¡Qué horror! 2013

Candidate #8

THE DAY

(September 2011)

It’s a film brought to us by WWE Studios, with Iceman and Meriadoc Brandybuck in it in front of the cameras, and as co-producers.

How can you possibly resist?

Sure, it’s yet another dark, nihilistic post-apocalyptic tale, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that it’s a well-made one, with just enough moments in its narrative to make you want to see it through, if only to see who lives and who dies past the end credits roll.

Plus, aside from Shawn Ashmore and Dominic Monaghan, there are some other familiar genre faces here: Ashley Bell (from The Last Exorcism), Michael Eklund (from yet another dark, nihilistic post-apocalyptic tale, The Divide), and Shannyn Sossamon (who you may remember from either A Knight’s Tale, Wristcutters: A Love Story, Life Is Hot in Cracktown, or the English-language remake of One Missed Call, depending on your particular cinematic leanings).

Plus, Marc Blucas is also in here as a co-executive producer (I presume because he’s collaborated in the past with director Doug Aarniokoski, on the less than stellar Animals, which I believe has a review stashed somewhere in the Iguana Archives*).

So, if dark, nihilistic post-apocalyptic tales are your horror speed, you could do a whole lot worse than The Day.

* Reviews for The Last Exorcism, Wristcutters: A Love Story and The Divide can also be found in the Archives as well.

(The Day OS courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

ONE MISSED CALL
(Review)

Eric Vallete’s English-language remake of Takashi Miike’s Chakushin Ari (which was itself Miwako Daira’s adaptation of the novel by Yasushi Akimoto) was originally scheduled for an August 24 2007 US release.
That soon changed to a January 4 2008 release. Now, a release date change of this sort is more often than not a bad sign. Coupled with its ultimate release falling in the early—or as defined in the Hollywood dictionary, “dead”—months of the year (another bad sign), where studios have perennially tossed their less than desirable product, a stigma began to taint One Missed Call even before it opened.
Still, I hoped for the best, and bolstered by that creepy-a$$ one-sheet, gave it a fair look-see.

With a handful of variations here and there, the set-up is pretty much that of Miike’s Chakushin Ari: Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) bears witness to a number of her friends falling prey to prophetic cell phone calls—signaled by an eerie ringtone—that serve as harbingers of their doom, before she gets her own call, and must solve the mystery lest she end up facing her own apparently impending death.
What Vallete and One Missed Call screenwriter Andrew Klavan so clearly fail to capture though is the air of dread and tense anticipation evident in Miike’s take. Nowhere is this sad—and ultimately fatal—shortcoming so painfully evident as in One Missed Call’s redux of a bravura setpiece from Chakushin Ari, which involves a victim’s death on live TV.
Here, we have American Miracles, run by Ted Summers (genre powerhouse Ray Wise), who has exorcist Ray Purvis (Jason Beghe, who incidentally recently walked away from Scientology in a big stink) attempt to eradicate the cell phone curse.
With its Christian iconography, non-existent suspense, and fairly ludicrous “body of Christ compels you to leave this cell phone” blather, this sequence turns out to be the most disappointing in the entire film.
When you’ve got Ray Wise and this is all you have him do, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

There are attempts to introduce elements not present in Miike’s version though, particularly in having the intended victims begin seeing disturbing presences all around them (which is where the one-sheet image comes in), but this really isn’t anything new in a horror film; as I recall, this was also done in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
In One Missed Call, these moments happen so often that they quickly feel like desperate attempts to continually scare the audience, when all they really do is get pretty boring, pretty quickly.
And while the “abuse as a cycle” theme is still here, it sadly also feels muted somehow, certainly less potent than in Miike’s Chakushin Ari.

Admittedly, the idea behind One Missed Call’s climax—which avoids that ludicrously monstrous cheat in Chakushin Ari’s final moments and that ambiguous last shot—makes more sense than the Japanese version’s.
Tragically, it isn’t executed very well, and plays out as horribly anti-climactic, with one of those annoying “Yes, we can have a sequel if we so choose” last shots, that I’d rather take Miike’s ending, flaws and all, than this mess.
And yes, Miike had some questionable funhouse scares in the hospital sequence, but none as laughably ridiculous as One Missed Call’s baby with a cell phone bit. (Of course, if I were to see that in real life, in the burnt-out shell of an abandoned hospital, I probably wouldn’t be laughing. On the screen though, it’s a golden MST3K moment…)
Oh, and why the vengeful ghost bothered with Luna—when the poor cat clearly didn’t have a cell phone—was just a bad decision to try and get a cheap scare. Is it worth it though when you could end up pissing PETA off?
And yes, Dave Stewart wrote and performed One Missed Call’s ringtone, and I love Stewart, and his work with Annie Lennox, as well as the Spiritual Cowboys, but I must say, Chakushin Ari’s ringtone is still far more disturbing… (Incidentally, Stewart is the founding member of Nokia’s recently established Artist Advisory Council. Presumably, he will do more in this illustrious position than compose murderous ringtones...)

In the end, as much as I thought Miike aimed ambitiously high with Chakushin Ari and didn’t quite hit the mark, Valette’s One Missed Call just kind of lies there, listless and droning, like an unanswered cell phone on mute, its battery winding down, just begging you to shut it off.

Parting shot: A review of Chakushin Ari can be found in the Archive.

(One Missed Call OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by Art Machine, A Trailer Park Company]; images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

WRISTCUTTERS:
A LOVE STORY
(Review)

Wristcutters: A Love Story opens with Zia (Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit) cleaning up his room, before he proceeds to slit his wrists. But even as he lies bleeding to death, he sees a stray, sad little dust bunny which has managed to escape his attention, off in the corner…
Based on Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, Wristcutters is a black comedy that posits an afterlife for suicides which is pretty much identical to this world, except it’s worse; with a population made up entirely of people who’ve offed themselves, you can imagine it isn’t an awfully cheery place.
So Zia finds himself working at Kamikaze Pizza, and generally missing his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), till he meets Russian would-be rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, who appears in the upcoming horror films, Town Creek and Splinter), and subsequently discovers what happened to Desiree after his death, knowledge that propels him to go on a road trip to try and find the one thing he believes will make his current situation bearable.

Written and directed by Goran Dukic, Wristcutters takes this bizarre and intriguing premise and sadly, doesn’t do too much with it.
Yes, there are some amusing bits in here, and the final ten minutes or so are suffused with a melancholy that almost manages to move, but the vast majority of the film doesn’t live up to its premise. The narrative just doesn’t, excuse me, come alive; it fails to properly engage the viewer in Zia’s quest. Which is tragic, since the film’s concept really does have a lot of potential.

A large part of why Wristcutters didn’t work for me is the way Dukic fails to take full advantage of the road movie genre to create an involving narrative. A road movie, by its very nature, has a story that constantly moves forward, that gets characters from point A to point Zed, ultimately changed by the journey, transformed by velocity and geography.
The trouble with Wristcutters is that the journey doesn’t feel very transformative.
Once Zia leaves the city, the only time the film kicks into a passably interesting gear again is when Zia and company encounter Kneller (Tom Waits). The introduction of hitchhiker Mikal (Catacombs’ Shannyn Sossamon) doesn’t really do too much for the proceedings, even after we discover her motivation for traveling: she claims she’s here because of a mistake, and she’s looking for the people in charge to set things to right.

The major culprit I feel, is Dukic’s script, which doesn’t seem to afford moments and opportunities for the narrative to properly display who these characters are, and what they feel for each other.
For some reason which I can’t really pin down (beyond the fact that it’s also essentially a road movie), this reminded me of Liev Schreiber’s film adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated, except Schreiber’s effort exquisitely captured the right tone of epiphany and melancholy that I felt Wristcutters needed in order for it to work.
In the end, Wristcutters isn’t a terrible film, and it’s certainly more original than the average movie out there, whether indie or Hollywood. But because the central idea was so tantalizing, I just felt that there should have been something more substantial there than what I ultimately witnessed.

Parting shot: A review of Catacombs can be found in the Archive.

(Wristcutters: A Love Story OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

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.)