Funny Games (1997)

Let’s talk about stuff that hasn’t held up. Every decade has a few things that just end up seeming dated after it’s over and we’ve all had a chance to analyze the settling dust of said decade. Like the 60s had the whole Woodstock hippy thing, the 70s had prog rock and acid, and the 80s had Reaganomics and weird PRMC hearings trying to say anything fun was witchcraft. Well, I’ve recently found an interesting one from the 90s – movies that really, really wanted to be smart about how VIOLENT and DANGEROUS movies were making America. Like Funny Games.

Director: Michael Haneke

Starring: Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Susanne Lothar

IMDb

This is kind of a weird social commentary type of movie where the villains break the fourth wall and talk to the audience occasionally. It’s not done much and not in very interesting ways – usually just a wink or a nod, or maybe a paltry bit of dialogue about how they want to make it to feature-length movie time or something. I guess it’s interesting but it’s hardly even all that obtrusive. I guess there’s some dialogue about reality perception and stuff, but that’s so on the nose it comes off as hokey. Without real character traits for these guys, it feels empty and gimmicky to me.

I have to give the movie props – it’s well made, and director Michael Haneke has a great command of putting together expert scenes and making this tense, sparse atmosphere, focusing on the pain of the victims of these two sociopathic killers. It’s more uncomfortable than a lot of thrillers at some points because they take their time to show the victims’ anguish in this very quiet, stark way, and don’t have any deus ex machina type shit to save them. So it does get its point across at least in the beginning.

However, the whole messaging and blunt “point” of the film is what ended up bothering me – oh, we’re complicit in violence because the killers can talk to us, and should we even be watching movies that have this kind of violence in them? It’s kind of condescending actually. It’s like the movie is the scolding parent wagging their finger, telling us not to watch violent films because they’re bad for us. Like, pretty sure we can make our own decisions there, bud. Natural Born Killers, another edgy 90s flick, is very similar in its messaging, and even goes further by totally un-subtly throwing the news media in there – that one is so obvious in its messaging you can see it from space. But I’m sure a lot of people thought this stuff was, like, so deep, man.

I mean it’s really just kind of a weird puritanical kind of thing. I know Haneke likely didn’t mean it that way – he wants to reflect on the violence and all that and it’s not like he’s literally running a Sunday school class. But come on. Violence in movies isn’t some insidious plot. It’s fucking fun. It’s entertainment and catharsis to escape whatever bullshit is going on in the real world – which, these days, is a fucking lot, if you’ve seen the news lately. Not everything is gonna be about knitting circles or a guy who finds a lost puppy or something. Occasionally we want to see a guy get stabbed with a bayonet on fire or something.

‘Movies are violent, we’re complicit in violence’ - yeah, it’s called escapism. It’s enjoyable. That’s been going on since, Jesus, like the dawn of civilization? It’s not like Hollywood was the first thing ever to invent violent made-up stories. The ancient Greeks had stories about guys fucking their moms and killing their dads. Shakespeare had violent disembowelments and all sorts of murders going on, some of them even via bears. Did they also contribute to the downfall of society? Maybe we never had a fucking chance.

And yeah there are movies that are in poor taste and are exploitative – no doubt about that. Some things are bad. But other times it’s just for fun. I think things have just changed in the last 20 years. Especially in these last few, with the ascension of Trump to the presidency and the surrounding chaos that seems to have enveloped everything in our public view. These days everything just seems so much more dire and serious than when we had the luxury of going ‘oh, isn’t our violent media consumption such an issue? Pass the caviar, Angelina.’ The stakes have all changed. So maybe that’s a part of why Funny Games didn’t strike me. That’s always funny about art; how it changes depending on an indefinite number of factors.

Maybe it’ll strike you different. For me this missed the mark. I might’ve found it really deep when I was 13 or so.

Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.

Event Horizon (1997)

With all these movies offering cautionary tales about the bad things that happen when you go into uncharted deep space in search of some abandoned space ship, I really think the astronauts of the future will have it pretty easy. When they're thinking about going out to some bum-fuck barren stretch of starry wasteland to rescue the no doubt alien-infested carcass of their lost ship...they'll probably reconsider. Especially with movies like this one as part of their space training curriculum.

Director: Paul Anderson

Starring: Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Event Horizon is from the pits of the 90s and made by the guy who did Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat, so you know it's good. It's a sort of splattershot mix of a low-rent Alien, a low-rent The Shining and gore from the Hellraiser series, put together with the craftsmanship of a guy with two broken hands trying to fix your porch.

The film starts off innocuously enough, with some incredibly boring opening credit scenes. Oh yeah, you really padded out the length of the film to make it look longer than it is!

The characters are kind of a mish-mash of various inoffensive stereotypes that, while they don't irritate me, do kinda come off like a checklist of the various types of people that have to be on every spaceship in the future – the obligatory super serious captain guy and of course one goofy comic relief guy, at least one woman who has some perfunctory emotional issues that cripple her ability to do her job and a mechanic guy who does nothing but talk about how horny he is.

I guess none of the characters are bad – they're mostly just bland, and so stock and predictable that it really feels like they were just thrown in there because this same set of characters HAS to be on every fucking space ship ever. The only differences between most of these characters is how many lines of soulless exposition they're allowed to spout out like a broken fountain.

Oh, yeah, you better believe there's a shitload of exposition in this movie. This whole thing is knee-fucking-deep in the kind of exposition you can only get from the thriller genre's awkward late-90s, early-2000s phase where there couldn't really be any fun or good cheer in these movies – only dramatic explanations of the plot. I get the idea that if Event Horizon tried to smile, it would crack into a million ceramic shards of its former self. Its idea of fun is probably reading help manuals for lawn mowers.

Okay, so I've said there's a lot of exposition. So what's the plot? They're going out to find this ship called Event Horizon which disappeared years ago, but now has come up again on their radars. Sam Neill's character tells them all of this when they get there, which takes a long time and is broken up by seemingly everyone else there interrupting him every other sentence. That's really all we get in terms of dialogue – people interrupting each other. It's almost like being at a really shitty Thanksgiving dinner, which is really something to strive for in your movie's dialogue!

Furthermore, why are they just now learning what the mission is? They really didn't know any of this shit before? Either the company they work for is just super anal-retentive about information, or they're just the kinds of people who hate asking questions before going billions of miles into space...either way, it's stupid. Oh, and apparently the government lied about what happened to this ship – amazing, a government lying about something? What kind of twists will this movie pull out next?

They find the ship instantly, and normally I'd be more complementary of them for completing their mission, buuuuut finding a ship ten times the size of yours isn't really THAT impressive. Should I make a Malaysian Airlines/CNN joke, or will that not make sense in a year or so?

"How did we lose this big-ass ship again?"
"Well, the navigator was preoccupied by sleeping with the hot chick who served the coffee at the space base, and..."

They get on the ship and it takes about five seconds before their young astronaut character finds a horrific abomination on all of mankind that threatens to kill them all:

"Maybe if we had painted this ship in other colors besides ominous blues and dark grays, we wouldn't have this problem."

Despite this, Neill acts indignant and whiny when the captain, played by Laurence Fishburne, tells him they're shutting down the room with that hellish otherworldly portal-machine thing in it and nobody else can go in there.

"Aw, what's the big deal? It's just an insane hell-portal to another dimension that could kill us all! You guys are buzzkills, man."

The characters aren't really very good in this, as the writing seems to think showing us the fact that they had relationships on Earth that they left behind is enough. Which really isn't a very inspired choice to make. Everyone who does something like this in a movie always leaves someone on Earth behind that they miss. You need more than just that. It's like saying, “yeah, her favorite color is blue,” and then going okay, that's good enough for character development!

But I do admire your penchant for putting boils on the legs of children:

And apparently Neill just has a fetish for his wife wearing red eyes, because that's what he sees in his visions.

As the movie goes on and more weird things happen, the characters start to distrust each other and show this through extended, overblown screaming matches, like they do in every other shitty movie. Guys, drama isn't created when you raise your voices high enough to lose them for the next 12 hours.

Later on, we get more “family drama” as the one lady who misses her son sees an illusion of him and tries to go to him – unfortunately for her, there's a giant hole in the floor for some unknown reason that she easily could have seen. Why is there a giant hole there? Space and stuff! Technology! Who cares! But seriously, she should have seen that shit. I don't know how good of a mother you are if you can't see giant gaping holes where you can fall to your death.

It's good that she's separated from her kid on this ship, because for one, apparently there are giant holes everywhere to fall into. And two, she can't see any of them. Awesome.

Meanwhile, Neill continues to act shifty, claiming he doesn't know what the deal with the ship was. Though later on, it's revealed that the ship went to Hell or something and that's why it disappeared. It also now has its own brain, or some shit like that. I'm glad it has its own brain and can think endlessly about taking people to Hell with it now, or whatever the story is; that's a relief. I was worried I was never gonna see that in a movie. Can it also play dead?

Neill's character goes crazy, murders a few people and stabs out his own eyes. He comes out looking like he got in a fight with a Gillette Blue blade.

It's like if a werewolf cut himself shaving.

Oh, and he can also show Fishburne some visions of his crewmates getting tortured in hell, because why not spoil the surprise, you asshole?

Hey, bucko, I didn't want to see the end of this. Now I won't be surprised when it happens!

He fights Fishburne and dies. Fishburne and the other survivors all shout a lot more while explosions go on, so you know it's serious. They find a way to get off the ship that they never considered before – by blowing up most of it and escaping in the one part of it that is conveniently safe and will allow them to do that!

And the remains of the ship get sucked into the anus of Neptune.

Wow. They could have done that when their crew was all still alive and before Neill went crazy, but I guess that wouldn't have been dramatic enough. Also there's no way to make sure the evil of the ship is really gone – you know, except for the fact that we mercifully got no sequels to this.

We end on a fake-out scare of the one lady waking up from sleep in the ship to rescuers coming in, only one of the rescuers turns out to be Neill with the scarred face again! Shock and awe!

"Surprise! I gotcha, didn't I?"

Except it's just a dream and the movie ends on the real rescuers comforting her. Kinda anticlimactic.

I used to like this pretty well, but after rewatching, it really just didn't hold up. The ideas are interesting – the whole cosmic occult thing is kinda cool, and the visuals aren't bad or anything. But in practice, there's just nothing interesting to this. There's a dump truck load of exposition, and then people start dying. It's Point A to Point B with very little deviation from the path and no real character or plot that isn't strictly generic and could have been made by anyone else.

It is better than other space-horror movies like Jason X or Hellraiser: Bloodline, though, which is a standard you can feel comfortable in when you lower your actual standards enough to buy this from the Walmart discount movie bin to watch while drunk off your ass.

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

Wishmaster (1997)

For the month of March, in all its Irish pride and love of all things green, I will be looking at a horror series based around a mythological creature. It’s a strange, campy world where ridiculous things happen and people with elaborate makeup try to scare the shit out of you.

That’s right, it’s Wishmaster.

Director: Robert Kurtzman

Starring: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff

IMDb

Part of the quirky 90s days of horror where movies like this could get three sequels somehow, Wishmaster is a gem of hilarity. Campy lines, ridiculous death scenes and lots of over the top scenes – that’s the bread and butter that makes up this sandwich of insanity. If you’re not ready to dive into this movie, just wish it – and it will be so.

We start off with a party in ancient Egyptian times. Someone says they’re bored and wish the party would get exciting, so a magical genie decides to fuck up the entire party by making everything go insane. We have bloody skeletons popping out of their bodies:

People ripping off Alien:

And people turning into whatever the hell this is:

It’s just a mess. I mean, who invited a genie to the party anyway? I have to say this re-imagining of Aladdin isn’t what I expected.

We then switch to the most logical thing ever after all that blood, violence and mayhem: a guy and girl arguing over him being friendzoned. Apparently the girl, Alex, just broke up with her boyfriend, and the guy, Josh, is trying to get in on the rebound.

"Will you go out with me? Will you go out with me? Will you go out with me?"

Jesus. Next I bet he’ll go online and start a blog about how all women only like jerks because this one doesn’t mistake his obvious pussyfooted sleaze-ball attempts as anything actually worthy of romance, because you know, the best way to get to any girl’s heart is by being her friend but begging like a pussy to be something else all the time. But I digress.

If you can believe it, Alex works at an auction house selling off valuable antique gemstones and stuff and Josh works as a scientist who studies gemstones. How convenient! We know this because of a freak accident where this screamy shouty guy gets crushed by a box containing an ancient statue, and a red gemstone falls out. Somehow Alex gets a hold of it. But little does she know that it's actually the gemstone that holds the evil Djinn inside!

Oh, and before I go on with the rest of the review – yes, Robert Englund is in this. Apparently still trying to prove he has a career outside of Freddy Krueger. Okay, okay, that’s a bit cruel. I mean, it’s not his fault the film is so desperate for street cred it actually fit Jason Voorhees (well, one of the actors that played him, anyway) and the Candyman in here later on, too. But I’ll get to that when it comes.

At least he doesn't start doing terrible puns along with the genie in this.

Meanwhile, Josh looks at the gemstone and discovers that red gemstones sometimes have explosive properties:

"That's the last time I mix gasoline with fire ... worst science fair experiment ever!"

And can also spawn horrifying demonic skeleton babies that look like Frank from Hellraiser crossed with Freddy Krueger and mixed with just a splice of DNA from the first Alien movie. Well, I wouldn’t have expected such a thing, but apparently that’s just the way genies work. The movie is the expert, after all.

Can you tell this director is most famous for makeup effects? He actually did work on movies like Army of Darkness and From Dusk Til Dawn.

So the genie kills him, and that somehow makes him strong enough to become full-sized again. I’d say this was a huge rip-off of Hellraiser if it wasn’t actually a lot better than Hellraiser ever got. The genie escapes, but the cops get there in true lay-z-boy donut-eating movie-cop fashion, too late. They find Josh’s body right before Alex comes running over and sees her friend dead. She comes running up, hysterically calling Josh’s name, when one of the cops stops her. His brilliant deductive work leads him to ask the following question: “I take it you knew this Josh?”

"I WAS JUST SHOUTING HIS NAME AT RANDOM! I like running around crying and screaming peoples' names around murder scenes! It's just how I get my kicks."

Yes, because a woman who comes running and screaming a dead person’s name at a murder scene might know the victim! Did this guy get hired by mistake? I’d look into that as soon as possible.

Then we get adventures with a homeless man. He gets into an argument with a shop manager or something about being a bum and paying taxes. The homeless man’s wording is exactly what you’d expect from a homeless guy insulting someone: “Piss conflected afterbirth of a Chinese gangbanger!”

This guy would make a good Internet reviewer. Give him his own blog!

Yeah, isn’t that what you’d expect a homeless guy to say? Oh well. He comes across the genie and says he hopes that guy in the store gets cancer and dies. So then the genie tells him to go look in the store, and he does. What he sees is probably the same thing that happened to the producers of the movie when they realized this wasn’t going to be the next classic horror series, and instead just a punchline to a joke that nobody was telling.

Also, it’s amazing that this spontaneous accelerated cancer death isn’t looked into or investigated. But then again, with police in this world who can’t tell someone knows a murder victim when she’s calling his name and crying, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

We then get some med student stumbling across the genie while he’s trying to steal a body so he can look normal. The genie asks the kid if he “doesn’t wish to see anything else,” and the kid nods his head. So what does the genie do? He … sews the kid’s eyes shut.

Well that's one way to avoid seeing the movie you picked to be in.

Okay, seriously, that kid didn’t even fuckin’ say anything; he just nodded his head! How does that count as a wish? This genie is a big old cheater!

On second thought this is all too exciting for me. What’s going on with Alex? Well apparently she’s hangin’ out with her sister, crying over Josh because it was her fault he died. Alex’s sister apparently has been cast in the role of Magical Exposition Fairy, as she does nothing in this scene but spew background on their past: apparently when they were kids, a fire burned down Alex’s house and her parents died inside, so Alex has been blaming herself for that ever since.

Movie, do you really think you can pull this storyline off? I mean the rest of your run-time is full of silly skeletons popping out of bodies, people turned into cartoon characters melded into jail cell bars and horrible, horrible lines from the genie. And you’re trying to pull off a serious “parents died in a fire” story? Thankfully it doesn’t really try. Actually, it’s mostly just glanced over – which makes it kinda hilarious. Point of the story is, Alex should see a psychiatrist.

But a psychiatrist wouldn’t solve all her problems – like the head-splitting visions that cause her to scream like a crazy person whenever the genie kills anybody.

I sure hope they paid her extra for trying to force a camera down her throat here.

And nobody ever questions it. When she does it this one time around Robert Englund’s character, he just says she “fainted.” That isn’t fainting you numbskull! She’s screaming at the top of her lungs and clearly in pain!

Next we get one of my favorite scenes in the film – the store clerk scene where he buys clothes. What can I even make fun of first? Maybe how the female clerk suddenly loses all sense of professionality when he walks out wearing the suit:

"Hur hur, I haven't seen an attractive man in seven years!"

I mean, yeah, the guy’s a hot piece of ass. I get it. But even most guys wouldn’t react this way if it was a beautiful woman! She’s just so hysterically amazed by him that it’s cartoonish. I know; something cartoonish in this film? God forbid.

Then you have the dialogue where he’s talking to her about how she’ll get old, wither and die. She doesn’t even bat an eyelash and doesn’t seem to find this weird in any way. I guess being attractive does excuse everything. Absolutely everything.

And finally you get what he does to her. Somehow, the genie cons her into “wishing” she would be beautiful forever. Ignoring the obvious misogyny of that, I do like his imagination for these wishes. She turns into a store mannequin! It’s kinda like a reject from the early episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only with less kung fu fighting.

This is just how the genie gets around paying for stuff; turn the employees of the store into mannequins forever.

Alex spends her time running around trying to figure out what’s going on, and the genie is trying to find her I guess. He goes to a police station and gets this one officer guy to “wish” that this one criminal would go on a killing spree with everyone watching so they could arrest him. Well, guess what happens?

The ironic thing is, I don’t even think the genie had to swing things to make this happen. What if that guy going on a rampage that way was just a coincidence? Maybe he had just had enough.

Oh well. He gets a business card with Alex’s name and then goes to find her work. Here we get the Kane Hodder cameo – if you don’t know, this guy played Jason in some of the shittiest entries in the Friday franchise, later in the game. So appropriately enough, they have him “wish” to see the genie “go through him.” Naturally, the genie just punches his lights out and goes on his way, right? Noooooo. That wouldn’t be coke-addled enough for this movie. So instead we get this image:

The absurdity of this is so complete that I just have no clue what the movie makers were thinking. I mean, how do you even come up with this image?

I’d love to make a joke about it, but honestly I’m not sure what is going on and it scares me a little, so I’m just gonna move on. There’s another scene where Alex’s boss says he’ll give up her location for a million dollars. So the genie has his mother killed in a plane crash so he gets the insurance money – you know, fuck it; I really want to see some of these weird characters’ stories played out after the genie’s done with them. What happened to the homeless “piss conflected afterbirth” guy with the cancer fantasy? Maybe he turned his life around and got a job working at an animal shelter.

What happened to the boss who got a million bucks when his mom died in a horrific flaming accident? Did he feel interminable guilt over the deaths of dozens of people on that plane, crying every night and blowing his nose into hundred dollar bills? Maybe he donates it all to a foundation for airline safety and turns his life around.

I HAVE TO KNOW. It’s more interesting than what’s actually going on: a laughably long scene of the genie talking to Alex about nothing. He actually says “the shit just hit the fan.” A millennia-old genie just said “the shit just hit the fan.” I think that just broke all of cinema. I think that’s just the end of cinema as we know it. You might as well just fuckin’ have Jesus in the new movie Son of God impersonating Kanye West.

Never mind the absurdity of this grotesque looking monster sitting in a nice old lady style living room...

So, I guess after that we get the Candyman – Tony fucking Todd himself – as some bodyguard at the hotel where Robert Englund is having a party. He says he wishes he could escape, so naturally the genie puts him in a water tank a la Houdini and leaves him for dead. Because, I guess, Houdini did escape tricks, so now Tony Todd has to! It doesn’t really make a lick of sense.

I’m guessing the Wishmaster genie is the socially awkward nerd of horror movie killers. Like the guy who everyone hated in high school because he never had any good ideas, just weird, ridiculous and implausible ones, but who you put up with at the high school reunion out of plastic conventional niceties of our suffocating society. Like that, yeah! Point is he sucks at these kills. I mean he’s just so desperate – anything even remotely connected to a “wish” and he gets creative. What a gyp.

Like the next scene, where he gets Englund to “wish” there was a party the world would remember for years afterward. What ensues is a repetition of the opening scene:

My favorite part of this scene is when people try to shoot those stone guys behind him - like yeah, really, try and shoot rock-solid stone. That's a brilliant idea!

There’s some kind of overly long, dull scene where she defeats him through something tangentially connected to the parents-died-in-a-fire thing – I really don’t give a fuck. The end result is, the entire movie gets erased and Alex gets to go back in time to when Josh was still alive and make a relationship with him. Hooray for anti-friendzoning! Does this mean the money I paid for the DVD gets refunded to me too?

This whole movie was just a delight. I guess there were a few boring parts, but overall it was a lot of fun. Recommended if you wanted to see I Dream of Jeannie remade as a horror film. And hey, there are sequels? Well, what more could I wish for?!

Wishmaster 2 coming soon!

Images copyright of their original owners.

Storm of the Century, Part 1

So, winter has finally come, there’s snow outside and the air is ass-numbingly cold. Your plans to go outside and frolic may have been quelched by the oncoming tide of snow flurries and ice-cold winds. It might be time to dig into the attic and bring out the mittens, scarves, wool blankets and kindling for the fireplace. And while you’re doing that, why not put on one of the best wintertime movies, Storm of the Century?

Creator: Stephen King

Starring: Tim Daly, Colm Feore

IMDb

Yes, the Stephen King TV classic of murder, madness and I’m a Little Teapot itself. This is a huge, huge movie, with a lot to cover, so I’ll be splitting up the review into two parts. Isn’t that exciting? Aren’t you just unable to contain yourself?

Yes, my fans are all Asian now.

Well, shut up. This is Storm of the Century!

We start off this masterpiece with some narration, informing us that the great “storm of the century” did not teach the narrator the value of life, but that he only just learned it a little while ago. Well gee, isn’t that a strange way to start off a movie?

Now with real snow and ice! Take the Universal Studios ride!

It’s like “Yeah, I didn’t learn anything from the story of the movie you’re about to see. But when I woke up drunk and high off my ass in a motel with a fat hooker the other day before coming in to record the final narration, THEN I came to the realization that my life was a catastrophic ruin and I should have managed my money better!”

I mean geez, imagine if some other films started off in a similar manner. Imagine if Se7en started like that.

“I didn’t really learn anything from the events in the film you’re about to unfold. But now, years later and after many therapy sessions, I think I finally understand the point: you should never, under any circumstances, trust Kevin Spacey.”

Yeah, not quite as powerful, is it?

So what am I talking about? Well, when you’re in the movie that thinks it’s a good idea to juxtapose the brutal murder of an old lady while her attacker sits down to watch the weather channel and sing “I’m a Little Teapot”…

Note: No teapots were harmed in the making of Storm of the Century.

…and the brutal head-stuck-in-the-stairs scene of a young girl in town as her classmates mock her ruthlessly, setting her up for years and years of psychotherapeutic sessions with an overpaid, over-medicated shrink:

She went on to star in the 8-bit version of Let the Right One In.

Yeah, not quite seamless, is it? Bit of an odd pair of scenes to play after one another. I love the head-in-stairs scene just because it’s so bizarre…they spend way too much time on this. It’s not a particularly telling or atmospheric scene. Unless the point is that the little girl will now begin a downward spiral of getting her head stuck places throughout her adolescence. But mostly it’s just hilarious to picture Stephen King, the master of horror himself, putting so much effort into this.

And the other scene is just baffling, too. “I’m a Little Teapot,” really? That was the scariest thing you could come up with for the villain’s motif? Apparently, yeah, this guy’s name is Andre Linoge. He kills the nicest old lady in town for no reason and then sets up camp to watch TV. The weather channel is hilarious, warning of the coming storm in the most fanatical way possible. Check out the weather lady’s great TV journalism:

“The forecast is calling for destruction tonight, death tomorrow, and Armageddon by the weekend. This could be the end of all life as we know it.”

Yeah, THAT wouldn’t incite panic, right? Totally neutral and definitely how weather people are supposed to act! I’m sure she’ll have a great career writing tabloid junk for The National Enquirer by day and fanatical 2012 Mayan calendar bullshit by night. I guess maybe it’s just part of Linoge’s magical sorcery after breaking the TV though.

So a couple people come in and discover the horrific crime, and then find themselves accosted by Linoge, who somehow knows their darkest secrets. The town manager, Robbie Beals, comes in and finds out that Linoge knows all about that time he was with a hooker while his mother was dying in a hospice bed far away. It is actually a very creepy, effective scene, and the atmosphere is through the roof.

And this continues as Mike Anderson, the town constable, and his men arrest Linoge and take him down to the county jail, which for some reason is located in the grocery store. As the back door is jammed shut and there is no way into the jail directly, Mike and his guys are forced to take Linoge through the grocery store where most of the town is shopping before the storm. As they do, he reveals some things about other town citizens, like the young woman who went onto the mainland and got an abortion recently, or the guy who sells marijuana out of his warehouse illegally.

He also has the gall to touch Mike’s son, which turns the whole thing into a circus once Mike finds out that Linoge doesn’t have a wallet. Obviously keen on setting a good example for the cops and the rest of the townspeople, Mike goes apeshit and shoves Linoge up against the wall like a crazy person. Isn’t it a bit early to go nuts at this point, guy? I mean Christ, so many more people are going to die over the next five hours of movie screentime! Save some inhuman rage for later!

"I'll show you that I can act dramatic and bland at the same time!"

This is all fine and good, but I just want to know what would happen if he got one of these “prophecies” wrong for once. Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Just imagine his face!

So I guess they lock him up and all, and he keeps on jabbering about how if the townspeople “give him what he wants,” he’ll go away. As the storm is coming in, they don’t really have time to focus on that, and half the town is stuck in a shelter whilst the other half is watching over Linoge. But Mike does find time to go back to the murdered old woman’s place and find Linoge’s slogan written on the wall in blood:

Well, geez, there are easier ways to redecorate a house you don't like than killing its sole occupant and painting the walls in her blood...personally I like Craigslist.

The only frustrating thing about this whole thing is that Linoge won’t say what he wants. So this whole time he’s killing everyone and causing Stephen King-ified trouble all around town and asking them to “give him what he wants,” there’s no clues to what it is he actually wants! It’s sort of like having a fickle girlfriend angry at you for some reason she won’t tell you about. Well, actually that’s selling the movie short – picture that same fickle girlfriend if she didn’t even speak the same language as you. That’s what Storm of the Century’s villain’s evil plan is like.

While that’s going on, we also get numerous scenes of Mike interacting with Robbie Beals. Apparently Robbie likes to try and take things into his own hands and investigate, even though Mike sees this as his own job. They have a couple separate quarrels about this, spread out throughout the film, and really I don’t see the point … unless  Robbie really has this history of messing up police investigations, in which case I am not sure how he’d even have a high city position at all. But this is never established, and the movie mostly just wastes time with these two, which could have been cut out and made the movie that much shorter.

What is this, a remake of The Odd Couple?

And that’s another one of the problems with this. As much as I love a good, long, epic film, and as entertaining as this is, there are way too many characters. It’s like two simultaneous games of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon going on. You will never be able to keep track of all these characters. I mean, even as much as King tries to fix that problem by having them all constantly refer to one another by their full names. Nice effort, but it’s still about as confusing as your last family reunion with your super-distant cousins and their super distant cousins, and so on. I will give it that it tries to genuinely replicate the feeling of a small town though.

While the townspeople are clamoring about, Linoge is busy doing incredibly important things while locked up in jail, like helping the police with crossword puzzles:

This truly is the only way Andre Linoge could get his point across. He just got lucky and found the only town in America with a crossword puzzle superstition.

Yup, that’s the extent of his evil so far. Singing “I’m a Little Teapot” over and over and helping the police with crossword puzzles. Why do I get the idea this guy would be laughed out of the annual villains’ convention? But I guess he does eventually kill that guy by making him hang himself though.

"You've helped with your last crossword puzzle, buddy..."

Oops, wait, no, I had another one.

Good start, but how about something a little more adventurous? Like … an ax to the face, maybe?

Now introducing Axe-O-Vision.

Yeah, that’s more like it! I give that kill scene three out of four stars. But you could still do better, though … like, maybe have the couple with the aborted baby argue outside in the snow. That’s a good way to set up a kill scene. Or at least, make the viewers want to kill someone.

Back the fucking camera up. We don't need to see what it's like to French kiss this jackass.

So, I gotta admit, this scene actually isn’t that bad. For a scene where two young people are arguing about abortion, Stephen King handles it surprisingly really well in a medium where his stories usually turn to crap. The girl, Kat, apparently had the abortion because she couldn’t count on the guy to help out, seeing as he was cheating on her at the time. Neither side is really right and neither side is completely wrong either. It’s a pretty damn good, heavy drama scene.

After that, Linoge tries to make the guy kill Kat, but he can’t do it. So then Linoge does the ole switcheroo and makes Kat kill the guy instead, which she does. She then sits on the ground and intones creepily about the murder in a dead-sounding voice. Which is also done very well, and creates a lot of atmosphere:

…until she eventually just comes out and says she killed him, which kinda ruins the moment. It worked better at first because she was being so vague about it, but when she just comes out and says it, the spell is broken.

Ah well. At least we have a scene after that in which Linoge talks about how this other guy and his friends once beat up a gay guy. In retaliation, as Mike is standing in between them, the guy shoots at Linoge and instead hits Mike. How awesome. This guy should be the official marksman of the town. Why haven’t they handed him a gun award yet?

So that’s pretty much the end of Side One of my DVD – they get ready for the storm and then that’s it; cliffhanger. Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion, when we learn that really, all Andre Linoge wanted was a lifetime supply of Lean Cuisine ravioli.

Am I bullshitting you with that? Well, you’ll have to wait until next week to see!

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