Welcome back. Today we’re going to be looking at the film Paranormal Activity, which is a DIY movies that some people slapped together for a couple bucks and then gets released and makes quadzillions of bucks. The movie has actually been around scaring people for a couple weeks (and two years in small screenings before it got a decent distribution), but I’m only getting around to it now. Ideally I would have reviewed this in time for Halloween, but I didn’t. Sue me. Anyway, I’m also going to SPOIL Paranormal Activity, but the version I’ve seen is an earlier version with a different ending. Anyway, let’s have at it…

So, Paranormal Activity is one of those po-mod verite movies that is comprised entirely of amateur footage shot by our protagonists—in this case primarily by the male half of a couple named Micah and Katie (Micah is ostensibly the male half).  Micah has bought a honkin’ big video camera to document the you-know-what kind of activity that has been troubling he and Katie. Katie has been plagued by minor league supernatural events her whole life (minor league, that is, until they burned her childhood house down), but things seem to have been exacerbated by their move to a ginormous  San Diego McMansion.

Micah and Katie live the kind of mind-numbing domestic bliss that makes single people like me shiver and whimper in a corner. Possibly the whitest couple ever to lead a film, Micah is a day-trader (read: worse than Hitler) and Katie is a student, picking up her degrees in English and Spanish. Holy shit, even her higher education is boring. Micah tries to cajole Katie into making an amateur porn tape with his fancy new camera, but she shuts that idea down hard and fast (and thank God she does, as it spares us all grainy footage of what could only be the most vanilla, missionary-position sex in the history of human procreation). And the first ten minutes or so follow in this fashion, with Micah recording the banalities of their everyday life: he noodles on the guitar, while she knits (God, it’s me Gunmonkey, who must I sacrifice to ensure you never saddle me with a woman who knits in her spare time? Just give me a name.)

But before you suck-start your gun out of boredom, the story begins to kick in. Micah and Katie consult with a paranormal expert, who concludes that Katie isn’t plagued by ghosts, but of demons. And he warns them against using a Ouija board to talk to the demon. That’ll just encourage him. He gives them the name of a demonologist, and then he beats feet.

 Now typically when you say “demon” and “demonic possession,” the understanding is that the best-case scenario is puking up green glop while a couple of Jesuits stand over you chanting “The power of Christ compels you!” So you take it seriously. Micah, however convinces Katie that the best course of action is, in fact, not to call the demonologist, but to screw with the demon. Micah strikes me as the sort of person who would try and sneak into Iraq to get a job as a truck driver and end up an Al Jazeera video instead.

So we watch over the course of the better part of a month as they camera catches a series of strange events that escalate, and the gradual unraveling of Micah and Katie as they try and cope. It begins with thumps and bumps in the night, doors that close, then re-open, but escalates as the camera catches Katie seeming to sleepwalk—or at least sleep stand—beside the bed for hours on end.

Time passes, sleep is deprived, and the couple snaps and bickers. When Micah brings home a Ouija board—very much against Katie’s wishes—things kick into high gear. A message is left, the board is defaced, and the thumping continues. Micah decides to slather the floor in talcum powder to capture the demons footprints and see where he goes (what, exactly, is the second step in this plan? Get a big net and catch it?). This leads to the discovery of an old picture of Katie as a child—presumed lost when her childhood home burned down—stuffed in the insulation in the attic.

At this point, Micah and Katie begin to act intelligently—you know, in the same way we call flatworms intelligent when they avoid a hot wire. They call the ghost guy back, but he refuses to enter the house. They call the demonologist, but he’s out of the country.  Micah discovers footage on the Internet of a woman, possessed by a demon, who died during the exorcism when she chewed her own arm off (gives new meaning to the term coyote ugly, am I right…oh, wait, no it doesn’t), and thinks maybe an exorcism isn’t the best idea in the world.

Things intensify when Katie is attacked (off camera) in the night, brutalized, and left with a big bite mark on her back. Finally, things culminate in another session of Katie’s somnambulism. She wakes, walks out of camera range and screams. Micah runs after her and begins screaming himself, before he’s cut off. Katie walks back into frame, covered in blood and holding a large knife. She then sits down and rocks for the next fifteen hours or so, until the police arrive. They discover Micah’s body, and when the disoriented Katie walks toward them wielding the knife, they shoot her. Fin.

[Mind you, this was the ending I saw. It was not, to the best of my understanding, the one used in the US distribution of the movie, and only one of three filmed. Your conclusion my vary. You may have the ending in which Katoe and Micah confront the demon after a harrowing car chase, and Katoe distracts him, while Micah shoots him between his enormous devil-horns...that might be what happens in your version. ]

Paranormal Activity is a pretty effective little movie, proving once again how simple it is to produce genuine scares by paying attention to what scares people! And by this I mean playing upon our most basic fears. Fear of the dark. Fear of noises in the dark. Fear of stuff we can’t explain. As I stated in my review of The Strangers, a door being pounded on at 3AM is leaps and bounds scarier than any number of machete-wielding killers. Writer/director Oren Peli understands this and plays off it well. Likewise, he intuitively stabs at our inherent vulnerability while we sleep. The sight of Katie standing beside the bed for what the camera tells us is over an hour before getting back in bed is more unsettling than any of the overheated dismemberings in any of the Saw movies. For those reasons, Paranormal Activity has a certain stick-to-your-ribs kind of fearr about it.

The rest of movie is merely adequate. For some weird reason, every verite movie seems to think that they gain realism by having incredibly dull and/or dislikable characters. Granted, much of the scariness of these movies comes from the illusion that you’re watching real characters and not movie heroes, but surely there is some middle ground between Heather Donohue and Lara Croft. Micah and Katie’s dialogue sounds spontaneous and realistic, but also dull as dirt. Can’t realism be at least interesting? Even when their veneer of happy couplehood flakes away, Katie is merely exposed to be…terrified, while Micah is all impotent bluster.

In her review of the film in Slate, Dana Stevens makes the argument that the movie is a thinly-veiled parable of the credit crisis. That seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. Sure, there’s a throwaway line about Micah taking a bath on the market, but that’s seemed to me to be more of a directorial nod to the fact that, oh yeah, these people have jobs.  I prefer to see the film’s message as something much simpler: Demons don’t like boring people, either.

Happy Halloween everyone! As you probably know, this is the holiday when the barriers between the living and the dead are the most permeable, and supernatural creatures wander the earth. They’ll probably want to watch movies, so you’re gonna want to have some decent horror movies onhand. I mean, if you were a ghoul come over to this side of the veil, would you want to watch The Ugly Truth? I thought not. So here is a quick roundup of great scary movies to watch on Halloween. Many of these are movies that even scared me—and I have a protective layer of cynicism towards most horror films that keeps me insulated from their effects. Okay, so let’s get to it: Gunmonkey’s Best Movies for Halloween!

The Exorcist– William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel unfolds fairly slowly at first (when watching it one Halloween with an ex-girlfriend, I was treated to repeated entreaties of “When’s the pea soup coming!”), but that makes the Satanic mayhem committed upon little Linda Blair all the more horrific. The film works as an enquiry into the nature of evil in the world and the viability of faith. But let’s face it: once Linda Blair crabwalks down the stairs at you, all you’re really thinking about is not freaking the hell out.

The Ring: Easy to forget amid the glut of American remakes of Asian-horror films is that the first one was actually very, very effective. Adapted from the Japanese film Ringu, The Ring tells the now-familiar story of the videotape which kills you after a week. It works a lot of Asian-horror tropes into its story—fear of technology, creepy little girl ghosts who walk in lock-step, the legacy of domestic violence being a catalyst for supernatural retribution—but surrounds it with such a prevailing sense of isolation and doom and the sense that they never seem rote.

The Thing– John Carpenter’s remake of Howard Hawks’ classic is like a bad dream, which just keeps getting worse and worse. Carpenter exposes his isolated Antarctic research team to a seemingly endless stream of biological horrors visited upon the human body and an extra-terrestrial pathogen tears its way through their blood and tissue. The movie is shot through with a sense of fatalism in the knowledge that none of these men can ever return home.

Session 9– This little-seen hair-raiser puts to good use a tremendous set: the abandoned Danvers State Mental Institution.  A small crew of hazardous materials workers work against the clock to remove the asbestos from the place while slowly falling prey to the evil that whispers in the massive, empty corridors. Brilliantly interspersing rapid, disorienting moments of psychological horror with long, languid takes of the forbidding building and landscape, director Brad Anderson generates a mood of unbearable tension and never lets up.

Halloween: The original is still best. Much of the shock and novelty of a killer stalking nubile, young cuties has been lost as the “slasher” genre was done to death, buried, the reborn in hyper-violent fashion. Still, John Carpenter’s iconic horror film finds the horror in negative spaces and Rorschach blot that his iconic killer Michael Meyers. Best evidence of this is the crappy remake.

The Strangers—29 years later, Halloween has the sequel it deserves in a movie that’s just as simple and effective as Carpenter’s original . Director Bryan Bertino demonstrates that sheer horror can be wrung out of a trio of a trio of real creepy masks.

The Last Winter—And ecological horror story, which employs many of the same atmospheric tricks as Carpenter’s The Thing, only to a very different end. As the isolated folk at an Antarctic research base begin to lose their shit, they see indications of an imminent environmental collapse and worse. Larry Fessenden makes his “go green” point without being obnoxious about it and even (nearly) manages to sell the prehistoric ghost caribou.

The Blair Witch Project—I was fortunate enough to see this when it was showing on only one screen in the U.S.—before the massive media overkill, and as a result it impact was never blunted by expectation. Seen without the promise of being the scariest movie in existence, it’s an effective, unsettling DIY project with a final scene that just gets more terrifying the more you think about it.

Alien—Once more, it’s best to eschew everything that came in the past 30 years and just concentrate on the original. Ridley Scott lets the story unfold in leisurely fashion to hammer home the characters’ vulnerability and isolation, before having something burst out of John Hurt’s stomach. Three decades may have taken the abject horror out of that scene, but not the sheer cinematic chutzpah. The movie still stands up, and seems destined to until human civilization is overrun by the damn things.

The Shining—Is there anything scarier than those creepy twin girls? “Come play with us Danny…” Stanley Kubrick take a classic haunted house story and makes it his own. Stephen King hated it, naturally.

Trick ‘R Treat—An honorable mention goes to this DVD offering. A quartet of horror tales which unfold in an Anytown in Ohio, it weaves the stories of various characters punished for not giving Halloween its proper respect over the course of one Halloween night.  A mild-mannered school principal reveals himself to be a child-murdering psychopath. A nubile young virgin seeks a man to be her “first.” A group of teenagers confront the town’s dark secret. A grumpy old man is terrorized by something intent on showing him the true spirit of Halloween. All of this is connected by the appearance of “Sam,” a sack-masked child who blithely goes about enjoying his Halloween while spreading mayhem in his wake. It’s not all that scary or original, but writer/director Michael Dougherty has such affection for his material—and the holiday—that the movie can’t help but be fun.

So, that’s it for this round up. Enjoy your Halloween! Gorge yourself on candy and pumpkin pie for me (but don’t trust anyone giving out apples—they probably have razor blades in them). And if you run into any supernatural beasties…uh…well, I guess you’re just screwed.

Well, color me surprised and not a little contrite. Here I was going into Rogue with my critical scalpels sharpened, ready to properly eviscerate it, and to find—surprise, surprise—that’s actually an effective little thriller. In my defense, I did sit through Primeval, and the experience left me predisposed to treating giant crocodile movies in more of less the same manner as the villagers treated Frankenstein’s monster. Yet, this movie exceeded my expectations.

Like Primeval, Rogue is about a giant crocodile and the people it eats, but the similarities end there. Rogue takes place in the Australian Outback where metrosexual travel writer Pete McKell (Michael Vartan) books a river cruise for his latest, um, column I guess (the movie never really makes it clear whether he writes for a newspaper or a magazine or books or what). The river cruise is piloted by the feisty and capable Kate Ryan, to whom Pete immediately takes a liking. And why not, since she’s played by Radha Mitchell? If I was on that boat I’d be making a fool of myself trying to impress her before we ever left the dock. Also on the boat is a widower come to scatter his wife’s ashes; a fat, hipster dude who eats a lot; a bickering married couple; and a family of three—mom, dad, and daughter—one of whom you just know is going to lose their shit, because what do the Brits know about crocodiles?

Along the way, they run into local douchebags Neil and Everett who harass them a little bit, but are quickly fended off by Pete’s rapier wit. As they’re heading back in, they spot a distress flare in the distance. Kate goes in to render assistance—over the objections of her passengers, who obviously don’t understand the Code of the Sea—and they soon find themselves in a remote gorge. And attacked by a giant crocodile. They end up stranded on tidal island (meaning its disappearing as the tide comes in), without communications, supplies, or shelter. Night is falling, and there’s a crocodile the size of a school bus lurking in the water. Wackiness ensues.

Writer/director Greg Mclean didn’t do much for me with his first feature, Wolf Creek (aka: Oy, Let’s Torture Young People to Death, Mate!), but with Rogue, he proves himself a genuine craftsman. There’s really no reason the movie should be effective on any level, serving up as it does a plateful of clichés. Yet, successful it is. Mclean anchors the clichés to realistically-drawn characters, and shows raw talent in his direction. As a result Rogue is one of the most genuinely suspenseful monster movies since Jaws. Not surprising, since Mclean seems to have learned from Spielberg that the inherent helplessness of being in the water serves to ratchet up the suspense factor.

It really kinda pisses me off that Primeval got a theatrical release and Rogue got shamefacedly shuffled into an American DVD release. Right, because we had to reserve those screens for such quality fare as Transformers, Captivity, and Alien vs. Predator 2. Okay, so Primeval was an American release and Rogue was an Aussie production. Still, does anyone think that Dominic Purcell is really that powerful a box office draw? And anyone who watched these movies back-to-back could immediately see why Rogue is the superior movie. Aside from, you know, generally not sucking, we have:

1) No Jive-Talking Sidekick (JTS) in Rogue. Hey, I like Orlando Jones, but seeing him reduced to borderline-minstrelsy (and eventual croc food) doesn’t exactly give me a warm-fuzzy.

2) Rogue savors the Australian landscape and backdrop, as opposed to Primeval, which states in no uncertain terms that Africa, as a continent, blows (wait, did my ex write that screenplay?)

3) There is no Great White Hunter/ Quint character in Rogue.

4) The crocodile doesn’t catch a hand grenade and throw it back as in Primeval. This crocodile acts like a crocodile and not, say, a commando.

Rogue never claimed that its alligator was a serial killer.

So I guess the bottom line is, if you’re going to see only one giant killer crocodile movie this year (and, really, one is enough), make it Rogue.

Oh, and if you’re vacationing in the Outback, bring along a .30-.30. You know, just in case.

Sorry I didn’t get around to reviewing some new horror films, but I had some work and family issues come up. So here’s my review of “The Reaping,” first uploaded on August 12 of 2007. You probably weren’t reading this blog back then anyway, so it’s new to you.

By the time The Reaping slouched to its inglorious climax—beginning as it did like a hybrid of The Exorcist and Star Trek 5: The Really, Really Bad One and then moving on to feature Divine Retribution—I couldn’t help but think that more movies should end with The Almighty smiting the evildoers. Seriously, how can a movie end better than that? I mean, yeah, the cavalry coming over the hill is rousing, and Han Solo deciding to join the rebellion and saving Luke’s bacon just in time to help him destroy the Death Star is a crowd-pleaser, but what truly beats The Big Guy taking center stage and dispatching the baddies? What better way is there to establish who is Good and who is Evil than to have Maker of Heaven and Earth weigh in on the matter?

And in the case of The Reaping it pretty much takes the guidance of He Who Created All That Is Seen And Unseen to untangle the mess of a movie that is, at its core, deeply, deeply confused. The Reaping doesn’t know whether it wants to be a serious enquiry into religious conviction or a condemnation of a faithless world. Likewise, it doesn’t know whether to pander to Red State religious literalism or to stereotype and ridicule Bible Belt fundamentalism. Hell, for most of the movie it can’t even decide if God is a good guy or a bad guy. Thankfully, the climactic battle solves that last question–God is a good guy–and drops the rest in favor of schlocky exploitation.

<In The Reaping, multiple-Oscar winner Hilary Swank plays Kathryn Winter, a professor of Miracle Debunking (wow, that’s gotta be an easy class) who ends her lectures by saying things like: “The only real miracle is that people still believe in miracles. Okay, I’ll see you Monday. Have a great weekend everybody!” Winter debunks miracles with a passion, since she is carrying a Great and Secret Pain. At some nebulous point before the movie began, her husband and daughter were sacrificed by some Sudanese people in the hopes that it would end the famine that wracked their land. Since then, Winter has ceased believing in God, because she cannot see how a good and living God could allow her family to be killed in such a way (the question of how God could allow the famine and genocide of that region to occur is never broached, since in this movie religion—like politics—is strictly local). Anyway, Winter and her assistant (played by The Wire’s Idris Elba) are asked to investigate a weird phenomena in rural Louisiana town. One of their rivers has turned to blood and they’re a bit alarmed about it.

The town is one of those Hollywood visions of the Deep South—not the Deliverance version, but the other one—everyone speaks in a thick accent, wears seersucker suits and hats and probably drinks nothing but mint juleps. They’re also all religious fundamentalists whose church is a quaint, old structure with fire and brimstone quotes on the sign outside (just a side note here, why is it when Hollywood envisions the religious fervor of Jesusland, they default to 19^th century churches and not the infinitely more frightening mega-churches that have by-and-large taken over the Bible Belt?). This small town is soon beset with the various plagues of the Old Testament. The river has indeed turned to blood. Frogs fall from the sky. Livestock get sick. The grilled seafood dinner made for Winter by the resident hottie is spoiled by vermin (I don’t recall this plague, but had the ancient Egyptians owned Hibachis it probably would have been included on this list). The lynch-happy town population believes that God is punishing them because an evil little girl that lives in the woods killed her brother in the very river that turned to blood. Now, if this seems a pretty trivial reason for God to get all bitchcakes on the town, the screenwriters thought of that too. So they add “Oh, and by the way…her family are part of a Satanic cult.”

Okay, so we have the various plagues and the Evil Little Girl. The movie more or less circles in this holding pattern until the overstuffed finale wherein Winter is convinced that she is actually God’s warrior angel (Archangel Michael is apparently on vacation or was called up to Iraq or something) and she sets off the kill the Evil Girl. But wait! Evil Girl is actually God’s killer angel and she was attacked by her Devil-worshipping brother, but God killed him and turned the river to blood. The rest of the plagues were the work of Satan, who is really bent about the girl living. Make sense? No? Well, too bad. Anyway, the cult attacks Winter and Formerly Evil Little Girl, and that’s when God unleashes his fury upon them. The baddies are smitten (smote?) and Winters gets a replacement daughter for her troubles. Pretty good deal for a couple days’ work.

Like most horror movies of the past 30 years, The Reaping very much wants to be another Exorcist—that is, a thoughtful, intelligent horror movie. The problem here, as it was with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Stigmata, and the various Exorcist sequels, is that the film is very, very dumb. Winter’s journey back to faith takes place over the phone in a brief conversation with a priest friend of her (Stephen Rea, literally phoning in his role). The existence of God is demonstrated by His standing against the forces of Satan, nothing more. The miracle of life, of our just being here, is never even acknowledged, nor is the greatness to which humanity can aspire. In this film, God and Satan are just chess players, and humanity simply game pieces with little in the way of agency.

The Exorcist, by contrast, put genuine thought into the existence of God and Satan. The book begins with an excerpt from an FBI wiretap of some mafia killers who describe in gleeful detail the torture and murder of an informant. The prologue concludes with “Auschwitz…Dachau…Treblinka.” Author William Peter Blatty’s point is clear: why would Satan need to possess a little girl to assert his power in this world when there is so much evidence of evil already? This is one of the main theological struggles of both book and the film. Father Damien Karras is losing his faith not because of some contrived personal horror, but because of the trivial hurts and indignities he sees every day: the despair and doubt he hears when counseling his peers, the homeless he encounters everyday on the street, his inability to take care of his dying mother (the latter is especially excruciating when his uncle rudely points out that if he hadn’t become a priest he’d be a rich psychologist who could afford to care for her better). Likewise, Father Merrin–the Exorcist of the title—sums up Satan’s design in the most elegant and shattering way: “He wants us to view ourselves as animal and ugly, unworthy of God’s love.” And that may be the best indictment of The Reaping: for a movie about humanity’s relationship with God, there’s no mention at all of His love for us—just His wrath.

No, scratch that: The best example of vast gulf between The Exorcist and The Reaping is in the scenes in which the heroes go forth to do battle. In The Exorcist, Father Merrin is a black silhouette emerging from the fog into the light of a streetlamp outside the family’s Georgetown brownstone. He pauses, looks up at the building. The scene cuts to a shot of the possessed girl. Her bloodshot eyes widen. Old enemies sense one another and anticipate the rematch. In The Reaping, Hilary Swank gets her marching orders from the resident hottie, who also hands a knife to use to kill the little girl. She tucks it in her belt at the small of her back and climbs a flight of stairs. The camera remains fixed on her ass the whole way up.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: If Satan’s presence can be detected anyplace, it’s in the fact that Hilary Swank, winner of two Academy Awards for Best Actress, chose to star in it. In fairness to Hilary, though, the pickin’s for strong, unconventionally-attractive actresses are awfully slim. And it’s not like she did Catwoman…

Happy Halloween, loyal readers! As we begin the run-up to that most magical day of the year (except for Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever high holiday you celebrate) we’ll be concentrating on horror flicks. And today’s entry is The Devil’s Tomb. I should warn you at the outset that the devil does not appear in this movie. There is, however a kind of a tomb. A figurative one. No, The Devil’s Tomb is the latest in what you’d call the “People in enclosed spaces see totally impossible hallucinations, but buy into them completely and follow them to their doom.” I’m working on shortening it.

In The Devil’s Tomb, Cuba Gooding Jr. (yes, the one who won an Oscar) plays Mack (yes, that’s his whole name), the leader of a maybe-mercenary team (the movie’s unclear on this point), who are directed by a shadowy CIA type named Elissa (Valerie Cruz) to take her into an underground bunker in the deserts of Iraq (or Afghanistan—one of the deserts where we’re fighting wars). She wants to rescue her father—some sort of hotshot scientist working on a super-secret project. The soldiers find the bunker easily enough, but, as you can imagine, things go sideways right off the bat.

First off, their medic—Doc (*sigh* that’s her only name and she’s played by Taryn Manning, who has the angular head of a true Froot Loop)—starts to see hallucinations of her sister begging to be saved. Obviously she goes batshit crazy first. At the same time they come across a corpse-like dude who snarls at them in Latin (then helpfully translates what he just said) and spits acid at them. Now, at this point, I have to ask: has any underground bunker yielded anything good in a movie? I mean, has there ever been the movie in which the intrepid band of soldiers busts into the underground bunker and finds it filled with kittens or the Monty Python players or Elmore Leonard sipping margaritas at a bar. No, it’s pretty much always gonna be monsters or slow insanity or both.

Okay, so Doc is going crazy, and there’s a dude with pustules like radiation burn blisters all over his body. So far, so good. They find some research materials on something called The Gehenna Project—which is doubtlessly a program to create a supergrain of rice that will feed the world, or something equally altruistic—and a different guy on the team goes crazy.

[I must admit here that I simply can’t keep any of the male leads straight, since they're all equally devoid of personality and acting talent. For clarity’s sake, I’m just going to refer to them all as Lunkhead and assign them each a number.]

Okay, so the team finds an elevator and figures, well, what’s the smartest thing we could do right now? Hey, let’s descend deeper into this trashed, creepy bunker that has been the site of something called The Gehenna Project. And is populated by Latin-and-acid-spewing neo-zombies. Nothing can go wrong with that plan.

So the head downtown and decide, sensibly, to split up. One of them, Lunkhead #2, is hanging out alone, when he sees a beautiful naked woman (Holly Weber, last seen bouncing her be-thonged butt through Sugergator. Now, here is where movies like this just lose me. Lunk 2 immediately makes a beeline for her and they start making out, pausing long enough for Holly to transform into one of the neo-zombies and killing him. Okay, so if I was hanging out in a creepy bunker and saw a willing, nude Holly Weber, sure my first thought would be “Yahtzee!” But I gotta believe a quick follow up thought would be “Now wait a gosh-darned minute. How did Holly Weber get here? In a war zone? And where are her clothes? Say, this doesn’t  jive at all…” Having Holly Weber throw herself at you—in a warzone, club, party, or cockfight—is just fucking improbable. But then the people in the movie haven’t done anything smart so far, so…

Okay, so next the other female member of the team, Yoshi (Stephanie Jacobson) starts seeing a little girl who identifies herself as the child Yoshi conceived with her boyfriend, Lunkhead #3 and subsequently aborted. Congratulations, Steffie, you would have had an improbably Caucasian-looking child. Go figure. Anyway, Yoshi follows the kid and finds a possessed Doc, who appeals to her Sapphic longings, resulting in a totally-illogical (but nonetheless enjoyable) make out session between the women. The Doc stabs Yoshi in the back. Okay, I don’t get this. Yoshi’s haunted by the child she chose not to keep, because she and bf are both soldiers.  But then she’s also deep in the closet and lusting after Doc. I mean, I guess it could happen, but in a movie like this you should just settle for one Deep, Dark Secret.

Next, what? Okay, Lunkhead #3 discovers Yoshi—now possessed and eerily calm—with her back sliced open, the flesh curled away. It should be a ghastly reveal, but the scene is ruined since 1) Lunkhead #3 is such a lousy actor the best he can muster under the circumstances is dim interest, as if he’s thinking: “Huh. Spine.” And 2) the effects are pretty awful. A note to the effects department: the human sinal column does not have a dorsal ridge like a Dimetradon.

Well, some other crap happens and pretty soon it’s revealed that Project Gehenna was all about attempts to contain a newly-discovered Nephlim—a fallen angel that God cast out of Heaven, but apparently the Almighty caught some rim and the thing ended up on Earth. So the good scientists at Project Gehenna froze it, but the damn thing can still screw with people’s heads. A couple more Lunkheads die, and then they find the Nephlim—inhabiting a dude named Wesley (Ron Perlman—yes that Ron Perlman). Wesley: Prince of Darkness taunts Mack a little to, uh, I’m not sure. Inhabit his body, I guess. He dredges up Mack’s own Dark Secret, which involves Ray Winstone (yes, that Ray Winstone), but is so sloppily-conceived, there’s not even any reason to it. Cuba blows up a gas pipe and knocks out Wesley, King of Lies, and allows Elissa to take the Nephlim into herself, while Mack runs and blows the bunker.

Okay, so yeah, this movie sucks. Do I have to belabor the point? Hell, even Cuba went through this thing acting in exactly modes: bored indifference, and minor irritation. Jacobson is usually an oasis in any crap. I mean, she’s a hot, tough Asian chick, and on top of that she’s got an Australian accent. Can you ask for anything more? Perhaps, but now you’re just getting greedy. But she’s wasted here in a totally under-written and preposterous role which also demands she eschew her native accent. Why would any director do that? Any heterosexual male knows that chicks are even cuter with accents.

Finally, just once I’d like to see a movie in which the characters recognize that the hallucinations tempting them are totally impossible. “Dad? But you’re dead! How can you be on this haunted starship? You can’t, so…I’m just gonna walk the other way.”

No tombs, no devils. What we did learn, though:

*  Pale, fat, paunchy dudes who barf battery acid are really not the most terrifying of monsters.

* Fallen angels are radioactive, and should be frozen immediately.

*  The Bringer of Pestilence and Despair is named Wesley.

* Nothing good can come from a nude Holly Weber.

What is it with James Cromwell? How did this character-actor (always awesome, btw) become the inventor of the future? Check out his resume: In I, Robot he played the dude in charge of the massive company that had the monopoly on personal androids (though, it should be noted, they didn’t go batshit crazy on his watch); in Star Trek: First Contact, he was the scientist who invented warp speed, and allowed William Shatner easy access to hot-to-trot alien babes throughout the galaxy; and now, in Surrogates, he plays the ousted CEO of the company which produces “surrogates”—artificial human avatars who go about daily life, while their controllers lay strapped in futuristic Barcalaungers.  I know the guy’s a workhorse—his IMDB page has him in 6 projects in 2009 alone—but what is it about this guy that makes people think, “Huh. When flying cars are invented, I’ll bet the dude running the company will look just like him”?

Cromwell’s presence is just one more factor that makes Surrogates seem so derivative. The problems begin with its “The Internet will kill us all” plot, that’s been done to death in recent years. Seriously, has every advance in technology fueled this kind of anxious, inane hand-wringing? I mean, people didn’t freak out when beer cans started using pull-tabs and not pop-tops, or when CDs replaced cassette tapes. But I digress. Surrogates’ particular bête-noir is the fantasy-world corner of the Internet—speculating about a world in which humanity lives through drones who look like much more attractive (and plasticky) versions of themselves. The filmmakers obviously played The Sims once or something. Anyway, by 2017, the movie states, most of humanity has decided to live by remote control.

The movie begins with the murder of actual human being (unheard of surrogates came into fashion), when his surrogates gets fried by some kind of souped-up EMP, which liquefies the kid in his chair. Investigating the murder is FBI agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters (Rhada Mitchell)—or rather their surrogates do. Greer’s surrogate sports a bad blonde dye job and flopper hairdo that indicates Greer really, really liked Willis’s look in The Fifth Element. For her part, Mitchell’s surrogate looks like a runway model version of Mitchell. Fair enough.

So, the feds realize they’re onto something big, since the whole point of surrogates is that they can live life with all its intendant risks, so the chair-monkeys controlling them are free to loll all day in their pajamas in safety. Whatever weapon fried the surrogates was a new and deadly weapon. This adds some urgency to the case. As does the revelation that the intended target may not have been the kid, but his father—James Cromwell, the aforementioned ousted computer genius. Complicating things is the fact that Cromwell’s estranged company, VSI—the Microsoft of surrogates—is running interference. Further complicating things is the existence of an anti-surrogate movement led by “The Prophet” (yeah, that’s what he’s called), played by Ving Rhames in a Unibomber beard and dreadlocks that encircle his body like massive, fuzzy pythons. It’s truly hilarious.

On the domestic front, things are chilly between Greer and his wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike), who has retreated completely into surrogacy since the death of their son in a car accident. This plotline seems like it should have been a lot more doomy than it actually turns out to be. After wasting a lot of time, it reveals that Maggie was also injured in the car accident, and now sports one of those facial scars that really aren’t very disfiguring.

Eventually, Greer is forced to abandon his surrogate and go boldly into the world as flesh-and-ass-kicking-blood, and Willis plays it with so much grizzled machismo, you have to wonder why these surrogate things are so popular. The movie ends fairly predictably—it introduces so few characters it’s just a matter of elimination and common sense figuring out who the bad guy is—but tries to be somewhat epic, as Greer in a position to deactivate all the surrogates does so. This would be more affecting, if the movie didn’t cop on the anarchy which would prevail if the entire workforce of the world just stopped working one day. In Surrogate’s reading, it just causes a couple car accidents.

Surrogates plays with some of its more interesting ideas: A voluptuous blonde avatar is controlled by an obese man; Greer’s boss is elderly and liver-spotted, while his surrogate is ripped and handsome. Even Peters is revealed to be frowsy and dumpy (they give Mitchell some reading glasses and ugly flannel pajamas—because in Hollywood that’s apparently all it takes to make a natural beauty like Mitchell ugly). A scene in which a bunch of surrogates use what looks like a futuristic bong to give themselves sexually-stimulating electric shocks stands out as one of those “am-I-really-fucking-watching-this-moments.”

The larger issues of surrogate use are pretty much abandoned, though. How do people procreate if they no longer interact? What’s the deal with sensation? Surrogates selling points are that they shelter their users from physical harm, but is there any tactile sensation? Is there a cut-off point? Say, you can feel a tickle but not a dismemberment? How do surrogates affect S&M play? Furthermore, what about those people who genuinely enjoy being active? What about all those bikers and hikers and douchebags in Mountain Dew commercials? And finally, aren’t people more afraid of their bodies failing them than of their bodies getting damaged? Surrogates might be a great insulation against getting mugged, but not so much against cancer.

Surrogates was directed by Jonathan Mostow—a talented action director who is perpetually hamstrung by his inability to shape interesting stories out of lackluster scripts. He made Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines a passable (if forgettable) installment in the franchise (unlike this summer’s entry). He also made U-571, a good little World War Two actioner that never got the audience it deserved. In Surrogates, he crafts a couple of very good chase/fight scenes, but can’t seem to do a thing with stale, rote dialogue.

In closing, let me just say to all of you screenwriters and directors out there: The Interweb has been with us for almost 20 years now, and the world has not collapsed into anarchy. Can you all just calm the fuck down now? Find some other bugbear to worry about!

Holy crap! I’m going to be reviewing a film before many of the major media outlets! How did I fall ass-backwards into this? I’m now amongst the media elite! When do I get to suck Rose McGowan’s toes (as all professional movie critics do, I understand). Well, until that call, let’s take a look at Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a film which proves that if you put someone batshit crazy behind the camera, he can actually make Nicolas Cage look…well, normal is probably the wrong word. Bordering on normal. In the same neighborhood as normal. On the same continent, anyway.

The first thing you should understand about BL:PoCNO is that it has no connection to the original Bad Lieutenant—the overheated rumination on Catholicism and scuzz, starring Harvey Keitel and directed by Abel Ferrera. Allegedly, director Werner Herzog—the nutjob who directed this installment—wanted the title changed. No soap. The second thing you should understand is that while the plot I am about to outline seems fairly straightforward, there is a while lotta weirdness going on under the surface.

Bad Lieutenant…yadda…begins in the aftermath of Katrina, as Detective Terrence McDonaugh (Cage) jacks up his back saving a drowning inmate at an abandoned police station. The back injury, we learn, will leave him with chronic pain, but fear not—his doctor prescribes some pain-killers. Well, nothing can go wrong with that plan. Flash forward a few months and McDonagh has been promoted to lieutenant. He’s also developed a full-scale addiction to pills, coke, and pretty much anything else he can get his paws on. The plot proper kicks in as he investigates the execution-style killing of an African family by a local drugord named Big Fate (Xzibit–proving his utter worthlessness as an actor).

The mystery is pretty standard stuff, but thrown into the mix is Terrence’s escort girlfriend (Eva Mendes, whose teeth continue to look ravishing) who winds up on the wrong side of some well-connected mobsters, his father’s attempts to get sober, the potential loss of his evidence-room drug hookup, an IAD investigation, and the ten grand he owes his bookie (Brad Dourif). Oh, and there’s some crap about his childhood spoon thrown in there, too. I don’t know what that’s about, either.

Throughout all this is Cage, who shambles through the movie wearing the same baggy suit, regardless of the day, and growing simultaneously more frantic for a hit as he grows more sleep-deprived and exhausted. Cage keeps his usual crazypants overacting just barely in check. It helps that Herzog gives him some truly lunatic moments to sink his teeth into. Some are subtle, such as when he emerges from hiding in a witnesses home, wielding a gun and nonchalantly shaving with an electric razor. Some are not, such as when he busts a couple as they come out of a nightclub, steals their coke, then makes the guy watch as he fucks his (very, very willing) girlfriend and shoots his gun in the air in orgasmic glee (that actually seems like a lot of fun, I have to admit). I’m not sure if I would call Cage’s performance good necessarily, but it certainly fits the film. That is until the point about two-thirds of the way through when he seems to have suffered a stroke offscreen, and half his face droops and his voice changes. It just gets weird at that point.

But any Werner Herzog movie is ultimately all about Herzog. When he made the fascinating documentary Grizzly Man, he managed to transform the story of a mentally-ill amateur naturalist’s death by bear into a voyage through his own ego (as his movie makes clear, Timmy Treadwell’s death might be tragic, but Herzog’s really a great guy for not playing the recording of it in front of the camera). With BL:PoCNO Herzog has made…well, I’m not entirely sure what he’s made, but one thing’s for sure: it’s his freakin’ movie and whether or not it makes any sense, you’re along for the ride, podna.

And this is a ride which includes Nicolas Cage cutting off an elderly woman’s oxygen supply. It includes the penultimate line of dialogue: “Do fish dream?” It includes a scene in which the soul of an aging goombah is embodied as a fade-sporting, parachute-pants-wearing renegade from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo who breakdances amid the carnage of a shootout. And then there are the reptiles.

Yes, Herzog does love his reptiles. He shoots them lovingly, close-up on digital video—so close their images distort. Mostly they just sit there and tolerate this lunatic, camera-happy kraut, but sometimes he annoys them into hissing at him. What, you ask, is the purpose of this? Hell if I know. The first one we see is a snake sinuously gliding through the foul water of Katrina. Okay, fair enough. Next we have an exchange between two cops over the corpse of a roadkill alligator. It’s a darkly funny image and makes a neat counterpoint to the action. But then he does the whole, weird close-up thing with an alligator by the side of the road, watching the exchange. It’s a long, uncomfortable, hilarious shot in an I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-this sort of way.  Finally, we get Terrence looking askance at a pair of incongruous iguanas lounging on a table in a surveillance room. When he asks about them, his colleagues assure him there are no iguanas.

I don’t know what’s up with the dancing soul bit.

Herzog is a big chronicler of man’s folly when he challenges nature (look at poor Timmy Treadwell in Grizzly Man), and you can’t help, but get the impression that he sees these characters as men redefining their existence in the wake of the great humbling of Katrina. As Terrence dodges and weaves his various predators and demons, he seems to be surviving based upon sheer instinct—the same brain those reptiles use—than any great cunning or quick-thinking. Maybe that’s Herzog’s point: in the ruined city, these men have become reptiles. And some have become fish (sigh…don’t ask).

But if you’re looking for a socio-economic treatise on the sorry fate of New Orleans, this is a bad place to look. The New Orleans of Herzog’s film is completely a construct of his own mind. It’s a city in which a disheveled man with red-rimmed eyes and wild hair can casually stroll the street (and churches, stores, hotels, casinos), openly displaying a .44 Magnum revolver tucked in his waistband. It’s a city in which a cop would be allowed (or would want) to carry a .44 Mag for a police work. A few scenes mention “the old cowboy days,” but the NOPD’s notoriety for corruption, graft, vice, and even murder of fellow police officers is never touched upon. It’s a city in which no one has a Cajun accent…or even a Southern one.

Bad Lieutenant ends (when it ends…there are about six or seven false endings–Herzog, apparently just couldn’t put the camera down) on an ambiguous note—a suggestion that our narrator is a bit unreliable, and maybe nothing of what we’ve seen is true. Maybe fish do dream. Reptiles sure as hell don’t.

So is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans a good movie? Well, it’s a distinct one. If you’re looking for realism—either in its depiction of police work or New Orleans—you’re out of luck. If you’re looking for a rambling, serio-comic meditation on fate, determinism, and possibly humanity…well, there are worse ways to spend two hours. Of course there are probably better ones, too.

Hey, sorry this summer film roundup is so late. Part of the reason is because some of these films didn’t get a release in Thailand until recently. Mostly, though, the reason is that whenever I ponder for extended periods of time the cinematic offerings Hollywood horked up this summer, I’m overcome by the need to drink myself into senselessness. Then I wake up in my own sick, and possibly with unexplained facial injures, and, well, you can see where this would delay the creative process. Oh yeah, the summer of 2009 blew. Especially when compared to the sprightly and mostly fun summer of 2008 (hey, Crystal Skull haters, would you rather watch that again or Transformers 2 again? Yeah, I thought so). Okay, so before the DTs set in, let’s get started.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1): Leaden, depressing, and preposterous. At this point, Hugh Jackman could play this role in his sleep, but this time his growlyness isn’t defusing a movie’s self-seriousness, but instead feeds into it. It’s quite a feat, being as downcast as this movie is when you have Ryan Reynolds prancing around with a couple of katana swords like the world’s most dangerous band geek, Will.i.am channeling the cowboy from the Village People, and numerous shots of Liev Schrieber bounding like a drunk alleycat. Despite all this, XMO:W is about as much fun as war crimes tribunal.

Star Trek (May 8 ): Everything XMO:W isn’t: it’s light, fun, airy and disposable. Director J.J. Abrams capably reimagines the classic series, and manages to ably establish a parallel Star Trek universe. He’s aided by a sturdy cast with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto anchoring the film with uncanny homages (though not impersonations). Simon Pegg brings the laughs, John Cho the butt-kickery, and Zoe Saldana the (sexxay, sexxay) eye candy. The new Universe looks pretty cool, though Eric Bana is underused as a villain that resembles a white-trash elf. Plus the new Enterprise is kinda lame. Still, it works.

Angels and Demons (May 15): Did anyone like The DaVinci Code? No? Okay, so why did we get a sequel? When the best thing you can say about a movie is that Tom Hanks’ hair no longer looks like a small, dead animal, it’s pretty much time to pack it in. Ewan MacGregor manages to not expose his wang. Possibly the only movie without Star Wars in the title in which he doesn’t.

Terminator: Salvation (May 21): Amazingly stupid installation in a series known for its playful intelligence, and its way with science, paradox, and philosophy. Now it’s just another loud, dumb action flick, lacking all sheen of professionalism. Christian Bale glowers his way through his role as John Connor, while Sam Worthington wanders around, looking befuddled. One sympathizes.

Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian (May 22): No…fuck no.

Drag Me to Hell (May 29): A fun, low-tech, old-fashioned scarefest from Sam Raimi, marking his return to seat-of-the-pants horror filmmaking after spending the better part of a decade making heavy-duty blockbusters. Drag manages to be genuinely frightening despite a dearth of gore, effects, or big caliber stars. One of the summer’s diamonds in the rough.

Up (May 29): Pixar continues to knock them out of the park. Like last summer’s Wall-E, it begins with a bravura sequence—this time telling the story of love, marriage, and loss wordlessly and within a few minutes. It has so much genuine humanity stuffed in there amid its hilarious plot points with talking dogs and geeky birds, it had my date openly weeping at a couple points. Its singular triumph, though, must be that it’s probably the first children’s movie for adults.

The Hangover (June 5): What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas for the better part of 90 minutes. After a massive bender, Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, and Ed Helms spend a madcap day searching for a missing groom. Along the way, they deal with Mike Tyson’s tiger, an inadvertent marriage to a stripper, and a flamboyant, sexually-ambiguous Asian mobster. It should all be hilarious—especially Galifianakis’s spaced-out character—but the gales of laughter somehow never quite materialize. It steps to the precipice of hilarity, but never takes the plunge.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (June 12): Over the past 20 years, Tony Scott’s films have become increasingly incoherent, mean-spirited, and unwatchable. So I didn’t watch it.

Dead Snow (June 19): Two words: Zombie Nazis!

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (June 24): Gee, maybe God doesn’t exist. Or maybe He does and He hates us all. This film represents the absolute nadir of summer blockbusters: ugly, racist, misogynistic, obnoxious, xenophobic, visually-unintelligible, and rock-stupid. It thinks Petra is next to Giza (and not, you know, in another country), and that Shia LaBeouf could land Megan Fox, and that big, endless, visually-incoherent  action sequences can take the place of actual decent craftsmanship. It’s a movie that is beyond cynical, believing that as long as boku bucks are tossed at the screen, mindless audiences will devour it. And they did. You people really tick me off sometimes, you know that?

Public Enemies (July 1): Michael Mann’s flawed, beautiful, brutal movie about dreams, reality, and the violence that lay in between. It’s also a great view of the rise of a modern age that not even Tommy guns and endless bullets could stop.

Bruno (July 10): This movie was so heavily edited in Thai theaters that whole scenes were removed. So, I can go to Soi Cowboy and watch a couple naked Thai women shoot darts out of their vajayjays, but a talking CGI penis is just indecent? I don’t get this country sometimes.

Blood: The Last Vampire (July 10): No one else seemed to like this movie. Am I the only guy who likes watching a cute Korean chick in a schoolgirl uniform killing vampires? I’m not. Right? Please tell me I’m not.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (July 15): Just marking time until the last part of the series. Nothing happens for 150 minutes, then Dumbledore dies.

The Ugly Truth (July 24): Women are all frigid, sexually-repressed beauties, and men are all horndogs. Really, Hollywood, do you think I’m that stupid? Really? Why don’t you insult my mother while you’re at it. Katherine Heigl is beautiful enough, but stuck in prim, harridan roles. Gerard Butler reminds me of a CIA contractor I once met who proclaimed he really, really hoped he got to waterboard someone someday. So I hate him.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 7): A serviceable dumb action flick. Too bad they blow all their best ideas in the first installment.

District 9 (August 14): Every couple years a promising upstart makes a (relatively) low-budget movie that’s well-done, intelligent, and thrilling. He’s heralded as the next great filmmaker, at which point he promptly sells out. So, expect Neill Blomkamp to direct the next G.I. Joe movie. Still, District 9 is an interesting look at intolerance, bigotry, apartheid, and the struggle for basic human dignity. Featuring some creepy-looking aliens. The last third of the movie devolves into Transformers-style mayhem, but the movie never loses the courage of its dispiriting vision.

Inglourious Basterds (August 21): Quentin Tarantino meticulously crafts several brilliant and unrelated scenes, strings them together and calls it a movie. Despite an incredible performance by Christoph Waltz and an entertaining one by Brad Pitt, IG is his weakest film in years.  

Whiteout (Sept. 11): It’s over. Thank the Lord, it’s over.

So that was 2009. What a kack summer. Maybe next year it’ll be better, but Hollywood really, really likes to disappoint, so I’m going back to my drinking now.

Okay, so what’s on deck here? Pandorum? Aw, dammit…(sigh). All right. Pandorum. Well, here’s something novel about this movie: it’s simultaneously stupid and disappointing. Disappointing because it’s so stupid, and stupid because of the ways it disappoints. Wow, it’s sort of a Mobius strip of badness. That’s something, isn’t it? Well, not really, but I’m doing my best here. Pandorum reminds me a lot of Event Horizon. Like EH, it’s a wholly original sci-fi vision of terror. Not a franchise, or a reboot of a franchise or a bastardization of a franchise, but something totally new. And like Event Horizon, it carries this idea as far as an intriguing set-design before promptly pissing all over it. Thanks screenwriter Travis Milloy and director Christian Alvert. Want to kick my dog while you’re at it?

Pandorum begins with a not-horrible concept: in the relatively far-flung future (like 500 years or so) Earth has become so polluted and ecologically-ravaged that about 60,000 people have boarded a massive city-ship called Elysium and lit out for a newly-discovered Earth-type planet called…well I can’t remember. Let’s just call it Happyland. It’s apparently quite a trip, so most everyone goes into suspended animation, leaving just a skeleton crew to run it. As the film begins, we get a pretty good zoom from space through the bridge viewports to the bridge where a small command crew hears what seems to be Earth’s last transmission. Uh-oh. Looks like the stakes just got raised.

Then we’re thrown into confusion as a crewmember named Bower (Ben Foster) comes to in his hibernation pod. Unfortunately, he has little memory of who he is or how he got there. Well, he skulks around in the darkened, empty ship for a while, not knowing what’s going on. It’s as exciting as it sounds. He also grits his teeth a lot and winces. Pretty soon he remembers enough to defrost his commanding officer, Payton (Dennis Quaid), who’s also befuddled. What they can piece together is that their shift is due to pilot the ship. Only the ship is really jacked up. Nothing works. And the reactor is going offline, which will, you know, turn the ship off. Oh, they also figure out that Bower is an engineer, so he gamely crawls into a maintenance duct (the doors don’t work) and tries to crawl to the reactor core to reset it, with Payton guiding him on radio.

Well, the whole ship is dark (which is handy for budgetary reasons), and while scampering down a corridor, Bower encounters some nasty alien thingees. Only it’s pretty clear they’re not aliens, but mutant humans. But they’re not really all that mutated. Just mean and fast and multiply-pierced. Like some extras form a dinner-theater production of The Road Warrior. Bower runs away from them and meets up with a couple of dudes who don’t know any more than he does, except that they’re all fucked, because the mutant thingees are killing everyone. Then they’re all attacked and eaten (except for Bower). But then Bower runs across, seemingly, a guest star from Xena who goes all Jija Yanin on his ass before deciding he’s too wimpy to pose a threat. So she joins in his quest to turn on the lights. They also meet a warrior dude who, I think, speaks Thai. He goes along for the ride too. Probably because the Xena-chick is the only non-mutated female in the cast.

So, the trio set out through the hazardous, dimly-lit bowels of the ship, running from mutants, fighting them, and evading the leader mutant guy. It’s a lot like a videogame. As a matter of fact, it’s exactly like a videogame. We’ll probably see the videogame before too long, littering bargain bins at Best Buy. Along the way we see some nifty terraforming bits like an arc containing Earth flora and Fauna, and CHUs.

Meanwhile, in the videogame cut-scenes, Payton loses contact with Bower, but comes across a skittish young crewmember whom he ends up playing a game of mental chess with. Bower suspects the kid is suffering from a psychosis called pandorum (and we have a title!), which basically causes you to wig out while on long space voyages. But, the kid suggests, maybe it’s Payton who’s suffering from pandorum! Ooooo! Wait, that doesn’t make any sense.

Finally, in the videogame, the avatars…er, characters come across some hermit who unspools the whole story of the Elysium. Seems when Earth’s final message reached the ship, the young dude currently taunting Payton freaked out from pandorum and killed the command staff, then defrosted people and set himself up as king of the ship, ruling over them, and banishing many of them to the ship’s bowels when he got irritable. Those people became the mutants currently chasing the avatars (well, duh). And the young dude grew up to be…Payton! Yes, the young dude is just a figment of Payton’s pandorum-riddled mind.

So, the good guys restart the reactor, which nukes most of the mutants. A few survive. The main baddie is killed when the Thai dude stabs him in the head while he eats the dude’s liver (yeah, that happened). But the Thai dude is killed when he hesitates before killing a kid who promptly slashes his throat. Bower makes his way to bridge where he confronts Payton. But Payton has one last surprise: he opens the, uh, space curtains, and reveals that the ship has crash landed in Happyland’s ocean! Payton and Bower fight, then someone breaks a window and the bridge floods. Payton drowns, while Bower and the chick escape in a hibernation pod (which conveniently floats. Soon, the ship is ejecting all its pods and the ships 1200-some-odd survivors are bobbing like corks in the water, ready to repopulate the planet. Fin.

Yeah, this movie sucks rhinos. It’s got a neat premise and a great-looking ship (from the exterior), but by keeping the threat internal, it lowers the scare level a bit. It also telegraphs much of dénouement. Sure, the ocean-landing is unexpected, and Payton’s going all A Beautiful Mind isn’t necessarily predictable, but that’s only because the young dude looks nothing like a young Dennis Quaid. Likewise, the ship interiors and mutants are kept in darkness, to hide the low budget. And we do see the mutants…well, like I said, they’re from imaginative. The stakes remain high (saving human existence), but the pedestrian threat keeps it from landing with the blow it should.

Finally, we have the acting. Ben Foster grits and glowers through most of his scenes—even the flashbacks to his breakup with his girlfriend fail to convey any genuine emotion. And Quaid—oh, Quaid. First Horsemen, then G.I. Joe, and now this. He basically just phones in his role of…well, mostly talking on the phone (okay radio). Maybe he wrote it in his contract (“as little contact with any other actors in this crapfest, and absolutely no scenes with any goddamn mutants!”) The only time he breaks a sweat is when he squares off with Foster at the film’s climax, and then they just bug their eyes out and scream at each other a lot. It’s actually pretty sad: the respected older-generation and the up-and-comer both trying to out-crazy the other.

Okay, what did we learn from Pandorum?

1) When sending out a ship to repopulate a world, you may want to send a psychiatrist or two.

2) A good way to distract an opponent in hand-to-hand combat is to let him eat your liver.

3) Never trust kids. They’ll cut your throat just as soon as look at you.

4) Dennis Quaid will probably appear in your Youtube video of dropping Mentos in bottles of Diet Coke at this point.

So, the last installment in our roundup of the Bangkok International Film Festival, comes from the host country of Thailand. No, it’s not Sawasdee Bangkok! the country’s official entry (fer chrissakes, that movie is 247 minutes long–I couldn’t watch Freema Agyeman bathe for 247 minutes…well, maybe…probably not…possibly…), no, instead we’re going to look at a scary little installment called Phobia 2 (or Haa Phrang in Thai—Five Crossroads). Phobia 2 is a series of five horror vignettes, directed by some of Thailand’s most successful commercial directors. As a general rule, I’m not a huge fan of vignettes—movies or TV shows—since by design they can’t delve too deeply into the worlds they present. In this case, as a horror-injection system, they work pretty well. It kept the girlfriend huddling against me in fright, and what more can you really ask of a horror film?

Segment 1: Novice—This is the best and my favorite segment of the film. In part, because of the gorgeous cinematography, but also because its connections to traditional Thai spirituality give it an added dimension of weirdness—at least it does to this farang. In Novice, Pey, a troublesome teenager is sent to a remote monastery after a petty act of vandalism leads to a car accident and the inadvertent death of the driver. Pey’s a mean little dipshit, who can’t seem to internalize how much trouble he is in. He doesn’t much take to monastery life or the jungle village in which it’s located. The village pays homage to the Tall Ghost—a local deity they make regular offerings to—and yes, there does seem to be something unsettled in the wilderness. Still, it doesn’t stop Pey from breaking all kinds of taboos. First off, he makes himself a midnight snack. Second off, he takes food left as offerings to the Tall Ghost. Okay, so here’s a cultural note: don’t eat ghost food. No matter how good the Ramen noodles or strawberry Fanta looks, do not eat it. Pey learns this the hard way. Novice is a great-looking episode, buttressed by some great performances by Jirayu La-ongmanee as Pey, and Ray MacDonald (last seen in Dear Galileo) as an older monk who attempts to keep Pey on the straight and narrow. Director Paween Purijitpanya is a remarkably subtle and evocative director and gets the most out of his creepy locations. A few shots of the jungle at night and it’s easy to believe that it’s teeming with the supernatural.

Segment 2: Ward—This is one of the film’s weaker entries, mostly due to its static location and, for that matter, lead character. Dan Worrawech plays a young bike messenger checked into the hospital for an overnight, observational stay after being hit by a car and having both legs broken. As if that’s not bad enough, he has to share a room with a comatose old man whose body is covered with creepy tattoos. Well, the evening goes about as you’d expect—with all sorts of frightening goings on, and shocks, and various indications that the man behind the curtain is something other than the unconscious husk at death’s door he appears to be. Ward is fairly effective, but neither character has enough detail to make them anything other than plot elements. The ending is twisty but not enough to prove any real kick. I mean, what else would a dying, old cult-leader want the healthy (if banged-up) young dude in the next bed for? Wait, that came out wrong…

Segment 3: Backpackers—Making a nice bookend with Novice, this segment also showcases the fearsome remoteness of Thailand’s countryside, while featuring updated horrors and a morality play for a borderless world. Backpackers begins like Hostel or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with two none-too-bright teenagers hitchhiking along a lonesome stretch of highway someplace in Thailand’s low country (probably down south). They snag a ride in a grungy cargo van driven by a taciturn older man and his young, 20-something assistant , Neither is very friendly, but both seem very uncomfortable. Okay, need I even point out that nothing—not one thing—can possibly go well with this scenario? I mean, do you really think that the truck will pull into the parking lot of Disneyland at the end of this segment? Yeah, it doesn’t. What happens is the cargo in the back of the truck begins pounding on the walls. Guess what the cargo is? Hint: it’s not Hello Kitty sex toys. But it gets worse, as the “cargo” seems have all expired  from a bad batch of drugs the younger smuggler forced them to swallow before their trip. So now the one cargo has killed the other cargo, which means that some set of bosses are going to be very, very upset. In the middle of it are two, innocent backpakers who can’t even understand the language. When the situation becomes much, much worse, well, words really aren’t necessary. “It’s gonna eat you!” is pretty much the international language.

Segment 4: Salvage—Like Ward, this segment is somewhat hamstrung by a fairly predictable and familiar concept. Singer-actress Nicole Theriault plays a mercenary used-car dealer who blithely sells recovered and repaired cars as “gently-used” and neglects to tell her buyers about the various wrecks they’ve been in and the safety risk that poses. Payback come sin the form of a serious of ghostly visitations at her used-car lot, where she must navigate the maze of refurbished death-traps she sells in order to find her juvenile son who has gone missing. There’s nothing really wrong with Salvage. It has a few genuine scares and fairly memorable ending, but it doesn’t really stick. We’ve seen morality plays before and vengeful ghosts, so there’s not really much new here.

Segment 5: In the End—The movie’s ultimate episode wins some points for originality, and it almost does. In the End is a clever meta-comment on Asian horror films, as it follows the travails on just such a film set. Marsha Wattanapanich plays the diva-ish star of a horror-film sequel (despite the fact that she–and everyone else–died in the first film) which is beset by strange occurrences and possible hauntings. The episode sends up any number of A-horror clichés: the endless churning out of sequels, the creepy girl with the stringy, black hair, and most amusingly the completely arbitrary screenwriting that accompanies most of them (I only wish they’d worked in a dig against Hollywood’s mindless remakes). Unfortunately, rather than letting the jokes breathe, the movie devolves into a lot of running and screaming and slapstick comedy—too bad, it was a cool idea. Still, it manages a blackly funny ending.

So, the BIFF has come to an end. Next up, back to the usual offerings.