There is no reason for you to see Skinwalkers.

Seriously, I cannot emphasize that enough. No reason whatsoever. If your child has a rare and fatal disease that can only be cured by seeing Skinwalkers; you still have no reason to see Skinwalkers. If you are carjacked and commanded at gunpoint to see Skinwalkers; you still have no reason to see Skinwalkers. If you are kidnapped by members of Al Queda Iraq and told that the only way to avoid being dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forced to “confess” your crimes against the Muslim world on streaming internet video, and have you head sawed off is to see Skinwalkers; you still have no reason to see Skinwalkers. If God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Of All That is Seen and Unseen descends from Heaven in a swirl of clouds, flanked by seraphim, and promises you a life of happiness, joy, and fulfillment as long as you see Skinwalkers; you still have no reason to see Skinwalkers. If Tyra Banks calls you up for dinner and a movie and following that, an evening of athletic sex so debauched, so raunchy, so debased that you will remember it upon your deathbed as you prepare to shuck off your mortal coil and can’t even recall your loved ones or your own name–as long as that movie you see is Skinwalkers…I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Okay, get the point? Skinwalkers is bad. It’s not fun bad, or funny bad, or even train-wreck bad. It’s dull bad. Bland bad. Highway rest stop bad. McDonalds breakfast burrito bad. Absolutely no pleasure can be derived from watching Skinwalkers, but neither is it a risible experience. It lacks even the ambition to be terrible. There are any number of more productive things you could be doing rather than watching Skinwalkers. Some examples:

Reading the TV Guide

Completing the TV Guide crossword puzzle

Sleeping

Bathing

Petting a dog

Scratching a cat between the ears.

Bathing a dog between the ears.

Doing your laundry

Doing someone else’s laundry

Selling someone else’s laundry on the street

Tearing your apartment apart to find hidden microphones

Writing admiring letters to Joel McHale

Engaging in a lively chatroom debate on the merits of the USS Enterprise vs. the Battlestar Galactica

Threatening members of a sci-fi chatroom

Making YouTube music video homages to Scarecrow and Mrs. King

Setting your house or building on fire

Setting your neighbors’ house on fire

Googling everyone you know

Masturbating

Buying a dozen GI Joes and reenacting the Battle of Pork Chop Hill

Using the GI Joes to reenact the 2007 Armed Forces Sub-Committee Hearings

Using the GI Joes to make amateur gay porn

Seeing any movie with Keaunu Reeves

Seeing any movie with Andie McDowell

Seeing any movie by Lars von Trier

Reading any novel by Tama Janowitz

Seeing which home electronics will work in the shower

Repaint your bedroom with White-Out

Mentally listing every villain from every James Bond film in chronological order

Mentally listing every villain from every James Bond film in chronological order while drinking malt liquor

Reading a graphic novel

Paying your taxes

Updating your Buckaroo Banzai fan site

Raising sea monkeys and then feeding them to a sucker-fish

Writing haikus about William Shatner

Seeing if your car can float

Teaching yourself a foreign language by watching all your DVDs with the subtitles running

Audition for American Idol

Write a thesis on the lyrics of Corey Hart’s Sunglasses at Night

Speaking to a loved one

Thinking up additional dialogue for Slow Burn

Thinking up a better ending for Sunshine

Baking gingerbread men, so you can eat them while pretending you’re the ginormous crocodile from Primeval

Daytrading

Stockpiling ordinance for the inevitable zombie attack

Frequenting Haitian prostitutes

Making a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho

Writing your Family Ties/The Shield crossover fanfic

Seeing how many e-mails you have to send to Claire Danes before the inevitable restraining order

Dressing your pets like late-Vice Don Johnson

Prank calling Elmore Leonard

Slipping Patrick Stewart photoshopped pictures of you and he dressed as a harem girl and a sultan respectively (or vice-versa)

Filming The Grapes of Wrath using weebles

Inventing a comic commentary track for Schindler’s List

Go to Single’s Night at the local Wal-Mart

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point. There is absolutely no reason to see Skinwalkers.

When you title your movie Frankenfish, the audience is going to have some natural expectations. I, for one, fully expected there to be a fish with little bolts in its fishy neck. And maybe he’ll be wearing little Doc Martins on some of his fins. There could even be a scene in which a mad fish-scientist—maybe bearing a resemblance to Jacques Cousteau—brings the fish to life in a blaze of electricity and cackles, “It swims! It swims!”  Maybe, if you want to ambitious, you even have a scene in which the fish bellows, “Fire bad!”  I don’t how you make the fish talk, since they mostly only make that popping noise with their mouths, but what the hell. It’s a Frankenfish. Alas, none of those things happen in Frankenfish. We do get China Chow, and she’s cute. Plus there’s another hot chick, too, so you could do a lot worse.

Well, they cruise the swamp a bit, which gives us the opportunity to take in some swamp culture…or a bad B-movie’s approximation of it, anyway. It also gives China a chance to strip down into her bikini top, and really, isn’t that the reason we go to movies in first place? You know, that and, like, to dream or whatever. Anyway, they get to a couple of houseboats, and chat up the residents in the direction of, “Hey, seen some kind of a monster that could tear a man to pieces? No, we ruled out an Alligator X already.”

And this is how this movie was green-lit.

The residents in one trailer are a hippie couple played by that guy with the broken nose that shows up in a lot of stuff, and hottie blonde wife who likes to walk around naked. OK, so far that’s awesome (though if Swamp People is to be believed, you really don’t want to see any bayou-dweller’s naked). The other boat has some swamp woman living in it. She’s being visited by her smokin’ hot daughter Eliza (K. D. Aubert), and her douchebag boyfriend/boss. Get used to these folks we’ll be with them awhile.

Okay, so in the meantime we see some Asian mercenary types contacting a Great White Hunter type, who gleefully barks orders into his cel phone while topless cuties canoodle on a sleeping Bengal tiger. That’s a pretty awesome way to live as a millionaire. I bet they all do. If Warren Buffet doesn’t have naked chicks lounging around a mansion with endangered species, I will be very disappointed. I’m pretty sure Ted Turner does.

Cut to Sam and Sara, who’ve settled down to have dinner with Eliza and company. Eliza’s mom keeps pushing her toward Sam, and she ends up fighting with her boyfriend. Sam, meanwhile, reminisces with the mother about when he went to school with Eliza and Sara’s thinking, “Um, isn’t there a killer fish out there or something?” Well, the boyfriend calls K.D.  swamp trash and storms off to…uh, another part of the boat, I guess. Sara takes the opportunity to have a little girl talk with K.D. during which she unsubtly hits on her.

In this moment, the movie brushes up against awesomeness.

Oh please...please...

Alas, K.D. rebuffs her advances, saying, “Funny thing, whether it’s a man or a woman, you always end up with your head between someone’s legs.” She says it like it’s a bad thing. I don’t get it. I also don’t get why the filmmakers didn’t work in at least a decent make out scene. It’s just mean they don’t. Bordering on sadistic, really.

No matter, in short order, the hippie couple get taken out by a massive mutant snakehead fish. The chick’s death in particular is pretty awesome. It smacks her out of the water, then leaps out and snaps her in half in midair. I gotta admit, this is one of the more endearing monsters in B-moviedom. He really puts effort into it, like Colin Farrell did in Fright Night or F. Murray Abraham did in that killer baboon movie.

Okay, so this is the point where everyone freaks out. Reasonably so, you have to admit. But they also think, Aha! I think I know what’s been killing people in the swamp! Well, the fish swims around terrorizing them a little bit more, then decides, “Ah the hell with it,” and attacks the houseboat. Fortunately, a swamp dude shows up in time to blow it away with a shotgun, then cut its heart out. Turns out it’s the brother of the guy whose murder kicked the whole movie off. Then he grills the heart and takes a bite out of it!

Then another fish leaps out of the swamp, rips out the guy’s entrails and eats them in front of him. God damn, this movie is fun. This is almost making up for the lack of hot-chick-on-hot-chick action.

Oh, shit...

So, the houseboats catch fire under the assault of the Frankenfish, and Sara ends up with half her skull blown off by a ruptured propane tank. This is a helluva waste of a China Chow, I gotta say. She went out pretty awesomely, though. Anyway, the group gets whittled down to Sam, Eliza, and her d-bag boyfriend. They end up being saved by the aforementioned hunter and his Asian posse, who explain that they created a massive mutant snakehead hybrid. Why? Because he could, apparently. I guess once  you reach a point in life where you have naked chicks canoodling on Bengal tigers it’s tough to come up with new hobbies.

"We've run out of things for China to do, so, uh..."

Well, the hunter-dude isn’t really a good guy, and he forces the group to wade into the Frankenfish’s lair, where the fish promptly eats him and his Asian posse. I guess attention to detail wasn’t this guy’s strong point.

Sam and Eliza set off in a fan boat, with the Frankenfish in hot pursuit. Sam cuts the engine, and the Frankenfish ends up taking a header into the fan and being diced. Sam and Eliza then exchange banter and make out, obviously haven forgotten about the half-dozen dead friends and family members they’ve accumulated in the past 24 hours. Oh, and Eliza’s d-bag boyfriend ends up stuck in the mud and being eaten alive by baby Frankenfish.

So, yeah, this is a pretty cool movie. You have a fairly well-deployed monster, adequate amounts oif unnecessary nudity, and hot chicks. Still, that tease with the lesbian action was in bad faith, as was killing off China. If she had been the one blithely making out with Eliza in the last scene instead of Sam, this movie would have been epic.

Oh well…

So, about two minutes into the first action sequence of Underworld: Awakening it hit me:  I have never liked these movies. Ever. None of them, and I have seen all of them. Most in the theater.  And yet none of them has been good.  I mean, vampires vs. werewolves should be cool. Not awesome. Not epic.  Not like, you know, Daniel Craig riding dinosaurs into battle against Imperial stormtroopers awesome, but it should be cool. So why do they blow so hard and long? You even have Kate Beckinsale in skin-tight leather and still, I can barely recall anything about any of these movies except the fact that they’re shot through a blue filter and I think Tony Blair was in one. So now we got Underworld: Awakening. And it is…um…well, I fell asleep during a shootout, so what does that tell you?

Okay, so this movie begins with Kate delivering a voice over explaining where we are in the Underworld saga. And this, basically amounts to, “Hiya, I’m a vampire assassin who used to kill werewolves. But then I fell in love with one who’s played by the dude from Felicity. And then I learned that the other vampires were d-bags, so I killed them. And then we paired up and killed some more vampires and werewolves, and, well, there was a third one, but that was a prequel, and I wasn’t in it, so don’t worry about that and here we are.” And then she launches into another expository sequence in which she explains how humans learned about the vampires and werewolves in their midst and led a pogrom to kill them all. Within five minutes we have a flashback and a flash-forward which is really a flashback. That’s how this movie is built. Holy hell, Tilt-a-Whirls run by toothless carnies huffing spray paint are constructed better than this movie.

So, Kate wakes up in a test tube in the bowels of a massive research company, and she kills a fuck-ton of guys before she escapes. She figures out she has been on ice for 12 years, and that now vampires have been forced underground and werewolves are virtually extinct. She tracks down another escapee who is a young girl. She takes the girl to an underground (literally) vampire coven, but they’re attacked by a bunch of werewolves, and…

Oh screw this. I have no interest in recounting the plot of this movie. I could barely stay awake during it. The kid is Selene’s daughter—I don’t know how she was born, I was asleep during that part—the research facility who claims to be creating a cure to vampire/werewolf virus is actually run by werewolves who are using vamp DNA to repopulate their species and make super-mega-banzai werewolves, and Selene has to lay everything waste and save her daughter. Now let’s get the bullet points:

* Selene’s daughter has a British accent, despite the fact they’ve never met. Okay, filmmakers: accents are NOT genetic. You morons.

* The daughter also looks like Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist when she vamps out. Hm. Good way to build sympathy for a character.

* Who are we supposed to root for? Vampires and werewolves are MONSTERS who transform humans. So why are we supposed to hope Selene and her vampire brethren prevail in this fight?

* Oh yeah, and the first two films of this series pretty much established that the vampire and werewolf societies are corrupt and duplicitous. Again, why are we rooting for these people to win?

* Kudos to Kate for still fitting to that skin-tight leather corset after the years.  Of course, these movies are about as sexy as a Republican debate, but, hey, good on Kate for still rockin’ the bod.

* Vampires can’t be killed with bullets. Neither can werewolves. Still, they fight with machine guns. Anyone want to explain that one to me?

* Selene traded down from her Walther P99s to the vastly inferior (IMHO) Beretta.

* Kate’s husband, Len Wiseman, couldn’t even be bothered to direct this installment. Guess he’s saving up his inspiration to screw up another Die Hard movie.

* Does Stephen Rea need the money this badly? I mean, he plays a werewolf and has to fight a ten year-old girl while in mid-transformation. What did he have to buy so badly he would submit to a scene like that? A pool? A Corvette? An iPad?

* The werewolves’ big master plan is to genetically engineer themselves to be impervious to silver, because this will, in the logic of this movie, make them invulnerable. Maybe I’m naïve, but I always thought that werewolves’ big weakness was the fact that they become bestial and abandon all higher forms of thought and reason when they transform. Am I wrong?

* The ending of this movie is so ramshackle, I’m pretty sure the editors took one look at it and just said, “Screw it, we throw in a voice over and roll credits. Okay? Wanna get tacos?”

That’s Underworld: Um, number 4. Yeah, it’s better than any of the Twilight movies, but that’s like saying Dengue Fever is better than being eaten by a shark.

So… Creature of Darkness …yeah …Creature of Darkness…this movie is basically a rip off of Predator, only without any of the things that made Predator awesome. So, instead of commandos, we get a bunch of dumbass twenty-somethings.  And instead of Arnie we get, um, Sanoe Lake. Remember her? She was the chick in Blue Crush that wasn’t Kate Bosworth or Michelle Rodriguez. Remember her now? Well, it’s not a big deal—you’re probably not going to see this movie (and there’s no reason you should). Ooo! But it does have an alien hunter! Aw yeah! Only instead of, like, a cloaking device or really cool alien weaponry it…uh, well, it dresses up like the Gordon’s Fisherman. (Sigh), okay let’s just get this over with.

Okay, first we have the setup—try and stay with me here, because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You just gotta trust me, okay? Basically we have a bunch of dumbasses going on an off-road camping adventure so one of them can get therapy. Yeah, I know it makes no sense. So, one of the chicks with them is like a psych major or something, and she brought them all out there so this one wiggy dude played by Devon Sawa can work through his traumas. This is a little like going bowling to repair a collapsed lung, but I guess it made perfect sense to the filmmakers.

Anyway, they get to the campground and immediately start off-roading on ATVs and dune-buggies and stuff. Well, pretty soon they fiond out that they’re on the edge of an Air Force testing range. Now, this is the point where anyone with a scintilla of common sense pops smoke. Okay, it’s not tough math: Air Force testing range=planes dropping bombs. Bombs=bad (this is why we drop them on people we don’t like). Ergo: let’s get the fuck out of here! But, no, they figure as long as they stay far enough from the edge of the range they’ll be fine. How do you root for people like this?

Oh yeah, and they find the body of a pilot who’s been disemboweled. And they still don’t leave!

Well, pretty soon, we shift POVs to that of the alien hunter stalking them. How do we know it’s alien? We see it’s alien claw. Okay, good enough. Well, pretty soon it starts picking them off. First it uses a sinkhole, like an ant lion trap that it can camouflage with a hologram. Yeah, that’s okay so far.

"I am so gonna anally-probe these people..."

So, then the chicks all strip down to their bikinis, and get the boys all hot and horny (a little ol’ disemboweled corpse isn’t going to stand in the way of a good time), only Devon is all mopey, and the gangbanger guy gets all wifebeater on his girlfriend, like, “Yo! That body belongs to me, bitch! It ain’t for no display! Yo, I’m gangsta! Check out how gangsta I am!” Some of that is real dialogue, BTW.

Okay, so a couple of their party have disappeared, but they’re not real worried about them, because, well, they’re idiots. Night falls, and they make a campfire and proceed to get wasted. Only the gangsta guy is showing off with his gun and he manages to shoot their car, causing it to explode (as cars are prone to do when they’re struck by a piece of metal the size of a marble). Oh no! They’re trapped!

"Missing friends, disembowled corpses...only one logical response."

At this point I just have to assume the alien is laughing its alien butt off.

So one of the chicks decides this is a good time to take a sexxaaay shower. I don’t how they got a shower out there, but they did. So She while she’s caressing her funbags under the spray, the alien watches, and, er, well, they don’t show anything, but I’m pretty sure he’s jacking it. I mean, you hear its breathing getting heavier and faster while it watches her, so the only logical conclusion I can come to is that its burping the worm…or whatever it has.

Well, the chick catches it eventually, because chicks can always sense when someone is peeping on them while they fondle themselves in the shower. I don’t know how, but it sucks. Only, she doesn’t realize at first that it’s an alien hunter, because the thing is wearing a fishing hat and a raincoat! WTF?

(Literally: raincoat. I told you it was slapping the ham.)

Eeeew! That's its ham-slapping tentacle!

The alien incapacitates her by throwing a couple spines at her. Seriously, spines. Like backbones. Only they’re green and start strangling her. The rest of the dumbasses try and fight it off, but it escapes. So, here Devon finally reveals the dark secret that’s been tormenting him. Seems his uncle was a fighter pilot who was taken aboard a UFO (sure, okay, so far so good), where he was tortured and experimented on.  In the process, I guess his alien captors got a little talky, and explained to him that they were watching our planet and every full moon, one of their number comes and collects human samples and vivisects them. They call that one “The Catcher,” which sounds dirty to me.

"They call me 'The Catcher.'..for ALL sorts of reasons!" (wink, wink)

Blah blah blah (I’m bored already), the surviving dumbasses decide to hunt the Catcher, which goes about as well as you’d expect. Finally, Devon, Sanoe, and some expendable dude manage to throw a rope around its neck and drag it around behind the dune buggy! And if you’re thinking, “Hey, wasn’t that a horrific hate crime a decade or so ago?” so am I.

Then they piss on the corpse for good measure. I really want to make a joke here—many of them actually–but the US Marine Corps ruined that for me. Thanks, guys.

Other choice bits:

* One chick describes a guy as, “Dark and sexy, and slippery as an eel…just my type!” Um…eel? Is that what the kids are into now?

* Sanoe gets pissed off at Devon for not telling them earlier about the Catcher. Sure, because they would have bought that story.

* They theorize that the Catcher dresses in a coat and hat to fool its victims into lowering their guard. Either the Catcher is a complete retard or he has a low opinion of us.

* The alien model in this movie is pretty impressive…and completely immobile. Seriously, I think there’s someone standing behind it just moving it back and forth.

* An excerpt of my notes from watching this flick: “Am I drunk?” “Goddamn, this alien sucks.” “Really? I’m not drunk? But I’m seeing things…”

* They also figure out the Catcher (I’m sorry, I can’t keep typing that without feeling gross) the alien is collecting people of every race. Only then do they realize their group is laughably diverse: “Wait! We have a black dude! And an Hispanic chick! And a White guy!”

* Hilarious line from Sanoe, “When I was a girl, my dad was in the military. I used to read his letter from the warzones he went to…” Um, Sanoe, there weren’t any warzones when you were a girl. Unless he found time to write you from Grenada at some point during the, what, three hours we were fighting.

I know you don’t believe this, but I looked this movie up on IMDB. It exists, all right.

Oh swell, The Darkest Hour. The only reason I can think of that this movie exist is that Hollywood hates us all, and decided it would just be too difficult and time-consuming to punch us all in the face. That or some producer needs a way to launder some cash he’s been embezzling, and African conflict diamonds didn’t seem evil enough. Either way, certainly no one could have made this movie because they thought it’s good…I mean, here is a movie that asks us to plunk down what little of our hard-earned money the 1% didn’t steal out of our wallets in the middle of the night (that’s what they do, right?) to watch a couple douchetards being chased through Moscow by—(aw Jesus…)—wavy distortions. Seriously, that’s what happens in this movie. I’ve had more creative bowel movements after a bowl of tom yum goong than anything happens at any time ever in this flick.

Okay, so the Dingi get to Moscow just in time to see their idea jacked by that dude from The Killing who’s Swedish, but talks like he learned English from watching, like, a thousand straight hours of MTV reality shows. Well, they’re both really upset, so they go to a nightclub—because when you’re flat busted and your business model just got blown up like Death Star (either of them), the best thing to do drown your sorrows someplace where a mixed drink costs about as much as a Cadillac. While there they hook with that cute blonde chick from the first Transformers that they never brought back, and Olivia Thirlby, who, despite looking like Huma Abedin, is still the best thing about this movie.

Well, suddenly the power goes out, so everyone runs out in the street, where glowing jellyfish descend from the night sky. At first everyone’s all like, “Pretty lights! They’re wonderful!” Then the big orbs of light get all “Growr!” and begin blowing people up like Doctor Manhattan on a meth bender. So everyone freaks and runs into the club, which the space jellyfish lay waste and kill almost everybody expcept the Dingi, the chicks, and the pretty-fly-for-a-white-guy Swede (yeah, he was at the club—I guess there’s only one in Moscow). Our, um…you can’t really call them heroes…humans take refuge in the club’s cellar, where the space jellyfish can’t go, because, uh, I dunno, they got bored or something. Anyway, they hole up there for a solid 72 hours, before they venture out into the cold light of day, where they find most of Moscow deserted.

So, their big plan is to make it to the American Embassy where they can, I assume, pull that whole, “I’m on American soil, and you can’t touch me! Neener neener!” routine spy movies like so much. Along the way, they discover that the space jellyfish are invisible in the daylight, so they just look all wavy, like the bar does after six Heinekens heat rising off asphalt. Wow. Cheapest. Alien. Effects. Ever. They also figure out that the wavy aliens can’t see through glass and they make lightbulbs glow when they pass by them. So the group all start wearing lightbulbs around their necks. Seriously, these are the people we’re supposed to root for.

Eventually, they make it to the Embassy, only it’s trashed worse than a concert ground after a gathering of the Juagglos. They do find a radio inside a birdcage (I don’t know, either) transmitting in Russian, and some records of dispatches from the rest of the world that has also been attacked. Oh yeah, and the Swede loses his shit and runs out to attack the wavy aliens with a rifle. That ends precisely how you think it does.

Ugh…yadda yadda…some other crap happens and they hook up with a Russian teenage chick and a crazy inventor, who built a jerry-rigged gun that can hurt the aliens (and looks like something the propmaster for Doctor Who would laugh at). Only he gets killed, and so does Dingus #1, and the cute Australian chick (who dies before she can get naked or make out with Olivia or do jumping jacks—thanks movie). And then they hook up with some Russian guerillas that wear scrap metal (like keys and license plates—they look like dudes that couldn’t make it through past the velvet rope at Bartertown).

They figure out how to rig the gun to kill the aliens, and we finally see the damn things somewhat, and…hey, remember when you played Doom on your 486 computer? They look like something from that game. Then Dingus #2 and Olivia get onboard a Russian submarine that whisks them away to safety, while they transmit to the world how to kill the aliens. And the movie ends, presumably minutes before the sub starts on fire and sinks, because that’s what Russian submarines do.

But I left some stuff out:

* Along with the group in that club’s basement is a corpse which, in three days, never seems to decompose or stink. Man, those Russians like their vodka.

* The Embassy staff wrote down their accounts in a big, bound volume like an old timey sea captain.

* We get several shots of alienovision. It’s as goofy as you’d expect.

* You know you have script problems when the dude freaking out makes the most sense: “We can’t go out there!” “The Embassy is probably destroyed, why risk our lives going there?” “We can’t go to the upper floors! We’ll be trapped!” He’s not wrong about any of those things.

* Olivia Thirlby is watchable in anything—even when she’s juking a weird incestuous vibe with David Duchovny.

* The Russian teenager speaks perfect English, including complex physics and engineering terminology. That’s gotta be one hell of a Rosetta Stone extension pack.

* Attention budding screenwriters: If the audience spends the first ten minutes of your movie checking their watches and saying aloud, “Goddamn it, why don’t the aliens invade already!” you’re doing something wrong.

*  So, the aliens can traverse the massive distances of space and launch a planet-wide attack, but glass befuddles them? Something tells me these aliens rode the same intergalactic short-bus as the ones from Signs. Probably wearing matching crash-helmets, too.

* This movie was directed by Chris Gorak, who made the equally dumb Right Outside Your Door.

* If I was given the choice between a city full of invisible, nigh-unkillable alien marauders and rescue on a Russian submarine I’d have to think long and hard about it.

So, that’s The Darkest Hour. It’d make a nice double bill with Vanishing on 7^th Street for a “Horror Movies that Feature Crap-Ass Monsters Chasing Douchebag Leads and Utterly Wasted Hot Chicks” film festival. You know, for people who want absolutely no enjoyment at the movies.

Okay, so when we last left venerable sleuth Sherlock Holmes, he was being portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC series which smartly and successfully transplanted the character to present-day. Ah, but we’re not talking about that show (which just returned for its second season), but instead Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the tepid sequel to the first Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. outing two years ago. I wish I could be as enthusiastic about this movie as I was about that one, but it’s sort of hard to get into a good Holmes mystery when the leads spend the whole movie looking like they’re on the verge of making out.

More on that later. First, a rundown: in AGOS, Sherlock Holmes squares off against his greatest nemesis, Professor Moriarty. This is kind of a strange decision, since there’s most-likely gonna be a third one, and I don’t know who Ritchie and Co. are gonna trot out as the villain now that Holmes has already met his arch-nemesis. Maybe Bigfoot. Or a aliens. Loch Ness is close to London, right?

Anyway, Watson is about to get married, but Holmes plays the part of the party animal who’s all like, “No way, dude! Come on. Let’s go out and get wasted!” Only rather than following up the ”get wasted” part by seeing Rush in concert, he convinces Watson to accompany him on one more adventure. Now, this request is lent a certain urgency by the spate of bombings that plagues London. While the authorities believe said bombings are politically-motivated (when you start to narrow it down, there are a lot of people who like bombing London), Holmes sees the hand of the nefarious Professor Moriarty at work. How, you ask? Shut up, that’s how. Yeah, that’s pretty much how this movie works.

So, basically, Holmes and Watson end up in France, where they hook up with some gypsies and bring Noomi Rapace along for the ride, because, well, why the heck not? Pretty soon Holmes and Watson track Moriarty down to a munitions factory in the forests of Germany where we get a long action sequence that’s cribbed from 85% of all James Bond movies. Holmes and Watson and Noomi infiltrate Blofeld’s Moriarty’s lair only to be discovered and have to shoot their way out. And shoot they do. Holy fuck, there’s more ordinance expended in this sequence than in the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan.

And it all culminates in a race against the clock to prevent a suicide bombing at a diplomatic conference at a Swiss resort. Just like the end of From Paris With Love. Or a million other bad action movies. Anyway, the bombing is foiled, but Holmes and Moriarty go over Reichenbach falls together.  Oh no! Is Holmes dead? Of course not, idiot. This franchise is making money.

You can kind of see where my impatience with this movie comes from. They basically took the plot of any generic thriller and dropped Holmes and Watson into it. And while Downey’s banter with Law is always fun, really, the guy could banter with a houseplant. We can see this in the Iron Man movies or even his non-franchise stuff. We go to a Sherlock Holmes movie to see Sherlock freaking Holmes! Specifically, we want him to awe us with that big brain of his.

Alas, exceedingly little deduction goes on in this movie. Holmes has figured out that Moriarty is behind the bombings before the movie even begins, and he knows that Moriarty has been buying up munitions companies, because shut up! He just knows! So, with these pieces of puzzle put in place offscreen, it’s not really a massive feat of brainpower to figure out that Moriarty is trying to start a war between the superpowers in Europe. I mean, you own a bunch of munitions companies, and what are munitions used for…um, er, uh…ow! Brain hurts! Problem too hard!

And then you have the aforementioned sexuality problem here. The first movie coyly planted an undercurrent of homoeroticism between Holmes and Watson, which could be read as a clever subversion (or rewriting) of every buddy cop duo, who, themselves, were borne out of Holmes in Watson. In this movie, though, these guys just look like they want to do it. And I think Guy Ritchie wants them to. He has Watson’s wife thrown from a train in the first third of the film and sidelined from the rest of it. Still, she fares better than Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), who suffers the dual indignities of being killed off within the first ten minutes, and subsequently being forgotten about. In the first film, Holmes was so enchanted by her he could barely function in her presence. In this movie he’s all, “Irene what now?”

No, the flirting, affection, and physicality occurs only between Holmes and Watson, who bicker, banter, fight, make up, rush blindly in danger to save one another, and rend their garments when they think the other is dying or dead. Oh, and Holmes dresses up like a chick in one scene and spoons with Watson to avoid machine-gun fire. Yeah, that happens. At some point, this all stop being coy and seems genuinely plantitive. You want these two crazy kids to end together, if only to alleviate the misery Holmes feels when he’s without Watson. 

Oh yeah; and speaking of machine-guns, this movie is lousy with them. Guy Ritchie proves himself less the British answer to Quentin Tarantino than the British answer to Tony Scott (I know, I know, he’s already British, just let it go), a director with a talent for empty spectacle. The machine gun fights in this movie speed up, slow down, freeze-frame, but they’re more exhausting than exhilarating.

Plus he has a character school Holmes on the C96 Mauser Broomhandle machine-pistol. Yeah, he sounds pretty badass, unless you factor in that 1) the C96 did not have a box magazine, but instead loaded through the breech with a stripper-clip, and 2) that gun wasn’t invented when this movie took place. I know it’s nitpicky, but it annoys me. Why don’t you just give the guy an Uzi while you’re at it?

In conclusion, the movie is hopelessly unoriginal expect for the homosexual subtext (which isn’t enough to save it).

I’m afraid I have to start 2012 on a note of slight disappointment with the film Alligator X (also known as Xtinction: Predator X). See when I saw that title I thought it was an alternate take on the life of Malcolm X, only using an alligator rather than a militant black man. So, I picked up the DVD imagining 85 minutes of an anthropomorphic alligator in a dashiki being all like, “By any means necessary, whitey-non-reptile!” Hopefully in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson (what? Like, he wouldn’t do it if you paid him enough). Tell me a militant negro alligator with Samuel L. Jackson’s voice wouldn’t be awesome. Yeah, probably unsurprisingly, the movie’s not about that. Instead we just get a bad cgi dinosaur eating people in Louisiana.

Okay, so this movie begins more or less where you’d expect: with a couple dudes getting eaten by a giant monster the filmmakers wisely keep off camera. In this case it’s a couple of Sheriff’s deputies, whose combined brain-power, on the basis of their dialogue, could maybe master the TV Guide crossword puzzle. Okay, so far so good. Darwinism at work. Then we meet the Sheriff, Tim Richards (Lochlyn Munro), who, with the abrupt eating of 2/3rds of his police force is stuck with only his little brother as a Deputy Sheriff. Of course, at this point, he still doesn’t know what killed his men–just something hinky.

Enter Laura Le Crois (Elena Lyons), a local girl who’s returned to the bayou from New Orleans to operate her dad’s swamp-charter business in the wake of his mysterious disappearance. Now, at this point I made false assumption #2 about this film. With Lyons’s dead-eyed, flat-as-the-topography-of-Illinois delivery, and her totally inappropriate-for-swampland outfit of a fitted shirt, short skirt, and spiked heels, it suddenly seemed to make sense: This is a porno film! It even has X in the title! Makes perfect sense, right? You’d think the same thing, I’m sure.

Yeah, no. I’s just your basic monster movie. See, Laura La Crois was married to disgraced college Doctor Charles LeBlanc (Mark Shepard, aka the annoying lawyer in BSG). He’s back in town and looking for her father, so he can buy up their swampland from him. Wait? Why would this guy be so interested in buying swampland? And does it have anything to do with La Crois’s pappy’s disappearance and/or the monster attacks?

Um, yes. Yes, it does. Laura learns this when she takes a young couple out on the swamp, so the dude can propose to his girlfriend. In the process, she spies two rednecks feeding her dad to a gigantic alligator-like monster in the swamp. Unfortunately, the rednecks spot them and take them prisoner. In short order, Laura learns that Charles has returned to Louisiana to breed a prehistoric alligator, and he needs pappy’s land, because it is the only place in the river that’s nutrient-rich enough to support the monster.

So, from there, the movie is a long chase through the swamp, as Laura and the couple escape the rednecks, get recaptured, re-escape et cetera. While this is happening, Sheriff Tim spends most of the film stuck in a tree. Finally, they all team up and kill the rednecks, the mad scientist, and the monster. Well, actually, the rednecks kill each other off. And the monster kills the mad scientist. And Laura’s until-this-point-unseen mother appears from nowhere to blow up the monster. You know, these characters aren’t the most active of protagonists.

So on top of that wafer-thin plot we also have:

* Laura takes the couple onto the swamp at sunset. A moment later, when she is investigating some screams she hears, it’s pitch-black outside. Literally, there is no lapse in time. It goes from sunset to past midnight in, like, two minutes.

* So, this movie takes place in the swamps of Louisiana, which, as I understand it, is pretty hot and humid. Yet everyone in this movie wears multiple layers and, in one case, a knit hat. Except for the women who all wear light tops or bikini tops. Um…what temperature is it supposed to be?

* Holy shit, the cgi on this monster looks less realistic than the graphics on “Angry Birds.”

* Actual dialogue: “He wasn’t just fired. He was banned from teaching in Louisiana or the United States.” Um…Louisiana is in….never mind.

* I’m still unclear on Charles’s plan here. 1) Clone dinosaur-alligator, 2) set it loose in the swamps of Louisiana to breed, 3) ???, 4) $$$$. It’s that step 3 I’m not so clear on.

* Where and how did this dude clone a dinosaur-alligator? That strikes me as the kind of thing you can’t just do in your Motel 8 bathroom.

* The last scene of the movie has everyone preparing to live happily ever after, with the Sheriff and Laura trading flirtatious banter. It’d be heartwarming if 1) Laura hadn’t witnessed her father’s murder by dinosaur-alligator 24 hours earlier; 2) Sheriff Tim hadn’t discovered his brother’s dead body earlier that day. Okay, there’s shaking off a traumatic event, and then there’s borderline-sociopathology…

So, that’s Alligator X. Yeah, this would have made a better porno…

Okay, so it’s time once again for a look back at the year in bad cinema that was. We could look at the good, but how much fun is that? Not really all that much. Plus, I’ve had, like, six cups of coffee this morning, so I don’t have much of an attention span. Anyway, I figured this year rather than do a list, I’d just lump a bunch of movies together in different categories. There was simply that much badness this year. Okay, so let’s get this party started:

It’s Not Easy Being Green: It was a bad year for stuff that featured “Green” in the title. Of course, it doesn’t really help that the two such offerings were both completely unnecessary superheroes. First up, we had The Green Hornet, a big-screen treatment of an ancient comic character from, like, the 1800s or something. The original TV show launched the career of Bruce Lee. This one features Seth Rogan and a damn-near unintelligible Korean pop star. This is not an improvement. Oh yeah, and Cameron Diaz is in it, but I’m pretty sure she just wandered onto the wrong set, and the director just kept filming, because, well, why the hell not? It’s Cameron Diaz. How many times do you see one of those. The second useless “Green” movie was The Green Lantern, a movie that pretends to be about outer-space cops with magical power-rings, but is really about Ryan Reynolds’ abs. Because, really, who would make a movie with such a fruity premise as glowing rings, murderous phlegm clouds, and the truly laughable notion that Blake Lively can act?

Yes, Hayden Christensen Does Indeed Suck: He does. He really, really does. Let’s just drop the post-”Star Wars Prequels” rehabilitation campaign. Maybe George “bantha poop is a great idea” Lucas shoulders most of the blame for the prequel’s awfulness, but included in that Nuremburgh-length indictment must be the casting of Hayden. As Takers and A Vanishing on 7th Street showed us, the guy has basically one mode of acting: douchebag. In Takers, he plays a sort of suburban mall food-court hepcat-wannabe, while in Vanishing, he’s just your basic all-around douchebag. Look, it’s time to face facts: no matter what role he plays, Hayden just comes off like the weird dude who lives next door, who you just know is going to get arrested someday with duct-tape, Vaseline, and a soiled Wonder Woman costume in his trunk.

You’re Not Even Trying Anymore: Now, we know Hollywood is lazy, but is it too much to ask that they at least pretend to be putting some effort into movies? You know, like, “Hey, this movie is all about luring chicks into summer movies using Ryan Reynolds’ abs, but we’ll make it look like it’s part of a superhero movie.” No, instead we get stuff like Apollo 18, which features a budget-saving found-footage concept, and even more budget-friendly killer moon rocks. Yes, you read that right. Fucking moon rocks sprout legs and kill people. In The Ward, John Carpenter phones in the entire damn movie as if trying to wrap things up in time for the Early Bird Special at Sizzler: “Hey, I’m gonna roll film, and you, uh, do some stuff…and someone will, uh, kill you, I guess…and, uh…fuck it, she wakes up and it’s all a dream.” Hey John, that sound you hear is whatever goodwill you still have left being flushed away. Then we got stuff like Priest and The Roommate, in which I’m reasonably certain there was never an actual screenplay involved, just a lot of blank pages with things like “Vampires vs. Priest in a Futuristic Western” or “Single, White Female on Campus” scrawled on them.

The Crazy Train Has Left the Station: Fortunately, Hollywood likes to whipsaw between extremes, so when it’s not being blandly derivative, it’s pants-crappingly nuts. I mean, in The Resident, we get Jeffery Morgan hiding in a fake wall, and slapping the ham over Hilary Swank (Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, I should point out), when he’s not hiding beneath her bed and suckling her fingers while she sleeps. Yeah, read that last sentence all you want–it’s not going to make any more sense. Then, in Insidious, a team of paranormal specialists don WWI-era gas masks before a seance and show off enough MacGuyvered equipment to make those nitwits on Ghost Hunters look like fucking neurosurgeons. In Red Riding Hood, the whole town has a festival wherein people wear animal horns and pretend to sodomize Amanda Seyfried’s father (and don’t tell me they’re celebrating The Feast of Horned Animals and butt-raping–I Googled that, and it’s not a real holiday), while later they make her wear an aardvark mask and slow roast someone in a giant, brass elephant. So, yeah, someone typed “aardvark mask” in a script in Hollywood and someone else filmed it. Yep, that happened. Finally, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn started and…it just went crazier and crazier from there.

Pretentiousness Punches You in the Face: Okay, so we got the usual suspect, Lars Von Trier, who offers up Melancholia, in which we get plenty of non-sensical still images, an excruciatingly drawn-out and unnecessary first act, thudding symbolism (“Aunt Steel-breaker?”), and finally the end of the world–which would almost be worthwhile if it meant we’d never have to sit through any more high-minded twaddle like this. Oh, and Kirsten Dunst’s nude scenes do not ease the pain. On the flip side, you have Hanna, which seeks to be a subversion of the action-hero genre, but comes off as silly, because no matter who her father is, a 13 year-old girl is not going to overpower a commando. There are physical principles involved that just can’t be avoided. On top of that we get Eric Bana’s junk in close-up, and a villain in nuthugger shorts. I’m absolutely certain the director thinks he was making an anti-Iraq War statement with the groin shots (Eric Bana’s junk is the UN, the nuthugger shorts are Cheney and Rumsfeld…something like that).

Pure Idiocy: Then you have the movies that are just plain stupid. Not fun stupid, like, “Oh good, I can shut my brain off and drool on myself for two hours” stupid, but “Really? Fucking really?” stupid. Like Immortals, in which people in silly hats slaughter one another in orgies of violence…that are impossible to take seriously because of the silly hats. Or In Time, which only needs a very minor amount of tweaking to be a sub-par Saturday Night Live sketch. Or pretty much every movie Adam Sandler has done this year, because he’s a 50 year-old man still acting like a basement-dwelling teenager.

Cage-tastic 2011: Nicolas Cage’s legal troubles ensure we’ll be fully stocked with movies featuring perhaps the only leading man for whom a raging coke habit would only make him more restrained. This year alone, we got Season of the Witch, Drive Angry, Trespass, and Seeking Justice. Who knows what Cagey goodness 2012 will bring? Cage donning a feathered bodysuit for a remake of Condorman? Cage playing the shark in a new Jaws installment? Or Cage just facing the camera shouting borderline incoherent things for 90 minutes? Really, I’d pay 12 bucks to see any of those things.

The WORST of 2011: It’s a toughie, but this prize has to go to Sucker Punch, a film in which Zack Snyder manages to sexualize four women in such a way as to make them as unerotic as possible, while; piling on the action sequences in such a way that they’re deadly dull. Really, the only thing he got right was the whole undercurrent of sexual assault and victimization that permeates the film. And then he claims that it’s all about female empowerment. Hang on a sec here…bwahahahahahahahahahaha! Sorry, I….hee hee hee hee hee Man, I knew I couldn’t get through that with a straight face. Okay, so having your various female characters raped, used as sexual chattel, murdered and lobotamized is empowering? Jeez, Snyder, why not just pay R. Kelly a couple bucks to pee on them and claim they’ve been canonized?

Okay, so that’s 2011. Bring on 2012…

So, recently Kassandra the Work-Wife told me “You need to review something new. I’m tired of the looking at the poster for Midnight Meat Train. It’s boring.” As I was in the multi-day process of returning home from Iraq, I told her it might take awhile. “Oh, stop being such a baby about things. All of a sudden you’re so self-centered: ‘Wah! I can’t review movies because I’m traveling for the next 72 hours! Wah! I can’t keep texting you internationally because my phone bill was $500 bucks this month! Wah! I can’t talk to you right now because we’re being rocketed and I have to run to a bunker!’ Jeez, find your balls, cowboy up and review a freakin’ movie will you?” Unfortunately, I’d have to get around to seeing one worth reviewing, and that hasn’t happened yet. Instead, I thought we’d do something a bit more seasonal. I mean, it’s Christmas and all, why have some horrible B-movie’s poster plastered on my site over Christmas? So, here’s a quick holiday movie roundup. Just a quick (and easy) way to celebrate the season. So, in no particular order:

It’s a Wonderful Life–Poor George Bailey. His youthful dreams of living a life of adventure have curdled into middle-aged disappointment. Add to that the various and sundry failures that have stalked him his whole life, and his impending financial ruin, and it’s easy to understand why he’d seriously consider jumping off a bridge. But he’s also married to a babe-a-licious Donna Reed, so he’s got that in the win column. Frank Capra’s movie is not so cloying as its reputation would make it seem, finding joy and humanity in the heartbreak of the average man.
Timeless Holiday Message: Life is hard, but that’s what makes it precious. Plus if you can land Donna Reed, you’re luckier than 99.999% of the rest of the hetero male population.

Miracle on 34^th Street—Some kid doesn’t believe Santa exists. But then the real one shows up working at Macy’s. Or something. Natalie Wood was in this movie. And Macy’s was prominently featured. I think Santa has to appear in front of the HUAC at the end. The volume was off when I was watching this, but that’s what it looked like. Anyway it ends with everyone believing in Santa Claus, and Santa working for Macy’s, I guess.
Timeless Holiday Message: Macy’s has a really good PR department. It’s good to perpetuate myths and lies. Santa’s a dirty commie.

The Santa Clause—Tim Allen murders Santa Claus and has to take his place. Wackiness ensues. I’m not sure how they padded this thing out to 90 minutes but they did. It was a huge hit. Anyway, it was the 1990s and we believed all sorts of dumb stuff like tortoiseshell glasses were attractive and Tim Allen was funny. For our sins we were afflicted with numerous sequels and other Tim Allen holiday movies.
Timeless Holiday Message: Each holiday season Tim Allen visits us all to bring a little misery into our lives.

Elf–Will Ferrell is a human adopted by an elf (Bob Newhart), and grows up working in Santa’s toy factory. With a note-perfect performance by Farrell–who happens to be about a yard taller than everyone else–this is actually a funny enough premise to carry a movie. But director John Faverau sets his creation loose in New York City to reunite with his father (James Caan). If, like me, you’ve ever wondered what Sonny Corleone would do when confronted by a dude in a green velvet jumpsuit claiming to be his son, this movie supplies the answer. Along the way we get generous helpings of Zooey Deschanel’s big blue eyes and endearing spaciness.
Timeless Holiday Message: Bob Newhart is freaking hilarious as an elf. More movies need stop-motion narwhals. Zooey Deschanel’s eyes are hypnotic.

White Christmas—Bing Crosby took a break from getting hammered and beating up his kids to crank out this musical with Danny Kaye. He and Kaye play World War Two veterans who put on a show to save the ski resort that their old General had sunk his savings and pension into. In the movie Crosby was a Major and Kaye was a private. In reality, the rank culture in the Army would have made sure all these dogfaces hated one another. Kaye would resent Crosby for being an officer; Crosby wouldn’t have deigned to talk to Kaye, and the General would have treated them both with less respect than you give the average farm animal. But this is Hollywood, so it’s one big love-in. Also Rosemary Clooney shows up and even in her youth looked like a wildebeest.
Timeless Holiday Message: Bing Crosby was a very, very bad man and George Clooney got his looks from someone else.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas—Hollywood takes a revered childhood classic and promptly urinates all over it.
Timeless Holiday Message: There’s a special place in hell waiting for Jim Carrey.

The Shop Around the Corner—The basis for the far, far inferior You’ve Got Mail. I watched this with an ex-girlfriend. After a while she said, “Wow. Jimmy Stewart was hot. It’s almost disturbing how hot he was when he was young.” “Yeah,” I concurred.
Timeless Holiday Message: Before he was perpetually middle-aged, Jimmy Stewart was hot.

Jingle All the Way—Arnold Schwarzenegger battles an alien hunter for the last action figure that happens to be the hot Christmas toy that year. At least I think that was the plot. I didn’t watch this movie. Would you?
Timeless Holiday Message: You should be prepared to punch someone—maybe many people –in the face if you want your kids to love you.

The Family Man—Nicolas Cage plays a career-minded single guy who learns the true meaning of Christmas when he wakes up in a parallel universe wherein he is a dorky husband-and-father who works a crappy job as a tire salesman. Yet the love of his family makes this hellish existence ever so much better than his life as a rich, swinging bachelor.
Timeless Holiday Message: If you’re happily single without kids you’re just deluding yourself, because you’re actually miserable and should just stick your head in the oven. And you’re also probably in Al Qaeda. Freak.

Home Alone—God I hate this film. If Macauley Culkin was my kids, I’d leave him at home, too. Actually, I’d probably see if I stuff him into the Salvation Army donation box outside the nearest gas station. Annoying little bastard.
Timeless Holiday Message: The fact that Macauley Culkin grew up to be a very screwed-up adult is all the Christmas miracle one can hope for.

Black Christmas—The movie that started this blog. A bunch of sorority babes are snowed in at Christmas and stalked by a serial killer. For some reason or other director Glen Morgan seems to think we’d rather see scenes of the killer’s twisted childhood rather than scenes of the sorority chicks having pillow fights or eggnog wrestling. Glen Morgan is an idiot.
Timeless Holiday Message: If you’re going to set a movie in a sorority house, there should be a lot more chicks in lingerie.

Bad Santa—A drunken, foul-mouthed mall Santa. A viscous dwarf as his elf sidekick. A truly weird kid. Lauren Graham. A wooden pickle. Betrayal. Murder. Anal sex. John Ritter. Bernie Mac.
Timeless Holiday Message: This is the best holiday movie ever.

Die Hard—What? It takes place over Christmas Eve, so that makes it a Christmas movie in my book. It tapped into our late-‘80s anxiety over being left behind by emergent economic superpowers in Europe and the Pacific Rim, and then quells them in a soothing hail of gunfire from blue collar hero John McClaine. Now I have a machine gun. Ho! Ho! Ho!
Timeless Holiday Message: Yeah! Bruce Willis kicks ass! USA! USA! USA!

So there we are. Wow. That was probably more work than reviewing a new movie. Oh well, too late now. Here’s wishing a Merry Christmas* and I hope you’ll join me for the year-end round-ups just as soon as I see a few more movies (which will be as soon as it’s not colder than penguin’s butt outside).

*Or whatever godless pagan holiday you choose to observe instead of Christmas, you heathen.

Just so you don’t get confused, this is a totally different Maneater  than the movie I reviewed in 2008. That was your basic SyFy “monster-eats-people-for-85-minutes-until-washed-up-actor-kills-it” movie, only the monster was a common Bengal tiger, which, you know, is scary, but you gotta admit is no Sharktopus. No, this movie is much crazier. Not crazy in a good way, but crazy in a “God, I hope the writer/director of this flick gets a lot of therapy…and that I never somehow marry into his family.”  This Maneater is a straight-out monster movie with a very, very disturbing subtext. And that subtext is: women are all duplicitous, knob-craving, succubae that think only with their vaginas.  Oh, and did I say subtext?  Yeah, it’s subtext the way that the USS George Washington aircraft carrier is a submarine because some of it is underwater.

Maneater stars Dean Cain—remember him? He was famous a couple decades back for playing Superman. You know, before Brandon Routh. And this new British guy. Anyway, he’s in this movie and he plays, Harry, a sheriff of a small town in, uh…I dunno…someplace in the woods. Well, Harry has a bad history as a former FBI profiler—you may remember those. They were popular around the same time Cain was Superman. And as portrayed in TV and movies, they’re basically mediums, who have visions of how a crime occurred by skulking around the crime scene.

Harry’s powers of deductions-via-seizure get a workout when a couple is savagely attacked while camping. The man is severely burned, and the woman is gone. Harry’s visions shows him that the couple were having some decidedly non-missionary sex. So, I guess Harry’s abilities also give him, like, psychic voyeur power. Anyway, he figures out that whatever attacked the couple couldn’t be a bear (the working theory), but something more ominous.

Speaking of ominous, Harry’s in a bad state. Let’s run down his problems. 1) His wife left him while cheating on him with one of his FBI buddies. She took off one night and never came back. 2) His teenage daughter, Pearl is discovering boys, and this is driving Harry apeshit crazy (more on this later). 3) he is having dreams of a strange, savage creature slaughtering people. And he might be one with that creature. So, yeah, this wingnut is our hero.

So, much of the movie is about Harry and his police force—it consists of a moron pervert and  an elderly Native American—investigating the rash of brutal murders that suddenly strike the town. Given his police force, you can probably imagine they don’t make much headway. At least not until Harry abandons your basic police work and looks into his weird-ass dreams and visions and tries to identify the creature they contain that has glowing blue eyes.

Turns out the thing Harry keeps seeing is a Wendigo, or “Skinwalker” (yeah, don’t see that movie, either). Okay, so as near as I can tell, a skinwalker is a shape-shifting monster that punishes the deceitful, and the impure. It’s like the id monster, if the id monster solely keyed in on sexual anxieties. Maybe it’s Eric Schaeffer‘s id monster.

And that brings us to the B-plot, where this movie’s real craziness kicks in. Harry’s daughter , Pearl, has a new boyfriend, and Harry is obsessed with the notion that she might give up her special flower to this kid. Now, in the movie’s defense, while Pearl and whatever her bland boyfriend’s name is are pretty chaste, her nubile friends are all, well, knob-craving succubae who flash their tits for no reason and are about as obsessed with sex as your average 13 year-old boy. Also, they get naked whenever the movie starts to drag (read: a lot).

As the movie goes on, Harry’s behavior gets more and more disturbing. I mean, from jump street, we know Harry’s off. He keeps the house precisely the same as when his wife left and freaks the fuck out whenever the smallest thing is disturbed, believing intensely—one might say, psychotically—that she will return someday.  On top of that he does stuff like have his pervy deputy peep on his daughter’s doings through his house’s window (thus, providing Deputy Degenerate with some prime spank-material when one of Pearl’s sluttier friends bangs her boyfriend).

On top of that, he barely sleeps, and when he does his dreams suggest he may be the Wendigo. He has a series of fights with his daughter in which he basically accuses her of being a filthy whore. He never actually says this…oh, wait, I think he does. In one of the more disturbing dream-sequences, he threatens Pearl with a butcher knife and tells her he’s going to “cut the bad place out of her” (holy fuck, I don’t want to know where the “bad place” is on the human body). Oh, and after one dream, he finds the shallow grave where his wife his buried.

Okay, so at this point we really only have two options. Either Harry is the Wendigo or he’s the worst father ever. Interestingly, the movie takes the second route, establishing the old Native American as the Wendigo and killing him off. Seems he also murdered Harry’s wife, because she was a filthy adulteress, and the other people he killed were all fornicators (something tells me Wendigos are big fans of Pat Robertson). Harry kills the Wendigo and everything’s okay.

Ahhh…except for the fact that Harry is still a lunatic obsessed with his daughter’s sexuality.  So, you see what I mean about these filmmakers needing lots and lots of therapy. Or maybe they just need to get laid. No, something tells me that would make things worse.

What else do we have?

* It’s a good time to point out that criminal profiling has more or less been debunked.

* Pearl’s friend blithely says, apropos of nothing, “I think I’m going to let [my boyfriend] spank me tonight.” Who talks this way? I mean, outside the imaginations of horny middle-aged screenwriters?

* The severely burned guy they find at the beginning isn’t immediately rushed to the hospital where they can, I don’t know, maybe put him in the burn unit. No, instead, he’s kept on a gurney in the Sheriff’s office. This is just about the point I began to suspect that Harry doesn’t head up the most professional police force in the world.

* If you’re going to send someone to peep on your daughter (you shouldn’t, really), don’t send the sexual deviant who’s going to clear the snorkel while on this perverted surveillance mission.

* There’s a hilarious scene where the kids kill a bear believed to be responsible for the attacks, and the thing is so clearly a puppet it makes Fozzie Bear look like something out of Avatar.

* Wendigos eat their own skin. Seriously. They nibble it off when in human form. Goddamn, these monsters suck.

* The Native American deputy was born in 1930. Is it wise to have a deputy who is north of 80?

* Wendigos have hearts of ice. Literally, ice. This is pretty stupid, but then again, these things eat their own skin, so…

* Early on, Harry places his hand on Pearl’s bare thigh in such a decidedly non-paternal way…aw man, I so need a shower right now.