Misanthropaea

Mega Load

 

Five seconds doesn’t seem that long. Look at a stopwatch or count aloud to yourself (with your fingers if needed) in the time-honoured ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi…’ It’s negligible. On a geologic time-scale, five seconds is roughly the amount of time all various permutations of anatomically modern humans (that’s us, kids) have occupied the Quaternary section of the Cenozoic Era. It’s a yoctosecond – one-quadrillionth – of a blink of the great cosmic eye.

And yet if you are sitting at a traffic light and it turns green and you wait  five seconds before pressing the accelerator, or if someone asks you a question and you wait five seconds to answer, you become acutely aware of just how long those five seconds can feel. This proves Einstein’s prediction that observed time is not absolute time.

Another stunning and striking confirmation of the relativistic nature of time is to be found in the  presence of a super massive black hole where nothing – not even light – can escape and time itself can stretch for what seems an eternity. And, interestingly enough, this is exactly how it feels to be subjected to writer/director Eric Forsberg’s catastrophic 2010 film Mega Piranha, inexpertly executed by the mental midgets at the House of the Schlockbuster, The Asylum, and inflicted upon an unwary public as a ‘SyFy Original Film.’

I stopped expecting great things (or anything) from SyFy when they were still more correctly spelt ‘Sci-Fi’ after they cancelled Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and then later when they squandered the potential of Crusade, the sequel series to Babylon 5.  The final blow came when they chose to distance themselves from what they stupidly perceived as a ‘geeky’ image in favour of building what President David Howe called ‘a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.’  As such the ‘human-friendly’ SyFy Channel has been a turd in the cable television punchbowl ever since.

But at least with this most recent offering they seem to have recognised that they have served up the incomprehensible cinematic equivalent of a Dirty Sanchez and were kind enough to forewarn us of impending doom:

Note that SyFy have begun making use of their new SPORK₁ system code (seen in the lower left hand corner of the screen capture). This is a handy reference for knowing just  how many small plastic utensils you will need to dig your eyes out of your head during the running of the film. It is similar to the AIGA universal symbol for Poking Yourself  In the Eye With a Sharp Stick Because You Will Be Standing Here Waiting Forever that you might have seen recently if you haven’t just poked  yourself in the eye with a sharp stick after standing somewhere waiting forever.

Truly no light and no joy can escape this spiralling mass of ineptitude. Yet despite the dual SPORK kiss of death, the film does start out with a glimmer of promise as ominous music rises with the title cards. We fade from black to find a sepia-substituting-for-intense-heat-washed shot of a river and some big trees in silhouette. There are a couple of palm trees on the left and, with the inclusion of insect sounds and some vaguely Near Eastern musical orchestrations to emulate the angry buzzing of flies round the foul cadaverine stench of bloated carrion, it is clear that we are in a tropical locale, hence the heavy sepia wash to make it look really quite hot indeed.

Actually it’s not so much ‘sepia’ as it is a sickly yellowish-green colour – sort of like a gangrenous wound – as if the film was shot under the steady glow of cheap fluorescent lights without a corrective filter. In the skilled hands of a knowledgeable Director of Photography (or DP) – a master cinematographer like Vittorio Storaro, Gregg Toland,  or Gordon Willis – colour (or its absence) can be used to enhance a scene, to establish a sense of mood, place, time, or environment; to lend individuality to locations, or to possibly add subtle visual clues to the nature or intentions of characters.  However in the clumsy hands of DP Bryan Olinger and Colourist and Post Production Editor Mark Quod (whose only recognisable cinematic expression seems to be that of turning the blue and green colour channel knobs almost completely down), this egregious wad of poo is like being in a dimly lighted room and having someone wildly waving old yellowed photographs from the 70s of people you don’t like and, for 90 minutes, to the merciless beat of an action soundtrack, making you watch with your eyes clipped open all Clockwork Orangey.

(And, yes, I ask the same question all the time: why do I work in a liquor store and not in film?)

We are then whisked away from the opening shot (oh yes, I know, just sit down – you don’t come here for brevity) to an aerial view of a dense tropical rainforest, also in heavy sepia just to remind us of how incredibly bloody hot a dense tropical rainforest really is. But where are we? Fortunately the next shot – a heavily sepia-stained shot of a river cutting diagonally across the screen in stagnant yellow foreboding – explains that this is The Orinoco River.  We know this because ‘THE’ comes swooping across the screen from the right with a great whooshing sound and ‘ORINOCO RIVER’ zooms in likewise from the left.  When they meet,  just a wee right of centre, they do so with a crashing noise, like some huge steel door slamming closed, a crack of thunder, a sonic boom, or perhaps the gunshot of one of the editors taking his own life. The words pause together for just a moment so the audience can process that we are at ‘The Orinoco River’ (and not ‘Orinoco River The’) and then, with the same dramatic crack of whooshy sonic thunder, the words quickly fly apart and disappear into the opposing sides of the screen.  

After that it all becomes just a chaotic, joyless downhill ride.

Once we have our geographical bearings, we are treated to a pre-credit teaser wherein a young Latino couple, on a picnic in the sweltering yellow sauna of the rainforest, go for a dip in the laughing brown waters of The Orinoco River so they can be eaten by a school of piranha. After the credits ( thematically reminiscent of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, except for the part were Gordon’s credit sequence was good and had cool music) we are sped off to the ugly yellowed city of Puerto Ayacucho, Venezuela. Once again these critical establishing titles whoosh in across the screen, crash together and then fly apart to the frenzied strains of strings and rapid percussion as if Jack Bauer were about to step in and take charge.  After a series of roughly twenty jump cuts and whip pans and flashes of light – dramatically enhanced with that really helpful whooshing sound – all of which act as an abbreviated travelogue of the slums of Venezuela (and obviously there is simply no time to linger on small details with such a sprawling story to tell, so things have just got to keep moving) we are lead back to a place called ‘The Orinoco River,’ (which would probably look more like this image if it didn’t have the blue and green channels taken completely out of it to make it look unbelievably sweltering). And obviously in the rush of the last 47 seconds or so since we were last here we must have forgotten about it because we have to see the whooshy titles again to remind us where we are.

There we discover a boat – the Manta Ray! – speeding along the lifeless yellow-brown waters carrying a handful of partying passengers, amongst whom are two apparently key figures. We are introduced to them (as we will be to all the central figures who the film-makers were too lazy to establish through such ridiculous time-wasting means as exposition) by way of dramatic black and white still frames thrown dramatically across the screen with the dramatic urgency of a Mission Impossible-style dossier, each accompanied by the dramatic ‘shutter click’ of a digital camera and the incessant frenetic music that just never stops:

There are also some bikini-clad hookers (who vary in number depending on the shot) and a muscle-bound guy occasionally in dark sunglasses navigating the boat. They are out to ‘enjoy the sunrise’ (which clearly took place many hours earlier and makes you wonder just how early the now dead young couple from before the credits had to get up to have their picnic and die) and to talk about politics over champagne.

Suddenly a hooker hears ‘sometin’ (and any discerning Venezuelan diplomat knows that when one wishes to get one’s stank on it is done with finer Jamaican prostitutes and not  the local Venezuelan stock) and they all look over the side of the boat. The ‘sometin’ they hear, other than the beeping of the comically loud sonar, is uncertain as it takes a full 20 seconds until sometin actually happens. We see the severed head of a CGI alligator bobbing in the water; we see (in two different shots) a school of CGI piranha speeding towards the boat; we see frightened birds scattering into the skies from nearby treetops as all birds do prior to an aquatic massacre that places them in no immediate danger, but it takes 20 seconds of staring stupidly at the water and at each other to the relentless pounding of the soundtrack until we finally hear sometin too, and that would be some air bubbles beginning to churn near the bow of the boat. The bikini-clad hookers and their breasts tumble buoyantly as the CGI piranha attach themselves to the bottom of the boat and rock it from side to side.  Ambassador Regis, trying to stop himself spilling his champagne, looks round and asks, ‘What the hell is going on here? What the hell is that?’  He delivers these lines with the sort of urgency and life-imperilled fear that one would typically expect from someone looking in the fridge at sometin mouldy in an old Tupperware container. 

They soon find out what the hell that is, though, as the CGI piranha (roughly the size of flat footballs) leap out of the water and woodenly attach themselves to the various flailing appendages of the terrified passengers. Finally the boat tips and its occupants spill into the churning yellow-brown water and are thus eaten in a frenzy of bubbles, ketchup, and bikini-clad hookers yelling ‘Ai-ee!’

And then the piranha quickly and cartoonishly chew through the bottom of the boat (a traditional ichthyologic palate cleanser) and it plunges beneath the CGI waves of the otherwise stagnant yellow-washed Orinoco river. In a final touch, an undigested forearm with attached hand floats rapidly and gently down the stream like a paper boat down a storm drain…

(Might as well get comfortable, this is going to be a while…)

Loch Mess

Another putrid snooze-fest of illogic and abysmal CGI from Sci-Fi, or SyFy, Channel called Beyond Loch Ness was shown again recently. This yawning proctology wound was originally aired in 2008 –  which I missed the first time round – and festers on the painful premise that the Loch Ness Monster has somehow managed to arrive in Lake Superior in Michigan and, for whatever reason, along with her many carnivorous offspring, is taking a richly-deserved feeding frenzy holiday somewhere, one would presume, near the Upper Peninsula.   

Since the film-makers have obviously never travelled to Scotland, nor even seen pictures of it – or of Loch Ness, for that matter – they assume that viewers will think that Vancouver British Columbia will pass for it. It doesn’t. I know. I’ve been there. And I’ve seen pictures. I’ve stood in the waters just below Urquhart Castle (pictured for your convenience). It is nothing like Vancouver. And neither does the region of Vancouver, nor the Strait of Georgia, at all resemble Lake Superior, except for the part where both areas have a body of water surrounded by land. Does nobody listen to Gordon Lightfoot?  Utilising this rationale we could substitute the Orkney Islands for a remake of South Pacific.

Our tale begins in the apparently sepia-coloured, washed out year of 1976 as three researchers and a smarmy punk kid of about 15, named Jimmy, are investigating the Loch Ness monster. The Scottish guy from Stargate Atlantis (playing Jimmy’s father) brings up a giant egg (which is conveniently light and buoyant) and explains that it is a dinosaur egg, at which point Nessie bursts from the water and stares at the three men and Jimmy through a louring, watery fish-eye POV shot. The four of them stand on the beautiful sandy beach, surrounded by giant, old-growth fir trees exactly like there aren’t round Loch Ness, and stare back as if they are trying to figure out why the camera is filming them from a crane.

The guy from Stargate decides it’s best to give back the egg. They do, and Nessie goes away. One of the researchers smugly turns to the smarmy punk kid and says, ‘Pretty scary for something that doesn’t exist, eh, Jimmy?’  Because he delivers this line in a glib I-Told-You-So fashion, it instantly incurs the wrath of Nessie – who understands (as do we) that the man has not shown the proper humbled amazement at having seen a once-in-a-lifetime event – and she bursts from the water again and promptly bites the unrepentant man in half.

Everyone stands and stares at this horror as if they cant understand why the camera would be swooping down at a man squatting on a beach with his hands over his head saying ‘No!’  In the ensuing rampage Nessie smacks Jimmy out of the way with her tail and eats the other two men, including Jimmy’s dad, and Jimmy – who clearly must favour his mother because he looks as much like his father as Will Smith looks like Kevin Smith – runs and  hides under a giant canoe (because there are always lots of giant canoes conveniently lying about on many of the sandy old-growth fir tree-lined beaches up and down Loch Ness). That’s thinking with your dipstick, Jimmy. Sorry.

Thankfully we are swept  to present day Lake Superior, where everything is more or less in colour. Crazy Old Sean tells the local hot chick sheriff – who, of course, is also his daughter-in-law, Karen – that  he has seen the Loch Ness Monster! Or something like it anyway. It’s definitely a member of the ‘plesiosauroidea’  family he tells her. And he’ll prove it.

Josh, the nephew of Crazy Old Sean and the son of Karen the Sherriff, is involved in a 90210-style tangle of cool-rich-guy-Brody-whose-girlfriend-Zoe-has-a-crush-on-the-uncool-average-local-guy-Josh-but-stays-with-Brody-because-she-has-low-self-esteem-but-she-finally-discovers-that-Brody-is-a-total-dick-and-her-real-love-is-Josh-after-Brody-gets-eaten-by-a-CGI-monster that is completely without merit and serves only to help cram the 20-minute story into a 91-minute feature.

Enter then cryptozoologist James Murphy as Indiana Eastwood, our little Jimmy from the opening segment all growed up, replete with fedora, unseasonable floor-length duster, a scar on his cheek (from Nessie’s tail), a chip on his shoulder, squinty cowboy eyes, and a hand-rolled cigarillo clenched in his teeth. He pronounces the word as ‘cigar-ee-o.’ And although that is the original and proper way to pronounce the word, here in the vapid backwaters of the mid-west we call them cigarillos – with the L-sound intact – but that’s okay. He probably spent time in some cool exotic country like Meh-hico or something and isn’t hip to the local dialect. And after all, he is a cryptozoologist, not a linguist.  He is looking to rent a boat and have Josh take him round the lake, as he is investigating strange happenings. No reason. Just looking.

Crazy Old Sean goes out to find and photograph Nessie to prove to everyone he is not insane. He chops up what appears to be an entire cow and wheelbarrows it out to an old wooden pier, throwing into the water four softball-sized chunks of cartoon meat which float on the surface like bright red buoys.  As luck would have it, his labours are quickly rewarded. Out of the vastness of Lake Superior, Nessie is summoned to the surface by the siren call of the bright red floaty bits and eats Sean and his camera – but not before Sean snaps just one single critical piece of photographic evidence. Of course he has a comically large telephoto lens on the camera, something which could capture an image almost a quarter of a mile away, and Nessie is patiently awaiting her next meal only ten feet in front of him, so that picture will come out just fine.

As the 90210 cast go out in a boat to go camping on an island and drag the film out even more, Obligatory Random Victim One is eaten whilst fishing on the banks of a sandy fir-tree lined beach, and Indiana Eastwood finally returns, from wherever he’s been the last few minutes, to have Josh chauffeur him round the lake.

Don S Davis, also from Stargate, plays Sheriff Karen’s deputy. He calls her to a beach where it is his sad duty to point out the uneaten portion of Crazy Old Sean which is found staring up from the beach in rubbery Tempera paint-smeared surprise. His camera, however, is no place to be found, so what a complete waste of time it was watching him stop and take a useless photograph which will do nothing to further drive the narrative.

At the same time, Indiana Eastwood  and Josh find, with their sonar equipment, a convenient tunnel beneath the deep dark waters of Superior – a lake which oddly looks almost identical to the one in Scotland back in 1976 – and they soon locate a 40-foot object racing through the water. They give chase only to find themselves (in some especially bad editing) in the very spot from which they started. Their find leads to some stellar dialogue instigated by Josh:

‘What was that?’

‘Unknown species.’

‘Cool. What kind of species?’

‘Not sure. Unknown. You hungry?’

I would have preferred this:

‘What was that?’

‘Unknown species.’

‘Cool. What kind of species?’

‘Thanks for listening, fucknut. Didn’t I just say “unknown?” What part of “unknown” makes you think I would know? I’m a cryptozoologist, not the Amazing-fucking-Kreskin. Jesus Christ. No wonder all you do is rent boats for a living.’

That evening, a change which happens with head spinning rapidity, Josh and Indiana Eastwood share a quiet dinner together on paper plates outside Eastwood’s shitty old mobile home. Clearly being a cryptozoologist pays very little. We discover that Josh’s father is dead, paving the way for Mr Cryptozoology to become Josh’s new dad, if he can just break through the tough exterior of dedicated single mom Sheriff Karen whom he hasn’t met yet.  Eastwood shares the pain of having lost his father as well, saying ‘I was twelve,’ as if this is somehow a perfectly reasonable explanation. And he was more like fifteen.

Later, as Obligatory Random Victim Two arrives home with her bag of groceries and is eaten by Nessie who was hiding behind a tree, Josh stops by the station to tell his mom all about the cool cryptozoologist he met. Sheriff Karen explains that Crazy Old Sean was eaten by a predator that somehow got in the lake. Josh remembers just then that he and his new dad chased some unknown thing when they were out on the boat smoking cigar-ee-os.

The 90210 cast continue to unnecessarily pad the film.  Strangely, it is substantially darker on the land in Michigan than it is on the water, because out on the nearly day-bright lake, something is stirring. And soon The Obligatory Non-English-Speaking Hot Foreign Exchange Student gets her head eaten off because she can’t hear the giant CGI monster crashing through the thicket in English.

Sheriff Karen arrives at Eastwood’s shitty trailer just in time to be his future wife and questions him about what he and Josh chased out on the lake and tells him that Crazy Old Sean (who posted a sighting of a plesiosaur on Eastwood’s website, which is why Eastwood just happened to blow into town) is dead. Eastwood tells Sheriff Karen how sorry he is as if she had said, ‘Oh, my shoe is untied’ and says he will have to see the body to determine what killed Crazy Old Sean. Sheriff Brody Karen then asks Quint Eastwood if he can help.

The dwindling 90210 cast, soon encounter Nessie and stand and stare at her in the same type of horror one might reserve for staring at a slightly difficult math problem and then they ‘run’ away; slowly and laboriously, looking back over their shoulders a lot. The Obligatory Doomed Black Guy crawls inside of a conveniently-placed hollow log common to almost all cartoons and some horror films but almost never seen in reality and is summarily eaten for his stupidity.

The next morning, Eastwood goes out on the boat again with Josh. Thankfully they take with them, for some inexplicably ill-defined reason, a police scanner and, whilst out on the ‘speeding’ boat (which is leaving no wake in the water), they hear that an Obligatory Character Actor found a carcass on the beach. Despite almost no details, they race to the scene and arrive just in time.  And before Deputy Don can walk the full ten yards from his vehicle to his sad duty of pointing out the carcass neither he nor the Obligatory Character Actor seem to notice Eastwood (flailing a large blue Coleman cooler full of ice like it was an ultra-light polystyrene prop) run up to the carcass and, in broad daylight, in full view, abscond with the head.

Once they see the creature’s head has been replaced with a six pack of Pepsi (which of course now makes it impossible to identify what the creature is because it is ‘the vital clue to solving this thing’) Deputy Don calls Sheriff Karen and tells her what Eastwood has done.  With thoroughly impossible timing, Sheriff Karen and Deputy Don arrive at the docks, their weapons drawn, to arrest Eastwood and charge him with obstruction, impeding a police investigation, trespassing, tampering with evidence and making her fall in love with him by having a shitty old trailer and being dressed like a cowboy for no clearly-stated reason.

Eastwood explains that he’s the only one who can hunt this creature down and kill it because he has been after it his entire life.  Apparently there are underwater tunnels connecting Loch Ness to the Great Lakes and this is how Nessie got to Lake Superior. (Sorry. My eyes were watering from rolling back in their sockets so far. Did that last sentence make sense?)

Without telling anyone, Josh takes his boat (and a loaded .38) out to rescue the cast of 90210 because they are probably camping in Nessie’s nest.

At the sheriff’s office, Sheriff Karen tells Eastwood that the results of ‘Wildlife’s’ study of Crazy Old Sean’s bite marks (a document which has arrived with a swiftness unseen by typical official paperwork) show ‘no match with any known genetic sequence.’ She doesn’t explain how the bite marks can have a genetic sequence, but ‘Wildlife’ is damn sure they don’t match.  She asks if Eastwood has seen anything like this before. Of course he has. He’s a cryptozoologist.

So they decide to track the beast with sonar and an audio recording of Nessie which Eastwood’s father recorded in ‘76 on the shores of Loch Ness. They will try to kill the creature with a ‘military grade high intensity sonar gun,’ a ‘338 Magnum Huntin Rifle’ which fires cyanide tipped rounds – because cyanide is the only poison that will kill a plesiosaur (take that, Discovery Channel!) – and, if those two fail, then Eastwood also has a ‘custom made Soviet EMP gun.’

Josh arrives on the island to rescue Zoe and the rest of the mostly dead 90210 cast and stumbles upon a nest of muppet-baby Nessies who are devouring the wobbly remains of a surprised looking rubber doll smeared with bright red hot sauce who is supposed to be the Obligatory Doomed Black Guy. They soon turn on Josh but Zoe arrives just in time to throws rocks at the plesiosaurs so he can escape. It seems he has forgotten he has – or how to use – a gun.  Zoe and Josh climb a fir tree to safety where cool guy Brody awaits them, whimpering. He believes the babies will sit and wait for them to come down from the tree. Not so, Josh corrects him, waving his hand in the air as if testing the heat of an imaginary flame; clearly their vision is based on movement (I am not making this up) and if they sit still the babies will not see them and go away.

As if by magic, this actually happens.

Cool guy Brody pleads for Josh to get them off the island in his boat. Josh says that’s going to be difficult because ‘one of those things pushed it off shore.’ Actually Josh himself pushed it off shore in his failed attempt to escape the ravenous muppet baby plesiosaurs just before Zoe started throwing rocks, but Brody doesn’t need to know the details. Why they cannot or didn’t think earlier to take the boat used by the 90210 cast is unclear. In the meantime, as Josh formulates their rescue plan, he leads Zoe and Brody to an ‘old abandoned mine’ on the island. Of course there’s an abandoned mine on the island. A magnetite mine.

Back on the docks, the Killing Party is racing into action with the speed of some people going out to do a little fishing and maybe have a sandwich. Sheriff Karen, utilising all of her forensic skills, looks in the window of the darkened boat rental shack (where Josh works) and returns to the water’s edge to report ‘I can’t find Josh. The shop’s closed.’ Eastwood says he forgot to tell her the reason Josh isn’t there is because he went looking for the cast of 90210. It is now a race against time to save Josh, and whoever is left, and to kill Nessie and her young. Hooper, Quint and Brody   they race out on the Orca boat to hunt for the shark Nessie and they shoot at it her with their Buck Rogers Space Toy Soviet-Made EMP gun to no effect.

Josh swims out to the boat he pushed out into the lake and finds it is useless because someone pulled all the wires to the engine – which is inside of a housing. How a baby plesiosaur managed to disable the engine is unclear.  In desperation, Josh sends up a flare which, thankfully, is seen by the crew of the Orca boat and they race to help him through the last 30 minutes of the film.

They find Josh sitting and waiting for them. In anticipation of his rescue, he leaps for their boat and attempts to grab the handrail with his forehead, a clumsy move which leaves him floating face down in the water with Nessie fast approaching. Not wanting to remove his cowboy hat and duster, Eastwood lets Sheriff Karen dive in after her son. But he does use his way cool sonar gun to thwart Nessie’s attack so that they can drag Josh’s limp body into the boat so the Sheriff administer CPR.

Once on the island, the Killing Party discover that the magnetite from the mines is disrupting the vision of the plesiosaurs. This means that they cannot see Zoe sitting motionless in the middle of the mining compound waiting for help because someone told her the plesiosaur’s vision was based on movement. Brody somehow failed to comprehend the precise definition of the whole ‘based on movement’ thing and was eaten.  But the magnetite is also disrupting the fine instrumentation Inspector Gadget has brought along – like his binoculars and the telescopic lens on his rifle which we can see through quite clearly because it’s glass but which appears much like this…

 

…from his end of the scope. 

The magnetite is abundantly scattered everywhere in a convenient powder form, and Eastwood states that it is as combustible as gunpowder (and you can read all about how it isn’t at geology.com in case I just missed something). To prove his point he scoops up some with his knife (made of an apparently a non-magnetic alloy as the magnetite slides about like common sand) and sets it on fire with his ever-present cigar-ee-o.  And then the fun begins. Deputy Don and Eastwood move about twenty feet away and radio in to Sheriff Karen to inform her of their position and begin to broadcast the audio recording of Nessie to draw the young plesiosaurs away from Josh’s soon-to-be-girlfriend.

It works, as master plans go, and even Nessie is drawn by the siren call of herself on tape. Zoe makes a walk for it but Nessie comes waddling back after her. Presumably the magnetite only works occasionally to disrupt the plesiosaur’s vision.  And then, out of nowhere, Eastwood appears, holding one of Nessie’s eggs and threatening to smash it if Nessie won’t let Zoe escape.  How or when he theorised the eggs must be lying about somewhere – or why Nessie would choose to nest in an old abandoned magnetite mine – or how Eastwood got down from the ridge so miraculously fast is never made clear.

Deputy Don starts picking off the four babies being summoned to the recording of Nessie, shooting one in the head, another one in the head, blasting the face off of another, blasting the face off of another only from the other direction by flipping the film the other way to make it look like a different animal, and then shooting another one in the head. Behind him, one of the babies approaches as he quite suddenly runs out of ammunition. He reloads the weapon with the skill and expertise of a trained accountant who has never seen or loaded a weapon before and knows nothing about the funny stick-like brass thingies with the cyanide tips that go boom. He is eaten, saving himself the embarrassment of the final six minutes of the film.

In the confused and monumental cluster-fuck that is the finale, Eastwood uses his cool ray gun to burn a hole in the side of Nessie to more easily plunge in an entire syringe of cyanide as she tries to eat Josh. Josh, meanwhile, cowering inside a giant bin of magnetite, begins shovelling the ‘highly combustible’ powder into her mouth. He then leaps to safety just as Eastwood lights his Zippo and tosses it into the bin and Nessie bursts into a ball of cartoon fire and then blows up real good.

And now Nessie’s dead, Mr Cryptozoologist wants to find a nice little town in which to park his shitty trailer – a little town with a hot Sheriff and a 20 year old son still living at home.  They all smile and walk back towards their boat into the cold grey mists of a dismal Vancouver Michigan afternoon.

And I thought Titanic made me cry…

Annelidical Nonsense

Sci Fi Channel rolled out their new brand identity this week and are now, pointlessly, called Syfy, which is pronounced ‘sigh fi’ just exactly like Sci Fi was.

And to inaugurate their commitment to ‘Imagine Greater,’ despite continuing to be crushed beneath the woefully misinformed  leadership of Bonnie Hammer, not only are they still airing Extreme Championship Wrestling (which may as well be thought of as science fiction because it sure the fuck isn’t wrestling) they are also gracing the screen with an insufferable piece of shit called Sand Serpents. Perhaps it might be more appropriately called GI Joe and The Tremors of Dune.

This resplendent glittering jewel in the new Syfy crown is about two hours that you will never ever get back and stars Jason Gedrick as Lieutenant Stanley who, for a variety of tedious and uninteresting reasons, ends up as the unofficial leader of a small ‘platoon’ (if four people can be called a platoon) trying to survive in the wilds of a Canadian rock quarry. I mean Afghanistan. Sorry.  Gedrick is no stranger to high action military adventure, having stunned audiences in the 1980s with the gritty realism of Iron Eagle and Iron Eagle II.

Rounding out the cast is Elias Toufexis as Private Andrews, an unprofessional smart-mouth and a thoroughly whiny punk-ass bitch who, by even the vaguest of military standards would have been sent home with a dishonourable discharge after he said about two words; Sebastian Knapp as Gary Sinise in A Midnight Clear portrays Private Kaminsky (because you need to have someone with a Slavic-style name to shout out – ‘Wierzbowski! Wierzbowski!’); and finally Tamara Hope plays Captain Henle which, of course, immediately begs the question ‘Why isn’t the Captain in charge?’ Are they not familiar with the chain of command or the meaning of rank insignia?  It hardly seems to matter, though, since the  incorrect uniforms, incorrect haircuts and unacceptable facial hair, non-military issue glasses and the lack of anything like discipline, all point to the fact that the military advisor must have been someone who probably watched part of Saving Private Ryan once. Or knows someone who did.

The central premise of the film is explained by Captain Henle: ‘The Taliban blew up a mine about twenty klicks from here. We think it may have ruptured some kinda prehistoric chamber or something.’ This critical plot point is delivered with all of the enthusiasm one typically reserves for epic, Palm d’Or winning statements such as ‘I must have left the toilet lid up.’

(As a point of logic – oh yes, there’s room for logic even in here – one must consider how blowing up a mine would make any possible difference? The worms – or Sand Serpents – are clearly quite capable of manoeuvring unimpeded through the lithic terrain, including, it seems, through the very bedrock, so why would exposing ‘some kinda prehistoric chamber’ release them? They aren’t really ‘sand’ serpents, per se. The nature of sand is such that, like water, it displaces – with some resistance – to an object  moving through it. Rocks and gravel, on the other hand, in a word, don’t. And here there is no ‘sand’ to be seen.)

‘Here’ is defined as an old abandoned warehouse or a disused refinery, perhaps it’s just a burnt-out multi-storey car park, somewhere deep in the rugged mountainous region of  Canadafghanistan (shot with heavy-handed yellow filters and de-saturated colours to accentuate the feeling of a hot desert region and give it that real ‘foreign country’ look) where the troops have been lead to relative safety by Lieutenant Stanley.  They are shown all the comforts of a bombed-out big cement building by some Afghan guy (who is not a terrorist) called Amal and his daughter Isla (also not a terrorist) who are the only ones left behind after the Taliban stopped by earlier in the day to round up people to tie bombs to. There are also five other Afghan women there with whom, we must  imagine, Amal is going to single-handedly repopulate the New Afghanistan when this whole silly war thing is over and if they aren’t all eaten by giant Sand Serpents.

Amal has an old radio, which doesn’t work, but explains that he has an ‘old truck’  (which looks suspiciously like a 2008 Chevy Avalanche) which our heroes can use to get them to the next big cement building that might have some working radio parts – so long as he and Isla can go along for the ride.  There’s always a catch.

No sooner are the group on the road when the Sand Serpents come after them. Or so it would seem.  Because of the mesmerising, star-studded cast, the exotic locale, and the expensive big cement buildings, the CGI would have probably pushed the budget for this film into the stratosphere of the high four figures, so the visuals of the worms are kept to a minimum. Instead we rely on wobbly camera shots, occasional editing, and the reactions of the actors to relay the sense of horror at seeing the giant predators coming after them.

‘Give em sumthin to chew on!’ says Lt Stanley from the drivers seat of the ‘old’ 2008 Chevy as they trundle down a gravel road. Everyone begins throwing grenades and wasting precious ammunition firing at something only they can see as the camera dollies in and out and tracks along side of or behind the vehicle. ‘Oh-ho! Got that sucker! Yea! Nailed it! Yea! Eat it!’ exclaims Private Andrews after throwing an IED at and presumably killing something off screen.

‘We’re losin em!’ Gary Sinise cries reassuringly. I believe he was talking about the Sand Serpents but, as we don’t actually see them, it’s hard to be sure.

Once they reach their destination and think they are safe, another worm rises up over a big cement building. Thinking fast, Gary Sinise throws an IED into its gaping mouth and blows it up real good with a spray of clear gelatine.

‘Great,’ Lt Stanley grumbles because he got worm goo on him. ‘Just great.’ Not a ‘Hey, thanks for killing the giant fucking Shai-Hulud knock-off creature before it killed us’ or anything, just piss and moan because the uniform got messy.

Using the battery from their ‘old’ 2008 Chevy, Captain Henle at last manages to fix the otherwise junk radio and radios for help, all very military-like: ‘Black Dog requesting immediate evac.’

She (Black Dog) eventually gets through to someone called Colonel Jones who looks like he’s having a difficult time pinching off a stubborn turd – bobbing up and down in his chair and peeking out of the tent opening at the ‘intense fire-fight’ going on just outside to his left, which would be the three guys doing the Axl Rose crab dance back and forth in the background to the sounds of occasional small arms fire.  Colonel Jones goes on to conversationally explain that, sorry, evac will be ‘when it suits this command’ and, as such, will not be possible at this time because all of his ‘flights’ are grounded or in use and it could take up to two hours to get free from their current attack, but thanks for calling and have a great day.

In a cunning plot twist – and a decisive move which changes everything – Captain Henle grabs the handset back from Lt Stanley (who was crying about giant worms being after them) and tells Colonel Jones that ‘the mine’ – the one the Taliban blew up –‘was operational.’ Oh yes, that’s right, and she has a bag full of ‘kremlin’ to prove it. Or ‘Crinoline.’ Or maybe it’s ‘gremlin.’ Anyway, whatever it is she slurs into the radio, Colonel Jones suddenly realises that he must get these four soldiers out of harm’s way. He orders Henle and her men to a ridge ‘about one klick southwest of your twenty’ (gosh, that sounds so cool!) where he will, in approximately thirty minutes, divert a Blackhawk to pick them up.

Lt Stanley translates her slur and responds: ‘Corudnum?’ I believe he meant to say ‘Corundum’ because Henle just passes this off by saying ‘Oh, it’s, uhm, sapphires.’

This, of course, was simply a ruse on her part to have got Colonel Jones to agree to divert critical resources from a major conflict and rescue them from the eminent danger of being inside a big cement building.

Half a dozen Taliban members arrive (on foot it seems) and begin firing at the big cement building (as if they know the soldiers are in there) and of course the weapons fire draw the giant worms who gobble up the yummy Taliban. ‘They’re driving them away,’ Henle informs everyone. I suppose being eaten by giant worms could be called ‘driven away,’ yes.

There is an energy and a pace to most of these scenes which make Ben Stein seem like Robin Williams on a coke-fuelled rant.

Gary Sinise takes a grenade blast to the chest and, as the group make their escape to a cave (which will apparently get them to the ridge one klick southwest of their twenty in record time – and, yeah, who wouldn’t want to go inside the earth where there’s no place to run away when the giant worms who live inside the earth come after you?), and, as he is dragged to safety, he leaves an unnaturally large trail of blood which, along with all the pounding feet and yelling, draws the attention of the worms. He is then dumped by his fellow soldiers and left to wallow in agony on the ground and is promptly eaten, sparing him the last 40 minutes of the film.

Switching on the electric lights inside the tunnels (though Lt Stanley still finds it necessary to use his miniature flashlight in a manly way despite the glowing 300 watt bulbs overhead) Amal leads the three remaining soldiers and Isla through remarkably well-kept, though incongruously dust-filled, ‘ancient’ chambers and then, in a brilliant piece of script-writing, he steps on a land mine and goes boom.

This, as you may well have guessed by now, rather conveniently collapses the only part of the tunnel which leads to the only way out and traps our heroes between a pile of rubble and a now closed ‘blast door’ which some idiot felt was a good idea in the middle of a fucking tunnel.  Thank the gods that Lt Stanley discovers an air shaft that leads to the outside. Don’t all airshafts lead to the outside? That’s why they are called ‘air shafts.’ And don’t all secret tunnels have strategically placed air shafts that only children – like the now conveniently orphaned Isla who burdensomely came along for the adventure – can climb through? Perhaps children dug these air shafts and learned how to do all the fine intricate masonry work lining them as well. This is Afghanada, after all. Child labour laws are much different there.

When the worms begin to attack – which, frankly, I just didn’t see coming, not in the safety of the tunnels! – Private Andrews asks, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’

Captain Henle tells him he must have done something ‘and the rest of us are just paying for it.’

Can I get a witness? Somebody say ‘Amen!’

Once outside the air shaft, Isla almost immediately gets caught by the Taliban, who apparently don’t notice the ground shaking wildly like the American soldiers do in the tunnels below the surface. When they finally do realise something is wrong, Isla runs back into the tunnels and slowly unlocks the ‘blast door.’ Thankfully, the worms break into the tunnels and Andrews is eaten, leaving Stanley and Henle to run away without their privates.

Hmm…

Stanley and Henley escape the tunnels only to discover that their ‘extraction point’ is just over the next ridge. Of course it is. Just beyond where the giant worms are busily munching on little screaming Taliban treats. Captain Henle then suddenly remembers that worms don’t have eyes and that they rely on sound and vibration to locate their prey. So why not throw grenades at them and divert them as she and Stanley and Isla run away? She then spots a ‘big structure over there’ (apparently a mining elevator) which, when climbed, will get them out of harm’s way because the tower ‘has gotta be, like a hundred and the worms are sixty, right?’

Lt Stanley agrees.

It seems that this little Army of Fun have no true sense of scale, as one would presume that these so-called Sand Serpents are substantially more than 60 feet long. If one guesses the military vehicle in this shot to be an average of 15 to 18 feet in length, that would make the worms some 150 to 180 feet (not including the bits we cannot see below ground). So I’m thinking that a climb to the top of a 100 foot tower would put our tasty heroes directly at dining level.

Deciding that the best course of action is to lob grenades in every possible direction and run for the ‘extraction point,’ Lt Stanley and Capt Henle (and Isla) do just that, arriving in time to nearly be lunch for two worms. Of course the diverted Blackhawk appears at that very moment and fires a missile at a worm and, probably, kills it. I say probably because in the next shot there is no worm – or worms – just a cloud of smoke in the air where the worm had been in the previous shot.

In a typical Jason Voorhees moment, one of the worms (the one that didn’t probably die just seconds before) lunges out of the quarry to strike at the departing Blackhawk and, in a stunning yet thoroughly pointless move to assure he won’t be in a potential sequel, Lt Stanley takes a belt of C4 and leaps from the helicopter and into the gaping maw of the Sand Serpent where he detonates the charge in a slow motion spray of clear gelatinous goo.

Obviously, there was no other way. The chopper could never make it to the safety of 180 feet or defend itself like it did when it blasted the other worm entirely out of the previous edit. It had to be done.

Really, though, anything I can tell you about this film would only pale in comparison to the video for the main theme song (featuring Gary Sinise) which, to my way of thinking, captures some of the same effervescent magic – the sheer inescapable joy and buoyancy – of the song ‘Sweet Freedom’ sung by Michael McDonald for the 1986 film Running Scared starring Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines…

Technorati Tags: SyFy,Gary Sinise,Sand Serpents

To Go Boldly... Somewhere

I'm not sure how to feel about the trailer for the new Star Trek film. After months of seeing the teaser with just the Enterprise being constructed to sound bytes and dramatic music, this new clip creates a storm of mixed feelings. On the one hand it's nice to see new life being breathed into this franchise, but on the other... I'm not entirely sure how much I can stomach seeing these classic roles being completely re-cast, let alone Zachary Quinto (Sylar from 'Heroes' -- a series I have seriously lost patience with --who is not so much an actor as he is an Eyebrow Delivery System) as Spock.  There's a certain sense of blasphemy that I really just can't put my finger on.

Frankly, Star Trek: Enterprise was maddening enough as it was, returning to those thrilling days of yesteryear by thoroughly ignoring the fact that Star Trek: TOS (The Old Series) ever even existed. I gave the show half of the pilot episode to ruin everything for me and never watched it again. Scott Bakula was as drab and lifeless as always and woefully miscast, as was virtually everyone on the show.

So perhaps this new film is more a re-imagining, like Battlestar Galactica, which elevated a shit disco-era series into something palatable, but there is still a sense of wrongness about it.

When Andreas Katsulas died in 2006, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Strakzynski stated that no-one would ever play G'kar again. Fans would be outraged-- like stupidly trying to slip Mary Kay Adams under the wire as Na'Toth --and, honestly, G'kar's are some mighty, mighty boots to fill. Anyone else would pale to insignificance in the role. If anyone were to assume that character-- whether for a re-imagined television series or perhaps for a film --I could maybe see F. Murray Abraham who, unfortunately, will be long dead by the time anyone gets round to even thinking about bothering with anything Babylon 5 again.

Oh. Did that sound bitter? Perhaps a topic for another time.

Presently, however, I am greatly at odds with the new Star Trek. Much like the Star Wars prequel films, this new version appears, stylistically, to ignore not only TOS, but it also appears to ignore everything that came after-- The Next Generation, Voyager, stupid Enterprise... and that fucking Babylon 5 rip-off piece of shit with Avery Brooks and the Forehead of the Week Creatures.

And of course the final judgement will need to wait because the new release date is now in May, not 'Christmas 2008' as all the previous trailers for the last year have been promising.

Figures...

Tell Me What's A-Happening...

There had to have been a moment, I think, when M. Night Shyamalan, sitting down with Barry Mendel and Sam Mercer, executive producers of nearly all of his previous films, finally revealed the denouement of his proposed film 'The Green Effect' and felt a thick, weighty silence stretch out for an excruciating fraction of eternity. Eventually either Mendel or Mercer would have suddenly shaken their heads as if waking abruptly from an unexpected nap and asked

'What?'

in a manner which would have suggested they didn't believe they had heard correctly.

Behind them someone would have undoubtedly made a strangled snickering sound (followed by a sharp and none-too-covert 'shushing') as Night shifted uncomfortably in his seat and darted his eyes nervously to the side before responding, 'The-- the plants. The trees and stuff.'

'Plants.'

'And the trees.' He would have cleared his throat dryly.  'The trees, too. All of them. And shrubs.'

Inhaling sharply, adjusting notes, one of the producers would have sat up in his seat and scratched the back of his neck: 'So... Are you thinking CGI trees, or... what? Guys in suits?'

'What?' Night would have seemed bewildered.

'Well for when the killer trees attack--'

'Oh no,' Night would have shaken his head, shifting in his chair as another muffled snicker came from someone.  'I just want to suggest it-- like Hitchcock would have done. Just trees swaying in the breeze, all spooky and stuff.'

'And the people just fall over dead for no reason?'

'Well... I...' his mind would have raced momentarily. 'I could make the plants make people kill themselves. That would be cool.'

'So...' Mendel or Mercer would have tried to clarify, 'you want to make an ecological statement feature.'

'But we could market it as an apocalyptic thriller,' Night would have thrown in. 'Maybe change the title to  something real ambiguous or something-- like "Something's Happening" or whatever; maybe cut a trailer that sells it as a huge mystery...'

'But how does it end, Night?' One of them would have asked. 'I mean, you can't have people kill off all the plants.  Or do the plants kill everyone first? Are we talking another Cloverfield where all the stars die?'

'Oh no,' Night would have shaken his head again. 'I figure they just kill a few. You know, to teach us a lesson; get back at us for global warming or something.'

'But why--?' One of the producers would have began and then waved his hands dismissively: 'Yeah, you know, let's just not even go there. Just don't even bother to explain it. It would be better if you didn't. Leave it a mystery...'

And so it is that after the excruciating 91 minute duration of this film one sits staring at the black screen, seconds before the end credits roll, and repeats the phrase from my imaginary dialogue: 'What?'

After the agony of The Village, I really didn't think that M. Night Shyamalan could (or would) be so bold as to rapidly produce yet another in a growing line of completely mindboggling stinkers. I largely ignored Lady In the Water after the debacle of The Village and because of scathing early reviews. And had I not been intrigued by the ambiguity of the trailer for The Happening, I would never have plunked down $15 for the DVD. But, it successfully tricked me. And now he's got my money and I lost 91 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

The marketing for this film incessantly impresses upon the potential viewer that this is 'M. Night Shyamalan's first R-rated film.' Unfortunately that is about the only thing that can be said in its defence. In fact the entire nexus of the film being R-rated seems to centre on killing off one of the Obligatory Irritating Children halfway through the story, the impact of which is later diminished (if not cheapened) by endlessly discussion of it in the special features. It feels as if the only reason this stupid film exists was so they could shoot a little black kid in the head. The deaths in this film are as pointless as they are gratuitous.

One scene in particular, a zoo keeper (one guesses) getting torn to pieces by lions, is pointlessly gruesome and yet, in how it is played out, an absolutely ridiculous waste. It is seen (in a crowded diner) on a customer's iPhone (in amazingly unnatural pristine video), presumably either being shown on the news (which it would never be, given the graphic nature of it) or having been uploaded to YouTube (which, given the clearly apocalyptic nature of the film, seems like a pointless waste of someone's time if everyone was about to die). After watching it, the characters react as if they had just seen a car commercial. There is no horror, no being taken aback-- just moving blandly on to the next shot.

To say that this film was shit is really selling it short. It's actually ponderous self-indulgent shit that apparently cost $60 million. Seriously. Sixty million. That's not only embarrassing, but it ought to be considered a crime against humanity. $60 million for what? The stars?

Zooey Deschanel (as Alma) must have assumed that she had been cast to play one of the trees in this film and was probably confused by the fact that she had some words to say.

She spends the entirety of the film in sort of a listless, zombified state, staring in empty confusion at nothing in particular and delivering grippingly memorable dialogue like 'What's happening?' and 'I'm scared' and then running once in a while.

Of course Ms Deschanel's acting chop has always run the emotional gamut from A to B in almost everything I've seen her in (which is blissfully few films) so I imagine that this role was quite a stretch for her, all that weird talking and stuff. Her acting style has been called 'unique' in some reviews. I have not decided whether these reviews were praising her abilities, bashing them, or attempting to safely straddle the fence to remain in good favour. Perhaps calling it 'unique' is Hollywood-speak in the same way that, in the South, when someone says 'Well bless your heart...' they are actually saying 'Dumb as fuck.' 

In stark contrast, Mark Wahlberg's Elliot seems to feel that 'innocent confusion and terror' are best portrayed through a high-pitch E-minor whine, which made it seem as if he was delivering every line like Wally Cleaver saying 'Aw but gee, Dad! Me and Lumpy were gonna go out and play some catch!' Although he does have the benefit of having the best line in the film, such as it is, when he realises that he's talking to a plastic house plant.

I won't spoil it for you.

In the special features there is an 'alternate opening' which Night claims was 'this huge fight' between Alma and Elliot and which comes off as an unwatchable whine-fest of some of the most cardboard acting I have ever seen. It even beats out Avery Brooks of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 as Most Placid Characterisation Ever. Night claims that this scene was cut because all of the information in the fight is revealed throughout the film and so it was redundant. One would have to hazard a guess that the real reason it was cut had more to do with bad acting than the fact that it foreshadowed the overall plot, as it opens with trees swaying in the breeze.

For some reason John Leguizamo (as Julian) is in this film as well; wasted talent who is given a barrage of useless dialogue which serves only to clue the audience in on needless backstory (the fact that Alma is a little twat who cheated on Elliot) which is completely superfluous to the needs of the film.

Having served the purpose of establishing information thoroughly irrelevant to the story arc (although one guesses that it was supposed to create in the audience an emotional bond with Elliot and Alma, something to make us care about what happens and 'humanise' the tale) Julian promptly dumps his daughter (another Obligatory Irritating Child) on the protagonists and, wisely, kills himself at the earliest possible convenience, thereby lightening the character load and saving face for the inevitable Ice Age 3.

Most advocates of this film say that this was 'a parable,' or has 'deeper meaning' or that M. Night Shyamalan's made in 'on purpose' as take on Hitchcock's The Birds. I can clearly see the parallels except for the part where The Birds was a brilliant and disturbing film made by a master at the top of his game.

Some have argued that The Happening will challenge you, make you think. This is true. It was a challenge to sit through it all and it made me think that I had just pissed away $15 and 91 minutes of my life.  Others have stated that it was just a fun B movie made with A-list actors.

As a film fanatic and someone with a wealth of useless knowledge about B movies amassed from more than thirty years of experience, allow me to offer my own take on what separates a 'fun B movie' from a gruelling sixty million dollar experiment in self-indulgence. A fun B movie with A-list actors is David Cronenberg's The Fly, Joel Schumacher's Lost Boys or Flatliners, Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil, Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again.

There is a certain je ne sais quoi to a proper B movie-- a certain Wessonality --that The Happening utterly lacks in heaping great wodges, and that distinction usually ends with the words 'Starring Wings Hauser!' or 'Only on DVD!' 

B movies are the rich fodder keeping alive the Sci-Fi Channel and Cinemax; they are the movies you end up taking home from the video store because all the good films are checked out and you don't want to have wasted the trip; they are the cinematic equivalent of secret elephant burial grounds where washed up actors go before fading completely into obscurity; they are where WWF 'wrestlers' get to be gritty action heroes or where aspiring actresses do nude scenes they regret later if and when they become famous; they are where former porn stars try to go straight or when they are so used up their orifices resemble aircraft hangars or, as Borat states 'hangs like a wizard's sleeve'; where Playboy models (like Sydney Moon, A.K.A. KatieFun789) quickly learn that they will never be as big as Pamela Anderson or Anna Nicole Smith and will wallow forever in soft-core American Pie knock offs for all eternity before they end up in porno or married to Gene Simmons.

And the chasm between between fun and faeces is wide and deep, very like an old porn star. Truly bad B movies can range from pioneering schlock like Roger Corman and his made-in-an-afternoon low budget crap to masters of gore like Herschell Gordon Lewis. But what makes a B movie absolutely extraordinary, what can elevate it to classic status and make it memorable is that little extra spark of madness. 

Directors like the poor delirious Edward D. Wood Jr or his buddy Phil Tucker believed with all their hearts that they were making films on the same type of grand scale as David Lean. They poured their hearts and souls into making some of the worst films imaginable and yet could not understand why they were being crucified or mocked for their efforts. They were unrepentant for their mistakes because they didn't believe they had made any and strove even harder to prove their critics wrong-- resulting in hilariously awful cinematic gems.

When you believe you are making a Star Wars level masterpiece and the result is a couple of pie plates dangling on fishing line, you are deluded. And often your films are pee-your-pants funny by complete accident and gives the world such bittersweet moments as Tor Johnson's 'Now is time for go to bed' line of dialogue. You can't set out to make a bad film on purpose. People who do often fail miserably at it because it so obvious that the attempt was to make a 'cult' film.

As a literary parallel, it is why H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson or, more contemporaneously, Clive Barker are considered masters of the horror genre: their command of language, their ability to elevate the often absurd into epic, terrifying proportions that continue to haunt you years later is what makes them different than, for example, Stephen King ('Oh, here he goes again!') who is basically sitting around a metaphorical campfire with a flashlight under his chin. Yeah, it's okay. It's short-term visceral pleasure. But does it last? Not so much. Good on him, though. He's wealthy at the expense of 'Constant Reader,' and if that's the only important thing well, then, he's achieved his goal.

Good schlock has heart and soul. It has an integrity behind it, though often misguided. Anyone attempting to recreate that feel on a 60 million dollar budget is missing the point entirely. Do it for 60 thousand dollars, then we'll talk. In the meantime, to argue that it is a 'fun' B movie is radically missing the point. And to compare it to Hitchcock is slander.

A perfect example of how not Hitchcock this is: because they think New York is under attack, everyone flees the city and eventually Elliot, Alma, and the Obligatory Irritating Child make it to a secluded farmhouse, owned by Mrs Jones (played spectacularly by the hugely underutilised Betty Buckley) where they are informed for some reason that there is an old shack out back that has a 'speaking tube' run between it and the main house. You can hear people in the shack just like they were standing in the same room with you, Mrs Jones tells them. Then she goes and smashes her head on the side of the house.

The point in broadcasting or telegraphing the 'speaking tube' would be, one would think, so that it can be used later for a critical plot point, some twist in the events, a vital moment of deus ex machina. Where Hitchcock would have woven the speaking tube into the story in some seemingly random fashion and then pulled it out about the time you were relentlessly on the edge of your seat screaming 'The tube! The tube! Use the fucking tube!' at the characters, Night introduces it clumsily and uses it ineptly.

Elliot, shortly after Mrs Jones inspects the side of her house and smashes out some windows by smacking her head into them, discovers that Alma (who, it is established, hates children and does not necessarily want them) is suddenly and uncharacteristically playing with the Obligatory Irritating Child out in the shack. Why? Who knows. Clearly, though, Alma has not heard the banging and shattering of glass-- or Elliot whining out for her --but Elliot, on the other hand, hears Alma and the OIC perfectly well from several rooms away. He has to run and find the special room where the tube is to get Alma's erstwhile attention.

This is called a 'logic gap.'

Hitchcock, at the end of The Birds, creates and prolongs the tension as the protagonists, believing their ordeal may have subsided, finally and with great trepidation creep from their safe haven and gingerly navigate their way through a sea of thousands of watchful birds to an escape vehicle. There is a sense of foreboding that walking out unprotected amidst this vast avian army might not be the wisest choice, and even as the car finally crawls slowly away we are never quite certain that this is the end of the story.

Shyamalan, on the other hand, now has Elliot, who is separated from Alma by a yard full of swaying grass and whispering evil tree boughs, decide that he has to be with her. He marches out into the yard, as does Alma, and-- oh... wait... Hey the trees don't kill them. Huh. The evil must have passed.

Then back in a strangely very empty New York, Elliot and Alma have apparently decided to single handedly repopulate the eastern seaboard because Alma has just discovered she is pregnant.

The end.

And then you sit and stare at the screen and suddenly shake your head as if waking abruptly from an unexpected nap and ask

'What?'

in a manner which would suggest you didn't believe you had heard correctly.

M. Night Shyamalan must have worked out the dialogue and plot details of this film with Midori-san, the blogging house plant.  And if he conceived this film as an homage to Hitchcock specifically and The Birds in general, he should have taken better notes in class. He would have known that classic Hitchcock placed the protagonists in a state of heightened tension to draw the audience in for a cathartic moment.  He might have understood that, for example, if you have your characters find safe haven in an old farmhouse, it is only after having abandoned their car on the other side of the woods. Only to then do they discover that it was the woods doing all the killing and that the only way to get out of this mess is to get back to their car-- back through the evil killer trees. You make it clear that they have to face something horrifying, a metaphor for passing through the underworld if you want to go all Joseph Campbell.

The makers of The Blair Witch Project understood this.  So did James Cameron with the classic 'Oh shit' moment in Aliens when Ripley inadvertently stumbles into the queen's lair and finds herself surrounded by hundreds of alien eggs. Even M.Night Shyamalan recognised this and used it quite effectively in Signs. Unfortunately he seems to have forgotten the underlying point of a 'horror' film, which is to horrify-- and not just with lame writing, pointless gore, and stupid dialogue.

Honestly, the only thing that probably could have saved this film-- apart from being re-written, re-cast, re-shot, and completely re-edited into a good film made by a director who understood the genre --would have been to end it with a memorable chase scene accompanied by a toe-tapping rendition of Yakety Sax as the screen faded to black.

It would have left the fate of Elliot, Alma and the Obligatory Irritating Child wide open, in keeping with the apocalyptic theme of the film, and I wouldn't have felt so thoroughly ripped off in every imaginable way.

One can only hope that, with a little time to reflect on what went so radically wrong the first time through, M. Night Shyamalan will see the error of his ways and return to this subject again at a later date with the anticipated sequel:

 

Conspicuous Silence

For as long as I can remember, part of the thrill of experiencing a film in the theatre has always been the trailers. And an indelible part of that experience was the seemingly ubiquitous nature of the deep unearthly baritone voice narrating those trailers-- that announcer guy from the movies --who stamped them in your memory.

It's going to be missed.

Don LaFontaine 1940 - 2008

Musn't See TV

Sci-Fi Channel has become, over the course of time, less of a haven for die hard science fiction and fantasy fans (the two Stargates and Battlestar Galactica not withstanding) and more of a clearing house for some of the worst possible films ever made, many of them proudly bearing the title of Sci-Fi Originals. This means that, generally speaking, they either financed the project directly or they bought a load of substandard productions that would otherwise languish in the twilight nether world of direct-to-video rental and slapped their name on it in the hopes of attracting advertising and thereby recouping some if not all of their primary investment by lending these productions a sense of legitimacy. Basically it's a somewhat cleaver marketing strategy, like calling a pile of shit "re-purposed post-consumer food product." It may be accurate, but it certainly is deceptive.

This is not to say that all direct-to-video productions are destined for the 49 cent bargain rental shelf at Family Video. There are many reasons why specific projects see video and DVD distribution rather than broad theatrical or network television release, like the upcoming Babylon 5 DVD advertised to your left (yeah, I saw you look) or all of the recent Disney sequels, and those reasons are largely financial and practical, such as realising that you can reach a wider audience and see better or more prolonged revenue from direct purchase.

These films, however, are not to be confused with the aptly-named "B Movies" which have a long, often illustrious (if not illuminating) history of their own. In the 50s and 60s these films were the low-budget "make out flicks" shown after the primary-- or "A Movie"--at double features and drive-ins: for example you might have gone to see the "A" picture When Worlds Collide and that would be followed by the "B" picture Zontar, Thing From Venus.

Other films, though, are just so bad that no one will distribute them once they are made. They make some of the worst of the B movies--like Bride of the Monster--look like Gladiator.

And so, as a public service, let me strongly caution you to stay far, far away from two of these over-glorified Sci-Fi Channel turds running in a seemingly endless cycle of late: Descent (a sad, painful, ultra-low-budget remake of The Core) and  Fire: Nature Unleashed (with Melanie Lewis from Gigli), which is just... well at the end of The Man With X-Ray Eyes Ray Milland is told that if his "eye offend thee, strike it out" and that's how I felt watching Fire.

Just like driving past a violent and bloody traffic accident, I found that I couldn't stop looking at Fire: Nature Unleashed (with Melanie Lewis from Gigli) no matter how badly I wanted to. And at a certain point, I simply lost track of just what it was I was watching because of the ever-shifting premise and the distraction of people walking around in front of the camera talking about stuff. In other films these people would be called "actors." In this film they were simply in the way, taking up about 90 minutes of otherwise productive time until the end credits rolled. Oh and then some stuff was kind of on fire too, in a bad, orangey CGI sort of way, which was good because the people ran for safety and hid in a little wooden building that lead to an old abandoned mine shaft, and everyone knows bad orangey CGI fire can't burn little wooden things.  And then this guy who was supposed to be like Jason Voorhees came in and got killed and then everybody was rescued from the lush green forest that wasn't on fire--except for the little wooden building that blew up because of the methane.  The budget for this film must have been in the hundreds!

And then there was Descent, made in 2005. Not to be confused with Descent from 2005 or The Descent from 2007. Or the various other films entitled Descent made over the last thirty years. This was the one made in Canada. It had Luke Perry and Michael Dorn. And some bitchy ugly chick who thought she was still really hot for a sixty year old with disgusting chicken-skin neck and really wasn't. She worked "for the President"(of Canada?) and told everybody that they'd better have a good explanation for why all this lava was burning stuff.  My bet was that the pryoclastic flow dangerously geysering up out of the centre of the Earth was hot enough to melt rock. Of course I had to wonder too, if this dangerous volcanic build-up was happening in "The Ring of Fire" (which is essentially Indonesia), why did the film take place in "California?" Even the obligatory "PhDs" in their obligatory Hawaiian shirts and five o'clock shadows (to show their non-conformity and contempt for "the system") never bothered to  explain that one.

The twist came when it was revealed that the reason for all the lava was actually because a government experiment  had gone wrong. Figures. So this scientist who always seemed concerned about everything and a girl who wanted to be Hillary Swank got a plastic toy ship with a giant drill on the front of it and they drove into the middle of the planet so two of the guys could fight it out over the girl who wanted to be Hillary Swank and everyone had to wear matching grey tops to show that they belonged on the ship then my brain stopped working.

I couldn't take it any longer. Like Joel and, some time later, Mike, I was searching for the crate of Hamdingers, all the while thinking Must...reach...remote...control....Must...stop...

So the next time you are surfing channels and happen to stumble across one of the many screenings for these little germs gems on Sci-Fi, remember all the brain cells that died for you. And be afraid. Be very afraid.