Screenhead

I’ve sampled horror flicks from all around the world, and I’ve found that most of them have a pretty regional flavor to them.  The Japanese and Koreans, for example, love ghost flicks.  The Europeans favor the theme of man’s inhumanity to man.  And most horror I’ve come across from other lands is at least fairly good.  Joining the ranks of the best, however, is a little title from Poland, The 206.

It’s about a guy who wakes up in a stairwell, semi-conscious, unable to figure out what’s going on.  As he sets out to reconstruct his life, he finds out there more going on here than he realizes.

The best part about this one?  There’s NO DIALOGUE.  The story is being told entirely through the actor and through the background music, both of which are quite thoroughly awesome.  The ending, however, is somewhat unclear and can be interpreted several ways, something I never like.

However, the rest of the film is enough to wrangle a rare eight out of ten from the Screenhead Ten Scale, who was sufficiently on edge through most of it to appreciate its sheer Hitchcockian tendencies.

So Anchor Bay sent us out another in their long line of interesting titles the other day, and to that end, today we’re going to be talking The Forgotten.

Featuring Simon Baker from The Mentalist as a guy with a past revolving around some kind of bizarre Mexican death cult, he thinks he’s managed to move on…until his daughter goes missing.  And that’s when our boy finds himself neck deep in his past, going forth to attempt to find his missing daughter.

Admittedly, I found most of this movie pretty strange, and where it wasn’t strange it was just slow.  I got the feeling that I was missing large parts of it because I was completely lost by the subtext.  See, most of us really don’t know about or understand or even CARE about stuff like La Santa Muerte if it even actually exists.  But there are plenty of more subtle elements at work here–some deeper mystery aspects that make for a somewhat interesting title.

Sadly, though, there’s plenty of confusion here also, and that definitely doesn’t help things.  In fact, by the time it really gets interesting, it’s almost over. The ending is actually a pretty good twist, but it’s not really worth the trip.

The Screenhead Ten Scale looks at this slow, plodding wreck of a suspense movie, shakes its head in sorrow and hands it a five out of ten.  It’s nothing particularly bad yet it’s too dull and listless to be much of anything good, either.

Okay, on the off chance that you’re looking forward to the re-emergence of the Scream series in the form of Scream 4, then you’re not going to want to read what you’re about to read.

It’s a HUGE spoiler alert.  Huge.

Apparently, there’s at least some chance–and this comes from writer Kevin Williamson–that Sydney may not live past the end credits.  Quoth Williamson:

“The thing about ‘Scream 4′ is that there are a lot of twists and turns, so I can’t promise anything,” he told PopWrap about Sidney’s role in the fourth film now that Neve will return. “There are a lot of moving pieces, so we’ll see — but if you’re a ‘Scream’ fan, I think you’re really going to like it.”

Now, the most disconcerting part about this is that it’s so very feasible.  See, Neve Campbell was essentially the weak link in this particular chain, and for a while it was unsure that she’d even come back at all.  It’s entirely possible that, at this point, Neve agreed to come back…one more time.

And that means they’d need to get rid of her.  What better way than to write her out?  It’ll be a good long while before we find out either way, but you know we’ll fill you in when we know!

One of the single most terrifying concepts in the world is evil children.

Children epitomize–or at least are supposed to epitomize–the concept of innocence in the world.  And the thought of something turning children into murderous sociopathic little monsters is chilling beyond all reason.  The thought of having to defend yourself against children inherently makes your mind rebel.  Children are to be protected, not to be protected FROM!

And that’s exactly the trope that’ll be riding us in The Children, last, and ultimately best, of the newest round of the Ghost House Underground series.  Lions Gate sent a copy on and it’s a downright peach.

Basically, it’s about what I said–it’s a family Christmas celebration, and all seems about as normal as can be when the kids, for reasons that are utterly unexplained, turn into murderous psychopaths.  And they’re utterly gleeful about the transformation, too.

What follows is about an hour of harrowing, terrifying mayhem as the children go from normal fun loving tykes to monsters that make the children from Village of the Damned look like an ad for Romper Room.

Frankly,  I cant remember the last time I saw the “killer kid” trope played this well.  Orphan?  Nah, not hardly.  These kids would eat that crazy little tot ALIVE.  It’s a whole new standard for killer kids run amok. They’re devious, they’re careful, they plot like…like…well, probably like ROMULANS, I can’t even get them an earthly equivalent.

And when you put these horrendous little child nightmares in a blender with some oblivious adults and one rebellious teenage girl who gets the picture WAY before anyone else, the end result is a horror flick on par with some of the greats.  Granted, the explanations as to WHY this all is happening is flimsier than wet tissue in a windstorm, but hey!  It’s still pretty creepy!

The Screenhead Ten Scale’s already pricing shotguns and hands up a whomping eight out of ten for being some pure-T horrendous horror filmmaking, guaranteed to scare just about anyone.  Watch this on a winter night with someone you love and watch them hit the birth control.

So we’re back in with another round of Ghost House Underground’s newest releases, and this time we’re tackling The Thaw, which Lions Gate dropped me a copy of.

The carcass of a woolly mammoth is exposed in a polar ice cap, and a team of researchers–okay, more like a bunch of college kids and their ecology professor–heads out to excavate and investigate.  But what they’ll find buried in the ice is a whole lot more than science.  They’ll find a parasite thought long extinct, and the students have only two, equally horrible, options remaining to them:  either establish a quarantine that will kill them all, or set loose a pandemic the likes of which the world has never seen.

I know, sounds freaky, doesn’t it?  And by itself, it definitely is.  The only remaining question, of course, is how well does it WATCH?

Okay, first off?  This sucker’s going to be REALLY heavy handed with its eco-trippy crunchy granola we’re-all-killing-the-planet-by-breathing message.  I mean REALLY heavy handed.  It’s like the new gold standard for smug.  If you hate environmentalism excelsior then this movie will give you hives.

Second, it’s just INCREDIBLY awesome that they got THE Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) from The X-Files involved.  I’m prepared to forgive a whole lot of preaching for that little cameo, and it’s a good thing too, because they will do a LOT of preaching.

Third, global warming is weak sauce science at best, and no one can conclusively prove this isn’t part of a normal cycle so NYEAH.

Anyway, the end result is a movie that’s actually got a few good scares on it, but also couches those scares in a lot of environmentalism nonsense.  It’s hard to be scared when you’re bored, and it’s easy to get bored when you’re being preached at relentlessly by a movie.  They had a wonderfully scary idea–pandemic movies are great fun because they’re often survival horror-based and, let’s face it, anyone can get sick.

There is a pretty good twist ending that’s actually a really nifty surprise, even if it too is heavy handed.

The Screenhead Ten Scale agrees with me that this might have been scarier if it weren’t so ham-fisted about its message, and thus gives it a six out of ten.

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.

Johnny Depp may join Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, a film that is experiencing many, many casting and directing changes – yet is set for production this February.   

If Depp joined Jolie, he would play an American tourist drawn into a web of intrigue and danger by a female Interpol agent (Jolie) as she attempts to locate a criminal who was once her lover.

You may be asking yourself, wait…I thought Sam Worthington was playing this part or Tom Cruise.  You’re thoughts are correct but changes happen in the film biz fast and furious.  Even Charlize Theron was attached to play Jolie’s part.

I am not sure about all the directors, but Alfonso Curaron is at the head of the line to take on this juicy and plum gig.

I like the idea of Depp and Jolie working together on a spy thriller. Don’t you?

(Source)

Remember how, when I wrote about The Haunting of Winchester House, how GREAT I thought it was that The Asylum was finally getting out of the mockbuster trend and no longer Asylumizing movies?

Sadly, that’s all gone as The Asylum releases 2012 Supernova, which is pretty much taking on 2012.  The only problem is that, of course, The Asylum doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the cash required to make those kind of special effects.

The plot, though, is actually pretty interesting–two hundred years ago, a star exploded and launched an enormous wave of radiation.  Sadly, two hundred years ago was apparently during the War of 1812, because it’s about to hit in much-popularized 2012.  So now a group of scientists is out to launch a whole load of nukes into the upper atmosphere so they can augment the Earth’s natural anti-radiation shielding.

I’ll admit, though, that The Asylum clearly does the best it can with what it has to work with.  What baffles me, though, is that they try to take on this monster projects with the most minimalist budgets you can imagine.  It’s like trying to eat a Ho-Ho the size of a Buick, and doing it with a knife and fork.

The result, however, of trying to load a bunch of AA batteries in a space designed for a Diehard is that the whole thing has this vaguely repetitive feel in which a simulated disaster happens, then we react to that disaster, then another one happens, and so on and so forth without much in the way of an overarching plotline to hold it all together.

There will be plenty of thrills here–watching people try to escape from things blowing up and whatnot–but are these thrills going to be enough to hold the overall picture together?  Well, that’s your call, in the end.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile,  isn’t so impressed and thus hands the newest Asylum knockoff a fair enough five out of ten.  it clearly tried, but it just couldn’t tackle what it set out to try.

Young man as a wolf is something to behold. Don’t you think? 

The more I see Taylor Lautner with his pack of wolves the more I am interested in the Twilightmovies — owooooo!

Ridley Scott is one BUSY individual.  But let’s face facts–the man’s got like thirty hojillion projects in the works right now, so his announcement that he’s considering an Alien prequel needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  A grain of salt about, say, the size of a Buick.

But he’s clearly been thinking it over, and even has some possible strategies.  Dig the word:

“It’s a brand new box of tricks. We know what the road map is, and the screenplay is now being put on paper. The prequel will be a while ago. It’s very difficult to put a year on Alien, but [for example] if Alien was towards the end of this century, then the prequel story will take place thirty years prior.”

There are possibilities here.  After all, I seem to remember that one of the earliest parts of Alien described an alien ship that crash-landed on LV 426.  Checking Wikipedia confirms my scattered memories, so a great point for an Alien prequel would be, what is that ship, and how did it get jam-packed with xenomorphs?

Of course, it’s a fair bet that that’s a Predator ship that was seeding the planet for use as a hunting ground, so they may have already kinda sorta covered that already.  Still though, I find myself plenty interested in where they’re looking to go with this one.