Screenhead

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.

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.

No one’s ever going to mistake Stan Helsing for a high-brow horror flick.  But this title, that you can get in video stores starting tomorrow, will prove to at least be a watchable horror comedy with some slightly entertaining elements.

In Stan Helsing, which Anchor Bay sent me a copy of, the title character is a video store clerk on a mission–to make as little of an impact on the world around him as possible.  Seriously, I don’t know if this guy’s just the laziest guy on the planet or if he’s got some kind of allergy to doing anything, but he sure seems like he just plain doesn’t care.  Faced with losing his job at a video store (a Schlockbuster, no less!) he’s forced to make a delivery run for the owner’s mother.  With his friends in tow, Stan goes forth on a voyage of discovery, personal growth, and godawful monster parodies to make his delivery and save a gated community from the wrath of various aforementioned monster parodies.

There were a few parts in here that got me to laugh.  This is important.  Had it not been for that handful of parts I would’ve dismissed this outright as plain old garbage intended for teenage boys who otherwise couldn’t get their hands on porn.

Let’s put it this way–the movie openly admits it was written and directed by the executive producer of Scary Movie, and the writer and executive producer of Soul Plane.

Yeah.  That’s what we’re dealing with.

Like I said, this isn’t THAT bad a movie, but it’s definitely nothing great.  It’s predictable, it’s tired, it’s badly disjointed, and frankly, it’s trying to do entirely too much in entirely too little time.  I don’t know why their Freddy Krueger analogue Fweddy is dressed like Flava Flav.  I don’t know why their Chucky’s face has a tic-tac-toe game carved into it.  I’m not sure I want to know why their Leatherface is wearing a purse or why their Michael Myers is wearing a yarmulke.  And possibly gratefully the movie will respect that and not even bother to try explaining it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this barely passable rental a three out of ten and says that Bo Zenga should stick to producing. At least Scary Movie wasn’t complete crap.

I haven’t heard about Uncertainty until today.  It looks interesting with what appears to be a major plot and a minor plot together in one movie. The major plot, I believe, is a cell phone thriller, danger and “run for your lives” while the minor plot deals with a milestone in their relationship. It’s hard to tell in the trailer really what is happening or which plot is more important than the other.  The movie is co-directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer), Lynn Collins (Wolverine), and Olivia Thirlby (Juno).  

Uncertainty has a limited release in movie theaters as well as a VOD release.  Both releases start November 13, 2009.

Renee Zellweger’s Case 39, which has been the subject of intense scrutiny and a raftload of rumors in its own right, has apparently, finally, managed to land a release date.  Specifically, this will be busting out on New Years Day 2010, likely so the studio could buy off a critic or two into calling this “The most suspenseful title of 2010″ or “the scariest movie this year”.

Although, to be fair, New Years Day IS on a Friday this year so it likely would’ve ended up that way anyway, but it does seem pretty clear that the studio doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in this one.  Paramount’s the one releasing this one, and considering how often this one’s played musical release dates I can see why they’d choose to bury it in the deep dark ice-lined hole that is January.

I’m hopeful, however, that this one isn’t as bad as its scheduling suggests it will be, and have some hope that it’ll at least be watchable.  But then, I’m weird that way.

Okay, I know I should be up to volume 4 of Ghost Stories by now, but I really had to break in with one of the big new releases fresh and opening today.

Today we’re talking Whiteout--figured most everyone else would be handling Sorority Row today–and I’ve got good news!  It doesn’t completely suck!

Join us as we go on a tour of the wilds of Antarctica as Carrie Stetko, played more than ably by Kate Beckinsale, a U.S. Marshal with a painful past, finds herself neck-deep in a murder mystery that’ll go a lot deeper than she ever thought possible, in just about every sense.  Murder, conspiracy and betrayal are the order of the day on the underside of the world, but can Carrie stop a killer before she’s left stranded in Antarctica for the rest of the winter?

See, I liked this movie.  Apparently most of the critical community is breaking its back to decry it but I’m not seeing the problems they had.  Of course, I admit to a note of personal bias–I used to watch John Carpenter’s The Thing every Christmas Eve back when I was a kid, and movies about Antarctica are so few and so far between that I enjoy them whenever they show up, because they’re so rare.

If the originality factor didn’t do it for you, then maybe you’ll enjoy the surprises going on here, the twist ending, or the incredible stark beauty of the surroundings in which the movie was shot.  I don’t know how they got a fake Antarctica to look THAT COLD.

Okay, granted, this is no walk in the park.  It had some fairly dull stretches in which not very much was happening. I actually yawned and stretched a couple times–not exactly bellringers for success.   Some things were unnecessarily drawn out and even I got a little bored by the killer’s chase scenes taking place on tethered lines, but I tell you this much–it was almost eighty degrees outside when I caught this one, but by the time the first ten minutes kicked in, I was shivering.  Watching the wind whip across the snowpack, that takes me back to my childhood days in Michigan.  When they were explaining what exactly a “whiteout” is, I sat nodding.  I’ve seen those.  I’ve DRIVEN in those.  It’s really not as bad as they say, though–sure, visibility’s a joke but if you keep your speed down you can blow right through it.

In the end, though, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Whiteout a respectable six out of ten for being a fairly engaging thriller with more than a few flaws and for being original and realistic enough to actually cool off a late summer Friday.

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.