Apartment 143 (2011)

Well, it’s a new year and it’s time for some new movies. So why waste time? Why not start off with one that makes me wish I had never even learned what a ‘movie’ was?

Director: Carles Torrens

Starring: Kai Lennox, Michael O'Keefe

IMDb

I mean this is so bad, I have a hard time even imagining the people who made it are functioning human beings. This was made by cavemen. Or insane asylum patients. I seriously can’t comprehend the level of pure absence of thought it would take to come up with something this asinine. How do these people even get dressed in the morning? How is it that they haven’t caused some kind of nuclear reaction trying to make their oatmeal every day? Because Satan knows, they’ve certainly made a toxic mess out of the art of filmmaking. This is Apartment 143.

We start off with a bunch of morons “testing” their first-person found footage cam. It doesn’t really serve a purpose or anything – it’s just so we don’t forget that the movie is supposed to be “realistic found footage” style. Because the audience is the type that forgets things after five seconds, I’m guessing.

AAAAAHHHHH! Don't eat me!

Hey, that's the same reaction I have to this whole movie!

And yes. These are supposed to be the “paranormal researchers” of the movie, and I put that in quotes because you probably know more about the paranormal than these dingbats will ever know. The characters are pretty one note … an annoying cameraman, some Irish chick whose only role is, well, to be a chick, and a craggy old man for a boss. Isn’t it a great sign for your movie when your actors fall asleep while you’re trying to shoot?

They get to this apartment they’re supposed to be at and immediately start a long train of “setting up sound equipment” scenes, which don’t serve any purpose. Oh, wait, I’m sorry. They do serve a purpose. Two, actually! One is to waste time, because the movie has barely over an hour of actual “storytelling” – a dubious claim to the word, but still. The other is to reiterate for the second time in under ten minutes just how amazing and realistic it is that the movie is using shaky camera found footage gimmicks to tell its story.

The family they’re visiting apparently has some supernatural stuff going on. The father is a complete waste of testosterone who can’t even stand up to his daughter, who is abjectly terrifying. Seriously, she should be the monster in this film:

What kind of a father just lets his daughter scream in his face and slam doors all over the house, then slinking away like a wounded dog? Well, apparently this guy. The backstory to this whole thing is that the family experienced some paranormal stuff in their home and then moved to get away from it. But, shock and awe, the ghost has followed them to their new apartment! So it's basically Insidious, except without anything entertaining.

So the movie just kind of aimlessly meanders along, like a retarded baby elephant. We get some Paranormal Activity rip off scenes here and there, just a bunch of green-lit garbage, mixed in with boring ones of the family eating dinner with the paranormal researchers.

Now on Apartment 143, watching middle aged men sleep!

What point does this scene serve anyway? Pretty much fuckin' nothing at all. How utterly asinine ... this movie seems to think it's being realistic with these scenes, but nobody wants to see this shit! It's the stuff you edit out in the studio when you're putting together a film!

I don’t know why, but that strikes me as funny. Why are they eating dinner together? Was that part of the contract? Did a fine-print clause way at the bottom of the last page demand that the bereaved family make the paranormal researchers dinner?

But hey, at least they do the dishes:

Get used to it guys, it's the only job you'll have after this.

They make some stupid jokes, and then they see that one of the pictures on the wall has been turned upside down. Is that really the best you can do as a “scare” in this movie? Something that basically amounts to the kids messing around and not paying attention when they put a picture back on the wall after knocking it down?

The whole thing is just so contrite. We really need overly long scenes of the family hearing noises in the dark and then just finding out it was the ghost moving a tea kettle? Wasn’t that like a throwaway gag in the Poltergeist movies to create some lighthearted, kid friendly scares more than 30 years ago? How is this relevant, scary or interesting at all?

Hell, maybe the ghost just wanted tea. Ever think of THAT?

Mixed in with that, we get soggy scenes of the dad whining about how his daughter hates him. Apparently the mother in the family died some years back, and the daughter blames the dad for it. His solution is not to try and be a good parent and overcome this maturely, but to whine about it on camera and cry that the mother was the one the daughter really listened to, that he doesn’t know how to communicate – call me insensitive, but I don’t think walking away like a little bitch when your 12-year-old daughter slams the door in your face is going to ease the situation.

And that’s another thing, too – why is he bitching and moaning about all this shit on camera? I guess to an extent, it’s understandable that the researchers need background information. But this guy just goes on and on. Christ. Get a psychiatrist! It’s cheaper and they usually don’t video tape you and put it on Netflix for the world to see.

If you weren’t bored and insulted enough with this movie yet, we get a scene where they’re sitting around analyzing the situation after the family has gone to bed, just as an excuse to shove it in our faces that there are cameras everywhere. WE GET IT.

After some more Paranormal Activity dick-riding, we get a scene the next morning where the father goes in to wake the kids up and the daughter is rude to him again, even telling him to fuck off, because it’s Saturday and she wants to sleep more. At this point, I really have to ask – why is she still even living in that house? Isn’t there some kind of Catholic boarding school the father could send her to, where she could perhaps be hit with a paddle or something every time she tries to mouth off?

I mean there’s just only so much bullshit you can take! There’s being an annoying teenager and then there’s just purely beyond repair. Ship her off to the nunnery!

And get this; the next scene is a séance scene – why don’t you just come out and admit that you’re as bankrupt for ideas as the United States recession from several years ago was for money? What value does a scene like this have? There’s also a part where they even take time out of this movie’s runtime to show the characters setting up mics on everyone – get fucked, movie; you don’t have this kind of time to waste!

Hey, hey, get it? It's found footage! It's realistic! Are you feeling the real horror yet? Get it? It's SO REAL. *gasps for air, forgetting to breathe*

The whole sham is just made all the more laughable and yet perplexing because it doesn’t really do anything. Yeah; nothing happens! What the hell? Jesus, can’t you even try?

So at this point of the film I was just about done. I mean I just couldn’t take it anymore – my brain physically could not take any more of the inane nonsense of the film. What was I supposed to grasp onto? The fact that there’s a several-minute-long scene of the father talking to the douche-bag boss character about what’s really going on? Oh yeah, there’s a real winner of a scene. I’ll sum it up for you in one sentence: the real reason weird stuff is happening is, the daughter is going through puberty.

If you didn’t just press the ‘Back’ button on your browser after reading that, well, why the fuck not? Go do something else. Read a short story. Plant a tree. Help a homeless man buy lunch. Talk to a new potential boyfriend/girlfriend. Why are you even still reading?

Oh well, if you are still reading, let’s talk about this scene in a little more detail. Basically, it’s one of the most poorly put together scenes I’ve seen in a movie in a long time – maybe ever. It’s not just the end result of the guy revealing the “puberty” twist; no no. This whole THING is insane! The guy just rambles on and on … about NOTHING! He’s babbling about how what’s going on is not supernatural, that it’s a “poltergeist syndrome.” Then he says there is nothing supernatural in the universe and parapsychology can be explained by science. Then he goes on to talk about ghosts and spectres and whatnot. How is THAT not supernatural, you human dildo?

Watching this asshole talk in a condescending voice with no changes in the shot and nothing interesting going on OR being said is just about unbearable - call it the eleventh level of Hell.

His conclusion to the whole thing is what I said before – the “poltergeist” following them is really just a manifestation of the daughter’s puberty happening. I think if this was a school term paper, it would get an F. I mean, it’s just so bullshitty – it sounds like the mental excretion of a crazy man. Even if we’re to take the whole “poltergeist syndrome” thing seriously (I guess it’s a real theory), the way the daughter acts in this movie isn’t even consistent with that. Spoiler alert, but yeah, she acts and looks like any old “possessed” person from a Ring or Grudge movie:

Nice contact lenses! Bought those for three bucks at the Halloween store, did you?

Then they hire some “psychic” guy, who looks more like a druggie burnout at a Burning Man concert. The shortest way I can say this is – he’s also fucking insane.

What, are you getting a blowjob under the table? Get the fuck off screen.

Yeah – get this: he says the other side is “just 90 centimeters above our dimension, so that’s why it’s so common to see ghosts from the waist up.” Gee, maybe I’ll vacation there sometime. He also talks about how sensitive ghosts are and how it’s not polite to run away from them. Yeah, those ghosts, man – so sensitive. We really have to be attentive to their feelings and stuff. Otherwise they might write emo poetry on Facebook behind our backs!

I guess these are all legit theories that people have in the realm of ghost studies and whatnot, but even so – isn’t the working theory IN THE MOVIE'S UNIVERSE that it’s NOT anything supernatural? Are you just trying to say that going through puberty is related to ghosts? Because even if you started out with a real paranormal theory, I think even a herd of bulls would gag on the bullshit you're shoveling now.

Then we get the daughter possessed with her eyes all white, talking in a retarded voice about how her father mistreated her somehow – for a minute you end up thinking this is a repressed child molestation story, but nope, that isn’t it either. Then she blows him through a wall.

Breaking that window probably cost them every cent they had. Was it worth it? I guess when the next scene has him eating dinner with his head bowed in shame, the answer is revealed - this is really just an unintentional comedy.

I’m sorry, so what did that psychic guy accomplish? Right, absolutely nothing except more pain, suffering and confusion for these people. I hope the family isn’t paying these hacks too much.

Later on we get the father telling his whole story … with one camera shot, held steady for almost ten minutes while he talks. GOD this movie is annoying.

So, here’s the gist – his wife went crazy and didn’t take care of the kids out of some unbalanced mental state. Then she cheated on him. THERE. THAT WAS EASY. WHY DID YOU NEED TEN MINUTES TO TELL THIS STORY?

Then the whole movie just sort of gives up and goes nuts on you. Lots of screaming, shaky cameras and the boss guy telling the cameraman to KEEP FILMING, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES STOP FILMING, KEEP FILMING SO WE HAVE A FLIMSY WAY TO COVER UP THE PLOT HOLE OF THE CAMERA BEING THERE AT ALL! Maybe I added in that last one from my own opinion. But I doubt it.

In the middle of all the chaos, he looks back and gives that expression to the camera. I really have a hard time believing this was intentional. I think he just wanted to fuck with the movie and so he added in an inappropriately silly face at a "serious" moment. Good job, guy!

There's also a weird thing where he keeps telling Camera Guy to not worry about the Irish chick, saying she's fine over and over again. I dunno, guy. She could be in trouble. I mean, look:

Oh, but I guess helping someone would ruin the integrity of the oh-so-important ghost puberty movie they're shooting. So, yeah, I'm not even kidding; they don't help her. Chivalry is dead. But then again, she does survive at the end, so I guess Mr. Douche Bag Boss was onto something. Not that you'll really be able to get to the end though, without having a seizure from the camera work.

So after all this bullshit, they have some really epic, amazing way to save her, right? Some truly fitting climax for the story? Nope, they just grab her hand once and then she falls down and it’s over.

"April Fool's! I was never really possessed at all! Ha ha ha..." Well, that doesn't happen, but I wish it had.

How anticlimactic. But hey, if it means this movie is shorter, I’m all for it! So really this was a good way to resolve the whole stupid conflict.

After it’s all over, the boss guy and the cameraman stand around exchanging ridiculous dialogue. I’ll give you an example:

CAMERAMAN: Strange day, doc.

BOSS: The strangest day of my life. With a possible exception or two.

Heh heh, yeah, because this movie is so shitty even the characters don’t really think what happened was a big deal. Remember, kids: going through puberty means you turn into a possessed Grudge ghost crawling on the ceiling!

Nothing about this made sense! It was 67 minutes of nothing but pure stupidity. An insult to anyone with a brain. I mean it's a horror movie with a whiny pre-teen girl as the villain. I think I would call that a new low in human entertainment. Personally I’d rather just stare at a wall for 67 minutes. Horrible movie, nothing good about it, just don’t watch it.

Images copyright of their original owners; I do not own any of them.

Storm of the Century, Part 2

Come one, come all, to the biggest review of the year – my two-parter Storm of the Century one, that is! The first part taught us many enlightening facts. It taught us that singing I’m a Little Teapot is on par with The Exorcist in terms of scaring people, that the proper response to talking about abortion is to bash the other person over the head, and that crossword puzzles are Satan incarnate. What will happen this time? The suspense is just killing me.

Well, let’s not waste any time then!

We start off this side of the DVD with Andre Linoge killing some old lady by making her drown herself in the sink – well, give him points for originality. I don’t even know how that’s necessarily Linoge’s doing. Maybe she just dropped her dentures down there.

After that, we get some more fun times with – guess what:

a) The teapot song

b) Crossword puzzles

If you guessed “A,” you’re right! Your prize is more scenes of “Give me what I want and I will go away” written in blood, this time on the mirror in the bathroom:

Not getting old AT ALL yet, is it? Several times during this whole thing, we get Linoge repeating the line “Hell is repetition,” in regards to people eating other peoples’ eyes in hell, or something like that. Either way it’s a bit odd – is King just admitting that hell is watching this movie? I mean, so much of it is just repeating the same tropes and “scares” over and over again … maybe the movie became self-aware during post-production. That sounds like something King would write about actually!

Anyway, yeah, so Katrina Withers, who murdered her boyfriend in the previous segment, is hanging out watching the moms play with the kids, when they all start singing the Teapot song again. She starts crying, remembering her trauma when Linoge made her murder the boyfriend. All the kids are surprised by this, and then ask what’s wrong with Katrina Withers…and okay, I’ve got to stop the review for a second and address a bit of a pet peeve of mine with this whole thing: Stephen King’s overuse of characters saying each other’s full names when talking to one another in normal conversation.

"You will refer to me by my birth name, which is Michael Arnold Jonathan Caligula Jacob Cheese Sandwich Smith. If you try to shorten that in any way, I will destroy you."

Yes, it’s a bit of a nitpick, but this trope is so common in King’s writing for any medium that I just have to mention it. It’s just so contrived – nobody talks like that! Does every character have to say everyone else’s first AND last name when addressing them? It’s kinda quaint in a small-town Maine sort of way, but the way it’s done here is just over-done. Maybe King just realized he’d put in too many goddamn characters and this was the only way to keep them all straight in his own head … eh, well, any way that works I guess!

So back to the review then. It turns out Linoge is getting his kicks now by taunting Robbie about his mother, who died while Robbie was with a hooker somewhere – what a dirtbag. So the old grandma makes some scary faces and then shouts so loud that she actually creates a gust of wind that blows Robbie across the room. Then Linoge breaks out of prison as this happens:

Oh my God, the color blue is breaking out of the I Know Who Killed Me vault and threatening to usurp the world! AAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

And what is he supposed to be here? Geriatric Gandalf? Dumbledore on a sick day?

Is that really the scariest thing they could come up with to represent Legion? An old codger in a robe? Why not go full stop and give him Alzheimer's in this state too, really add to the effect?

Well, whatever – he leaves. I guess there’s no incentive to go find him. I don’t think being a small-town cop had a section in the rulebook for what to do when your prisoner magically breaks out of jail and turns into a reject from a Terry Goodkind book. Might have to add that one in next year, guys!

Then they all go outside and have a good time watching a lighthouse fall down:

Will somebody turn the 'blue' filter off?!

While I’m sure King intended this to be really atmospheric and affecting, it kind of gets lost in the film and doesn’t come up that much before or after this scene … in fact I’m pretty sure they don’t even talk about it at the end after the storm has passed and all. The effects are, well, about what you’d expect from a 1990s TV special – I’d make fun of them, but it’d be kinda like making fun of a low-budget art student’s pet project for senior class after visiting the Louvre.

...

Oh, okay, just one joke: Not the director's toy lighthouse! That was a childhood relic!

And get this – guess how Mike discovers the real identity of Linoge? He plays around with some kids’ toy blocks until he comes up with…

Why don't you discover a new musical symphony via the Xylophone next? Or maybe find the cure for cancer in a pop-up picture book? The possibilities are limitless.

Yup, Legion. That’s who Andre Linoge really was this whole time – one of the most well-known demons from the Bible. While the movie thankfully never delves too deep into the whole Biblical thing, it is definitely there. Whatever floats your boat. All I’m saying is, how come he didn’t discover Linoge’s real identity through a crossword puzzle? Wouldn’t that have been more in keeping with the movie’s erudite themes?

We then see everyone fall asleep and have different dreams about the whole island being found empty and deserted once the storm clears in the future. That’s all fine and well, but there is one really silly moment: when the newscaster breaks character in this kid Davey Hopewell’s dream and looks straight into the camera and says “Davey, you’re too damn short to play basketball.”

Uh, seriously? Let me just put that into perspective for you: this is a dream in which everyone on the whole island is mysteriously disappeared. Why would being too short to play basketball factor into the equation? Moral of the story: teenagers have weird-ass dreams.

There’s also another dream in which everyone on the island is walking over a cliff and into the sea:

This part is actually kind of effective. Why did they even bother with the other scene with the too-short-to-play basketball stuff? Just stick with this, King! There’s some real effective tie-ins to the Roanoke Island mystery, as it seems like the same thing is happening again on the movie’s island. This is what King is really great at – tying his supernatural stories into real life mysteries and events. Occasionally it comes off as hokey, but a lot of the time it adds an extra dimension that really puts the viewer/reader in the story. It’s very atmospheric.

After that, we get one of the woman who was thought lost in the storm suddenly recovered. She tells them a story about how Linoge found her and then made her come back and tell everyone that if they give Linoge what he wants, he’ll go away. Shocking how new this info is, right? Then she actually does give us something new by telling everyone that Linoge wants to meet them that night. What a shock! Information that actually moves the plot forward!

But then everything is thrown back into confusion and insanity as all the kids mysteriously faint and won’t wake up. The parents are all afraid that the kids found their secret Valium stashes hidden beneath the bathroom sink, but it’s okay. Linoge shows them through the window that he has them all flying in the air with him, holding hands like a game you’d play at recess.

Just imagine it was Michael Jackson instead of Linoge there – now THAT would be scary!

Oh okay, that was kind of a low blow – but the film does have an actual child molester in it. Apparently it’s the town priest, if you can believe that … yes, King actually put in that tired cliché. Linoge reveals that secret to Mike after Mike talks to the priest about the religious implications of what’s going on. Literally – Linoge flat out tells them that the priest sexually assaults his two young nieces on a regular basis.

Uh, pardon me for asking, guys; sorry if this is insensitive, but WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING STILL CHASING THIS LINOGE GUY?! Take the child molesting fuck ass out back and make sure he never does it again! Lock him up in the jail cell! You can deal with the literal demon from Hell later; just make sure this sick fuck gets what’s coming to him!

But of course they don’t and it never comes up again. Instead we get a scene where Linoge threatens to make a woman burn her own face off if they don’t listen to what he has to say. I’ll sum it up – he demands that they all meet him in the City Hall that night. So they set about doing exactly that. They gather in city hall and Linoge shows up. Before he actually tells them what he wants though, he spends some more time going around to random town people and humiliating them. How awesome. Maybe he’ll post a series of YouTube videos doing this next.

"Subscribe to my channel. You can also see my 87 impersonations in 100 seconds video too!"

But no, he actually FINALLY tells us what it is he wants. Brace yourselves. Sit close to the screen. Do not under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES miss what he says next … after all, you wouldn't want all of this time you spent watching the movie wasted now, would you? So what’s it gonna be? Does he want a lifetime subscription to their town newsletter without the annoying emails about each month’s next meeting? Does he want to know how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie roll pop? What the hell is it?

Well, listen to this: his request is one of their children. He wants to take away one of their children to become his heir after he dies in thousands of years. And if they don’t give him one, he will kill everyone on the island, children included. Jesus. Why not just hit up an adoption agency? Wouldn't that make more sense? I guess he just likes being super fuckin' dramatic and wasting a bunch of time. Hell, why not take a kid who doesn't have parents off the streets and raise him? Just goes to show you how bad orphans have it, doesn't it? Not even a demonic dying entity from Hell wants them.

He then gives the whole island thirty minutes to decide what to do. They all immediately set about establishing that they don’t have any problem giving Linoge a child if he’ll spare the rest of them. Except, that is, for Mike, who stands up and calls them all insane. His position is simple – if they give Linoge a child, how will they live with themselves from then on? Nobody really has an answer to this, except that they don’t want to die. And frankly, it IS a tough situation, and there ARE no really great answers to anything going on here. Mike gives his point and the others have their own, all rather unfounded and flawed except  for the simple fact that they don’t know what to do – because it is such a hard choice. Eventually they do have to settle on giving him a child though, simply for self-preservation.

Linoge comes and makes them all take a little rock – seven of them white and one black, and the parent with the black one is the child who Linoge will take. And if the laws of dramatic irony have ever had any presence, guess whose kid gets chosen?

That’s right. Mike, the only person in the room who didn’t like the idea, is the one who gets the short end of the stick here. Linoge turns back into geriatric Gandalf and carries young Ralphie Anderson off into the background of the ET poster.

Then we get an “epilogue” where Mike has decided to move off the island. He divorces his wife and takes his car and just drives. He eventually ends up, for some reason, becoming an FBI agent or something – isn’t that kinda random? And then he sees his grown-up son with vampire teeth – which are only shown in close-up because the movie didn’t have the kid’s parents’ permission for him to wear them himself:

I'm just amazed Andre Linoge would take the kid anywhere in the proximity of Mike. You'd think he would know better than that.

All in all I just have one question at the end of this: what the hell did they ever do about that pedophilic priest? Did they arrest him? Did they save the little girls? Come on! You can’t just tell me they let him live! Does a storm of the century with a horrific demonic entity taking children really excuse PEDOPHILIA?!

Eh, I guess it does. Innocence is dead.

So that’s Storm of the Century. All bullshit aside, I like it. It’s a good, imaginative movie with some real heart and soul to it. Unlike flops like IT or Pet Sematary, this actually takes itself seriously for the most part and delivers a good story that rises up through the rather average acting and production values. The characters, while too numerous, are occasionally very good, and the atmosphere and tension are fairly palpable.

While there’s nothing exactly arresting going on here, and the whole is perhaps too long, I kinda like the huge running time. It makes this whole thing more spacious and detailed, really giving the viewer a feel for the atmosphere it’s trying to convey, and the weight of it all is so massive that it’s really something you have to see to believe. Even for all its flaws and silly moments, Storm of the Century is impressive.

And that’s 2013 for Cinema Freaks. It’s been a fun year with some great reviews, some terrible movies and even some really good, fun movies in the mix. Check back any time for more.

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

Storm of the Century, Part 1

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

Creator: Stephen King

Starring: Tim Daly, Colm Feore

IMDb

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

Yes, my fans are all Asian now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, not quite as powerful, is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is this, a remake of The Odd Couple?

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

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

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

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

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

Oops, wait, no, I had another one.

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

Now introducing Axe-O-Vision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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