Project Hellraiser: Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

Project Hellraiser Log: I seem to have woken up in an unfamiliar place. It looks like a motel room. The wallpaper is paisley-patterned and the lighting is all a rather puke-ish green. Weird. And it all feels like I’ve been here before…

Director: Scott Derrickson

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0229440/

Hellraiser: Inferno is the first Hellraiser sequel that didn’t have “creative genius” Clive Barker involved, which means it doesn’t have the same goofy slapstick-style horror and lack of any kind of dignity that the other movies had…but is it any good? Actually, I’ll spoil it for you and say no; no it isn’t. In fact, it just replaces what was bad about the first four films with entirely new flaws.

We start off with this guy named Joseph Thorne, who you might remember as Lowell from Dracula II: Ascension! Oh, wait, nobody ever saw that…my bad.

Anyway, in this MUCH DIFFERENT and DEFINITELY NOT BAD movie, he is a hard-assed cop who plays chess at high school basketball practices, does cocaine, lies to his wife and screws hookers on the side; isn’t he just a peach? He also narrates over the top of some scenes in a boring monotone; because of course what we need to see in a corrupt cop movie is his justifications for cheating on his wife! That makes it deep!

The other stuff he does is bad, but playing chess on a basketball court? He could really distract those kids! What if they decide they don't want to play sports anymore and instead take up chess?!

At one point he does cocaine with a hooker while lying to his wife and then drinks alcohol shortly after. And if THAT isn’t enough, he ALSO steals evidence from crime scenes!

Yeah, this is one of the very few reminders that this has anything to do with Hellraiser. Don't get used to that.

What a top notch guy! I think he deserves some kind of award for behavior.

So yeah, that knocks him out, and then we just flash forward rather haphazardly to the next day…we see that his best friend is a guy who has nothing better to talk about than his crossword puzzle of the day, which apparently needs a word for his own name that is ten words long. Thorne gives it to him – “palindrome.” I know this kind of detail is mundane and uninteresting, but hey, it’s what the movie gives us, and if I skipped every mundane and uninteresting thing in this movie, I wouldn’t even have a review.

Thorne gets a very distressed call at his office from the hooker he was with the previous night…what, so he just gives hookers his work phone number now? Does he also give them his wife’s cell phone number? I mean hey, you gotta be thorough!

And so this prompts him and his buddy to go running off to the motel to see what happened to her. We don’t see exactly what happened to her yet, but we do see that Thorne is visibly disturbed. His buddy ends up going to look, too, and also has a similar reaction. Thorne spills the beans about what happened, but he also frames his friend as well, implicating him because otherwise he would get all goody-two-shoes and tell on Thorne. Well, gee. It’s almost like it was a STUPID IDEA TO BRING HIM ALONG. Maybe keep the super-honest good-guy cop who wouldn’t want to cover up a mistake from the bosses OUT of the scheme next time? Just saying.

And seriously, THAT'S all it was in the bathroom that the film was trying to hide and build up to? That's not even that gory. The other movies had way worse moments!

So through some stupid dialogue, we stumble onto a plot involving a guy called ‘The Engineer,’ who is a mysterious pimp figure that kills his hookers…or something…yeah, it doesn’t make sense. We meet some guy who drives an ice cream truck who talks only in low indiscernible mutters and whispering. Of course, he’s given a long scene in which we’re supposed to be interested…are you really showing us a flashback with that stupid muttering voice narrating? Go to hell, Hellraiser: Inferno.

Then later the ice cream truck driver gets killed inside his truck, and a video is taken and sent to Thorne while he’s eating at a diner. Being a genius, he puts the video tape into the machine at the diner, instead of just taking it home where he could watch it himself, and sees the guy getting killed and all…unfortunately nobody else who watches the tape can see it and now Thorne looks like he’s crazy, oooooh!

Also, why is the ice cream truck just sitting there with the guy’s dead, skinned body in it right next to a park? Did nobody notice that and freak out or anything?

Apparently the story is ‘The Engineer’ has kidnapped a child, which Thorne knows through…some kind of psychological mind link or something? I don’t know. Thorne is put on the case and he takes his partner to this seedy looking bar in the middle of nowhere, where we see…

Okay, I have no idea. But to be fair, it doesn’t matter – none of this is ever referenced again. You know, it’s really bad when even Dracula II upstages your movie in the logic department. This movie is making Dracula II look good – THAT IS AWFUL.

Thorne goes to see a psychologist played by James Remar, who honestly gives one of the most bored, tired, sleep-inducing performances I’ve ever seen in a movie. He’s constantly about to nod off to sleep and none of the lines he gives sounds like he’s awake in the least. No conviction, no energy, no believability...wow, NOTHING worth talking about!

"I am the physical embodiment of the viewer's boredom...now that's deep...zzzz...."

And what’s the pay-off of this whole scene about Thorne seeing the psychologist? He tells Remar that he wants to reschedule, and Remar says okay and that they can do it tomorrow. That’s literally it; they don’t talk about any important subjects or anything like that. How hard is it to make a movie that has any kind of redeeming quality? C’mon. Tell me. Because I’m starting to really wonder about that, watching stuff like this.

So he goes back home again and tells his daughter he has to leave again immediately only to stick around and lie in bed for a while; glad he’s so good with his kids…his wife gets a call from the hospital that apparently tells them that his parents got a visit from The Engineer – apparently they’re in the hospital, but no real explanation is ever given and it’s not really brought up much after this at all, so we can mostly skip it. Anyway, he goes to the hospital and a bunch of weird shit happens:

This is a weird scene because they do the whole 'guy sees weird stuff that may or may not be real' thing, but then just stop after like one hallucination...like they just gave up all of a sudden and said, no, we don't feel like doing any more of this. Kinda takes the creepy factor out when there's only this one very brief, passing hallucination...

He opens a door and goes through it and is suddenly back in the hotel where the hooker died, oooooh…he wakes up, finding out that the previous scene was apparently all a dream, and goes down to the hospital for real, drawing his gun and getting arrested like you damn well would if you did that in real life. Finally. Just keep him there!

But unfortunately the show goes on, and Thorne’s best friend who he framed for murder gets killed by one of those freaky guys in masks. Thorne goes back home to find his wife and kid dead and tied to some pillar thing. James Remar comes back and reveals that he’s been Pinhead all along – does Remar ever just play a normal, non-supernatural being? Ever? – and then…well, alright, I can’t hide it anymore. The movie breaks after that. It just breaks in half, and after that it’s smashed into a billion little pieces, and those pieces are broken into a billion more little pieces, and those pieces are…okay, you get the idea:

Yeah, screw character development that actually expands our knowledge of who Thorne is and why he treats the people around him so badly. WE NEED MORE GORY FAST-PACED ACTION SCENES! STAT!

I guess he’s supposed to be…fighting his inner demons, or his sins, or something like that…but honestly, it’s done so poorly that I am astounded nobody in the studio just took a big hockey stick and whacked the director over the head with it to knock some sense into him. Why is the fantasy world falling apart around him now? What was the catalyst? Nothing was really resolved. He didn’t find out any groundbreaking clues that would make Pinhead take apart the world he constructed for him. So why? You can’t just…throw random scary images into a blender and turn it on ‘puree’ and expect it to work! You need some kind of cohesion and thought put into it! For this kind of thing to work, you need subtlety and an underlying theme to it!

But no. Hellraiser: Inferno just gives us scary old people with no eyes, and vampire hookers. I think the part that pisses me off the most about this is not just the lack of subtlety, but the fact that they have character development and an interesting story right at their fingertips, and they just throw it all away! Like there's the scene where he's fighting his dead eyeless parents, right? This could be a very subtle, well-done scene that explores why he neglects his parents and also allow him to grow as a character. But they just scrap that stupid idea and just throw in a goofy fight scene, right before he blows them away with a gun, like he didn't even know them. This is just despicably poor writing and a HUGE missed opportunity for what COULD have been a really good scene.

Anyway, Pinhead is in this movie!

He's in this movie for so little of the runtime that I bet he thought he was just shooting a commercial or something. 

…surprised? I was! What, are you trying to tell me this was a Hellraiser film or something? Pfft.

Thorne’s face gets pulled apart by a bunch of hooks and stuff, because if you didn’t know this was a Hellraiser film before, you at least know now. It’s revealed that the child he was trying to save all along was a younger version of himself, and then an evil version of himself kills the younger version of himself, and then kills the Thorne we’ve been following for the whole movie…okay, seriously, I give up. Movie…you need help.

The film finally ends its long, drawn out cascade of nonsense with Thorne waking up again completely unharmed, ready to repeat his own hell all over again. He answers the phone at work, it’s the hooker screaming bloody murder again, and the whole thing starts over again. The next time he wakes up, he just shoots himself in the head with a gun, which implies he can make choices in this “hell” of his…so why not just NOT answer the phone then, genius?

He wakes up a third time in the green-lit hotel room after the hooker has already been murdered, which makes sense, because that’s totally congruent with how he’s supposed to just repeat the same thing over and over again…oh wait…no, this movie is just retarded.

To add a cherry on top of this whole delightfully wrong-headed festering abomination of a movie, there’s more narration over the top to point out that Thorne is living in hell, as if we couldn’t guess that by now – thank you, movie! Thank you for treating your audience like a bunch of sloped-forehead mongoloids! Thank you for having no logical story or cohesion at all! Thank you for absolutely DRIVING ME UP THE GODDAMN WALL WITH YOUR BULLSHIT!

This movie is a complete disaster! It’s not as bad as the last movie, but GOD DAMN did it nearly drive me nuts! There’s just nothing sane about it; it’s completely bizarre, ridiculous gibberish with no higher thought put into it than ‘durr, I wanna make a movie about psychological stuff, that’ll be REALLY deep!’ Well I spit on you, Hellraiser: Inferno. I spit on everything you stand for! Maybe instead of talking down to the audience next time, fix your own plot-holes and inconsistencies. How does THAT sound, you bunch of…

Wait…no, what’s happening? I feel like I’m being…sucked in….NOOOOO!

I realized at last that I died at the end of the Bloodline review from how awful the film was, and that I am now being punished in Hell forever for making fun of the Hellraiser films. With horror and dread I realize that I am doomed to repeat this review forever. I know you could probably figure that out on your own without me writing this italics-bullshit, but hey, I don’t think you have the mental capacity to think for yourself. I think you need to be held by the hand and led around like a child, because I’m a condescending prick who doesn’t know how to tell a good story. Oh well, off we go!

….

Project Hellraiser Log: I seem to have woken up in an unfamiliar place. It looks like a motel room. The wallpaper is paisley-patterned and the lighting is all a rather puke-ish green. Weird. And it all feels like I’ve been here before…

Director: Scott Derrickson

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0229440/

Hellraiser: Inferno is the first Hellraiser sequel that didn’t have “creative genius” Clive Barker involved, which means it doesn’t have the same goofy slapstick-style horror and ridiculous over the top plots that the previous films had…but is it any good? Actually, I’ll spoil it for you and say no; no it isn’t. In fact, it just replaces what was bad about the first four films with entirely new flaws…

The Month of Terror: Dracula 2000 (2000)

Amazing, a movie that actually manages to screw up the Dracula story even more than the 1991 version with that ridiculous Gary Oldman costume. I didn’t even think that was possible. Yes, Dracula 2000, brought to you by the genius minds that brought you sequels to White Noise, Pulse, Children of the Corn and Hollow Man, is another gem of a movie that you just can’t describe in a short review…so I made a really long one again, happy?

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219653/

"Don't ever fuck with an antiques dealer!"

-Jordan Chase

Our movie begins quite beautifully with scenes of London in the 1800s, with a bunch of dead people on a ship. I’d say these scenes had a point, but really I just think the director wanted to take a vacation to London, as we flash forward unceremoniously to the present day, without any kind of transition. Then we see Christopher Plummer and Jordan Chase from Dexter talking about some stuff in a room. Chase proceeds to flirt with the token attractive woman in this unnamed and vague company, who turns him down like a bad grade on a math test. Burned, Chase! Burned!

Then we see that this attractive woman is actually a part of some gang of robbers planning to break in and steal stuff. They find a secret passageway, a dungeon full of skulls and smoke and a big coffin, and, being idiots of the highest order, think that Plummer decorated the place like that to scare off thieves:

Looks like a rejected Buffy the Vampire Slayer set.

Come to think of it, why did Plummer decorate the secret passageway like that anyway? He’s clearly keeping the Dracula-coffin down there to keep it safe, so what’s the logic in decorating the place like a cheap haunted house? Why go through the trouble of putting up all those skulls and everything when he could have just put it in a room and locked the door? Not like anyone would see it if he was just using it to keep the thing in. I guess he’s just got a flair for the most ridiculous and over the top drama.

So yeah, the robbers activate a bunch of traps that were rejected from Indiana Jones 17 and a couple of them get killed off and impaled on stuff, which shocks the surviving robbers about as much as getting a letter in the mail. They just kind of shrug it off, take the coffin and go. This gets Plummer and Jordan Chase mad, as you can clearly tell by the way they scream every other line as if they’re in a terrible soap opera. Because that makes it dramatic! About as dramatic as a bunch of kids fighting on a schoolyard anyway…

We also get introduced to Mary, who has dreams apparently directed by Rob Zombie, although I would also accept ‘dreams directed by Tim Burton’ if you please:

Stop tormenting me, strobe lights and quick cuts!

She lives with her friend Lucy, they talk about boys (because that’s all girls ever do when they’re alone, you know), and that’s pretty much it. BACK TO THE ROBBERS!

They’re on a plane transporting the coffin back to wherever the hell they came from, and they all pick on this one guy for no reason except that he’s white and has a dorky Jew-fro style haircut that just begs to be made fun of. He opens the coffin after whining and complaining to himself, and is suddenly engulfed in a cloud of pot-smoke that I think was used by the writers to create the script!

Look at that hair; it's practically its own meme.

Actually it’s Dracula, played by Gerard Butler. He then proceeds to hide and wait for more idiots to come out. Which they do, leading to several long, drawn out minutes of those terrible ‘stop kidding around man!’ scenes you get in every terrible horror movie. Joy. But then using his incredible 'appearing ominously in doorways' power (which is pretty much all he does throughout this movie), Dracula turns everyone into vampires and crashes the plane.

But the wonders don’t end there, as then we get one of the strangest hallucination scenes ever as Dracula and Mary see each other through the door of the plane somehow? But one side of the door is the cockpit of the plane, and the other side is her room…and then he goes into her room, and attacks her until Lucy walks through him like a ghost? It’s hard to describe, but that’s because it’s just visually confusing as hell! I get what they were going for, but seriously, what kind of insane brain-cobble produced this anyway?

Well, I guess David Lynch was called on set to direct a scene after all...

After that, we get the BEST NEWSCASTER EVER as she wears a skimpy dress and talks incredibly dramatically about the robbers’ plane, which crashed in a lake. I mean really, saying things like ‘this is a lake of death and doom today’ is just silly. And I love how the camera-man is drooling over her the whole damn time. “I’m just recording this for my own jerk-off sessions later tonight, thanks!” But then Dracula just kills them, although even THAT is rendered incredibly silly by the fact that you see it through the camera so you can’t actually see him doing it:

"And tonight on National Enquirer News, we have a newscaster who they probably picked up from a brothel down on the bad side of town..." 

"...and flying men propelled by their own farts (that are actually vampires killing them; but that's just a conspiracy theory)!"

So then we get some exposition from Plummer on why Dracula is so evil: he hates Christianity. Yup, that’s it; just like any common acne-ridden 14 year old internet troll! Dracula’s just angsty! Oh, and apparently Christopher Plummer is actually the real Van Helsing, who kept himself alive by injecting himself with Dracula’s blood over the years just to make sure he doesn’t get out of his prison. And while doing THAT, he apparently also had time to father a daughter! And that daughter was Mary! See? It all makes sense now…except it really, really doesn’t. Let’s take a closer look at this ridiculous subplot:

First of all, how did he know that Dracula’s blood would give him any kind of special powers anyway? He’s counting on them to let him live forever, but how can he possibly tell that would work without some kind of problem occurring? Second of all, how did he know he wouldn’t run out sometime in the 100 years since he killed Dracula? What would’ve happened if he came in one day and tried to drain the blood but found out there wasn’t enough? “Whoops, my bad! Guess I should have just left it to my descendants or something, like any other sane person would have!” Third of all, he really had time to father a daughter? So much for devotion to the cause. You’d THINK a guy smart enough to figure out a way to live forever would be smart enough NOT to have sex with someone with that demonic blood in his veins! But I guess stupidity is necessary to move the plot forward!

Also I really like the Michael Jackson dance moves the hot vampire chick does in the science lab where she’s being held:

You could have at least put in "Thriller" or "Smooth Criminal" at this point...might have made the movie better...

And then we get another fight scene with some of Dracula’s goons, full of Matrix-style wire-jumping, terrible one-liners and implausible set-ups…and where are they supposed to be, anyway? Could they just not afford a real morgue, and so they had to film in a high school auditorium-slash-gymnasium?

After that, we see Dracula approaching Lucy at the video store where I’m sure they have much better movies than this one available. She decides to take him home, because I guess the creepy guy in the black trench coat who approached her in the video store is a good enough catch for her standards, and surprise surprise, he kills her soon after. Mary discovers that Lucy went off with some guy, and, jumping to the most bizarre conclusion possible, she of course automatically suspects that it’s Dracula at work. Because a hot blonde girl like this:

…couldn’t POSSIBLY have gotten a date otherwise, right?

Christopher Plummer goes to Mary’s house too and gets killed off easily by Dracula. So much for the great Van Helsing, right? Ho hum. So then we see some more of those wonderful schizophrenic editing in the Rob Zombie style as Mary returns and starts seeing things in the house. She fights some of Dracula’s posse, including the news-lady for some reason, and then runs away only to find Jordan Chase outside! They run away and go to a church, because…I guess the director felt like he hadn’t ripped off The Crow enough with all the shots of Gerard Butler wearing black perched on top of roofs, and had to compensate for his own insecurities.

Through more fight scenes that not even 4^th graders who like The Matrix would find endearing and lines so stupid that I’m surprised the actors willingly said them, the movie pretty much gets nowhere. However, there is one line so over the top and so silly that it actually makes the movie worth it…for a few seconds, anyhow. It’s when Jordan Chase is fighting off the vampire chicks. He beats them down and then screams “DON’T EVER FUCK WITH AN ANTIQUES DEALER!” at the top of his lungs, like some kind of battle cry. Yes. I believe we have a new indictment into the hall of absolute AWESOMENESS. No other line in this movie touches this level of over the top cheese.

But yeah, after that it pretty much produces nothing of worth, and I’m almost positive the writers ran out of ideas after that too, because the movie can’t even hold my interest for two seconds anymore. Jordan Chase chases the vamp-chicks around and Mary is kidnapped by Dracula and blah blah blah. They fight on the roof until it’s revealed that…DUN DUN DUN

Somebody call Mel Gibson, I think we have a new movie idea: Dracula and Jesus Christ!

No. No, you can’t be doing this, movie. You seriously can’t!

No, what are you thinking, movie? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Dracula is Judas? What? Why? What was wrong with the original story so much that you had to add this religious crap into it? It makes zero sense at all and just turns the whole thing into an even bigger joke. This isn’t Dogma or some nonsense where you can just make stuff like that up! At least in that movie it was played for comedy and satire. Here’s it’s supposed to be serious! Ugh. Let’s just finish the damn review.

So Dracula turns Mary into a vampire and tells her to bite Jordan Chase, but in a VERY SURPRISING TWIST she fakes it – didn’t see that one coming, did you? It’s only been used in EVERY OTHER MOVIE EVER MADE after all! Then he throws her off the building but she wraps some wire around his neck before she falls…and wait a minute, wouldn’t the fall barely hurt her anyway? I mean it’s been shown in this movie itself that vampires are almost invincible, so…what? Dracula burns up, Mary turns back into a human somehow, becomes a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rip-off and then we mercifully get the credits!

Phew. So in case you couldn’t tell…this was stupid as hell. It made as much sense as the ramblings of a fever-ridden fourth grader on a sugar high, the acting AND writing was terribly over-done and over-dramatic, the story was a pile of clichéd horse crap and the characters weren’t very interesting. I will say it was at least entertaining, but it was entertaining in spite of itself rather than for any actual merit. And that’s never the way to go.

So are you guys ready for the sequel?!?!? I am!

Review: Meet the Parents (2000) TH

A laugh out loud comedy, but the ultimate test of resolution

This is a film that takes misunderstandings and awkwardness to new levels with a Jewish male nurse named Greg Focker (Stiller) visiting his girlfriend's parents' house during a wedding about to take place for her sister. He attempts to fit in to the social circle of this traditional family, who has their own set of rules and specific ways of living that keeps him thinking on his toes and attempting to fake it till he makes it.

Greg tries to make an impression with the overly protective father, Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro, who has a clandestine past and is growing suspicious due to mix-ups that put Greg in a negative light for being the right man for his prized daughter. He has to drop a few habits and pick up new ones to keep up. If it could get any more worse the ex, Kevin, played by Owen Wilson, is on top of everything without evening trying, not to mention close to the father and on good terms with Greg's girlfriend. You could say he's got a lot on his plate, as he's the extreme of polite and can't say what's really on his mind out loud in order to save face in front of others.

"Meet the Parents" was fresh for its time and still holds up as a situational comedy with some relating points about meeting others for the first time or just trying to be one of the gang. It can make you cringe for the main character as he fumbles to do things right by these new people with hilarious trial and error. Just in time, some of the zany pile ups begin to get far-fetched but is saved by seeing Greg in the cross between imploding and running away from everything going wrong by his own hands. This is a Hollywood film, so some sentiment and resolution is going to be offered in order to give it that finishing touch. This was a well-done film as it steadily paced the timing of its jokes instead of trying too hard to completely shock the audience. That's what gives it its replay value as the scenarios are memorable, not to mention identifiable if still exaggerated for comic relief.

Director: Jay Roach (Austin Powers)
Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Owen Wilson, Teri Polo
Website: IMDB

Review: Final Destination (2000)

Director: James Wong

Starring: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195714/

In the year 2000, there was a movie made that was groundbreaking, original, horrifying, intelligent and mature. This…was not that movie.

Final Destination begins with a rich white kid named Alex going on a plane trip to France for his high school graduation. And already I’m wondering, what kind of high school sends their students to France as a graduation present? Do they attend the Richy McRichRich School for Rich Kids? Caucasian Meadows High? Alex tells his mom not to remove the tag on the briefcase because he believes it’s good luck. You'd think this would have some significance in the movie, but nope. It's just setting up how much of an unmitigated pussy our main character is. Seriously, the kid's a wimp. The fact that he does ANYTHING heroic in this movie at all is a testament to the very convenient writing more than any actual development. Ugh.

Then through some home-video-style tracking shots of his room in the dark, the camera arrives on the alarm clock, which flashes 1:00, which is the movie's cue to transition to the flight departure board at the airport flashing a similar number. This poor directing brought to you by the same guy who made Dragonball Evolution! The graduating class is made up of all white kids, all interchangeable from one another – they're identical balls of disposable dough and hair gel, each with the same crass under-knowledge of French and each with parents who can buy them an SUV in the blink of an eye. Alex gets handed some pamphlet about death not being the end, and this gets him spooked at the scaaaary coincidence of the flight time being the same number as his birthday (9:25) and the shutters of the flight departure board moving. Creepy! Oh, wait…no it isn’t.

Then some kid comes up to him and says, “Alex, let’s go take a shit.” His reasoning is that hot girls might not like them if they take a shit on the airplane.

…You really don’t want me to be interested in this movie at all, do you? Did I mention the same director made Dragonball Evolution? I can't decide which one is less mature!

They board the plane where the friend who was worried about girls not liking him tells those same girls that he has a urinary tract infection and can’t switch seats with them. Real counter-productive there, guy!

"Help! This movie is simply way too hammy and clichéd!" 

Alex gives up his seat for the two girls and then the plane blows up horrifically. Oh, wait, no; it was a dream. Then he goes fucking nuts and starts screaming about how the plane is going to blow up. He gets in a fight with this kid named Carter, who I guess takes it really personally when people act crazy, and they get taken off the plane along with a teacher, Carter’s girlfriend, Alex’s friend Tod, this one kid who was in the bathroom at the time, and a random girl. They sit around for a while when the plane actually does blow up after all. Oops.

YOU DON'T FUCK WITH THIS FACE! This is his Mean Face. Or his 'taking a shit' face...I forget which.

They all get interrogated by the FBI and then go home to wallow in depression. Everyone pretty much treats Alex like dirt because he had this unexplained vision and yet nobody really seems too interested – until later, that is, when people start dying. Yeah. Don’t do anything logical like have him see a counselor about his problems or anything. That would make too much fucking sense.

At the memorial event for all the dead students, Carter gets in another fight with Alex for no reason (because he has nothing better to do, I guess) and that random girl, whose name is Clear Rivers, gives him a flower for saving her life. Clear Rivers? That’s a weird fucking name. What, was she one of those Native American children whose names are more like nature catalog descriptions? Maybe she’ll name her son Muddy Puddles. Or Sharp Rocks. The possibilities are endless.

Oh, and while I’m at it, one of the kids is named Billy Hitchcock. Yeah, because when I think of this movie, I’m going to think of Alfred Hitchcock’s name now because you did that. Clearly the resemblance between this movie and Hitchcock’s classic, inventive thrillers is striking! I’m just shocked.

Then we see Tod on the toilet again. Because you didn’t get enough of that the first time, you get to see it again. Seriously, how many movie characters get shown taking a shit twice in the same movie? After that, Tod gets killed when some water in his bathroom comes to life and makes him trip into the shower where he somehow strangles himself to death. Yeah, can’t make this up, people. It’s like if MacGuyver constructed a death trap. It’s just insane! Everyone of course dismisses it as suicide, and when a shredded up newspaper gives Alex a clue – they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here – he rushes over and gets arrested. The detectives laugh at him when he tells them about his vision and then just let him go.

Don't even ask how this happened; the writers don't know either!

So then Alex hooks up with Clear, and he tells her that he thinks that Death is trying to kill them off because they didn’t get killed when they were ‘supposed to’ in the plane crash. Like Death is a serial killer that actually chases after people in a black cloak with a scythe. Is this movie making you dumber yet? Pause the movie now just in case, and do a few basic math problems to exercise that big brain of yours which probably isn’t getting a lot of work out of a movie like this.

Done? OK. They go and break into the funeral home where they find…the Candyman! AHHHH!

He tells them that Death is coming for all of them. How does he know this? Never revealed. What is he doing creeping around the funeral home in the middle of the night? Not answered. Why is he even in this movie? Because they didn’t have any other black people in the movie. Or just because their quota for ‘wasted horror actor potential’ had not yet been filled, and they decided that Tony Todd was a seasoned veteran of that kind of thing. Either one works – pick and choose your own explanation! Get creative. He never shows up in the movie again anyway, so whatever you pick will be fine and dandy!

So then Alex goes home and sits around in his room some more trying to find – oh, God – a pattern for how Death is killing everyone off. A fucking pattern! Are you for real? It’s not like this is a scavenger hunt. You don’t get a prize for jumping through the most hoops and figuring out the big riddle. Well, these kids get to stay alive, I guess; but that’s not a reward for any of the rest of us watching this shitfest! And again, it’s like they’re trying to say he’s a physical bogeyman running around going OOGA BOOGA BOOGA!

Alex talks to Clear about it at a random, generic intersection where by COINCIDENCE everyone else who survived the plane disaster shows up, too! The teacher is coming out of a store, Little Billy Hitchcock is riding his bike down the street and he almost gets run over by Carter and his girlfriend Terry, or something like that. Carter decides to pick a fight with Alex for no reason at all, literally, and Terry stands conveniently in the middle of the street to tell everyone to stop fighting. Or else they’ll all be dead.

That’s when the bus comes out of nowhere and hits her. Even though in broad daylight it should have seen her from a mile away and slowed down, this is the movie’s most famous scene, so I guess I’m just supposed to shut up and deal with it.

Then we get the revelation that the teacher is next to die. She’s alone in her house moping to some random friend on the phone about how her life sucks now when a computer blows up for no reason and slits her throat. Then she falls to the floor as her house catches fire, where a kitchen knife falls at the PERFECT ANGLE to stab her in the stomach and kill her. Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollablAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Okay, I’m done. All this right before Alex arrives and picks up the knife, putting his prints on it and setting him up to look like the murderer. Good job, dumbass; good job!

Tom and Jerry would have been proud. So would most of the ACME corporation, I think.

Now he’s on the run! The police are after him and he’s got to shack up with the other survivors and BE A REBEL! They drive around in Carter’s car until Carter goes nuts and tries to kill himself on some train tracks. Alex pulls him out, but then Billy gets all huffy about how Carter is next and he doesn’t want to be around him, like it’s contagious. Just like before with that Terry girl getting hit by the bus, Billy stands in exactly the right spot and gets decapitated by the train right at that very moment. OH. HOW. CONVENIENT.

So then Alex, holed up in a cabin all alone and talking to himself like a crazy person, realizes that Clear is actually the next to die! He rushes to her house, which is guarded by the cops who are looking for him, where he finds her trapped in her car, victim to a million and one failed Looney Tunes traps. Yes, even Tom and Jerry wouldn’t do these traps, unfunny as they are…damn, I really want to finish this review; if you’ve seen the movie you know how dull it is. How little surprises can you have in a movie? Both characters live, they go to Paris with Carter for some reason (I guess he’s a friend all the sudden…) and then Carter dies because he saves Alex from dying. Yeah. The movie ends on the death of a character nobody liked and who barely did anything throughout the film but act like a whiny little pussy. SURPRISED?

Whew, this was an annoying one. I mean, come on; this is pretty much a Saturday morning cartoon, not a horror movie! Final Destination embodies pretty much everything wrong with a lot of these late 90s and early-mid 2000s films that were just so lame. That’s really the core of it. Lame writing, lame acting, lame directing, lame stories…just lame ass movies in general. This is more of a comedy than a horror movie, and if you think it’s scary, I have another horror series that might chill you to the bone, too:

Disclaimer: I actually think Goosebumps is much cooler than this movie.

That about sums it up. Don’t watch this crap, it sucks. The end.

None of these images are mine. I took them from other people. I did not create them.

Review: Hollow Man (2000)

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Starring: Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Shue, Womens' Bodies

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164052/

"If I die, pretend I said something deep and clever."

-Sebastian

Aren't directors funny creatures? Like Paul Verhoeven, for instance! He directed such critically acclaimed works of film like RoboCop and Total Recall, both very enjoyable and action packed science fiction flicks that provided good, solid entertainment. But he also directed the infamous Showgirls, which I haven't seen, and then this pile of unentertaining slop. Yes, this is Hollow Man, the Kevin Bacon thriller where he turns invisible. My only question is, how do I turn my TV screen invisible so I don't have to watch it again? I think that ought to do it for an intro. Let's dig in.

Our movie begins with a mouse being ripped apart by some invisible beast, bloodily ravaged into pieces…yeah, I’ve seen a ton of awesome movies start off like that! Then we switch to Kevin Bacon, who is having about as much luck with his scientific formulas as he is with being a peeping Tom and watching the hot chick across the street undress through her windows. That is, none at all. Until a miracle of shoddy writing occurs and he suddenly comes up with the solution for his formula. He immediately contacts a co-worker who asks in stunned disbelief, “7 months and you suddenly come up with the code out of the blue? How?”

It’s pretty damned bad when even the characters don’t buy your plot 3 minutes into the movie. I think that’s a clear sign to give up while you’re ahead. Or at least…not a million miles behind, panting like you’ve got a punctured lung.

So then we see Bacon interacting predictably with other unlikeable characters at his vague secret scientist lab thing, creating scenarios that will likely be humorously duplicated and expanded upon when he turns invisible. There’s the guy who he competes with all the time at everything and constantly exchanges dull sarcastic banter with, who is secretly having sex with the cute blonde co worker who he flirts with all the time. There’s a veterinarian who hates what he’s doing and thinks it’s morally wrong. And there are a bunch of security guards and janitors who he talks to for like a second each. God, can’t you just feel the boredom emanating from the screen?

Basically what happens next is that this ape named Isabella who they turned invisible as an experiment goes crazy from being invisible too long, breaks out of her cage and is then tranquilized. Then they bring her back and turn her into a living game of Operation:

So Bacon lies to the Pentagon officials who assigned them this project in the first place and tells them they’re still working on it, just so he can get more glory and fame for himself. His co-workers rightfully express their disdain at this stupidity and Bacon just brushes them off, volunteering himself for the job to turn invisible next – the first time they’ve ever performed the experiment on a person. We then see the only reason this movie was really made, to show Kevin Bacon’s ass and get a bunch of girls to swoon over it. Yay, fanservice! Oh, right, and he turns invisible, too; that’s…that’s kind of important also.

And what does Bacon do with his newfound superhuman abilities? Pretty much nothing except try to take off his female co-workers’ clothes. There's one scene where he sneaks into where the veterinarian lady is sleeping and starts fondling her breasts - this scene more or less sums up the feel of the movie. It's kind of like, "should I even be watching this?", followed by several uncomfortable shufflings around on the couch, averting your eyes a little each time, waiting for the scene to stop. When he talks to the blonde one, Linda, one-on-one it’s actually disturbing as hell – I mean, he actually puts his hand between her legs, for Pete’s sake; that’s sexual harassment! He could get fired for that if she’d just say something! Screw scientific integrity; this is just wrong.

And has anyone noticed we never really see Bacon doing anything that indicates how good of a scientist he is? What, so we’re really supposed to believe that this guy is such an amazing scientist just because everyone says he is? That’s a lot to swallow, movie, especially when you had to pull that first bit where he comes up with the formula out of nowhere right from your collective asses.

Oh yes, Bacon's priorities are definitely in place...

Also, this unresolved sexual tension between Bacon and that blonde chick is seriously hilarious with how cliché it is. “Oh, you were never there! And now you’re invisible so you’re really not there! Even though you try to rape me several times and do nothing but objectify me, I’m not going to raise any serious objections! You’re just quirky, is all. And I'm going to keep tolerating you because I'm secretly the embodiment of every pre-teen girl who ever wanted Kevin Bacon! Tee-hee!~” And Bacon…good God, his scene on the roof where he tries to get her back and lean in for a kiss is just embarrassing! Where did he learn how to seduce a woman? That horrible Black Dahlia movie from 2006 with Josh Hartnett? Eugh. That’s kind of like asking Jim Carrey how to be subtle.

After that they try to turn him back to normal but it fails for some reason, and he almost dies. Then they give him a mask to make sure they can see him until they can cure him. He looks kind of like a crash test dummy if it were made by Leatherface...or something like that. I don’t know; it’s hard enough to make jokes about a movie this dull without resorting to just saying ‘look how ugly that crap is’ every five minutes, because there’s always something you can say that about in this movie. I guarantee it. Yergh.

That just looks kind of stupid.

And no, seriously guys, isn’t he going to do anything else but sexually assault women? It’s like…sitting here watching a movie about that weirdo who sits in a car outside a Victoria’s Secret and always has his hand where you can’t see it. It’s just painful! Can't someone just lock this movie up for indecent exposure already? It's seriously getting uncomfortable to watch this for more than a few minutes at a time.

Then we get Bacon’s Big Escape, in which the guy guarding the research labs does the maximum amount of hands-on security work possible by doing absolutely nothing to stop Bacon from leaving aside from just…shouting at him. That doesn’t work very well, you moron. We see that Bacon goes back to his apartment only to see the same girl from the opening walking around with her blinds open taking her clothes off – what, does she just leave her blinds open RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER while she’s taking off her clothes all the time? What a tease!

Anyway, Bacon goes over and decides to mess around with her and then rape her. Because…well, yeah, I got nothing. Then he goes back to the lab and kills a dog with his bare hands for no reason, too. Isn’t this movie just SO HAPPY AND CHEERFUL? It’s just peachy!

Alright, let’s just wrap this up. So the two good scientists tell the Pentagon what happened and then Bacon decides to go on a killing spree, because I guess sitting down and talking about his feelings with a psychiatrist was out of the question. In between we get some scenes with the blonde chick scientist and her secret boyfriend making out with the window open – GOD, CAN’T THESE MORONS CLOSE THEIR BLINDS EVEN ONCE? – and then the movie gets off its meds again and decides it’s suddenly a slasher film. So we get to see every scientist somehow getting killed off by Bacon with nobody even noticing for the first few times. It’s not like they’d scream or anything else that would give it away, right?

Bacon locks them in a storage room or something after stabbing the one guy who he was rivals with or whatever…although that guy is later shown to be perfectly fine somehow; I don’t know. The blonde chick sets him on fire – guess nobody taught him to stop, drop and roll – and then he vanishes again, only for the blonde chick to turn on the sprinklers in the building and reveal where he is like they SHOULD have done 20 minutes ago! Then some stuff blows up and causes the building to start collapsing, I guess.

After Bacon comes back AGAIN and visible this time – how? It’s never revealed – he kisses the blonde chick again but then she makes him fall down into oblivion with the elevator shaft that was falling from the ceiling. I guess THAT finally killed him, in case being set on fire three times in a row didn’t.

Oh, and you know that one scene in every movie like this where the cops usher out the two survivors with a blanket out through all the smoke and rubble? Yeah. That’s what they end on in this movie. No resolution, no denouement; just that same cheap-ass scene that we see in every dime a dozen movie ever made with the credits over it in some cheap font. It’s like they just said, “OK, we’re done with the two hour festival of misogyny, rape, animal torture and all around debauchery. We’re just going to end on something generic and lame! We hope you enjoyed this mess of brutality and unholiness. Please come back next time as we remake Salo: 120 Days of Sodom!”

OK, a bit of an exaggeration? Yes. But still. This is horrible! It’s like a manic-depressive schizophrenic was assigned to write the script; it’s just so unpleasant and so relentlessly ugly that it’s unbelievable. How am I supposed to be entertained by this? It’s like they wanted to cram in every goddamn morally objectionable thing they could. It’s stupid, it’s weird and it’s awkward as hell. I mean, I guess there are a few parts that are pretty entertaining, most to do with Bacon before he goes crazy, but that's far from the majority of the film. This movie sucks, and I can't see why any sentient soul would ever like it. God, and I still have the sequel to review too, don't I? Damn...well, let's get it over with, then.