SEPTEMBER 29, 2013

GENRE: GHOST
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Being a "credits guy" (if you don't recall, doing titles on stuff is how I make my living), I tend to pay attention to them more than I should, which can sometimes affect how I look at the movie. For example, if I didn't notice that Aberration's female star also wrote the screenplay, I could just shrug off scenes where characters tell her she's beautiful, and chalk up the fact that she seems a bit too old to be playing a high school student to the usual strange casting decisions that plague horror movies like this. But knowing that SHE HERSELF was behind a script where she (23-24 years old at the time of production) was a 17 year old that found herself desired by two handsome fellas, I can't help but roll my eyes a bit. Not to mention have flashbacks to Soultaker (from MST3k) and Kiss Of The Vampire, both of which had the same problem.

I mean, sure, it's better than writing yourself as an ugly jerk that no one wants, but it just feels a bit self-serving, and twice as bad when you're too old to be playing the role. Why couldn't she just set the film in a college? I could buy her as a senior, even a junior, but when there's a scene where her mother accuses of her of having a beer, it feels a bit silly. And when the climax rolls around, and the killer is explaining that he just killed his own girlfriend so he can finally be with her because she's so beautiful and perfect (while mocking her boyfriend's own obsession with her), I can't help but wonder if this was some sort of Twilight fanfic that got turned into a movie somehow.

Of course, if that was the case they'd be pretty impressively ahead of the curve. Despite just hitting DVD now, the movie was copyright in 2006, a full two years before the first Twilight movie (and barely into the book's run), so that can't be it. No, it's actually an attempt to join the sort of movies that were in vogue at the time it was produced; namely: J-horror remakes and ripoffs. Our heroine keeps seeing a little ghostly boy with blackened out eyes, and eventually has to determine if he's friend or foe while solving the mystery of his death - same as any half dozen others adapted or directly ripped off from our Eastern brothers. So it's actually kind of helpful that it's been collecting dust for a while - it actually comes across as retro now. If it was actually new they probably would have done it found footage.

And admittedly, it's not THAT bad, as these things go. The mystery isn't terrible in theory, but it unfortunately does take a while to kick in, as the script keeps dragging its heels with bland teen drama (no one in town likes her boyfriend! Mom works a lot!) and the sort of scares we've all seen a million times. We know it concerns some years old tragedy that no one wants to talk about, but the entire thing is solved by a trip to the library where Kristy does a quick Google and finds out the whole story from like two articles - the movie could have been over in 20 minutes if she thought to check the internet sooner. Plus, we know the boyfriend is innocent, because duh, so all the time spent on trying to cast suspicion on him just feels like a waste of everyone's time - it'd be like if Nightmare on Elm Street spent the entire runtime with Rod saying "I didn't do it!" and Nancy not sure whether or not to believe him, and only finding out about Freddy's existence with 10 minutes of the movie left.

I also have to admit I was surprised to discover it was shot in the United States (Wisconsin, to be precise). I heard more than one "abOOT" and the male characters are seemingly all on the local hockey team, so I thought for sure this was a Canadian production (that the sheriff's American flag patch on his uniform was reversed didn't help matters any). That it was so steeped in local businesses and seemingly populated only with local actors (I didn't recognize a single person, though I will keep an eye out for the lovely Bobbi Jean Basche who played the best friend) gave it a fun "Let's put on a show" vibe I don't see too often anymore (especially since everything is secluded, claustrophobic found footage movies). Sure, you know that the over-gestating extra is probably someone's uncle, but there's a charm to that sort of thing, and when you add in the fact that it's practically a relic, I couldn't help but be somewhat endeared to the whole thing.

The credits list a "Behind the scenes director" or something of that nature, but that will be lost to the ages - the DVD is completely featureless save for the scene selection (not even subtitles, which I discovered when I thought I heard a character say he was inviting over his male friends for "some porn and shit" - three rewinds later I realized it was "SUPPORT and shit", referring to their friend who had recently died). The movie is shockingly low on online information as well; usually these long-shelved movies tend to turn up a 3-4 year old posting of its trailer and an IMDb post saying "Where the hell IS IT?", but there's absolutely nothing about it older than 2 months ago - not even a goofy "Hollywood comes to Wisconsin!" type news article about its production. It's as if the movie was made in total secrecy and then time traveled to this year in time to be released for the Halloween season, where it should make a fine Redbox rental for your 14 year old's slumber party (there's no rating, but it's PG-13 equivalent).

What say you?

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MARCH 28, 2013

GENRE: ASIAN, GHOST
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Every Thursday, landscapers come and drown out everything for about three hours, and if I have the morning off that's when I'd be watching my daily horror movie. So I try to stick to foreign films when that happens, because I'll be reading anyway and thus don't mind if I can't actually hear a few lines, rather than keep turning up the volume and hoping that I don't blow out my speakers. And I have had my eye on The Hotel!! for a while now, as it was from Thailand but sounded more like a slasher movie, which could be interesting (plus it was 108 minutes, making it a tough sell), so I made today "the day" as, well, I won't have to worry about the landscapers for an obligatory horror movie on Thursdays anymore.

Sadly, the slasher element only lasts for the first couple of kills; the film switches gears and focuses more on typical ghostly revenge plotting, with the kills taking on a more ridiculous, Final Destination type of approach - one guy is pinned down by shards of glass before a final one lops off his head, a far cry from the simple stabbing that had occurred 20 minutes or so before. The ghost story isn't bad, but as a slasher fan, AND as someone who has seen enough pissed off Asian ghosts to last a lifetime, I wish it didn't take such a familiar route to tell its story of a bunch of siblings who inherit a hotel and then try to figure out what's going on when guests and renovators start dropping like flies shortly thereafter. Maybe it's because the You're Next trailer just hit today (at long last!) but I was kind of into the idea of someone targeting a family for some reason to be revealed, with lots of slashing, but no - we actually find out who the bad guy is at like the halfway point.

And that's problematic, because even if you're way more excited about ghosts than slashers, the movie really starts to drag in the 2nd half, with an endless flashback scene explaining why he's so pissed off and an overlong, action-lite finale where the ghost makes his case to the woman he still loves. There's also a silly bit where the survivors are flushed out to the ocean as the hotel crumbles, which is really pushing things. I don't know what I like less - 70 minute movies that are stretched to 80 with credits and other filler, or 90 minute movies that are stretched to 108 by dragging their damn heels and not knowing when to quit.

There's also some jarring tonal shifts, particularly surrounding a cop who is investigating one of the earliest murders and sticks around for a while. He acts all goofy at times, but other times he feels like he can almost be the movie's hero (shades of The Guard Post), so I never knew what to make of him. There's one brother (or cousin? I couldn't quite get a grasp on the family tree) who is introduced as the idiot they all love to tease, but then he never displays much of that behavior again. At times it felt like a Dark Shadows movie, where there were all these characters fighting for screentime because they were important and the fans would be mad if they weren't there, except as far as I know The Hotel!! is a standalone movie.

Oh, the exclamation points. Only one appears on the poster, but IMDb and the on-screen subtitle give us two, and I'll be damned if I can explain either of them. I can assume the second one on the movie was just a subtitling error, because there are plenty of those - verb tenses and the like are atrocious, and sometimes words are just skipped entirely; I think he means "hotels" when a character says "because Lots of large have been build there", though why he felt the need to capitalize "Lots" is still a mystery. Bad subtitles always confuse me - someone's being paid for this, right? Can't they find someone who can understand both languages to do it, instead of handing a guy the script and hoping his word for word translation gets the gist of it? It's fine for a Hong Kong movie consisting primarily of guys punching and kicking each other, but when it's a plot/character driven film like this, it'd be nice if they could put a little more effort into it.

For all its problems though, I will defend it for one bit at around the halfway point, when a cat suddenly lands on the table between a few characters in the middle of a discussion. It's identical to 2895 other cat scares you've seen, but one guy demands an explanation - he first points out that no one owns a cat, and when that is explained by the cop (he suggests one of the renovators brought it with him), another guy backs him up, pointing out that there's no tree near the window for the cat to have jumped from. In all these years, I think the only other cat gag that had this much thought put into it was the intentional spoof of such things on Community, which doesn't count. But sadly it's also what kicks the ghost story into full gear, so it's also the beginning of the end of my enjoyment of the movie. Oh well. I've seen worse, but I'm not surprised it's so obscure (zero user reviews/board posts, and only a single external review - in German! - on the IMDb), either.

What say you?

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MARCH 15, 2013

GENRE: GHOST (or) PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Fun fact: I actually own The Bunker because I wanted to save on parking. During my last trip home to Boston, I had parked in a garage that was pretty pricey but not TOO bad if you got a validation, but I was just meeting a friend at Dunkin Donuts which didn't offer validation (because why would you park at an expensive garage to get cheap coffee?). So I went into Newbury Comics and looked at the cheap DVDs until I found something that would work for HMAD, coming across this previously unheard of WWII based horror flick that seemed to be from England based on the cast (Eddie Marsan, Jack Davenport, Jason Flemyng, etc).

But it also had a bunch of bonus features, which meant it kept getting conveniently passed over for Netflix Instant or featureless movies over the past few months. But with the site ending soon, I figured it was a "now or never" type thing, since I bought it specifically to watch for HMAD - after all, if it was as good as Deathwatch or Below, I would have heard of it by now, right?

Alas, my assumption was correct. It was fine, but like those others (which were all in production around the same time, so I suspect no shenanigans) it leaves some things vague but certainly seems to suggest that it's the soldiers' own guilty consciences that are responsible for all the terrible things that happen, and nothing overtly supernatural. So it kind of just follows what is almost a template at this point: they get pinned down or seek refuge in a seemingly abandoned base/bunker, find evidence or a survivor of a previous thing that happened there, someone dies, accusations fly, one soldier begins exerting too much authority... there's something really off-putting about watching a movie that's supposed to be keeping you guessing and in the dark and yet knowing almost exactly how it will play out.

So I had to keep trying to forget those other movies and judge it on its own, and when I succeeded I could see that it was a pretty solid entry in this sub-genre. The terrific cast helps: in addition to Marsan, Flemyng, and Davenport (familiar character actors I quite like), there's Andrew Tiernan (who was in the recent WWII horror War of the Dead as well) as the requisite "hardass who becomes a tyrant/murderer" soldier, and some other guys I recognize as well. And whoever did the opening titles was wise enough to put them in alphabetical order, so there was no obvious hero or "He's billed at the top so he'll be around the longest" giveaways; indeed, I thought for sure Davenport was going to be the hero only for him to be one of the first to die (which bummed me out, because that guy's voice has me questioning my sexuality. Seriously, best British accent ever).

I do think they kind of tip their hat a bit too early, showing brief flashbacks throughout the film that eventually spell out what's going on - but it's pretty easy to tell from the first that they clearly participated in some pretty terrible war crimes and now it's coming back to bite them on the ass. Director Rob Green could have been a little more vague/subtle with the first couple of flashes if he didn't want us to know yet that these were not upstanding soldiers, though I suppose he might want us think that it might be the actual ghost (or a zombie) seeking revenge in the present, with my "it's always in their head" knowledge tipping the scales.

But they certainly get the atmosphere down pat; they were only in the bunker for about 5 minutes before I started feeling uneasy about it, and the confusing geography is actually a benefit, not a hindrance (I'll give Green the benefit of the doubt and say that this was intentional). There's a pretty good bit where two groups of the soldiers are firing at each other, thinking the other is the enemy Americans - it's actually perfectly plausible since the place is so hard to get a handle on. Oh, no, that wasn't a typo - the heroes here are German soldiers, thankfully not weighed down with silly accents (though the fact that they're all British makes it a bit confusing to an American - we know they're not US but it's hard to remember they're our opponents - if you miss the setup or don't recognize their uniforms, you might think it's a British force and wonder why they're scared of the Americans). I actually wish there was more of the war stuff; it's not often we see them from the German (NOT Nazi, though one seems to be OK with their practices) point of view, and it's easy for us to forget that they were just defending their country same as we were. There isn't much characterization at all, which is a bummer - it's that sort of thing that could have helped elevate this a notch or two above "Yeah, pretty good."

I overpaid for the DVD though; in addition to a terrible non-anamorphic transfer, the bonus features are pretty worthless. The making of is OK since it mostly focuses on the actors joking around in between takes (Flemyng is pretty hilarious), and again, I liked a lot of them from other, later projects so it was fun to see them in their younger days. And it has some stuff on the creation of the bunker set, and I always like that sort of thing. But the two deleted scenes wouldn't have helped the movie any, and lack any context for where they would have been in the film or why they were cut, and the trailer is pretty bland. And the commentary is a complete waste of time; apart from explaining (repeatedly) that they didn't often have time to film things the way they would have liked, most of it is simply Green or one of his partners (I couldn't tell their voices apart) saying "That's a nice shot", or saying nothing at all. They mention early on that it's been a while since they've watched the movie, but when you have three participants on a track, there's no excuse for as much silence as you have to endure here. If you absolutely loved the movie, you might find some of it interesting, but otherwise just play it over your favorite bits and hope that they say something interesting about them.

I really should take another look at Below. I haven't exactly been hiding the fact that the site will still be up and operational (just not updated daily), so it'd be a good one to do when I have time again (it's been over two years since I did a non canon review just for fun, not because I had to review a disc I was sent). I keep saying "Not as good as Below!" but it's been so long that maybe my opinion of it has become a bit inflated - I hope that's not the case. Hopefully The Bunker will get a better release someday; it's enjoyable but not good enough to put up with that hideous transfer unless you're still rocking a 4:3 TV.

What say you?

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