Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Zombie Apocalyspe is a stupid mess.  It's clear that there was virtually no budget to speak of, the director and cinematographer had no camera shots available at any time aside from "mid range of fronts" or "mid range of backs," the actors were literally one step above community actors, and the plot just sort of wanders around a map before arriving at the payoff scene that is like spending your life savings at a slot machine only to realize it only dispenses those gross little chocolate coins Jewish people have during holidays.

Despite all that, I'd put it in the upper 50th percentile of trashy zombie films and/or Syfy originals.  Hell, let's say upper 75th percentile.  What gives?

The biggest reason is sort of a damning with faint praise, but have you have seen budget zombie horror?  Zombie Apocalypse is bad, every element of it barely working, but goddamn at least it could be called a horror movie with trashy action that barely works.  Compare this to something like Monster Ark, where you spend a good half of the movie of people talking about the Bible like it is a mysterious artifact only read by madmen and gods, and then segue to people waving their airsoft M-16s at a greenscreen for the other half.  Zombie Apocalypse had the good graces to interrupt scenes of people walking empty streets and CGI explosions to include zombie battles, and while those battles are entirely shoddy CGI (PHOTOSHOP THAT BLOOD SPURT HARDER), they're at least entertaining enough for me to have finished the movie stone sober.  The plot is followable and does have a destination and doesn't try to overextend ambition beyond what it can barely accomplish.

The acting is bad, but at least when they're not being forced to speak utterly awful lines (ARE THERE ANY HUMANS IN THERE), there's sort of a fun awkwardness to their acting, being fully comfortable (Ving Rhames and that chick from Spartacus: Blood and Sand that wanted to ride Crixus's bone included) in being in a terribad zombie film, as opposed to, say, the Day of the Dead where it appeared Nick Cannon and everyone else was being filmed at gunpoint.  The only exception to this is Taryn Manning, whose sullenness in the film is pretty clearly not just acting, but she's virtually a non-entity in the second half of the movie so who really cares.

Indeed, especially for an Asylum film, there's a fairly intelligent apportioning of focusing on characters that you can almost care about, as opposed to the usual Asylum practices of giving the meatiest roles to people who don't know how not to glance nervously at the camera every five seconds.  Maybe they hired an editor with a soul, who knows?  Perhaps the best part (spoiler but again who fucking cares) concerns the role of "token educated dude who in zombie film parlance means he is a flowery dipshit who quotes a line from Wordsworth and acts like he's hot shit.  Of course, he's easily the worst character in the film and one prays for his death, but as the halfway mark, you feel like he's somehow going to make it to the film.  Even worse, he has an awful romance scene with another survivor and now you're virtually sure he's going to survive SO MAD.  But then he gets bitten (due to his own dumbassery), and turns even before he can do anything heroic!  It's a really rare moment of schadenfreude fanservice coming out of nowhere, and while it was probably unintentional considering the rest of the script, one must take what they can get.

So is it worth watching?  There's certainly better zombie films out there, but there's far, far, worse.  If anything, this is a positive step for Syfy and Asylum, so we may as well be nice enough about it as possible.

A Film that Dares to Call Itself "The Thing" (2011) (spoilers because fuck this movie)

Fuck this fucking movie.

My gut knew it wasn't going to be pretty.  Especially when I found out the screenwriter was the same person that wrote (get ready) the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.  But did I know how ugly?  Did I have the slightest conception of the depths that it was going to slobber and fuck over my memories of the Carpenter version?  No.  I was like those Lovecraft protagonists (minus an authorial transference of casual racism), realizing something was wrong but that the breadth was far beyond my grasp, so at the end all I can do is laugh like Sam Neill at the end of In the Mouth of Madness.

Part of the problem can be traced to the whole boneheaded idea of trying to remake The Thing by doing a prequel of it.  In doing so, you've stepped into crazy murky waters, as you're ostensibly creating a new plot while having to sort of hug onto the original plot for protection, like a baby bear with worms.  Not at all surprising in retrospect, My Least Favorite Screenwriter in History handled this the same way he did with the Nightmare remake: Clumsily patch favorite scenes from the original to a shoddy original plot, then go completely off the rails with a wretched ending with enough plot holes to hide a universe destroying morphing race spaceship in.

I'll say one thing and one thing only, as it's the only reason this film got anything resembling positive reviews: it's competently made and acted in.  But hey so was the Nightmare remake, and honestly if you're giving any credence to horror films because of the quality of their effects then go the fuck away.  I guess I can also say that the only thing God I am Going to Punch You Screenwriter-San does right is that he also manages to avoid any romantic subplot, so kudos laced with rat poison for that.  Unfortunately, this leaves the plot.  The opening thirty minutes function exactly how you'd expect, for better or worse.  Spaceship found, alien excavated, science does some retarded shit, alien breaks out and ohhhh nooooo.  Since this was strictly paint by numbers plot wise, I was just sort of bored here.

Then we have the first major divergence from the original.  As you may or may not recall from Carpenter's version, the time period between when the crew first sees the alien in action to when they realize its full capabilities was relatively short.  Here, there's a 30 minute period of Dr. Ramona Flowers going "oh no guys something wrong" and all the dudes going "haw haw we're males."  It makes sense logically, but it's still boring as hell, as that time period is people just shuffling around grumbling at each other.  Then eventually the alien reappears and get ready for a descent into total incompetency.

Some of you are probably anticipating me bitching about the alien being quick.  Honestly, I don't fucking care if it's fast or not, especially as it was the same sort of awkward shambler that we saw in the Carpenter film, there probably would have been not a single moment of tension in the film.  What I do sort of care about is that the alien looks pretty fucking shitty.  The remake Things are generally a simpleton's version of what they remember the Thing from Carpenter's version to be mixed in with nixed Silent Hill designs: full of giant teeth and weird arms going everywhere and decidedly not really scary.  Everything is just clean looking and stupid, missing any of the nightmare unfamiliar murkiness of the original.

So we find out that the alien can mimic, and we settle back.  Finally, some of dat sweet paranoia that made Carpenter's version so goddamned good.  All the characters are in the room, and...wait, they already developed the test?  Okay.  And some guys just escaped, all right, lots of opportunity for potential infections to be developed and questioned later and wait they already revealed the Thing and now it's just an extended chase sequence and what the fuck is going on

Of the many things that pissed me off about this remake, it's this.  I think even Hawk's version had more time devoted to the quidessential feeling that nobody could trust each other, the isolation exemplified within Antarctica.  Instead, one gets the feeling that Holy Shit I'm So Goddamned Worthless at Everything Guy watched the Carpenter version and thought "boy, look at all these people talking, this is so boring, I'm gonna cut this stuff down to like fifteen minutes so I can get to what people really care about, why that ax was in the wall!"  You think I'm joking, right?

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we're doing it by autopsy, by examining very, very closely everything we know about the Norwegian camp and about the events that happened there from photos and video footage that’s recovered, from a visit to the base, the director, producer and I have gone through it countless times marking, you know, there’s a fire axe in the door, we have to account for that…we're having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”

— Eric Heisserer describing the process of creating a script that is consistent with the first film.^[17]

HOLY SHIT WHO FUCKING CARES.  THANK GOD MY IMAGINATION ISN'T ALLOWED TO CONCEPTUALIZE ANYTHING ANYMORE, WHOO 2011 SPRING BREAK HAND ME THAT GRENADE IT'S TIME FOR THE TRUE JAGERBOMB.  

So the remaining 30 minutes of the movie are literally just a space monster slasher.  It's not even a good slasher, but people running in rooms as a giant Thing monster also runs around in rooms and occasionally kills people and less occasionally recreates the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park.  Near the end, one of the monsters takes an ATV to get back to the mothership, and it says alot about the success of this movie that I was fully expecting a Space Mutiny style chase sequence to close things out.  But don't worry, instead we have an Alien ripoff where the lady is menaced by the Nilhilanth from Half-Life but then she shoots him in the weak point.  Then she walks out of the spaceship with her Not-MacReady while he is holding the flamethrower and then he puts the flamethrower in the truck and then the lady kills him because he is ACTUALLY THE THING AND IF HE IS THE THING WHY DID HE NOT KILL HER WHILE HE HAD THE FLAMETHROWER AND WAIT ARE THOSE CREDITS WHAT THE FLYING FUCK

oh

oh wait

so here's a helicopter guy and he's seeing the thing 

and there's the dog from wait wasn't that infected like at the start of the film why is it running out now and I guess that's the most FUCKING INEPT WAY YOU COULD DO A REACHAROUND TO THE ORIGINAL FILM GOOD JOB MR SCREENWRITER

In conclusion, this is what really galls me.  You have a screenwriter going "hurp durp gonna tie up all these loose ends," to aspects of the Carpenter version I don't really care about, while at the same time just creating obvious, ridiculous plot holes to tie other stuff together that I also don't really care about, all while leaving the quidessential themes of the previous films out to die in the Antarctic wilderness.  The Thing is a triumph of autism and boring fanboyism over imagination and creativity, so really just fuck this movie.

...One other thing.  For all the hubbub about how the screenwriter, director, and producer watched the film a million times, they seemed to miss something that would have allowed an ending that would be both creepy and an actually creative twist on something.  Re-watch the opening of the Carpenter version.  Do you notice something about one of the two Norwegians on the plane?  One of them is completely covered in clothes and never says anything, so the gender is indeterminate.  It would have been entirely possible to have Winstead return to camp, completely devoid of emotion, then get shot at by the last Norwegian, then see the dog, have them get into some convenient helicopter and as they pull out, she pulls the clothes around her.*

It's so goddamned obvious that I can't think of why you wouldn't do it and instead leave her for some indeterminate fate.

Unless.

No.  That's not possible.  It can't be.

No.  

No. 

"I, Eric Heisserer, Screenwriter Extraordinary, can see it now! Ramona Flowers and MacReady, the ultimate duo and...maybe something more ;)"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


*Edit: On watching the opening again, it's less clear whether the person on the left shows their face or not.  It's more likely that the one on the left was the one that was shot by the Americans, but with the constant film cuts, one could conceivably argue that the two switched positions, so that the "uncovered" face on the right seat threw the grenade and ran (with gun now in hand? WHATEVER) while the uncovered searched for it and was blown up.  It's awkward, but certainly makes more goddamned sense than anything in the remake.

Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The Nightmare on Elm Street remake was really goddamned bad.  This isn't surprising for anyone.  Perhaps due to that lack of surprise. I didn't really see any critics expend too much thought on the badness.  After all, it's a horror remake produced by Michael Bay's company, Platinum Dunes, which brought out flaccid remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th.  Literally no one is going to be swayed by anything said about a movie like this, a husk floating on an ocean of stupid teenage buying decisions.  And yet, there's some interesting kernals to glean from this film, which is a shining example of the present trend of modern, studio-backed horror films bringing absolutely nothing lasting to horror canon.

After finishing the movie, I took some time to watch various scenes from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. What's interesting about Craven's version is, for the most part, the scares are telegraphed fairly well in advance.  By this, I mean that while something scary might happen, generally it comes out of some sort of lead-up.  For example, take the death scene of Nancy's blonde friend from the start of the movie.  The earliest sense something is really wrong is when you see the garbage can lid roll from the fence and hit the ground.  There's a good two seconds of the lid rolling before it hits the ground.  Only then do we see Freddy, and not in some quick-cut closeup, but in the distance, a shadowy vision.  Of course, there are sudden jump scares (such as when Nancy runs into the Freddy hall-monitor), but for the most part, scares are delivered by the impact of the images, not simply by impact.

Guess what I'm trying to say about the remake!  Every single goddamned scare in the remake is some sort of lameass "ooooo things are sort of creepy when is the spooking happening huh huh huh NOWWWW BOOOOOOO VOLUME SO LOUD GONNA PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS."  If you're the kind of idiot that freaks out during "scary" video games (truth Amnesia is fucking garbage) and want some more of dat fear factor, then by all means rent this movie because there is not a single five-minutes scene without something like Freddy jumping out of a pipe or a little girl getting a monster face happening.  For gentle viewers that need something more than loud sounds to scare them, prepare to, at best, be gently amused as the movie does its best to imitate your high school's haunted house.  Nothing, of course, is going to stick with you.  I'm not even 24 hours from when I finished the film, and already all the scenes are sort of awkwardly merging and fading together, one after the other, with nothing valuable to remember a week from now aside from "god how do you manage to not include one affecting scene even 976-EVIL II managed that."

The plot is sort of the worst of both worlds as far as remakes are concerned, somehow both mechanically reproducing scenes from the original and adding unnecessary, stupid as fuck complications to the plot.  The first two-thirds of the film are basically the same as the original, save for the previously mentioned jump scares being fucking everywhere, and that Nancy's boyfriend is now a fat ugly Robert Patterson.  It was about at this point I said, "god, can they not do anything original in this movie aside from adding dream scares going no where?"

My girlfriend murmured, still watching the movie, "so you wish for them to alter the plot?"

"Sure, I mean it can't be any worse than what I'm already seeing."

"GRANTED"

"FUCK YOU WISHMASTER"

The film suddenly swerves into new territory at the last third of the film, and boy is it a total mess.  It is now revealed (spoilers I guess) that the remake wasn't happy with Freddy pre-demon biography being "creepy dude who did bad stuff to children."  No, in keeping with the Bay philosophy of leaving nothing to the imagination aside from the full extent of your slackjawed stupidity, it is agonizingly demonstrated that Freddy was in fact a total baby rapist.  The remake tries to trick you by implying at first that hey maybe Freddy was just an innocent victim of childhood overimagination but I can't imagine someone thinking there was a possibility of gray morality in a shitty horror remake, so that's given up like fifteen minutes after.

Of course after the interminable backstory parade the film can't come up with a cleverer way of dispatching Freddy than the "okay I will bring him out of the dream with the power of HUGZ" idea (which was by far the weakest concept in the entire original film), except now Fat Ugly James Patterson remains alive instead of being eaten by his bed.  I don't even know why they kept him alive because he is awful, except probably they couldn't figure out a way to make a blood puking mattress into a cheap scare.  Then ending jump scare because fuck this pissy earth.

Ultimately, I just want to talk about what happened with Freddy.

I don't really mind the new design.  After all, the iconic Freddy is substantially different from the original film's version, which was almost never seen in full light (presumably because the make up was bad, or Craven's reaction to not being able to make Krueger into a skull monster as he originally planned.  The voice, while hokey in its modulated deepness compared to Robert Englund, isn't bad.  The problem is that the remake apparently couldn't decide between the original, dread-filled Krueger and the later sequel's wacky, joking spouting Krueger, and thus decided that what was needed was a jerk Freddy who talks as much as the later iterations, but doesn't make jokes but just acts all weird and rapey.  In other words, they decided the best version of Freddy was the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 version.

Oh yes, the rapey.  So, from a strict perspective, I guess this isn't that surprising.  After all, Freddy has always been more lascivious than most other horror icons, "I'm your boyfriend now" and all that.  And yeah, Craven apparently wanted to make Freddy a child molester before cooler, more intelligent heads prevailed.  That doesn't change the fact that, like pretty much anything else in this movie, making Freddy into a rapist ruins everything good about the film series.  It also doesn't help that the only real ramifications of this change is now we have to have a scene where the main character sees pictures of herself being abused and then get changed into a weird fetish dress (which afterwards I realized was the same one used in Freddy's Dead so I don't even know anymore).  It's just some sort of rat dropping on top that in this hokey, ineptly filmed disaster we also have to get the feeling that the director thought he could even broach real life serious topics.

were it not that I have bad horror...

hey I wonder how xkcd took steve job's death

PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHBBBBBBBBBBBBBBT

976-EVIL II (1991)

I'm always torn how to review mediocre horror that is fully, gleefully aware of how mediocre it is.  I know how to deal with terrible that overplays its terrible; you call it shit that doesn't get any better because hurr hurr tongue in cheek.  But how do you deal with something that seems to have been developed solely with the intent of entertaining shut-ins who love them some USA "Up All Night" and Monstervision?  I'm not saying that the people that produced Terrorvision or Slugs or basically anything from Full Moon Productions weren't aware that they were developing stupid, cinematically unimportant movies, but there isn't the same overt pandering to my scene as there was in 976-EVIL 2.  I mean, look at this:

yeah, that's a reference to Corman and Monstervision's Joe Bob Briggs.  I don't even

And while it bugs me, truth be told, I sort of liked this movie.

The original 976-EVIL was notable for two things:

• It was directed by Robert Englund
• It had one of the lamer plot frameworks for what amounted to "evil demon terrorizes people" 

I barely remember the first one, honestly.  All I really recall was its surreal mish-mash of various horror aesthetics, with it completely unclear what kind of horror it wanted to be, trying to push heartstrings with the central conflict between the tough softy biker and his nerdy cousin with some weird revenge fantasy and it's just an enormous goddamned mess.

The sequel, to its quasi-credit, has no problems with this.  It very clearly a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off awkwardly melded with the distinguishing feature of the first film, an "evil" pay phone service that tells your HORRORSCOPE while slowly turning you evil.

So here's the terrifying title shot.

I can't really stress enough how clumsily shoehorned the whole "evil phone service" concept is.  As in here, every so often when something spooky happens, there is a ringing phone but it rings kind of evil like?  Whatever.

Because this is generic late 80's/early 90's horror, we open with a lady getting naked.  I guess the twist here is that after the initial spook, instead of getting dressed to the boos and jeers of a suitably drunk audience, she instead puts on a slightly trashier version of what Sigourney Weaver wore at the end of Alien.  I should note that despite this really trashy fanservice at the beginning, there's literally nothing in else in the way of nudity for the rest of the film.  So if this film is your only hope on those lonely Friday nights, you better finish quickly unless you've got a fetish for horribad early 90's fashion.

Anyway.  She's menaced not very well by this guy:

This is Rene Assa. I kept thinking I had seen him before, but as far as IMDB was concerned, he was just a bit character actor who had this movie as one of his primary roles.  I'm not really sure what to make of his performance, as while he's not a terrible Freddy Krueger stand-in (to the point that they literally have his face start melting towards the end), there's something forced and kind of sad about forcing a 50-year-old man to fart out endless corny one-lines like "let's put...the pedal to the metal, as they saaaaaay."  Sometimes he seems to be having fun and other times he's just embarrassed to be there.

At any rate, Assa kills the woman via college drama club stalactite (no, really, but it's not as cool as you think), but is arrested.  We find out he's been calling the 976-EVIL hotline, and has the hots for his student assistant, who is also the police commissioner's daughter.  We don't know if these two character traits are connected, as this movie (wisely, as far as I'm concerned) skips the original film's plot about being driven evil by the hotline, so we never know if Assa was just a prick, or if he was corrupted by insane phone fees.  The script doesn't help, as there are a few scenes where Assa is all tender and friendly to his assistant, and other times he's all "gonna eat ur soul lol."

Assa quickly gains REAL ULTIMATE POWER, being able to astral project himself, which in this film means really awkward scene within a scene effects.  One curious part of 976-EVIL II is that really virtually every special effect that isn't an exploding car is something from one frame going into another.  Or whatever you call it.  I'm not Tom Savini.

They really should have called the movie We Bought This Greenscreen, We're Going to Use It Goddamnit.

Unfortunately, there's not alot of kill scenes in this movie.  We have:

1.  Assa killing the drunk janitor who witnessed the murder by holding him in front of a semi (with a fairly satisfying gib explosion)
2. A prosecutor, Monique Gabrielle (that chick that got naked in Bachelor Party and Deathstalker II, but not here, hmmmmmmm) having her car possessed and exploding after a really long sequence of her running into other cars.
3. Some dead policemen.

There's actually one more scene, but god help me, it's probably one of the most creative I've seen in a long time.  Don't worry, no explanation is needed here.

Some notes here (AFTER YOU WATCHED IT DON'T PEEK):

1. The decision to hide the awkward effects via black and white is pretty clever. 
2. The subsequent scene was creepy enough that I didn't even mind that the movie was totally wrong when it had the girl say that the end of the movie had the zombies breaking into the farmhouse and eating everyone.
3. I especially didn't mind when they even included the driving gloves from Barbara's brother on one of the zombies reaching from the door.

I'm bewildered by this scene.  In a movie with almost no competence whatsoever, you get an honest to god clever tribute to a horror classic with almost nothing to complain about.  Unfortunately, it's probably the only thing five minutes in this film worth anyone's time.

Aside from Assa, everyone is just bad.  Main girl is bad.  They actually got the biker dude, Spike, from the first film, but I don't know if he was this awful before or what but it's a damned good thing he basically does nothing useful for ninety minutes aside from wearing alot of leather and sharing a scene with Brigitte Nielsen as an occult specialist, which goes about as you'd expect it to when the actors are wearing stuff like this:

The real kicker is the ending.  Everything culminates with the girl trying to kill Assa while Spike's motorcycle fights Assa's astral projection's semi-truck (with more predictable results).  Both fail, and Assa chases the girl to some rocky seacoast and then Spike's Astral projection appears and knocks Assa over the cliff but then they kiss and Spike turns into space dust.

Dumb, but all right.  All we want is a good twist ending.  You ready?  The police come, and ask the girl who killed Assa.  She says Spike, but her dad says Spike died an hour ago.  Then she's arrested for killing Assa.  As she's loaded onto the ambulance, handcuffed, camera pans right to show a phone booth.  RING RING FUCK YOU AUDIENCE THE END.

I'd probably be alot meaner towards this movie if not for that death scene.  I'm not sure I would have hated it per se even then, since it's not like it's trying to be anything more than horror movie junk, but at the same time, it's trying so hard to be that junk I'm not sure what to think.  Reverse ambition?  Maybe I just need to call a helpline or something.