Psych: 9

 

TITLE: Psych: 9
RELEASE DATE: 2010
SCORE: 1.5 out of 4

This film straddles the line between psychological thriller and supernatural thriller, but its perch is precarious.  The obviousness of the later reveal renders large portions of the movie as tedious set-up to what you know is going to be a grim and meager payoff. Then the movie forgets itself and tries for something half-clever, but leaves us with a muddled ending that tries for ambiguous and lands somewhere short of comprehensible.

The plot is basic, and lifted from countless predecessors (such as Session 9, a movie with a nearly identical set up and many other obvious similarities): a young single white female starts a job doing tedious filing work for the psych ward of a hospital which has been closed down. She thinks this will be relaxing but actually the spooky setting and long hours alone start to fray her nerves. She picks up smoking again, her marriage starts to deteriorate as does her mental health as she becomes plagued by paranoia and nightmares. Slowly her past is unraveled as she begins to have therapy sessions with a psychiatrist who is occasionally around, apparently tying up loose ends or something...

This character study is "added" to by a serial killer subplot which acts as the catalyst for the final, and not quite understandable, denouement. The film presents two mutually exclusive possibilities for the events that unfold before us, but these possibilities are also each internally inconsistent and don't hold up to scrutiny. The third possibility is so vague and barely realized that I'm not sure I even know what it might be.

Its not a stinker; the production values are fairly high and the acting is good for indie horror standards. Unfortunately, the film also suffers from some of the common afflictions that come with a small budget - a cast of six characters, a total of four sets, hardly any establishing shots, and so on. I think a really good film will transcend its budget - and tell a story where these things don't really factor in at all; in fact many of the best horror films have had notoriously tiny budgets and its because of being innovative with constraints its part of the art of film-making.

All in all its mostly a retread of very tired psychological thriller tropes, lacking any spark of originality, done cheaply without much concern for artistry or cinematic depth. There's just barely enough meat on its bones to make it not terrible, but obviously that's not much of a recommendation.

Virus X

TITLE: Virus X

RELEASE DATE: 2010

SCORE: 1 out of 4

I can't recommend in good faith that anyone watch this film. There are many problems with this film; for one, the basic plot is barely even half-cooked. A rich old lady has some sort of cure-all 'vaccine' to H1N1 but the virus never did anything scary so she hires scientists to develop a super-amped version of the virus. Of course they test these new strains on humans in poorly lit underground cells. As luck would have it, strain X turned out to be the really really nasty one.

So, of course, things happen and the virus gets out of control. But everything happens at a very slow pace, and the performances are either too melodramatic and exaggerated to be believable or too sedate and blank to be worth mentioning. Who are any of the characters involved in the virus program - including at least a half-dozen patients? I don't really know. I don't really care. There's a doctor. There's a guy who seems more like a fighter character in a video game than anyone who should be in a super-science lab. There's some alright gore but much of it is of a regrettable form in which people puke up what kind of looks like poop.

Lots of blue lighting, tilted angle shots, shakey-cam; the cinematography was uninspired to say the very least. The make-up effects were very nicely done, but that can't really carry a film. The whole thing was a wooden exercise in pointlessness. It was a story that takes maybe an hour to tell stretched out to film length and a mildly clever "twist" ending tacked on. Its not quite contemptible, but its no treat.

Finale

TITLE: Finale
RELEASE DATE: 2009
SCORE: 3 out of 4


This is a well made and visually striking supernatural tale of a family unraveling the pieces of a young man's life that led up to his apparent suicide. The role of the mother is a stereotypical uptight Christian, consistently in dour long dresses and prominent cross-wearing. Fortunately, the actress, Carolyn Hauck, transcends the cliched trappings and delivers a stellar performance. She comes across as a clever, instinctively canny mom, yet also delivers a profound sense of frailty, as she is inflicted with night terrors and disturbing episodes of sleep-walking -- she pulls this off very convincingly. Her guilt, paranoia, and obsession are really what carry this film. While most of the cast is quite capable, she definitely comes away as the strongest.

Anyway, It quickly becomes apparent that her son, "Sean Michaels," (I suppose the production team never heard of Shawn Micheals, but this had me laughing every time they said the name -- which was frequently!), dabbled, or was possibly quite deeply involved, in black magick and left-hand path occultnik stuff. Yet it soon becomes apparent that his death was not the end of the dark troubles he unleashed.

Early on, the film suffers from being over-stuffed with montages of "found footage" of SHAAWWWWN MICCHEAALLS as a happy go-lucky college kid before he turned all dark and evil. This grainy boring nonsense is contrasted with scenes of Mother Helen wracked with guilt, pouring through his crazed notebooks and hunting for clues. Although a devout Christian, she seems unable, at first, to sense the obvious evil black magic trappings that surround her son's death. I'm not sure if this is quite believable or not; why do people in horror movies seem to never notice that there's ghosts or demons or Satan or whatever involved in the events that happen to them? I mean, if I found my son's secret stash of stuff and it was notebooks with crazy William Burroughs cum Aleister Crowley type scribblings and creepy newsprint cut-and-pastes as well as 16mm footage of secret ritualistic sex orgies - ya know I might just suspect that he could have been fucking around with black magic!! (I know, call me crazy...)

Well anyway, it fortunately doesn't take too long before she suspects something spooky is afoot and that's when the movie starts to really pick up. There are a lot of very creepy sets and unsettling visual effects, and some quality gore. The plot is fairly bog standard and predictable, aside from getting a little complicated at the end (and a little too light on the exposition about just what the kooky culties were up to), but the strong characters and captivating visuals kept me from yawning. I have to make a note, however, of the exceptionally cornball performance of Elizabeth Holmes, who's idea of acting sinister is apparently to channel Pearl Forrester from MST3K...

All in all it was quite good and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I recommend it and its on Netflix streaming, so if you have that, you have no excuse not to watch it!

Circle of Eight

 

TITLE: Circle of Eight
RELEASE DATE: 2009
SCORE: 1.5 out of 4


First and foremost there is the fact that the studio that made this is named "Mt Dew Green Label Studios" and that Paramount is most likely just distributing this film. Not knowing what to expect from this film at all, I begin worrying I am about to watch an 83 minute Mountain Dew commercial repackaged for my consumption as "horror." How horrifying! Well, as the Dew is extreme, so is this movie - which remains unrated (as far as I can tell).

The first few minutes of it happen to be a sort of music video -- and a terrible one! Jessica, while adequately performed by Austin Highsmith, is still a weak and hackneyed Mary Sue character in which to project all our fears and anxieties on to, with little or any actual personality of her own. She soon meets her neighbors when she moves into a new apartment on New Year's Eve. Oh, and the apartment complex has a "file room" no one is allowed to go in to. And, you guessed it, all the neighbors are crazy (and there's eight of them)! Or is Jessica the crazy one? Who knows? Who cares...

No one knows anything, everyone is an unreliable narrator/crazy person and no one is very likable, so the emotional commitment I had for the characters was less than zero, I definitely rooted for all of them to die. The dialogue is atrocious and delivered with all the ability of high school drama team flunk-outs. I expect this out of a low-budget horror film but this really stood out to me.

The film is an utter pain to watch; its a dismal and unconvincing drama followed by some tiresome and unfunny comedic scenes followed by psychological "twists." This is a movie that trades in a brisk pace for an attempt at building suspense and mood, and it utterly fails. The mood is irritating rather than entrancing and the suspense is sporadic rather than building. Throughout the second half a bunch of random bonkers stuff happens, so at least that's kind of entertaining.

The pitiful twists and turns are as predictable and tame as a Made-for-TV movie. Perhaps it was, the production value is certainly no higher than one (a cheap one). You should all go rent Shredder Orpheus, its a cheap movie that rules. Its nothing like this movie, but for some reason I was wishing I was was watching it the whole time I was watching this fairly unenjoyable film.

Triangle

TITLE: Triangle
RELEASE DATE: 2009
SCORE: 1 out of 4

I didn't know what to expect from this film, but I had hoped it was going to be about the Bermuda Triangle and full of creepy ghost-ship suspense. This movie is kind of like that, I guess, if you have no idea what the words creepy or suspense mean.

I hate it when weird shit is constantly happening around a set of characters and none of them acknowledge that said weird shit is happening. And it all happens so quick as well -- the entire cast is dead except for the Single White Female (with bonus Autistic Son back home) within the first half hour of this movie. A horrendous situation for a slasher flick, but then the movie just switches gear into a psychological thriller with "mind-bending" (poorly fleshed out) time travel stuff. Still - I always maintain that it's a good idea to at least have one other guaranteed living character around to make things slightly interesting. An unreliable narrator is great and all, but if that is the only person in the film it kind of needs to be spectacularly written and directed and acted - and this movie is certainly not. The end is not satisfying, and it is not clever.

This movie really seems to be made up of several different coherent ideas for a movie that were then slammed together to make a complete pile of shit. It is not a movie that frightens you, it is a movie that angers you by being so stupid and slap-shod.

Honestly, Hot Tub Time Machine might provide the audience with more sensible temporal distortion plot line. It might have more thrills, too!

The Crazies

TITLE: The Crazies
RELEASE DATE: 2010
SCORE: 2.5 out of 4

This rendition of The Crazies is almost nothing like the original George Romero film. The original film was loaded not just with gore and creepiness, but also a building sense of tension and suspense throughout its entirety that really kept you engaged with the film through its use of documentary-style filming and editing. This one lacks any such substance and relies on pure shock tactics.

What you get with this Crazies is a pale imitation of an already over-the-top film that kicks it up into outrageous nonsense. A boring, dull sheriff and his highly pregnant wife gruelingly survive an outbreak of T.R.I.X.I.E (that's one more than D.I.X.I.E) in what amounts to basically the Die Hard of zombie movies. Of course, in The Crazies they aren't technically zombies, just homicidal maniacs infected with an incurable infectious disease that causes permanent insanity and brain damage.

The amount of paranoia induced by Romero's original mind-fuck masterpiece is something I doubted this remake would be able to match, but it disappointed even my very low standards. Standard boilerplate horror turn-arounds and misdirections are the stock and trade of the "suspense" of this film which is regularly ruined by ridiculous things happening to and being done by our protagonists. 

Everything in this film is cartoonish -- the bungling government is amped up into fascist stormtroopers who indiscriminately kill any and all civilians. In the original there are plenty of sane people being shot, but it is through confusion and the disintegration of support and communication lines. In this one, the military is just a bunch of coldblooded bastards committing wholesale slaughter starting Day 1 of the outbreak.

The idea of exploring the whole "how you know what sanity is, can you know that you are sane?" angle seemed to have been lost on the writers here, there are certainly no cerebral or philosophical themes present in this film; everything is played completely straight with seemingly no irony, subtlety or subtext.

In short: This is a pathetic failure. What's more unfortunate, is that this is probably the strongest effort the people involved in the making of this film are able to make -- this trashy pablum is the pinnacle of Breck Eisner's career, and I'll bet good money that the fact this film is even watchable is in spite of him and probably due to conscious efforts to block his shitty ideas.

More Quick Bites

A quick snipe at some recent films I've seen but don't have the heart to review in full...


Legion (2010): This is a movie that is fun to watch but impossible to take seriously. Not very scary either, and the whole concept of the movie is really half-baked. Still, it is thoroughly entertaining. 3 out of 4.

The Dead Outside (2008): This was a very compelling film about a small set of characters attempting to survive after a decimating viral outbreak which causes its victims to become violently insane. I liked it quite a bit but the editing and pacing just seemed to be a little bungled, and it took away from the mood of the film for me just a bit. 3.5 out of 4.


I will be reviewing the 2010 remake of The Crazies very soon!