Creature is a tiny little indie horror movie distributed without studio backing that made history. Not the good kind of history, mind you. Released on 1500 screens with little in the way of advertising, the film raked in a measly $331,000 on its opening weekend. That works out to $220 per screen and less than six viewers per showing. This puts Creature in the top ten worst opening weekends ever by some estimates. But hey, I hear it’s doing better than Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star.

Knowing these facts, and having already seen Bucky Larson, I set out to see Creature for myself. Why? I want to be able to say I paid full price to see Creature in a theater. Sure, no one will know what I’m talking about - this isn’t as momentous as saying you saw something like The Room in a theater (by the way, I did) - and even if they did, they wouldn’t care, but it’ll mean something to me. And I am nothing if not an egoist.

Surprisingly enough, this nothing of a movie made it’s way to the local mall multiplex. I would have expected it to land in some piss-ant locally owned place in the middle of nowhere. I appreciate the savings on gas. As I am wont to do, I arrived twenty minutes early for a matinee screening, and as I expected the theater was abandoned. Surely I was the only masochistic idiot dumb and/or crazy enough to see Creature. “Five dollars says I’m all alone for this one,” I tweeted from my phone.

I owe myself five dollars.

Two other people showed up, which fits neatly with the “less than six viewers” average. I was tempted to walk over and ask them why they were doing this to themselves, but then again why was I? Probably the same reasons I saw Bucky Larson: someone has to, and at least I can use the experience to entertain strangers on the internet.

My life is a waste, isn’t it?

I was legitimately flabbergasted that there were trailers before this thing. I mean, it’s self distributed by some random guy, why are studio flicks like 50/50 and  Dream House linked to it? I assume the theater owners did that to lend the film some sense of credibility. A noble failure.

The film itself revolves around a group of generic twentysomethings on a generic road trip to some generic party in Louisiana. Along the way they get lost in the bayou and stop in a gas station that happens to be full of memorabilia relating to Grimley Botine, a local who supposedly mutated into a gator monster roaming the swamp.

Spoiler: he’s real, and he kills the kids. You’re shocked, I’m sure.

Yeah, I know it’s “not professional” to spoil a movie, but I’m not a professional critic. Besides, I didn’t mention the incest! Oh darn, now I really spoiled it. Ah, none of you were going to go see Creature anyway.

If you want my honest opinion, Creature is a very average, competently made and kinda entertaining movie, in that “brain turned off” sort of way. It would have been better off on Syfy or direct-to-video. There are no recognizable people in the cast, unless you count Sid Haig, who I count only in the “Oh yeah, that guy” kind of way, which is exactly the reaction I had every time I saw the trailer - “Oh yeah, that…guy”. I couldn’t remember his name for the life of me, and I didn’t care enough to look it up. I remembered it when someone mentioned it on a message board. “Oh yeah, Sid Haig! What the hell was he in, again?”. I still haven’t bothered to look that up.

The rest of the cast, anonymous though they may be, are serviceable and inoffensive. I wasn’t particularly invested in their lives or deaths on an emotional level. I didn’t care on any other level, come to think of it. Oh well. They die anyway. The monster is well done for such a low-budget affair, with all practical effects and no CGI - how refreshing! In a time when every big budget horror film resorts to CGI for everything, right down to the blood splatter, seeing a film with actual, physical make-up and gore in it is like a breath of fresh air. The makers of Creature should be commended for that. If I have one problem with the monster - and I do - it’s the permanently grinning mouth. That’s a little silly, but the director at least has the sense to keep the creature in the dark most of the time, and even when it is in the light, it’s dim light.

In every technical sense, Creature is a fine film. The photography is professional-looking, the editing is smooth and keeps things going at a good pace, and the writing is never bad enough to call attention to itself. But the movie as a whole never excels beyond being a middling, nothing-new rehash of the same formula that every “monster in the woods” movie follows. It really has no business being on the big screen, but hey - if the producer is so hell bent on losing money, more power to him. This is a rainy day rental kind of movie for everyone else.

Sylvester Stallone must have been in a bad mood. The Rambo films have never been particularly cheery, but none of the first three were as bleak and despairing as this fourth entry in the franchise, where the main theme seems to be the meaninglessness of life and the finality of death. I’ll put it to you this way: if Ingmar Bergman or Woody Allen made an action film this would be the result.

Rambo is little more than a ninety-minute reel of unspeakably gruesome death shown in explicit detail. I find it hard to believe that a film where people are liquified by bullets and transformed into clouds of red mist floating on the breeze by landmines (and those are the tamer deaths, believe me) got a mere R rating. I’m not opposed to violence of this level per se, but I also recognize that pornographic violence deserves a pornographic rating, and that’s why the (little-used) NC-17 rating exists. Here is the perfect candidate. But that’s not to say I had any problem with the violence in this film. Rambo addresses the genocide in Burma - a particularly vicious and violent situation - and aims to show it realistically. And for that the film can be applauded. Just know that if you have a weak stomach, this isn’t a film for you.

Rambo finds it’s protagonist in current times, still living in Vietnam, the place where his worst memories - the ones that “turn on” his murderous instincts - were born and still thrive. Ironically, it is here where he has found peace, living along the river and catching cobras for local tourist-trap snake charming shows. As in the films that came before, Rambo’s peace is interrupted by his fellow Americans. This time it’s a church group looking to hire Rambo to bring them up the river to Burma so they can bring relief to a village recently ravaged by the Burmese military. Rambo is initially disinterested, but the good heart of a woman in the group changes his mind. Shortly after landing in Burma, the church people go missing and their pastor flies in from America to hire Rambo - this time to ferry mercenary hunters into the area to recover the missing.

I suppose you can guess how the film goes from there. Here’s a hint: lots of people blow up, lose limbs, take arrows through the head, or otherwise get dead. The second half of Rambo is basically a protracted blood and gore highlight reel, the scenarios becoming increasingly more violent as each new scene comes. If you’ve never seen a truck-mounted .50 caliber machine gun turret used at point-blank range, you will have after seeing this film. It’s messier than you might even expect.

Does the violence serve a purpose? Yes, I believe it does. It highlights the cruelty of Burma’s military, and it reminds us of the hell people like Rambo went through in our own wars. Indeed, a dream sequence flashback to Vietnam ends with Rambo’s superior Col. Troutman shouting his name, a sound which is replaced by the American pastor calling it out. It’s a blunt but effective way of drawing comparisons between present and past. Watching Rambo fall back into his old ways, where “killing is as easy as drawing breath”, the audience might stop to think that there are people in the real world like this. They may not singlehandedly level small cities, as Rambo did in the original First Blood, or kill hundreds of soldiers as he does in the sequels, but they have the killer instinct in them and can’t shake it. The deepest horror in Rambo isn’t the killings, it’s looking into Rambo’s eyes and realizing that he can’t turn it off. He wants to, but he can’t. And if the purpose of his life is to end others, will there be any tragedy in his own eventual death? I don’t think he’d think so, personally.

I suppose they could always make a fifth movie where he turns on himself. He does hate killers, after all. God knows there must have been at least one innocent in his line of fire somewhere down the line.

It occurs to me that my overall opinion of the film may not be obvious in the above, I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I have positive feelings. It’s a challenging film and I respect that. I can’t say I’d ever want to watch it again.

The tagline of this blog is “I want to Like Movies. Really, I do”. This holds true for Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a film that I wanted to like, but which would not allow me to do so. For everything I liked about the film, the filmmakers had to bungle up the delivery on those elements. However reluctantly, I had to accept that I hated this movie at every turn.

Snow Flower began as a historical novel which I assume is popular (otherwise, why the film?), but which I suppose the writers had little respect for, as the movie alters the plotline fundamentally. Whereas the novel takes place entirely in 1800s China, chronicling the lifelong friendship of two women, the movie reduces this story to a sideplot and adds an entirely pointless framing story about two women in the present whose lives, a-doi!, parallel the story from the past. This is especially frustrating, as the movie also tells us that the historical plot is merely a book written by one of the present-day women, making the parallels not so much poetic or haunting as they are blunt and obvious. The story was literally written to reflect the lives of these two women, by one of the two women.

About that story. Let’s start with what the movie takes from the book. In 1800’s China, two girls named Snow Flower and Lily were born on the same day, and later even had their feet bound (a particularly gruesome practice in Chinese society) on the same day. Why, they even get visited by the local matchmaker on the same day, which leads not only to their being married off on the same day, but also to their friendship. The matchmaker matches the two girls as laotang, or soul sisters; they will be each others confidantes until the day they die. Snow Flower comes from a rich family, and Lily from a poor one. We should not be surprised that fate switches their lives: Lily marries well and becomes a wealthy aristocrat, while Snow Flower marries poorly and becomes a peasant farmer’s wife, living in a hut. They live in separate towns and are forbidden to speak by Lily’s overbearing and stuck-up mother-in-law, but they communicate secretly by writing messages in the folds of paper fans, which are transported back and forth by servants.

In present day, Nina and Sophia are best friends, raised by a shared foster-mother whom they both despised. So close the two girls were that they signed a laotang contract of their own written, annoyingly cute-enough, on a Faye Wong CD cover. But as they grew older they also grew apart, Nina caught up in a career at a bank and Sophia writing a novel about their faded friendship. On the night that Nina is celebrating her promotion to manager of a new bank branch in America, Sophia attempts to reach her for a goodbye, but is struck by a car on the way and winds up in a coma. Since Sophia has no family, and laotang contracts are apparently the next best thing to power of attorney, Nina is contacted and decides to give up her promotion to stay in China, by Sophia’s bedside.

Oh, that novel Sophia is writing? Nina finds it in her personal belongings, and it’s the story of Snow Flower and Lily.

Now, this all sounds fine for the plot of a whimsical, romantic, chick flick. But my god does the execution ever ruin it. I like the premise of the whole thing, but the actual delivery is atrocious. The film’s attempts at juggling three timelines - Snow Flower and Lily, Nina and Sophia as teens, and Nina and Sophia as adults - are hopelessly flawed. Director Wayne Wang gives the timelines different color schemes so the viewer can tell them apart just by looks alone, but as the movie progresses, the color schemes get confused and suddenly one timeline has another’s colors, and sometimes the colors don’t change at all from one timeline to the next, and since the editing gives no definitive breaks from one story to the next, you may as well give up all hope of telling the stories apart. They all just bleed together after a while.

You know what else really bothers me? How little of Snow Flower’s life we really see. She’s in the title of the movie, and she’s secondary even in her own timeline. This movie should have been called “Lily and the Half-Hearted Attempts at Communication”. Lily is always at the front, and she really doesn’t try very hard to keep up with her supposed soul-sister. The Lily/Snow Flower time line is constantly jumping ahead in time (really, you’ve never seen “One Year Later” used so often as it is in this film) and we are left to assume that Lily checks in on Snow Flower once a year. Maybe. Later on, when they are older, Lily visits Snow Flower and is stunned to see her friend living as a peasant. She’s been a peasant since she got married at the age of 10, but thirty years later, Lily can’t believe it. Way to pay attention. I mean, really, am I supposed to care? These people never communicate and I’m supposed to be invested in their “timeless friendship”?

It’s not as bad as Nina and Sophia, though. I sat through this whole movie and I have no idea why they’re even friends. They grew up together, sure, but so what? They have seemingly nothing in common, and their adult lives are reduced to a handful of scenes where they talk about their childhood, and then have a fight and stop being friends. I have no idea why Nina would so quickly dump her lucrative new job to stay in China and and hang around Sophia’s bedside reading her awful manuscript for Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, as if it’s some kind of atonement for letting their friendship die. Because they both liked Faye Wong when they were kids? Because they both hated their foster mom? Woo-hoo, movie.

There’s an old rule in screenwriting 101: show, don’t tell. If you want to invest the audience in your story, you need to show them the events that make an impact of the character’s lives. But Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is all tell. Most of the major events are simply narrated. Typhoid fever kills Lily’s family. We only hear about it. Taipei rebels destroy Snow Flower’s village. We only hear about it. Sophia has an affair with a man Nina doesn’t trust. We only hear about it. On and on. What we do see is basically the time in-between the interesting parts. In other words, the boring stuff.

The actors all range from bland to flesh-searingly awful, and the dialogue they have is no better. A particularly egregious example is the scene where Sophia tells Nina about her plans to write a book. This happens late in the film, and the writers felt it necessary to have Sophia (woodenly) say “it’s about two people a long time ago, but I think it’s also about us”. You THINK so? Really? Never would have guessed. It’s not like the characters in both stories are played by the same women - oh wait they are. Fuck you, movie. I haven’t heard exposition that clumsy in years.

I forgot to mention that Sophia’s boyfriend is played by Hugh Jackman. The movie glosses over all the good stuff, so I guess I can get away with glossing over the one good actor.

Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear

Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear

BABY MONITOR: SOUND OF FEAR

This HAS to be awesome, right? Any movie with a title like that is promising to be the biggest, tastiest slice of cinematic cheese I’ve stumbled upon in ages. Images of a woman clutching a baby monitor and gasping in fear as some ominous voice comes over the speaker, a killer who’s modus operandi is child care product-related, and a deadly weapon that looks like a big rattle or something all flood to the mind. And it’s a Lifetime Network Original Movie. This is going to be the best thing since Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?, right? Right?

Wrong.

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The fine art of parody is dead, and Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are it’s killers. Like some horrible bizarro world version of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, these two men have forged a fruitful filmmaking partnership that churns out movie after movie year after year, only whereas Powell and Pressburger were masters of cinema who produced nothing but silver screen classics, Friedberg and Seltzer are hacks who produce nothing but pain and suffering. From Scary Movie 2 and Date Movie to Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, Friedberg and Seltzer have been terrorizing moviegoing audiences with their joyless brand of erratic sketch “comedy” for the last decade without remorse or pity. One imagines that if the killers in the Saw franchise ever turned their attentions to a film critic, they’d strap him down and make him watch one of these horrible films, the only way to escape being to scoop his own eyes out with a grapefruit spoon and shove sharpened pencils into his ears. Friedberg and Seltzer’s idea of comedy is, essentially, to watch the trailers for upcoming films and then write a so-called screenplay that does little more than reenact clips from those trailers with the insertion of a fart joke or a pop culture reference that will already be dated by the time their film hits theaters, which is astonishing, given that it takes these two all of three weeks to write, shoot, edit, and release most of their movies. Vampires Suck is likely the one and only exception to this rule, given that it’s target - the Twilight films - have been around for a couple of years and Friedberg and Seltzer may have actually had the chance to watch one or two of them before setting about spoofing them. And yet not only is Vampires Suck no better than their other efforts, it may actually be worse. I can’t think of any other comedy film that these two, or any other filmmaker, have ever produced that was so profoundly painful and depressing an experience.

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The Rapture is one of the more fascinating aspects of Christian theology. All the truly faithful vanish into thin air and are taken to Heaven, the non-believers are left on Earth to suffer through seven years of tribulation while the Devil rules the globe, and then Jesus finally returns to reign supreme…it’s the stuff of epic fantasy. You could make a pretty damn impressive movie out of it if you knew what you were doing, but I guess none of the people who have ever tried even remotely knew what they were doing.

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Marital discord. Single parenthood. Alcoholism. Runaway children. American Indian mythology. Political maneuvering. Naval mutiny intrigue. You’re probably thinking that these do not sound like the plot points of a movie with the title MAGMA: Earth’s Molten Core. That’s only because you haven’t seen MAGMA: Earth’s Molten Core. Most people haven’t seen it, in fact. Though made in America over five years ago, the film was never released here and indeed was almost never released anywhere except, I think, for some obscure European countries. Never seen in theaters, never released on DVD and practically unheard of except by the most hardcore of bad movie seekers, MAGMA: Earth’s Molten Core is like a movie that doesn’t exist.

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The original Predator is remembered by many as a true action classic. It’s simple but engaging story of a group of mercenaries sent into the jungle under false pretenses and then abandoned to die at the hands of an unseen and seemingly unstoppable alien hunter was enough to hook audiences and make for a massively entertaining film that continues to be popular twenty-three years on. It didn’t matter that the characters were barely developed beyond one-dimensional archetypes: they were tough and they didn’t take any shit. What else do you need, really?

The newest entry in the Predator franchise, the blandly-titled Predators, delivers almost the same exact things as the original: a group of badasses lost in a jungle and surrounded by unseen foes trying to pick them off. The new sequel hits many of the same plot points as it’s predecessor - to the point that sometimes one has to wonder if they weren’t just using excerpts from the original screenplay. And yet, unlike it’s predecessor, it utterly fails to engage and barely entertains. Indeed, Predators is one of the most boring action films in recent memory.

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