Screenhead

It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a review of a movie like The Fourth Kind because it’s not really a movie so much as it is an agenda.

Clearly, someone desperately wants us to believe that what we’re seeing is actually really really REALLY REAL, and won’t be satisfied until, my guess is, we start pestering our Congress critters for answers.  I’m not sure.  Because I’ve never left a movie so utterly confused, and I’ve seen David Croenenburg movies.

This one follows Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler, who is played by Milla Jovovich, who actually TELLS us that’s what she’ll be doing in the beginning of the movie.  And we’ll be following her around as she conducts a sleep disorder study on the people of Nome, Alaska.  Now, Nome is downright infamous for being hard to reach, but apparently it’s also got a serious missing persons problem, and it’s somehow become the FBI travel destination of choice, garnering over two thousand official visits when neighbor Anchorage, who has something like seventy times the population, rates only about three hundred visits in that same time frame.

Now, it’s hard to tell at first glance just how much of this is real and how much of it so utterly fake as to be a complete pantload, because the movie is trying so very desperately hard to convince us that EVERYTHING WE SEE IS HAPPENING FOR REALS, YO, by virtue of running split screen so often I thought I was watching 24.  They’ll do two splits and three splits and four splits and four splits with rotating frames.  It got to the point where I wondered, is this a movie or a Final Cut Pro demo?  And they’ll run, almost ad nauseum, “real footage” alongside footage of the actors, to try and cement that belief.

I’ll freely admit that this is some creepy stuff–when that guy started levitating I got a little freaked out, and Abigail Tyler “herself” under hypnosis was a cold chill up my spine but do I believe this actually went down?  No.

See, one great line from the movie that manages to describe the movie in its entirety is where one of the “patients” is muttering that he’s okay, and “Dr. Tyler” swings in with “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”  And that’s exactly what I thought of this movie.  Yes, okay, you’re going to RELENTLESSLY show me this “real footage” and insist, as loudly and vociferously as possible that it’s real, and frankly, I kind of doubt it.

Folks, this has allegedly been going on since the year 2000.  But somehow it took almost TEN YEARS for someone to exploit it?  Come ON.  We’re talking about a Hollywood scene so desperate that TWO GARFIELD MOVIES looked like a good idea but we’ve got allegedly actual footage of a woman shrieking that she’s god in SUMERIAN and NO ONE’S ran with that ball yet?

The Screenhead Ten Scale joins me in a dismissive back of hand “bah” to this creepy but horrendously disjointed fright fest and acknowledges that the idea is pretty scary but forces my suspension of disbelief engines to glow white hot and give off an ominous whining noise.  Thus, it hands this incredulous horror romp a five out of ten for being creepy yet not even vaguely credible.

No, really.

There’s a short film on YouTube–in retrospect it never should have been this big of a surprise–called The Horribly Slow Murderer With The Extremely Inefficient Weapon.

And as Jack Cucchiaio finds himself running from his life from the poorly armed maniac, he finds himself in a race against time–an extremely slow race, granted, but a race nonetheless!–to find out the truth behind this killer before the killer can finish his deadly, extremely long term, project.

I about laughed myself stupid watching this.  Seriously–these are guys who know their horror movies, because they’re frantically mocking virtually every convention ever involved in a horror movie.  Watching this horribly slow murder go down was just hilarious.  And yet at the same time, a little creepy.  They really knew what they were doing, and so I recommend it openly.  The movie itself actually drags on, much like the killing itself.

So does the Screenhead Ten Scale, which knows a laugh when it sees it.  Short film or no, this is hilarious stuff and absolutely deserves its eight out of ten.

On behalf of Overture Films, Screenhead presents a new production still featuring Radha Mitchell from The Crazies, starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Danielle Panabaker and Joe Anderson.  Quite a bit has been posted here about The Crazies, which opens February 26, 2010. 

The story is about a small town where everything is safe and happy…until suddenly it isn’t. In a terrifying tale of the “American Dream” gone horribly wrong, four friends find themselves trapped in their hometown in The Crazies, a reinvention of the George Romero classic directed by Breck Eisner from a screenplay by Ray Wright (Pulse, Case 39) and Scott Kosar (The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

I am NOT a huge fan of Jack Ketchum’s work.  Ever since I saw The Lost–in which only I really lost, about ninety minutes of my life and a sinking feeling that someone somehow was making a living at writing torture porn–I looked at pretty much everything he did with a sinking suspicion.

So when I settled in with a copy of Offspring, one of the newest parts of the Ghost House Underground collection, which the folks at Lions Gate sent my way, I wasn’t expecting much good to come of it.  Were my suspicions met?  You’ll find out directly.

First, the plot.  We’re going back to Maine, a land that Stephen King pretty much managed to convert almost singlehandedly into the horror capitol of the world.  But the town of Dead River is playing host to a secret that even King might have had a hard time swallowing–a clan of flesh-eating monstrosities that propagates seemingly entirely by abduction.  And when the local sheriff is forced to step in and deal with them, he’s reminded all too clearly of the last time he took these killers on.

This one is, somewhat, different.  In fact, “graphically screwed up” might be a better term.  In fact, if you want to get an idea of what it’s like, imagine Clan of the Cave Bear intermingled with The Hills Have Eyes.  And you’ll be mostly horrified, but at the same time, you’ll be so catastrophically weirded out by the whole thing that you’ll scarcely know what to think.  Watching these dirt people tear apart actual humans and eat flesh is…well…it’s not the kind of thing you’ve seen lately, I guarantee that.

It’s graphic, it’s violent, it’s grotesque in the absolute…but it IS unique.  And that definitely gives it at least a point in its favor.  But the sheer horrendousness of the content leaves it difficult to recommend.

It’s downright painful to be looking at a movie that’s the most unique thing I’ve seen in a good while, but have it be so thoroughly repugnant that it’s tough to recommend.  It’s really just painful.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shares my consternation and hands The Offspring a thoroughly confused five out of ten.  It’s too unique to not bear mentioning, but it’s too downright vulgar to encourage anyone to watch.

See, I knew it.  I knew this was coming.  I knew that, somehow, Katie Featherston was going to burst onto the scene as, at the very least, the flavor of the week in Hollywood after the incredible success of Paranormal Activity.

One, she’s pretty good.  Two, that movie did unbelievably well.  But it’s actually one of the ballsiest things I’ve ever seen to consider what her next movie is.  It’s either phenomenal brilliance, stupidity or hubris for them to retitle Featherston’s next movie from Walking Distance to…

…Experimental Activity.

No, really.  They changed the title from “Walking Distance” to “Experimental Activity” JUST BECAUSE of Paranormal Activity.  Oh, sure, they’re downplaying the title change in interviews, but you know and I know and the half-blind family DOG knows that’s why they did it.

I’ve heard about…Experimental Activity…and it sounds like a pretty awesome movie regardless.  The question of the day, of course, is will more people follow because of the change…or in spite of it?

You’ve got to give the crew behind Creeper a little credit for effort–they recorded all their own music to add onto this three minute short film. It’s too bad that that’s pretty much the only area in which they succeeded.

In this one, a young man finds himself running afoul of some random monster or possibly human that sounds like he’s been chain-smoking rope since the eighties.  Anyway, this human / monster thing is dispatched to kill the young man for some reason, but we don’t know what that reason is.  All we know is, his time is UP.

And yes, the musical score is pretty nifty, but what they forgot to do was actually make a movie.  There’s no coherent plot here outside of some fart noises on voice mail and a guy getting killed for no clear reason.  I’m not even sure whether the guy that did the killing was a man or a monster.  And what’s with all the coughing?  The movie was actually TOO short, leaving a lot of its issues unresolved.

There are a great many questions that I don’t have answers to because Creeper didn’t bother to create them.

The Screenhead Ten Scale respects the musical side of this whole short endeavor, but at the same time, can’t help but be a little unsettled by the fact that there’s not much of a, you know, MOVIE here.  It thusly hands out a three out of ten.

So Lions Gate has brought up a bit of that old retro horror with the rerelease of The Gate, now out on DVD. And as always, the question we’re out to tackle today is, is it worth your rental dollar?

The plot is a little convoluted, and basically requires you to suspend disbelief like no tomorrow.  But after an old tree is pulled out of a suburban family’s backyard, it’s left a whole lot of trouble in its wake.  Like a load of fairly valuable geodes.  And a reeking pit in the backyard that just happens to be full of demons.  TINY demons.

And now it’s left to the kids of the suburban family to take on the horde of tiny demons that have burst forth from the hole in the backyard.

See, this may sound just plain old loopy to horror buffs of the modern era, but this kind of thing happened ALL THE TIME in eighties horror flicks, especially ones that carried that malign PG-13 rating, the rating usually reserved for half-baked slasher flicks today.

And frankly, it IS loopy.  How do we discover what’s going on under the surface?  Simple–the characters learn about it from the album cover of a heavy metal band from “Europe”, and more than likely, from Finland.  Because as we all know now, thanks to Metalocalypse and the various Lordi incursions, Finland and metal go together like peanut butter and jelly.

The farther in you get in this thing, the steadily more insane the whole thing gets.  In fact, it’s like that loopy uncle of yours that lives in the attic and won’t stop screaming about how the government’s putting mind control suicide chips in the flouride in the water–it’s absolutely insane, and yet at the same time, it’s also entertaining in a creepy sort of way.

If you’re up for a history lesson, then The Gate will provide it.  If you just want a creepy and fun little movie with some occasional scares, then The Gate will provide that too.

The Screenhead Ten Scale can’t help but give due props to this piece of the past, and thus issues a seven out of ten for being fun, even if absolutely looney.

When a film company titles itself Mediocre Films, it’s hard to tell whether you should expect their work to be good or expect to be, well, mediocre.  But today’s short film, a fairly interesting piece from Mediocre entitled Trick or Treat, is at least fairly good.

Two guys are hanging out in one of their houses and talking about movies they should make when they get the idea to make a documentary.   Wondering who would make the best documentary target, they hit on a random stranger hanging around outside the house who knocks on the door with one message–trick or treat.  But when we find out more about the random stranger, we discover that he brings plenty of trouble in his trick or treat bag.

It’s hard to tell where Trick or Treat is going, primarily because it makes almost no sense at all for most of its six minute run time.  By the time it gets to the horror part of the show, you’re so abjectly lost that literally anything could happen.  This is actually an interesting effect as most horror flicks like to telegraph their punches from the word go, but this one will keep you guessing.

In fact, if you can stay interested until the very end, you’ll likely discover that the whole thing makes a lot more sense looking back than going forward, and that’s a lot like life itself.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this strange analogy for life itself a six out of ten–it’s confusing, yes, but it’s also funny and just a bit creepy, and that’s a great combination.

I don’t know where to begin telling you how HORRIBLE an idea this is.

See, there was something I noticed long, long ago that I quickly developed into a law of horror movies.  Ouija Boards Are Always Bad News.

I thought it was strange that, pretty much every time one of them was used in a horror flick, it was only a matter of time before someone got haunted, possessed or just plain old dead outright. And upon further investigation, I discovered that  Ouija boards were roundly condemned by–and you’re going to want to brace yourself for this:

1. Virtually every Christian group (no real surprise there)

2. Most every type of pagan

3. The paranormal research community

Look, under normal circumstances, getting these three to agree on ANYTHING is tougher than getting the Mossad and PLO to double-date (thank you Bruce Bethke!), so when they all agree on something you’d best pay attention.

And now I hear that Platinum Dunes is developing a movie around these?

Yeah, great work guys…I loved your movie the first time I saw it.  Back in the early nineties. When it was called Witchboard.  It had a SEQUEL, you jackasses.

Ouija, however, will be coming to theaters sometime in 2010, or so the current word goes.

In what may well be the single most ominous portent at the theaters in quite some time, apparently the only thing standing between us and Blair Witch 3 is Lions Gate.

See, they own the movie rights right now, so it’s their call as to whether or not the project goes anywhere.  But the current word is, that if it does actually go to a movie, that the original cast will be brought back (it’s not like they’re doing anything anyway except maybe Josh Leonard who occasionally shows up in direct to video horror but usually does at least a passable job, credit where credit is due), and they will continue on as if all our fondest dreams had come true and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows never actually existed.

Sigh…if only…

While I have to admit that the thought of a third (really second) Blair Witch leaves me somewhat cold, I suppose it could possibly be good if done properly, but I don’t imagine it likely.  But the success of Paranormal Activity will likely not be lost on Lions Gate, and a shot at Paranormal Activity cash will be plenty welcome in a down economy.