The Pyramid (2014)

There have been a lot of good horror movies coming out. So many, in fact, that I occasionally go back and watch something fucking stupid to remind myself where I came from. You can’t forget your roots.

Director: Gregory Levasseur

Starring: Ashley Hinshaw, Denis O'Hare

IMDb

The Pyramid is a found footage movie – remember that stupid-ass form of horror? I mean sure, there were a few good ones. This isn’t one of them. I guess it’s about a bunch of archaeologists filming a documentary in Egypt as they’ve found this underground pyramid. The entire country is rioting because of this, by the way, because the discovery disturbed their old spiritual beliefs. You know what I always say; starting off a horror movie with mild racism and xenophobia is always a surefire good idea.

The main characters are all vapid as fuck and barely worth commenting on. There’s a documentary team who are, uh, doing a documentary I guess. Then there’s an archaeologist girl and her father, who argue a lot. Arguing is a good way to show character, right? That’s always a good sign when the bulk of your dialogue is just idiots screaming at one another, makes it real endearing. Oh but they do show a lot of close-ups of the blond archaeologist woman in her underwear – why watch pornography when you can watch movies like The Pyramid? Very minimal titillation followed by underwhelming horror; that’s the way to go.

Like all these movies, there are a bunch of shots of people screaming at them not to film, which adds tension because uh oh, they’re filming anyway! Those incorrigible rebels! They send a robot into the pyramid and it gets attacked by something and goes offline… like true geniuses, they go inside after it despite every indication that just leaving would be better. But hey, anything for science and/or documentary filmmaking – in shitty movies, a person’s job is always 100% of their identity and motivation and they have nothing else going on!

Inside it’s poorly lit and this is the rest of the movie; just these jackasses wandering around in the underground pyramid. There’s at least an hour of movie, if not more, set here, and it becomes apparent that it only has two things to offer: dialogue with the characters screaming at each other that they NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS PYRAMID (‘cause, you know, it wasn’t obvious before) and the two archaeologist characters randomly stopping to recite facts about Egyptian gods and mythology they got off Wikipedia. Seriously, I fucking took a Middle School history class and it was more in depth than this movie made by supposed adults.

So most of this is really just these idiots running around through dimly lit catacombs bickering. Why did they think this would be entertaining? Whose idea of a good time is ‘oh yeah, I’d love to watch a bunch of characters walk around in a dark tomb where I can’t see what’s happening’? Even when you get a brief glimpse of creatures running around in there, or when a character gets sucked into a dark hole by the monster, it’s not scary or interesting. It’s like the whole direction was ‘make sure none of this is compelling.’

It’s like the moments that should be scary aren’t given any more weight than the ones of them just arguing in the hallways. This is a problem common to these found footage things – they have to be real and gritty and so they can’t do any of that cool stuff like, ya know, actually having interesting, well-lit scenes that show you stuff. That isn’t real at all! All those classic horror movies with cool lighting and special effects and scary scenes were for drama club dorks. THIS is the real shit, man! I’m being sarcastic but it really seems like all of this was the mindset here.

Most of the characters die off in awful ways, but that doesn’t stop the archaeologist father and daughter from gawking dumbly at cave paintings and talking about Egyptian history. Wow, the writers can copy-paste from a textbook! Amazing! A few times characters died who I’d thought were already dead. Usually a good sign, when you can’t tell fucking anybody apart. The archaeologists certainly don’t give a fuck – these damn sociopaths wouldn’t notice their own mothers dying if they had a rock with some carvings on it in front of them. What awesome characters! Totally invested! I think The Shining or The Exorcist would’ve been better if they took notes from this movie’s character development, man, just have everyone be bland, soulless and barely act like a real human.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, we get the climax, with Anubis himself making an appearance! Wow, didn’t think they had a real celebrity in the movie. It’s amazing how dumb he looks though. I can actually see why they kept everything so dark for the movie before now. Anubis looks like some kind of third-rate Resident Evil video game villain rip off. It’s like what a very uninspired artist would draw and then be like ‘nah, this is not my best work,’ but then whoops, here come the producers of The Pyramid to steal from your trash can and put it on screen anyway!

Holy fuck this was lame. I don’t think there was anything I’d need to see again. But in fairness, I’ll do the movie a solid and bury it underground so nobody discovers it for the next thousand or so years.

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

American Sniper (2014)

The verdict is still out on whether or not Clint Eastwood hasn't just been dead for years, and really it's some kind of voodoo sorcerer using his reanimated corpse puppet to bitch about “political correctness culture,” like he's so senile in his old age that he forgot that Gran Torino was just a movie and is now just acting it out forever in some hellish loop. And we're all too nice to tell him.

But maybe we shouldn't be so nice. Eastwood, after all, hates what pussies our generation has become for caring about racism. So I think we should toss the baby out with the bathwater and stop caring about offending senile old people like him, too.

If Eastwood wants the kind of culture where we just say whatever we want with no repercussions, allow me to say his movies have sucked ass for years. He can't do it anymore. All his recent movies are hack work garbage. And yes, especially the one about the American military. What was that one called?

Oh yeah – American Sniper.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

I realize it's weird that we're doing this so soon after 9/11. There. The elephant in the room has been addressed. This is a supremely lame and boring movie for something that should feel so important. It chronicles the life of Chris Kyle, the “American Sniper,” who killed a record number of people over in the Middle East in the war. The way this movie tells it, though, is more like an overt love letter to blind patriotism with no actual character or drama. Watching this thing was like listening to my conservative uncle blather on over a Thanksgiving dinner, getting drunker and drunker. So, yeah – not fun.

Not that I expected “fun” out of this movie, but I did expect something. And it didn't deliver! The first 20 minutes rushes haphazardly through Kyle's childhood and into adulthood, when he and his brother find his wife cheating on him in his house. None of it is really given any importance or drama – why should we care about any of it and why is it being shown? It's not very interesting. The dialogue fucking sucks, too. Gotta love when he finds his wife cheating on him and she just flat out says “I'm doing this because I want attention!”

...That is not good writing. Unless her character is just super self-aware and in touch with her emotions, it's god-awful dialogue.

"I have a deep well of personal issues stemming back to the absence of my father in childhood which now causes me to act out in ways that some men may find to be dishonest. I use sex as a crutch to hide my crippling emotional deadness and during the day I feel ashamed, but I can't stop," - a deleted scene in the film involving this character, who is the most in-touch with her emotions out of any of the characters

It just gets worse from there – he meets a girl at a bar and they hit it off in the most cliché and hollow way, exchanging horrendous dialogue on their second scene together about how perfect she is and how he wants to be together forever. Pass the barf bag! She even admits that they barely know each other, which I think was her character breaking from the mundanity of the script and saying something that made sense before the idiocy pushed her right back down.

Love at first sight.

There's just no complexity to these characters. Every interaction between every character is a safe bare minimum slice of vanilla, like the writers were afraid any diversion from the most standard, nonspecific dialogue would alienate their viewers, like they are that fragile-minded. Is there even a point in going over much more of it? Every relationship is exactly what you'd expect it'd be if I told you who was talking to who, AND you were just a really boring, unimaginative person. Kyle and his brother? Just the most empty, banal jocular quips back and forth, bro! Kyle and his wife? “I love you, please don't go back overseas, you can't see what this is doing to you.” Repeat ad nauseam. That's literally all there ever is in this fucking movie.

"My whole existence is based on wanting you not to be in war. I have no other personality. Oh God, I'm having an existential crisis! What is the meaning of anything in life? Am I just a two-dimensional character written down sloppily and hastily to finish a script? Is life just a meaningless black void of nothingness?" 

If it seems odd that I am harping so much on this, well, shouldn't a biopic trying to honor and respect a guy's life be a bit more interesting than just this stale, generic kind of characterization? It's practically a Made for TV movie so far as the writing goes. Yes, as Michelle and I both noted when watching this, it's obviously going for the whole “rah rah America, fuck yeah” conservative attitude. But does that mean it also has to be a bad movie? I just have to ask these questions.

Also, there's really not much conflict to be had when the whole point is that he is a great and untouchable shooter in war. Not like he ever struggles with THAT aspect... and since there's no real drama otherwise, it just comes off as flat.

But speaking of politics, let's talk about this movie's shitty politics. Do you think every Muslim is a terrorist? Do you think the Middle East is nothing but a bunch of gun-toting, bomb-loving terrorists who want to KILL AMERICA? If so, then this movie will really speak to you.

What kind of erudite, hard to glean point could he be trying to make here??? I just don't know.

And, look, I know they aren't going to take time out of this military war movie to show a bunch of peaceful Muslims playing with a dog in a park. I get it. But that's the problem in itself. If I can't tell whether your movie is racist or whether you were just cramped for time, that isn't a really good problem to have.

The bulk of the movie is taken up by fairly passe, dull scenes of military guys wandering around, shooting stuff, wandering around some more, and shooting stuff some more. I can't even believe how many fucking scenes there are in this movie of guys walking slowly and tensely up stairs or driving around corners in their military vehicles. It's seriously way too many.

The above two pictures = 95% of the movie. And you know I never exaggerate anything.

They do vary it up a bit, though, when they show a military funeral for some guy we didn't know. It's so boring I can't even describe it properly. Am I an asshole if I was looking at Facebook on my phone during this scene? Does it count if it was only a fake military funeral? No? Phew.

So then after some more boring action scenes, he goes back home and spends a fuckload of time with a bunch of disabled vets, and sure, it's god-awful that they got blown up like they did. But I will say there's a reason that Eastwood is showing you this in such a gratuitous manner and hammering it home, and it isn't because he really liked the concession stand in that veteran's hospital. Do veteran's hospitals have concession stands? They do for the purposes of this. Shut up.

Obviously it's horrific when things like this happen to people. It sucks. But isn't it really creepy and weird that he's basically using amputees as a political prop to make his shitty point? "See? Look at what those Muslims did to our American soldiers!" If they were real characters we already knew from earlier, and not just appearing on screen for a second at the end of the movie, maybe it'd be something else. But it just can't be ignored with the tone of this whole movie being "America good, Muslims bad." It's uncomfortable.

The film ends with Kyle going off to hang out with the guy who would kill him that same day in real life. Like many true-life biopics, this doesn't actually show anything and instead fades to black on them standing in place outside Kyle's house, making it yet another disappointing choice in a movie full of them. I get why they wouldn't want to show the guy dying. But I dunno - the way they did end it just feels a bit weak to me.

Honestly, this is awful. It sucks because it's relentlessly boring, generic, vanilla scriptwriting and moviemaking that does nothing to tell a good story. Instead it just serves as a hollow pro-America propaganda piece. And I'm not against the troops or anything – certainly, good for them if they chose to go over there and do what they do. I wouldn't want to do it. But it's not like I needed THIS movie to tell me America is good. If Eastwood thinks he needs to make this to drive that point home, maybe he needs to have a bit more faith in his own country if he needs to try this hard to convince himself.

It's just so bad, though. Even if it wasn't a propaganda piece of shit, the characters are bland, the action is dull and the writing is plastic and hollow. I may disagree with Eastwood's politics, but the film is bad no matter what. This isn't some kind of lost masterpiece that just has a political view I disagree with. Bradley Cooper did a good job and I enjoyed some of his performance, but others like Sienna Miller as the wife are just bad, probably because she was given very little to work with. The other soldiers and side characters are entirely unmemorable.

Apparently, Steven Spielberg was going to direct this, but the idea he had for it was too much money for the studio's budget. So they threw Eastwood in as a consolation prize I guess. I dunno. Watching the scenes set in Iraq, I think this could've been good with a more noirish, slow-burning, artistic style of filmmaking, maybe a style that really drove home the desperation and eerieness of the darkness over there and the danger the troops faced. You don't really get a sense of that in this movie.

But the way it shows the Middle East, as solely a hive of evil villains waiting to kill the good Americans, comes off as shitty and ignorant too. I don't think it was just Eastwood being crunched for time like I joked about in the review – I think he deliberately portrayed the Middle East this way to make a fucking awful "point." And given our country's current climate, it's not helpful and is actually more harmful than anything. Again, there's no exploration of any of the complexities of this war or why we're there or whether or not we were doing any good at all, and the movie would've been more interesting with some of that. The only exploration of Kyle's character at all is "war is hell," and that isn't enough to carry a two-hour movie in the 2010s. Not exactly a striking, in-depth characterization...

Remember – Eastwood wants a world free from the political correctness he claims is destroying us. So here's me not being politically correct: this movie sucks, and Eastwood is a cranky old man who needs to hang up his hat and retire. Fuck American Sniper.

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

Kristy (2014)

Kristy is a movie that is set around Thanksgiving time, and you don't see many of those. I like to try and review movies close to whatever holiday is going on, because I guess I want to annoy myself in a themed way. For Thanksgiving, I guess this is the best way to do it short of sitting at a Thanksgiving table full of vegans. Kristy is a new thriller/horror movie that tries some exciting avant garde tricks, like having no explanations for anything that happens. How deep!

Director: Oliver Blackburn

Starring: Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

We open with a girl getting killed in a car. Her attackers are a bunch of guys in hoodies. They take some pictures and upload them to this “dark web” looking place. What can we possibly find in there of any worth? Child molesters? Oh yeah, sounds great. I'd love to go there.

Pictured: total weenies.

This is actually an interesting opening, and it does set a creepy mood. Though, the bad guys wearing hoodies means they have bigger problems to worry about:

Pictured: Another total weenie.

Ahhh!

Then we get introduced to our main character Justine, a college girl staying at school over the Thanksgiving vacation. Her boyfriend is leaving and so are all her friends, so now she's free to do truly scary things like dance in the hallway and chat with the security guard. Scandalous! I bet her parents didn't expect this debauchery when she went away to college!

The dancing, sure, but talking to a security guard? Don't get too crazy, movie.

These scenes aren't bad or anything, but they take up a lot of this movie, which really isn't that long. Like really, we've got about an hour left at this point and the scariest thing you've shown us is Justine running into some creepy girl in a hoodie at the gas station while buying ice cream or something. Sorry if I'm not shaking with fear, but I see people in hoodies everywhere I go. That doesn't scare me.

I will give the movie credit – it does actually make you like Justine and even the security guard guy guarding her building. They're good actors and the movie sort of, actually, endears you to them. So I guess what I'm saying is, if the movie decided to change gears and be a buddy comedy, it would probably be pretty good.

But that isn't the plan. The plan is for a trio of hooded maniacs to attack her at the school. When people said colleges shouldn't be so PC, I'm pretty sure they didn't mean students should have this happen to them. But then again, maybe this was what they meant. Gotta toughen those little pricks up somehow.

These guys are edgy!

The movie after this is mostly just Justine running around and trying to escape the college. Michelle and I found it interesting that pretty much every dorm room seemed to have been left wide open – like, the doors weren't even closed, much less locked. Every dorm, just hanging wide fucking open like an invitation for thieves. That security guard must have either been the best or worst at his job in the world.

She runs outside and attempts to call the cops, which seems to work, but then of course it's just the gangsters messing with her – because you know, most criminal violent thugs like to pretend to be the cops and string their victims along. Or they do in dumb movies anyway. I guess these guys are part of a cult that's actually smarter than your average dumb thugs. But even so, them playing around with her, cat and mouse style, is just such dumb-ass padding. All these sorts of movies do it. In real life, I hardly think these scenes would drag on so much. They'd just get it over with faster, ya know. Criminals in real life don't have time to waste.

Plot twist - the killer was INSIDE THE COLLEGE...BUM BUM BUM...actually it's lame when you put it that way. Never mind.

There's even a scene where she hides under a table and the bad guys never find her under there, even though they're in the room looking around. Guys, it's not that hard. Unless they're disabled and can't bend at the waist, I see no reason why they can't find her under there.

If you were going for groin-vision, though, then this is a success.

I guess there's some cool conceptual stuff when the cult people attacking her start calling her Kristy – title drop! – and say she's beautiful and has a pretty car or some other stuff like that. I thought the movie was trying to make a point about how shallow our society is, but they didn't even try that. They don't really explain anything. If my review is a bit confusing so far, it's because the movie has given me exactly that little to work with. It's kind of like trying to understand a person speaking a foreign language, only then you find out it was never a foreign language and the person was just blabbering gibberish the entire time.

These chase scenes are mostly not bad, I guess. There's a lot of running around in the dark, a lot of hiding. I found myself wondering how hard is it to escape when she's right out in the open? How far away is this fucking college campus from the rest of society? Can't she just run to a gas station? Don't keep hiding under tables, you moron, try actually running away!

Then she runs outside and finds the random groundskeeper guy who lives in a shack with his dog. For some completely unknown reason, when they go back outside again, the whole area is suddenly covered in a thick fog that wasn't there before and isn't always there later on. I guess that's a pretty minor thing, but it's really just more of the never-ending randomness that is Kristy, and I need to document all of this for future civilizations to see.

The fog was dumped there by government planes flying overhead, who are in cahoots with the killers. I can make that up because the movie's actual plot is so threadbare.

The groundskeeper and dog both get killed, because really, what else was ever going to happen? There's no reality where this doesn't happen to side characters in slasher movies. You could go to alternate universes where this movie was directed by a talking dog, or where all the characters had an extra arm, and this groundskeeper guy would still die in all of them.

Sorry, man. You didn't get lucky.

Things get so bad that she gets chased up the stairs in the library to the balcony, where she has to jump off to escape the killers. She lands on the ground after like, at least a fucking two story fall, and is mostly just fine. Seriously – like, she limps for a few scenes, but then a few minutes later, she's totally fine and there's nothing even worth mentioning. Did she land on the secret marshmallow filling pit on the ground below the balcony, or is she just fucking invincible?

So the movie keeps a'rollin' on, somehow, and the boyfriend guy shows back up! I love how he sees the one female killer running past him and, as he can't see her face, just assumes it's Justine. Like hey, it's a woman, so obviously it must be THE woman I'm looking for! I have a hard time believing this guy dresses himself in the morning.

It also speaks very poorly of his ability to recognize his own girlfriend.

Hey, he'll probably be fine! If I completely ignore everything I know about slasher movies and about this particular movie, I can convince myself of that just fine...

"If only I knew my own girlfriend's body better and hadn't fallen for that trick!"

Oh. Whoops. I guess we all make mistakes, including me even.

Other escapades include the time she hides in a pool and they can't find her there even! You know, I'm starting to think these guys aren't a threat at all. How hard is it to look down in a fucking pool? She's not magic invisible girl, transparent like a jellyfish, she's just right there, clearly visible to anyone who isn't blind. Maybe the guy chasing her was just bored and didn't care about looking very thoroughly.

"Hang on, let me look very quickly at the pool room and make sure she's not in plain sight... nope, we're good! She's nowhere to be found! We're brilliant at this!"

But at least they're crafty enough that they're hard to kill! Killing these badasses requires exquisite planning and strategic brilliance. Like, you know – beating the fuck out of them with baseball bats!

The intellect required for this is off the charts!

So I guess with the renewed knowledge that these guys are actually a bunch of moronic pussy bitches with the survival instincts of wounded baby bunny rabbits, Justine is able to go back outside, instantly find the last surviving cult member, and burn her alive in the parking lot right there in public.

I'd say that's cool, but there's an after-credit scene that lasts all of five seconds showing more hooded maniacs killing people. So I guess if you wanted the end of the movie to be “nothing you saw mattered at all,” this is cool.

Seriously though, they never explain why the hell this all happened or what the story was behind these cult members! There's no meaning given for it. Guys, I'm not saying I want a Peter Jackson trilogy explaining where the bad guys in this came from. But I think there had to be something.

It's just a shame, because the visuals were nice and the acting and characters weren't bad at all. This was a cool looking movie and got some atmosphere going, but the story itself just didn't tie up any loose ends, and didn't bother explaining anything going on even a little – even the most bare minimum. Most of the movie was basically just an elongated chase scene like you'd find at the end of any other slasher movie. While I appreciate the lack of dumb filler scenes, the lack of any real story just made this a pretty empty, hollow experience.

And frankly, this wasn't even really that much about Thanksgiving! Let me fix that:

Ahhhh. Yes. That's better.

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

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)

The first Woman in Black movie with Daniel Radcliffe was an excellent real estate ad for those looking to buy old English country homes. The movie itself was a contest by the filmmakers to see how long they could stay awake during endless scenes of Radcliffe walking around in the dark with nothing happening. I guess that description sounded good to somebody, because now we have the sequel, Angel of Death.

Director: Tom Harper

Starring: Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This one is set in World War II, and sure, there was a war going on, kids were in the trenches fighting for their lives and there were unspeakable horrors going on at the concentration camps, but hey, we NEED to focus on this silly haunted house ghost story right now! That's amazing to me. You could do anything – it's a fucking period piece – but instead, we just get the same stuff we're used to from movies set in the plain old modern day. "But they set THIS one in the 40s!" Well, okay. It must be better then.

I mean, surely there were no better story ideas? How about a bunch of soldiers come across a house and stay there for shelter during a storm? Maybe a wounded or discharged officer trying to cope with the war AND the ghost? Nah. We really need another bullied loner kid story and a cliché romantic subplot! That's really original, guys!

On the plus side, it does work as a sleep aid – Michelle actually told me it worked for her that way after the movie ended.

The movie begins with a bombing in London during World War II. Gee, I have never actually seen a movie start off with such an accurate description of how it did at the box office.

Then we get our main character, a woman named Eve Parkins taking a bunch of kids to this house on an island to keep them safe. She is introduced to Edward, whose parents died in the bombings, and who now wears the permanent expression of sorrow more fitting for a kid who's just realized his acting career won't be helped by starring in this.

His loss of his parents could be a positive thing, if he spins it and becomes English WWII Batman. That would actually be awesome. Much more awesome than this movie.

They go to this old house, which gives us more of the movie's favorite thing ever – showing us the house as if we have the option to come to the open house next Tuesday. It's not a very good real estate agent though, as rather than warm and inviting, we just get a broken down house with everything ruined. Thanks for nothing, guys!

"Ugh, the LIGHTS aren't even on?! Worst open house ever."

It turns out the movie did find one use for the World War II setting – pseudo-intellectual dialogue that doesn't really reveal anything insightful about the characters or story or even, really, the times. But what would we do without characters talking about how strong they need to be to survive, which is something that could be from literally any time and any situation? Aren't there better ways to develop characters? Nah. Just throw bullshit hollow platitudes in and call it a day. Back to our bland supernatural lobotomy-fuel horror!

Most of the first hour is just boring as fuck. It's all played out scenes of Edward, who is silent, withdrawn and likes drawing pictures, being bullied by the other kids. Sure, like one girl is sort of nice to him, but even she's just doing the bare minimum any character does in these sorts of movies – every once in a while she'll call out for them to stop being so mean. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

"Teacher, can't we get one decent line or some kind of identifiable character trait?"
"NO!!! As punishment for asking that, you must write I have been a bad child 100 times on the blackboard!"

I mean, I guess we could have had actually well written dialogue for the kids that made you like them, and actually treated them like human beings. Whoa there, bucko, don't get TOO progressive on us there!

There's nothing overly annoying about most of this stuff, but they just do so little with their story. It's like having the ingredients to make a really great five-star cuisine, but then just settling for McDonalds for dinner instead, out of laziness and convenience.

But hey, at least we have a bunch of jump scares! Shitty ones! Ones where you see a glimpse of some Grudge-style white-faced ghost and then the character turns around and sees nothing! Give me a hip, hip, hooray for that!

….Guys? GUYS?!

Oh well. The film trudges on as we see Eve has a tragic past that can easily be explained in a short flashback complete with cliché orangey colors and slow music. Apparently she had a baby and since she wasn't married, the hospital took it away from her – that's really all we get.

This is almost a scary scene. You're closer to hot than to cold. But this is the closest you'll get, I'm afraid. Sad...

It's a story, I'll give them that – but that doesn't mean they did much with it. They didn't really do anything. It's the equivalent of a guy winning the lottery and spending the money incrementally on the same stuff he bought at CVS every day before he won. Complete waste of time.

But at least we have another backstory scene as Mr. Pilot Man, whose name I suppose is actually Harry, stops the car with Eve just to tell her his sob story about how he was a coward in the war and left his buddies to die. This character constantly has a deer-in-headlights look, like he has been locked in a room his whole life waiting for a Pantene commercial that he's been specially bred to star in. So I can believe he's a World War II pilot if I stretch my disbelief far enough!

They find one of the bully kids dead in the thorns outside in the morning, which I guess is really the point when they start to ask questions.

...Or it would be in a movie that had any logical sense. But in this movie, it's just another thing that happens – nobody really questions it or has a big reaction. I guess you could argue they figured that kid just wandered outside and died accidentally – but even then, nobody really seems to care. That child's death is just glossed over like nothing. I realize these kids have all the personality of a pack of playing cards left out in the rain, but that's not THEIR fault – that's the writers' fault at Satan's Movie Studio.

The movie rolls slothfully along, with some more random jump scares and some scenes with scary toys that should have probably been removed by now. But we needed some dismally small attempt to scare the audience, so it's pandering time on a level usually reserved for four year olds watching Barney the Dinosaur. If you think this is scary, you probably shouldn't go Trick or Treating this year; you'll probably have a heart attack.

It's scary because that stuff was found in an abandoned toy factory and ominous lighting was put on it. OoooOOoooohhh...

Eve, meanwhile, gets locked underground with a zombie version of this one doctor character from earlier. He blabbers on about some prophetic sounding nonsense, and once she gets out, she realizes she has to take the kids away from the house, putting together the clues from the nonsense that ghost was mumbling about. Because she is the type of teacher who lets supernatural ghosts and ghouls guide her decisions. Today, they would probably call her crazy and fire her for this, but in the 1940s, she was just being a good teacher.

"You look like a credible person that I should listen to!"

So they recruit Mr. Pilot Coward Man Harry to take them off the island, which he does – he takes them to the greatest place possible, a decoy airfield used to make the enemy bomb them during the war. That sounds like an amazing place to hide a bunch of scared children, doesn't it? Take them on a field trip there, pop open a bottle of wine. Why not?

I also love the contrived romantic scene we get here - Harry reveals that he had been making up a lot of his stories about being a pilot, and that he never made it out of training. Eve's response to this is to kiss him right there. Which just goes to show you - cowardice and lying gets you chicks.

Harry shows off his true nature when the place gets bombed like, a few hours after they arrive (great place to take kids, remember?!), and Edward tries to run back to the island. Harry tries to save him, but pusses out at the last second and instead goes back to the bunker like the weak-ass bitch he is. It would be one thing if we saw the conflict of his character doing this. But this is his face when he's telling Eve about how Edward was lost:

Amazing. The heartbreak is achingly obvious. I feel for this man in a way I've never felt for a movie character.

Truly heart-rending.

Anyway, Eve decides Edward is still alive, and so she goes back to the island and the old house. This results in an extra endurance round of 'boring scenes of searching the house while sad music plays,' where nothing is accomplished except for padding this movie out some more. It's only an hour and forty minutes, but goddamn, does it drag like a deflated wet balloon across a hot blacktop.

The movie also seems to think that rocking chairs are scary. A lot of these kinds of movies do this - see also Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring - they all do this scare. Why? Did a rocking chair traumatize the writers when they were young?

While looking out a window, she sees Edward walking on the frozen marsh toward this giant cross thing sticking out. She somehow makes it out of there super fast, and runs to him, but they both sink into the water. Fortunately, Harry the Pilot Man comes to save them, jumping into the water and helping to pull them out of a pile of corpses. He sacrifices himself in doing this, and they bid him farewell as he slowly dies underwater.

"Bbbrbrrgggbbb.... I knew I should have just gone back to the mainland and started telling women that I saved these two instead of actually doing it! That would have been in line with my character and also kept me alive!"

So, wait a second. Pause the movie. This represents him finally having the balls to do something brave – all movie long and even in his backstory, he's been a coward who survives only by running away when things get tough. Now, he finally does something brave – and HE DIES INSTANTLY the second he does so! What kind of message is that? Clearly, he should have stuck to being a coward, as that was the best way to stay alive.

I guess that ends the whole thing, as we then see that Eve and Edward now live together and Edward is on his way to becoming a normal kid. I mean okay, there IS that one moment where a picture is shattered on his desk, which might allude to the ghost still being around:

But I think that's just proof that picture frames were in short supply during the war, and this one was just poorly made craftsmanship. I turn up my nose at your shoddy handiwork!

Overall, this was lame. No good character, a story that's been done a thousand times over, and no good scares. The settings, like the first one, are nice – but they rarely use them to their full potential. You can tell they're trying to go for atmosphere, but the movie just shoves your face in these long, dull scenes of the characters walking around in the house – atmosphere can only take you so far. You need something else aside from a creepy setting – I know this might be an unrealistic expectation for a modern horror flick, but how about an actual scary scene? How about trying that?

No? Oh well. I can't wait for the third movie set in the 2000s with a bunch of partying college frat bros staying at the house on a dare. Come on, you know that's what they'll do.

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

Killer Mermaid (2014)

I recently saw the 1979 Tarkovsky film Stalker, which was about a man who led people into a strange other dimension called The Zone to search for their innermost desires. And it rang true with me, because I also am about to embark on a similar journey.

For you see, I am also searching for something – a purpose in my life. I've heard all the legends and stories; all the hushed whispers of those who have tried and failed at the task I am going to undertake today. This is the path I need to take, for at the end of it, there supposedly lies a grand, ultimate truth that will set my soul at ease and answer all my questions. It is in a cruel twist of fate that I realize what road I must travel down – this movie contains the answers I seek.

Director: Milan Todorovic

Starring: Kristina Klebe, Natalie Burn

IMDb

Yes, Killer Mermaid. It's a Serbian horror film that is actually, apparently, the first 'creature flick' made in the country, which is pretty cool. What isn't cool is the fact that everything about it is stale and tired already. It is a strange, boring journey with many perilous obstacles that could be the death of me. This is the voyage of legends, which no man has survived awake or with all his brain cells. If I fall asleep, I lose the game and have to start over. Wish me luck!

It starts off rather innocuously, as it is in all aspects a regular film – it has characters speaking English and not breaking off into crying screaming gibberish, and they are talking to each other and not to hallucinations only they can see. Also, the dialogue seems to all go in one direction and seems like it's in the same language. So it's good – we know we're in our own reality, which is the standard I have come to start out all these reviews with, because that way at least nothing is as bad as Bad Kids Go to Hell.

Unfortunately, what seemed like a comfortingly bland beginning gives way to my first obstacle, as I was lulled into a false sense of security – The Bland and Stupid Opening Kill. The opening kill scene is these two, who come to the beach to take off their shirts, stand on the sand and make out – I'm sure that's a great pastime in Serbia where this was filmed. Leave your pants on and don't get in the water – just take off your shirts. That's where the real sexiness is.

Ohhh yeah, cue the funky music.

Then the guy says he hears a strange sound, and the girl assures him it's just a club nearby. They don't seem to be AROUND any clubs, and I'm really not sure what clubs play weird atonal ocean music. I wouldn't want to go there though.

I wade through the ocean of cliche with no stars to guide my way. I can feel the reality setting in - I'm on my own, and there is no one to help me. The opening kill characters get killed off by a guy who clearly has watched too I Know What You Did Last Summer too many goddamn times. Like, seriously, a hook used to kill them? That's so last summer.

You've done something new this week, Rebecca - did you cut your hair?

The sludgelike miasma of the movie rolls over me in waves. I can already feel my eyelids growing heavier. But this is only the beginning of the bizarre and terrible challenges of the movie. The next challenge to overcome is the main plot, involving two American chicks who look like supermodels going on vacation to Serbia. Because, ya know, why not? We need some implausible reason to set this in Serbia! No, we can't just have a movie set there! We have to throw American tourists in like every other movie on the planet!

Already, I feel my sanity starting to go. Sarcasm won't save me this time. This is the second horrible trap the movie springs on me – that of the Awful Dialogue and the Cliche Characters. These two just blather on and on about nonsense like how hot the one girl's boss is.

"Is your editor hot?"
"No, he's in his 40s and overweight."
"...so, he's hot?"

Also, yeah, they're here to see an old boyfriend of the one chick's from college, who now has a fiancee. Because that sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? It's practically tailored for the next episode of Dr. Phil. Cause, you know, most adults let their future spouses invite random hot supermodel-looking foreigners to come hang out for a weekend. If it sounds like a set-up for a porno, it's good enough for your horror movie.

I already feel my feet sinking, as if I've stepped in quicksand. I grasp for something to hold onto, but there is nothing. This is the next stage of traps the movie has set up – The Filler Scenes. This is a sequence of utterly dull and drab scenes of these morons actually trying to relate to the audience. This movie is so bad at that that I relate more to this than to these characters:

Yes – the movie is reverting me to a primal form. It's winding back the clock on humanity, and now suddenly, I can relate to apes. This is torture. It's the movie's test getting real. This has become an ordeal on the level of the perils Odysseus faces in The Odyssey.

Seriously – we really need all these scenes of these assholes cheating on one another, lying about it AND sitting around at a dinner table blathering about a deserted island with an old prison they want to visit? That last one is fine, but the FIRST TWO? Just unacceptable. The dialogue is just the pits, and sitting through these airheads talking about whether or not Mr. Serbian Ex Boyfriend has a guy friend she can hook up with is torture of a magnitude I have not known in at least a few weeks since I saw Ouija.

I really wanted him to just straight up say 'no, you're awful.' Ya know – be honest. It would make it better for me.

Fuck. There's even a scene where a grizzled old man in a fisherman's hat warns them not to go to the island? I'd like to say it's better to play it straight than to do the whole dumb irony thing, but I really think in Serbia, they just got the first Friday the 13th like, a few years ago, so this seems fresh and new to them.

"I only drink when I'm remembering contrived tragic backstories. And I'm always doing that." 

Also, one of the characters mentions that the guy looks like he's from I Know What You Did Last Summer. What? How dare you steal my joke? That's the first time a movie has done that. Truly, this is a devious plot – what lengths will they go to to undermine everything that I do?

Sigh. I just don't know if this is worth it. What kind of enlightenment could possibly be worth sitting through more of this movie's grueling tests of my will? Is it worth it to finish this? Who am I, really? What am I going to gain for finishing this movie? I feel the weight of all of this settling in – all the dumb characters, all the insipid lines and all the rehashed plotlines – and I sit down. I pause the movie. I reflect for a moment on all that I have seen and all that still lies ahead.

And I decide, in this moment of truth, that not finishing this piece of shit movie would be worse than finishing it, because if I don't finish it, then I just watched half of it for nothing.

And so I turn the movie back on.

The film's final test is by far the worst one – the Stunted, Dull Horror Movie Chase. The settings could be worse I suppose. But everything else is toxic poison. It even throws in some of the previous awful cliches when we get scenes of one girl whose brother drowned struggling with how to deal with her fear of water. And yet she agreed to come on vacation to a place with a lot of water and hang out near it the entire time. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds brain-fuckingly retarded.

Oh, a pointless flirting scene for a romance that goes nowhere. Excuse me while I drift further into the realm of sleep...

Then we just get a bunch of extremely rote scenes of them wandering around the prison. It's every scene you've seen in every other dumb movie like this. I want to be nicer since this is a foreign film and made on a fairly low budget I imagine. But there's really no excuse for poor dialogue and poor writing. The movie very nearly did me in with this, as it lasts for the entire rest of the film – a long, slow, agonizing trudge through nothingness and nonsense.

Like, really, how serious does the tone need to be in a movie about a bunch of dumb kids finding an island with a guy feeding random kill victims to a mermaid? This whole thing is about as silly and fun as a funeral procession for a guy everyone liked. The one thing that could have saved this was a goofy, fast paced thrill ride, but all of that was squeezed out of this movie like a tube of toothpaste.

That's really only a D minus mermaid. You can do better.

And when they randomly run into Exposition Man from earlier, Mr. I Know What You Did Last Summer, who tells them a story in a very monotone voice about how he was the only survivor of a shipwreck on this island years ago after the mermaid killed his crewmen. Wow. How sad. Let me play the world's smallest violin.

The final battle scene goes on way too long and is yet another solution to your insomnia. Lots of ominous sounding dialogue delivered in boring hushed monotones and lots of scrambling around on a boat. Yaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnnnnn. They finally kill the dumb mermaid after it attacks them on land, which was a dumb plan from the monster's part. Really, you'd think she'd have been smart enough to not go to the one place where the humans have the advantage.

RIP...on second thought, no, I changed my mind. I don't care.

Phew. What a shit-show. Bad characters, a cliche plot and nothing remotely exciting about it, due in no small part to the ludicrous 'dark' tone the whole thing has. It's cool that this is the first Serbian 'creature flick,' and I hope they make more, but that doesn't excuse the lame things about the movie, as much as I want it to.

But in the end, I made it through the movie. I completed my vision quest journey. I am a weary traveler, and I think I deserve to know what it is that will complete my yearning soul.

So. What is it? What is the light at the end of the long, dark, murky tunnel of this movie?

Yeah, y'know what? Not worth it!

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