brother Eli (Cody Linley), the
valedictorian who just wants to be a pirate. There’s Jake’s sister Lex (Jillian
Murray) the supposedly bad-girl who is dating TJ (Sean Wing). There’s Chad
(Zachary Abel) who is stringing along two women, cheating on both because he is
our Even More Unlikable Douche character. The two women he’s screwing are Layla
(Chloe Bridges) and Hannah (Brie Gabrielle). For additional drama, Eli also has
a thing for Hannah. And our whole group has just graduated high school, and are
planning on going on a vacation together.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The
strain on my suspension of disbelief starts in right away. A) None of these
people look even remotely like recent high school graduates. That’s not
uncommon in horror, or even film in general, but this is pretty egregious. B)
None of these people act like high schoolers either, and not just because of
the truly endless alcohol, weed, and sex they seem to have available. C) I know
this is nit-picky, but how many people do you know that have had the identical
large friend group since they were young kids? For that matter, how many friend
groups have not one, but two sets of siblings that have the exact same social
circle? And how many people do you know that maintain childhood friendships,
and then only manage to date within that same circle? One or two of these
issues could be pretty easily ignored, but there was just nothing about this
batch of people that made me believe they were their characters, or that those
characters could be real people. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
So
our group is hanging out and they decide to go to the local graveyard to play a
game they played there as kids. It’s a “ghost in the graveyard” game like hide
and seek, where the “ghost” has to find the other players and turns them into
ghosts until only one person is left “alive.” As they get ready to play, a
mysterious girl shows up and asks if she can play too. This is Angela (Brittany
Renee Finamore.) At the end of the game, she jumps off a cliff (who builds a
graveyard next to a cliff? Erosion is a real thing, people), claiming that soon
Sandy will remember her. The police can’t find a body when they investigate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
As
the friend group goes about their business the following day, Sandy remembers
her childhood friend Angela, the girl who taught her the ghost in the graveyard
game. Then people start getting offed… and Sandy suddenly realizes that she’s
the only one who remembers the people who’ve been killed. The others don’t have
any memory of them at all. And reality seems to be changing around them, as if
they didn’t ever exist. (For instance someone’s tattoo of a now-dead
character’s name disappears, their plans to go to the beach have changed to
plans to go to the mountains, etc.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
In
some ways I liked this. It sort of subverts the usual plotline, where everyone
realizes that their group is being killed off, and is aware that they’re in
danger, but then acts stupidly anyway. At least this time, they don’t even
realize that their friends are missing. If you cared about the characters, it
could even be psychologically hard-hitting to realize that they won’t even
remember their significant others or siblings. Honestly, I like this as a plot
line, and think it could have been really well utilized in a more suspenseful
movie, but unfortunately it seemed to be somewhat wasted in this film.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The
plot goes on, more of them are offed, everyone assumes Sandy is crazy, blah
blah. Sandy tries to find out what Angela has to do with the murders, while no
one will help her. The resolution isn’t really surprising… the motivations are
pretty standard for this kind of “pick a group off one by one” deal, though
that’s usually a slasher trope, and this doesn’t really feel like a slasher. I
suppose you could argue that it is one, but without an actual physical
slasher-who-does-the-slashing. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I
had so many problems with the believability of this movie that I feel kind of
bad even giving it a C. In terms of tech it’s okay – the sound and
cinematography are nothing special, but they’re fine. The effects are
laughable. I DID literally laugh at the ghosts several times. A mix of bad
Halloween costume masks and bad CGI. But ugh… the unbelievable characters. Not
that badly acted, all things considered, just horribly miscast and poorly
written. The plot isn’t outstandingly original, but I mentioned that I liked
this take on it, at least to some extent. Sadly, it’s the characters themselves
really ruin it for me. One saving grace may be turning it around and viewing
the villain as the protagonist, which could reframe the story in an interesting
way. I didn’t really want to watch the film again with this in mind just to
find out, though. Despite my issues, I did find the movie to be very watchable,
and I enjoyed it at times. It just has too many glaring flaws for me to
consider it “good.”</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-69223511157648258612013-03-11T10:00:00.000-06:002013-03-11T10:00:50.486-06:00Horror Movie Quick Review: The Rite (2011)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlvV-VxqS4HOIvs0dA-hm4Ma0ofqj0eZZidbfH7VKnatrdEJeqh7qJFRiNFNxhPDGxWAq8MQZrHGQRbGGbMRzfz2vEgY2NFgclQJPnnAzpo6Ny-qvwEGlEdmATVgGqzV9MOhYhOQZT8phk/s1600/The+Rite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlvV-VxqS4HOIvs0dA-hm4Ma0ofqj0eZZidbfH7VKnatrdEJeqh7qJFRiNFNxhPDGxWAq8MQZrHGQRbGGbMRzfz2vEgY2NFgclQJPnnAzpo6Ny-qvwEGlEdmATVgGqzV9MOhYhOQZT8phk/s320/The+Rite.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: B</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1161864/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Mikael
Håfström</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Anthony Hopkins</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Colin O’Donoghue</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
I liked this one pretty well, but at the same time it didn’t
feel like it did anything new.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The basic plot is that Michael (Colin O’Donoghue) begins
training in seminary. Having a crisis of faith, he goes to Italy as a last
attempt to renew his belief in God, and begins studying with Father Lucas
Trevant (Anthony Hopkins), supposedly an exorcist. Michael doesn’t believe that
demonic possession is real, and he still questions his faith. But then Father
Trevant is possessed, and Michael is forced to take on the role of exorcist.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
It’s a movie that is pretty good at what it does, and is
well acted. But it also feels like it followed the recipe for making a movie
about demonic possession and exorcism to the letter. There’s the main character
having a moral crisis over his beliefs and whether or not he really has a
vocation, there’s the demon that causes the possessed person to speak in
tongues and talk about how the main character’s dead family is rotting/burning
in hell, the demon is exorcised, and the main character finds his faith.
Hooray!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
If you like that type of movie, this one will probably not
disappoint you. But if you’re looking for something new and different, this
doesn’t really deliver.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-69688274256412257602013-03-07T12:15:00.000-07:002013-03-07T12:15:01.956-07:00Horror Movie Review: Seconds Apart (2011)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggR7hSbXD_sRF88hlTH2yrqoWS15UjzA3l3B7aMNfPnSPXNeJkXE6Q8wtcWfJ69F61Z838jHZaUriQtS5cPeWAH0L_sOJ2xm0vqCO17p68tWkVC1kQfelcPREWwWyF_acxKrrmNOg4WgUG/s1600/Seconds-Apart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggR7hSbXD_sRF88hlTH2yrqoWS15UjzA3l3B7aMNfPnSPXNeJkXE6Q8wtcWfJ69F61Z838jHZaUriQtS5cPeWAH0L_sOJ2xm0vqCO17p68tWkVC1kQfelcPREWwWyF_acxKrrmNOg4WgUG/s320/Seconds-Apart.jpg" width="216" /></a><span style="color: #990000; font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: B+</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: A-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1601475/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Antonio Negret</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Edmund Entin</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Gary Entin</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Orlando Jones</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Samantha Droke</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Particular
trigger warnings: coerced suicide, self-harm</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Passes the
Bechdel test: I don’t believe so</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span><i>Seconds
Apart</i> is about a pair of
identical twins, Jonah (Edmund Entin) and Seth (Gary Entin), who have a psychic
connection with each other that allows them to control people’s minds. The
brothers, to put it lightly, do not use this power for good. When they were
children they killed their babysitter; as teens, they’re doing a “project”
where they force people to kill others or themselves, so the brothers can film
them as they die. The people they control rarely seem to have any sense that
they’re being controlled, and rarely fight the illusions… instead they seem to
believe what they are doing is entirely normal. This “project” is apparently an
attempt by Jonah and Seth to experience some emotion that they believe they are
incapable of feeling. Their sadistic project is somewhat at odds with what
appears to be an idyllic home life in a beautiful house with almost
Stepford-esque parents.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>Investigating
the deaths at the twins’ school is Detective Lampkin (Orlando Jones), a man
haunted by memories of the death of his wife in a house fire. The twins
frequently prey on these memories, trying to torment the detective.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>Meanwhile,
a new girl named Eve (Samantha Droke) transfers to the school, and befriends
Jonah. This begins to drive a wedge between the brothers, as Jonah becomes more
interested in her, and wishes to drop the “project” with Seth.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I don’t
want to spoil the pseudo-“twist” to the ending; it’s not the most shocking out
there, and doesn’t change a lot about the plot itself, but I enjoyed it and
what it showed about the characters.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>I
really enjoyed this movie, though there are some really valid criticisms. One
is that it’s a bit disjointed. That was distracting for my boyfriend when we
watched it, though I didn’t notice it much at the time. But just trying to
summarize it above, I’m reminded of it when I realize how much I didn’t
mention.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I’m not
sure how the detective jumps so easily to suspecting the twins. He gets some
anecdotal evidence from other students, and they play some conceited mindgames
with him, but it still seems like a pretty big jump for him to make.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span> </span>Some of the “tension” was obviously
manufactured, for example with their murder of their babysitter being hinted at
several times throughout the film as if it should be a shock when it’s
revealed… but because they’ve already been shown killing people, that’s the
obvious conclusion, devoid of any real suspense or surprise.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
There’s a
lot made of the “it” that the brothers hope to feel, but it’s left somewhat to
interpretation what “it” is. (Uh… unless I missed it somehow?) It could be
fear, as that’s what they believe they should experience at witnessing death,
but if they want to feel fear, I’m unsure why they don’t do anything to put <i>themselves</i> in danger. I don’t want to immediately
blame poor writing for that – it could be a deliberate choice to leave it to
audience interpretation. But honestly, it mostly just leaves me confused more
than thoughtful.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The
introduction of Eve as the plot device to force the brothers apart is a bit
cliché as well… the “woman causes divide between two close male friends/family
members” isn’t exactly an original trope, and she didn’t have much
characterization outside of that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
But the
movie was very well-acted, including the rather surprising choice of Orlando
Jones as the detective, and the chemistry between the brothers in particular
was wonderful. The “twist” at the end is pretty creepy and well handled, in my
opinion. I liked that the individual characters (with the unfortunate exception
of Eve) were all quite complex – Detective Lampkin’s personal traumas didn’t
feel too overstated, and gave him enough dimension to be interesting, and the twins’
relationship with each other vs. their relationships with the rest of the world
contrast really well.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The world
of the movie itself felt quite surreal, somehow removed from the real world. It
felt fantasy-ish, something like the stylized settings in <i>Willard</i> or even in <i>Edward Scissorhands</i>, possibly because of the Victorian
semi-Gothic aesthetics of the film. I enjoyed that, though it might not be to
everyone’s liking.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
There is
less “horror” to the film in some ways. There are some scares in terms of the
murders, but much of the horror comes from knowing what the brothers are
capable of, not necessarily just what’s happening on screen. There’s a lot more
focus on the drama between the characters and suspense. Again, I enjoyed that,
but that may be disappointing if you aren’t expecting interpersonal drama and twisted
psychology. Objectively this probably wouldn’t get a B+, but that’s what I give
it for my personal enjoyment.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-45650099401787414782013-03-04T10:11:00.000-07:002013-03-04T10:15:14.970-07:00Horror Movie Review: Hyenas (2011)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgADUVrCrQWmglweWs_Q6WzOEZHEQOSWndGMucJS8GK86i6xAA6IH00JHfUgMJUaCCFoWDUwwSSsJktX1hxHeGfJ_SUBozFdCkoYUGv16QLNWDPua24j59bkTi6t4F2KX-V9DEXY9t2Pg6z/s1600/Hyenas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgADUVrCrQWmglweWs_Q6WzOEZHEQOSWndGMucJS8GK86i6xAA6IH00JHfUgMJUaCCFoWDUwwSSsJktX1hxHeGfJ_SUBozFdCkoYUGv16QLNWDPua24j59bkTi6t4F2KX-V9DEXY9t2Pg6z/s320/Hyenas.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>:
C-
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887143/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eric
Weston</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Costas Mandylor </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meshach Taylor</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Joshua Alba</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Christina Murphy</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Derrick Kosinski</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Andrew James Allen</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Christa Campbell</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Particular trigger warnings: Mexican racial slurs</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Passes the Bechdel test? Yes, but barely.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you are hoping for a horror film that brings mostly
unintentional comedy, this could be the choice for you. Because this was bad,
but mostly silly-bad, with much of the camp probably deliberate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Hyenas</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> has several plot threads going, none of them
especially compelling. First we have the story of Gannon (Costas Mandylor), a
man whose wife and infant child were killed by a breed of “were-hyenas” brought
to North America by slave traders. He’s initially unbelieving when it comes to
the existence of these werehyenas, but a man named “Crazy Briggs” (Meshach
Taylor), a hunter of these creatures, convinces him. Crazy Briggs takes Gannon
on as something of an apprentice hunter.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Then suddenly that part of the
movie just kind of… ends for a while, and we’re taken to an apparent gang war
in the local small town between the obnoxious white kids and the Hispanic kids.
Bobby (Derrick Kosinski) leads the white kids against Marco (Joshua Alba), the
leader of the Hispanic kids. Complicating things, Bobby is hazing/recruiting
Jasper (Andrew James Allen), whose older sister Gina (Christina Murphy) is
dating Marco. Drama!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Meanwhile, it’s revealed that the
leader of the matriarchal hyena clan is dying, and so the disparate packs are
meeting in the mines outside the town to pick a new leader. Wilda (Christa
Campbell) seems poised to take over.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Back with Gannon, they rescue a
girl from some of the hyenas, leading to an incredibly contrived plot twist
that I doubt anyone was fooled by if they were paying any attention.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Eventually the plots converge
somewhat by coincidence, as Gannon and Crazy Briggs head to the caves to kill
Wilda and the rest, while Bobby and Marco go there to fight out their issues,
and Gina follows them in order to stop them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
[<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers</span>] There’s a silly action-y
ending, that again I doubt will come as much of a surprise to anyone: Bobby and
Marco are suddenly friends, most of the good guys escape (minus a dramatic
self-sacrifice,) and most of the bad guys get blown up. [<span style="color: #990000;">End spoilers</span>.]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
This movie is just so damn silly.
It’s often entertainingly so, but much of the badness also comes just from
sloppy writing and inconsistencies. I joked that when it cut to a scene about
the white kids/Mexican kids’ rivalry that they’d never be referred to again and
that they would have nothing to do with the rest of the film… and I wasn’t
really that far off. Most of the movie seems to be about the struggle Gina has with
her brother being drafted into the white kids’ gang, and yet that’s ultimately
inconsequential to the rest of the film and the hyena plot. It causes some
additional tension between Bobby and Marco, but it was established that they
hated each other whether Jasper and Gina were in the picture or not.
Eventually, despite taking up a whole lot of screen time in the first half,
Jasper’s character is pretty much dropped from the movie and has nothing to do
with the resolution. I kept expecting the douchey white kid gang to have
something to do with the hyenas, but there was no connection between the pack
and <i>either</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> gang; the storylines only
cross by coincidence when the characters wind up in the same place, rendering
the “dramatic” gang plotline absolutely unnecessary.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
There are a lot of times where it
seems like there were a few scenes missing or something, where there are
unexplained character changes or passages of time. For instance, it seems that
Gannon and Crazy Briggs are the only two people to know about the were-hyenas,
but then at one point Gannon is getting a report from another hunter that was
never mentioned or introduced. At another point there’s a brief bit of
narration by Briggs that tells us how he started training Gannon (rather than
showing us any of said training) but it’s unclear how much time has passed. We
later find out that it was three <i>years</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
since Gannon’s family was killed, but nothing in the narration made it clear
that we’d skipped so far ahead until he mentions it. Toward the very end, [<span style="color: #990000;">spoilers</span>,] Bobby
and Marco are ready to kill each other, and yet thirty seconds later they
decide they’re BFFs. Granted they were faced with a cave full of werehyenas,
but it goes beyond temporary truce and into the unrealistic “now we’ve overcome
our differences!” resolution. [<span style="color: #990000;">End spoilers</span>.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
The effects are laughable mixes of
bad costuming and bad CG hyenas. The “transformations” prompted snorts and
giggles. Of course, your experience may be helped or hindered by the fact that
Wilda has to take off her clothes every time she’s going to transform (a trait
not apparently shared by any of the not-as-hot-as-Christa Campbell-werehyenas.)
The nudity is still relatively lacking (nipple-less boobs!) but hey, it’s there
should that be a draw for you. (Though would people find her as hot if she,
like real female hyenas, had basically a pseudo penis? Just wondering. Maybe
she does; we don’t see it.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
If you’re a <i>Buffy the Vampire
Slayer</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> fan, you may recognize most of the
mythology about the hyenas as being very similar to what was mentioned in the
episode “The Pack” from the first season, where Xander and some other kids were
possessed by hyena spirits. And honestly, I think I’d rather watch that episode
a few more times than this movie. Still, the film is entertaining and campy and
easy to laugh at.</span></div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-62735037101086701512013-02-24T19:38:00.001-07:002013-02-28T09:48:57.564-07:00Horror Movie Quick Review: Shadow Puppets (2007)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxpboUuxCzmMvMSDAi-7mYFc7a30ncLwrQBsbfFdVqVvuUdPLYPHNUVcTPHqnbTTPSAbbfTlSkkMkI7mLDsRP18NAxiuw5yxvTZIz2nBho9HGjoxq13N1Et0eq-f6nyrrE1XoAPxCyrZ1_/s1600/shadow+puppets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxpboUuxCzmMvMSDAi-7mYFc7a30ncLwrQBsbfFdVqVvuUdPLYPHNUVcTPHqnbTTPSAbbfTlSkkMkI7mLDsRP18NAxiuw5yxvTZIz2nBho9HGjoxq13N1Et0eq-f6nyrrE1XoAPxCyrZ1_/s320/shadow+puppets.jpg" width="206" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span> C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0491145/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Michael
Winnick</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
James Marsters</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Tony Todd</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Marc Winnick</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Jolene Blalock</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Shadow
Puppets</i> is the story of
eight seemingly random people who wake up in an abandoned asylum, none of them
with any memory of how they got there. As they meet up with each other, they
begin to search for a way out. But there’s some kind of sentient shadow monster
lurking, which is hunting them and picking them off. They find a machine apparently
used in experiments on erasing memories, and they rightly figure that since the
machine was used eight times, it must have been used on them. [<span style="color: #990000;">Reasonably minor spoilers</span>] But when they
find a ninth stranger in a coma, they realize that one of them has <i>not</i> had their memories erased, and that
person must be the one behind everything. And so the traitor in the group is
discovered and begins trying to kill everyone. [<span style="color: #990000;">End spoilers</span>]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
This
movie suffered the most from having way too many characters introduced in way
too short a period of time. And because they don’t learn their names until
halfway or more through the film, I was just giving them insulting nicknames
the entire film, because otherwise I had no way to tell who was who. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The
story starts off somewhat intriguing, with the strangers in the asylum,
wondering what their pasts hold and why the building seems abandoned… but as
soon as the (poorly animated) Shadow shows up, it just gets somewhat… silly.
Its presence is never really explained (or rather, the explanation makes no
sense.) If the pseudo-monster had been removed in favor of focusing just on the
idea of the science experiment on their memories, it would have been an
improvement. And anyway, most of the characters get little individual
screentime outside of our mains, so when they’re killed and in danger it didn’t
resonate any with me. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
There
are also several small but silly inconsistencies (things as simple as the
characters constantly complaining that they’re freezing, but never wrapping
themselves in the sheets they all have from the beds they awoke in.) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The
movie was okay, but it started far better than it finished, and had more than a
few moments that were unintentionally funny out of sheer ridiculousness.</div>
<br />mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-39125883533903108822013-02-24T19:37:00.000-07:002013-02-25T10:03:10.502-07:00Horror Movie Review: The Tenement (2003)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5H9gRkCASCom-wVj5jh2Umgvtn2up6-zQ7IOyqUg039S2d_qzkJ9f1Zcih5FbqwctSoKvdSvYIH-NWPlxZi12xlVjEtgDgNyFj8rdP4rAhzhHFgp548CzzMkmWU0NIigy8842Rnz9vysS/s1600/the+tenement.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5H9gRkCASCom-wVj5jh2Umgvtn2up6-zQ7IOyqUg039S2d_qzkJ9f1Zcih5FbqwctSoKvdSvYIH-NWPlxZi12xlVjEtgDgNyFj8rdP4rAhzhHFgp548CzzMkmWU0NIigy8842Rnz9vysS/s400/the+tenement.jpg" width="278" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing:</span> D- </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story:</span> D+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects:</span> D+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328528/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Glen Baisley</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Joe Lauria</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Michael Gingold</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
C. J. DiMarsico</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
John Studol</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Mike Lane<br />
Ed Shelinsky</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">
Danielle Russo</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br />
<br />
<br />
Particular trigger warnings: sexual assault, animal cruelty,
prostitution, hard drug use</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Passes the Bechdel test? I don’t think so</div>
<br style="font-family: inherit;" />
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
I basically give a synopsis below, because it’s
hard to pick apart otherwise. Beware of spoilers all the way through.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The Tenement is a series of four
loosely related stories about different occupants of the same tenement house. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The movie starts with a man named
Ethan (Pete Barker) speaking to the owner of the building (Jude Pucillo.) Ethan
says that he used to live there forty years ago, and he wants to know if the
new owner has seen the building do anything strange to the people living there.
Ethan begins to reminisce about the time he lived there.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
We suddenly cut to a scene of a
girl being kidnapped and crucified as part of a cultic ritual, but we soon find
out that this is just a crappy movie within our crappy movie, as this is part
of Ethan’s memory. It’s 1980 and Ethan (Joe Lauria) lives in his apartment with
his bedridden mother (Doreen Valdati) and spends his time either at work or at
home watching horror films by director Winston Korman (Michael Gingold), whom
he idolizes. Well, Korman is in town casting for a new film, and Ethan is paid
to deliver black roses to him. He gets mistaken for a prospective actor, but
when he can’t act and freezes up, Korman laughs at him and mocks him until he
runs away. Ethan goes home, kills his cat, and then leaves his
overbearing mother. He dresses all in black, and goes to Korman’s house. Korman
is outside, doing all he possibly can to prove even further that he is a
caricature of a douchebag and we Should Not Like Him. After an awkward chase
scene, Ethan kills Korman with a shovel, dropping a black rose on the body,
becoming the “black rose killer.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
second story happens in 1990, and focuses on a young mute girl (mute apparently
due to something traumatic in her past, though this isn’t expanded on) named
Sarah Weston (C.J. DiMarsico). She spends her time waltzing alone to music from
her radio. A neighbor named Henry Wallace (John Studol) keeps watching her,
prompting her parents to take her away on a vacation for a while. They leave
her alone for a while, and Wallace breaks in and sexually assaults her. She
fights back, but he keeps overpowering her. In the midst of the rape, he
suddenly blacks out and appears to be hallucinating and recalling trauma from
his own childhood. He wakes back up in the living room, with Sarah gone. He
finds her in the bedroom, and approaches her, but she turns up her radio, he
starts screaming and holding his head, and then he disappears. Later on, with
the Weston family back at home, Sarah is seen dancing in her room, but the
shadows and mirror show that she’s dancing with some sort of creature.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
third story jumps forward nine years to 1999, and is about Jimmy (Mike Lane),
who has begun attending a therapy group to help him deal with his relatively
unspecified issues. He appears to mostly just be a shut-in. On his way home,
he’s attacked by a wild animal (and by wild animal, I mean a husky that just
kind of happily trotted behind him for about three seconds.) He’s bitten on the
arm, and he slowly starts becoming convinced that he’s turning into a werewolf.
He thinks the symptoms are obvious, though no one else sees the transformation.
He kills his friendly neighbor who apparently had a thing for him, he kills a male
prostitute, and then he kills a female dancer in a strip club. Here he’s
apprehended, and sentenced to life in a mental hospital. But then he’s attacked
by some apparently “real” werewolves, who want to kill him for bringing too
much attention to them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
fourth story happens in 2000 and is about another serial killer (Ed Shelinsky)
living in the tenement, who pretends to be a taxi driver to pick up women and
then torture and murder them. We see him capture and kill a prostitute, and
then go out “hunting” again. This time he picks up a girl (who I can’t remember
being named, but I believe is being played by Danielle Russo.) She has him take
her out to the place where Winston Korman, the horror director from before,
used to film his movies. She has to give him directions, but she says she’ll
just go in for a second to get money for the cab fare. When the taxi killer
follows her in and attacks her, she says she “likes it rough” and attacks him
back, saying it was obvious he wasn’t a real taxi driver because he didn’t know
the place she wanted him to take her, and the two fight some more. Apparently
they realize that they’re soul mates or something, and the two make out. Then
we see that they’ve joined forces and are killing people together. Aww.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
movie closes with the elderly Ethan and the owner discussing that they have
seen the house do strange things to people. Ethan lays a black rose on a nearby
bench. The owner (who by this point I was calling “goth Fabio”) confronts Simon
(Chris Alo) the local pimp and drug dealer, telling him to stop hanging around
and selling all he sells in front of the building. Simon pretty much blows him
off before hallucinating madly about drug use and overdosing and what the fuck
ever, while the owner stands nearby, leering at him, obviously the cause. The
end.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
This movie was pretty bad. One of
the reviews on the case says that it “certainly shows an affinity for the
genre” and we remarked that that seemed like a backhanded compliment. And that
really feels like the nicest thing I can say about it, too. It’s clear that the
makers really like horror films, and it seems like they probably even really
enjoyed making this movie, but I certainly can’t say that it was very good.
According to something else I found online, the director, Glen Baisley, was a
sexploitation film director in the 60s and 70s, and then filmed porn for a
while, before coming back to horror films, and I guess I wouldn’t have a hard
time believing it. (And the “Walter Korman” film we get to see a brief snippet
of during the first story is a perfect sexploitation/horror, to the point I
wonder if it was a clip from something the director did in the past.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
My problems with the movie are
varied. The acting was generally really substandard. Some actors were fine, but
some side characters delivered their lines so badly it sounded like they were
reading them off for the first time, and at other times it was obvious they
couldn’t remember their lines correctly. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The stories themselves just weren’t
that well-told in my opinion either. The first one, it sounds like all the
dialogue between Ethan and his mother was lifted from <i>Willard</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (which is a much better film.) They refuse to show
the mother for a while, and I wondered if it was going for the </span><i>Psycho</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-style twist, though apparently that was just a
deliberate allusion. It reminded me more of </span><i>Willard</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, anyway, down to the tone and pitch of the mother’s
voice. Plus there were the weird dangling plot threads like Ethan's hallucination-girlfriend. The fourth story just bored me more than anything else; it was too
bloodless to really be shocking the way it seemed to be aiming for, and it just
managed to leave no real impression. The second and third had at least glimmers
of interest for me. I want to know more about Sarah and the thing she was
dancing with. Does she have strange powers? Is she allied to some kind of demon
that killed her attacker? Is the creature a personification of the “monster”
she killed? And the third story, while (probably deliberately) ridiculously
silly, at least has a twist that could be interesting in a better film; the
idea that someone who pretends to be some kind of monster is killed by the real
thing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
As far as the anthology goes,
judging from the title and the prologue/epilogue frame story, we’re apparently
supposed to think that the building is somehow compelling people to become violent
or is giving them delusions and apparently occasionally psychic powers. But
without the occasional exterior shots of the tenement house, there’s nothing
that tells me that these people supposedly live in the same building; none of
them meet each other, there aren’t any other ties between the characters or
stories (aside from Gordon Korman being mentioned in two stories, and Ethan
being a character in one story and the frame,) there aren’t any other clues to
the setting. There’s also never any reason given for why the building would
have this effect on people. It really comes off as just being the most tenuous
possible way to connect four ideas that couldn’t quite be films on their own.
And despite all the stories being relatively short, averaging in the 20-30
minute range each, the film <i>drags.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The entire time we’re skipping
around from the 80s onward never felt convincing to me either – there was never
anything that made me believe we’d changed time periods. Hairstyles, clothing,
technology, etc. all remained so constant that it was hard to feel that this
was somewhere in the past, or that years were passing between the stories. And
Ethan, supposedly our “tie” between the past and the present of the building,
appears to have aged about fifty years since 1980, so either their math is bad,
or the frame story is set in the future.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The effects are nothing great.
Fights don’t look at all convincing, with it often being incredibly obvious
that there’s no force behind any of the blows. The movie doesn’t overly rely on
gore effects and the like, which to me is a point in its favor, since the blood
effects they have aren’t that good. Some of the scenes ended up prompting
laughter when it wasn’t intentionally funny. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Pretty much everything from the
acting to the effects to the scenarios just feel completely unconvincing. And allegedly this is part one of a trilogy… I’m not sure how to justify continuing
this through two more films.</div>
<br />mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-4774320102773645282012-10-05T09:51:00.000-06:002013-02-24T19:36:49.805-07:00Horror Movie Review: Side Sho (2007)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCd1m8twbtgCNH-cVsttVqapALSfjgM3YvEm2u_oWJakPwSM4LXtMrxe4nmuA_e_NzbJe56Yv73LtWTDfYbk2IPwT5d-ZWrNJ_LNOB9aN5baLeQzaCqABK_7N9chDCzuhWthWP0nUS7CgH/s1600/sidesho.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCd1m8twbtgCNH-cVsttVqapALSfjgM3YvEm2u_oWJakPwSM4LXtMrxe4nmuA_e_NzbJe56Yv73LtWTDfYbk2IPwT5d-ZWrNJ_LNOB9aN5baLeQzaCqABK_7N9chDCzuhWthWP0nUS7CgH/s320/sidesho.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span> B-
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting:</span> C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing: </span>C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story:</span> C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects:</span> B+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects:</span> B+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0965443/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Michael D’Anna</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
J.D. Hart</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Toni Robider</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dana Poulson</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Elizabeth Bailey</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hunter Ballard</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
J.R.
Reynolds </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This
movie starts off with a pretty awesome opening credits sequence, using vintage
photos and advertisements for actual freakshows and side shows that were
popular in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, that was probably my favorite part
of the movie.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
basic plot is that a typical suburban American family (plus a friend) is on
vacation, heading home on their roadtrip. The father, John (J.D. Hart), is
stopping at old roadside amusement parks and side shows in order to take
photographs for a book he’s putting together. At a gas station somewhere in
Florida, he finds out about a supposedly abandoned freak show just down the
road, so the family takes a slight detour, despite the complaints of the
daughter, Christy (Toni Robider), and her friend Steffi (Elizabeth Bailey.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Turns
out that “Side Sho” is not actually abandoned, and the barker (J.R. Reynolds)
offers to give them a tour. The family splits up, the girls and the mother,
Gwen (Dana Poulson), going one way, the son, Cory (Hunter Ballard) going around
the grounds to take pictures, and the father heading with the barker to the
“real” freak show. Turns out that it’s full of twisted things like malformed
human fetuses, so John freaks out and intends to get the family out of there.
Meanwhile Cory has an after school special “we can all be friends despite our
differences” moment with a young boy with a facial deformity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
family decides to leave, and they rush out of there, but not before a
mysterious someone puts water in their gas tank! So the car conveniently dies
in front of a group of creepy cabins, and the man there says that it was an old
fishing camp. He’ll let them stay the night, since it’s getting dark. But
shock! awe! horror! This used to be a prison camp! And the man letting them
stay there is part of an extended family of deformed freaks descended from the
prisoners, as are the barker and the woman from the gas station, and they
intend to kill the father and the son, while keeping the women as “new breeding
stock” since they’re getting so inbred!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What
follows for the last two thirds of the movie is your basic slasher
run-and-escape-and-fight-and-die-and-kill-and-run-some-more, until the end when
two of our heroes escape, to be picked up by a police officer… but as the scene
ends, we see that HE IS ONE OF THE DEFORMED FREAK FAMILY.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
movie is pretty average, which in some ways is a shame because the tech is
great. The cinematography is fantastic, and the sound direction is good as
well. Set design and such is also great. Leonard Wolf provides the soundtrack,
which has more presence than I’m used to (by which I mean I noticed it pretty
constantly, rather than it fading into the background) but it was well done and
has some pretty good tracks. It’s actually kind of sad that such good tech went to a film
that’s so average in many regards.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
acting is middle of the road. It’s not unwatchable, but particularly at the
beginning, the dialogue is horribly stilted. Very “you have said your line,
therefore I will now respond with my line,” not flowing like anything resembling
an actual conversation. It sounded almost like sitcom dialogue where they pause
for the laugh-track or other audience reaction. This seemed to be less of an
issue later in the movie, though probably because it was more running and
screaming and less “conversation.” The woman from the gas station they meet at
the beginning bothered me the most as far as acting – she looked like a kid
doing an impression of a crotchety old woman, scrunching up her face to talk
out the side of her mouth (if you ever watched the 90s kid show “The Amanda
Show” on Nickelodeon… it looked like Amanda Bynes’ old woman impression)… It
was distractingly awkward looking.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
story itself is pretty basic slasher fare, without really adding anything new.
The effects are pretty good, from the makeup of the freak family to the blood.
And while the plot is standard, and you can pretty well guess which characters
are going to be offed, the death scenes are pretty creative. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen two reptile-related deaths in the same non-reptile-horror film – one
person having their face crushed in with a turtle, one getting a terrarium with
a poisonous snake smashed on his head. Lots of killing of the innocents, lots
of return killings of the villains. But it’s not aided by having the
predictable “twist” ending of the escape-but-not-really-because-it-was-a-trap.
That just shoved it into eye-rolling territory for me.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-19900407316366667512012-10-03T10:08:00.002-06:002013-02-24T19:40:07.562-07:00Horror Movie Quick Review: Fertile Ground (2010)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGL5mcymoKYk9sUSEHO4ewmHRSxKbLcHW65l8YjIlO18ONCt9NzZv6rJek4_RcIfCMDQlADvdOG0sj2gY5C0-9RfN4gOi9D4yspUdZ2YHPJdz_EEWWCqwNuu9O_9hkYBgP4rA09dY7yYQY/s1600/fertile-ground.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGL5mcymoKYk9sUSEHO4ewmHRSxKbLcHW65l8YjIlO18ONCt9NzZv6rJek4_RcIfCMDQlADvdOG0sj2gY5C0-9RfN4gOi9D4yspUdZ2YHPJdz_EEWWCqwNuu9O_9hkYBgP4rA09dY7yYQY/s400/fertile-ground.jpg" width="270" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span> C+
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515199/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Adam Gierasch</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Gale Harold</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leisha Hailey</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Fertile
Ground</i> is the story of
married couple Nate (Gale Harold) and Emily Weaver (Leisha Hailey). After Emily
has a tragic miscarriage, they move to Nate’s ancestral home in the country,
presumably in order to move on. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
As
time goes on, Emily begins to believe the house is haunted, and she finds
disturbing materials such as the diary of a former Weaver bride who was eventually
murdered by her husband. Human remains are found in their yard, and a local
historian tells Emily how many strangely similar deaths have occurred in that
house.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span> </span>Nate begins to act strangely and
threateningly toward her. She realizes that an ancestor of Nate’s murdered his
wife there, and that ever since, the people in the house have been essentially
possessed by his spirit, accounting for the near identical deaths of so many
women at the hands of men in the house.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
There
was a lot that I enjoyed, particularly the artistic direction. There was some
really great use of light and shadow, some beautifully framed shots, etc. The
story itself was pretty good, if relatively typical of ghost stories (the
“ghosts possessing and reliving significant events/changing the people present”
isn’t exactly original… see<i>, </i>duh<i>, The Shining</i> or <i>Amityville Horror</i> and countless others.) I thought it was pretty well acted,
and liked the characters well enough. Parts of the story dragged a bit, mostly
because it was too predictable to justify the sometimes drawn-out suspense.
There were a couple parts I found genuinely creepy, but some parts fell flat.
For better or worse, the movie doesn’t contain much gore, which I generally
like, since over-reliance on gore has become lazy shorthand for “this is a
horror movie!” Few people seemed to like this one, largely because of its slow
pace and somewhat predictable story. I do think they’re valid criticisms, but
if you can get beyond the pacing, I think it’s still a decent ghost story.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-8884817063302418052012-10-01T10:02:00.003-06:002013-02-24T19:36:33.787-07:00Horror Movie Review: Razor's Ring (2008)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTeXFLl2jPKE97V1GtlObdXGmDkMxD0JnOvmK02wUD1oso_XnJjmQuI8JWFbRFN_0zLahxMgOEKJ5qSlaNVp8cLOnHtthB0XwT1s1DHnzrBGXAszve5_ZiZLXQRgVHH3W6kieXBEaL-myW/s1600/razorring2008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTeXFLl2jPKE97V1GtlObdXGmDkMxD0JnOvmK02wUD1oso_XnJjmQuI8JWFbRFN_0zLahxMgOEKJ5qSlaNVp8cLOnHtthB0XwT1s1DHnzrBGXAszve5_ZiZLXQRgVHH3W6kieXBEaL-myW/s320/razorring2008.jpg" width="226" /></a><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span>
D-</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting: </span>D+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects:</span> F</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1189441/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Directed by: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Morgan Hampton</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Wayne Casey</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
AnnieScott Rogers</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Paul Schilens</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Lisa Wharton</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Nate Duncan</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
basic plot of this one is that an innocent guy named Scott (Wayne Casey) is
just out for a jog, when he’s suddenly kidnapped by the couple Razor (Paul
Schilens) and Julie (Lisa Wharton.) Their motives for this are never really
explained… they’re both wanted by the police, but they’re driving around
running over people and animals as a game, and for some reason they grab Scott
and take him with.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
They
aim to run over a little girl, and Scott attempts to get control of the car,
and they end up hitting an old man. The man’s family members attack the three,
capturing them and taking them to see “Red.” The three are kept in a shed,
where they’re tormented in various ways (Razor has a finger cut off, Julie is
forced to stand naked on their dinner table, Scott gets stabbed…) And Red
(AnnieScott Rogers,) the apparent matriarch of the group insists that she’ll
slowly let each of them go over the next few weeks, so her family will think
they’ve been justly taken care of.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Blah
blah, stuff happens, Julie and Razor are supposedly let go, Scott is allowed to
come live in the house rather than the shed, and he’s taken to a big party
they’re putting on. As he’s eating, he finds Razor’s ring (clever title!) in
his food, and he realizes that OMG THEY’VE BEEN EATING PEOPLE. AND HE’S NEXT.
Either a Soylent Green or a Troll 2 joke would be appropriate here.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers!</span>
He escapes, there’s the fakest explosion ever, and he returns to society. But
then he realizes that he’s now addicted to eating human flesh! He then buys the
land the cannibals were living on, and is apparently planning to eat his
girlfriend? Or something. (<span style="color: #990000;">End spoilers.</span>)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Anyway,
not a good film. The characterization was very inconsistent – Razor and Julie
plan to pin the death of the old man on Scott, Scott plans to tell the truth
about his non-involvement, so they’re fighting with each other most of the
time. But then suddenly they’ll be acting like great friends, trying to work
together, or just talking to each other. And what’s ostensibly a couple days
later (though we’re told that it’s been weeks, sometimes; there’s no real sense
of time passing) Razor and Scott sit talking about how wonderful the food is,
and how great things are. (It’s funny because they’re EATING JULIE, GET IT?)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
acting is pretty poor, though not the worst out there. Some is likely more
budget than anything, but in a couple scenes it appears an actor screws up a
line and then just has to roll with it. None of the characters strike me as
very believable in their roles, though. The one exception is probably
AnnieScott Rogers as Red, as she’s pretty entertaining. She falls into the
“watch my extreme mood shifts to show I’m evil” acting camp, and could be
considered the low-budget Kathy Bates-as-Annie Wilkes, but she’s pretty good as
both a violent psychopath and as the kindly grandmother-type.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
sound direction was all right, but the filming was not. It appears to be done
almost exclusively with a handheld camera, sometimes going out of focus, always
unsteady, using clumsy zooms to focus on things. Scenes are terribly edited
together, in some cases making it painfully clear that the two people or events that are
being cut between aren’t happening even remotely near each other.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
effects are laughable. Most of the gory scenes aren’t shown, probably for the
better, because the blood effects are pretty sub-standard. And the explosion at
the end… we both literally started laughing at how silly it looked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
This
movie definitely felt like a waste of time. But it gets a D simply because my
bar for an F has been set so incredibly low.<br />
<br />
(Happy October, everyone!) </div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-77986596296609588792012-09-28T09:59:00.000-06:002013-02-24T18:42:56.026-07:00Horror Movie Review: 100 Feet (2008)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA68SLaSoFITgrg_jqhGX6lozOoOtyMgechf1B30IOrCS_gpS_86eCj4HhNeYbAh2K_DToRiBNDYXkYHz87-08ONsRiDG5YZD309MvvRHNLLqeQjsB27znjmqsO8UMqmb-opChtfTD-J40/s1600/100_Feet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA68SLaSoFITgrg_jqhGX6lozOoOtyMgechf1B30IOrCS_gpS_86eCj4HhNeYbAh2K_DToRiBNDYXkYHz87-08ONsRiDG5YZD309MvvRHNLLqeQjsB27znjmqsO8UMqmb-opChtfTD-J40/s1600/100_Feet.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span> B</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting: </span>B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing:</span> B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story: </span>B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects:</span> B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects:</span> C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0899128/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Eric Red</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Starring:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Famke Janssen</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Bobby Cannavale</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Ed Westwick</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Michael Pare</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;">Particular triggers:</span> domestic violence</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Passes the Bechdel test?</span> yes, but barely</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<i>100
Feet</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is the story of a woman named Marnie
Watson (Famke Janssen), who is placed under house arrest after being found
guilty of the murder of her husband, Mike (Michael Pare). Mike was abusive, and
the murder was in self-defense; Marnie had reported him several times to the
police, but as Mike himself was a cop, little was done and the investigations
were generally dropped. Complicating things, the cop in charge of Marnie, named
Shanks (Bobby Cannavale), was Mike’s partner.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
“100
Feet” refers to the distance that Marnie is allowed to travel – any farther,
and the anklet she wears will send a signal to the police, and she’ll be sent
back to prison.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
It
quickly becomes clear that Mike’s ghost is haunting the house, and he continues
to attack her. Unwilling to leave or be sent back to prison, Marnie attempts
exorcisms, attempts to force Mike’s spirit out of the house by getting rid of
his possessions, etc. but nothing works. Some of the assaults against her are
investigated by Shanks, who is beginning to believe that someone else is
beating Marnie, and that this other person may be the one actually responsible
for killing Mike.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
It’s
hard to say much else without being too spoiler-heavy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I actually really like this movie.
I find Marnie’s character interesting and sympathetic, not quite the same as
the average female horror movie protagonist. She seems genuinely conflicted,
not feeling guilty for killing her husband because of the circumstances, but
regretting that it happened. She’s imperfect, but her actions are consistent
with her character. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The small cast helps the film feel
very self-contained, and emphasizes the feeling of isolation that Marnie
experiences in the house.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I enjoy the premise of being
literally trapped in a house with something malevolent, and by something more
than a broken-down car or a silly dare. (And yes, I remember that <i>Disturbia</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> also used the “house arrest” premise, but I like its
use in this movie far more, and that’s about the only way the films are at all
comparable.) Also in the category of at least kind of subverting common tropes,
while she does refuse to seek outside help, this also makes sense for her
character. After her experiences, of course she’s not going to ask Shanks or
any other cops for help.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The biggest detractor in my opinion
is the ending, which is tied together a little too neatly and rapidly. The
ultimate way they get rid of Mike’s ghost works, I suppose, but seems like
something that would have occurred to her earlier. The effects are also a bit
hit-or-miss. They aren’t the most ridiculous, but a few times the ghost
modeling is quite fake looking (when he’s heavily active) and one scene in
particular has pretty laughable blood effects.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Occasionally this one runs on Syfy,
and I’d certainly recommend the watch if it does come up. It’s also had a DVD
release, and it’s one that I enjoyed enough that I’m considering purchasing it.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-84456715161475432412012-09-24T09:50:00.002-06:002013-02-24T19:40:07.564-07:00Horror Movie Quick Review: Case 39 (2009)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJycMdB6tmdgmMlua9LsfV6kb8PZiXonTrp0B97skcK119vmP6l7wy3cSxNeoTwh4zhyphenhyphenWrNVbDva34T9PlnxoipXMDB33CcLIL7Kw0t16AD3LtWp90OitZko1_90Evwt2_nts3PVyeZuKs/s1600/case-39.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJycMdB6tmdgmMlua9LsfV6kb8PZiXonTrp0B97skcK119vmP6l7wy3cSxNeoTwh4zhyphenhyphenWrNVbDva34T9PlnxoipXMDB33CcLIL7Kw0t16AD3LtWp90OitZko1_90Evwt2_nts3PVyeZuKs/s320/case-39.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: B
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795351/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Christian
Alvart</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Renee Zellweger</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jodelle Ferland</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Case 39</i> is about a social worker named Emily
Jenkins (Renee Zellweger) who is beyond overworked, but takes on the case of a
girl named Lilith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland.) There seems to be a severe case
of abuse towards the girl, seemingly confirmed when Lilith’s parents try to
murder her. The parents are found not guilty by reason of insanity as they
claim that Lilith is a demon and they had no choice but to kill her. Emily ends
up taking Lilith in until a better foster home can be found, but then as people
in Emily’s life begin to die under mysterious circumstances, she realizes that
Lilith’s parents may have been right.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m a fan of
evil child movies, so I liked <i>Case 39</i>. It does a pretty good job of setting Lilith up as the
innocent victim (though somewhat unfortunately because of the expectations of
it being a horror movie, and especially after reading a summary of it, the
audience will still realize that she’s evil, so there’s not much opportunity
for surprise.) It’s well-acted (and I really like Jodelle Ferland, as far as
child actresses go) and the characters are pretty good as well. Emily’s
conflict over proper professional behavior vs. legitimate worry for Lilith is
believably handled. In a few ways it felt like the ending and resolution were a
little bit rushed, and I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to not realize that
Emily is probably going to wind up spending a good chunk of her life in prison
after the credits roll. The film isn’t the most groundbreaking or original
offering, and it felt to me like there was just something kind of missing, but
it’s a well put together film that is largely successful in telling its story.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-75037366730996706932012-09-20T18:33:00.001-06:002013-02-24T18:42:56.025-07:00Horror Movie Reviews: Intermedio (2005)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRQtUVrvWcgxoBL5JcMQKdFdkDIVz36Y11eaMgJvnqgBrEg19UweudjlkSNWUP9g51nSZdZtJdPTLl7_rY7ySGXjIAwX8OR2VHZdbU95NTkxaNIHzqUH5HY5xQ6TiSxL3_iY8GRX9K4ano/s1600/intermedio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRQtUVrvWcgxoBL5JcMQKdFdkDIVz36Y11eaMgJvnqgBrEg19UweudjlkSNWUP9g51nSZdZtJdPTLl7_rY7ySGXjIAwX8OR2VHZdbU95NTkxaNIHzqUH5HY5xQ6TiSxL3_iY8GRX9K4ano/s400/intermedio.jpg" width="291" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall:</span> F</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting: </span>D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing:</span> F</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story:</span> D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects: </span>F</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects:</span> F</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414161/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Andrew Lauer</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Edward Furlong</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Steve Railsback</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Cerina Vincent</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Amber Benson</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Callard Harris</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Paul Cram</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Alejandro Samaniego</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Dean M. Arevalo</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
What the ass, man? This sucks.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
This was a bad movie. Like… in some
ways just bafflingly bad. <span style="color: #990000;">Also, I give basically an entire synopsis of the film
below, so it’s super heavy on spoilers. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>Okay,
so we’ve got four main characters. Malik (Edward Furlong) lives out in
California with his girlfriend Barbie (Amber Benson). His childhood friend Gen
(Cerina Vincent) and her boyfriend Wes (Callard Harris) come by to visit, and
Wes has a super-awesome plan for them to meet some Mexican drug dealers, spend
all their money on some super-awesome marijuana that’s apparently the best weed
in the history of weed, and sell it for a super-awesome profit back in the US.
As you do.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span><i>But</i><span style="font-style: normal;">… the tunnel they have to go through turns out to be
the very tunnel that Malik and Gen’s respective fathers disappeared down when
the two were kids! But the four decide to go down these tunnels, even though
the Mexican drug dealers insist on not going all the way to the halfway point
due to the fear of “intermedios.” The intermedios are supposedly ghosts trapped
in between the realm of the living and the dead. There’s also some other story
that’s tied in somehow about how someone who catches the blood of a dead man
before it hits the ground will become immortal or something. It’s a little
vague.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>As
they go through the tunnels, some weird stuff happens, though it’s pretty
disjointed. A guy appears to be following them, knocking out the lights and the
like. After the four kids meet up with the drug dealers Jorge (Alejandro
Samaniego) and Al (Dean M. Arevalo), whoever is stalking them uses a mysterious
amulet apparently filled with blood to summon ghosts to attack them. One kills
Al, and the others run away. They get separated, with Wes running around alone
and yelling for quite a while. (Giving us the wonderful line “What the ass?”)
Barbie gets cut in half while they try to run away, and Jorge’s fingers also
get cut off. They all get lost in the tunnels, but end up in a safehouse that’s
blockaded from the inside. They keep running into a ghost-like boy named Zee
(Paul Cram), who seems mostly to want to help them. Wes semi-sacrifices himself
so that Gen and Malik can get away, and they crawl through a tunnel to a room
filled with bodies. They end up escaping, and ask for a ride from a local
(Steve Railsback). He says he’ll drive them to the nearest town, though the
viewer knows that he’s the creepy guy who was summoning ghosts before! He
starts going on a rant about how his son died in those tunnels, and how the
papers made him out to be a terrible person, but the only ones to blame are the
drug dealers and people like Malik, Gen, and their friends. He gives Gen some
beer (from a sealed can) and she passes out, he drives nails into Malik’s legs
before knocking him out with chloroform. The pair wakes up back in the room
with the dead bodies, but they find another tunnel to escape out of. They come
up into a bedroom that’s covered in news clippings about the boy, Zee, who was
killed presumably because he was a drug runner. They realize that the creepy
old guy must be Zee’s father.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>The
old guy comes back and we get a flashback of sorts explaining how he actually
murdered Zee. The old guy tries again to kill Malik and Gen, but the
previously-silent Zee tells him to stop. Gen grabs the old man’s amulet, which
takes away his powers over the ghosts, who then kill him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>Malik
and Gen get out of the tunnels and get a ride. They then get a hotel room, and
the two appear to have decided to become romantically involved. The camera pans
out their window, where the ghosts of Barbie and Wes are staring at them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>This
movie was just… badly done. The plot isn’t anything special, but could have
been an average or above average movie if done correctly. They even have some
real actors! But no, it’s presumably poorly directed or something, because the
acting is pretty shoddy, and Edward Furlong pretty much just yells all of his
lines.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span> </span>The
story also is just absolutely rife with plot holes. There’s little reason for
them all to go down there, particularly since Barbie is on crutches the whole
time. (Trivia tells me that this is because Amber Benson actually was injured,
so the crutches were written in for the character, but going into a tunnel with
someone who can’t walk is still a stupid idea in-film.) Even down to simple
stuff like the old guy kidnapping and knocking Gen and Malik out, leaving them
in a room, and then coming back later to kill them. Why did he leave them at
all?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The ghost effects are always bad,
but additionally are inconsistent. Sometimes they’re bad CG blurs, sometimes
they appear to be guys in bad skeleton costumes. The other effects such as the
blood and gore stuff is also poorly done.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Some stuff strays between plot
hole, inconsistency, and plain incompetence. Several scenes have had the film
flipped, so text on people’s shirts appears backwards. Some scenes are entirely
reused, just with the film flipped, like when they crawl through the tunnels.
When Wes is running through the tunnels he alternately is carrying his backpack
and not carrying anything, and eventually inexplicably loses his shirt. Zee is
alternately called Zeke and Zack and I think something else throughout the
movie. It’s shown that his father killed him by strangling him, but we got a
“shocking” scene earlier where you could see him from behind and it appeared
he’d been shot in the head. When Gen steals the old man’s amulet and he’s shown
frantically trying to get it back, he’s STILL WEARING THE DAMN THING. Gen’s
tank top starts out at a reasonable length, and gets progressively shorter
through the film (presumably whenever they figured people’s attention was
waning) until we start to get some gratuitous underboob shots. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
This movie pretty much had no
saving points. It’s kind of funny in an unintentionally-bad-movie way, but
really isn’t worth seeing unless you want it for that reason. (And while I
think the actors realized how bad it was, I don’t think it was truly intended
to be as awful as it was… I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem quite
self-aware enough for that. If I AM wrong, then I still think the film fails to achieve its goal.) Even if you’re watching it for the “hey, this is a
bad movie, let’s laugh at it” reason, it’s more obnoxious than entertaining a
lot of the time. Though at least we now have knowledge of the phrase “what the
ass, man?” which has entered into near-daily use in our household.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-70938959246820970472012-03-25T18:33:00.000-06:002013-02-27T03:07:58.529-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episode 8<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Episode 8: Row Row Row Your Boat
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2209823/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Gary Fleder</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Joe Anderson </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leslie Hope </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eloise Mumford
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paul
Blackthorne </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Daniel Zacapa </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pauline Gaitan
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thomas
Kretschmann </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shaun Parkes </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bruce
Greenwood</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Scott Michael
Foster</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So. Yeah.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Having
found Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), the crew of the Magus is finally heading
for home, intending to leave the Boíuna (the bizarre portion of the river
they’ve been on) far behind them. Clark (Paul Blackthorne) gets involved with
doing some final interviews for the crew, and speaks about how he’ll edit the
video together for his TV show once they get home. Emmet, while surprised that
the Boíuna and the related supernatural entities saved his life, seems to
feel his quest was a mistake. He believes that the paranormal events that
occurred really were warnings that he should have heeded. Lena (Eloise Mumford)
desperately wants to know how she’s connected to everything, with her
suspicious birthmark, but Emmet tells her to forget it, that he was wrong in
thinking that the two of them had some special destiny related to the place.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>While
Lincoln (Joe Anderson) and Emmet converse on deck, someone fires a shot at
Emmet, but misses and fatally wounds Lincoln. The crew is unsuccessful at
finding out the culprit since many have motives; Clark is in love with Tess,
Jonas (Scott Michael Foster) was abandoned by Emmet, Kurt (Thomas Kretschmann)
was overheard planning to kill Emmet (though he insists he’d never have missed
the shot), Lena’s father died because of Emmet’s quest…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>[<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers
ahead!</span>]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Against
Emmet’s wishes and the wishes of her own father, Jahel (Pauline Gaitan)
involves Tess in a ritual to call Lincoln’s spirit back to his body. The ritual
involves calling on the Boíuna, which is not only the stretch of river, but is
also an entity that is “God of Demons,” to return Lincoln’s spirit. Initially
it seems to work, and Lincoln awakes, and says it was Kurt who shot him. Kurt
is locked away by the crew. But then when alone in the kitchen with Jonas,
Lincoln reveals that he actually saw <i>Jonas</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
shoot him. Then Lincoln kills him with seemingly supernatural strength. An
obviously not-himself Lincoln also confronts Kurt, speaking German, telling him
that Kurt isn’t needed to protect The Source; Lincoln (or the thing in his
body) is enough.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Meanwhile,
Emmet realizes that this can’t really be Lincoln; he’s too affectionate towards
Emmet, when they haven’t been on good terms since Lincoln’s childhood. Emmet
gets Lena to make Lincoln drink something, which sickens him and proves demonic
possession.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>It
turns out the Boíuna is also possessing his body, though Lincoln’s spirit is
there as well. The demon taunts them, especially Emmet and his lack of
knowledge about Lincoln, and assaults Lena, thwarting their attempts at an
exorcism. Eventually they speak to Kurt, as he had his own reasons for being in
the region. He tells them he won’t attack Emmet, and then explains that a
demonic possession can only be fought from within; Lincoln has to will the Boíuna out of his body. Speaking to Lincoln, they give him enough strength to
take his body back.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Afterwards,
Emilio (Daniel Zacapa) speaks to Jahel, telling her why he’s tried to keep her
from using her gifts. Her mother, who she believed to be dead, was driven mad
by the voices of spirits demanding her help. He hasn’t wanted the same fate for
Jahel.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Soon
they approach the end of the Boíuna, intending to rejoin the main Amazon, and a
small village. But things aren’t where they’re supposed to be! And they lose
the link to the satellite map! Sending up a sky camera, it’s revealed that the
forest and river are literally changing in front of them, and it will not allow
them to leave.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>[<span style="color: #990000;">End
of serious plot spoilers. But spoilers will continue in my reaction below.</span>]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>So.
This is how this season ends. The episode isn’t really all that bad. The
demonic possession thing is at least fitting with the rest of the series. And quite
honestly, the effects of Lincoln twisting around while possessed have been some
of the better ones in my opinion. Characterizing the Boíuna as both an entity
and a location simultaneously is cool; it strikes me as at least feeling rather
authentic to the region, even if the specific entity in question isn’t a real
figure. (And I do not know if it is or not.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>However,
for a show that has a questionable future, this was an immensely unsatisfying
ending. Literally just about nothing has been wrapped up or given explanation.
Leaving some things to interpretation or as mysteries is one thing, especially
if there’s a definite future for the series to continue with, or if something
being unexplained has some sort of point. But this is pretty much NOTHING, verging
into the territory <i>Lost</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> infamously fell
into with “we just didn’t plan this shit out!” Other than some random things
like Clark doing final interviews, this didn’t in any way feel like a season
finale. Not that I was expecting (or wanting!) it to end with them all
surviving and making it home, but that this feels just like an episode from the
middle of a story somewhere, with no real sense of closure whatsoever.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>A
few of the things we’re left wondering about:
What is with Lena’s birthmark, and the prophecy tied to it that Emmet believed
in? What exactly is The Source? Why was Emmet’s life spared if the Boiuna won’t
allow them to leave? Is there more explanation about the “angel-like” Zulo
tribe? Why is Kurt there, and what is his connection to the area from before
the series? What was with the research facility Mina had infiltrated, and
how/why did they turn into zombies? Who locked the demon in the Magus, the one
they found in the very first episode? <b>If they never make it off the river,
how are we viewing “found footage” from their tapes? </b>And this is not an exhaustive list.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>In
having none of these things explained, it feels like many of them had no
purpose whatsoever. “The Source” was kind of downplayed here, with the Boíuna
itself being the entity responsible for at least some of the paranormal things,
contrasted to episode 6 when it was played up as what Emmet had devoted his
life to finding. The symbol on the necklace Emmet gave to Lincoln, which is
also Lena’s birthmark, which was also seen on the body of Zulo tribesman in the
research facility… that and the supposed prophecy have never been relevant to
the plot! So why were they in there at all? Why have a forced camera footage
feel, which was often a detriment, feeling contrived and awkward, without having
any plausible way for the “found footage” to actually <i>be found?</i><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Now,
the series isn’t officially cancelled. But it isn’t renewed officially yet,
either. Viewership has been pretty low and declining, which I can’t really
fault audiences for considering how disappointing most of the episodes have
been. Apparently there are talks to move the show to Netflix’s streaming
service for future episodes/seasons. And there’s no guarantee that even if
someone makes more of the series that it’ll follow the same characters.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>If
this episode came in the middle somewhere, this
would probably be one of my favorites. The demonic possession was fitting for
the series, and was well handled. I liked Joe Anderson’s acting between Lincoln
as normal and in his possessed state – it was subtle enough until the attempted
exorcisms that it didn’t seem ridiculous, but the difference was obvious. The
rest of the acting was competent, though not perfect. Like I said, the effects
were pretty good this time, and the story was engaging. If this had been “just
another episode” it’d be a solid B. But as it is, it’s such an unsatisfying
ending to the season (and maybe the series) that I have to knock it down just a
bit. C+ still seems generous for how unfulfilling it was as a finale, but I did
enjoy the episode, and don’t want to let feelings on the series as a whole
color that too much.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Because
as a whole, the series disappointed me. The quality was very all over the
place, straying from subtlety to over the top ridiculousness in almost every
aspect, from acting to writing to effects to story. Some of the characters are
intriguing; I’ve grown to like Kurt quite a bit, and Jahel is great when she
gets to do something besides provide plot-relevant exposition. The understated
drama and implication that Emmet focused too much on Lena because of her
birthmark, and that being the cause for the emotional distance between him and
Lincoln had potential, especially if Lena was going to have some type of
special “destiny” that Lincoln didn’t. But the lack of consistency, not to
mention dangling plot threads, is a huge problem for the series. While my
individual episode grades have ranged from average (C), to slightly above
average (B-), the series as a whole would probably wind up more with a C-. Not
quite bad enough for a D, but still below average, because of all that
inconsistency and wasted potential.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Additionally,
this feels like exactly the wrong length for this story to be. It could have
been a decent movie, and could have lost a lot of the irrelevant filler that so
many earlier episodes contained. Or it could have been a better long-form
series, where episodes focusing on single legends, areas, or creatures would be
more appropriate, and episodes could be devoted to character development without
sacrificing so much of a limited amount of time. Of course, there’s the
possibility that the series will continue and will wrap up all the loose ends
I’m complaining about. But there’s also a possibility that it will do no such
thing. And even if it does come back to wrap things up and maybe even gain some
consistency… will enough people still care?</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-8391346199711151572012-03-22T18:20:00.000-06:002013-02-27T03:07:58.531-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episode 7<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Episode 7: The Experiment
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2128312/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Kenneth Fink</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Joe Anderson </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Leslie Hope </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Eloise Mumford
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Paul
Blackthorne </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Daniel Zacapa </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Pauline Gaitan
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Thomas
Kretschmann </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Shaun Parkes </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Bruce
Greenwood</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Scott Michael
Foster</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Katie
Featherston</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
[<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers pretty much the whole damn time, this time.</span>]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Zombies. We went with zombies? Really?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Picking up directly after the end
of episode 6, the crew has arrived at the outpost where they hope to find Emmet
(Bruce Greenwood). But it appears to be entirely deserted, and oddly like the
abandonment happened very suddenly. Wandering around, they discover that this
was a research facility, and Lincoln (Joe Anderson) speculates that they were
trying to find a cure for cancer. Much of their experimentation appears to have
been unethical, killing and studying the Zulo tribe members, who supposedly have
nearly impossible good health. The crew then comes across a freezer filled with
decaying human bodies, though Emmet is not among them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Kurt (Thomas Kretschmann) goes off
alone, followed by A.J. (Shaun Parkes). He finds a photo of himself and a woman
revealed to have been his fiancée. He also finds Rabbit (Katie Featherston),
the camerawoman who abandoned Emmet in the jungle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
She reveals that Emmet was in the
facility, and though he was still very sick he’d been recovering. But then the
crew is attacked by some of the inhabitants of the facility, who have somehow
been thrown into a cannibalistic fury. Yep. We’ve got zombies. The
zombie-fication is courtesy of Kurt’s fiancée, Mina (Lili Bordán), who was also
on a security mission. She interrupted the scientists dissecting one of the
Zulo tribesmen, telling them that their research would never leave. Shooting
them, she apparently released some type of… virus? energy? or something that
has turned them into zombies. She, too, has been infected.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Tess (Leslie Hope) nearly gives up
hope of finding Emmet, though there’ve been clues that he survived. Then they
spot a dragonfly, and recognize it as a symbol that’s always led them closer to
finding him. Ultimately, they discover him in some type of cocoon, barely
alive. Frantically trying to escape from the cannibalistic doctors and soldiers
of the base, they make it back to the Magus. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
But some of the zombies have
followed them, and attack. Rabbit is killed, Kurt has to shoot Mina, and Tess
is nearly killed. But at the last moment, she is saved by Emmet, who is out of his
coma.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Well, again, at least this episode
has plot. But seriously, I just can’t get past the fact that we brought zombies
into it. I love zombies, don’t get me wrong. But they’re an obvious trend as
far as horror and general pop culture goes, and this just feels… weird and out
of place. The horror prior to this may not have been super successful in any
consistent way, but focusing on supposed regional legends and creepy things at
least gave the show some distinction. Or having the ghost ship, which at least
made sense as a plot having to do with being trapped on the river. But zombies
have nothing to do with anything except as a “hey, this is a trendy thing right
now.” I suppose it could be making a point about the excesses of science trying
to understand or replicate or thwart nature, and how it will end in disaster…
but isn’t that more or less all the other zombie movies out there?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Leaving that aside, I guess it was
an okay episode. The found footage style is starting to feel extra contrived,
though, in some regards. Not that it was seamless and totally believable
before. But just happening to find the computer in the facility, that just
happens to contain the footage of Mina shooting the scientists… way too
convenient. Similarly, deliberately <i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
showing the scary things gets frustrating, too. Like supposedly the cameraman
is disgusted so we don’t get to see more than a tiny glimpse of the bodies in
the freezer. It’s not necessarily unrealistic, but it still <i>feels</i> fake. The
“less is more” theory of horror doesn’t always work in my opinion. Sometimes
it’s a good way to build tension, but sometimes when it comes to filming it
just seems like a way to mask laziness and bad effects.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I’m liking the development we got
for Kurt, even though it doesn’t explain all of his creepy behavior throughout
the series, or <i>why</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> he (and Mina?) were
on the mission that he reveals to A.J. [<span style="color: #990000;">Extra heavy spoilers</span>]: He reveals he
intends to kill Emmet, probably to “protect the Source” as we’ve gotten cryptic
hints about. And since he seemed to know that Mina would be in the outpost,
they may have both been on complementary missions to do so. [<span style="color: #990000;">End of spoilers.</span>]
I like Kurt’s willingness to discuss his secret plans and mission in German,
since no one around understands him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The cocoon thing with Emmet was…
weird. It was intercut with a clip from his nature show about how some
butterflies and dragonflies will essentially retreat into a pupa-like state in
order to wait out hardship, sometimes for months or years. (While I know of
fish and frog species that do something similar by retreating to a near-coma
until conditions improve, I didn’t actually know of any insects that do
something like this. I don’t know if it’s actually a thing, or if the show is
just making shit up. It’s disappointing if they’re just bullshitting, but I
don’t have any knowledge either way.) This “older footage” comes with
commentary from Emmet telling the audience to keep this in mind if they think
they could improve upon nature… that nature always provides a way for creatures
to survive. This seems like the contrast against the scientific disaster
zombies, but… HUMANS DO NOT PUPATE and I just can’t quite get over that. I know
it’s supposed to be a mystery and unexplained and such, but… nature doesn’t
work that way.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
We’ve got one episode left. I have
no idea how this is all going to be resolved in any way that actually wraps it
all up. And maybe it won’t be; the implication of the “this is the footage they
left behind” taglines in the commercials is that none of the crew ever returns
from the mission. There also seem to be plans for this to continue for more
than just this mini-season, though whether it’ll be the same characters and
goals, I don’t know. We shall see.</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-11327629668213523072012-03-17T19:11:00.000-06:002013-02-27T03:07:58.518-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episode 6<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Episode 6: Doctor Emmet Cole
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: B-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2128310/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Michelle MacLaren</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Joe Anderson </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leslie Hope </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eloise Mumford
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paul
Blackthorne </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Daniel Zacapa </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pauline Gaitan
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thomas
Kretschmann </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shaun Parkes </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bruce
Greenwood</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Scott Michael
Foster</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>After
finding out from Lena’s father a possible location to find Emmet (Bruce
Greenwood) the crew sets off. They find Sahte Falls, and some evidence that
Emmet was there, including a pocketknife and a bag containing some of his
tapes. Taking the tapes back to the Magus, they see the last leg of the journey
Emmet embarked on.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>The
tapes show him leaving Russ on the Magus, and setting off on a long trek on
foot with two other crewmembers and his dog. He went on some type of spirit
journey and found “them,” a tribe that he believes guards the Source that he
hopes to find. Soon they encounter a threatening “spirit” (though upon viewing
the tapes Jahel, returned to her role as mystical exposition provider,
recognizes it as a demon,) that he insists is merely “testing them” to prove
they are worthy, and that all the other unexplainable things they’ve
encountered have also been tests. He apparently believes that The Source is
some kind of cure for death, that it creates magic but that the spirits of the
dead can be found there as well. (He hopes to find the friends and crew he’s
lost, as well as his and Tess’ first child, a girl who died in infancy.) He
believes that members of the Zulo [I don’t know how to transcribe the name he’s
saying, so my apologies if that’s wrong] tribe are angels on earth, and that
they guard the Source. Eventually one of his companions is killed, and the
other runs away in the middle of the night with their provisions, leaving Emmet
alone and still followed by the demon. He continues on foot, filming as he
goes. He addresses some of the tapes to Lena, insisting she’s “marked” and
special. But Emmet starts growing weaker and sicker, and eventually seems
near-death. But just as the demon comes for him, members of the Zulo tribe find
him and carry him to some type of (military?) outpost, leaving him outside the
gates.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Lena
discovers the birthmark on the back of her neck, the mark that matches the
necklace Emmet gave to Lincoln.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>The
current crew goes to find the outpost and Emmet, but when they arrive, it
appears deserted.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>The
other plot-relevant bit we get, which is also a <span style="color: #990000;">spoiler</span>: Lena reveals to Jonas
that she used a remote satellite link to set off the beacon that brought
everyone to find Emmet. She wanted someone to try and find her father because
she believed the crew was still alive. <span style="color: #990000;">End spoiler</span>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>At
least the plot is back? Finally there’s some forward progress, now that we’re
two episodes away from the end. For that reason alone, I’m inclined to say this
is one of the better episodes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>There’s
actual development of some of the characters; Lena, Tess and Lincoln, Emmet
himself. There’s progress made toward understanding Emmet’s goal, and towards
the current crew’s goal of finding him. It was pretty competently acted, or at
least I remember fewer cringe-worthy moments.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Still,
it’s not managed to shake the problems with the series as a whole or the
individual episodes. Some are just seeming plot holes, which could maybe be
resolved in the future. If the Zulo took Emmet and his camera (still filming!)
to the outpost, why did they then take the tapes back to where the crew found
them? For that matter, why <i>did</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> they
continue filming him, from multiple angles at points? How has Lena made it to
her early/mid-twenties and not noticed a pretty major birthmark? Since the
first episode featured them finding a demon sealed in a room on the Magus, when
will that fit into the timeline? It didn’t appear to have happened yet at the
point when Emmet leaves the Magus.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Some
issues are with the writing and story, like why there are typical
Judeo-Christian angels (basically winged humans) found in the middle of the
Amazon? (And yes, the people don’t appear with wings, but Emmet tells us they
scar their backs “as if removing wings.”) It just feels like it’s largely about
moving Euro-centric mythology into an exotic location, which feels… shallow at
best, and shittily appropriative more likely.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>It
also felt like the horror was absent from this episode. Emmet was running away
from a demon, but minus one shot of the demon having skinned a monkey to
threaten them, and the largely uncharacterized companion being killed, there
wasn’t anything “scary” that happened. There’s the more “mundane” horror of
being alone and sick in the jungle, too far out to get help, but that’s a very
different kind of horror than the supernatural or paranormal feel that the show
had up until this point.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span> </span>Basically,
I am glad to see a return of the plot, and it’s reignited some of my interest
in the eventual resolution. But at the same time, it still fails to really pull
together as a whole. Plus that eventual resolution feels increasingly like
it’ll probably be very anti-climactic.</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-35711632269823574042012-03-16T19:08:00.000-06:002013-02-27T03:07:58.524-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episode 5<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a>Episode 5: Peaches
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2128311/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Rob Bailey</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Joe Anderson </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leslie Hope </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eloise Mumford
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paul
Blackthorne </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Daniel Zacapa </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pauline Gaitan
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thomas
Kretschmann </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shaun Parkes </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bruce
Greenwood</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Scott Michael
Foster</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lee Tergesen</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Don McManus</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Karen LeBlanc</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Walter Perez</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Kelemete
Misipeka</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well, I speculated last time that Lena (Eloise Mumford) was
a non-character because they wanted to push her into the background, but that’s
proven wrong, since this episode focused mostly on her.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
The Magus and crew are continuing
on, hoping that they can use Jonas’ (Scott Michael Foster) recollection of
Emmet’s (Bruce Greenwood) plans to find him. All Jonas can really tell them was
that Emmet had become obsessed with the idea of “The Source;” a single thing
responsible for the real magic in the world. On the journey, the boat is
sideswiped by another vessel in the dark, leaving them stranded and in need of
parts to do repairs. Meanwhile, Lena seems to be growing very upset over the
focus on Emmet. Her father, Emmet’s cameraman, is missing too, and she feels
like the only one who cares about that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Fortunately, the Magus is contacted
by another boat named the Exodus. Their four-person crew is on an ecological
mission to fight logging and protect indigenous people, flora, and fauna. They
agree to sell some spare parts to the Magus. As the crews mingle and chat, Lena
and Jonas realize that it looks like there’s someone else over on the Exodus,
and they decide to investigate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers for the episode</span>: It turns
out that it’s Russ Landry (Lee Tergesen), Lena’s dad, that’s on board the
Exodus, which appears run down and abandoned. The Exodus is a ghost ship, and
the crew is trapped on the boat unless they can capture living people to
replace them. Eventually, Lena, Jonas, Tess (Leslie Hope), and Kurt (Thomas
Kretschmann) are all captured, and have to be rescued by sunrise in order to be
saved.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
In the end, Jahel (Paulina Gaitan)
is able to tell Lincoln (Joe Anderson) where to find them, and they are
rescued. But Lena’s father is now one of the ghosts, so he can’t leave with
them. <span style="color: #990000;">End spoilers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
I feel like I’m running out of
things to say. The flaws are just so frequently getting more and more apparent.
The writing for the individual episode was pretty good, but it’s rather obvious
that each episode is written by a different person. So, conveniently, the
episode where Lena is upset about her father is the same episode in which we
find out his fate, when there’ve been few mentions of him before. (We know he’s
missing, and that Lena wants to find him, but she hasn’t been especially
emotional about it prior to this episode.) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
The effects in this one were bad.
The “fuzzy static, off-color scary ghost-face” thing just isn’t scary.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
The acting was… inconsistent. Parts
were pretty good… other parts were too ridiculous and over-acted to take
seriously.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
And in episode 5 out of an 8
episode series, do we really need to shoehorn in an awkward love triangle
subplot between Lincoln, Lena, and Jonas? I mean, I guess it was set up in the
last episode a bit, since Lena hired Jonas in the first place and flirted with
him in his audition tapes, but seriously. More subplots in a show that can’t
seem to focus on the main plot is not what we need.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Which leads to the biggest thing
that still bothers me; again, with the possible exception of <a href="http://horrormuse.blogspot.com/2012/03/horror-episode-review-river-episode-4.html">episode 4</a>, every
episode has felt unnecessary. This one too. While it provides emotional
development for Lena, and lets them know what happened to Russ, the overall
plot is no closer to being resolved. It’s not that an episode focusing on a
single character’s development is worthless, far from it, but this is such a
short series! We’re more than halfway through, and it seems like they have yet
to really move forward. This episode was about the crew being <i>literally</i>
stranded and unable to move ahead.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
I also really for some reason
noticed during this episode that this show has a severe case of Missing Mother
Syndrome. Lincoln’s mother Tess obviously features prominently, but the other
two young members of the crew, Lena and Jahel, both have fathers who show up
and are important to the story… but neither of their mothers have been
mentioned to my recollection. It’s like watching a Disney movie!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
There are some positives for the
episode. I complained a lot in my last review about Jahel’s character being
reduced to the mystic exposition fairy, and she actually had a better role this
time, in my opinion. She was primarily responsible for helping out as mechanic,
and then later for receiving Lena’s transmission and directing the others on
where to go; something done without some kind of mystical knowledge.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
There were also at least two
moments that I thought were actually pretty funny, both in kind of a meta way.
One was where one of the ghosts was trying to get Jahel back to the Exodus, and
she remarked that no one on the Magus joked with her, because they were afraid
of her. The boy said she didn’t seem scary, and she replies with “You don’t
know me.” The delivery was pretty funny, and was even a decent bit of
foreshadowing, as she’s the one who ultimately led to the failure of the Exodus
crew’s plans. The other moment is when Jonas and Lena go on board the Exodus,
and make fun of Blair Witch style found footage camera work. I mean, in some
ways that joke falls flat because The River isn’t really any better at the
“found footage” thing, but at least it gives it a little self-awareness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Despite the good points in the
episode, the flaws are still way more prevalent. The individual episodes still
feel too isolated from each other, like they have almost no bearing on the
entirety of the plot. Considering there are only three more episodes to go,
it’s going to take some kind of masterful finale to tie this together in a way
that really works or makes the individual episodes feel relevant. I still don’t
think it’s “THE WORST THING EVER” as a lot of angry internet comments say, but
as is, it seems stuck around mediocre.</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-14491680582235803592012-03-01T16:59:00.000-07:002013-02-27T03:07:58.520-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episode 4<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a>Episode 4: A Better Man
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C+</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: C+</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C+</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: B</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C+</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2055478/"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">IMDB</span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Dean White</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Joe Anderson </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Leslie Hope </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Eloise Mumford
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Paul
Blackthorne </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Daniel Zacapa </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Pauline Gaitan
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Thomas
Kretschmann </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Shaun Parkes </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Bruce
Greenwood</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">Scott Michael
Foster</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
In Episode 4, the crew of the Magus
continues their journey. As they try and decide where to go, they see a man
hanged in a tree. Shocked, they realize the man is Jonas Beckett (Scott Michael
Foster,) a cameraman who disappeared along with Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood).
As they plan to cut him down, speculating that the body must have been put
there recently, they realize he’s still alive. Bringing him onboard, it’s clear
he’s suffering from malaria, and they face the decision to go back to
civilization with him to get him treatment, or press on to find Emmet. Tess
(Leslie Hope) is thrilled that Jonas’s phone may provide some data that will
help them find Emmet. But Jahel (Pauline Gaitan) becomes obviously distressed
by his presence, as she keeps pulling the “hanged man” card from her tarot deck.<span> </span>There’s some exposition regarding the hanged man being a justly punished
thief. Viewing tapes, it becomes clear that Jonas was a thief of a sort: he
went against Emmet’s wishes and filmed a death ritual that was forbidden to
view. In doing so, he “stole” the soul of the man who was dying. Bizarre and
dangerous things begin happening on the boat, such as birds plummeting from the
sky and hundreds of thousands of insects appearing. It’s evidently the curse
following Jonas for what he’d done, and will probably culminate in a severe
storm that could kill everyone on board. Upon viewing a tape that Jonas had
tried to steal, it’s clear the curse was brought down on the Magus before, and
Emmet elected to throw Jonas overboard to save the crew. Furthermore, the tape
reveals that Jonas had been hanging in the tree for months until they found
him, and somehow hadn’t died. After getting what information from Jonas that
they could, Tess and the others plan to cast him off again, though Lincoln (Joe
Anderson) fights to keep it from happening.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers for the ending of the episode</span>: In
the end, Jonas pulls a rather sudden 180 from begging for his life to deciding
to sacrifice himself. He smashes the phone he recorded the ceremony on, and
hangs himself from the vines. The stolen soul is freed, and Jonas is spared. In
the end, Jonas is hired on as a new cameraman. <span style="color: #990000;">End heaviest spoilers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Is it just me, or are the “morals”
kind of simplistic and heavy handed? The <a href="http://horrormuse.blogspot.com/2012/02/horror-episode-review-river-episode-3.html">last episode</a> had “be brave and willing
to sacrifice yourself, and it will prove you’re worthy.” This one has “stealing
is wrong, but if you give it back, it’ll all be okay.” It’s kind of…
frustrating. And how quickly Jonas suddenly decided to kill himself to save the
others, after spending the whole episode trying to hide what he’d done and then
begging them to save him, was also rather bothersomely unbelievable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
I did actually like this episode
more than the last one, in that it seemed to have a little more actual tension
to it, and the horror felt a bit more “real” to me. Particularly the reveal
that Jonas had been left hanging but alive for months… that actually struck me
as creepy in a way that some of the rather unsubtle imagery from previous weeks
hasn’t. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
However, there are certainly flaws
that seemed more apparent to me this week than they have in previous weeks. The
filming, for one, feels far too convenient for a “found footage” story. So
often there are multiple camera angles that conveniently fit together to give a
perfect and deliberate sense of continuity for a conversation or a run of
action, in a way that doesn’t feel authentic for what it’s supposed to be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
Some of the characters are
beginning to feel more one-dimensional, as well. The episode largely hinges on
Lincoln being the moral voice on the boat, and it feels like that’s becoming
all he is. He’s the “good guy” who will be the hero and try to make everything
right, even though he has to go against everyone else. The other one that
frustrates me is Jahel. She was initially my favorite character, when it seemed
like her knowledge of the supernatural was just one aspect of her character.
But with the last episode and this one, it seems like that’s <i>all</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> she’s there for. To have her tarot cards and obscure
knowledge of symbols in order to provide easy exposition of what folkloric
creepy-of-the-week they’re facing. She could be an interesting character, but
she again is falling into feeling like a plot device more than a person.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
This last one might be just me, or
might be deliberate, but is Lena a total non-entity to anyone else? Like
seriously, I forget entirely about her character when she’s not on screen. It’s
been suggested to me that this may be deliberate, because she’ll be important
later, and it’s meant to be some sort of twist. But the story so far hasn’t
shied away from hinting at her importance. The birthmark that matches the
necklace Emmett had? The fact that she was in contact with Emmett even when
he’d stopped speaking to Tess and Lincoln? It hasn’t been real subtle about
hinting around the idea that she may ultimately be the most important person,
or that she knows more than she lets on. And yet, I just don’t seem to be able
to hold onto her as a character. If it is intentional on their part to push her
into the background, they’re doing so with more skill than I would expect. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
And a final gripe, the episodes
don’t feel well-tied together. I feel like any one of these episodes,
particularly <a href="http://horrormuse.blogspot.com/2012/02/horror-episode-review-river-episodes-1.html">2</a> or <a href="http://horrormuse.blogspot.com/2012/02/horror-episode-review-river-episode-3.html">3</a>, could have been left out entirely, and we wouldn’t really
be missing anything other than a line or two of relevant dialogue. I understand
that a series has to have stand-alone episodes. But this almost feels like
every single episode is a filler episode, like nothing about the ultimate goal
is getting closer, like nothing new and necessary occurs. This episode may be
the first exception, since finding Jonas at least propels them forward and
expands on the mystery of Emmet’s disappearance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
So ultimately, I think this episode
was a little stronger and more enjoyable than the previous one, but I still
wish the series would live up to a little more of its potential.</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-33755913805053226022012-02-24T17:55:00.000-07:002013-02-27T03:07:58.522-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episode 3<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Episode 3: Los Ciegos
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">Writing</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">: C-</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2063512/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Michael
Katleman</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Joe Anderson </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Leslie Hope </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Eloise Mumford
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Paul
Blackthorne </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Daniel Zacapa </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Pauline Gaitan
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Thomas
Kretschmann </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Shaun Parkes </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Bruce
Greenwood</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
In Episode 3, the crew is still seeking to rescue Emmet
Cole. They hope that they have some kind of new lead, and go into the jungle.
Unfortunately, when they stop for the night, it becomes clear that something is
following them. Jahel, who has the most knowledge of the superstitions and
legends of the area, believes that they’re being followed by the Morcego, a
semi-paranormal/semi-real tribe that will judge whether they are worthy of
survival or not. (Since it’s this show, of course she’s right.) After spending
the night in the jungle, one by one they start to go blind. Seeking answers on
the boat, they find out that it’s probably a poison, which has an antidote, if
they can find the right tree. The few non-blinded members set off to seek out
the antidote. Meanwhile, everyone on the boat has gone blind, including
Lincoln, who is trying to tend a very severe wound of Clark’s. And of course
the Morcego are on the ship as well, threatening to kill them. And meanwhile on
the expedition off-boat, the cameraman A.J. is the only one who can still see,
but he plans on abandoning the others. Ultimately he finds the antidote, though
he has to face what turns out to, of course, be his most paralyzing fear in
order to do so.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Spoilers for the episode</span>: seriously, this crappy ending bugs
the hell out of me. Simultaneously A.J. and Clark do something
self-sacrificing. Cool. And this means that the Morcego decide to let them
live, going so far as to actually save A.J. from death. But… really. It’s just
so… cliché, yes? The idea that “oh, we’re so doomed, oh God, what will we do?
We’re all going to die, because we’re being judged” but then oh, someone is
willing to be a martyr, so everything is okay again, because of the goodness of
the human spirit. It’s just so obvious and such an overplayed trope that I
couldn’t take it seriously. <span style="color: #990000;">End of the most serious spoilers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Otherwise the episode is all right. I liked the development
A.J. got as a character, since we didn’t see much of him in the first two
episodes. Enough new hints were placed for some of the ongoing plot threads to
keep it interesting. The Morcego were pretty creepy looking, though they held
to the idea that “the less you see the scarier it is” for most of the episode.
Once you do get a good look at them, they’re plenty freaky, but kinda in the
same way the dolls in episode 2 were. Like it’s just so obviously done
specifically TO be creepy, that it doesn’t feel surprising or real. I know that
horror obviously has the <i>aim</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to be
horrifying, but something about this just feels like they’re doing it wrong.
I’m not sure I can explain what I mean all that well... But in my opinion (for
the kind of horror this seems to want to be,) doing it right would be a good
atmospheric horror, where it’s unsettling and creepy and the horror serves to
further the story. Where ultimately, the story is most important, it just
happens to have a bunch of creepy happening, too. And this feels more like they
just wrote a story with the intent of tying various creepy things together, so
they can point and go “hey, it’s horror!” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
I’ve heard a lot of “OH GOD, THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER
PUT ON TELEVISION” opinions, and I think that’s kind of an exaggeration. It’s
still entertaining enough and has a few legitimately creepy moments, but it’s
also kind of underwhelming. Probably especially so if you’ve seen a lot of
horror things in the past. My opinion hasn’t changed much since the first
couple episodes. I’m still watching, and still want to see more, but this
episode definitely felt weaker than the first two, and that’s not what I hope
for out of a short series.</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-65129800242803916152012-02-19T17:06:00.000-07:002013-02-27T03:07:58.527-07:00Horror Episode Review: The River, Episodes 1 and 2<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Two reviews in one! Mostly because they were presented together as the pilot.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s1600/the+river.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7BT4uP-e81SMf4mh3dGq-kA-Xu36b5IJEy82GgY12pyXkEMtAt-R2aw01XnMMNf3rha-MuGGN2pD_-fFCNqPj49ZiIs1-zjIUR5XhUMpKeZ4xJUUNdss9hA8AtRhX_Gxko2emCaUj4rw/s320/the+river.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: B-
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: B-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: B</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2008374/">Episode 1, “Magus” on IMDB</a> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2056424/">Episode 2, “Marbeley” on IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Jaume
Collet-Serra</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Joe Anderson </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Leslie Hope </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Eloise Mumford
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Paul
Blackthorne </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Daniel Zacapa </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Pauline Gaitan
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Thomas
Kretschmann </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Shaun Parkes </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Bruce
Greenwood</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
In the 80s,
Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) starred in a wildlife/exploration/nature show
along with his family: his wife, Tess (Leslie Hope,) and son Lincoln (played as
an adult by Joe Anderson.) A bit later in life, he continues to go on
expeditions, eventually at the expense of the relationships with his family.
Six months before <i>The River</i>
begins, he goes missing on a trip to the Amazon. Just as his family, in
particular his estranged son, are coming to terms with his assumed death, a
signal from his beacon is received, giving hope that he or some of his crew may
be alive. The company that originally funded his show will even fund an
expedition to go recover the beacon and possibly Emmet himself, but only if
they can get his family and some of the rest of the original group involved
with the show to go along.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Lincoln reluctantly
agrees. So he; his mother; Clark (Paul Blackthorne), the producer of the old
show; Lena, the daughter of a cameraman who went missing along with Emmet;
Emilio (Daniel Zacapa), the mechanic of Emmet’s old ship; Jahel (Pauline
Gaitan), Emilio’s daughter and assistant; Kurt (Thomas Kretschmann), a security
and bodyguard; and A.J. (Shaun Parkes), the cameraman; all head off to the
Amazon.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Creepy things
happen from the outset, as they find the beacon underwater, with no sign of the
crew. Then the ship is found along with some very disturbing tapes recorded by
Emmet. Eventually things stray to the downright paranormal, with a demon spirit
locked on board the ship, eventually giving Tess the belief that Emmet is still
alive.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Much of the
first episode is devoted to introducing the characters, which I appreciate was
done with at least moderate non-awkwardness. It’s not perfect and seamless by
any stretch, as there were some moments I was still very aware that I was being
fed exposition. However, I can certainly imagine it being far worse. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The show is
set up as being a mix between the <i>Crocodile Hunter</i> style nature show of Emmet Cole’s from
the 80s (and I love how very 80s they make those clips feel), a found footage
narrative in the style of <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> or <i>Paranormal Activity</i>, and the reality TV show that Clark and
the studio are intending this to be. I don’t know if this is intentional, but I
think it’s kind of in a way a wonderful commentary on how TV has changed over
the last couple decades. As a kid, I loved nothing more than the Discovery
Channel and NatGeo and such, with their nature documentaries and exploration
shows. Now, almost everything, including those same channels, has moved into the
realm of “reality TV” and that kind of contrived drama. I like that the same
progression from “educational, and people enjoy it” to “cheap and contrived
drama, and people enjoy it” is visible in the fictional production company.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Episode 2
begins with Jahel being possessed by Emmet’s spirit. She realizes that he must
still be alive, even though he wants them to leave for fear of them being in
danger. Tess and the crew set out to try and find him, based on clues from the
countless (but unorganized) tapes of his expedition. With one idea of where to
go, the group sets off and finds a very creepy tree covered in children’s
dolls. Lincoln even finds a childhood toy of his own there, meaning Emmet must
have been through. The tree is tied to a legend about a child’s spirit that out
of loneliness drowns travelers, with the dolls being an attempt to comfort her
and pacify her. Once again, the paranormal legend turns out to be true, though
I’ll spare the spoilers of what happens with it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
In this
episode, I admittedly found the doll tree creepy. (<i>And there’s a creepy
doll… that always follows you… it’s got a ruined eye…that’s always…open…</i> Though seriously, <a href="http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/Creepy_Doll">go download that song</a>. Jonathan Coulton is awesome and I love that song, and yes you can get it for free legitimately.) I’m one of those people who
does get kind of freaked by dolls. And I’ve heard this legend before, though
they’ve taken a few liberties from the one that I know. (The one I know of is
the <a href="http://travel.spotcoolstuff.com/haunted-creepy-places/mexico/island-of-dolls">Isla De Las Muñecas,</a> or Island of Dolls, and is actually something of a creepy tourist destination.)
But at the same time, it felt a bit like “HEY, THIS IS CREEPY! ARE YOU CREEPED
OUT YET? BE CREEPED OUT.” Maybe it’s just that I watch a lot of horror, so I’m
familiar with a lot of the tropes. But while dolls are pretty creepy in their
own ways, it seems like just such a stock “now you’re afraid, yes?” that it
felt a little lazy and uncreative. But hey, it was still pretty unsettling.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Anyway, in
terms of quality, the show is pretty average. It has good points and bad
points, for sure. Positives include some of the things I mentioned above, with
at least somewhat competent writing in terms of character introduction and
a reasonably interesting story. Unfortunately, the acting is inconsistent in quality, with
some truly cringe-worthy moments but some pretty good performances as well. The
effects are nothing special, but they’re passable for a TV series. Other times,
the writing feels a bit lazy and like it’s just trying to force the plot
forward, rather than having it develop naturally. There are some badly
explained shortcuts, like insisting they’ll be able to recognize locations from Emmet's tapes, which I find ridiculous. If you’re not immensely familiar with the
setting, all the trees along the Amazon river are going to look a lot like all
the other trees along the Amazon river. And when the tapes are of parts of the
inner jungle, not even bordering the river, it’s even more suspect that people
unfamiliar with the area will know where to go to find him. There’s also some
kind of shoddy research or explanations given, like with the dolls and the insistence that “well,
originally dolls were used to house the spirits of the dead.” Again, I’m
nit-picking based on personal interests and knowledge, but while in <i>some</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> cultures this is true, it’s not true of the whole
damn world.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
While the show probably isn’t destined to go into the annals
of time as a Great Series, it does manage to be entertaining enough and have
enough in the way of dangled plot threads that I’ll keep tuning in. It’s not
perfect, and the flaws are pretty apparent in some cases, but it’s at least
captured my interest for the time being.</div>mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-30640671762990268012011-11-17T15:11:00.001-07:002013-02-24T18:40:20.689-07:00Horror Movie Reviews: I Was a Zombie for the FBI (1982)<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT9Fh4rtm_uxylgpBdTzN2dnf3DXaqS025QLD5S9ag_dQjX234PCQUDeMTaOmNNAsy4mfPuE4BKMAshYmJieC-dVKWmH8nuUsQ6m76raFjhaI1cC0AzCjrdDStjjaN-BRhNdqvVDJ193By/s1600/i+was+a+zombie+for+the+fbi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT9Fh4rtm_uxylgpBdTzN2dnf3DXaqS025QLD5S9ag_dQjX234PCQUDeMTaOmNNAsy4mfPuE4BKMAshYmJieC-dVKWmH8nuUsQ6m76raFjhaI1cC0AzCjrdDStjjaN-BRhNdqvVDJ193By/s320/i+was+a+zombie+for+the+fbi.jpg" width="219" /></a><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing</span>: D</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C-</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138508/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Directed by</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Marius
Penczner</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Larry Raspberry</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
James Raspberry</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
John Gillick</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Laurence Hall</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Christina
Wellford<br />
<br />
Passes the Bechdel test? Not to my recollection.<br />
Specific warnings? None I can recall.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
I have only seen
the later DVD version, which is apparently not identical to the originally
aired 1982 version.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
This
movie was entertainingly silly. In some ways it’s probably more of a D film,
but gets bumped to a C- just because it means so well and is so self-aware of
its silliness. (Though unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well in my memory;
<i><a href="http://horrormuse.blogspot.com/2011/10/horror-movie-review-biophage-2010.html">Biophage</a></i> for instance held up well in my mind, where this one I
remember the negatives more than the positives.) The film is a parody of 50s B-movies,
in the same vein as <i>Lost Skeleton of Cadavera</i>, though it appears to be a
lower-budget more independent undertaking.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
The
plot is as convoluted as one could hope when it comes to parodying 50s sci-fi
and FBI agent type stories. A plane carrying a pair of criminal brothers, Bart
Brazzo (John Gillick) and Bert Brazzo (Laurence Hall,) crashes in
Pleasantville, and FBI agents Ace Evans (Larry Raspberry) and Rex Armstrong
(James Raspberry) are sent on a case to find the brothers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
But
unknown to them, the plane was shot down by aliens! Aliens who have taken the
Brazzo brothers hostage in the nearby Health Cola plant. Some time later, the
criminal brothers go to a different cola plant, this time for Uni Cola, where
they hold the secret cola recipe and an attractive reporter named Penny
(Christina Wellford), (who also happens to be Ace Evans’ fiancée) hostage. They
demand a ransom of one million dollars, which is provided. Ace and Rex thwart
the brothers’ plans, sending them to jail. They rescue Penny, but the cola
recipe is lost. Uni Cola is furious about the failure to retrieve their secret
recipe, and Ace and Rex are reassigned.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
They
are sent back to Pleasantville to investigate the strange zombie-like behavior
among the townsfolk. They get a tip that the Health Cola plant is somehow
responsible for the zombie behavior, and they figure out that it’s probably
connected to the missing Uni Cola recipe as well.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Showdown
ultimately ensues in the Cola plant, where they must rescue the recipe (hidden
in Penny’s necklace) and thwart the evil plans of the aliens who intend to
control the world through the production of soft drinks. The final battle
against a stop-motion monster that would make Harryhausen proud is truly a
crowning moment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Honestly,
I think the fact that this is a played-straight parody of 50s B-movies hides
and in some ways excuses a lot of flaws. The acting is somehow both flat and
over-the-top, but it fits with the parodies of stock-characters that the actors
are portraying. The story itself is ridiculous and convoluted, to an extent
that I’m afraid my summary above sounds a bit confused. This could have been
intentional, but it could also have just been clumsy. The stylized black and
white filming looks nice, so it gets points for that, and I especially loved a
few of the shots of the buildings and other settings. And the effects, while
apparently “updated” slightly for the DVD release, are delightfully silly. As
mentioned, the stop-motion monster at the end is wonderfully ridiculous in a
way that I really loved. On the downside, the movie kind of drags. In between
some of the more ridiculous or action-heavy parts, the dialogue seems really
unneeded, and it starts getting boring to sit through. Also, as most reviews
mention, the title is quite misleading. There are zombie-like people, and there
is the FBI, but there are no strict zombies, and definitely no zombies in the
employ of the FBI.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Ultimately,
I think this may be a love it or hate it type film. If somewhat loving parodies
of this nature appeal to you, this one is pretty good. It’s not as over-the-top
silly as <i>Lost Skeleton of Cadavera</i>, but has the same deal going to some extent.
But if that doesn’t appeal to you, there’s nothing else that will keep you
interested.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407581721017079582.post-41756483790214020232011-10-31T15:56:00.000-06:002013-02-24T18:39:05.214-07:00Horror Movie Reviews: House of Fears (2007)<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwNU88Lwq4MkLerncuz-MnDkS7KkpQZOKcsyjP7D7uQdFz_vHVOd9oI8009KQ2HYHL4LsN0AwMld5lJncgzBaP7CUBdtrlpAogG08_Z1O8oK6ILPMv3l-CwaNKr8B14ni97VxqMWAmNdD0/s1600/houseoffears.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwNU88Lwq4MkLerncuz-MnDkS7KkpQZOKcsyjP7D7uQdFz_vHVOd9oI8009KQ2HYHL4LsN0AwMld5lJncgzBaP7CUBdtrlpAogG08_Z1O8oK6ILPMv3l-CwaNKr8B14ni97VxqMWAmNdD0/s320/houseoffears.jpg" width="254" /></a><span style="color: #990000;">Overall</span>: C
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Acting</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Writing:</span> C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Story</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Technical
aspects</span>: C</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Effects</span>: C+</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002992/">IMDB</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #990000; font-family: inherit;">
Directed by:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Ryan Little</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="color: #990000;">Starring</span>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Corri English</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Sandra McCoy</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Michael J. Pagan</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Corey Sevier</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Alice Greczyn</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
Eliot Benjamin</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The best way to describe this movie
is probably just “average.” It’s a pretty basic curses-killing-teens-type
movie. We start off in Africa, where a woman is apparently intending to make a
purchase from an archaeological dig. They arrive, her guide discovers that
everyone has been killed, she grabs
the Mysterious Evil Statue they unearthed, and in the interest of getting out,
the guide says she can keep it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Then back in America, we see a
security guard doing a patrol of “The House of Fears”, a haunted house
attraction. His dog companion freaks out about something, and they go to
investigate. Of course, it’s the Mysterious Evil Statue, which proceeds to
cause the dog to attack him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Meanwhile, six high school kids are
at a party dealing with some stock teenage drama. Hailey (Sandra McCoy) is
angry that her father has remarried and hates her new stepsister Samantha
(Corri English,) and is interested in Carter (Corey Sevier) who only has an
on-and-off relationship with her, and… oh man, it is so hard to care much about
any of these people and their stock teenage drama… But okay, Carter’s friend
Zane (Eliot Benjamin) is into a girl named Candice (Alice Greczyn) and intends
to invite her to the haunted house where he works. But she only wants to go
with her boyfriend Devon (Michael J. Pagan.) (Can’t keep all the characters
straight? That’s okay, most of the audience can’t either!)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Well, the six of them sneak into
“House of Fears” where Zane works, and start their way through the “nine fears”
that the house is supposedly built around – things like ghosts, death, spiders,
the dark, etc. I’ll admit that the house itself looks pretty cool – it’s a
haunted house I’d probably enjoy going through in real life.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
But of course, because it’s a
horror movie, the Mysterious Evil Statue exerts its power to literally bring
individual’s worst fears to life, and starts killing off the teens one by one,
as they’re forced to go progressively deeper into the house in hopes of escape.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
It’s really hard to say anything
about the movie except that it is just so painfully average. It isn’t bad, but
it’s not especially good either. The acting is nothing special, but it’s all
right. The story itself is basic, and it works to the extent that it has to. It’s
a silly premise for sure, but doesn't require much more suspension of disbelief than half the
horror films out there. The setting is nice enough, and
like I said above, I can see this haunted house being fun to go through. But
watching other people go through it? Eh, not as exciting, even if we do get to
watch them die.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The effects are pretty good; again not spectacular, but
not relying solely on CGI. That’s what pushes the effects category into C+
territory for me - I have pretty low tolerance for bad computer
generated effects, but I love seeing more “traditional” effects with props and
makeup and the like. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
It’s lacking in the sexuality and gore that a lot of teen
scream type movies have, which may be either a deterrent or a draw depending on
your position.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">
I can say that this could be a fun
movie to watch around Halloween or with a group of friends, but it certainly
isn’t particularly stand-out.</div>
mistressofmuseshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09684568046520953007noreply@blogger.com0