MOVIE: Shark Night (2011)

Oh, man, this movie was FUN.  I had decided to go see it last week on a whim, after a super-stressful day on the job.    I’m a sucker for shark attack movies, for one thing, and I’m also a sucker for Donal Logue and the ever-widening Josh Leonard (I like big guts and I can not lie. . .).  The reviews had panned the hell out of it for being beyond stupid, and, well, that sounded absolutely perfect to me.  (Hi, Mom!  Wish you were here!)

The best part about this movie is the way it’s utterly packed with clichés and yet, is not at all trying to be a spoof.  It truly has them all, from the opening scene (topless blonde eaten by shark), to the meet-cute at the local gas station between the local Deliverance-style hicks and the visiting college snots (incidentally, that’s exactly how the delightful horror spoof Tucker & Dale vs. Evil opens — QED), to the fact (and my god, I still can’t believe they did this) the black guy gets it first.

THE BLACK GUY ACTUALLY GETS IT FIRST!  AND THEY WERE COMPLETELY SERIOUS ABOUT THAT!  It’s that good, you guys.  It is THAT GOOD.

Plot-wise, it follows the same trajectory these movies always follow, but it did throw in a bit of a curve ball I wasn’t expecting — without revealing it, I’ll just say it involves the reason why this tiny salt-water lake is teeming with 47 different species of shark.   And though it’s clearly about as unoriginal as you can get in every other regard, it’s also hilarious in its lameness, which, for me, is a  joyous thing (I mean, really, your friend gets his arm bitten off by a shark and your first move is to dive into the lake to find the limb?  The bloody limb that will be attracting MORE SHARKS?  Brilliant, ace.  And I also love it when the “pre-med” college kid knows a lot of practical medical skills. You know what pre-med actually is?  It’s chemistry.  Lots and lots of chemistry.)

Speaking of chemistry, there’s also a cute little love thing going on between two of the college kids, both of whom are really shy, and one of whom has a past that is about to come around and bite them all in the ass (litrilly).  I liked the way this romance part was subtle and sweet, and except for the part where: SHARKS!!, it was authentic and minor enough not to get in my way.  Often times in these sorts of movies, there ends up being WAY too many sex scenes and smooches (or, in the case of Piranha 3D, way too many underwater lesbian sex scenes and smooches), and man, I don’t come to movies titled Shark Night to watch people make out.  I come to watch them get eaten.  And, gloriously, many of them do here.  Sometimes more than once.  (They aren’t terrifically fast learners, those college kids.)

If you like dumb creature features, hie thee to the movie theater!  I think you’ll dig this one.  And just FYI, I didn’t see this in 3D and it’s unlikely it’ll be worth your extra bucks to see it that way either.  A few times, I could tell when they had framed a shot specifically for 3D, and they were all pretty clumsy and dumb.  I shouldn’t be able to tell, if you ask me, and I could tell.

So, pocket your extra $4, or whatever that costs these days, and use it to buy yourself a larger popcorn.  Well, I don’t know — shark movies just kinda make me hungry.  (“Man eating shark. . . AND LOVING IT.”).

(By the way, fans of smart horror spoofs should be sure to check out Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, because it’s fantastic.  Now available on VOD services like Amazon.com’s Instant Video, and well worth the $9.99 it’ll run ya to rent it pre-theatrical release, trust me.)

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Horror, SHARRRRK!
Cast: Good ol’ Donal Logue, Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack, Katharine McPhee, Alyssa Diaz,  Joshua Leonard

MOVIE: The Caller (2011)

I was poking around on Amazon Instant Video this weekend, looking for a bad horror movie to rent, when I came across this one.  The premise sounded overly familiar –  young woman receives increasingly scary phone calls — but it had an intriguing, potentially ludicrous (yay!) twist that caught my eye.  The young woman?  Answering the phone in 2009.  The phone calls?  Coming from 1979.

Well, now, just how am I supposed to resist THAT?  Time travel AND cheesy horror?  It’s like someone crafted this movie just for me (though, obviously, if that were truly the case, it would’ve co-starred Richard Dean Anderson, not Stephen Moyer, but never mind. . .).

The young woman is Mary (Rachelle Lefevre, from ABC’s Off the Map), and she’s in the middle of a hellish divorce, having only recently gotten up the gumption to leave her abusive husband.  Finally on her own, she moves into an old apartment building — cheap, convenient, and though not in the best of neighborhoods, certainly good enough for the time being.  She even makes a friend right away:  her neighbor George (Luis Guzmán, a fave of mine), who turns out to be the building’s gardener, as well as its longest resident (he grew up there).  The only thing that seems sort of strange is that the apartment comes with its own phone already installed — an old rotary-style phone.  But hey, that just saves her from having to deal with the hassle of installing a land line, right?

Her first night, though, she realizes the problem with inheriting a phone number from a previous resident when she gets a phone call from an older woman (age 50 or so) asking for someone named “Bobby.”  Mary explains the situation — she just moved in, there’s no Bobby there anymore — and the woman hangs up.

The next night, she calls again, and this time becomes furious when Mary repeats she has just moved into the apartment and hasn’t met anyone named Bobby.  The caller insists she just saw him inside the  apartment, at the window, and accuses Mary of lying to cover up an affair.  Distraught by the woman’s anger and more than a little freaked out, Mary hangs up.

But the calls continue.  Finally, the woman explains what’s going on — her boyfriend Bobby, who, sure, is abusive but totally loves her you know, hasn’t been returning her calls.  Yet she knows he adores her — he proposed to her once, even, right before he left for the Vietnam War.

Whoa, ho, ho, hold up.  The what now?  Mary assumes the woman is just crazy, but the woman, who introduces herself as “Rose,” figures out what’s happening right away — their lines are crossed.  IN TIME.

(Well, OBVIOUSLY.)

To prove it to Mary, Rose says, “I’m going to go draw something in the pantry, and when you go look, it’ll be there!”  But Mary opens the pantry door and sees nothing.  She yells at Rose to leave her alone, and heads to bed.  Something bugs her all night long, though, and she finally gets up to look again.  Sure enough, it’s been wall-papered over.  She scrapes the paper off to find a drawing of a rose right there on the wall, just like Rose said it would be.

When Rose calls again, she begs Mary to talk to her for a little while.  She’s lonely.  Just five minutes.  So they begin to chat, Mary still believing she’s a nut job and that the rose in the pantry was a coincidence.  They end up comparing notes about their abusive partners, and Mary says, after describing the way her ex-husband is making the divorce proceedings drag on forever, “Sometimes I wish I had just gotten RID of him, instead of walking out.”

The next night, Rose calls again, this time giddy because she “took Mary’s advice.”  When Mary figures out Rose means she killed Bobby, she panics and hangs up the phone.  Then she goes to the pantry, opens the door. . . and finds it’s been bricked up!  BOBBY’S IN THERE!

Mary stops answering the phone (yeah, took her long enough to come up with that idea, right?), until one evening she picks it up thinking it’s her mother and finds an angry Rose on the other end of the line.  This time, Rose makes it clear if Mary doesn’t do what she wants, she will track her and her mother down in 1979 and kill them.  Or kill someone important to Mary — a friend, a boyfriend, someone.  They were all alive back then, after all, though children, and Rose has all the control in 1979 — there’s absolutely nothing Mary can do to stop her.

From there, enter a series of brutal murders, with people simply disappearing in the present after they’ve been taken out in the past.  Though there’s an attempt at one point to explain why Mary can remember events from both timelines (that is, she remembers the pantry before it was bricked up, even though, having been changed in 1979, she shouldn’t have ever seen it NOT bricked up), it doesn’t really make much sense, I confess.  The theory, posited by Mary’s new boyfriend (Stephen Moyer), who accepts this whole time travel theory with curious calm, I must say, is that Mary can remember things from both timelines because she’s been directly involved in the alterations.  Well, but, hmm.  Huh?  She hasn’t really been any more involved in the alterations than HE has; after all, he’s seen things before and after too, never remembering the “befores,” and he’s also talked to Rose.  The thing is, however unclear a theory that might be, I always appreciate it when there’s at least an attempt to explain these sorts of things in a movie.  Just TRY, people.  Give it a shot.  For my sake, if not your own.  (Hear that, Connie Willis?  Yeah, you heard it.)

The end of the film, which involves death-matches in both timelines happening simultaneously, was FOR SERIOUS fun.  And though the acting from Lefevre was pretty ho-hum, everybody else did a fine job, and the story was original and entertaining.

Though it was made in 2009 and then shelved, this film’s been lately making the rounds of various film festivals, undoubtedly because Stephen Moyer is famous now (from HBO’s True Blood).  My guess is that it’ll go straight to DVD without a theatrical release, which is too bad because I would’ve enjoyed this in the theater and it’s certainly no worse than other theatrical horror flicks I’ve seen recently (The Ward, e.g.).  Sure, the plot is a bit gooferoo.  But it’s also an interesting concept.  At least it’s a unique one, anyway — that counts for a lot in my book.  (My book is very small.)

Definitely recommended to fans of this kind of stuff, and well worth the $6.99 rental fee at Amazon (I would’ve gladly paid full theater ticket price for it, after all, and this way, I got to watch it in my PJs — aces!).

[Prequeue at Neflix | Available for streaming at Amazon.com | View trailer]

Genre: Horror
Cast: Rachelle Lefevre, Stephen Moyer, Luis Guzmán, Ed Quinn

SIFF MOVIE: Detention (2011)

First things first: I thought this flick was incredibly entertaining and I laughed out loud more than once while I was watching it.  Director Joseph Kahn (who thoroughly charmed me when he introduced the film at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) last week) is ferociously clever and I’m fascinated by the way his brain works and can’t wait to see what he does next.

That said, this movie is an absolute disaster.  Whew, what a mess!  Not only does the dialogue zoom all over the place, but the story does too, and while that frenetic pacing was clearly part of the film’s deliberately chaotic style, it was so overdone it ultimately made the movie feel more sloppy and unfocused than different and cool.

The plot takes place at a high school and focuses on one girl, a senior named Riley, who’s not quite cool enough to be cool, and not quite dorky enough to be a dork.  She doesn’t really fit in with any group, in other words, and while I think she’d probably tell you haughtily that she didn’t give a rat’s ass about that, her defensive anger would suggest a different story.

Making matters worse, she’s got a crush on her friend Clapton, who appears to only have eyes for the school’s stereotypical head cheerleader character, Ione.

Oh yeah, and also making matters worse?  There’s a killer on the loose, dressed as a sort of prom queen mummy and assumed by the kids to be the incarnation of the star of a fictional slasher series called Cinderhella.  That ain’t good.  (But, it’s also neither here nor there, really,  because Kahn seemed to forget he was making a slasher movie a good 80% of the time — just one of the many, many examples of his complete lack of focus here.)

Even more distracting than the all-over-the-map storyline, though, were the two huge issues I had with the film’s dialogue.  The first is that the characters, especially Riley and Clapton, frequently converse in over-written, too-craftedly-clever, Dawson’s Creek-speak — swapping long, long, precociously astute, complete sentences back and forth rapid-fire.

You know, the way NOBODY talks?

Equally problematic for me, though, was the characters’ incessant use of pop culture references from the 80s and 90s — decades chosen intentionally for one character (there’s a subplot involving time travel — in a giant bear — don’t ask), but which make little sense for the others.  We’re supposed to believe that modern day teens spend time arguing about whether Roadhouse Patrick Swayze could beat up Any Movie Steven Seagal?  Wha’?

The net effect of this film’s chaos was that visually and story-wise, the film seemed directed toward the 15-20 year-olds in the audience (and, indeed, it was a panel of 15-20 year-olds who selected it for the festival, as part of SIFF’s Future Wave project).  But dialogue-wise, it was far more relevant to my generation — people who grew up in the 80s and 90s — which is why only we 30-somethings laughed when, in one scene, a physics teacher circled the word “FLUX” on the chalkboard and then mumbled something about “1.21 gigawatts.”

That’s a good example, though, of the things I DID like about Detention.  Its sense of humor is sharp and crazy and kooky and weird and delightfully subtle at times, and it combines a huge variety of stylistic elements from an equally huge variety of genres — sometimes brilliantly.  (That film-within-a-film-within-a-film montage of clips from previous Cinderhella installments at the end was masterful, for example.  Though, again, did the audience’s 15-20 year-olds really get that scene’s reference to Ron Jeremy?  I have a hard time believing they did.)

Overall, I definitely recommend renting this one just so you can see what it’s like.  I think you’ll enjoy it.  But Kahn said during his introduction that he made this movie without any studio involvement (after the studios ruined his first feature film Torque, he said) so he could have absolute control over every element, and I think a little meddling feedback probably would’ve done the final product some good.

If Kahn can mellow out ever so slightly and not try so damn hard to be clever and cool, I think he could be a truly unique and engaging filmmaker.  But ultimately, I felt Detention was a lot like its main character Riley:  not cool enough to be cool, not dorky enough to be dorky, and not quite fitting in with any (audience) group.

I liked Riley a lot, you see.  But she’s still got some growing up to do.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Cast:  Josh Hutcherson, Dane Cook, Spencer Locke, Parker Bagley, Richard Brake, Kate Kelton

SIFF MOVIE: John Carpenter’s The Ward (2011)

I hadn’t heard anything about this film when I cracked open this year’s Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) catalog and found it in there.  Given the way Wes Craven’s films have been going over the last several years (i.e., downhill fast — I walked out on My Soul to Take last summer because it was boring the hell outta me), I was pretty sure this movie, the first in ten years from Carpenter (one of my all-time favorite horror/sci-fi directors, incidentally — The Thing, Halloween, They Live, Escape from New York, Starman, to name a few), was going to be pretty weak.  But I didn’t care.  You see, the great thing about seeing films you think/hope will be crappy at SIFF is that you’re seeing them with a room full of  other people who are likewise lovers of crap — the worse the movie is, the more fun the audience experience can be.  Last year, for example, we had a blast at the absolutely awful film Splice because by the half-way point, everybody in the sold-out audience had given up on the film ever getting good and started ripping it apart aloud together.  Awesomeness.

Surprise, surprise, though — this movie isn’t half-bad!  That is, it’s pretty bad — after all, it’s a ghost story set in a 1950s psychiatric hospital, which is about as far from unique a concept you can get in the genre — but it actually had a few nice twists, was decently acted, and held my attention throughout (despite the fact I was seeing it at 10:30pm, WAY past my bedtime!).

It’s about a young woman, Kristin (Amber Heard), who has just been committed to North Bend Mental Hospital after burning a farm-house down.  On the ward with her are four other girls about her age — one who’s just plain cuckoo (played by Mamie Gummer from the TV series Off the Map), one who cradles a stuffed animal and reacts to things like a little child, one who’s clearly a pathological narcissist, and one who is a lovely but very, very sad young lady.

Her first night on the ward, Kristin wakes to find someone — or something — has stolen her blanket in the night.  At first, she thinks it was one of the orderlies or the other girls, but when she starts seeing glimpses of a horribly disfigured girl over the next few days and then is attacked by that same girl in the shower, she becomes convinced the ward is haunted by the ghost of a past patient.

It soon becomes clear she’s right, and that the ghost’s goal is to prevent any of them from ever leaving the hospital, a goal she achieves by brutally murdering them one by one before they can be released.  Eventually, Kristin learns the ghost is a girl who was attacked and then killed by all the other girls one night, which explains her motive.  And the story progresses fairly predictably from there, though not without a few good scares.

What I liked about this film was that Carpenter clearly knew we were all going to groan and think, “Man, how many times have we seen THIS plot?” and that we’d thus have all kinds of expectations for it.  A few of those expectations were turned on their heads, though (they were minor elements, but I still appreciated it), and overall, I thought the story was decent and film itself well-made.  Sure, the concept is tired tired tired, but Carpenter somehow still managed to make this movie pretty engaging.

The ending, on the other hand, made me roll my eyes — it’s one of my biggest pet peeve endings of all time.  But it was handled well enough that I didn’t figure out that twist was coming until just a scene or two before it arrived — I appreciated that much of it, at least.  There were also several little elements that made no sense whatsoever (for example, the psychiatrist in a locked-ward loony bin keeps a sharp, metal letter-opener sitting on his desk??), but a lot of them were essentially taken care of by the ending.  Those incongruous bits alone should’ve gotten me suspicious much sooner that a twist was going to overturn a lot of what I was seeing, but I was so engrossed in the story I never got bored enough to start trying to work out where it was headed.  Props for that too, Mr. C.

Overall, I thought this was a really enjoyable horror flick.  Sure, it’s nowhere near as strong as the other Carpenter films I have known and loved, but it’s no Wes Craven namby-pamby snoozer either.  Maybe now that he’s back at work, his next picture will be even stronger?  Possible.  I’m game to find out, anyway.

I think The Ward gets nation-wide release in July, and I read it will be available on-demand as soon as early June.  Well worth the price of admission for fans of the genre, ghost stories in particular.

[Prequeue it at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre: Horror
Cast: Amber Heard, Danielle Panabaker, Mamie Gummer, Lyndsy Fonseca, Jared Harris

MOVIE: Insidious (2011)

One part Poltergeist, one part The Exorcist, one part The Entity (well, you know, Barbara Hershey, anyway), one part The Lone Gunmen, and three parts “I’ll be leaving the light on at night for weeks, I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING.”

Dear Leigh Whannel (writer of both this film and the original Saw) :

You are mother-f*cking HIRED, sir.  I was all, “Aw, MAN!” at the end and then I was all, “HELLS YES, GENTLEMEN!”  And now I would like to buy you a beer.

Sincerely, Meg.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Horror, Ghosts
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins, Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Barbara Hershey

MOVIE: Scream 4 (2011)

This movie was exactly the flick I was expecting it to be — no more, no less.  It’s, you know, Scream 4.  ‘Nuff said, right? As a fan of the entire Scream series, I had a good time watching this one and actually thought it was marginally better than Scream 3.  But after this installment, I think it’s probably time to put ye olde Ghostface to bed — the two old men in charge of this franchise are, put simply, too old to be in charge of this franchise (more on this in a moment).

The set-up: Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who ought to win some kind of final girl award for having survived both the original AND its two sequels, is now all grown up.  After a decade of living in fear, she’s finally overcome her traumatic past and written a book about her experiences.  The final stop on her book tour?  Woodsboro, of course, and right around the anniversary of the original murders to boot.

Yeah, that oughta go well . . .

If you’ve seen the other three movies, you can pretty much take the plot, such as it is, from there.  Ghostface, Gail Weathers, and Dewey the dunderheaded cop are all back, and lots of really dumb teens get slashed in between scenes of sarcastic bantering about the nature of horror movie sequels and “reboots.”

Though I found this flick satisfying overall, I did have a few complaints.  The first was Courteney Cox’s face, which has been horribly marred by some plastic surgery procedure or another to the point where she looks so distractingly weird I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth instead of listening to what she was saying.  Jesus, ladies, what IS it you’re doing to yourselves that’s making you all start to look like Jack Nicholson’s Joker?   Whatever it is, it’s not doing you the favors you seem to think it’s doing and you should stop immediately.

The less-petty issues I had were with a few elements of the script.  First,  the dialogue sounds exactly like what it is:  lines written by a guy in his mid-40s (Kevin Williamson, author of Screams 1 and 2, way back when) who knows juuuuust enough about teen culture to be able to drop in a few semi-relevant keywords, but is no longer young enough himself to make any of it sound natural. Instead of portraying realistically casual use of social networking sites, texting, live-video-blogging, etc., everything gets pointed out directly and heavy-handedly (“I am going to post this on The Facebook right now!”  “The Facebook?  But The Twitter is so much more cooler, LOL!” “Something something JUSTIN BIEBER!  CHANNING TATUM!  TOP CHEF!” “Wait . . . Top Chef??”) (note: I just made all that up, but you get the picture).

This is the problem with trying to sound hipper than you actually are — Top friggin’ Chef, for pity’s sake.

The other weird thing about the script was that none of the teens in this movie appeared to have any empathy whatsoever.  Was that sly commentary on how our online lives are negatively impacting our ability to truly relate to others?  Or merely lame stereotyping of a population the writer no longer understands?  I’m guessing the latter.  And though there were also plenty of parts of the script that DID work, including a killer opening scene (pun intended) and some decent witty banter now and again, overall, I think Williamson and Craven are getting too old for the teen slasher genre.  (As if we didn’t know that already from Craven’s last feature, My Soul to Take, the only film in 2010 I walked out on due to INSANE BOREDOM.)

In any case, despite the fact it’s not brilliant, it’s still fun and definitely worth seeing if you’re a fan of the series.  You could probably wait for DVD, though I’m really going to miss movie theaters when they finally all go out of business because everybody keeps waiting for the DVD.  Sigh.  Que sera, etc.

Recommended!

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre: Horror
Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Adam Brody, Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell

BOOK: Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeline Roux (2011)

I really wanted to like this novel — I mean, a story about a group of book lovers trapped by zombies HAS to be fun, right?

But though I found it entertaining enough overall, especially in the beginning, it took a turn for the boring and befuddled somewhere around the midpoint, and I found myself increasingly frustrated by the author’s lack of thoughtful use of the story’s primary gimmick:  the book is a collection of blog posts, complete with comments from “readers,” and I really feel like Roux wasted an opportunity to do something truly interesting with that set-up.  More on that in a bit.

Here’s how the story goes:  Allison Hewitt is one of a group of bookstore employees recently trapped together by the zombie apocalypse.  Luckily, she’s trapped with a still-functional laptop and a working wi-fi network, and she immediately starts to blog her situation to anybody who might still be alive out there in the world.

As supplies begin to run low and morale collapses (no bathrooms and a steady diet of break-room beef jerky will do that for you), Allison manages to convince a couple of her colleagues to join her in a quest to get to the apartments above the store and see if any of them are habitable.  She grabs a fire axe, the others grabbing baseball bats and fire extinguishers, and together, they burst out into the store, whacking zombie heads left and right, and scramble upstairs.  (The zombie fight scenes are a little “been there, done that,” I’ll grant you, but still fun.)

After some exploration, they decide the group’s gotta move in.   They can’t stay in the break-room — the time for panic has passed, they’re alive and likely to stay that way if they’re careful, and it’s time to move forward.  The group takes over two apartments and tries settling down into a more manageable life.  But when Allison discovers a broadcasting radio station, the gang decides the next step is to leave the building altogether and try to make it over to the university campus — where the broadcast is coming from and where, the broadcaster reports, a large group of survivors have begin to collect.

Maybe Allison’s mother is there, you see?  Maybe Phil’s family.  They can’t ignore the possibility, so they set out with what little supplies they have left in pursuit of a larger community.

Most of the group manages to make it to campus safely, but that’s where the story starts to fall apart.  There’s a bizarre plot twist involving a group of fanatically religious women who kidnap and torture Allison and her friends; a boring, boring, borrrrrring love story between Allison and an astronomy professor; and a gang of militant survivors trying to force themselves into power, shooting anybody who dares challenge their authority.

Most of the second half of the book is an absolute mess, with a lot of inconsistencies in the story and subplots I feel like I’ve seen/read a million times already in both the zombie and post-apocalyptic genres.  That might’ve been okay, though, were it not for my increasing frustration over the blog format.

The problem was that I felt Roux could’ve done more with that device, and I was annoyed that she wasn’t bothering.   Despite the fact it made little sense Allison was able to keep a laptop running AND access a still-operational wi-fi network (whatever — I was willing to roll with it), when I first realized Roux was going to include comments from readers, I got a little bit excited.  I was expecting a whole second storyline to develop in the comments section, as people chimed in from all over, swapping stories and advice, starting flame wars from all the stress and anxiety, forming relationships between themselves and with Allison, etc.  All the stuff that typically DOES happen in a blog comment section (hi, guys!).  At the very least, I was expecting more emotionally charged content and question-asking.  What’s going on?  My god, I just had to kill my own mother.  That sort of thing.

Instead, there are only a couple of comments per “post,” and most of them are totally vacuous (Keep fighting, Allison!  Hey, we’re on a boat, tra la!).  Disappointing.  Occasionally, Roux tried to shove in an incongruously-timed comment from a reader suddenly logging on to despair, and once there was a father posting about his infected son, but none of these comments were particularly emotionally evocative, in part because the replies to them from Allison and other “readers” were usually bizarrely cavalier and quick.  Instead of exploring what that father might be going through, for example, Allison just says something flip like, “He’s not your son anymore — kill him!”

Man, great opportunity wasted to explore some of the painful, personal side of the whole end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it thing, instead of just the gleeful zombie-killing adventure side (which is mostly what this novel deals with — nobody seems to think twice about killing anybody in this book, even zombies they recognize, which I just found strange, though that’s not uncommon in the genre, really).

One positive note:  I did like the fact each blog post/chapter’s name was a relevant book title (In Defense of Food, A Room with a View, Things Fall Apart, e.g.) — clever, but not enough to save this novel from its thorough lack of originality.   That was what the format needed, and failed, to do.

Overall, I’d say this one’s definitely worth picking up if you’re in the mood for something brainless (pun intended) and fun, but while I did find it entertaining (I read the whole thing, after all), after reading the excerpt from Roux’s upcoming second novel (included at the end of this book), I don’t think I’ll be going on from here.

Fooey.

[FICTION, HORROR]

[Buy from an Indie Bookstore | Buy from Amazon | Browse more book reviews | Search book reviews]

MOVIE: The Children (2008)

If I spend the last 40 minutes of your horror film yelling (mostly swearing) at your characters, this means one of two things:  your movie is either really bad and my yells are intended as encouragement for the bad guy (GET ‘EM!), OR your movie is scaring the hoo-hah out of me.

Never in a million, trillion, bajillion years would I have expected this film to fit in that latter category.  And yet, holy fish-on-a-bicycle, did it ever.

This British flick, one of 2008′s Ghost House Underground movies (Ghost House is ex-Boyfriend Sam Raimi’s production company, by the way), is about two sisters, Elaine and Chloe, who have gotten their families together just after Christmas for a long weekend of holiday fun.  Chloe’s family owns a house way out in the snowy wilderness, and as the visit begins, the kids mostly spend their time playing in the woods, sledding and having snow ball fights, while the parents stand around in the kitchen gossiping and drinking tons of wine.  Most of the children are under the age of 10 or so, but Elaine’s eldest daughter, Casey, is about 16, precocious as hell, and adolescently sullen, bitter she got dragged along on this stupid trip when she could’ve been going to a totally sweet New Year’s Eve bash with her friends instead.  Parents totally suck.

Things are going pretty well until the holiday dinner the next evening, when, out of the blue, all the little kids start crying and screaming at the table.  While at first it seems like they’re just tired and cranky, when Chloe goes to comfort Elaine’s 10 year-old daughter, the little girl suddenly hisses at and then bites her.  Rawr!

The next thing we know, the adults are dying horrible, violent deaths, at first possibly by accident (note: never sled down a hill head-first), but then clearly viciously and intentionally.  Casey’s the first to figure it out: THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT.  In fact, they seem to be sick with something that’s turned them into blood-thirsty little monsters.  And though anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie can pretty much take this from there, this film was so wonderfully shot, with cameras peeking here and there, not showing us what’s really happening until the final moments, that I was litrilly on the edge of my seat for the entire second half.

It was also a refreshing and complexity-adding twist to have the kids seem sick, as well (the theory seemed to be that the woods had infected them with something).  They began by vomiting, and as they grew more and more ill, seemed driven by a compulsion they weren’t fully conscious of.  And so, as each adult was confronted with the madness in their child, they also  had to confront their parental instinct to protect said child.  To want to take care of him or her.  Even while the kid was lunging at them with a paring knife.

All in all, a fine little thriller, beautifully made (lovely, lovely visuals), creatively written, and actually mother-frakkin’ goddamn scary.  Whew.  Man.  Nailed it!  Highly recommended to all fans of scary movies, and that goes double for those who have written off the “evil kid” genre after seeing far too many tediously identical installment.  I’ll definitely be checking out more of the films in this series.  See any?

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Horror
Cast: Eva Birthistle, Stephen Campbell Moore, Jeremy Sheffield, Rachel Shelley, Hannah Tointon

MOVIE: Case 39 (2009)

I’m not really a huge fan of the “evil child” horror genre, in part because once you’ve seen The Omen and The Bad Seed, there isn’t anywhere to go but down.  It’s very rare that anybody tries to do anything new with that story, and even when they do, they aren’t often successful (for example, I appreciated the idea behind the twist at the end of Orphan more than I appreciated the actual execution of that twist).

– NOTE:  SPOILERS BELOW (though if you have any brains, you will read on so you’re never tempted to rent this movie yourself) –

This movie, unfortunately, is about as boringly straight-forward as flicks in this genre tend to be.  Which is too bad, because despite the fact Renee Zellweger is, in my opinion, a painfully terrible actress, the movie itself started out pretty entertaining.  It began far more like a thriller than a horror film, for one thing, and even though I knew the evil-child thing was coming, there was a point during the first hour when it seemed like the filmmakers might actually be taking things in a new direction.

And then, bam!, they didn’t.  Man, I hate it when that happens.

The movie’s about a social worker, Emily Jenkins (Zellweger), who becomes obsessed with helping a little girl named Lilith she believes is being abused by her parents (one of whom is Callum Keith Rennie, Due South fans).   There’s no physical evidence, so Jenkins can’t do anything official, but her gut keeps telling her something is terribly wrong.  One night, she gets a call from a terrified Lilith that suddenly cuts out.  Panicked, Emily grabs her cop buddy, Mike (the awesome Ian McShane — and what the hell was he doing in this, by the way?) and heads over to Lilith’s house, only to find her parents have trapped her in the oven and turned it on.  Horrified, Emily and Mike save the girl and her parents get sent off to the local mental institution.

Emily petitions to get custody of Lilith, who seems like a sweet, quiet, damaged little girl in desperate need of saving.  But then weird things start happening — and soon, Emily’s friends start dying (one of whom is Bradley Cooper, Alias fans).  When it turned out those people were all getting phone calls “from a man” before committing what looked like a series of bizarre suicides, I had this moment where I thought maybe Lilith was innocent and either some actual man was following her around killing off anyone he perceived might harm her or, at the very least, she was possessed by a demon and therefore had no control over what was happening.

That might’ve been an interesting twist, I thought.  Especially having the evildoer be “just zis guy, you know.” (No, not Zaphod Beeblebrox). (<– joke only Douglas Adams Über-Geeks will get.)

Alas, that’s not where the movie goes.  It goes right where these movies always go instead.  And that lack of originality, coupled with Zellweger’s absolutely astonishingly lame performance, results in a movie you should never, ever spend ANY money on.

You’re welcome.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Horror
Cast:  Renée Zellweger, Jodelle Ferland, Ian McShane, Bradley Cooper, Callum Keith Rennie

MOVIE: Devil (2010)

I still remember the first time I saw the preview for this movie.  It was last September, at a screening of horror stinker The Last Exorcism, and the reason I remember is because the audience’s reaction to it was kind of hilarious.  As the trailer began to roll, a hush settled over us all — we were all horror fans, after all, and horror fans always get kind of excited about previews for new horror films.  We sat there, watching it unfold, nodding with a sort of “Huh, that could be good” motion, when suddenly M. Night Shymalamadingdong’s name appeared on screen and, in unison, every single one of us groaned:  arrrrggggh!

And then we all laughed, because we’d literally all groaned at exactly the same time for exactly the same reason, and it was kind of funny.  (Okay, so maybe you had to be there.)

Back when Devil was in theaters, there were a few times I was tempted to go see it, only to think back on that trailer and opt for something else instead.   But, I was home sick after Christmas for a few days, and when I saw this was available on pay-per-view, I figured why not.   And you know what, dudes?  I ended up really enjoying it.

Though, in my defense, I did have a fever of 102.4 at the time.

Scary movies set in isolated spaces, like this one about five people trapped on an elevator (with Satan!), are a favorite of mine.  Trapping small groups of people together in stressful situations often results in fairly interesting psychological effects (think The Shining), and that can make for pretty good suspense.

While this movie definitely has some ridiculously bad elements (oh, must there always be a foreign person, usually Hispanic or Eastern European, who spins us a hokey yarn about religion?), overall, it’s, you know, not terrible.  For what it is.   Which is a film co-written by Dingdong, after all.

In short, if you like horror movies about small groups of people being picked off one by one by an unseen force of evil, you should do okay here.  Well worth a rental, at the very least, and it’s always nice to see Caroline Dhavernas from Wonderfalls, even though she was completely wasted in this film, which is a crime.  A CRIME, I TELL YOU.

(p.s. I have a huge crush on Matt Craven — have I ever told you that?   I think this might be his year on the Boyfriend of the Week site.  Let’s see how long it takes me to get around to the research.)

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Horror
Cast:  Chris Messina, Logan Marshall-Green, Jenny O’Hara, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, Matt Craven, Caroline Dhavernas