Splice (2009)

Science is pretty great, and has given us innumerable achievements. Plenty of great things were accomplished with science in the past and there are still new things happening every day. But in Splice, the only thing science is good for is, apparently, working out your dead mommy issues or just making your own horrific alien mutant to fuck in a shed somewhere. Both of those things really happen in the movie. I'd say sorry for the spoilers, but I think we deserve an apology for the movie as a whole.

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley

IMDb

Co-written with Colin and Michelle.

This is a rotten film with almost nothing good about it. I can't really think of a better way to describe this other than just diving right in, so hey, let's do that.

The movie begins with a couple of scientists, Clive and Elsa, played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. They are trying to create some sort of artificial life by combining a bunch of animals together, or some shit like that. I don't even know – it's barely even glossed over, what they're actually trying to do. I guess they just wanted to see two weird looking, vaguely penis-shaped worms do photosynthesis together or something:

"All my life, I have waited to see this."

I guess they're working for this big business suit guy, who tells them their experiments have been canceled by the company they work for because they don't want them to keep doing their weird ass experiments. What? Why not? Why can't we make an abomination that could potentially be the worst thing ever thought up by mankind???

But that doesn't stop them from doing it anyway and hiding their experiment away in some basement in the building. At home, they talk about moving in together and maybe having a child, which Elsa doesn't want to do. Okay, now it makes sense – creating a horrific scientific mutation is okay, but moving in together? Woah there, bucko, don’t get any crazy ideas!

"Before you touch my boobs, we have to create at least 50% of a completely amoral scientific abomination that most would call the living embodiment of Satan. I have spoken!"

But it's okay. After all, we can see their progress. Look, they made a gross thing in a tank that almost eats Elsa's arm! That's cool, right?

"Nope, still don't regret this!"

So, they made a living punching bag?

Eventually though, they make a baby that I'm sure the characters in Eraserhead would be happy to see, as it makes the baby in that movie look adorable by comparison. There are a fuckload of scenes in this film of these two taking care of their pet monster, and early on it’s mostly just the creature destroying things and vomiting.

Hooray for that!

We see her start to grow up and become an even uglier being, which they name Dren. There are a bunch of scenes of them playing with her in the lab, which would be touching if she didn't look like a human ass with eyes and a mouth.

Somehow, the fact that they put it in a dress makes it worse...

At one point, Dren gets sick and they try to bathe her in cold water. Clive gets the idea to push her head completely underwater, presumably trying to end the horror he brought into the world. However, that's the exact point she evolves to grow gills and is able to survive, miraculously coming out okay! Elsa congratulates Clive for his brilliant idea, and he grins weakly while thinking inside that he should have just shot Dren in the head.

"Uh, yeah, of COURSE I was trying to save her, and definitely not trying to kill her... heh heh heh...."

There is a scene where they present their two weird looking worm things in front of a live audience. But what they didn’t know is that one of them changed gender into a male! Now that both of the weird worm things are male, they stab the fuck out of each other with needle-like appendages and then knock the cage over, showering the audience in mutated worm blood. I guess that was exactly what Clive and Elsa were going for, so good job, guys!

The day will live on in infamy as the day Walgreens heavily reconsidered who it let do their pharmaceutical experiments for them.

Also, how did they not notice the thing changed genders? They must be bad scientists.

I guess they were busy, though, as they have kept raising Dren as their own child. They even move her into the creepy old abandoned farm barn that Elsa’s family used to own. There are some scenes that could have been affecting here, as the two become even more like parents raising a child. But it’s too little, too late - we’re almost halfway through the movie at this point, and we don’t know anything more about these characters or their relationship than we did at the beginning.

What DO we have, then? Scenes of Dren eating rabbits in the woods?

...okay. I guess if that’s what you want to show, go right the fuck ahead. Who am I to stop you?

This is really where the movie falls apart. There’s sort of a subplot about how Elsa was mistreated as a child, and is now taking out her inner anger on Dren. But the movie never details or explains what happened to Elsa, and it never resolves whatever she was trying to work out. Like, there’s one scene where Dren found a cat outside and Elsa takes it away, fearing Dren will kill it. Before leaving, she says “that’s part of growing up, you can’t always get what you want.”

What am I supposed to gain from that? Clearly she’s treating Dren like her mother treated her, in some fashion. But it’s never elaborated on. There’s no exploration of her character. The movie clearly wants us to glean something, some kind of point about who she is as a person, but it doesn’t bother to actually do any work on finishing that plot. It's like if you were reading a book, and then halfway through, the author stops midsentence and leaves the last 200 pages totally blank. It doesn't help anyone.

What do we get instead? Dancing scenes!

...whimsical?

In another horribly written plot, now Clive is actually sympathetic towards Dren, even though before he was obviously repulsed at what they’d done and how Elsa was acting. But now, he seems cool with her. Probably because she now looks like a fucking exotic supermodel or something. What can I say? Sometimes ugly children grow up into beautiful adults I guess!

He also finds out that Elsa put her own DNA into Dren. Oh wow, will this be expanded on at all? No. No it will not. This is the last we hear about it, actually.

The next day, Elsa goes to see Dren and Dren attacks her and tries to escape, wanting to go outside. Elsa subdues her and then does the sensible thing - straps her to a table and cuts off her tail, all the while talking like a scientist into a recorder with a smug look on her face. I like all of my scientists to do cruel things to their test subjects just to get out their own insecurities! So this scene is cool with me.

Ahh yes, now I see that they are catering to the market for people who like scenes that you're not sure you even want to watch, but can't quite turn away from.

There was… absolutely no build-up to this insane torture scene, and it isn’t talked about in depth by any of the characters later, which is becoming a running theme in this film. After all, so what if every single thing we do in the plot has no consequence? Fuck it, right?

In an apparent contest to see who can be the biggest douchebag in the film, Clive then comes into the barn, un-shackles Dren and then the two begin having steamy human-on-scientific-mutation sex... no, I'm not trying to make a joke, and yes, it does really happen in the movie.

He helped create her in a lab, but acts like her father, and she has DNA from Elsa, who is his girlfriend, so I don’t even know what angle to call this ridiculous from!

Adrien Brody like you've never seen him before!

I’d just like to point out that Adrien Brody won an Oscar in a movie about the Holocaust. I guess he really just wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again. But uh-oh, Elsa comes in and sees him right as he’s fucking Dren! That’s super-awkward!

"Nope, it's not cold out here guys, this is totally realistic!" He would be saying that, but you can't hear him over the sound of his chattering teeth and freezing bones crackling.

They both go back to their apartment and cry about how they both fucked up raising a genetic experiment gone wrong. Oh, boo hoo, you fucking drama queens. Everything that happened is your own fault, and clearly, given what we've seen, it's good that all you did was create a creature in a lab instead of, y'know, actually having a goddamned child. You clearly wouldn't be any good at that, so this was a useful test run of sorts.

"Shush, I'm still trying to think of a way I can justify this and blame you instead!"

I also love the part of this scene where Clive actually manages to turn the argument around on Elsa and make it seem like it’s her fault the whole thing is happening. I slept with a weird alien monstrosity in your family’s barn? Fuck that! IT’S YOUR FAULT! What guy hasn't had to use this kind of mental manipulation on a loved one after sleeping with a genetically engineered monster?

The movie loses all sense of where it’s going, though, and instead of any kind of character development, it just gives us goofy action scenes. They rush back to the farm, where Dren has died, so they go and bury her in the yard.

"Well, I think we both agree that this has been a most unorthodox time in our lives."
"Yup. Oh well, you want to go get Chinese food?"
"Sure."

Conveniently at the same time, the businessman guy shows up, demanding in a loud voice to see Dren. They’ve conveniently just finished burying her when he shows up, for an extra dose of hack writing. But I guess they didn’t check that well to make sure Dren was dead, as she comes back to life and kills that businessman guy. Whoops!

You know, the old "thought my child was dead" mistake. It happens!

Oh, and Dren is actually a male now, having changed like the two worm monsters did earlier. With his newfound male-ness, he does the worst thing possible and rapes Elsa in the woods.

Then he kills Clive. Boy, I wonder what Clive’s last thoughts were. I bet they were a real gem. “At least I died looking at the last thing I fucked”? “Boy, I sure am glad we created this thing in a lab now, because this is exactly what I wanted to accomplish with this experiment”? I guess we’ll never really know.

Man. Dren raped her mother and killed her father. It’s Shakespearean, if Shakespeare had ever written a play about a genetically engineered accident created in a lab... which I totally think he should have! There’s my contribution to the Shakeapearean criticism conversation!

HE IS PROUD OF ME!

In one final scene, we see that Elsa is pregnant now, presumably with Dren’s child.

Great! Now they can have genetically engineered mutant sequels. Just what nobody in the world ever wanted.

This movie is steaming manure. The premise could work, in a vintage Cronenberg kind of way, but they don't really do anything with it. They try to tell this whole story of these characters creating a surrogate child and then failing to raise it because of their own insecurities and flaws, but there's no exploration of either of their characters, even when the film looks like it's about to start giving you some. Like the hints at Elsa's backstory with her mother abusing her; where the fuck did that go? You can't just hint at that and then never develop it! Are you crazy? That's not being subtle or smart, that's just being lazy, as well as obnoxiously and willfully obtuse.

As the film goes on, the characters just become more and more unlikable as they make dumb decision after dumb decision. The movie is more interested in showing gratuitous gimmick scenes than actually telling a good story, and so the characters come off as obnoxiously moronic rather than realistic, and it is impossible to really get invested in them. There's no exploration of why Elsa suddenly starts torturing Dren, or why Clive has sex with her - it's all just random scenes thrown in there haphazardly with almost no context, and there is no bigger story to distract you from that. This is all you get, and it's no good.

There’s a really forced commentary on the state of science, too, delivered with all the subtlety of an atomic bomb blast. Like, yeah, THIS movie will make us all reconsider our ideas about where science is going! It warns us that if we don't check ourselves, random white people will create a monster and then have sex with it. Uh, astute observation?

The acting is fine, especially from Sarah Polley and Delphine Chanéac as Dren, but it can’t save the bad characters, idiotic story and lame writing. Characters make dumb choices for no reason other than to further the plot, plot lines are dropped unceremoniously with zero resolution... I'm starting to think the movie itself was created in a botched freak lab accident. Basically, it fucking sucks.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

Single White Female (1992)

We've all had bad roommates. It's a part of growing up in the modern world – trying to find a place to live, coming up short on cash and having to move in with some psychopath who starts to imitate your every move.

Wait, what?

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Starring: Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Yes, this is one of those 1990s films which has since become a sort of punchline - “don't go Single White Female on me,” cries many a half-joking roommate, crossing their fingers and hoping they don't end up on the front page of the newspaper as the victim in a crime story. But back in 1992, it was just a movie. A weird, weird fucking movie.

The film begins with a woman named Allison (Bridget Fonda), in bed with her husband when her husband's ex-wife conveniently calls and leaves a message saying the two slept together. Wow. That's awfully contrived that she called RIGHT FUCKING NOW, like some silly stage play, isn't it? The husband feebly tries to save face, but really, it's all over. There is nothing to do anymore, and the relationship is dead in the water. Now, it's just time for crying alone on a bed:

"This is even worse than the time I was in Lake Placid!"

She goes through a bunch of potential roommates, most of whom are a little bit weird and say bizarre things, so they're all obviously terrible and not even worth considering. Like this girl:

Yes, it looks hopeless. Who will she ever find as a roommate? Who will spare her from these awful cretins who deserve to die?

But all is not lost – eventually, as she's sitting there crying in the kitchen, a random girl walks in without being invited, which doesn't raise any alarm bells for some reason. The girl, introducing herself as Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), offers to make her tea, but when they try to turn on the sink, it showers them with water.

I wonder how they'll bond when the toilet gets clogged.

Let's recap that: She was crying in the corner, Hedy broke in without even knocking or anything, and the sink exploded on them. Seems like a match made in heaven to me!

So they're pretty much instant BFFs, trying on clothes together and they even get a dog, which they take pictures with and even sleep in the same bed with. It's all pretty candy coated.

I can feel my teeth rotting just watching these scenes!

And hell, Allison even promises Hedy that she'll never get back together with her old husband. Weeeeeellllllllll....

She's basically a big liar!

Yup, they get back together almost instantly, without any scenes of them talking or anything. I guess that's a blessing though, as the film is already close to two fucking hours long. Which honestly begs the question – why did they break up at all? Why not just make a film about a younger couple who weren't living together and the girl got a new roommate? Why have the breakup/marriage plot at all? I guess they really needed the extra 10 minutes tacked onto this already overlong film.

Anyway, Hedra doesn't take their getting back together well – there are even a couple of scenes where she sits around eating and watching TV! The horror!

You would think after The Hitcher, she would be able to take this a little bit better. But I guess not.

At least she has the dog, though – oh, wait, no she doesn't. The dog starts ignoring her too.

I guess the dog is just able to tell which person it should pay attention to because the movie's plot needs to move forward.

Which doesn't make any sense, because Hedy's the one who has been actually paying attention to and feeding the dog! Allison has mostly been ignoring it or not there. But in this movie's world, it wants Allison only, even though she never seems to do anything with it, over Hedy who does everything for it and is always there. But Hedy doesn't take THIS injustice lying down... she retaliates by throwing the dog out a window.

Ha! Take THAT, you dumb dog!!!

If seeing a dog die makes you uncomfortable, just pretend the dog was an advocate for the anti-vaccine movement.

My favorite part of this is how Allison believes the bullshit story Hedy feeds her - the dog jumped out of the window of its own volition. Like yeah, that's something a dog would just do at random, because dogs have no sense or intelligence at all and are just helpless dumb animals who commit suicide at any given moment. Does this movie understand dogs at all? Well, a better question would be, does the movie understand anything? I don't think it really does.

Things get even stranger, though, when Hedy gets a makeover and dyes her hair to look exactly like Allison. This is all extremely weird, but does Allison take any action about it beyond being a little annoyed? Nope! It's just kinda weird, is all. I dunno, if my best friend showed up wearing the same clothes as me with the same hairstyle, I'd stop being friends with them.

I guess Allison does start to get worried about her though, after she finds a box under Hedy's bed containing a bunch of letters and stuff that prove she was lying about her past. Allison confides in her best friend, a gay guy upstairs, who tells her they should definitely call a therapist and get her institutionalized. That seems like the obvious thing to do, but then, I live in real life, and not a strange fantasy land like these characters.

But Hedy takes care of him well enough, so whatever, you know?

If a scene where Hedy sleeps with Allison's husband while pretending to be her sounds like a fucking Dr. Phil episode, well, I wouldn't blame you for thinking so. But I'll give the movie one concession – most Dr. Phil episodes don't end with the woman killing the man with a high heel to the head. Though, that would give me more incentive to watch fucking Dr. Phil.

Not all deaths are equal. Some deaths are cool, like dying valiantly saving a friend from an assassin's bullet. Other deaths are not cool, and this is one of those.

So Allison finds out Hedy killed her husband, and that immediately flips Hedy's evil switch. Like, boom, it's fucking instant – she's suddenly just Saturday-morning-cartoon-character evil. Now, she holds Allison hostage at gunpoint, forcing her to buy plane tickets so they can escape. Hedy leaves for a while and Allison, tied to a chair, tries to escape by turning up the volume on the TV to try and get someone's attention to come save her. Which is exactly the way my father survived his own kidnapping in 1993, so I have an emotional attachment to this scene.

Hedy gets back and is about to finally kill Allison, when Allison decides to kiss her on the mouth, which stops Hedy from doing anything. The least they could have done at this point was add in some hot lesbian action, but no, all they do is kiss and then she rests her head on Allison's lap.

This is just her favorite kind of foreplay.

Well, that's one way to stop from getting killed. Though I doubt it would work in every situation...like, a fucking Mafia hitman probably wouldn't be swayed by that.

So let's run down a checklist of what this movie considers mentally ill people to be: they're super clingy and can turn into serial killers at the drop of a hat for almost no reason. Just remember, people with mental health problems: this could be you! Make sure to feel completely ashamed and feel awful about yourself. This movie's got you figured out.

Oh, and the gay best friend guy survived. How? Did he just hide out in his house pretending to be dead for several days? Why not go to the cops and tell them what's happening? Maybe he's just attracted to the fucking danger of all of it. He does give it his best shot at beating Hedy up, but he can't even do that right, as this isn't the real climax!

You get a B minus for effort though.

The real climax involves Allison escaping and running around in the basement air vents like a fucking Die Hard action scene – I'll give the movie a few points for that, as I honestly didn't think THAT would be in the movie. But mostly that's because it's a complete non-sequitur with where the movie was going.

She's like the John McClane of privileged white girls in NYC.

Eventually, though, all things must come to an end, via a stab in the back:

Et tu, roommate I kidnapped?

What did we learn from this movie? Mental health problems means you're crazy and have always been crazy. There's no hope for you, and you'll probably die by being stabbed in the back.

Seriously, this is a pretty silly flick. It's not that good, with little character or story development – it's all strictly shallow and surface-level stuff, existing only as an excuse for the cheap thrills. To be fair though, the thrills can be kinda fun in a dumb way, and the movie was never outright bad. Jennifer Jason Leigh's acting is actually really good, and the other actors aren't bad either.

Talking about it afterwards, Michelle and I both concluded that this was a product of its time, a relic that seems dated now, but also kind of innocent in a way. Like, they didn't know any better. This was made in a time when the world didn't have the Internet giving everyone a voice, including people with mental health problems who would have said 'hey, this is insensitive as fuck.' The people making the movie were living in a much simpler world, without the societal context to know what they were doing was inaccurate and silly. They just wanted to make a scary, fun movie.

It really is interesting in that way, to watch Single White Female in the context of today's super aware world. Social media did a wonderful thing by allowing minority voices to come out and express their feelings and make the complexities of life more visible – that way, they're not as confusing, and the average person can understand the plight of the mentally ill better now without, you know, having to go to school and learn that shit in books and stuff.

But hey, at least we make great and insightful movies now, that only show mental illness in realistic ways!

... On second thought, I'll show myself out.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.

Death Curse of Tartu (1966)

They say the past was a simpler time, free of all the modern hustle and bustle and stress. The 1960s, for example, was a much simpler time, as shown in the movie Death Curse of Tartu, which is an hour and a half long and only about 35 of those minutes actually have anything happening in it. Ahh the good old days. Actually, saying there's 35 minutes of something “happening” in this is pretty generous...

Director: William Grefé

Starring: Fred Pinero, Babette Sherrill

IMDb

Co-written with Clayton.

This is an insufferable film with as much charm as waiting in line at the DMV, only usually you get something done a lot faster at the DMV. It was made at the same time as Sting of Death, another bad old 60s movie I reviewed a few years back. But this one is actually worse, mostly because the dance scenes in this are way, way less good, which is the standard by which all 60s horror films were judged even back then.

This one starts off with something sure to sweep the audience off their feet – twenty fucking minutes of nothing but some dude just walking through the Everglades. There's barely any dialogue and we have no idea why we should care about him, but hey, the music is so super over the top and lavish pomp and fanfare that we don't need anything actually happening! The music alone is enough.

Row, row, row your boat...sorry, I got nothing. I should have just left this caption box blank. God dammit.

He gets killed off by a snake. The music is the same pompous soundtrack now as it was when he was just walking through the forest. I really don't think that's the greatest way to build tension. Indiana Jones wouldn't have been as good if they had high-flying soundtrack music blaring while he was talking to people in his office back at home. Not all food is better when you put a bunch of sprinkles and whipped cream on it. Am I getting through with these comparisons? Point is – lay off the music until something exciting is happening!

Unless that's a real snake, I just can't believe this performance.

Ha! There! I showed THIS 50-year-old film how much I can critique it! Now I will truly look really smart.

To the film's credit, they do lay off that music in favor of … something even more annoying. It's this bizarre sort of ritualistic drumming with some weird slow chanting every now and then. I guess they were trying to set a mood, but it's too repetitive and mostly I think it was intended to send viewers into a catatonic state so they wouldn't be bothered by how boring the rest of the movie is. Though I do like that they showed us how current Florida Governor Rick Scott was spawned... 

Behold, yes, the birth of evil.

At this point, the movie only has about an hour left of its runtime. I can just picture a group of lazy filmmakers high-fiving one another in the editing room. “Yeah! Economic storytelling!”

Then we're introduced to generic body count characters Nos. 2 through 6! They're all white and nerdy and have no real other personality traits, which is the perfect type of person to get lost and die in some foreign place. That's some good old fashioned xenophobia for you. Much better than the modern kind, at any rate.

So I guess the movie now becomes about these bungholes. One of the guys, the leader I suppose, is constantly talking just to hear his own lips flap. I can say that because they see a skull in the woods and get freaked out, and one of the girls says it's the legend of Tartu, who can turn into animals or something. The main dude says no, he doesn't believe in that, it's all just superstition!

We found a human skull on a stick in the woods where we're going to have our field trip! Let's just disregard this and act like nothing is wrong!

But then, a few scenes later, he says he's worried about it. Maybe in a movie with more character development, this could be considered a plot point. But I think it's because the writers were on drugs and forgot about the first scene due to the large amount of time spent walking around doing nothing between the two.

In the middle of all this, the other kids ask if they can go down to the river and party and he says they can, reluctantly, not really sure it's safe for them – but he lets them go. Then later, he tells his girlfriend he wanted them to go and told them to, so he could talk to her about the curse stuff. What? This guy changes his mind more than Two-Face from Batman. Get a grip. Think!

But it ain't like the other characters are any better. They're the kinds of people who like to have a dance party on top of some ancient burial ground in the middle of the Everglades. I don't know who taught these morons to dance. I know white people never had much rhythm, but this is ridiculous.

Oh yeah, block the fucking camera! That's great choreography!

Hmm... let's try to find some positives with this scene, as hard as that might be. Uh, at least they're keeping to the spirit of Sting of Death? But at least that one's dance scene was focusing on the girls' faces and asses. I don't know what the fuck the cameras were directed to do during this scene – focus on the girls' abdomens! That's sexy!

Then they get in the water and are immediately killed by a shark that shows up randomly, presumably being an incarnation of this Tartu they keep going on about. Leader guy shows up with his gun and starts shooting at the shark. I think it'd be funny if he accidentally shot the two friends in the water and missed the shark entirely. But that doesn't happen.

The greatest field trips are always the ones where you need to have a gun at the ready at all times...

After that, they decide things have gotten bad, and now they have to leave. But they can't all just go back the way they came, no – they have to send one dude out on his own to bring back help. Why? It's never really explained. That's just the way they want to do it, so they send off Johnny to go do it, saying he's perfect because he can take care of himself in the wild.

But before we can get to how he does, we have to sit through another loooooooong scene of him wandering around in the Everglades. Because, I guess the movie hadn't shown us enough of that yet.

Pretty sure this guy ate paint chips as a kid...

Then, Johnny – the guy who we were told was so good at surviving that he'd be totally fine out here – sits down against a tree and is killed instantly by a snake. He doesn't put up a fight and he isn't taken by surprise – he just sits down of his own volition and lets himself die. That's amazing, after the stuff we heard a few minutes earlier about how good he was at surviving. It's like hearing someone is really good at drawing, then you see that they can't stay inside the lines when coloring. The cognitive dissonance is complete.

This = good in the wild, can survive. Awesome.

The remaining characters all find this cave place with a tomb inside. But before they can get to that, one girl is scared by the cave and runs outside, where she is chased by an alligator for way, way longer than any alligator chase scene ever needed to go. I love how she runs like hell to get away from that dumb gator, only it's walking at a very slow pace. She really sucks at running.

Now we know where Michael and Jason learned this trick from - Tartu!

Seriously, how does she get up into a tree? What is going on?

Gotta love the end of the chase, too, where she succumbs to injuries from a bite on the arm and dies. Wow. The tragedy is just too much to bear.

Back in the cave, they get into a fight with this guy, who pops out of the tomb – I guess it's supposed to be Tartu himself, who has taken all film just to show his lazy ass on screen. Which I guess is pretty much the same way the movie treated its audience. I love how they just shoot first, ask questions later. Like, really, what if he was a benevolent spirit who could help them out? How the fuck do they know they need to fight him? And even so, they're fucking breaking into his tomb. What did they really expect him to do - invite them to watch TV and have pie?

"What are you douchebags doing in here? I'm trying to sleep. I have an important meeting in the morning."

So they just drown him in quicksand and that's the ending!

That look of mild irritation basically sums up the audience reaction to the film. Boom! Oh yeah. Nailed it again!

Overall this was an asinine film with pretty much no redeeming qualities. Everything about this story is bad. It's basically a story about some idiots who come into this place, disturb a grave, and then when the sleeping ghost is mad and starts killing them off, they kill it in return. And it's a happy ending. That's like if you broke into my house, I attacked you to try and keep you out, and you killed me, then you were the one who got praised as a hero. What a load.

Most of the film is made up of the characters wandering around doing nothing in the Everglades. Being filmed there on-site doesn't excuse how mind-numbingly boring this whole thing is. Propaganda videos from tree-hugging Everglades rights groups are more interesting. B-roll footage from National Geographic have more substance.

Sigh. So I guess this movie would never really make Florida a great place to make movies. Oh well. I'm sure something else would eventually put Florida on the map.

Maybe.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.