Horror Movie Review: The Tenement (2003)

Overall: D

Acting: D

Writing: D-

Story: D+

Technical aspects: D+

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Glen Baisley

Starring:

Joe Lauria

Michael Gingold

C. J. DiMarsico

John Studol

Mike Lane
Ed Shelinsky

Danielle Russo

Particular trigger warnings: sexual assault, animal cruelty, prostitution, hard drug use

Passes the Bechdel test? I don’t think so

I basically give a synopsis below, because it’s hard to pick apart otherwise. Beware of spoilers all the way through.

The Tenement is a series of four loosely related stories about different occupants of the same tenement house.

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.

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.”

            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.

            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.

            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.

            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.

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.)

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.

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 Willard (which is a much better film.) They refuse to show the mother for a while, and I wondered if it was going for the Psycho-style twist, though apparently that was just a deliberate allusion. It reminded me more of Willard, 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.

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 drags.

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.

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.

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.

Horror Movie Review: Side Sho (2007)

Overall: B-

Acting: C

Writing: C-

Story: C

Technical aspects: B+

Effects: B+

IMDB

Directed by:

Michael D’Anna

Starring:

J.D. Hart

Toni Robider

Dana Poulson

Elizabeth Bailey

Hunter Ballard

J.R. Reynolds           

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.

            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.)

            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.

            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!

            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.

            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.

            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.

            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.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Fertile Ground (2010)

Overall: C+

IMDB

Directed by:

Adam Gierasch

Starring:

Gale Harold

Leisha Hailey

Fertile Ground 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.

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.

 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.

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, duh, The Shining or Amityville Horror 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.

Horror Movie Review: Razor's Ring (2008)

Overall: D-

Acting: D+

Writing: D

Story: D

Technical aspects: D

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Morgan Hampton

Starring:

Wayne Casey

AnnieScott Rogers

Paul Schilens

Lisa Wharton

Nate Duncan

            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.

            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.

            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.

            Spoilers! 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. (End spoilers.)

            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?)

            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.

            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.

            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.

            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.

(Happy October, everyone!)

Horror Movie Review: 100 Feet (2008)

Overall: B

Acting: B

Writing: B

Story: B

Technical aspects: B

Effects: C

IMDB

Directed by:

Eric Red

Starring:

Famke Janssen

Bobby Cannavale

Ed Westwick

Michael Pare

Particular triggers: domestic violence

Passes the Bechdel test? yes, but barely

            100 Feet 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.

            “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.

            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.

            It’s hard to say much else without being too spoiler-heavy.

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.

The small cast helps the film feel very self-contained, and emphasizes the feeling of isolation that Marnie experiences in the house.

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 Disturbia 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.

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.

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.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Case 39 (2009)

Overall: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Christian Alvart

Starring:

Renee Zellweger

Jodelle Ferland

Case 39 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.

I’m a fan of evil child movies, so I liked Case 39. 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.

Horror Movie Reviews: Intermedio (2005)

Overall: F

Acting: D

Writing: F

Story: D

Technical aspects: F

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Andrew Lauer

Starring:

Edward Furlong

Steve Railsback

Cerina Vincent

Amber Benson

Callard Harris

Paul Cram

Alejandro Samaniego

Dean M. Arevalo

What the ass, man? This sucks.

This was a bad movie. Like… in some ways just bafflingly bad. Also, I give basically an entire synopsis of the film below, so it’s super heavy on spoilers.

            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.

            But… 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.

            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.

            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.

            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.

            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.

            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?

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.

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.

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.