CATACOMBS
(Review)

My profuse apologies to the late producer Gregg Hoffman, to whose memory this film is dedicated.

200 years ago Paris ran out of room to bury its dead.
By royal decree the remains of 7 million bodies were relocated to an abandoned limestone mine beneath the city.
Today, the most romantic city in the world sits just one hundred feet above…
… the largest mass grave in history.
The empire of the dead.

This is the woefully dire pronouncement at the head of the film, that quickly follows an eyebrow-raising “Inspired by True Events” claim (I get very dubious when a horror movie tacks that onto itself these days, but that’s a whole other story), as if these little bits weren’t actually mentioned in characters’ dialogue later on in Catacombs.
Very briefly, Catacombs follows young and nervous and rather imaginative Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon), who travels to Paris on the behest of her sister Carolyn (Alecia Moore, better known to the free world as Pink), and is swept away from a rave being held in the titular Parisian catacombs, into a not-so-frightening ordeal of the masked psycho stalker variety.

Now, please pardon the very Neanderthal piggy comment, but I’ve always thought Shannyn Sossamon was hot.
The thing is, the only film I’ve seen her in that I’ve actually enjoyed was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, while most of her other film work aren’t the sort of movies I go out of my way to watch. I did see The Sin Eater, but that was lamentably lame, and I saw bits of A Knight’s Tale on cable, but that didn’t look so great either.
So I was hoping I could add Catacombs to that list of one, but alas, I shall have to wait and hope the One Missed Call remake is the contender I’ve been waiting for.

One of the problems Catacombs has (and it has quite a number) is that the initial set-up and the eventual predicament Victoria finds herself in is played out in a rather daft manner, so much so that the climactic turn the plot takes is something that I was convinced was going on the entire time.
The apparent threat and suspense never really sets in as concrete reality, largely since Victoria never quite comes across as an actual person. There’s no identification here at all. She’s saddled with a nervous, introverted personality (with the prescribed medication to match)—her “issues,” as sister Carolyn so compassionately puts it—without any back story at all to explain why this is the case. She’s just a Nervous (and rather annoying) Nelly.
There’s only one moment in the entire film—sadly enough, when Victoria actually commits a ruthless and selfish act—that Sossamon comes across as a real person, capable of the most cruel action in the interests of self-preservation.
Every other instance is her being ragged on by Carolyn and Carolyn’s friends, or shrieking her fool head off as she’s stalked by the goat head-masked psycho.

But the fact of the matter is, the exact sequence of events that bring her to the catacombs and the terrible poopy mess she steps in, is so boneheaded, one can’t help but discover a complete lack of sympathy for the character and the predicament she finds herself in.
When she goes off to wander the labyrinth on her own, to the shouted warning from Carolyn of, “Don’t be a retard,” one can’t help but get all MST3K on Catacombs and go, “Everyone in this damned movie is a retard.”
And the whole “One must surround himself with reminders of death to fully appreciate life” jazz comes off as juvenile bubble gum pop psychology, when presented to us by Carolyn and the intellectual giant, Jean Michele (Mihai Stanescu), who also regales us with the ludicrous tale of the Cult of the Black Virgin and the goat head-masked psycho (apparently a low rent attempt to breed the AntiChrist), an account which comes complete with bizarre stutter-strobe images, presumably courtesy of Victoria’s overactive imagination.
At least, it sounded ludicrous when told to us like this.

I mean, with all that talk of “Oh, oui, people wind up missing all the time down here,” then the pervasive question of “Why the hell are we raving our heads off down here again?” glares in our faces like an irritating strobe light, a rudely inescapable reality.
It’s the 21st century “Inspired by True Events” horror movie equivalent of building a house on ancient Indian burial ground: this is simply a place you shouldn’t be in at all. Period.
If you insist on staying past the first lame “Boo,” then you deserve everything that’s coming to you. (And in Catacombs’ case, that’s certainly true of Carolyn.)

There is nothing here at all that I can commend, and even certain editing choices come off as bargain basement attempts to emulate Kevin Greutert‘s excellent work on Saw.
There’s even the climactic montage of Significant Moments and Telling Lines that, here in Catacombs, feels hideously unnecessary, as if it was there in the vain hope that it would elicit a “Well, don’t I feel like a dunce, I didn’t see that one coming at all” reaction from the less-attentive members of the audience.
In fact, a lot of Catacombs feels like underlining and overemphasis, leaving you with the urge to shout, rather irrationally, at the screen, “Yes, I got it!”
But, like some communicable disease, or an invite to a party that turns out to be a horrid stinker, or a postcard asking you to come to bloody Paris, you’ll only wish you hadn’t.

Parting shot: I don’t relish writing bad reviews. I know any movie, no matter how bad, had hundreds of people who worked on it, and many of them would probably have nothing at all to do with the flaws of the movie in the first place.
So, not only did I feel bad because Gregg Hoffman gave the horror world Saw, and he’s credited as one of the producers on Catacombs, but also because the film was co-written and co-directed by Tomm Coker, whose early comic book art I rather enjoyed.
And what’s worse, being co-writer and -director would mean he had at least half to do with why Catacombs was as awful as it was.
Apologies to you too, Tomm. I really do like your art, but Catacombs was terrible.

(Catacombs DVD cover art courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

CAPTIVITY
(Review)

There are some movies that just don’t live up to the hype. Roland Joffe’s Captivity is one of them.
Even as gorno became the horror genre’s whipping boy, billboard ads for Captivity (which tells the story of the abduction and torture of fashion model du jour Jennifer Tree, played by 24’s Elisha Cuthbert), apparently unapproved by the MPAA, went up in New York and Los Angeles this past March. The billboards—which featured four panels depicting Cuthbert in the stages, Seduction, Confinement, Torture, and Termination—attracted a firestorm of controversy, and were subsequently pulled down.
Thus did Captivity become “the movie they didn’t want you to see!” (Or so the trailer put it following the billboard incident.)
As it is, there’s probably more excitement in the hullabaloo of that run-in with the MPAA than can be found in the film itself.

This is a limp and tepid exercise in thrills, and the twice-Oscar-nominated Joffe (for directing The Killing Fields and The Mission) never manages to raise the tension level above the slow simmering that runs through the film’s entire course. There is one brief moment, about an hour into the film, when something happens that could make you wonder, “Okay. So where are you taking this?”
Past that point though, the film settles back into its slothful zombie shuffle and sort of just shambles off towards its uninteresting climax.

Nothing really quite works in Captivity.
Once you get past the initial sense of discomfort and unease at the idea of abduction, things settle into a sense of humdrum tedium that never fully leaves the premises, like an unwanted, overstaying guest.
And while Jennifer is tortured (largely a psychological ordeal; despite appearances, this film is hardly gorno), the bits of police procedural interspersed throughout the proceedings seem lackadaisical, as if Joffe were begrudgingly giving us these scenes because that was expected of him. It doesn’t help that Michael Harney and Laz Alonso, who play the detectives, aren’t exactly the Oscar types either.

Additionally, the identity of the mystery abductor is immediately obvious to any film geek. (And if you don’t instantly identify the abductor when you get to see the eyes, pay attention to the abductor’s actions.)
Thus, not only is there no tension, there is no real mystery either.
So that’s bad enough. But the film also chooses to leave the abductor’s psychology a complete blank to the audience. By movie’s end, we have no frakking idea why all this happened. We get no sense of the abductor’s past, of the presumed trauma that caused this much psychological damage.

And ultimately, Captivity is also the kind of movie that doesn’t seem to have a point at all.
Certainly, this is not entertainment.
A: I would not call a bad movie “entertainment.”*
And more importantly, B: The reality of abduction and torture and murder is hardly “entertainment.”
Even with films as dark as the first Saw and Hostel, there were points to be made, and skill and savvy used to tell the tale. Captivity seems to have none of these.
There is a brief brush against the class divide, as Jennifer is made out to be a rich b!tch who has no real idea of how the other half lives, as well as some babble about the only real things being what you can touch, but these ideas don’t really go anywhere, trapped in the dreary hollow of this film the way Jennifer is in her cell.
And though it was apparently Joffe’s intent that Captivity be about “female empowerment” (the common PR spin for horror movies that have women running about and screaming and being stalked by unsavoury, would-be killers), I really don’t see that.
And even if the whole female empowerment aspect managed to escape me somehow, even if it’s actually there, hiding under the bed or in the crawlspace, it still wouldn’t change the fact that it’s contained in a drab and uninvolving film.

At the end of it all, Captivity just doesn’t seem to be worth the time or the effort to actually sit down and watch it.
It’s not exciting, it’s not thrilling, and it doesn’t have anything important to say. (Yes, I am aware that these things happen. All I have to do to know that is watch the news. I don’t need an uninspired horror movie to make me aware that we live in very troubled times.)
It doesn’t even have the gore.
All it really does have is Elisha Cuthbert in peril, and we already saw that on 24 Day 2, and in the House of Wax remake.
And on that note, I’d have to say that watching either is a far better prospect than enduring Captivity. (Yes, even if Paris Hilton is in House of Wax. Not only does House of Wax have an interesting climactic sequence as the eponymous house melts in a raging fire while the principals are still in it, but if you need added incentive, there is the opportunity to cheer madly when Paris gets iced. Come on, admit it. You want to.)

* Unless of course, it falls into the MST3K/so-bad-it’s-good territory, in which case, you can’t beat that kind of entertainment.
Captivity clearly does not have a passport or VISA to enter said territory.

(Captivity OS and billboard ad image courtesy of wilaboutmovies.com)