Halloween (2007)

There was a time back in the mid ‘00s where, for some reason, movie studios felt the need to totally revamp the old horror classics that nobody ever had a problem with to begin with. But the studios really wanted to do updated versions, even though nobody was asking. And I get it - Hollywood has always lived on the backs of remakes. We have timeless stories and we make them new again for new generations. However, it really seems like Rob Zombie was trying to kill the story of Halloween with this remake rather than keep it going.

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Scout Taylor Compton, Sheri Moon Zombie, Malcolm McDowell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

This is an awful, repulsive piece of trash with nothing really good about it. It’s seriously just amazing how bad this really is. Zombie wasn’t bad at making pseudo-Texas Chainsaw rip offs like House of 1,000 Corpses, and The Devil’s Rejects was legit a great movie, but it was this movie where he showed his true colors - i.e. he can’t do anything else. But if you want screaming, cursing rednecks and lots of sleazy sex scenes, you’ll be in paradise here. And if you want that, I'll know to stay the fuck away from you.

The only question is, what does any of that have to do with John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween? Nothing. It has nothing to do with it.

We start off with something that doesn’t make sense from even the first line of dialogue: hillbilly rednecks living in the midwestern suburbs. Yup, the Myers family in this is apparently a bunch of constantly unpleasant jackasses, led by the stepfather Ronnie, this greasy looking motherfucker who looks like he belongs in a trailer in Alabama, but is instead in the suburbs in Illinois now. I guess Zombie really, really needed to put in guys who look like him! It’s like a security blanket or a pacifier for an infant.

Yup, this is how Halloween should open up, said no one ever.

In the first few minutes, Ronnie says he thinks his own stepdaughter's ass is hot and says Michael’s mom is jealous of her own daughter’s ass. That’s how we’re starting off this movie. A pair of adults talking about a teenage girl's ass. Ah, it’s refreshing to start off with absolutely zero expectations or integrity. How could you get any worse, movie? That was a rhetorical question. The movie gets way, way worse.

It’s fucking amazing how unpleasant this is to watch - like, really, even if you don’t care that it has nothing to do with Halloween, it’s still bad on every level. What’s entertaining about watching a bunch of white trash rednecks scream and break shit? I guess the point is to show how bad Michael’s home life is, but frankly all that’s missing here is the cops on speed dial for the next time there's a domestic incident in which one of the kids or the mom, uh, fell down the stairs. Yeah. That's it.

If you never pictured the hulking behemoth Michael Myers as a whiny, stringy-haired 10-year-old, well, now you're safe and will never be afraid of him again. Thanks for fucking nothing, movie.

Michael's mother is of course played by Sheri Moon Zombie, because the entire cast of every Rob Zombie production goes like this: 12 big hairy ugly dudes, and Sheri Moon Zombie wearing a bikini top most of the film. That sounds like the beginning to a terrible porno, which makes sense because Sheri's only role in every one of these films is to show off her tits and ass.

If it seems weird to you that Zombie constantly casts his own wife in these films just to let the whole world see her naked, well, I guess some marriages are just never meant to be understood.

And yeah, as most criticisms of this movie mention - it’s an origin story for Michael Myers, one of the most recognizable horror movie villains. Not to quell the creative ambitions of Rob Zombie (haha...hahahaha….ha ha HA…), but if we needed an origin story, we probably would have gotten one before this movie came out in 2007. The scary thing about Myers was that he was pure, unexplained, unstoppable evil. Explaining him and giving him an actual character is like shining a light under the bed and telling your kid there’s nothing there, it’s all in her imagination.

But seriously, even if you get past that, just think about it: if you were to give Michael Myers an origin story, and show it on screen, why the fuck would you want it to be this one? We don’t need scenes of him whining in the bathroom or being bullied at school. Why would we ever need that? Even if you wanted to know more about why he became a killer, these are very poorly written scenes where every person he meets is a total unrepentant, over the top dick to him. They’re all basically just excuses for Zombie to go for the shock factor of having people say fuck around little kids and show boobs. That’s not interesting to watch.

I want to see all my horror slasher icons as bratty children. That makes the REAL terror shine through...

But hey, he gets his revenge by killing a bully who was mean to him in the woods!

When they say fight back against your bullies, I’m pretty sure they just mean throw a punch back. Not ambush them in the woods and beat them to death with a stick. But it’s okay, because this is never mentioned again. Yes, really…

The whole movie so far has just been the equivalent of a really obnoxious guy screaming in your face. Every scene is full of greasy, grimy looking people swearing and talking about sex in the most annoying ways possible. But hey, at least we get to see the realism in how Michael finally snapped and became a killer! He’s sitting there eating candy in his house, and then, with no provocation, he gets up and starts slaughtering his whole family.

This is a ridiculous scene where it plays "Love Hurts" over top him sitting on the sidewalk by himself - just awful. It's baffling to me that anyone thought this would be touching. It's as emotional as watching a pet fish flushed down the toilet.

It was the fucking candy corn after all. Damn candy corn.

Yup, that’s it. That’s what Rob Zombie wanted to show you to account for a ‘realistic’ backstory! I mean, I guess it can happen in real life. But the way it’s shown here isn’t particularly realistic, subtle or well written - he’s sitting there eating candy, and then he goes and kills people. I guess he should have had an apple or rice or something. Maybe then he would have been fine.

And yeah, he kills his stepfather, his sister’s boyfriend AND his sister this time, as opposed to just his sister like in the original. That isn’t a big deal, but I just find it funny, like the movie is the bratty little brother of the original trying to outdo all his big brother’s stories. “You had one person killed, huh? Oh yeah, well I can have THREE people killed and in more bloody ways! And I’ll have child Michael wear the Michael Myers mask when doing his first kill!”

Nobody ever wanted to see a midget cosplaying Michael Myers, movie.

So then we get like forty minutes of him in a mental hospital with Dr. Loomis, who is played by Malcolm McDowell. He looks less like a doctor here and more like an aging rock star your dad would be friends with and your mom would disapprove of because he always sleeps on your couch blind drunk after a show down at the county fairgrounds on a Wednesday.

Hey, don't judge him. He's trying to clean up. He's just in a bad place right now.

These scenes all pretty much go like this: Michael asks to go home, Loomis tells him he can’t because he’s a terrible child, Michael cries. Rinse and repeat for like over 30 fucking minutes. Except for one scene that changes up the formula, where a janitor played by Danny Trejo of all people gives Michael a random pep talk about not letting the hospital get him down. I don’t even think Trejo was part of the cast. He was just walking by the set wearing a janitor costume for no reason, and delivered this speech unprompted.

"Remember, kid, don't let them get you down."
"Okay, Mr. Janitor. I don't know why you're telling me this, but okay."
"So why are you in here, kid?"
"I killed my whole family."
"Really? Oh, well forget what I said. You're fucked."

Oh, and this is apparently the worst hospital in the world, as they give metal forks to patients who have murdered people, and train their nurses to make rude comments that provoke the patients to murder them! Ha ha ha! Oh wait, I guess that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

The REAL origin story of the film is telling how mental hospitals learned to stop letting patients have metal forks.

After that, I guess they learned their lesson and kept him locked up for the rest of his life. But hey, what could have really been done about this? You know, things happen!

Until about 15 years later, when a couple of wretched security guards decide to rape some innocent girl who was brought in as a patient. They drag her into Michael’s room and do it there. It’s extremely unpleasant and grating to watch, as they scream “fuck” and “faggot” through the whole thing and obviously the rape itself is extremely awful to watch, and nothing I’d even want to subject my worst enemy to. There is no point to this scene. And it takes way too long. So, congrats on that one, Zombie, you can film a fucking awful rape scene. Hang that award on your wall.

Seriously, what am I supposed to get from this? I guess he really wanted to make Michael Myers the good guy, because I don’t think anyone in the audience is sad that these rapist assholes got murdered. Nothing about this scene or anything else so far has actually been scary so much as fucking gory and awful to look at - neither of those things are compliments. A gonorrhea infection is also awful to look at, for a comparison point. This does not make a good movie.

My only real conclusion has to be that Zombie wasn’t interested in making a horror movie, because this is not a horror movie. This is porn. It’s porn for people who like watching serial killer films and who get off on reading about Jeffrey Dahmer or some shit.

Sigh. So I guess Michael kills everyone else in the hospital, including Danny Trejo, and breaks out. After like, an hour and a half of all this unwatchable, unpleasant, unscary bullshit, what more is there to do? Regurgitate the original 1978 classic, of course!

Seeing this poster on a Google search while you have this remake on would be the only way you'd ever be reminded of the original while watching this piece of shit.

Yes, really - an hour and a half in, we get introduced to Laurie Strode finally. She’s played here by Scout Taylor-Compton, who doesn’t seem like a bad actress. But her first scene has her miming being molested by making over the top sex noises and playing with a bagel, and I died inside just typing that sentence.

You know, it doesn't matter if I even explain this scene more. It would still be stupid.

Her whole character doesn't even make sense. She's a girl next door type who makes jokes to her parents about child molestation! She's an outgoing peppy chick who gets inexplicably shy like a different person entirely when her best friend asks if she has a boyfriend! These things could be fine if written better, but in this movie, I think it's safe to say Zombie isn't in tune with how teenage girls act.

Well, that bagel-child-molestation thing would be bad no matter what. Seriously, what the fuck?

The whole thing just kind of plays out like a dumber, trashier version of the 1978 one, with several scenes just being shot for shot the same. It’s full of really shitty changes from the original. Like when this one girl and her boyfriend just finished having sex. In the original one, it’s just a dumb, harmless scene - they had sex and she tells him to get her a beer, and he gets killed by Michael. Here, though, she’s a total bitch to him and seemingly can’t stop being rude even for one second just because the sex was bad.

Christ, even her face is annoying to look at. I'm sure she's a nice person, but this character is just so bad in this movie.

I’m not saying that’s unrealistic - though the dialogue and writing suck - but it just points out what’s wrong with this. This wasn’t a change made for some great change to the overall story. It was just because Zombie seemed to want to make everything super gritty and "realistic," which mostly just comes off as dumb as fuck in this. It comes off silly, tired and dated. Making people shittier and ruder isn’t being realistic, it just shows what a small minded view you have of people.

The final chase scene is extremely boring and lame. It goes on for fucking ever. Like seriously I could have read a few chapters of Infinite Jest by the time this goddamn scene ends. The original movie’s chase scene wasn’t night and day from this one, but this movie has been completely unwatchable poison up to this point, so I guess it’s just hard to sit through more of its fat rolls of “plot.” There’s a moment at the end when you think it’s over - Laurie does her whole “was that the Bogeyman?” line, and Loomis replies. But then…

Yup! It’s still going. You hack ass piece of fucking shit. JUST STOP! Sorry for the tasteless profanity. I got possessed by the spirit of the movie there.

It finally ends, after like twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the Myers house in another stale attempt at a chase scene. The least this movie could have done was end sooner, but no, we don't even get that. We have to sit through Zombie's unique vision - a dull, dime-a-dozen chase scene that anyone could have filmed. Woo hoo... Anyway, Laurie finally kills Michael and THEN it's really over!

Wow, was that all? After two hours of rednecks screaming the word “faggot,” unnecessary violence, rape scenes and people being horrible to each other for no reason, I really want more. I think Rob Zombie really did capture what made the original a classic. I’m surprised he ended it at only two hours myself! I know I could have watched at least another two hours of this tasteless, irredeemable bullshit.

A lot of people talk about how this remake ruined the original’s point by explaining Michael Myers’ character, and they’re right. The original movie was only scary because of how mysterious Michael was, and how he was this unstoppable evil force who just descends randomly on a small town. It was the arbitrary, random nature of it that made it scary. Here, once Zombie explains it all, it’s just a bland serial killer upbringing story that has as much charm as reading a Wikipedia article on Ted Bundy.

But even if you don’t care about that, the movie is still complete shit. This is an annoying, irritating movie on every front. It’s visually grimy and grungy, annoying to listen to because every character constantly spews "fucks" and "faggots" every other line in awful redneck accents and even the violence and sex can't save it, as neither one of those things is even remotely enjoyable to look at here. The movie is not even remotely tense, scary or atmospheric. The writing is woefully slow-witted, blunt and dull, so they can’t even fall back on ideas in the script and claim the gratuitous sex and violence was an artistic decision. It feels more like a dumb 15 year old’s attempt at scaring his mom and little sister because they made him go to church.

This movie fucking sucks, and Rob Zombie fucking sucks. The Devil’s Rejects was a fluke. This is all he really has to offer.

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

End of the Line (2007)

I'm just going to go out on a limb here: for the most part, horror movies about cults are generally not made by people who can read. This is some caveman, base-level shit. It's an easy route to throwing in a bunch of gore, sex and screaming, which are all cheap gimmick tricks movies like this use to try and hook you in to watching them. I really don't know how better to express this to you all than by talking about End of the Line, a worthless piece of trash that is, really, nothing more than that.

Director: Maurice Devereaux

Starring: Ilona Elkin, Nicholas Wright

IMDb

That's right – it's the end of the line, for my kindness toward these movies! Oh yeah, I said it. Let's get started.

We start this off with a girl named Karen, who works as a nurse and is stressed out by her job, to the point where she has to go into her office and take off her clothes – yes, that was the only point of this scene. Just to show boobs for a millisecond. I'm already astounded at the high standards here, aren't you?

Because really, that's the only purpose this movie sees for women – to get naked and show off their boobs after acting submissive and lost. It's misogynistic garbage, plain and simple, but then again, why show women as complex human beings while you can just have them take off their clothes? I think her facial expressions in this shower scene show her progression in realizing this movie won't advance her career:

Then again, the guys in this movie aren't any better really. So fuck it. No standards, zero stars – that's where we're starting off with End of the Line! The movie that thinks a guy coming through a door with a piece of hospital equipment is a good jump scare.

Just to put things into perspective. This is the kind of 'scares' we're dealing with here.

Later on, she goes down to the subway and gets hit on by some creepy guy. If you want some of the brilliant dialogue we get, well, how about this: the guy goes “You got a cigarette?” When she says no, he then says “C'mon, just one cigarette!” Yes, please, materialize cigarettes out of nowhere, you cold-hearted miser! Make them out of thin air!

Then the guy starts to get weirder and creepier, until she gets saved by this other guy in a green shirt. His character is that he's as bland and boring as a guy can be. He also starts talking to her like they're old buddies, since I guess saving a chick from a creepy guy entitles you to start talking her ear off immediately when she's just trying to go about her business. Hypocrisy? What's that?

They get on the train and the lights go out, causing some confusion. While they're trying to figure out what happened, some old lady with crazy eyes comes on the train and acts like she's confused, too. It's all a ruse, though, as she then stabs Mr. Green Shirt in the back for no apparent reason.

How does an old fat lady sneak up on you with a knife like that? C'mon, man, put in a little effort.

This is apparently her 'evil switch' flip, as she then starts babbling about the end of the world in a manner similar to how all these characters are going to act. It's revealed pretty quickly that she's a member of this religious cult called Voice of Hope or something, which apparently has a huge following. And tonight, the movie tells us, is their “day of reckoning” where they're “saving” everyone by killing the shit out of them!

I'm sorry, but for one, how did this group get enough followers to overrun a city and start murdering people? I can see a situation like the Jim Jones Kool-aid stuff where you'd attract a bunch of desperate, weak-minded souls, but that's a whole other ballpark from getting a bunch of people to straight up MASS MURDER everyone they come into contact with for no reason! But, sigh, as we see later, they really do overtake this entire big city somehow. The city was just no match for a bunch of two-bit serial killers with knives. I guess it is too much to ask for even a little bit of logic.

Yeah, the people on the subway aren't prepared to be stabbed to death, because frankly it's a stupid and implausible situation.

Two, why do these people all act like fucking cartoon characters? I didn't realize religious zealotry and horrible goofy acting were part of the same package, but yeah, all of these characters constantly scream every line of dialogue they say, have wide eyes and talk in shaky voices like they belong in mental asylums.

No, you fucking hack, having the characters say "God is love!" while killing, does NOT count as good religious commentary or even remotely decent writing. It's shit. You should feel bad.

Meanwhile, that creepy Quentin Tarantino-looking guy from the platform holds some hot Asian chick at knifepoint and then proceeds to try and rape her. And I would be more offended at this, except he doesn't rape her – he just sort of holds her back against the wall and rubs his hands on her shoulders and arms. I just find it funny how long this goes. He's just sitting there rubbing her arms for like, several scenes in a row cut in-between the other scenes.

It would make sense if this guy WASN'T part of the cult of bad guys, and was just some random dickweed that the cult killed a few scenes later, but no. This is just more of the movie's weird fixation on women - "hey, show them helpless and victimized sexually; THAT makes for good cinema!"

We also get this couple, who decide to start fucking in the train car while the power is out and they're stuck on the tracks. Extra stupidity points for when the conductor announces they'll be delayed and stuck there, and the guy goes “Oh, take your time!” because he's busy making out with the girl. What, so you got no better place to do that? You were just waiting for a fucking subway train car to stop so you could have more titillating sex? I somehow don't think that's really the best idea, unless lying on top of a dirty floor where thousands of peoples' feet have stepped turns you on! Have fun lying in vomit, dirt and all manner of other disgusting things!

I wouldn't complain about the sexism so much, but it's really just all over this movie like a roach infestation. Every other scene is some chick getting half naked on camera or getting groped or harassed, and it starts to feel gross and weird almost immediately because of the tone and context of the whole thing. I don't even really think there's much to be said about it being a message about prudishness like, say, the original Friday the 13th films. It's just weird, perverted garbage. Just go watch a porno next time.

So they get run out of the car and into some kind of break room with two employees of the subway I guess. They have a long conversation about what to do, mostly just repeating the same shit over and over again. God it's boring, too – there's just nothing interesting about this at all. Movie, just stick to showing your juvenile trash boobs and gore scenes – you can't handle anything else.

Most of the group leaves that break room upon deciding that the religious cult members will come back for them otherwise. My favorite part of this is that even though they were with two guys who know these tunnels, they don't ask them how to get out. No, they're fine with just wandering the labyrinthine tunnels all by themselves with flashlights and hammers. Have fun getting lost, you morons.

They run into a few kids from the cult and kill both of them with very little drama or hesitation. Child murder, the fun way!

Later on we cut back to the two workers though, and maybe then it's clear why these guys wouldn't have been a big help – they start arguing almost immediately about how they should stay in the break room and hide, even though they only have one sandwich apparently. Riveting! Then this bald guy reveals he's part of the cult, which prompts the other guy to kick him out of the room and lock the door.

Meanwhile, the group runs into that crazy psycho rapist guy from earlier, who has axed a couple of technician-looking guys in this control room. They tie him up, but don't kill him. I guess since he isn't a little kid, it's okay to leave him alive even though he's clearly murdered at least two people and sexually harassed several others. But he COULD be okay in the end I guess! Here's hoping! Fingers crossed!

Well, fingers crossed for this character to get genital warts, anyway.

Elsewhere, the cult members find the two workers. Apparently they didn't know Mr. Bald Guy was a member, as he has to plead with them and convince them he is – maybe try keeping track of your members better, you fucking idiots. They kill the other guy right there, even though Mr. Bald Guy could have probably helped him and said he was a member too. Then they bring in Mr. Bald Guy's pregnant wife, and she stabs him in the gut and kills him instantly.

Oh, but she says she loves him first; that makes it okay. That is one of this movie's favorite tricks – having a character tearfully kill a loved one and then muse over their dying body about how much they love them. It's a cheap-ass substitute for any real character development. We know nothing about these people, barely even their names unless you reference IMDb while you're watching, and really, it's just tough to get invested in the oh-so-sad tragic deaths of these people by this cult when they kill off characters so fast that it makes The Walking Dead look absolutely conservative in terms of that.

And alright, I might as well not mince words – they stab the pregnant lady in the belly and take out her unborn baby, laying it on top of its parents' dead bodies.

No, I'm not going to show the scene a few seconds later where they put the baby down. I have enough tact to avoid that.

I just can't even imagine the mental state you'd have to be in to write something like this. It's one thing to have a scary scene or something shocking in the way that you didn't expect it, but – this is just nasty and mean for no reason; there's really no artistic reason to do this. Yeah, you're fucking edgy, you're dark as shit...but so what? You want a medal for being fucking disgusting? Cause that's what it is; fucking disgusting.

For that matter, it's doubly awful because of the dialogue during this scene – the pregnant lady is just moaning and bitching to no end about how she's sinned and needs to be saved, etc – she's fucking nine months pregnant. You sure there was nothing she could have done BEFORE NOW? For that matter, why have sex and get pregnant at all if you're part of an Armageddon cult that explicitly hates sexuality and anything related to it AND plans to kill themselves at the doomsday? Did you just not read the fine print on that contract?

Oh, wait, why am I thinking so hard about this? The answer is simple – the movie is some of the worst crap ever thought up by humanity. It's complete horse shit shock-mongering made by people with the emotional maturity of 12-year-olds. There. Simple and concise – that sums it up quite nicely.

If you actually continued watching after that scene for some goddamn reason, we get a scene where this other girl is also revealed to be part of the cult. Worried because she had sex with that guy earlier, she goes in the bathroom and starts washing out her vagina with a bar of bathroom soap.

I'm just at a loss for words.

What she doesn't know is that the soap was unclean too, so that won't save her:

That soap has seen the hands of thousands of prostitutes and strippers taking the subway home, therefore it is unclean too and YOU MUST DIE!!!

There's a lot more whining about how the people love each other before they kill one another and blah, blah, blah – fuck off and die, movie. Doesn't this level of drama just blow you away? “Oh yeah, let's have all these characters kill their loved ones! That will show the harsh and gritty reality of their world and warped minds! It's so deep and edgy! Then throw in some lines about how much they love each other even though they're killing each other! That's a real moral gray area, right?”

No...no it isn't.

Oh, a scene where the one guy has to play dead while the cultists are stabbing a bunch of bodies, and he gets called away before he gets to the main character? What abominably clichéd writing! That's...exactly what I'm used to from you, End of the Line.

"Maybe if I keep my head down, they won't drag me in for the sequel!"

There are some more lame scenes, like where the one guy who's sort of been leading the group makes his way to the lobby of the subway station and sees that the city is burning down and everything is up in smoke.

Really, movie? These two-bit hack religious fanatic murderers managed to take down AN ENTIRE CITY?!?! THAT IS JUST...acceptable to me at this point.

Yes, really. I'm completely fine with it.

Then he gets killed off unceremoniously by the old lady, because old ladies in this universe are invincible of course. Then she cradles his head in her lap and sings to him, because I guess the movie is trying to pass that off as scary or creepy now. Fuck if I know why; it's as effective as a light tap on the shoulder, in the grand scheme of scares.

Meanwhile, Karen confronts weirdo rapist-psycho dude in this other part of the tunnels, where he says he isn't going to kill her if she has sex with him. Really now. THAT'S the final conflict here? We're still on the “have sex with me” tangent from this loser?

That's seriously like some shit I would have made up as a joke to put in a picture-caption in one of these reviews, but this movie did it for real. She kills him, I guess, and then sits down and has visions of these demon things surrounding her.

"Wipe that blood off your chin, don't you know that's rude?!"

I don't know, the movie's over; that's all I care about.

It may come as a surprise to you after all of this, but no, this movie isn't good. It's one of the most wretched and unpleasant things I've sat through this side of The Purge: Anarchy and Curse of the Zodiac – and if you follow my blog, those two reference points should tell you something about this manure pile of a movie.

There's really just nothing to hook you in. What are we supposed to like here? The way the women are all written as cardboard cut outs with great tits and no real character? The awful writing, riddled with cliché and boring, half-assed dialogue? The boring plot and even more boring kill scenes, which lacked any kind of creativity or scares to them? The one-dimensional characterization of the religious cult characters, who have no real motives or anything to get us into their heads and, you know, actually scare us?

Contrary to whatever bullshit you might believe about religion, people (and people in cults, specifically) are generally more complicated than simply 'THE WORLD IS ENDING, LET'S KILL PEOPLE FOR NO REASON AND LAUGH ABOUT IT!' And, amazingly, exploring peoples' beliefs and convictions, even the darkest sides of them, makes for better horror movies. But that takes actual work, so of course we didn't get that with this movie.

I mean, there were possibilities! Maybe we could have had a movie about one person who joined that apocalyptic cult and then started to have doubts after seeing what they intended to do. Maybe we could have a real study of the human psyche and its frailty. But nahhh. Serial killers on the subway are the real way to go!

But really even if the rest of the movie had redeeming factors, it would still be the lowest form of shit, simply for the scene where they kill the pregnant lady and take out the fetus. I've looked at some pretty damn sick, gruesome stuff on here, some of it being outwardly unpleasant and grotesque to extremes that ruined the movies. And none of them – count it; exactly zero of them – ever went this far, to the level of killing an unborn fetus on screen, particularly in the manner and style this movie chose. It's just a tasteless crap, is what it is. No mincing words, no grey area, no double standard – it's just awful.

I can think of so many better alternatives, too. If you want a movie about a cult, go watch The Sacrament. If you want a movie about people wandering around underground, The Descent is a good pick. There's just so little reason to watch this shit. So don't. Forget about it like the wretchedness that it is. Apparently it won at least two awards, a fact which I was shocked to learn. Were standards really that low in 2007?

Oh well. This is the end of the line for End of the Line, and the end of the line for 2014. Happy New Year!

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

Dead Silence (2007)

Man, if I keep on reviewing these James Wan movies, people are going to start thinking I have some vendetta against James Wan!

...what? I have no clever retort to that. It was just an observation.

Director: The Great Visionary James Wan

Starring: Wooden caricatures of human beings, and also puppets

IMDb

So...Dead Silence. This piece of shit was one of the first in a long painful line of supernatural ghost-vengeance-small town-nice-house-porn flicks that have been coming out like the Octo-Mom’s kids ever since.

A quick glance at the Wikipedia page reveals, for one, that this movie’s script was heavily doctored after its initial draft by SAW writer Leigh Whannel, who wasn’t happy about it at all. Which is understandable given the quality of this movie, but baffling when you find out Whannel also wrote Insidious: Chapter 2 just last year - didn’t learn THAT much, huh? And two, one of the working titles was apparently “Sshhh…”. That...doesn’t even need a comment.

In the opening credits, we see how puppets are really made: in the dark with seizure-inducing flashing lights so you can’t see what you’re doing, with dark ominous music playing, because that puts you in a mood to make toys for children, doesn’t it?

Puppets are dark, scary monsters made in hellish domains by tortured souls. Rent one for your seven year old's birthday party today. Boy, Jim Henson studios got dark in its later years.

Once upon a time there was a boring couple who were unrealistically attractive. The guy, Jamie, loved fixing sinks and the girl flirts by saying that him dialing for take-out for dinner is attractive to her. Lovely! I almost, kinda, sorta believed that you had once been in a room a long time ago with two people in a relationship.

"The smell of hands working under a sink gets me hot! Dialing a phone to order bad Chinese food gets me even hotter!" ... "Hey, is this realistic dialogue yet? No? Well, fuck it; I don't like putting effort into things."

But that doesn’t last long, as apparently Jamie gets a puppet in the mail. I’d say how weird that is, but I’m following the characters’ lead. Because they don’t find it weird at all. They don’t even ask any questions!

"Where did that puppet come from?"
"Who cares? Let's play with it!"

I guess mysterious packages in the middle of the night are just normal for them.

We then see what a catch Lisa is as she talks to the dummy while she’s alone with it and sets it up to “scare” Jamie when he gets back. Seeing as that isn’t something any functioning human being in the history of the world would do, the doll rightfully kills her:

Jamie returns home and finds this, in a suitably obnoxiously edited flash cut with a loud sound behind it, because nothing can be scary without that. I mean, thank fuck they put in that loud sound and the flashy lights and what not; I never would have known to be scared here otherwise.

Then he gets arrested and questioned by the worst cop in the world, who suspects him of killing Lisa even though he didn’t do it and there was that tiny matter of a DOLL being delivered to him right before the murder happened! But the cop doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t consider it. What he DOES care about is interrogating a guy just for the sake of hearing his own stupid voice. Because that’s...really all you’re getting with this, you fucking idiot. I’ll sum up the conversation:

“Did you kill your wife?”

“No, but there was this weird puppet dropped off in front of my door like an hour before---”

“That had NOTHING to do with it! DID YOU KILL YOUR WIFE?”

“But I saw a guy with a bloody knife leaving the scene when I got back to the house!”

“Trivia at best! DID YOU KILL YOUR WIFE? I know ya did! Admit it, you guilty bastard!”

“But I get phone calls every night from the murderer and he taunts me that he'll never be caught because the police won't do their jobs right!”

“Oh pshaw, you killed her; just admit it!”

AAAGGGHHH!

Then we see the height of good policework - after you question your “suspect” for no reason very harshly, just let him leave town and take the fucking dummy with him. Oh yeah. Why does he take that dummy? Your guess is as good as mine. I guess he just wanted to remind himself of Angel Season 5 while on the road.

He goes to the town we see in all of these movies: the sorta small town with a Victorian mansion in the middle of it, and also with a population of only attractive, slender white people. The houses we see are always squeaky clean with nothing out of place and look like millionaires reside there. Because nothing says horror you can relate to like it’s happening to you, like a bunch of rich GQ cover models living in mansions even The Big Lebowski would call extravagant.

If a black person appeared in any James Wan movie, the whole universe would probably implode.

We get some very bland attempts at drama when Jamie interacts with his father, who apparently he didn’t used to get along with but now the father has changed and wants to reconcile I guess - whoop-de-doo, do you want a fucking medal? Also apparently the father has had multiple ex-wives and celebrates that fact by painting them out of portraits when they die, or some shit like that.

All of this is really just window dressing to the main point that this movie has no fucking idea what it’s doing. Who cares about any of this drama? How does it make us relate to the characters or story any more? That’s really the crux of horror, you know - relating to the characters so we’re scared with them when they get in danger. This movie, like so many before and after it, just wanted an excuse to show pretty looking mansions and attractive people.

There’s no spontaneity to any of this, no mess in the houses, no flaws in the characters’ appearances, speech or personalities - these things, while small, would have made the film a tad bit better, as at least THEN we could have gotten the sense we were watching real people, and maybe then we could have at least been a little more invested in this shitty story. As is, it’s more like watching a bunch of dolls playing in a dollhouse.

So Jamie leaves and goes to some motel where I really am just hoping Norman Bates will pop out and stab him to death. But that doesn’t happen. Instead we get another appearance by Detective Gumshoe McCrimeSolver, who has a brilliant solution - focus in on the dummy NOW. Yeah, before it just seemed like a silly idea, but NOW it’s genius! Detective work is fun when you can just make things up as you go with no logic or reason!

We also get the true height of detective skills when we see Gumshoe here talk to Jamie with the dummy just to be super funny and shit:

"For my next trick, I'll make the rest of this movie seem tolerable by comparison when I come on screen."

What the shit is this, the stand-up comedy hour with the detective? Get the fuck out. We really paid tax dollars for this? Is this really the best the police force could do? Well, I suppose it isn’t actually - it’s just that they probably put all their competent guys on cases more important than the fucking dummy murder case. That makes more sense.

After that we get an exposition scene where Jamie runs into the town crazy lady, and of course her husband is kind enough to sit Jamie down and tell him everything going on in a neat and orderly fashion, because the movie had no idea how to get all of this vital fuckin’ information out to us otherwise…

"Now, let's talk about something so boring the audience will fall asleeeeeepppppppp

So get this - apparently a long time ago, Cruelle DeVille’s even creepier and meaner cousin went on stage all the time in this town and did puppet shows. It apparently was fine and dandy until some snot-nosed kid made fun of her because her lips were moving.

It's like a Disney game; return 101 puppets to Cruelle DeVille's less successful cousin.

Then she killed him and the town pulled a Freddy Krueger and killed her in retaliation. Apparently her will involved them turning her into a puppet after she died, which I’m sure was a bucketload of fun for the embalmers and the morticians:

So do wood carvers in this world ask for their body to be turned into a wood statue after they die? At what point do these after-death wishes become too ridiculous?

And so now she’s a vengeful ghost haunting the town for no reason. Or maybe there is one. But I’ll be fucked if I’m going to listen to the bland writing that makes this thing up. Apparently she also had a bunch of dolls that she made that got buried because, I guess, the town thought they were haunted or something. Whatever.

The movie after this...really doesn’t have any structure to it, and it just meanders around like a drunk at Oktoberfest. There’s way, way too much exposition, with a whole other part where we get lots of backstory about the town and why Jamie specifically is being targeted - I dunno; forgive me for being vague, but do you really even care? It took me Herculean strength to type even this little paragraph - c’mon, I’m trying to make these reviews more exciting, and this movie is NOT helping.

I’m just amazed at the great use our taxpayers’ money is going to with this cop - he spends time digging up ALL THE PUPPET GRAVES to prove the point that, I dunno, something is going on I guess. Are you shitting me? Digging up little puppet graves is official police procedure now? 

"Phew, I didn't prove anything by doing this, but I sure did get a good workout!"

Eventually they make their ways to the set of Lord of the Rings for the final battle:

There, the ghost speaks through a puppet and says the reason Lisa died in the beginning was because she was pregnant. You know, the twist from Se7en doesn’t work when it’s a dumb looking clown puppet saying it.

Then we see the true way to kill ghosts - blow the fuck out of them with a rifle. Genius!

Call of Duty: Retarded Edition

The detective guy finally dies, which I think almost redeems the movie altogether - almost.

Then Jamie goes back home and has a flash-cut revelation when he realizes his father wasn’t his father at all, but instead a puppet the whole time, and his father’s new wife was actually the ghost in disguise!

This is why we can't have nice things.

This whole movie was just awful. Wan’s cliches are already in full force here like a back-full of angry warts. The characters are non-entities, the setting is boring, there are no effective scares and the story is mostly just really, really boring exposition. All in all, shit movie, shit director, nothing good about it and if you’re outdone in quality by an R.L. Stine book, you need to quit making movies.

Oh you bet I went there. At least the Stine books were awesome for twelve year olds. James Wan movies aren't awesome to anyone.

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