Screenhead

New Moon.

Yeah, I know, I’m pretty bummed out about it myself.  At the rate this thing is going it’s going to DWARF the original Stoker.  Dracula is going to get pushed out by…Team Edward.

A little part of me just died typing that.

But it’s no less true for my squeamishness.  The number one pre-selling title of all time, at least as far as Fandango goes, is New Moon.  In fact, at the rate it’s going, there’s a good chance that theater owners will be resorting to little-known techniques like interlocking the reels to reduce the length of show times, or even running continuous loop showtimes, in which there’s no, or at least a minimum of, time between shows to get the most possible in a day.

One way or another, this thing is going to be one of the biggest movies of the year.  The Twifans have already bought their tickets and there will be virtually no competition on that weekend.  The only alternative is Planet 51 and a handful of limited release titles.  Thus, there’s pretty much no way that New Moon won’t take top spot this weekend.

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.

I, unlike a whole lot of people, actually enjoyed one of the first films from WWE Entertainment, a movie studio that seems to exist for no other reason than to give wrestlers movie roles and try and make some quick bank.  And when Lions Gate put this sucker back on Blu-ray, it gave me just the opportunity I needed to start writing about it.

Today we’re talking See No Evil, a movie that acquaints you with Jacob Goodnight, played by massive man / mountain hybrid Kane, who won’t actually SAY anything through most of the movie, but you won’t really notice.  Goodnight, spurred on by a horrendous religious upbringing, went on to become the Hand of God killer, a serial killer who delighted in brutality and taking the eyes from his victims.  But when a bunch of juvenile detention subjects arrive at a run-down hotel in a bid to clean it to become a homeless shelter, for which they receive time served credit on their sentences, they’ll run afoul of the Hand of God, and most of them won’t survive.

One thing that See No Evil will do is make you actively hate it for introducing the well-known children’s Christian song, “Jesus Loves The Little Children”, into its proceedings.  There are some things that horror flicks just shouldn’t do, and bringing that song into things is just plain wrong.  I understand it was thematically necessary, given that Jacob Goodnight was a lunatic on par with the Westboro Baptist Church, only more apt to throw things, but still…surely they could’ve left the music out of it.

However, there’s a lot to like about this movie.  Kane is sufficiently menacing that he really doesn’t need lines, and the hotel they shot in is sufficiently run-down to project its own menace.  Plus there are all sorts of little hidey-holes and secret passages and whatnot to really add to the proceedings.  You don’t know who’s going to pop out of where and where they’ll do it next.  There’s even a taste of irony–check out what happens to the hippie chick who feeds a starving dog!  And, there’s a beautifully subverted trope in which someone’s cell phone actually works, much to their detriment.

Despite its problems, and they’re fairly minor, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives See No Evil a seven out of ten for its effectiveness as a thriller, even if it’s not exactly high brow.

If you really, REALLY, just couldn’t get enough of the movie Seven, then I’m somewhat happy to announce that you’ll get to enjoy a low-rent knockoff in the form of Horsemen, new from Lions Gate.

When a recently widowed detective finds himself forced to make ends meet between his detective work and his family, he ends up on the bad end of a murder spree focused around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  And as his family situation steadily deteriorates around him, the case only gets stranger and more horrifying.

Okay, okay–so it watches like a low-budget version of Seven, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Just because we don’t have Brad Pitt screaming about what’s in the box doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with Dennis Quaid being a mostly absentee father!

But it’s true–Horsemen is a fairly involving crime drama, but it does leave a lot of unpleasant plot holes.  Frankly, I wondered why they even bothered with the whole family thing at all–it’s not like it made much difference on the plot.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, hands this ambivalent crime thriller a four out of ten for not being too bad, but not being anything special, either.  Plus, being derivative is never helpful in these situations; if you’re going to rip someone else off, at least do it right.

This might be one of the biggest newsy bits we’ve had in quite some time, folks.  In fact, given who’s involved and what’s at stake this is a huge development.

The studio, at last report, is planning to move the movie Shutter Island from its original release date until sometime in 2010.  The reason given was due to the economy, but whether or not that’s the real case, no one knows.

Here’s the kicker: Shutter Island is a big name for a lot of reasons.  The first of which is its lead actor, Leonardo DiCaprio.  The second?  Its director is none other than the legendary Martin Scorsese. The first ever Martin Scorsese horror movie ever…got delayed a year.  Due to the economy.

Can anyone really imagine a Martin Scorsese movie tanking?  How about a Leo DiCaprio?  Put them both together and this should have spelled box office gold.  But why the delay?  Perhaps,  is there something worse than the economy afoot?  Is something seriously wrong with ShutterIsland?

Sadly, we don’t know.  But keep it here–you never know what we’ll find tomorrow.

Yes, I know that The Ninth Gate has been around for some time now, and reviewing it may seem a little out of the ordinary, but it’s getting a re-release on Blu-Ray, so it’s an opportune time to go back and visit this collectible from the vault.

Featuring Johnny Depp as unscrupulous (it’s the perfect term for him because they actually CALL him that in the movie) chain-smoking rare book dealer Dean Corso, who’s been contracted to find the last copies of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book that reputedly has the power to summon the devil himself.

This is not hyperbole.

That’s actually the plot in a nutshell right there, and in true Roman Polanski style (yes, he actually directed a Johnny Depp movie), it will be incomprehensible and occasionally frightening.  The Ninth Gate is an extremely dense work, and if you’re not big on rare books, chances are this is going to go skating right over you.  This is Cigarette Burns for the literati.

The question of course is, how game are you for a gigantic treasure hunt where the treasure is the most evil book known to mankind and the road to get it is littered with dead bodies.  As a horror movie, it’s not that scary, and as a thriller, there’s not much thrill here. It’s really rather sedate, for the most part, and won’t be throwing a whole lot of shocks at you.  But it does do a bang-up job of sheer foreboding, and in that sense it succeeds admirably.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, therefore, assigns the resurgent Blu-Ray title a seven out of ten for being a rather cold thriller that does still deliver, just not so much.

I admit, freely, that most of the reason that I enjoy the Saw series is because of the traps.  I’ve always been a sucker for amateur mechanical engineering, and watching everyday people build machines, whether they be for mowing the lawn or for dealing horrible pain and disfigurement to intruders, just makes me smile.

This is also why I enjoy the Home Alone series.

But I digress.

I finally managed to watch The Collector today, despite the fact that it’s in somewhat limited release, much to my sorrow.  And what I found was plenty of amateur mechanical engineering…almost too much.  More on that directly; but first, the plot!

In a desperate bid to pay off his wife’s loan sharks,  a burglar turned contractor turns back to burglary and targets a recent client, a jeweler.  But when he gets there and starts breaking into the safe containing a ruby the size of a human fist, he discovers that he’s not the only intruder.  But the other fella, he’s not out to take stuff…he’s out to take PEOPLE.  And, of course, messily and painfully dispatch anyone he DOESN’T want as part of his sadistic collection.  Now, the thief will have to turn hero in a bid to save the family he barely knows.

Like the title says above, you’re going to have to have a strong stomach if you want to see this one.  Most of the time, people don’t like to think about what an ordinary man can do with a pair of pliers if he’s sufficiently motivated.  The Collector will force you to consider that.  The Collector will ALSO force you to consider what that same man can do with rope and nails and screws and fish hooks and pretty much anything you can buy at Menard’s.  Except, of course, for the bear traps.  It’s criminally irresponsible to sell ANYONE half a dozen bear traps in this day and age.  I mean, seriously–didn’t this raise a red flag at the store?

And while I’m here, remember when I said it was almost too much amateur mechanical engineering?  It’s true.  I watched the thief stumble through a house where traps seemingly appeared by magic.  Windows that I hadn’t noticed were boarded up were suddenly, well, boarded up.  Extra locks requiring barrel keys sprouted on doors where there were none before.  I don’t know if I missed something or there was just a huge time lag, but narratively speaking, I don’t know where all this stuff came from.  It just shows up.

It’s hard to assign a ranking to a movie like this.  Clearly, this is for horror buffs only, and even they’re probably getting a little tired of seeing people tied to things and being cut open with little or no way to fight back.    Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale issues it a five out of ten for being a movie with niche appeal only, and even that beginning to weaken.

Normally I malign Wes Craven work like no tomorrow as lacking subtlety or anything that might make a halfway-decent storyline.  But even I will always thank him for one movie:  Scream.

Scream pretty much single-handedly pulled the horror movie genre out of a morass that threatened to destroy it back in the late nineties.  I remember those days.  They were DARK.  There were times when I thought there might never again be a horror movie, and when you’re in high school, that’s just a horrible thing to think.

But Scream managed to reinvigorate the genre by taking all the best tropes and putting them over the top.  Thus, any iteration of Scream gets a free pass with me, for what it did all those years ago.  And Scream 4, which may or may not include Neve Campbell, has been officially confirmed by both Kevin Williamson and David Arquette.

The script is still being written so you know it’ll be a while before we get the chance to see it.   I’m prepared to believe this might be good, and even if it isn’t, I’m prepared to, once again, give it a pass.

Normally, I hate vampire movies.  Why do I hate them?  Well, it’s not too hard to say why–most of them look exactly the same except for a handful of exceptions.  Blood Wars, meanwhile, proves why I hate this sort of thing.

Blood Wars puts a mild-mannered college student in the midst of a war between a group of vampires and a group of vampire-hunting warlocks.  The vampires have their own problems as members of the group vie for supremacy, but the hunters don’t seem to have these problems.

You can pretty much imagine where this goes–the vampires will act like pompous jackasses, their hunters will act like self-righteous jackasses and the random college kids that occasionally get involved will act like, well, jackasses.  Everyone in this movie is a complete jackass, and that makes me wonder why I’m even bothering to watch it.  It’s a horror movie that’s not scary, a thriller movie that has no thrills and a romance movie that falls flat.  And don’t even get me started on the waste of Tony Todd.  Seriously, don’t–you won’t like it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale takes this vampire movie that truly sucks to task and gives it a one out of ten.  Unless you’re up for wasting ninety minutes with the results of a vampire LARP so godawful that even college kids wouldn’t cop to it, there’s just no reason to even bother.

What happens when you give Vikings science fiction weaponry and send them to do battle with a creature straight out of a horror flick?

Well…it probably wouldn’t actually look much like Outlander, but hey; at least they tried!

Seriously, though–as glib as my description sounds, it’s actually not too far off from the truth.  An alien, played almost inexplicably by former Jesus analogue Jim Caviezel, flees an interstellar war only to land on Earth.  He’s crash landed on the shores of Norway, circa, oh, seven hundred AD or so.  But he’s brought company along for the ride–a huge murderous alien called the Moorwen, who immediately begins tearing holy hell out of the immediate Norwegian area.  Thus, it’s left to our alien buddy to recruit some good old fashioned Norse help and go hunt up the Moorwen before it turns Scandinavia into the biggest all you can eat buffet on Earth.

First off, as science fiction-based action epics go, Outlander is both terribly predictable and yet at the same time not bad for it.  It’s a lot like, say, Beowulf or The 13th Warrior or any of a dozen other hack-and-slays just like this except with the added twist of having aliens involved.

Second, the plot additions do trend a bit toward the far-fetched.  I’m amply familiar with the panspermia theory–frankly, I think it’s a load–and so every time I see a movie that uses the plotline that Earth is just a seed colony of some alien race I find myselfscoffing contemptuously at the very idea.  However, this is a small point, and really won’t interfere with the movie itself.

The movie itself, meanwhile, is really quite fun.  They’ve added some really novel twists to it–like the Shields game–that definitely caught my attention.  I’ve seen my share of movies like this, and this might well be one of the best of the lot I’ve seen in some time.  They really did play up the “epic” side of this one, with some infighting and some outfighting and even just a little bit of the old political intrigue just to round things out.  It’s really not just “alien humanoid goes hunting up alien monstrosity”.  There’s quite a bit more to it than that.

Regrettably, the “sci-fi weaponry” I mentioned above will be in short supply, at least when it comes to doling them out to the Vikings.  You’ll get to see some of it in action, and it’s downright awesome, but frankly there’s not much of it involved here.  And that which is actually involved is only involved in the most roundabout of senses.  I’m perplexed as to how this giant, clearly military ship was only carrying ONE GUN.  And while I’m at it, what happened to alien boy’s clearly superior armor?  He took it off at the crash site and then just sort of forgot about it.  Was it carried away by animals?   In that sense, it’s somewhat of a disappointment but there’s still plenty of joy to be had here.  Thus, the disappointment is scarcely too graphic.

The Screenhead Ten Scale,therefore, gives this one a seven out of ten for being an engaging if flawed action thriller, that’s so very much like that which has come before it, and at the same time, offering some fresh new features that make it well worth watching.