10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

This is a sort of related movie to Cloverfield, a movie that was so good, they talked about a sequel for years and now, nine years later, we're only getting the first tangentially-related thing to it. Nine years! That must mean this is just that much better for all that time, right? Oh yeah, and there are spoilers in this, by the way. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I accidentally spoiled the movie for you. No, literally. I'd have to impale myself on a sword, Seppuku-style, if I spoiled this one for you.

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Starring: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead

IMDb

The movie starts with Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle, a young white woman who is in a fight with her boyfriend when she's run off the road by a car. The voice of the boyfriend, by the way, is provided by Bradley Cooper of all people. I'm sure this will be a role he will look back on with misty eyes in his old age and go, yes, that was my best work ever.

She wakes up chained to a radiator in a dirty basement, which is obviously immediately distressing, and also same as the beginning of the Oscar-nominated drama from 2015, “Room.” That is a comparison I am sure the rest of the movie will no doubt keep making, and from here on out, I will only like this movie if and when it reminds me of the Oscar-nominated 2015 drama "Room." Anything else is lesser and I will throw it in the proverbial incinerator.

She spends a few minutes trying to get her cell phone from across the room and does so by breaking the IV tube she's hooked up to and using the pole to grab it. She does get the phone, and it's also incredibly lucky she didn't really need that IV tube thing for medical reasons or whatever. Seriously, she's pretty much fine afterward. Her leg is also in a cast and she's told to get used to walking on crutches, but we see she walks pretty good even with the supposed injured leg... not sure why THAT was in the story at all...

But I digress. Like in every horror film ever made, there's no cell signal when she grabs the phone. Of course there isn't. You're in a dark basement hole that looks like a pedophile's wet dream. What do you expect? Did you think he'd just have really good, full-bar cell service in that fucking nightmare dungeon?

"Goddamn Sprint!"

John Goodman comes in after that, playing a character called Howard, who is the guy who trapped her there. He says he saved her and she should be grateful to him because of that. No mention of how he chained her to a pipe for no damn reason, huh? That's never really addressed. We see later he has a perfectly nice upstairs area with a couch that could have convinced her she WASN'T some kind of kidnapped sex slave in a rape dungeon and made the whole thing go smoother. But I guess he just likes making things purposefully difficult!

To make things even more unclear, creepy and rape-y, she tries to escape and then Howard grabs her by the throat and sticks her with a syringe full of something that makes her pass out. He doesn't offered any real explanation for any of this, which is totally normal and not a hackneyed screenwriting device to make the movie go on longer. Why doesn't he just tell her what's wrong and prove it? Sure, she might be skeptical, but that would still be better than her thinking you're about to make her a sex slave or something. He eventually caves into the boredom of actually explaining things like a functioning human being, and tells her the world has ended. Ya know. The rational explanation.

The movie does get better after that. I'll admit. There's this other guy in the bunker with them, Emmett, who acts as a pretty good decent tolerable eh-we'll-go-with-it comic relief, and some nice scenes where you don't quite know where the film's going yet – some decent paranoia and world-building that work because you've seen so little of it. The uncertainty over Howard's motives and whether he's crazy or the world really has ended make this a pretty decent suspense sequence. And you get some good tension out of these scenes. So I will throw everyone else a bone and admit these parts of the movie were pretty cool. And I liked the scene where they hear someone outside and it turns out to be a woman with her face melting. That was pretty wholesome family fun.

There's also at least an attempt at character development with Howard talking about his daughter and how he lost her – John Goodman really sells that scene and it works; good scene. The rest of the character development doesn't fare that well, though. Like you get Emmett moaning about how he wanted to go to college but was too scared he'd be perceived as dumb, so he didn't go. It's really quite hammy, lame dialogue and just slows the movie down. And he should've saved it for his therapist, if his therapist is still alive in this nuclear future. If she isn't, well, she'll probably wish she was after listening to this idiotic sob story from a man-child like this guy. I know that sounds harsh, but hey, it's a fictional character. Who cares?

Michelle's isn't much better – she talks about how one time, she saw a kid being abused in public and did nothing. Truly she is the victim here and the real one we should feel sorry for!

If this all seems too routine and standard for you, don't worry: there is one scene where they turn on some silly pop music and have a montage of them playing board games. I must have missed the cut where this transformed into a commercial from the early 90s for a game like Monopoly or Clue!

Buy Candyland at your local K-Mart today!

Then they have a scene where they talk about missing pieces of a puzzle they're trying to build, so now you know the conflict is really heating up in there! I'm on the edge of my seat!

Things go topsy turvy again when the writers hit a dead end in the script, and so we get Michelle going up to another part of the bunker and finding out that there's HELP scrawled in the glass with blood on it, plus an earring that the other guy recognizes as that of a girl who went missing a few years ago. So it's pretty much set in stone – Howard may have built a fallout shelter that could survive the end of society, but he's still a perverted killer who kidnaps young girls. I'm really surprised at that given that his method of accommodating car crash victims is to chain them up in his basement and not explain anything about why they're there. Oh, wait, no I'm not.

After this, Howard turns into a completely different character – he's suddenly totally unsympathetic, and there turns out to be no doubt that he is in fact a monster. They try to plan to escape, but he finds out and kills the one guy. The movie turns into a slasher movie then as Michelle tries to escape and he starts chasing her like Jason Voorhees. She dumps acid on him and escapes through an air vent, but – uh oh! - he chases her and starts stabbing through the air vent like, again, a slasher movie.

Somehow, he keeps surviving, even after she dumped acid on his face. She does eventually kill him by blowing up the entire bunker, which is like killing a fly by shooting up your room with an AK-47. You know what they say about kidnapping and killing high school girls – it gives you invincibility powers. Man, my friends and I really were off the ball when we played superheroes as kids. This movie has it right.

So, yeah, she escapes to find out that the air is not poisonous like Howard had been telling them. Instead, a giant alien monster flying overhead sees her and starts to chase her. This results in a completely perfunctory supernatural alien chase scene tacked onto the end of their kidnapping underground end of the world movie, which fits in like a square peg in a round hole. I get that it's a Cloverfield movie, so it involves aliens, but the way this is done just feels half-assed.

And, it's full of just flat out weak-ass moments like when she sets off a car alarm by accident, so, whoopsy-daisy on that one! Or the other time when she finally kills the thing by lighting a bottle of alcohol on fire and throwing it at the monster. All of these things are ultimately just tired, cliche crap and don't provide any heart pounding excitement in what should be the movie's "big scene." I really think this sequence should've been extended and introduced way earlier in the movie. Maybe we could've gotten some good scenes if the thing had met (and maybe killed) Howard.

That means there's a definite hierarchy of power here: the bloated fat country bumpkin with a paranoid conspiracy end-of-world bunker was WAAAAY harder to defeat than the UFO monster that's ten times Michelle's size. But she beat them both! So it's a feminist statement, which means I am officially allowed to like the movie now.

This movie isn't terrible or anything, but it's half-assed, and there are too many lame things in it for me to say I enjoyed it that much. It was pleasant at times and had a few moments of good suspense. John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were both good in their roles, though Winstead was kind of wasted – she was a sort of generic character and could've been any young, fit looking actress and the movie would be no different. But she was OK.

Honestly, though, the tired and played out arc of the mystery surrounding Goodman's Howard character just made this so lame to me at times. He was about as mysterious as a fucking report card spelling everything out very clearly. And that was a great metaphor, as great as the pyramids of Egypt. I mean, sure, there were some moments in the first act where it SEEMED like the film was going some other way, but then in the end, it played out exactly like I thought it would; he was evil and that was it. Totally boring.

The sci-fi twist at the end could have been good, I guess, but it just feels like it was rushed and after-the-fact. Why should I care about anything that happens during that sequence? I already sat through the movie's main conflict. If killing an aging John Goodman is harder than killing the badass alien thing you put in at the end of your movie, then you're doing it wrong and you need to go back to the drawing board.

Overall, not the worst ever, and I do appreciate the attempt to create a new world and mythology of these characters rather than just remake something old. But Cloverfield just isn't selling me yet that it deserves to be a franchise with multiple movies.

Images copyright of their original owners; we don't own any of them.

The Thing (2011)

Merry Christmas! This movie has snow in it. It must be Christmassy, right? Right?!

Sometimes Hollywood cranks out really interesting, good movies. Other times they get the idea to take perfectly good horror movies and “remake” them in a way that, while not doing anything terribly different on the surface, is actually the Devil incarnate when you really think about it.

I mean, it's not a real remake. Okay. It's a prequel. I'll disregard the obvious fact that most prequels are festering boils on the face of cinema. It's a prequel to the fucking Thing from 1982, one of the scariest movies ever made by anyone. That's a pretty tall order. That's not just something you can throw together in an afternoon. But apparently some douchebags decided they could, and that's why The Thing (2011) exists!

Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton

IMDb

And there's your bedtime story, kids – a cautionary tale, of when Hollywood producers try to remake a classic movie but also simultaneously don't care. The punishment they get at the end is a plague of endless explosive, fiery diarrhea. Or that's what I'm telling myself happened anyway.

We start this off with a bunch of trucks driving to a base in a vast empty white wasteland, which is the same as the vast empty wasteland of the minds who thought this would be a good idea. Yes that was a cheap shot. I should probably actually review the movie instead of taking potshots, huh?

Apparently, just like in the original, we get a bunch of scientists doing scientist-y things in this arctic base I guess. The only difference is that one of them is a woman, played by Mary Elizabeth “Ramona Flowers” Winstead. The character is as bland as any other and has no personality, but she's a woman, and she has tits, so even though you can't see them under her bulky-ass jacket, that makes it worth the writers' time to put her in the film. Just the mere suggestion power is enough.

Not that a female character wouldn't be welcome in a good script, but in this one there's just no reason for it other than "hey! We need something different from the 1982 one!"

Not like the the dialogue is much better. Just listen to this. Or, read it, you know:

GUY: I was hoping to get an American newspaper.

MARY ELIZABETH: What information did you need?

GUY: I wanted to check on how the Cavaliers were doing.

MARY ELIZABETH: Oh, well I don't follow football.

GUY: They're a basketball team.

Amazing how insightful and interesting that dialogue is, huh?

They find the alien frozen in a block of ice at the base, I guess, and start trying to thaw it out. This sequence is really suspenseful since we don't know at all yet that these people are going to die and then the alien is going to get out and go to the other base where Kurt Russell is hangin' out. Nope. We're totally holding our breaths on that one!

Anyway, they examine the frozen alien back at the lab and we get some more boring-ass exposition as they try to figure it out. I was going over in my head while watching this exactly WHY this is so much worse than the first one even despite having the same basic traits. Sure, it isn't as well written, but why does this one specifically make me want to punch someone (usually the Hollywood exec who green-lit it)? Well, it's probably a lot to do with the fact that all this exposition where the characters are wondering what the alien is, is pretty much boring to us. We fucking know what it is already. There's no mystery for us.

So really all we're left with is shitty scenes where the head scientist who has a stick up his ass so far I'm surprised he isn't just a shishkebab at this point pulls Winstead's character aside and goes, “Don't contradict me, your only job here is to get that creature out of the ice.” Even though she was trying to help when she offered suggestions – but I guess being a fucking dick for no reason other than to swing your bloated ego around is cool. And I guess this guy just forgot that Winstead's magical main character powers make her automatically right about everything.

"I am the boss of everyone!"

There's also this other guy, who constantly looks confused or amazed at everything and all his dialogue is literally just pointing out the obvious and dumbing down the explanations for the audience.

Was Keanu Reeves not available? Did you really need this guy just to point out the obvious in your patchwork script?

If all of this was too serious and intellectual for you, don't worry. We have a party scene full of people playing banjos and dancing! What's that? Atmosphere and tension like the original had? Nah. Just throw in more banjo playing scenes.

Exactly what I wanted when I turned on a Thing remake.

So unfortunately, the party is broken up when one dude comes across the alien, which isn't as impressive due to the fact that it's all very poor CGI. More on that later, but seriously, just look at this shit:

The best gore scenes always look more like jigsaw puzzles being taken apart rather than actual human beings dying. It's just kosher.

Oh yeah. Totally worth making this movie at all when this was the type of monster design you went with, right?

So I guess some more very rote, boring “discovery” scenes plod along with Winstead and the other interchangeable jackasses discovering that the monster is replicating people and that it could be any of them. It's all very predictable and dull, again, because we know the story behind it. It's the same exact thing as the 1982 version except worse. How many different ways can I say this? Do I have to make a flow-chart complete with pictures to make this review interesting and make up for just repeating the same stuff over and over again about why the movie is bad?

Sure, a few people die, and you get some halfway-decent ambiance with the cold winter nights outside, but none of it is arresting. The formula is the same – We get a few gross-out CGI scenes, Winstead says something true about the monster, nobody believes her because she is a woman and the main character, and then the scientist leader guy says something arrogant while that other guy just looks bewildered and repeats whatever the scientist leader said. That's the whole rest of the movie. I dunno, man, that icepick lobotomy is starting to look pretty good right about now.

"I'M SORRY I TOLD YOU I DIDN'T LIKE YOUR NEW CIRCUS ACT!"

"Dammit, Angela; again? I told you I'm not into anthropomorphic spider-human hybrids! Now put your clothes back on."

Then we get a very lethargic, boring 45-minute climax in which everyone dies except Winstead and Joel Edgerton, because they were the best looking in the entire cast. Oh and we also get to see the really goofy looking spaceship straight out of a Saturday morning superhero cartoon.

I didn't know the rejected Tron: Legacy sets were so easy to steal.

Why bother even showing us the spaceship? It just feels like the writers went, “oh, this is too similar to the original! Better shoehorn in something pointless and ridiculous that doesn't even jive with the story!”

Then we get a really predictable, seen-it-all-before ending where Winstead gives Edgerton a big speech for the audience about how she figured out he's actually the alien in disguise because his earring was on the wrong side, and then kills him. Why would she bother explaining that to the alien at all? Just fucking kill it! It's not that hard. The idea that she would really take the time to say all this is just icing on the shit-cake of the rest of the movie – such dumb fucking cliché. Such soulless regurgitations of mediocre tropes.

Then because there is no God, we get the end credits interspersed with flashes of the remaining characters chasing after the alien after it transformed into the dog that runs into Kurt Russell's camp in the 1982 version.

I guess it's supposed to be a “tie-in” with the original one, but come on; was the audience so fucking mongoloid retarded that they needed to see that in order to “get it”? Were people so dumb that Hollywood really needed to spend thousands of dollars and make a shitty, boring movie like this to spoon-feed them the truth of what REALLY HAPPENED at that other camp when Russell's guys found it at the beginning of the 1982 The Thing?

Come on. The reason the original was so scary was that you didn't need to see everything that happened to those other scientists! The horror came from the freaky shit that went down when Russell's people started dying and getting paranoid – because not only did you get the complete shock and unexpectedness of that, you also got to imagine in your head the horrors that happened at the other camp where no one survived. That's what horror movies are all about. It's also the exact reason this movie doesn't work. The foreboding mystery and intrigue of what happened to that other camp followed by the explosion of terror later on was the core, basic story structure of that movie. The idea that some numbnuts went 'hey, what if we showed what happened before The Thing' goes directly against that and pisses right in its face!

The power of suggestion when you saw Russell and those other guys exploring the abandoned base and seeing the creepy shit in there and what not is so much better, more evocative and scary than anything in this hour and forty minute waste of time. The Thing (2011) is really one of the most pointless, valueless experiences I can remember having with a movie in, well, maybe ever.

The real cincher of this whole mess is what happened to special effects gurus Bob Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis. Apparently back when this movie was still being made, Woodruff and Gillis made a bunch of awesome practical effects for it, which probably wouldn't have made this great, but would have given us at least a few entertaining moments.

That is, until the producers nixed absolutely everything they'd done, claiming the effects Woodruff and Gillis made were “too much like an 80s movie.” I'll give you a second for that to sink in.

Okay. Done? Good.

Because that is just fucking insane. I mean, the effects we got in this movie were so shitty I'd rather just watch sock puppets pretending to disembowel each other and use my imagination. Too much like an 80s movie? What's next – is it going to be uncool to make Shakespeare adaptations too much like Shakespeare, and so you add in guns and some terrible modern acting to update it? Oh wait, that already happened. Have you no shame? No appreciation for great works of art?

It's very clear to me now how much Hollywood just hates horror movies. Lazy, boring, “we can just throw this together and no one will care.” That's what classic horror is now to Hollywood. Fuck that and fuck you.

And besides – this wasn't even that Christmassy. I'm so sorry I failed you on that front. This whole review is ruined now. I'll have to try again next time.

Fortunately, all is not lost. Woodruff and Gillis have taken their too-much-like-an-80s-movie effects and made their own movies, which will come out next year – Harbinger Down and Fire City: Interpreter of Signs.

Now those look awesome. I can't wait to see those movies. I mean they gotta be better than the crap I just reviewed today...not that that would be a huge accomplishment...

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