Abandoned Mine (2013)

A year or so ago, I did a post about what was wrong with horror movies today, and in that post I took pictures of a bunch of DVD covers at my local movie rental store. One of those DVDs was Abandoned Mine, a film about a bunch of dumbass kids getting trapped in an abandoned mine as part of a Halloween prank. You could also call it “the Darwin effect.” And since I have run out of ideas completely, of course I'm just going to cannibalize my own past and do this as the last review for October this year!

Director: Jeff Chamberlain

Starring: Saige Thompson, Reiley McClendon, Alexa Vega

IMDb

This movie starts off with several minutes of boring nothingness for the opening credits, because I guess they thought they really needed an opening that made people shrug and go “ehhhh.” Then we get our main character Brad, who has the distinction of having the most punchable face in the entire film.

He's going around trying to get his friends to join him in this SUPER COOL HALLOWEEN PROJECT yo, or rather what I already said – going down into this old abandoned mine to just hang out. Like I've said before...I really miss when kids just did drugs and got eachother pregnant.

If you need proof this movie has no idea what it wants to convey, well, get this – apparently Brad has invited his ex-girlfriend Laurie along, which is weird because his current girlfriend Sharon is also coming. And not only that, but Laurie and Sharon are also friends, who play wonderful tricks on one another like Laurie pretending to be a serial killer and then stabbing a ketchup bottle on the ground right next to Sharon. For some reason, Sharon is still panicked by this even after she isn't stabbed – does it just take her longer than most people to realize she hasn't been stabbed?

"I should realize I wasn't stabbed, but my brain moves at the pace of climate change, so I can't tell yet!"

"HA HA HA! You obviously are traumatized and I should be apologizing, but I'm a shitty friend. So nope!"

Maybe she's just empathic with condiments.

Then we get a several-minute long musical number scene where the two girls are trying on various costumes. It's really just an excuse to look down their shirts and watch girls who are supposed to be in high school getting dressed. It also comes off like it should have been in a Bratz movie.

Is it that hard to find a real live woman after writing a scene like this, show her what you wrote and ask "is this accurate?" Oh wait, yes it is, because you don't care about that - you just wanted jerk-off fuel. Being perverted is A-OK so long as you put it under the guise of characters dressing up for Halloween!

They all meet up in some empty field and we're introduced to some other characters, like Ben, who is a fat kid who plays football. And Ethan, who is an Indian guy who talks in a funny accent, is polite to a fault, misspells words and constantly knows everything about every trivia the characters need for the mine. I'd call this racist as fuck, but I think you actually would need to invent a new word to talk about what this is. It's at least as bad as blackface.

Somebody's going to hell for this, for sure.

There's some dialogue about how he used to work in a call center in India and how lots of Indian kids get those jobs – I refuse to become complicit in your attempt to make me confront racial stereotypes, movie!

While they're driving, someone mentions they're going to the old Jarvis Mine, which really freaks Sharon out, prompting her to start screaming about how SHE DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS THAT MINE, SHE THOUGHT IT WAS ONE OF THE OTHER HAUNTED MINES AROUND TOWN! Funny. I guess haunted mines are just like Walgreens around this town – there's one on every block.

They have a lot of really stupid conversations, which give off the aura that the writers just didn't want us to enjoy our time watching this. Like take a look at this gem:

LAURIE: I didn't know if I was supposed to be his mom or his girlfriend.

SHARON: Both, maybe.

LAURIE: Both is hard.

One, is it that hard to have your girl characters talk about ANYTHING besides the boy they dated? Two, that's gross and you should feel bad. I don't need to hear about any Oedipus complexes related to this face:

Then they sit around a campfire and Brad tells the longest ghost story ever – apparently in this story, some kid found gold in a mine and then grew up to have a family, but then the bosses tried to cut him out of his share of the mine. They kidnapped him and his daughters and raped the daughters in front of him – because there can't be a good horror story with women if they don't get raped... Then they became vengeful ghosts and spend the rest of eternity down there waiting to possess women, because possession is gender specific now.

Uh oh, better tell Pazuzu he got it wrong...

Then it starts to rain, so like idiots they hide inside the mine. They could just hang out there, but no! That wouldn't be stupid enough. They have to go further into the mine! I'm really just not sure what I'm supposed to be rooting for here. They're dumb characters doing a dumb thing on a whim – there's really no conflict or drama there. If the movie were scarier or more intense it might be easier to forget, but there's nothing but a bunch of obnoxious kids wandering around spewing putrid dialogue. What's there to latch onto?

They start going into the mine and somehow get lost in like five minutes – even though it was clear how to get out and they have nothing to gain by going deeper and deeper into this fucking place, I guess the story is running on the power of “hey! Putting my tongue in a wall socket sounds fun!” logic.

"Wait, let's check...nope, no point to what we're doing up there..." 

So they keep wandering around, going further up the ass of this old mine. Ethan keeps on hurling out random facts about mines, which starts to get ridiculous after a while. And by “after a while,” I of course mean it was never not ridiculous. He's Indian! He must know everything! That's just how Indians are. They're super-smart. Like Braniac from Superman, except with a funnier and more exaggerated accent.

"Wait, stop everything...I feel a psychic brainwave coming on that will give me the magical exposition-spewing powers all Indians have!"

When they come across a tight tunnel that may or may not lead to certain death, of course our brain-dead heroes are up for it. Except the fat kid doesn't want to get stuck and Sharon is just a wimp. Then it's bad dialogue time again!

BEN: Me and Sharon will just stay here. We'll probably, like, make a family or something together by the time you come back for us.

SHARON: I never would've been friends with you all these years if I had known how disgusting you were.

Because you know, friendship just means pulling the wool over your eyes and not caring who the fuck you're hanging out with, like at all! You could be friends with a serial killer and not notice until you literally just come across them stabbing some guy in an alleyway. Then you'd have just cause to be like “I never would have been your friend if I'd known THIS was what you meant when you said you killed people!” It just makes the most sense.

Then they get even more lost. Things finally start to look up a bit when Brad is killed, apparently by some kind of monster:

No, not that kind. I’m picturing something more like this:

Yeah, that ought to do it.

The other three wander around like this is their first day on Earth at all for a while until the movie decides it’s time to rip off [REC].

Then it’s just Laurie and Ethan. I will give the movie props for killing off its most annoying characters - not usually a consideration movies give the audience. But here it’s like sweet bliss.

We do get some more idiotic dialogue though, when Ethan reveals a stunning secret: he isn’t even really Indian! And what’s more, he never worked in a call center! Well, stop the fucking presses, I say. He should be left down in that mine to die for this heinous lie.

"How DARE you lie to me about your nationality?!?"

In my imagination, the actor for this kid is friends with the guy from Life of Pi. They were childhood buddies, let's say. I like to picture those two actors meeting up again after not seeing each other for years. Maybe the conversation would go like this:

"Hey, man, what have you been up to?"

"Well, I was in a movie called Life of Pi, which got critical fame and success! What about you?"

"Uh, well...let's change the subject."

Laurie has him beat, though, when she goes on an epic temper tantrum about the fact that the ghost is down in the mine and she wants to destroy him, I guess. This is clearly an Oscar-winning performance and will go down in history as the best scene to reference when putting a plot in your movie about an angry mine ghost trying to kill annoying teenagers. This will be one for the history books.

As the rest of the film progresses, I see I was wrong about it - it has more merit to it than I ever gave it credit for. For instance, the transcendental scene where Laurie seems to get the idea she’s actually a Game of Thrones character.

"Just keep the camera there and I'll look dramatic as hell."

And hey, bats are yummy!

Ozzy would be proud.

The film blends these diverse influences together into a strange amalgamation neither too silly nor too serious - it’s right on the borderline, leaving the viewers to decide how to feel! Such ambiguity certainly deserves at least a passing nod.

The directing also becomes more and more spastic and artsy, which is clearly a choice made to accentuate the confusion and bizarre nature of our own lives as we continue to forage into adulthood. The characters are clearly representative of a larger truth. Yes, the dialogue was bad in the beginning and yes, they could be annoying, but overall it was part of a larger plan. The movie is trying to tell us that life is confusing and there are no answers. Everything we see is just a cover for something that lies beneath. There is no good or bad, just a moral gray area. The mine, clearly, is supposed to represent the darkness and turmoil of our inner souls and minds - a complex and confusing labyrinth with no way out. Just like how we are as we try to figure out what to do in real life.

This is especially demonstrated when it’s revealed the whole thing was a big prank by Brad to get back at his friends for leaving town, because I guess they were all moving on with their lives and he wasn’t. What we thought was a devilish plot by monsters in a mine was just a sad kid afraid of losing his friends:

To get this effect, they stubbed his toe.

This is just like real life. In real life we constantly fear the worst. We always think things are one way when they’re really another. We tend to not see the underlying motives behind other peoples’ actions. That’s what this movie is conveying. What a masterpiece.

And it’s even more muddied by the actual ending, where it’s revealed Brad died in the cave and everyone else is somehow at his funeral. Were they all conspiring to kill Brad the whole time? That would certainly be advisable, but it isn’t clear. Were they all possessed by the ghosts? Or did Brad just kill himself, Laurie remain possessed by the ghost, and everyone else just get out completely oblivious? There are no clear answers. Just like in real life.

…

Actually, no, on second thought, none of this made sense.

Happy Halloween!

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

Why do modern horror movies suck?

Modern horror movies suck. Or a lot of them do. People who like the genre or even just watch it casually often espouse similar views and pose the question: why do modern horror movies suck so much? Well, fortunately I am here to help explain the problem. How am I going to do this? By going to my local video store and pointing out examples, of course. If you think I’m being incredibly cynical by judging these movies based on their covers and descriptions without ever watching them, well, maybe I am. Maybe I am just jumping the gun here and being too judgmental.

But honestly, just look at some of this shit. This is the kind of sewage you’re likely to find in any video store just sitting on the shelves un-rented. And why not? We’ve seen the same things over and over and over again in horror. Let’s take a look at our first candidate for a whipping, Paranormal Asylum.

Let’s just start a check list here…

[x] Pale ghost girl with only the whites of her eyes visible, with a vacant look on her face that mirrors that of brain dead drug addicts or people who actually watch these films – two groups who would overlap quite well in a Venn diagram, honestly.

[x] Cheap dark blue lighting that seems to forget there was anything in the horror genre before Paranormal Activity.

[x] Shaky cam frame to illustrate that the movie will have some kind of “found footage” element to it.

[x] The word “Paranormal” in the title. Almost an immediate candidate for the garbage bin these days.

Without even knowing what this movie is about, I’m already tired of it. I mean Jesus, did they miss a single cliché? This is like when you go to some shitty local grocery store chain and they have regular Oreos for an inflated price, but their own cheap knock-off brand for three bucks less. It’s just pure whitewashed blandness! But hey, let’s not stop there! Let’s pick it up and look at the back of the box.

“Mary Malone (aka Typhoid Mary) was committed to a NY insane asylum to live in solitary after being blamed for spreading Typhoid Fever in the early 20^th century.”

Okay, not too bad so far – a pretty decent historical backdrop. Nothing indicating that it will be great, but maybe it won’t be that bad…until we get to this sentence:

“Now, nearly 100 years later, two best friends and aspiring filmmakers are setting out to find out what really happened.”

Gee. What a unique plot idea. Surely they’ll find nothing, go home and live the rest of their boring lives without any interruption, right? I mean, surely nothing BAD will happen…

“What starts as a simple investigation turns into a battle for survival, as they discover Mary may be dead, but she’s certainly not gone! In her quest for vengeance, torture and death appear to be the only outcome.”

Torture and death? Aw man. I was hoping she was going to bake them cookies. I am just so shocked that something bad would happen to these characters in the horror movie with the dead zombie ghost girl on the cover posing for this month’s issue of Miss Undead USA.

Why would you make this kind of shit? If you’re making a movie, and you think you have this inspiration, this drive or passion – is “supernatural ghost revenge torture movie” the best you can come up with? HAVE AN IDEA. THINK. USE YOUR BRAIN. Jesus. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to skip the whole “friends in the 2000s take a road trip with video recorders and encounter ghosts and demons and stuff” bullshit and just make a historical horror film about Typhoid Mary? Wouldn’t that be cool? I think it would. But that would require a brain. And actually doing real work and not just aping everything that came before.

It just points out one of the chief problems with horror movies now and back in the old days. These days, it’s easy to make a movie. Technology and a greater knowledge of how it’s done have made it something that anyone can do. Provided you have the money to buy a good set of cameras and a video editing program, of course - but even the latter is negligible with certain, ahem, "Internet services." And with the increasing amount of resources, you can not only make a movie much more easily than you could in the old days, but you can distribute it too, and have it stocked in video rental stores and Redbox machines everywhere. Even if no one rents it, ever, you still win because it’s out there.

You can put it on Netflix streaming, and they’ll keep it up on there forever because it’s cheaper than haggling with big studios to put legitimate movies on the site. As Netflix is so omnipresent in the movie market nowadays and is so cheap, more people come across these films. The increasing number of these cheap-ass bargain bin movies means that more people see these (as in, they see the covers and notice them) instead of legit, good and creative horror films – which DO still come out, just not as much in comparison to the sheer landslide of shaky-cam shit with blue lights, set in insane asylums and featuring titles that contain the word “Paranormal.” It’s just a no-win situation.

Back in the old days, yes, amateurs could still make movies. I would never claim there weren’t rip-offs. Sure there were. People could make movies in their garages with their buddies and if they were lucky, maybe they’d hit it big and have their movie gain somewhat more of an audience. But there wasn’t anything like what we have now. The big studios still put effort into scaring audiences. They still had to try – audiences wouldn’t accept bargain bin shit on the level that they do now:

Yeah. Real great cinema there…surely these will be remembered in the same breath as Kubrick’s The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Sigh. But that’s just the way it works in any medium. Something catches on because it has some kind of context in which it matters and makes an impact. The studio, whether it sees that or not, cares about the profit made, which inevitably does happen when something catches on like The Exorcist did.

Caring about profit is the nature of the beast – it is how these corporations work and keep making money. So when movies like The Last Exorcism 2 or The Conjuring or The Possession oh-so-wonderfully grace our mainstream theaters, they are not the work of some insidious (or Insidious) corporate evil plot to destroy the genre, as much as I like to pretend they are. They’re simply tools of the money-making wheel that keeps on turning, nothing more.

So, with that said, what’s the next movie on our tour through bargain bin horror on video store shelves?

Uh, no. No, no, no. NO. I refuse to believe that something called “Heebie Jeebies” can be anything resembling quality. That’s unbelievable. Right off the bat you just throw all caution to the wind and come up with something so stupid even Bill and Ted would turn up their noses at it. That is an accomplishment.

So what’s this one about?

Haunted gold mine…reopened after 150 years…horrific supernatural creature emitting a maddening mist that paralyzes its victim with fear or “Heebie Jeebies”…yeah, I dunno movie, you’re not instilling in me any great confidence here. You couldn’t just title it “Fear” or something? Because you really can’t make the words “Heebie Jeebies” sound scary. There is simply no way you can pull that off and have any kind of serious effect. If it’s supposed to be a comedy, well, good job if you were trying to lower the bar as far as you could, I guess. Maybe they were trying to outdo Jeepers Creepers for the worst name for a horror movie ever.

But hey, that’s another big trend with modern horror…trying to be all ironic and silly. Why bother actually writing jokes and being clever when we can just give a movie a stupid name, or make it bad on purpose?

Horror is about ideas. It’s about taking what people are afraid of in society or just in their own minds, and putting it on screen. It is an imaginative doctrine, a trade of sorts that needs something to jump off of. In the 50s and 60s, it was the fear of the Atomic Bomb that kept horror movies going. Then with the post-war culture, it was the fear of disillusioned psychopaths and killers among us as regular human beings. The 80s brought a wave of cultural satire films that talked about consumerism and the rise of Reagonomics. In the 90s, we got urban legends with Candyman, the soulless repercussions of corporate America with American Psycho and the reality-bending terrors of The Sixth Sense and Jacob’s Ladder, which ask us to participate more actively in the viewing and think about what we saw before, and how much of it was “real” in the film’s world.

And honestly, there’s been some really good parallels to our current situation in modern post-2000 horror films too. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity have brought a wave of new “found footage” films which aren’t a bad idea in principal. We live in the generation of do-it-yourself. We are obsessed with experiencing things firsthand, recording them, and showing them to the world. Why do you think Facebook and Twitter are so popular? We love recording ourselves – we have the camera away from the horrors outside and pointed them inwards, holding them ourselves, wanting to see personally what lies out there waiting to scare us. We want to be part of the experience.

Films like [REC] and V/H/S, for example, have taken traditional horror stories and done them up the modern way by placing the camera in the viewer’s hands and letting us see the action as if it were actually happening to us, rather than to a detached third party like in a traditional narrative. There are pluses and minuses with this style as with any new trend, and I don’t even really think their full potential has been realized.

But, as with anything, there’s a lot of shit you have to sift through. As I said earlier, the fact is, horror movies are easy to make. They always have been, really; they’ve always been a DIY endeavor and have prided themselves on being a genre that didn’t need big-budget props and effects to be effective. Horror was the redheaded stepchild of cinema for so long, existing in the underground as a “B” movie artform for decades. Recently it has caught fire in the mainstream, but even so, the “B” ethos will always be there. And like I also said before, the current generation of “look at what I can do” has people making their movies and getting them out there for very little cost – even though the profit they gain back may not be earth-shattering, at least their names are out there. And that matters more than it may initially appear. Notoriety is its own form of currency.

Via Facebook and other mediums like local film shows and festivals you can submit to, these directors can get their movies out and become well known in niche communities. With an artist and the right low budget regional production company behind them, wallah, their low-grade, cheap movie becomes a reality, spreading through Netflix and video stores like wildfire. They clog the arteries of the horror genre like dairy products for a diabetic. And so the cycle continues and we get…

And no, I'm never finishing that series.

The negative effect of this is not just that there are bad movies around. It’s that really GOOD new horror flicks, such as Absentia, Pontypool or The Children, get buried in the morass and don’t get any of the attention they deserve. Take a look at Absentia:

That pretty much looks like any old random ‘ghost’ movie you’d find these days. But it’s really a complex story about a woman who lost her husband and has no idea what happened to him. He just went missing. The story unfolds as a complex drama about these peoples’ troubled lives, and also as a bone-chilling atmospheric horror film about what happens when people go missing. It’s an interesting movie because it takes a very real concept – people going missing with no explanation – and turns it into something larger than this life, giving us an explanation for it, but a terrifying one that maybe we would have rather not known at all. In these times, with our paranoia after 9/11 and the general distrust we have for strangers, a film like Absentia plays to those fears. It’s quite brilliant.

But because it appears alongside films like this in the Redbox computer or the video store…

…it doesn’t get noticed as much. Yeah, Abandoned Mine is awesome, I’m sure. A movie about teenagers going into an old mine to celebrate Halloween really sounds so vital to the genre, doesn’t it? More like Abandoned Hope for Humanity. Or Abandoned Rectal Thermometer.

So those are the big problems with horror now. Too much low-budget crap cheaply stocking the shelves of stores and Netflix/Redbox instead of good stuff, too little effort on the part of studios to actually put out good stuff. Too much copying of what came before, without really paying attention if it’s quality or not. But these things are just how the industry has come to be, for better or worse. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

What can we do about it? Pay attention to good movies. Don’t be satisfied just watching every single home-invasion or ghost possession film out there when they hit theaters. Dig around a little bit. Be open minded to stuff you may not have noticed – foreign films, underground films, et cetera. Care about what you watch. Every little bit makes a difference.

Fortunately, none of the crappy movies I took pictures of for this piece are going to be remembered at all. They are just like any number of other obscure films from the 80s and 90s that just got forgotten as time went on. But there are some movies out there that have a widespread influence on every modern horror film, which I think I’ll take a look at to commemorate the scariest month of the year. What’s first up, you ask? Well…

“Let’s play a game…”

All images copyright of their original owners. Thanks to Reel Video for having those DVDs in your store so I could take pictures of them!