REVIEW: Tamara (2005)

Ah, I remember the days when we got movies like this all the time…you know, the stupid “horror” flicks about people who get killed by dumb high school students and then come back for revenge, killing them off in silly slasher fashion? I Know What You Did Last Summer, Forget Me Not, Sorority Row, Prom Night…the list goes on. So why not add another movie to the list? I’m talking about the asininely stupid, daft mess known as Tamara.

Director: Jeremy Haft

Starring: Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Katie Stuart

IMDb

A good way to tell a movie isn’t going to be that good is when the title of the film is the name of a character you don’t know and probably won’t remember after it’s done…some of them, like Lincoln, work because the title is an iconic figure. I bet the people who made this really thought Tamara was going to be a big hit, though – the next big horror villain. Maybe they even had sequels planned. Guess how well THAT went…

We start with a four minute long credit sequence in which nothing is established. They could have easily put these credits over the top of the actual first scene, but I guess instead they thought it SO IMPORTANT that we see a bunch of pictures of dark basements, candles being lit and occult pentagrams everywhere. Or rather, they thought it important to pad out the length of this thing and make it look like a longer movie than it really is. Splendid.

We then get a sex scene between Tamara and her teacher, Mr. Natolly. Then a bunch of kids appear in the doorway and start laughing at them. The teacher recoils and says he could never love her, which is all revealed to be a dream that she’s having in class. Amazing – that’s almost ten minutes of wasted time that won’t have anything to do with the actual story now. I so love when movies begin with non sequitur garbage that won’t have a bearing on the plot – so many good ones do!

Aw, how cute, you can turn the camera sideways.

We finally get to the plot – joy, joy – when we find out Tamara has written some article for the school paper accusing a bunch of athletes of taking performance enhancing drugs, and now they all want revenge or something…riveting. Or just sleep-inducing. I sometimes get the two confused. It’s really just kinda confusing, though, since we never hear hide nor hair of Tamara writing anything for the rest of the film, and the whole plot point about the drugs is dropped about fifteen minutes in.

Also, how the hell are these people supposed to pass for high school students? They’re clearly in their 30s! Not that I don’t believe the people who made the movie aren’t 30 year olds who never got out of high school, but c’mon, not everything has to be an allusion to real life.

Yeah, that's about two steps away from an alcoholic deadbeat dad.

What are these two 30 year olds doing on a high school campus? Are they lost? Maybe they're just revisiting their glory days.

Tamara goes through the day and gets threatened and harassed by a bunch of people who are bigger than her, and like any school, nothing is done to stop it at all. I guess this one girl tries to tell them to back off, but even then, she doesn’t try that hard. Not much of a victory there...

After that, we see her try to make out with her teacher in real life this time, after he tells her he believes in her or some shit. He turns her down because he already has a wife and doesn’t want to end up on the 6:00 news in black and white stripes. Good choice there, bucko. Unfortunately the bullies all heard it too, and make a plan to trick Tamara into thinking the teacher really does love her back – because yeah, schemes you’d see on Roadrunner cartoons make for good horror movie plots, right? Sadly many movies take my sarcasm there waaaaay too seriously…

Before that though, they launch a contrived plan to use the school’s TV and audio equipment to filter one of their voices to sound like the teacher’s. To do this, they enlist the nerdy, socially awkward geek with glasses (glasses always = no social skills in these movies, you see) who runs the equipment to help, and invite him along, telling him it’s going to be a party. They also invite along some random guy and his girlfriend, but the girlfriend declines.

Their facial expressions are very telling. You can practically glean a whole narrative out of it - their futures, even. The guy's says "I'm destined to be in a movie like Tamara." The girl's says "I'm so done with this idiot. Time to ditch the beanie cap and go to nursing school like my mom said."

I’m actually fairly sure this character wasn’t supposed to be in the movie. The scene is so random and he doesn’t do anything at all the whole runtime, so my guess is, he just overheard the other characters talking about a party and figured they were having a party in real life and weren't acting. By the time he realized what was going on, it was too late, and any aspirations he had to a career in entertainment were shot down.

Meanwhile, Tamara performs a voodoo spell trying to get the teacher to love her. Way to get me invested in your main character, movie…you stupid piece o’ shit. Of course the magic in this movie is totally one dimensional and just there to fuel the idiot plot. Movies like this, as well as Forget Me Not and My Soul to Take, might as well just go all out and say the characters buy their magic in the new aisle at WalMart.

The bullies trick Tamara into coming down to this crappy motel room and leave a note in the room telling her to take her clothes off. Everyone else, being idiots, just assumes she is actually an exotic dancer. I really can’t wait for them to die now…I mean seriously?

Yes, the cautious and demure way she took off that dress, and the way she gets under the covers afterwards to cover up, is really how exotic dancers act, right?

I guess the fact that they’re all in their 30s makes it a little harder to tell, though.

So she gets pranked on tape and runs out of the room crying. She sees the one girl who was nice to her in the hotel room too (why did the bullies bring her again?), and goes crazy, attacking them. They accidentally kill her by knocking her head into a table, and then everyone starts the usual crap you get in these movies. What’s that? You don’t know how it goes? Well, let me enlighten you…

A DRAMATIC RE-ENACTMENT OF TIRED HORROR CLICHÉ

UNREALISTIC JACKASS: We can’t turn this into the police, I have a life I want to live!

VOICE OF REASON (as a metaphoric concept): No, this is insane and cannot happen! We are moral human be----

[UNREALISTIC JACKASS unzips his fly and urinates on VOICE OF REASON, who recoils in disgust and fear]

UNREALISTIC JACKASS: I won’t let any of you go against me or else I’ll kill you! We’re all in this together even though it was just me who killed the person in the first place! The justice system doesn’t discriminate against different levels of a crime! I don’t care if I did just murder another human being by accident, I NEED TO LIVE MY SUPERFICIAL AND SHALLOW LIFE! I am more important than anyone else in the world! I AM THE ALPHA AND OMEGA!

Eh, I may have embellished a little. But that’s the gist of it. Ugh, can you believe the main bully actually says to the nice girl, “You go ahead and tell the cops; I’ll tell them you killed her because you got jealous”? Seriously? The cops would have to be pretty god damned stupid to believe that. But I guess another staple of these movies is that the cops are always monumentally incompetent at their jobs. Tamara doesn’t actually show us this cliché, but having dialogue like this makes the cliché appear by proxy, so it’s no excuse.

"I'm supposed to be the heroine of the film but I let myself get swayed to cover up a murder in two seconds flat! Wow am I ever a failure!"

I also love how the one chick who is supposed to be “good” is swayed in like two sentences from this bully who she probably doesn’t even know that well – wonderful, movie; just wonderful. They bury Tamara alive outside and then, two seconds later, she pops up behind them all evil and stuff. She chases them around and kills them, but then it turns out to be a dream again. You know movie, you’re really not good at dream sequences.

A reality too stupid even for this movie...what an amazing accomplishment.

The next day at school, Tamara returns through her black magic bullshit, and makes that TV/audio kid kill himself by cutting off his ear, his tongue and then stabbing himself through the eye, on the morning announcements. It’s great how there were no teachers or supervisors around to make sure weird shit like this doesn’t happen, and even better that the school apparently doesn’t pay attention to what’s showing and doesn’t have a filter to just turn off the screen at times like this.

Now he's ready to audition for a Japanese horror movie!

But perhaps my favorite part of the whole thing is just their reaction to it later. After witnessing this incredibly bizarre and grotesque death scene, what do the other main characters have to say? “I can’t believe he killed himself.” Ha ha ha…yeah, THAT’S what’s unbelievable about what just happened. Not the fact that he did it in an insane way by mutilating himself and talking gibberish, though. That part’s normal.

There’s also some bullshit about how Tamara can now touch peoples’ cheeks and see their pasts, or something. Before she kills the nerdy kid, she “sees” that he tried to kill himself once. That could have been an interesting plot point, but does THIS movie elaborate on it? Nah. We have no time for human problems or character depth at all here. We’re too busy with scenes where Tamara makes the two guys have sex with each other to get revenge for humiliating her earlier:

Tamara, the only movie whose heroine can stand that close to two guys and turn them gay.

And to round out the complete disposability of this whole mess, we get some cheap tit shots when she makes the one girl bully take off her shirt. Women aren’t good for anything in movies except showing their tits, right?

Someone ought to just go all the way at this point, and make a movie with nothing but naked chicks running around getting killed off after a while...I guess Bikini Girls on Ice was close enough though.

So I guess that girl’s story is that she throws up in order to get a ‘perfect body’ for her boyfriend…the only reason this matters is because there was one line earlier about how she didn’t eat much. And even then, you wouldn’t catch that unless you were stupid enough to pay attention to this, like I was. Tamara’s power makes her start trying to eat her fingers – how deliciously stupid.

These “kill” scenes aren’t even scary at all, they’re more like comedy kills. Even the Nightmare on Elm Street movies at least had the dreamlike, surreal atmosphere. This is just the ass-hairs of the kind of pandering, low-brow minds that brought us gems like 5ive Girls. It’s not as bad as that, but trust me it is close. Very, uncomfortably, Sandusky-level close.

There’s some bullshit showdown at the hospital where Tamara chases everyone around and kills them. I love when the one random dude gets killed, the good girl cries over him like she knew him for years. Wasn’t he just some random kid who came up to them on the street at the beginning? Oh well. It’s not like her actually knowing him would make the scene any more poignant. It’s like trying to put a pretty pink ribbon on a pile of dog shit.

After that, we see them figuring out that they can’t kill Tamara, partly because of the “black magic,” but mostly because the script says so. The only way to kill her is for the teacher, Mr. Natolly, to throw himself off the building and kill both of them, since apparently, they are “linked together for eternity.” Yeah. Right. I can so totally tell – I mean I can literally see the passion in this movie’s creation, which shows me the doomed, romantic love between these two characters! It’s almost like…a fanfiction a 16 year old girl wrote about having a crush on her teacher.

Romantic maybe if you like Twilight...personally I think Texas Chainsaw was more romantic.

What a terrible ending! There was no build-up to it, no emotional connection…it’s just nonsensical crap that will oddly make you feel a tiny bit down afterwards because of how pointless it was. But wait – there’s actually even less sense to be made with the following scene, where it turns out the girl who bit her own fingers off is the new bad guy:

Oh no, she got possessed by Tamara, because that...wasn't ever how it actually worked before! Which means this movie is incompetent and has no idea how to tell a story! Shock and awe!

Aaaaaand that’s the end! Doesn’t make sense? You’re not alone.

This really is just a mess of a movie…when I said it was like a fanfiction by a girl with a crush on her teacher, that’s pretty much the best way to sum it up. It’s all so cutesy in its romanticization – “oh, my teacher is hot; better have us die together Romeo & Juliet style!” “Oh, people are mean to me; better make them one-dimensional bullies who resort to murder to solve their problems!” “Oh, I’m insecure; better turn the character into a Cordelia from the early Buffy seasons rip off!”

Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Just a quick PSA to finish this off: If you’re a high school student, you’re most likely generally dejected and lonely. You most likely have fantasies that are unrealistic and implausible. And you will inevitably write something creative to get out your frustrations and express yourself.

However, you must resist the pressure to revisit these cathartic writings years later and turn them into a movie. Just kill that impulse where it stands.

Remember Tamara.

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

REVIEW: The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Whenever Joss Whedon puts out something new, I always know it will at least be worth looking at. The man is frankly inimitable, and while not everything he touches is absolute genius, it’s always a lot of fun and he has a great, witty and sort of playful style to everything he touches that sort of plays with your expectations and straddles a line between goofy and serious, usually coming out the best of both worlds – it takes talent to balance comedy and drama and Whedon is good at it. But when talking about playing with an audience’s expectations, nothing in his catalog tops The Cabin in the Woods.

Director: Drew Goddard

Starring: Kristin Connolly, Fran Kranz

IMDb

This is just a delight of a movie. Horror satire is nothing new. Movies have been doing it forever, and since Scream came out in the late 90s, it’s blown up into almost its own genre. But I frankly think this is one of the best satires of the genre I’ve ever seen. The trick with satire is to make a good movie anyway in spite of the jokes and riffing on whatever it is you’re making fun of. You can’t just throw in a bunch of cheap one liners like Scary Movie or something. There has to be a story to your satire that is independently entertaining and drives home a unified point. And in my opinion, the more out-there and ridiculous, the better the satire. I mean, the idea behind this is that there’s a secret government organization out there that sacrifices college kids to the Old Gods every year to keep the Earth safe – and they do this by re-enacting tired horror movie clichés. So there’s your answer: why do so many horror movies use the same tired formula over and over? Because if they didn’t, the Old Gods would destroy the Universe.

The Cabin in the Woods works because Whedon does play with your expectations. It starts off pretty innocuous; just a bunch of college kids going to, shock of all shocks, a cabin in the woods for the weekend. They’re better characters than is usual for these kinds of movies, and Whedon’s wry dialogue endows them with a greater sense of personality than is the norm. But mostly it just looks like it’s going to be a regular silly horror movie, only done up with the old Whedon charm and style. The characters laugh and sexual tension arises and they even find a bunch of creepy stuff in the attic – almost, you might say, a catalog of jumbled items that bring forth demonic entities in other films, compiled here all in one room…

What really sets the movie apart is the other scenes, featuring a bunch of scientists at this government building trying to orchestrate events so that the kids will die as sacrifices for the Old Gods. The scientists are pretty silly and mostly serve as comic relief, but the juxtaposition of these scenes with the more generic horror movie styled ones makes for a really entertaining and twisted romp. The settings are cool and bring new life to really dated and tired movie settings – the cold sterile laboratory and the woodsy cabin, both.

The final half hour is the real cincher with this as things blow up and get messy, fast. By the time our two remaining heroes break into the lab and encounter all the various monsters, you’re convinced this is the most fun you’ll have all year. There’s one scene right at the beginning of this sequence, in which every monster attacks a bunch of soldiers all at once, that is probably my favorite scene in any movie so far this year. It’s a masterpiece of chaos and destruction.

The problem with this whole thing is pretty easy to see, really: it’s not exactly a deep film, and doesn’t really have the dramatic gusto to rank up with Whedon’s best works. Despite being incredibly enjoyable, it doesn’t have that spark that elevates it into something truly great – not when stacked up with Whedon’s Angel, anyway, although holding up anything he does to that standard is a bit unfair. The Cabin in the Woods, though, for all its nudging jocular humor and spry wit, is a bit of a light snack for the seasoned Whedon fan. Maybe if it had been twenty minutes longer and established the individual characters more, it would flesh out into something amazing and more multi-layered (which I know he loves to do in other works), but as it is, it leaves you wanting more.

And also I think the movies this is satirizing have become fairly passé at this point, and are no longer the main evil among horror films. While very funny, I can’t help but think this film is making fun of a social stigma that almost no longer exists. Nobody really makes movies about dumbass kids going out in the woods anymore. Maybe if this had been made back in the late 80s it would have been truly gut-wrenching, but as is, this is a bit outdated, to be honest.

Despite the problems, Cabin in the Woods is still a really entertaining romp, and it’s a testament to Whedon’s skill that I can overlook my critical problems with the film and just take it as a big, silly and fun slice of cheese. Nothing about this is in any way dissatisfying on a purely aesthetic level. It’s one of the most fun films this year, and Whedon is practically winking at you from the sidelines the entire time, a silly, childlike grin on his face. That’s how this movie should always be watched. 

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

REVIEW: Teeth (2007)

Welcome to the new and improved Cinema Freaks, where I only review movies based on current events from three weeks ago! Today’s movie is Teeth, which serves as a great support to Senator Todd Akin’s claim that women have a special defense system against being raped and having children through rape, because this movie is about a girl with teeth in her vagina!

Director: Mitchell Lichtenstein

Starring: Jess Wexler, John Hensley

IMDb

Yup…I don’t think any further introduction is needed. I actually think my previous sentence explains it all. So why am I going to continue writing stuff? Because I have a God complex and you all will listen to me FOREVER!

The film begins with two little kids sitting in a pool and showing each other their private parts while their parents sit in lawn chairs and drink beer – classy, right? The camera cuts away for a second and then the kid’s finger is bleeding…gee, I wonder what happened?

Hint: he stuck his finger down there and her vagina bit it off like a piranha. Just in case you couldn't, you know, guess.

After an opening credit scene of little biological genes floating around and infecting one another with the black plague apparently, which could be used in any instructional science video, we get our main character Dawn.

No; not that Dawn. This Dawn:

The way these kids react is more fanatical than the Children of the Corn, for Christ's sake. Whoops, was that a blasphemy? I'm sorry...I'm so sorry...

She’s a motivational speaker at schools telling kids to wait until marriage to have sex, and even gives out purity rings, which OF COURSE are the real deal, and can NEVER just be taken off whenever said wearer feels like it…also, I think I’ve already seen this plot in South Park. It involved the Jonas Brothers being killed by Mickey Mouse. Which one is more ridiculous? YOU DECIDE...

So anyway, we learn that Dawn has a brother who looks like something out of American History X and apparently does nothing all day but hang out with his girlfriend in his room and have anal sex…

He also likes to sit in his underwear with a gun in his hand. Because he's just that cool.

This is all very subtly psychological, indicating that he’s still afraid of vaginas after what happened to him as a kid. It’s very well done in this scene anyway (later on, when they're still arguing about having sex an hour into the film, it gets a little overblown), but honestly, just call Dr. Phil. He’ll help you out better than being in this movie ever could.

Dawn starts hanging out with this one guy who acts like a serial killer, so of course she’s attracted to him. But their Christian upbringing prevents them from even doing things like watching PG-13 movies together because there would be too much making out. They go with some friends to the woods and the creek, where apparently people go in this cave nearby to do “you know what…” in the words of the super-conservative Christian girl whose name I can't remember. Wait, what do they do in there? Swim?

However, after her brother tells her he wants to sleep with her, she decides to throw caution to the wind and invite creepy serial killer guy to go swimming in the creek, where stuff escalates pretty quickly:

A typical relationship for Dawn: Day 1, "we can't make out because we have to wait till marriage to even think about sex." Day 2, "we can't see each other because our thoughts are impure." Day 3, "let's make out and you can touch my boobs!" Geez...some women...

Then when he decides he wants to rape her…well…

Better luck next time, buddy! Oh wait…

That's supposed to be his body floating face-down in the water, by the way. Damn murky pictures...ruining my reputation around here.

Huh. I guess this scumbag rapist being removed from the gene pool ISN’T something we should mourn. Moving on, then. Dawn goes through some very serious guilt trip scenes about what she did, which are actually very well done and atmospheric, far surpassing what most movies like this end up going for. She researches vagina dentata, the phenomenon/myth of vaginas with teeth that this movie was based on, and she hears a steady drum beat in her head, so clearly she’s actually a forgotten Time Lord…

Ahem, wait, no.

Actually she just goes to a gynecologist where her vagina bites off his fingers. I just love this scene solely for what happens afterwards: he’s sitting on the ground, bleeding and hysterical, and he shouts “VAGINA DENTATA! IT’S TRUE! VAGINA DENTATAAAA!” That’s pretty damn funny. Is it like the bogeyman of gynecologists everywhere? The monster beneath their operating tables, keeping them in line? I want to see a movie about this guy. I’m sure it would be a story worth seeing.

Panicking, Dawn goes over to the house of the one guy who liked her earlier and was very frustrated when she turned him down, saying she has “nowhere else to go.” So why didn’t she just find someone else from her little Christian group thing? We even saw earlier she hung out with more people from the group; one of whom was a girl! So really? Her only option is to go to the house of the one guy who had a crush on her? She even takes a bath in his house and accepts strange pills and drinks from him. For someone so focused on purity until marriage, she’s really not very good at keeping herself safe otherwise. I mean what if something TERRIBLE happens…

"Hello, I'm Dr. Date-Rape. How can I assist you today?"

Yeah! Like that!

They actually do manage to have sex without her killing him this time, mostly because she was drugged and not angry or resisting this time, which seems to be the condition for her "teeth" activating. I will ignore the fact that this guy apparently wanted to have sex with her so bad that he would ignore the fact that she was panicking about having murdered someone. Actually, I think that’s probably the most realistic thing in the movie…guys just do anything to get laid.

Anyway, they have sex again, but this time she finds out that he made a bet with his jackass friend that he could have sex with her. So it’s chomping time again!

In a stroke of amazingly bad luck, she finds out that her mother has died in the hospital while all of this was going on, and that it was her brother’s fault for not responding to her screams for help, probably because he was busy trying out for the Broadway production of American History X the musical. The dad goes in and beats him up for being a disrespectful little shit.

This dad kicks ASS. You show that wannabe skinhead what's what!

As a completely rational response, the brother sics his big black dog on the dad!

A big black dog AGAIN? Gee…I’ve never seen THAT before…

Anyway, Dawn hears about this and decides to take the ultimate revenge – sex with her half brother following in more genital severance like this movie specializes in!

Dawn, having nothing left to tie her down, becomes a roadside drifter who has deadly sex with any man who tries to screw with her…literally and figuratively. I’m so glad this movie exists so that men in our US Senate can validate their otherwise strange and ridiculous opinions. What an oddly specific triumph for our country! Shame about the whole demeaning womens' rights thing though. You win some you lose some, I guess.

But seriously, I’d like to say a few things about Teeth. This was actually a good film, and very much something worth watching for fans of horror who want something a little more offbeat and abstract. Nowhere near the sleazefest I was expecting, Teeth is a very clever movie with great acting and camerawork. It’s a film about female empowerment tackled through a very strange, humorous and often gory plot point.

First and foremost, the acting is just excellent in this. It can get cartoonish at times, but only when the movie demands it, and you never really get the sense that the director just didn’t know what he was doing like you do in some other movies. This was a very calculated film, with the director finding a style that worked for him and getting some very appropriate, funny and oftentimes chilling performances out of these actors. Jess Wexler as Dawn is very, very good. She gives a really emotive performance and captures all the fear and bashful shyness that her character is going through, and he really got some great fear scenes out of her – I mean god damn. I can’t really describe it well enough through text, but the atmosphere of the film combined with her sort of withered, trapped-puppy-dog look is just immense.

The other actors are all really good as well, as I mentioned, but since there are really only two central characters, I’ll just talk about one more to save time – John Hensley as the brother, Brad. This character could have easily just been horrible. He’s the stereotypical mean delinquent older half-brother, but his personality has been shaped by what happened as a kid, when he got his finger bitten off by Dawn’s “teeth” down below. Now he’s got this twisted thing going on where he can’t have sex anymore because he’s afraid of vaginas subconsciously and also he’s attracted to Dawn. It’s not a GREAT character or anything, but hot damn does John Hensley sell this part! I mean this guy is on fire here. He takes this caricature, this Freudian miracle of psychiatry, this absolute piggy-bank for anyone who practices in the field, and turns the character into a stone cold mean, threatening and very believable villain.

Some people just can’t be helped – some people are damaged beyond repair through no fault of their own, and because of something strange and terrible that happened a long time ago. But sometimes those people turn into monsters and do harm to others, and then there is no more pity one can feel for them. Hensley’s performance as Brad is cold-hearted, sinister and sick as hell, and he is one of the best parts of the movie.

The real strength here is how good main character Dawn is, though. Dawn, afflicted with a very odd and horrific genetic mutation, coped with it growing up by turning into a total abstinence freak and a big religious nut. But paradoxically, that also makes her journey in the film much more harrowing and compelling than it would be if she was just a regular kid without all the religious stuff. Her “purity” which she defines herself by ironically is the biggest factor in her slide into a different personality – perhaps her heel-face turn wouldn’t have been so extreme if she wasn’t so bent on religion, but then again, if she didn’t have her “teeth” in the first place, she wouldn’t be that way either. Both of these aspects of Dawn – the physical and the mental – feed off one another and create something rather compelling out of such a goofy premise, and she becomes a fully three dimensional character. Maybe the movie could have worked even better if they jettisoned some of the comedic elements out, but with a plot this bizarre I don’t think that would really be feasible – I’ll get to that in a minute.

And there are goofy moments in this film, don’t get me wrong; very good ones. It’s very wry and witty and tackles its topic with enough down-to-Earth humor so that it doesn’t just become a pretentious mess. The balance between the comedy and the horror is really excellent and they start to blend together way better than some movies do. A lot of movies just sort of stick the comedy in and the horror in as very separate pieces, and as such, one of the two isn’t done that well, if not just the entire film.

Teeth works because both the comedy and the horror play off one another and create something stylish and fresh, amplifying both elements – it’s funny and actually pretty creepy at times, beyond just the gore effects. Director Mitchell Lichtenstein has a real feel for combining music with a scene. Sometimes it gets really goofy and parodic, imitating old school happy family sitcom music (MUCH better than anything that crap-ass movie Parents did), and sometimes it’s teeth-bitingly (ha ha) ominous like when Dawn is researching the “vagina dentata” myth, with some really good use of tribal drum sounds to create tension. The whole soundtrack is incredibly over the top, but surprisingly it really works – the whole movie is incredibly over the top, too.

So, yeah, with all this it makes it seem like there’s nothing gory or ridiculous in this film. Well, it’s safe to say, if you really, REALLY don’t like seeing mutilated male genitals, this probably wouldn’t be a good film to watch. And if you were looking for a movie to watch with your new girlfriend and her family…this wouldn’t be the best choice. The gore is silly and over the top and Litchenstein’s directing portrays it starkly and nakedly, without showing too much or too little. It has the effect it should – it’s shocking and brutal. But it’s never exploitative or gratuitous and doesn’t feel forced. The gore pretty much has to be there. It’s what the movie is about.

Teeth isn’t for everyone and it’s bound to create some controversy because of its theme and presentation, but from my standpoint, it’s really good. The directing is fantastic and artful, the acting is wonderful and the way the story is told is meaningful and has a real impact on you. It’s got witty moments and some silly scenes, but also some very powerful and serious ones, too. The film just is what it is, and those who are predetermined to hate it before even watching it will probably just hate it. But if you go in with an open mind and let the film surprise you, it’s quite a trip and well worth your time. One of the best horror movies of the 2000s for sure.

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

REVIEW: Kill Katie Malone (2010)

This movie is bad. Whatever kind of bad you're thinking, this is worse. This one’s going to hurt – I mean, it’s going to hurt a lot. Like, getting your wisdom teeth pulled-levels of hurt. I mean...I…ugh. I just…eugh. I can’t even….this movie’s tagline is “Never Buy a Demon on the Internet.” Never Buy a Demon on the Internet…that’s so dumb I can barely even form a coherent sentence around it! Ugh. Kill Katie Malone, people.

Director: Carlos Ramos Jr.

Starring: Dean Cain, apparently, and nobody else according to the DVD box! I'll go with that!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1523485/

“I teach Shakespeare! I don’t frighten easily!”

-A Shakespeare Teacher

The movie begins at some house where a girl is about to star in Hellraiser 17 and a half, with the window open and the wind blowing and everything as she’s standing over a black box. Her father comes in and shouts at her to get out of this script while she still can, but she says no, being an edgy and rebellious teen. Unfortunately their acting is so over the top that it causes flour to jump up and make the girl’s face all white. Then the father gets blown out of the room and the door closes, and that’s the scene!

Was that confusing enough just reading it? Well, that’s because it made about as much sense watching it, too. You know what, I miss the Hellraiser movies.

Then we see a Halloween party with some prissy douchebag, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer knock-off and a Nick Cannon wannabe walking around exchanging putrid dialogue. The prissy douchebag, whose name is Jim, goes to talk to some girl he likes, but apparently he’s such a terrible catch that she prefers the Insane Clown Posse’s head groupie over him:

Pre-etty low standards there, girl.

Then back in their dorm room, Jim is searching eBay and comes across a listing for a ghost. Thinking it’s really an awesome idea, he begs and pleads his two friends to pitch in 40 dollars so they can buy the ghost. Because they’re also dumb as a box of rocks, they give in with a minimal amount of prodding. Seriously, am I supposed to care at all? A bunch of 30 year old “college kids” (ha ha…right…) have seriously got nothing else to do except sit around on eBay and pool their money to buy “haunted ghost boxes”? Whatever happened to the days when kids did drugs and drank alcohol all the time? I miss those days.

"Hurrr durrr let's look up ghosts on the internet and buy them off ebay, we're so cool!"

Also, are we supposed to believe that the father from the beginning lost his daughter and then said, “Hmm, I don’t have any use for this evil demonic black box…better sell it on eBay”? Seriously?

So they get the box and there’s nothing in it but a little locket thing. They for some reason make wishes for things like roses and money, and for some random-ass reason, the box grants them and leaves these things on their bed while they’re not there. Why? I have no idea…I just want to get this over with.

Jim and his Nick Cannon lookalike roommate, Dixie, just goof around, I guess, until later that night when they’re sleeping and then they start to hear loud noises as an invisible force knocks stuff around their room. They hide in the bathroom like idiots for a few minutes only to come out and find something in Gaelic written on the wall, so of course they think someone broke into the room and did it – even though they were in there the whole time. I guess you could argue that they’re just making sense the only way they can out of something that cannot be explained, but I think that’s giving the movie too much credit. They’re just incredulously large dipshits.

And hey, random Asian girl locked in her room with a computer who has nothing else to do but look up historical information and foreign language translations for the main character!

That’s not stereotypical or racist at all!

The Buffy-like girl, Ginger, also has some strange stuff happen in her room, like books flying around. Even though she never leaves the room or turns away and can CLEARLY SEE that it’s some invisible force knocking her stuff around, she thinks it was Jim who did it, even though CLEARLY he was not there at all, nor was ANYONE. Was this girl dropped on her head as a child? Or is she just blind? Of course she’s angry at Jim for it, even though there is no conceivable way it could have been him, and she storms off angrily when he tries to talk to her.

Of course the next day, she’s completely over it and acts like it never happened, probably because the writer of the movie can’t concentrate on anything for longer than three seconds and literally just forgot the character was supposed to be mad. Stunning. We find out that Dixie apparently plagiarized something for a paper he did and is about to get expelled. He says he wishes she wouldn’t talk, so then we cut to a later scene where the teacher is walking all alone at night…gee, I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen in this scene

That's the face people made when they advance-screened the film for the first time.

She hears some noises and shouts, “I teach Shakespeare! I don’t frighten easily!” What? What does that mean? Is she related to that Mo guy from The Stuff? They both sure know how to spout the most non-sequitur, nonsensical crap ever…oh well, anyway, she bites off her own tongue in a really over the top fit of “acting,” and the scene fades out before any gore can be shown. Wonderful.

The next day, after some very poor shots of the backs of everyone’s heads that go on for way too long, we see Jim and Ginger sharing a cement-flavored energy bar together when Ginger’s roommate Misty comes up wearing a sweater of Ginger’s. Ginger bitchily chastises her for wearing the sweater and then gets mad at Jim when he makes a light crack at Misty, because THAT makes a lot of sense…ugh. Well, at least no kittens were harmed in the making of THIS roommate-themed scene.

Then outside, a big crowd is formed as the body of the Shakespeare teacher is found. Wait, so she’s just being found NOW, after at least one class is already done for the day? What, did the entire school just walk past the bloody tongueless body on the ground and shrug at it until someone put it into context for them that it was a dead body? Or are dead, bloody tongueless bodies just the norm at this school? Frankly neither one would surprise me. I also love how when they’re rolling out the body in a bodybag after Dixie tells them the teacher is dead, Ginger says “Is that the teacher?” No, you idiot…it’s the other dead body they found at school this morning! Gosh.

Just your average day at Kill Katie Malone school.

After that we see Misty messing up the sweater, and since the ghost is now an advocate of sweater protection, it pushes a big paper cutting thing all the way across the desk and forces her arm onto it. I love how Misty is obviously in distress, yet all the teacher does is scream at her to stop disrupting the class. It’s not exactly a special needs class, you jackass – she’s PRETTY OBVIOUSLY in trouble and most likely wouldn’t just randomly cause a scene if she wasn’t. Though, with the way people in this movie act, I don’t blame the teacher for thinking his students are mentally incapable retards.

She loses her arm via ghost paper cutter machine AAAAND we still don’t get to see any gore. Would it kill the filmmakers to at least try to entertain us? If your writers can’t write, at least throw some silly gore or tits in to give us SOMETHING to enjoy!

So she gets her arm cut off by a paper cutter because Ginger "wished" that she wouldn't mess up the sweater...wow...and I can't get over this with the teacher. "HOW DARE YOU GET MORTALLY WOUNDED BY AN EVIL GHOST! YOU'RE SO INCONSIDERATE!" This is stupid! I feel stupid for watching it!

After that we see Jim going over to that hot chick’s house where her dumbass Insane Clown Posse boyfriend pulls him aside in the kitchen and loudly and physically threatens him for the horrible crime of possibly thinking about making a move on his girlfriend…even though he hasn’t actually done anything. Also, wouldn’t the girls in the other room hear him shouting at Jim and pushing him up against the cabinets? Of course not, this is Kill Katie Malone! We can’t have anything make sense!

Then he goes home and this happens:

What?! WHAT?! No, you can't be serious with that! That's barely even a finished death scene; go back and finish the editing process and make it look better! And besides that, what's the reason behind this anyway? Most of the deaths so far have been connected to what a character "wishes" or something, but as the film goes on, they just seem to get more and more random. Did Jim really think in his head "Gee, I really wish that douchebag would meet a little ghost girl on the side of the road who would scream at him so loud that he would evaporate into thin air"? I'm sorry; I just...don't think that's very plausible! Mostly because he has the imagination of a goldfish. THINK, WRITERS! THINK!

The next day, the hot chick Jim has a crush on calls him to ask where her boyfriend is. He says he doesn’t know. He then says, “Hey, I was wondering…” and she cuts him off right there without even letting him finish and says “No, Jim…maybe if I was single.” Of course he was about to ask her on a date, which would have given her the right to be a bitch to him, as she is taken, but…he didn’t even finish the sentence! He could have been asking to borrow a textbook for class for all she knew! God, okay, whatever, she gets blown up randomly by the ghost for no reason:

Are they even trying with these deaths anymore? You might as well just jump-cut them off screen and then have one of the characters say they just ceased to exist. That’s how little effort you’re putting into this shit now!

So at the hospital, Ginger and Dixie are there because of Ginger’s roommate, who they say “cut off her own arm.” Uh, so that’s what they’re saying happened? Not “the paper cutter mysteriously, on its own, slid across a desk and then cut her arm off in front of an entire class,” but “she cut her own arm off”? IT HAPPENED IN FRONT OF A BUNCH OF PEOPLE. HOW DID EVERYONE GET THAT WRONG? WHY IS NO ONE INVESTIGATING IT? WHY IS THIS MOVIE SO STUPID? Gaaaaaggggghhhhhhh….I’m seriously reaching my breaking point, guys. It’s almost here. I’m just going to wrap up this shit fast and get it over with.

After that Jim comes up with the brilliant plan to “set the ghost free.” He opens the box, says she’s free and then throws it in the garbage, and that’s it. Riveting, Kill Katie Malone…riveting. This apparently gives him the license to date Ginger spontaneously for no real reason. They go back to have sex in her room, but he gets jump scared by a ghost for like a second, and she tells him to get out.

Seriously, movie?! Seriously, that's the ghost scare you're going for now? Get the hell out of here.

The next day she’s over it again, because again, her character is so poorly written that she can't even stay consistent in a two-minute interval between scenes. She and Dixie team up for the climax until the ghost freezes some stairs Dixie has his hand on and he rips it off and gets all bloodied up and stuff. This somehow renders him into a blubbering crying mess for the whole rest of the movie (until he gets turned into a smear of red paint on the floor a few scenes later, never to be mourned or even mentioned again). I know yanking your hand off ice like that hurts, but...God, the way this guy is going on, you'd think he just got his hand amputated or something! Man up, you pussy!

Meanwhile Jim is locked in his room by the ghost and gets a call from a mysterious girl who says the only way to get rid of the ghost is by buying it in an online auction apparently - stupid, but hey, it's almost over; bear with me.

WILL HE GET THE EBAY BID ON TIME?!? My heart is racing!

Oh no Dixie, don't cry! Your mortal wounds will have such a heart-rending effect on us all that I DON'T THINK WE'LL BE ABLE TO TAKE IT! NOOOOOO!

Yeah, grown men crying and eBay bids, truly Kill Katie Malone knows how to bring the thrills to life. Is the ghost just going to stop whatever she’s doing when the girl wins the bid and go “Oh, sorry, my bad. I’m leaving now!” I guess so. Because that’s what happens! What an obedient ghost!

There’s another scene after that, but screw it, I don’t even care. As far as I’m concerned this movie is over.

I seriously have not hated humanity after watching a movie like this in a long goddamn time. If there was ever proof of Satan’s existence and involvement on Earth, this movie is it. Do I even have to go over what sucked about this? I mean, it's pretty friggin' obvious if you're even half-paying attention while watching it! Going over what was good about it would be easier: nothing! There was nothing good about this movie! At all! Jesus H. Christ in a box of crackers this was an unwatchable mess. I walked away from this depressed, angry and more cynical at the world – but hey, at least it gave us the timeless advice, Never Buy a Demon on the Internet! Yes, truly now I’ll be a better person for that! GOD THIS MOVIE SUCKS.

Images copyright of their original owners, despite whether anyone would actually ever want to own anything in this movie or not.