THE RAVEN (2012): Quoth the raven, "Eat my shorts."

In a world where Abraham Lincoln fights vampires and Sherlock Holmes is a mixed martial artist, I suppose casting Edgar Allan Poe as an amateur homicide detective isn't such an egregious rewriting of history.  At least Poe no doubt had the fascination with the macabre to give him a familiar insight into the mind of a killer.  And his stories, helpfully in the public domain, make cheap fodder for Hollywood thrills.

John Cusack might seem like an odd choice to play Poe, but I actually can't think of anyone more perfect.  Who better to capture Poe's romantic frustration, his themes of outright abandonment by the opposite sex?  I'd like to see Cusack play Poe in an actual biopic.

That's not what The Raven is, nor is it a feature-length version of the classic poem.  Nor, in fact, is it expanded to a silly celebration of all of the things that Poe held dear, like Roger Corman's 1963 film of the same name.  In fact, aside from one or two quotes and a couple of wing-flappings, the movie has little to do with its namesake.  Cusack is Poe, broke and long suffering from writer's block.  People in his home town of Baltimore are being murdered in the style of Poe's stories, and the killer contacts him with clues.  The police, led by Detective Fields (Luke Evans), team up with him to solve the case.

The procedural plot of the film is as contrived as they come.  The murders are graphic and not very inventive; they even bear little resemblance to Poe's work.  Given Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, we know that the unidentified killer must be one of the characters we have met, unless the movie, like Se7en, has something else in mind.  This movie does not, and the surprise reveal comes with little fanfare.  The killer's motive is bland, and the confrontation between him and Poe is a yawn.

The one thing that anchors it is Cusack's performance, which is inspired.  If the script doesn't quite allow him to really get under Poe's skin, he at least gives us a genuine hero: a man who has loved and lost one too many times, and is fighting for his own last grasp on humanity, especially when his own girlfriend (Alice Eve) gets caught up in the mix.

Director James McTeigue, who made the very good V for Vendetta, manages to salvage a couple of good suspense sequences.  The first is borrowed from "The Premature Burial," in which a character awakens inside a coffin somewhere--McTeigue doesn't show us any outside point of view--and must find a way out.  The other comes toward the end, in which a character has been poisoned and must use what little life he has left to save someone else.  It's in these scenes that the real Poe seems to make a cameo appearance.

** out of ****

NOTE: One of the movie's screenwriters is named Hannah Shakespeare, which has given me an idea for the next movie of this type: William Shakespeare, Zombie Killer.

FREAK DANCE (2010): UCBeat Street

Made in 2010 but just hitting DVD now, Freak Dance may be a little bit late to the game with its skewering of the battle-dancing genre, especially since there's already been one goofy parody (the Wayans family's surprisingly decent Dance Flick).  But this film, written and directed by Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder Matt Besser and starring many staple actors of that theater in Los Angeles, still manages to find something fresh to savage.  Rather than take the anything-for-a-joke route of the Wayanses, Besser and crew apply a more subtle, straightfaced approach that embraces the outright silliness of the genre.  With the goofy factor toned down just a little, Freak Dance could have passed for an actual dance flick.

It has the obligatory plot line of any dance movie, borrowed from Footloose, Dirty Dancing, The Forbidden Dance, and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo equally.  When their community center is threatened with closing due to health violations, the dance crew Fantaseez and their leader Asteroid (Hal Rudnick) are left with no choice but to battle-dance in a local underground competition and use the prize money to pay their fees.  Their crew consists of the talented but cocky Funkybunch (Michael Daniel Cassady), the functioning illiterate Sassy (Angela Trimbur), the dorky Egghead (Benjamin Simeon), the aptly named Silent Girl (Peipei Yuan), and their newest recruit, the rich-girl-with-street-cred Cocolonia (Megan Heyn).

Though the many jabs at dance movie conventions grow tired pretty quickly, the movie works largely because the dancing is, well, not bad.  Rather than just goof on the genre, Besser and his co-director Neil Mahoney take the choreography seriously enough that the musical numbers are clever and often hilarious.  Though the cast is mostly made up of improv actors, they prove themselves (or in some cases, their doubles) to be pretty adept at movement.  An early scene in which the Fantaseez crew invades a hospital and infects the entire staff with dancing is laugh-out-loud funny, and the big battle climax against a rival crew led by a strip club owner (Drew Droege) is uproariously vulgar.  The song score, written by Cassady and Brian Fountain, is not tightly composed but is consistently clever and serves a series of charming numbers. (My favorite: the code violation list-song "The Bathroom's Too Dark to Pee.")

The four original Upright Citizens (Besser, Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts) are very funny in small roles, and there are guest appearances by several UCB Theater regulars, including Horatio Sanz, Casey Wilson, Tim Meadows, and Andrew Daly (who has the film's funniest one-liner).

Humor-wise, Freak Dance comes with few surprises; those familiar with Besser's work and with the Del Close-style improv of the UCB Theater (including the terrific sketch show from the late '90s) will know what to expect.  What I was not expecting was for the dancing to be this good.  Freak Dance is funny because it was made by funny people, but what elevates it is that the dance numbers are cleverly conceived and professionally choreographed.

*** out of ****

BREAKING DAWN PART 2 (2012): One disbeliever's honest appraisal of a movie that doesn't need his approval

Let it be known, in case I haven't yet made it clear, that I profoundly dislike the Twilight series.  What little I have read of Stephenie Meyer's books has left me agape at how such simple and juvenile writing manages to be a bestseller among relatively smart teenagers.  Never mind that its socially conservative message and disturbing cipher of a female lead sets a damaging example for young girls: remember, sex before marriage is EVIL, but defining yourself completely by the men in your life is OKAY.

But whatever.  Most teenagers are hip enough to see through the conservatism in the books; that's not what draws them to it.  Meyer has fashioned an empire with an undeniably savvy hook: two hunky guys fighting over a decidedly average girl.  What teen or tweener could resist?

The movies have been fairly bearable, mainly because they've assembled top-notch actors and directors behind them.  But with few exceptions, most of the talent behind the series has fallen prey to the terrible writing.  Casualties in the director's chair include Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen), Chris Weitz (About a Boy), and David Slade (Hard Candy), and even otherwise blameless actors like Bryce Dallas Howard and Graham Greene have faltered under Meyer's clunky plotting and dialogue.

But with Bill Condon, the series seems to have met its match.  The director of such sexually frank films as Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, Condon finally lends the series the authenticity it has been so sorely missing all along.  A chief complaint about the series has been that its female lead, Bella (Kristen Stewart), is a complete blank screen, and that her male counterpart, the vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), is a parody of a brooding rock star.  Condon's solution is to start from scratch and make the two main characters flesh and blood, so to speak.  His adaptation of the series's last novel, Breaking Dawn, brings a much needed humanity to the characters that other filmmakers have failed to apply.  By the end, well, I actually cared.  That Breaking Dawn Part 2 is the best in the series is without question.  That it is--deep breath, here we go--an actual good movie is the real surprise.

The splitting of Breaking Dawn into two parts is beneficial.  It limits each film to one plot apiece; while earlier films in the series felt like prefaces with lots of exposition, no beginning and no end, Condon's two Breaking Dawn films are more conventionally constructed, and easier to take.  For those playing at home, in Part 1 Bella Swan and Edward Cullen--he the dashing 100-year-old vampire who only looks 20, she the 18-year-old plain Jane--got married, Bella got pregnant with a half-vampire-baby, she died in childbirth, but Edward bit her, so she became, well, you know.

The child, Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy), grows at a highly advanced rate and has the supernatural strengths of her vampire father.  Word of the child reaches the Volturi, an ancient folk who are sort of a Vampire Senate, led by the slithery Aro (Michael Sheen).  The Volturi are not happy, and assemble an army to dispatch with Bella, Edward, Renesmee, and their entire family.  The Cullens call on their vampire friends, an assemblage of oddballs from around the world, to defend them.  At their side is the werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who has vowed to defend Renesmee.

Meyer's storyline has its faults.  The way it deals with Bella's newfound sexual hunger is downright sketchy, especially for a movie geared toward kids, but the movie thankfully doesn't spend much time on it.  I still haven't figured out how Bella's dad (Billy Burke) is meant to figure into the whole deal, or why he doesn't seem to notice that Renesmee is growing, well, way too fast.  The whole story with the Volturi is pretty filmsy too, and depends a whole lot on basic things being conveniently misinterpreted; for a race who appear to be psychic, vampires seem to misunderstand a lot.

It's not that the writing has substantially improved with this entry; it's merely that there is less of it.  The plot is ridiculous, but it at least has a clear through-line.  With a more well-defined story arc, the characters seem less like automatons and more like real people inhabiting a real story.  There is more action in this entry than in all of the previous ones combined.

The very large cast is exceptionally good; few of the film's talented actors are wasted.  The ensemble of vampire henchmen from various countries is made up of surprisingly well-defined characters.  I particularly liked Lee Pace (of the magnificent The Fall) as the Revolutionary War soldier who takes a special joy in sinking his fangs into Brits.  Dakota Fanning is chilling as a young telepath.

As the head of the Volturi, Sheen completely hams it up, and why shouldn't he?  He's now played the heavy in not one but two vampire/werewolf crossover series.  He's played an evil vampire more often than he's played Tony Blair.  His performance here is not up to his usual standard, but, well, let's just say he has fun with it.

Though Lautner remains one of the weaker actors of the bunch, even he seems looser and more human than before; this is the best performance he's given yet.  The movie even allows him to kid himself, and his serial shirtlessness gives way to one hilarious scene he shares with Bella's father.  Even Kellan Lutz, who hasn't been particularly noteworthy in the series thus far as the hulking Emmett Cullen, is pretty good here.  Alas, the series has failed to make a case for the existence of Jackson Rathbone, but I suppose it can't do everything.

The climactic battle sequence between the Volturi and the Cullens is really something.  It works, because Condon invests much of the film in making us care about the characters involved.  As has not been the case with much of the series, there is something at stake here.  Condon also takes a good deal more joy in the various grotesqueries of the vampire genre: I'm happy to report that, for anyone fed up with the inert kissy-kissy sparkliness of early entries in the series, there is a greater number of beheadings in this one.  I also liked the concept of the Immortal Child: apparently it is a crime to bite a child, since a vampire child becomes nothing more than a remorseless killing machine.  I'm imagining an army of bloodthirsty tots attacking the town.  But that's another movie.

It was no small feat to bring a respectable close to this usually mediocre, sometimes heinous series.  Perhaps it was a little easier to tackle the series after Bella and Edward's marriage; with the two of them finally doing the dirty deed, the off-putting abstinence allegory of the series's earlier films is no longer necessary.  Because Condon downplays the bigger picture and gives Stewart and Pattinson room to breathe, they become more believable.  The movie closes with an admittedly indulgent final moment between Bella and Edward, which is--for the first time in the series--completely earned.

Okay, so it could be that I'm suffering from a slight case of Stockholm Syndrome, having sat through ten hours of this series now, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  Actual fans ought to eat this movie up.  As a non-fan, let me offer this olive branch: I enjoyed it.

*** out of ****

NOTE: The movie doesn't do itself any favors by closing with a screenshot of the final page of Meyer's novel.  One sentence is enough to remind us of how poorly conceived her prose is.  "Our forever"?  Give me a break.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 8: EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)

It's easy to imagine a potential sequel to The Exorcist taking the route of, say, Halloween II or countless manufactured sequels to successful horror films-turned-franchises.  Usually when a sequel is conceived, the producers demand more of the same: if it worked the first time, do it again.

The most comforting thing about Exorcist II: The Heretic is that it is not that.  After talks between the studio, writer William Peter Blatty, and director William Friedkin hit a stalemate, the studio brought in John Boorman to take the reins.  Boorman might have seemed like the natural choice, since his handling of brutal, realistic horror in Deliverance was not far off from Friedkin's approach to the first film.

Deliverance was so good that it must have been easy to ignore that Boorman at that point had also made Zardoz, the sublimely wacky dystopian sci-fi film in which a be-speedo'd Sean Connery drove a giant floating head.  That, unfortunately, appears to have been the mode Boorman was in when making Exorcist II.  It's a mess of overwrought symbolism and psychological mumbo-jumbo, ditching the grounded terror of the original for a loop-de-loop through Catholicland.  It's something.  It's not a good film, but it certainly is something.

We begin in a distant jungly part of South America, where Fr. Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) is performing an exorcism that doesn't go so well.  Right away the movie approaches silliness: while in the original film exorcism was a rare occurrence, so much so that there appeared to be really only one exorcist in the Church, here they're the norm.  Exorcist II spends precious little time in the real world, and thus is never scary in any believable way.

Wait--I forgot.  The movie jumps the silly shark even before the first scene.  Right around the time the opening credits get to Ennio Morricone as composer, atmospheric music swells, drums kick in and we hear a woman doing her best hyena impression.  Oh well: with 510 credits, I guess you don't hit the bulls-eye at every one.

Lamont is informed by The Cardinal (Paul Henreid) that the Church is considering the posthumous excommunication of Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow), the eponymous exorcist of the first film, under the ludicrous premise that since he died at the hands of a demon, he may have been a Satanist at the time of death.  Lamont is dispatched to New York to question Regan (Linda Blair), the formerly possessed little girl, about just what happened that fateful night.

Then it gets weird.  Since Regan can't remember anything about her possession, her psychiatrist Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) hooks her up to a "synchronizer," which acts as a sort of dual-hypnosis machine, in which both doctor and patient can experience what's going on in the patient's head.  Dr. Tuskin, Regan, and Fr. Lamont hook up to the synchronizer to see if they can replay the events that happened just before Fr. Merrin's death.

Ho boy.  You can see that the unbending reality of the first film is gone.  What follows is a film that, however bad, I've never seen before.  The synchronizer scene, silly as it is, is mesmerizing in its loopiness.  Lamont further investigates Merrin's past, notably flashbacks of one exorcism he performed in Africa, which paves the way for the aforementioned drum-and-hyena score.  James Earl Jones turns up as a now-grown boy who survived an exorcism, in a scene that must be seen to be believed.

Meanwhile, Regan either has a relapse of her possession, or she gains angelic power.  It's hard to tell which.  There's a scene in which she convinces a young autistic girl (Dana Plato--yep, Dana Plato) to speak for the first time, which deserves a special place in film history alongside Evel Knievel inspiring a disabled kid to drop his crutches.


She also exhibits psychic powers, like when she draws a picture of Lamont surrounded by fire, which predicts a hospital scene in which Lamont tries to put out a flaming cardboard box with a wooden crutch.

The climax attempts to recreate the bed-thumping Bible-spewing exorcism from the first film, but it seems out of place in Boorman's film, which seems to want to head in a different path.  Boorman dives headfirst into the mythology of the demonic possession, caring less about the real-world characters and more about the demon itself. (Its name, by the way, is Pazuzu.)  Regan is the least interesting character in her own movie.

As for Burton, all that Shakespearean training did nothing to prepare him for lines like "Your machine has proved scientifically that there's an ancient demon locked within her." The dialogue in William Goodhart's monumentally goofy screenplay would sound better uttered by Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee than by the likes of Burton, Fletcher, Henreid, Jones, or any of its parade of Oscar-winners and acclaimed actors (Ned Beatty has a small role as well).  Oddly, the actor who fares best is Kitty Winn, who played Sharon, the live-in from the first film, and returns here in a role what was semi-obviously meant to be filled by Ellen Burstyn.

Exorcist II goes to so many odd places that I almost want to recommend it.  Somehow Boorman managed to out-Zardoz Zardoz and make one of the downright wackiest films ever made.  It's a film with clear intelligence behind it, and a respectable auteur with grand ambitions.  It's also completely ridiculous.

**** out of ****

No, no.  Mustn't get carried away.  In the real world:

* 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 7: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (2012)

The Paranormal Activity series is by now running on fumes, as none of the sequels has been able to replicate the raw terror of the first.  But they've still all been well-made, diverting throwaway shockers, and the new Paranormal Activity 4 is not a disappointment in that vein.  It sticks to the formula, and stakes some new ground to avoid becoming stale.  Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made the third film in the series as well as the clever documentary Catfish, try enough inventive stuff with the premise that it's still fun to watch.

The first film stuck with a first-person single-camera point of view; the second expanded it to multiple security cameras; the third went back to the 1980s and mined some interesting thrills from the limits of VHS technology.  This fourth entry takes us head-on into the 2010s and tells its story through Skype, webcams, smartphones, and any other equipment that helps piece together a modern-day panopticon.

15-year-old Alex (Kathryn Newton) lives with her feuding parents (Alexondra Lee and Stephen Dunham) and little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).  Her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) is ubiquitous in their household, and the two are up at all hours of the night live-chatting.  Then a young mother moves in across the street with her son Robbie (Brady Allen), and there appears to be something wrong with the boy.  He stalks their house, and strikes a strange friendship with Wyatt.  It appears that Robbie may have brought something malevolent with him to the neighborhood.  Scared, Alex and Ben rig every computer in the house to automatically record whatever the webcam sees.

Newton is a likable lead, and Shively is often very funny as her awkward love interest.  Their human story is believable and allows us to identify with them the requisite tension, though the film has a much lighter tone than, say, Sinister.  Joost and Schulman appropriately toy with points of view, delivering plenty of shocks and laughs.  Their biggest discovery of the new film is the use of Xbox Kinect, which, when viewed through a nightvision lens, displays a blanket of infrared beams which captures the players' movements in real time.  It also might capture certain activity which can't be seen in the light.

Other haunting moments don't particularly work, like a bathtub scene which goes pretty much where you expect, or the countless scenes where the ghost apparently gives up on the whole spooky boogeyman game, just picks a character up and drags him or her away.  The ghost could have done this right at the beginning, but then there would be no movie.

Though the film doesn't build to the kind of nerve-ratcheting conclusion that the first did, it still takes us to clever and surprising places as it goes along.  The ending manages to be the best-handled of the sequels so far, striking just the right chord before the inevitable blackout.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 6: HOUSE OF THE DEAD: DIRECTOR'S CUT (2003)

Uwe Boll's House of the Dead remains the most incompetent film to get a major release.  Yes, even after House at the End of the Street.  It's not the worst movie ever made, nor is it the most unpleasant time I've ever had watching a movie.  It's just put together with alarmingly little skill or regard for anyone who might be trying to follow its basic continuity.  I wrote a review of the theatrical version in 2004:

Strange how bad House of the Dead is, for a major studio horror film. There have been worse films made by better filmmakers, but usually this kind of cinematic incompetence is reserved for ultra-low-budget straight-to-video territory. It’s based on a video game, which is warning sign number one. Its director, Uwe Boll, has come out and admitted that the movie is pretty bad, claiming, "You can’t make a good movie from a bad script."

Well, actually, yes, you can, but that’s a whole other story. Either way, the script is the least of this movie’s problems. Boll has no understanding of how a horror movie works, though he appears to have seen many. He knows the notes but not the music.

Boll has also claimed that the movie is very faithful to the video game. I believe the game’s plot is something like the plot of Resident Evil: a group of government agents are sent into a house that is overrun by zombies. The movie is about a bunch of doofus college kids who travel to an island for a rave, only to find it overrun by zombies. Maybe Boll was referring to the little clips from the video game that he inserted into the film. He also films a death by having the camera circle a character before fading to red. You know, Woody Allen says he owes his filmmaking style to Ingmar Bergman; I think it’s the same with Uwe Boll and “Quake II.”

Once the kids meet the zombies, things progress rather like a video game would. Zombies jump out of the darkness, the kids shoot them. The kids are conveniently provided with guns by a grizzled but friendly arms dealer/fisherman named Captain Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow). The forced “Star Trek” reference isn’t funny, but I did laugh when one character referred to him as “the U-boat captain.” His creepy first mate is played by another old reliable, Clint Howard, who strongly advises against traveling to the “Isla del Morte,” for so the island is named. “Morte!” he admonishes. “That’s Spanish for dead!” Actually, it’s Italian for dead, but why argue?

Now, there is a special place in my heart for zombies that lurch around and bite people. In this movie, they lurch, they run, they do long-jumps, they swim, and they spit acid. Or at least one of them does. They’re led by a scar-faced hooded zombie (David Palffy) who, I guess, started the whole zombie plague. When one character asks him why he wanted to become immortal, the answer is so obvious that I am amazed I didn’t think of it myself.

But the action is so misguided that it’s hard to maintain interest. There’s one extended fight sequence between humans and zombies that’s so jumpy that I don’t believe there was any plan for it at all. It looks like the director supplied insufficient footage for the editor, who had to fill in the gaps with odd 360-degree image rotations and scenes from the video game.

The actors do more or less a passable job with their excuses for characters. All attempts at development seem to have been added after the fact. One character doesn’t stop to mourn her best friend’s death until twenty minutes after it happens; by then, we’d already forgotten. Ona Grauer is impressive as the female lead; she may one day be able to headline an action film. Will Sanderson, as the goofy best friend, is actually pretty funny. And God help him, Prochnow does what he can as the old sea salt.

House of the Dead is a failure, but it’s such a bizarre failure that it pretty much merits a viewing anyway. It’s more than just your average video-game-turned movie. It is incompetent, but it’s more fun to watch than some actual good movies. It is, unintentionally, sillier than any zombie movie ever made, and that includes Return of the Living Dead II.

Now comes the Director's Cut, or as it's labeled on the DVD case, "Funny Version." Boll, who realizes that he made a bad film but hasn't yet conceded that it's at least partially his fault, has recut his disappointing zombie film as a wacky comedy.  At first glance this doesn't sound like a bad idea: Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily?, which was a redubbed Japanese spy film, is one of the most consistently hilarious films ever made.  But Boll seems to have no sense of humor.  Every gag he inserts into his film is either a juvenile joke or a puerile jab at someone else.  Yes, the writing was bad and some of the acting was bad.  But the film was also poorly directed, and Boll can't escape that.

The main motif seems to have been to intersperse the film with "Pop-up Video"-style commentary that pops up occasionally in dialogue balloons.  The quality of this humor reaches about this level:

When Jurgen Prochnow appears: "Hey, isn't that the guy from Das Boot?"

When characters make questionable horror movie decisions: "Do you buy this?"

During a zombie fight scene: "Anyone feel like dancing?"

When entering a spooky house: "OK, where is Igor hiding?"

A surprising number of commentary balloons are made up of potshots at the actors, who are doing the best they can under the circumstances.  Will Sanderson, oddly enough, seems to take most of the abuse, which is odd since he's not only pretty good in the movie, but by all accounts is a friend of the director.  With friends like these...

In addition to the commentary, Boll also inserts fart noises, rimshots after bad comic dialogue, and ADR with different dialogue to make the scenes "funny." One scene is dubbed over so it sounds like a zombie is ordering a cappuccino (ho, ho).  A "Man O Meter" occasionally appears when a character is emasculated.  There are also repeated outtakes in which a dubbed-in Boll abusively screams at his actors.  Is he kidding his image?  Maybe, but he kids a lot of his collaborators on the way there: the majority of his inserted gags are targeted at "bad acting" and "bad writing," but never "bad directing."

There's no shame in trying to kid your mistakes, but House of the Dead would have been best left on its own.  Although Boll has been called a modern-day Ed Wood, the comparison is unfair to Wood.  Wood at least cared about making films, and never tried to distance himself from his failures.  He truly loved his work.  Boll would rather throw everyone else under the bus and pretend he had nothing to do with it.

As bad as House of the Dead was, I'd infinitely recommend it over House of the Dead: Funny Version.  The original is at least a pure and honest disaster, and a whole lot funnier.

House of the Dead: ** out of ****
House of the Dead: Director's Cut: 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 5: SINISTER (2012)

Sinister is the scariest movie I've seen since the first Paranormal Activity.  It's the kind of movie that leaves you walking out of the theater shaking.  It's well-made and taut, and nervewrackingly tense all the way through, but I think what truly elevates it is that the ghosts are real.  Not real in the "Based on a true story" sense (which I can say with pride that this film is not), but in the sense that the movie believes in them, and the characters eventually do.  Unlike many of its type, there's no Scooby-Doo ending to turn everything on its head and make the whole thing not worth it.  It's a truly scary movie that doesn't condescend to its material.

It opens with a startling image that sets the tone for the entire movie.  Then we meet Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a popular true crime writer who's chasing one last big story, and moves his family into a town where a brutal murder took place: a family was found dead, and one daughter has gone missing.  The local sheriff (Fred Dalton Thompson, well-cast) doesn't welcome his snooping.  What's more, Ellison doesn't tell his wife (Juliet Rylance) or children (Clare Foley and Michael Hall D'Addario) that they've just moved closer to the crime than they think.  While exploring the attic, Ellison finds a box full of old 8mm films, labeled "Home Movies," which gives him a new point of view on the murder he's investigating, and much more.

It isn't difficult to see that writer-director Scott Derrickson is doing a wicked play on the now-tried-and-true found footage formula.  But he does one better on the genre by using the found footage to punctuate the film rather than leaning on it too heavily.  The clips feature some of the most brutal sequences I've seen in any horror film, and Derrickson is sure to avoid fetishizing the violence in, say, a Human Centipede style.  The film doesn't enjoy the brutality.  As Ellison watches the films, he becomes infected by them; his moral disgust increasingly conflicts with his need to write a new book.  He finds a supernatural element in the films.  Strange things begin to happen in his house and to his children.  By the time his conscience comes around, it may be too late.  The movie reaches a terrifying conclusion that is not so much predictable as it is inevitable; it has been looming for the entire film, and in the end it confirms what we have feared all along.

Derrickson's films have always had a conservative bent, and this film is not without it.  His The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a dull, moronic advocation for intelligent design.  His Day the Earth Stood Still remake was a well-intentioned but hamfisted cautionary tale about stewardship of the earth.  In Sinister, which I love as much as I hated Emily Rose, there is a bit of a warning about the culture of voyeurism and the perils of profiting from someone else's misfortune.

Hawke plays Ellison as a desperate but decent man.  This character could have easily been played as the kind of jerk who would intentionally endanger his family to get a book deal.  But Hawke finds the right note; Ellison is merely trying to support his family by doing what he knows how to do, though the promise of fame and fortune isn't far from his thoughts.  He's the perfect horror movie protagonist: a good man who is naturally corruptible.  Though he makes some questionable decisions, we always know why he does what he does.  Because his situation is believable, the scenes of family drama lend humanity to the terror.  I've grown sick of horror movies that bore us with their characters' marriage troubles, but here the family sub-plot gives us a reason to care about the horrors that are waiting.  There's also a nice performance from James Ransone as a none-too-bright but pure-hearted deputy who's a big fan of Ellison's work, and unwittingly signs on as his sidekick.

The film captures just the right atmosphere.  Derrickson never overplays his hand, keeping in mind that there are more scares to be mined from telegraphing terror than in simply showing it.  He and cinematographer Chris Noll envelop Ellison in darkness; note the frequent setting of his home office, which he keeps closed off from his family and the outside world, so that it seems like night even when it's day.  Much of the reason the film works so well lies in Christopher Young's discordant score, which always reminds us that something--we may not be sure what--is not right.  The introduction of a Boogeyman, which might have seemed silly in a less classy film, actually works here, because of what the filmmakers show us and don't show us.

Sinister is a masterwork of fright.  It's fine-tuned to twist every nerve possible.  It's from one of the producers of Paranormal Activity, and deserves to stand alongside that film as a modern classic of the genre.  You may not want to see it alone.

**** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 4: THE EXORCIST (1973)

The reason that The Exorcist stands alone as the best exorcism movie made to date—not to mention the scariest movie of all time—is that it takes place in a world where exorcism doesn’t exist. Very few filmmakers are able to maintain the credible presentation of demonic possession in a normal, everyday world without seeming silly. Some have tried, most notably Scott Derrickson’s blithely ignorant The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which was about how we should all ignore science because a girl had a seizure.

Most movies about demons tend to come from a religious point of view; the genius of The Exorcist is that its director, William Friedkin, and writer, William Peter Blatty, take on the story from a secular point of view and are never quite converted. The tension builds as they present the possession and then gradually strip away any logical scientific explanation before leaving us with nowhere to go but the supernatural.

Regan (Linda Blair) is a happy adolescent girl, not without troubles. Her parents have recently divorced, and she’s just moved to Georgetown with her mom Chris (Ellen Burstyn), an actress. She finds a Ouija board in the attic, claims to be using it to speak to a friend named “Captain Howdy,” and soon she’s exhibiting strange and destructive behavior. When furniture starts to move across the house by itself, Chris begins to look into a spiritual option.

The movie proceeds with terrifying logic.  The idea of possession is not even an option at first; Regan is a lonely girl who's disconnected from her family and has no friends as a result of being dragged around the country by her mother, and is thus prone to psychological damage.  We witness as her behavior slowly ratchets up from merely eccentric to dangerous. The scenes at the hospital, where young Regan is subjected to every painful test she can go through, are horrifying in a way that is completely realistic. By the time we get to the exorcism, we completely accept it as the only reasonable thing to do.

Another way in which The Exorcist stands out among films of its type is that the demon inside Regan becomes a believable, chilling character in itself.  This is not "the devil," but a troublemaker who takes delight in messing with people on earth.  Mercedes McCambridge gives the demon a voice somewhere between that of a wise old man and a petulant child; it speaks with the knowledge of someone who's been causing this sort of mayhem for ages, but with an eerily playful tone.

Its conversations with Fr. Karras (Jason Miller), the troubled priest whom Chris calls in, are a chess game of two clever souls, though we get the sense that the demon might actually be holding all the cards.  The Church eventually sends in a professional exorcist, Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow), who's performed one before.  Merrin knows how the demon works, but he is flawed too.

The climactic exorcism, which might have been supremely silly, is dreadfully logical and quietly tense.  We see that the demon is clearly affected by the exorcism, but could it be luring the priests into false security?  We never quite know what it's up to.  The conclusion, a triumph of real human compassion over Biblical mumbo-jumbo, is inevitable and crushing.

Perhaps the reason he movie is so effective is that Friedkin doesn't treat it as a horror film.  What's scary about it is not the pea-soup vomit or the moving furniture, or even the masturbating with a cross, but rather the capturing and endangerment of a little girl.  We are scared because Regan is scared, and Friedkin never lets us lose her presence.

**** out of ****

Note: The more I watch the film, the more I want to praise the 1973 release over the now-more-prominent 2000 reissue.  The new footage added to the film--featuring an extended hospital scene, a stairway conversation between Merrin and Karras, frequent flashes of imagery from Merrin's expedition to Iraq, and the famous spider-walk scene--adds nothing of note to the film and only throws Friedkin's carefully built tension off kilter.  The extra footage doesn't really represent Friedkin's cut, but rather Blatty's vision of the film, since these scenes are straight out of his novel; in fact, the extended final sequence, between two secondary characters, serves no purpose but to set up his sequel, "Legion" (which he filmed in 1990 as The Exorcist III).

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 3: THE POSSESSION (2012)

The Possession is not the only recent horror movie to concern itself with a disenfranchised father's effort to save his child from demonic possession; for a much better example of that, we only need to look as far back as Intruders, or Insidious.  It's not even the first movie to boast a Jewish exorcism: David Goyer's laughable The Unborn got there first.  The Possession really isn't anything more than an mediocre take on familiar horror themes, with little new to enrich them except some noteworthy performances.

It does, however, have a pretty creepy box. The “possession” of the title refers not only to the demonic takeover of a person’s body, but also to an object. In this case it’s an ominous wooden box with obscure Hebrew writing on it, found at the yard sale of a paraplegic old woman. It catches the attention of young Em (Natasha Calis), who begs her father Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to buy it for her. After they take it home, Em becomes obsessed with the box; she has conversations with it, and attacks anyone who tries to take it away from her. Then she finds a way to open it, and becomes a different person altogether.

It doesn't take long for Clyde to figure out that Em has been possessed by a dybbuk, an ancient Jewish demon.  The trick is convincing Em's skeptical mother Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick), from whom he has recently separated.  Stephanie is one of those wet blankets who insists that Clyde feed their kids boring old vegetables instead of pizza, and harangues him about spending too much time at work rather than with the kids.  It doesn't help that Stephanie's been dating a stiff-shirt dentist named Brett (Grant Show) who makes Mitt Romney look like one of the Sugarhill Gang.  Stephanie sees what's been happening to Em and of course blames Clyde, because the script requires her to.

Sedgwick is a fine actress, but she fails at convincing us that Stephanie is as dumb as she's written to be. (If you guessed that toward the end she sees the error of her ways, they patch things up, and everyone is reunited as one big happy family, a gold Star of David for you.)  Show, however, hits just the right note as the perpetually smiling, gratingly bland Brett, and his comeuppance is one of the movie's few standout scenes.

Director Ole Bornedal, who's been a successful director of thrillers in his home country of Denmark but hasn't quite made a hit stateside (his only other American film of note was the lackluster Nightwatch, starring Ewan McGregor and Nick Nolte), knows how to fill the film with a looming sense of abandonment.  He mines an effective mood out of the setting of Clyde's new house--he's one of the first to move into a new development in a seemingly deserted area--which helps to enhance the stakes of Em's possession, which could leave Clyde shunned by his family and all alone.

Morgan gives a decent, sympathetic performance as Clyde, and we sense that his dedication to Em is genuine.  Calis is superb as the possessee, taking a cue from Linda Blair and never letting us forget that there is a little girl behind the demon voice.  The quiet early scenes of her possession are actually very chilling and suspenseful, especially one in which Clyde attempts to read the Torah to her, which is not met well by the dybbuk.

Other, less subtle scenes aren't so effective.  The locust motif, in which characters occasionally enter rooms to find them filled with bugs, is labored.  By the time Hasidic rapper Matisyahu comes in as a young rabbi charged with exorcising the spirit, the movie has run out of ideas, never minding that Matisyahu's skills as an actor are limited.  The requisite cast-thee-out exorcism has been seen and done, albeit rarely in Hebrew.  The climactic hospital chase is a yawner.

The Possession is a classy thriller, but is content to be merely average.

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 2: HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)

To see a horror movie get a wide theatrical release is a rarity, and I have little doubt that House at the End of the Street would have been sent directly to DVD were it not for the fortunate presence of Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence is the rising star who got an Oscar nomination (and should have won) for her breakout role in Winter’s Bone, and made a splash earlier this year with The Hunger Games.

Since House at the End of the Street was filmed before the release of Winter’s Bone, Lawrence’s recent success must have been a boon for the film’s producers, who otherwise would have been stuck with an unreleasable film on their hands.

Unreleasable, you say? When a trash heap like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen makes hundreds of millions of dollars, certainly the standard bar is low enough for pretty much anything to find an audience. But no: even on the Michael Bay scale, House at the End of the Street is unacceptable. To call it hastily edited would be to assume that it was in fact edited. It is barely assembled. If it were a dinner entrée, I would send it back. It’s not finished yet.

The notion that anyone would find this film interesting to watch is insulting. It was supposedly directed by Mark Tonderai and written by David Loucka, from a story by Jonathan Mostow which, with some work put into it, could have been a worthwhile shocker. Mostow is the director of some very good action movies, like Breakdown and U-571, as well as the surprisingly good Terminator 3. According to the IMDb, Mostow was originally slated to direct the film when it went into development in 2003, from a script by Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly. Now there’s a movie I’d like to see. At least they would have put in some effort.

Elissa (Lawrence) moves to a far-off house in the woods with her mom (Elisabeth Shue) after a divorce. In pure horror movie fashion, they get a great deal on the house because it’s next door to the site of a grisly murder. Four years earlier, a 13-year-old brain-damaged girl killed both her parents in the middle of the night. They’ve been told their former neighbors’ house is empty, but soon lights begin to come on in the middle of the night, and the estranged son of the dead couple, Ryan (Max Thieriot), is occasionally seen skulking around.

Though trailers have portrayed the film as either a haunted house movie or a Last House on the Left-style fable of human depravity, the film spends so much time dwelling on Elissa’s high school life, formulaic family drama, and budding friendship with Ryan that we begin to wonder if it’s pulled a fast one and reeled us into a made-for-ABC Family movie. The first half is filled with incredibly little substance, mostly dedicated to some completely inconsequential sub-plots about Elissa’s dealings with some stereotype high school douchebags and involvement in a Battle of the Bands contest.

Elissa’s early interest in Ryan, meant to signify that she is a bastion of empathy and compassion (her mom constantly chides her for wanting to “save everyone”), is rendered just plain weird by Loucka’s clumsy screenplay. She insists on prodding him about his past and has one scene in which she wanders about his parents’ house inquiring about things like the invasive old woman from Deathtrap. If I were Ryan, I’d give her my best and politely ask that she go home.

As poorly written as the character is, Lawrence at least takes it seriously and is able to latch on to something authentic most of the time. Her budding courtship with Ryan is completely ridiculous—and even contains one of those scenes where he leads her into the woods, points to a tree, and says “See the face?”—but Lawrence is committed all the way. Thieriot, however, falters in a role that is unplayable. He’s good at playing misunderstood teenagers who are withholding something sinister, as in the underrated My Soul to Take. There’s simply nothing for him to work with here.

Elisabeth Shue does what she can with the role of Mom, a doctor who works at a singularly unconvincing hospital (a red brick building with “HOSPITAL” over the entrance). Mom is usually seen leaving a phone message telling Elissa she’s “working the late shift” and conveniently won’t be home for dinner, and pops up occasionally to offer seldom-obeyed warnings about Ryan. Gil Bellows, usually a reliable character-actor, struggles to find a single genuine note as a friendly local policeman who’s literally too dumb to live.

By the time the bloodshed starts—too late into the overlong 100-minute film—the movie has indulged so heavily in its teen-drama framing device that it rushes through the allegedly suspenseful scenes with no thrills. Though there are a few unpredictable twists in the plot, they’re sloppily presented and fail to build into any tension. As a result of the poor writing, Lawrence is stuck with a scene near the end in which she’s required to figure out every single one of the plot twists at once. Not the most enviable task for an actress.

House at the End of the Street is presented with a clear disregard for anyone who might watch it. It has a point A and a point Z, but the letters in between are garbled beyond comprehension. Characters appear and disappear at a whim; your guess is as good as mine as to what happens to Elissa’s new best friend. Whole sections of the film dedicated to Elissa’s musical talent go nowhere. The big climax is one of the sloppiest I’ve ever seen, right down to the trapped-in-the-dark-basement final moment, which is kind of like the climactic scene in The Silence of the Lambs after a lobotomy.

Yes, House at the End of the Street is dumb, but that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that nobody cared to assemble it into recognizable shape. This movie is incomplete, and should not have been released until it was finished.

1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 1: INTRUDERS (2011)

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders is a rare ghost story that is consistently surprising without being condescending.  Its surprises are genuine because they come not from a desire to turn the entire story on its head and flummox the audience, but from an honest identification with its characters.  Its ghosts are not spirits of the dead who wish to jump out from behind things at us, but spirits of lingering trauma and sadness that have remained for years.

It also recognizes the power of creativity when dealing with monsters, whether spiritual or real.  Many of its characters are writers, and tell stories as a way to deal with personal trauma.  And at least one character begins to believe that her creations are bringing something devious to life.

Intruders interweaves two stories, set at different time periods, with the implication that they will coincide somehow.  8-year-old Juan (Izan Corchero), an avid writer, finds himself haunted by the spirit of Hollowface, a tall shadowy figure who preys on children and their parents.  His mother (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) doesn't know if Juan's fears are real, all in his head, or both.  She contacts a young priest (Daniel Bruhl) to help her.

In the concurrent story set some years later, young Mia (Ella Purnell) finds a folded up piece of paper in a tree.  Written on it is the story of Hollowface.  She reads it and begins to expand on it, submitting it for a creative writing project as her own work.  Before long, she and her parents (Clive Owen and Carice Van Houten) begin to notice ghostly occurrences at night.

Without revealing too many of the film's secrets, I'll say that never once does Intruders venture into the direction of the silly.  Fresnadillo and his writers, Nicolas Casariego and Jaime Marques, always keep the ghost business just a shade on this side of believable, and we always identify with the characters who experience the hauntings.  Like The Exorcist, it's firmly planted in the real world.  It also contains the rare exorcism which is performed not as a puke-splattering, Latin-spewing kinetic mess, but as a sly psychological trick played by a crafty priest.

Owen gives a dynamic performance as a sensitive, protective, misunderstood father, who very gradually becomes obsessed with Hollowface, to the point where we fear he may hurt his family.  He perfectly portrays undying conviction, even as it dawns on him that the rest of the world may think he's crazy.  Purnell is also very good as the little girl, and a cryptic side to her performance may not be quite decipherable until the final twist is revealed.  Lopez de Ayala and Corchero are fine as the haunted mother and daughter, but Bruhl walks away with their storyline as the determined, smarter-than-average young priest.

Intruders carefully tiptoes on the line between supernatural and real horrors, and it's to its credit that it never quite falls on either side.  There are ghosts in it, but they extend from the horrors that the mind creates.  Hollowface may or may not actually exist, but he is real to Juan, and that much we believe.

*** 1/2 out of ****

"MANOS": THE HANDS OF FATE (1966): One more visit to the Valley Lodge

Seeing as tickets have just gone on sale for the upcoming re-riff of "Manos": The Hands of Fate by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy, I decided to dust off a review of "Manos" that I wrote a few years ago.



My intention in watching “Manos”: The Hands of Fate uncut, without any help from Joel Hodgson or the ‘bots or anyone, was to give a fair appraisal of a film that has so many times been kicked while it was down. Just recently Entertainment Weekly dubbed “Manos” the worst movie of all time. Surely, I figured, this cannot be true. A no-budget movie like “Manos” has a kind of charm to it that is absent from big-budget big-studio clunkers like, say, Corky Romano. There have to be at least five or ten movies that Hollywood has released this year that are worse. A movie like “Manos” has the deck stacked against it, which should invite our, or at least my, sympathy.

And it did, for a while. But in the end, I’m sorry to say that there’s not much good I can say about “Manos”: The Hands of Fate. It isn’t bad simply because it has no budget and no real talent behind the camera. It achieves badness the old-fashioned way: by being bad for its entire running time. It earns its badness.

Now, is “Manos” the worst movie ever made? Not really. It is not the most painful movie I’ve ever watched; I had much more trouble getting through Dr. T & the Women and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. And there are good things about it. The opening few scenes, while they might seem to be contentless, are an appropriately eerie setup for what’s to come. The grainy look to the film, while purely unintentional, adds to the overall creepy tone. And I dig that oddball jazz score, man.

The story, with a little more effort, could be made workable. It’s the simple tale of a family—Mike (Harold P. Warren, who also wrote and directed) and Margaret (Diane Mahree), their daughter Debbie (Jackey Neyman), and their poodle Peppy—taking a vacation somewhere near El Paso, Texas. They get lost, and stumble upon an old house run by a creepy caretaker, Torgo (John Reynolds), who has some kind of handicap in his legs. It soon becomes apparent that Torgo is a member of an evil cult, led by the hibernating Master (Tom Neyman) and his many wives, who worship a devil-god called Manos.

With smarter writing, this could have been a nice, scary little homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” seeing as Mike and Margaret are two selfish oafs who pretty much deserve the hell they’re being put through. But the script is as ludicrous as they come, even incompetent at times. Perhaps the biggest glitch in the writing comes near the beginning, when the family arrives at Torgo’s house. Mike immediately declares that they’re spending the night there, and orders Torgo to fetch their bags from the trunk. Of course, Mike is set up as just the kind of jerk who would impose himself like that, but in this scene the movie doesn’t take a tone toward his attitude as he orders Torgo around like a bellboy. Only once, later on, do we get to see a fed-up reaction from Torgo, and it is hilarious.

There’s also a frustrating moment when Debbie goes missing, and Mike suggests she might have gone outside. “She couldn’t have gone outside. That door’s bolted!” Margaret exclaims. Mike asks Torgo if there’s another door; it’s in the kitchen, Torgo says. “That door’s bolted too!” he says, after checking. Then, not a minute later, Mike and Margaret are outside, looking. What happened there?

The sloppy editing doesn’t help matters. There are many scenes where the camera seems to just linger on its subject, long before and long after the action has obviously ended. My favorite is when Joyce Molleur, as the girl in the car at the beginning, fixes her hair and then says “Why won’t you guys leave us alone?” There are times when the movie is clearly put together out of order, such as when the Master arrives at his altar, then is immediately standing outside of Margaret’s window, then he’s at his altar again.

Other moments seem to have been written with no concept of how they would play out on film, like one where Torgo knocks Mike out and then ties him to a pole. With proper photography and editing, this should have taken only a few seconds to show, but Warren insists on showing every bit of it—Torgo knocking Mike out, carrying him over to a pole, taking off Mike’s belt and using it to tie him up—and it takes forever. Torgo, with his walking impediment, isn’t able to do this quickly, and it is to John Reynolds’ credit that he doesn’t get impatient; he takes just as long to do it as Torgo would.

It is Reynolds’s performance as Torgo that makes the film actually bearable for a while. Torgo is a technical failure as a monster; according to people involved with the film, he was supposed to be a satyr with horse’s legs, which accounts for why it looks like he just has humongous knees. But Reynolds actually holds our sympathy as the poor Torgo. He is something of a lecherous character—especially when it’s implied that he has molested several of the Master’s wives in their sleep—but we feel sorry for him.

But even Reynolds’ inspired performance can’t overcome the overall misogyny of the rest of the movie. I am not quick to give movies such labels, but Warren’s condescension to women is more than apparent. He goes for a cheap laugh by having the Master awaken his wives, and then cutting to a few moments later, when we see the wives doing nothing but bickering loudly, and the Master sitting there getting irritated. That’s fine, but a little while later the wives, after arguing about the same thing for what seems like hours, break out into a massive catfight. It’s hard to see what Warren is trying to accomplish here, other than the pure joy of watching women wrestle while bright jazzy music plays in the background. In what is supposed to be a disturbing horror film, here is something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Russ Meyer film.

Shortly afterward, we come to a scene where the Master’s oldest wife is tied up to be sacrificed for some reason, and the movie gets downright filthy. We are treated to a nice drawn-out scene where the Master angrily beats the woman, and I think sexually assaults her (the shots are not framed well enough that I could tell). In a movie that walks a fine line between real misogyny and silliness, this scene crosses the line. It’s at this scene, which was thankfully not included in the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” version of the film, that “Manos” stops being a fun bad movie and turns into a real bad movie.

I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised that there is a scene in “Manos” that’s too bad even for MST3K. But don’t be fooled by the film’s cheesiness, or how funny it appears to be on MST3K. MST3K’s Kevin Murphy has said himself that there is nothing funny about bad cinema, a statement which I have never really agreed with, but this time he is right. “Manos”: The Hands of Fate is a legitimately bad movie, and I will not be watching it without the help of Joel [or Mike] and the ‘bots again.

THE CINEMASOCHIST: Sucker Punch (2011)

The Cinemasochist takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic. Or not. 



If The Artist really does fulfill its promise of bringing the silent picture back to the American cinema, Zack Snyder will be the first director I'll be eager to see make one.  Snyder is a master at telling a story with images.  His prologue and opening credits sequence for Watchmen were fascinating and set up everything we needed to know for the film, with very little dialogue.  The film became less compelling as the storytelling became hamfisted, but the first twenty minutes contains some of the most memorable film images in recent years.

The same can be said for Sucker Punch, which begins with a masterstroke of a prologue.  It tells a story in itself, completely free of dialogue, using only montage and images.  If it were released in the 1920s, it would be praised as an expressionist masterpiece.  This silent sequence proves that Snyder is a born silent film director.  The talkie film that follows, unfortunately, proves the same.

But still, what an opener.  We meet Babydoll (Emily Browning), a young girl who's just lost her mother.  Her wiley stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) is upset at not being included in the will, and after a series of unfortunate events he has Babydoll locked away in a mental institution.  At this early point in the film, Snyder has established character, status, and conflict as succinctly as the best directors of the silent era.

Once we get to the mental hospital, the movie goes off the rails and keeps chugging.  When Babydoll is committed, we learn that she's going to be lobotomized in five days.  She then retreats into a fantasy world in which the hospital is a high-class brothel where the female inmates dance and seduce rich people.  The psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) is the madam, the orderly (Oscar Isaac) is the pimp, and the fellow inmates (Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens) are fellow prostitutes.  But that's not all: whenever Babydoll dances, she goes into a further sub-fantasy, where she and the girls dress as soldiers and fight dragons, under the command of a mysterious leader (Scott Glenn, aping David Carradine).

The '70s were rife with an exploitation subgenre known as the rape-revenge movie, in which formerly helpless girls took righteous revenge on the beastly men who attacked them, and the movie was generally just as interested in watching the poor girl get savaged as in depicting her rapists' retribution.

Sucker Punch is a step down from that: it's a rape-run-and-hide movie.  Though it's toned down to a PG-13 level, it's still morbidly fascinated with watching its team of girls get emotionally and physically abused by men, whether it be by the stepfather, the lecherous pimp, or a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, in a desperate cameo).  But rather than glorious bloody revenge, the characters' triumph is in retreating into their minds.

I have always had a problem with movies that find their victory in the magic of imagination.  Though one or two have done it right (Tarsem Singh's brilliant The Fall is an example), most are condescending and insulting (Marc Forster's insipid yet somehow Best Picture-nominated Finding Neverland being the most insidious culprit).  Sucker Punch is a few steps more tragic: the idea that any victim of abuse should find any sort of victory by retreating into fantasy is absurd and, when you think about it, extremely sexist.  Though it fancies itself a girl-power flick, what with its battle scenes of chicks decked out in army gear and kicking ass, Sucker Punch is firmly on the side of the attacker: when you're abused, the thing to do is deal with it yourself, in your own mind, without bothering anyone.

Even aside from that distressing implication, Sucker Punch is a story poorly told.  The fantasy-within-fantasy motif, which must have been modeled on Inception, might just as well have been ditched.  If the brothel scenes are predictable and dull, the battle scenes are completely devoid of any stakes or any connection to the story.  There are a lot of explosions, but what's being achieved is never quite clear.  Compare it to Inception, in which each level of reality has an effect on the other, and a bullet fired in one reality creates the stakes for the next.

The cast of girls is interchangeable.  They're a talented group of actors, especially Cornish, who starred as Fanny Brawne in the fine John Keats biopic Bright Star, and deserves better.  Browning, so good in the underrated ghost flick The Uninvited, is given little to do as the movie explodes around her.  The only actor allowed to make an impression is Isaac, who as the film's primary villain eats up the scenery and spits it out violently.  Jon Hamm, who doubles as the hospital's lobotomist and (in Jiminy Glick makeup) a rich customer at the brothel, must be on a quest to prove that he can cameo in everything.

It doesn't help that the film is plastered with wall-to-wall bad covers of classic rock songs.  The most egregious is Yoav's gutting of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind," though the eardrum-bursting rendition of "White Rabbit" that plays through one battle scene is formidable competition.  For a saving grace, Browning does a quite nice version of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" which plays over the prologue.  And as a nice touch, the movie prominently uses Bjork's "Army of Me," which makes for a great revenge anthem.

This is Snyder's first film based on an original script (which he wrote with Steve Shibuya).  He struggles with coming up with his own conceits; he's excelled mainly with finding ways to translate other works to the screen.  Building stories into images is his talent; here he comes up empty.  If the film had only consisted of the first ten minutes, it would have been a masterpiece.  As it is, Sucker Punch is a discouragement to abuse victims everywhere, disguised as a pointless, endless, loud mess.




* out of ****

Is it really that bad?: It's worse.

Pain level: Excepting the first ten minutes, high.

THE CINEMASOCHIST: The Hangover Part II (2011)

The Cinemasochist takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic. Or not. 



Given that nobody was really expecting The Hangover to be anything more than a modest success, plans for a sequel were not firmly in place all along.  But after it ran away with the box office and shot its formerly-second-banana cast into stardom, a followup was inevitable.  And so everyone involved in The Hangover Part II seems uncomfortably obligated to be there.

Paychecks must have been formidable, since there was no sequel clause in anyone's contract and the cast, many of whom have since become big names (Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong), has reunited nonetheless.  I have a feeling that what happened with the film was that the producers decided to forgo any new direction to take the characters in, and follow the old Hollywood principle: if there's no story to continue, replicate it.

This principle usually works better with horror films than with any other genres.  A series like Final Destination can continue forever with the same formula, so long as it keeps coming up with creative ways for its characters to die.  It doesn't work so well with comedy, which relies heavily on spontaneity and novelty.  Therefore, when the events of The Hangover are essentially repeated in The Hangover Part II, there are very few laughs to be had.  The first Hangover was an exciting, consistently surprising comedy that moved with cruel logic, and took delight in hurling its harried characters through each twist and turn.  When the sequel follows pretty much the same path, the surprises are gone, there is little at stake and the characters seem ready to give up.

Some time after the events of the first film, there's another wedding to prepare for.  This time it's mild-mannered dentist Stu (Helms) who's getting married, to the lovely Lauren (Jamie Chung).  Lauren is Thai, which means the wedding will be in Bangkok, which is music to the ears of Phil (Cooper), who insists on throwing a bachelor party, much to Stu's chagrin.  Along with the pitiable Alan (Galifianakis) and Lauren's genius 16-year-old brother Teddy (Mason Lee), the boys settle for a beer on the beach instead... and then wake up the next morning in a run-down hotel with Teddy missing and only his severed finger remaining.

As in the first film Phil, Stu, and Alan follow what few clues they have to put their night together and find Teddy.  Their quest follows the arc of the first film very closely.  Phil takes the alpha male role.  Stu finds himself with a facial deformity that will be tough to ignore come wedding time.  Alan runs his mouth.  They inexplicably meet up with the mob boss Mr. Chow (Jeong) from the first film.  The film is so desperate to replicate its predecessor that even Mike Tyson returns as himself.

What happens in the film may be played for laughs, but what was fresh in the earlier film is now stale.  Watching this sequel is like having the first film explained to you by someone who doesn't know how to tell a joke.  The characters go through a lot of slapstick-level pain, but the laughs aren't there.  Even Galifianakis, the major discovery of the first film, seems to have given up.  Soon into this film, we feel about Alan the same way that most of the other characters do: annoyed.

The star power involved in the film is good for a few amusing moments.  Nick Cassavetes has fun as a tattoo artist, as does Paul Giamatti as a crime lord.  Tyson's cameo gets a good laugh, and is one of the few unexpected moments in the movie.

The movie was written by Craig Mazin, a good comedy writer whose Superhero Movie was surprisingly clever (and not part of the Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer "Movie" series).  His co-writers are director Todd Phillips and frequent collaborator Scot Armstrong, who are usually ept at character comedy, having made Road Trip, the overrated but amusing Old School, and the entertaining semi-spoof Starsky & Hutch.  These are sound comic minds who were obviously told early in the process that The Hangover worked, and they should just do that again.  And that's what they did.

* out of ****

Is it really that bad?: Yes.

Pain Level: Moderate to sharp.  Urge to fast-forward strong throughout.

BATTLESHIP: Hit. Miss. Hit.

There are those who will shrug off Battleship as ridiculous because it's based on a board game.  I will remind them that good movies have been based on flimsier premises.  Val Lewton commissioned a series of horror films in the 1940s with only titles, and depended on real filmmakers to fill in the rest; we ended up with the heartfelt (and Bronte-based) I Walked with a Zombie, the chilling Cat People, and the clever The Body Snatcher.  At a time when the movie business is almost completely premise-based, it's good to see one with only the most minuscule of selling points which depends on good directing, good acting, and good writing to succeed.

Much of what makes Battleship surprisingly entertaining is that it has a real director: Peter Berg, not a graduate of commercials or a Michael Bay clone but a good filmmaker, a former actor who has made real films (Friday Night Lights) as well as rousing action-adventures (The Rundown).  Berg doesn't take his paycheck and leave, but delivers.

The battle in question is between the U.S. Navy and aliens.  Following a signal sent into space five years earlier, several alien warships from a similar planet travel to earth to put the flag in.  "This could be like Columbus and the Indians... except we're the Indians," says the astronomer Cal (Hamish Linklater), paraphrasing the hypothesis expressed more eloquently by Stephen Hawking (and earlier by Jake Johannsen).  They put up a forcefield around the Hawaiian islands and set themselves up to send a signal to the rest of the warships to come.  Humanity's only hope is a set of ships inside the forcefield that may be able to take them down.  There's your gameboard right there.

The battle scenes are effective.  Unlike the Transformers movies, which Battleship will inevitably be lumped in with, we are always sure what's going on where.  And the movie actually incorporates the hit-miss grid of the board game in a way that is not stupid or forced, but actually seems kind of plausible.

It also helps that there are human beings behind the battleships.  Though the story strictly follows formula, the performances are good and the characters believable.  Taylor Kitsch plays Alex Hopper, a former layabout who was pressured by his straight-arrow brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) to join him in the Navy.  Alex proves to be a capable soldier but still a stubborn pighead, and it doesn't help that he's in love with Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), the daughter of his commanding officer (Liam Neeson).  The human story is predictable but still helps give a backbone to all of the action, and a very funny prologue involving a bar, a convenience store, and a burrito acquaints us with the characters quite well.

Kitsch's performance does not display a great range, but he's a likable lead.  Tadanobu Asano is also very good as a Japanese soldier who feuds with Alex, paving the way for the two to grudgingly make nice when the aliens touch down, and later to damn well respect each other. (I had to check to be sure that this was the same Asano who played the amoral blond-haired slit-mouthed maniac in Ichi the Killer.  He seems far too nice to be the same person, but he is.)  Though featured prominently in trailers, Neeson is barely in the film.  This is a relief; between fighting off a pack of wolves in The Grey and bludgeoning dozens of henchmen singlehandedly in Taken 2, he needs a rest.  Of Rihanna's performance, the best to be said is that it will not likely harm her music career.

The writing is where the movie comes up short.  The script by Jon and Eric Hoeber, who wrote the dismal RED, is consistently funny but weak in plot.  The aliens are refreshingly humanlike (as would be expected on an earthlike planet), but it's never quite clear why the aliens do what they do.  For instance, why do they send machines out to commit mass destruction but will not personally harm another creature?  On several occasions one of them will look a person in the eye and leave them unharmed; meanwhile, they cause car crashes, destroy bridges, and hurl missiles on a whim.  What's their logic?

One of the key pieces of machinery the aliens possess is a ball of rotating blades which they send around to destroy ships and large structures.  It's an interesting invention, but it renders much of the hit-and-miss missile-firing action pointless.  They may have just used their death spheres to begin with and saved the trouble.

The land-bound sub-plot involving Samantha, Cal the astronomer, and a depressed disabled veteran (Gregory D. Gadson) who's getting used to his titanium legs doesn't contribute much to the story.  It proves itself worthy by introducing us to Gadson, who really is an Iraq war veteran and really did lose his legs.  But never mind that; he has a commanding screen presence.  This is his first movie and will not be his last.

Of course, Battleship comes complete with an undying and unquestioning reverence for the U.S. Armed Forces, and why shouldn't it?  A movie based on a toy isn't equipped to be nuanced.  But Berg and his writers find a way to avoid pandering, in a climactic battle sequence that pays tribute to the Navy in a clever and unexpected way.

Though Battleship is far from an airtight action film, I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised.  Occasionally a movie with only the most limited ambitions can be more satisfying than a movie that sets the highest bar and fails to reach it (Prometheus, that's you).  Though Berg and the screenwriters leave quite a few holes in their struggle to fill in the gaps of a plotless, characterless game, they have made a real movie out of it.  I was happier walking out of Battleship than I was going in, and that's enough.

** 1/2 out of ****

NOTE: I was warned that there was one scene after the credits of Battleship, and so I stuck around to see the most boring, pointless scene in the film.  It contains no surprises or pleasures.  When the credits roll, you may leave.

TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (2012)

It is no small miracle that Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim found each other.  I have a feeling that without each other, they would be alone in this world.  The stars and creators of Adult Swim's "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!", they revel in a type of humor that I must confess is usually beyond my understanding, which is saying a lot.  But as with Andy Kaufman and many misunderstood comedians, you get the feeling that they're making each other laugh, and sometimes that's enough.  That they were each able to find another person with the same sense of humor boggles the mind.

The word surrealist doesn't quite scratch the surface of their style.  Unlike Tom Green, the last mainstream comedian to try to make a surrealist film, they don't seek merely to push the envelope; they are more pointed than that.  True, they do throw a heap of gags at the wall and only a few do stick, but Tim and Eric are not desperate.  Critics might say they're trying too hard, but that is missing the point: they're playing the parts of people who are trying too hard.  Their character is the class clown who has no idea how to make you laugh, but gives it a go anyway.  It's inane, but that he tried in the first place is funny in itself.

What to call it?  Lame-ism?  Unfunny chic?  The funniest bits of Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie are structured like an office team-building video where the boss tries to show you his "lighter side" while still insisting you get that report in on time.  Though not always at the top of their game, Tim and Eric have a spot-on sense of what it sounds like when boring people try to be entertaining.  This sense is present even in their IMDb bios, which I believe they wrote themselves, claiming that their victory in the 2008 Webby awards was "based on excellence in the following criteria: Concept & Writing, Quality of Craft, Integration, Overall Experience." Oh, and Tim "was stabbed twice in the upper back while protecting an elderly woman from her son who was under the influence of hard drugs."

On a laugh-ratio level, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie has far more misses than hits.  Strung together with only the loosest of plots, it follows Tim and Eric after they've supposedly made the highest-budgeted movie of all time.  More specifically, they took a studio's billion-dollar investment, blew it on themselves, and turned in a five-minute piece of trash starring a Johnny Depp impersonator.  The studio heads (Robert Loggia and William Atherton, good sports) threaten to kill them if they can't pay back the money, so they decide to rehabilitate a failing southwestern mall so they can make the billion dollars back.

Will Ferrell is very funny as the eccentric hustler who sells them the mall.  Twink Caplan is charming as a store owner who immediately captures Eric's attention.  As a preposterous holistic healer, Ray Wise need only appear and smile to get the biggest laugh in the movie.  I enjoyed the prologue featuring Jeff Goldblum (as "Chef Goldblum"), satirizing the discomfort of 3-D movies.  Several bits which satirize self-help and promotional videos are side-splitting.

Other gags don't go so well.  John C. Reilly (who's hilarious on Adult Swim as Tim and Eric's "Dr. Steve Brule") appears as a particularly disgusting character without any redeeming qualities, or laughs.  A sub-plot about Tim stealing the son of one of the store owners gets no laughs and goes nowhere.  Even Zach Galifianakis is more bizarre than funny as a Hollywood guru, and the usually-reliable Will Forte relies too heavily on foul language for laughs as the proprietor of the mall's sword shop.  Scenes which resort to graphic potty humor are the only ones which seem desperate and out of place.

I didn't laugh at many of the jokes in Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie.  I don't particularly "get" Tim and Eric in general.  But I've seen enough comedies to know that not everyone has to be in on the joke.  When everyone is, you get a watered-down piece of slush like Failure to Launch or Bad Teacher.  At the very least, I can say with confidence that the Tim and Eric movie was probably not screened for any focus groups.  Comedy usually represents what one person thinks is funny, or in this case, what two people think is funny.  Tim and Eric made the movie that was funny to them, and no one stood in their way.

** out of ****

PROMETHEUS (2012): Man's origin leads to man's end

Despite how it was originally heralded, Ridley Scott's Prometheus is not really a prequel to Alien, nor is it terribly similar in concept.  Although both are set in the vacuum of space and mine considerable mileage out of the vast emptiness of the universe and the solitude of being one of a few people on an entire planet (and the titular creatures do make an appearance), Prometheus has far greater ambitions.

It seeks to explore a literal confrontation between man and god.  Its themes are similar to Altered States, a film in which a scientist took psychotropic drugs which gave him a vision of man's collective memory of his origin, and found that evolution was a little bit messier than he imagined.  Here, scientists travel to a distant planet to find what may be the engineers of mankind.  What they find is also messier than they expected.

A team of explorers is commissioned by Weyland Industries to travel to a distant planet which, according to numerous identical ancient cave paintings, is thought to be the home of those who set life on earth into motion.  While the boss, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) is mainly interested in the exploration, scientists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) want to make contact with our makers and find out just why we exist.

The answer isn't easy for anyone to take.  In fact, the only one who may have all the answers is David (Michael Fassbender), an android who's spent a long time studying what it's like to be human.  Having already met his maker, he has already faced what the others haven't.  And he may have plans for them.

The android David is the most complex, fascinating character in the film, and Fassbender gives a commanding performance.  When he is absent, the movie suffers.  The human characters, though well performed, are far less appealing: I just couldn't find it in me to care about Elizabeth and Charlie and their relationship, about Elizabeth's ambitions, about the flashbacks with her father (Patrick Wilson).  Theron is fun to watch as the no-nonsense businesswoman who could be mistaken for a robot herself, and the rest of the crew (including Idris Elba and Benedict Wong) are an amiable bunch of working-class schmoes.  Guy Pearce appears in full caked-on old man makeup as the 92-year-old chairman of the company.  Since Pearce looks notoriously unconvincing, and never appears in the film as a young man, the filmmakers might have cast an actual old man and saved a lot of trouble.  I hear that Christopher Lee is still working. (Okay, so a viral video was released with a fake TED talk from the Pearce character as a young man.  But was it still worth it?)

True to its sci-fi nature, Prometheus raises some interesting questions.  What if we could essentially meet God?  How does God feel about us?  Proud?  Ashamed?  Indifferent?  Might our creators feel the same way toward us as we do toward the things we create?  The movie has a great scene in which David poses this question to Charlie.  He doesn't have an answer.

The problem is that once Scott and writers Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof pose such questions, it seems they don't know what to do with the rest of the film.  While the first half of the film is mysterious, spooky, and thought-provoking, the second half turns into a simplistic yawn.  Once the cards are on the table, the movie goes on autopilot.  The emergence of a proto-version of the Alien creature is well-designed (H.R. Giger was brought in to "devolve" his creation a bit), but the scene surrounding it is brief, hackneyed, and suspenseless.  Fassbender is relegated to the sidelines and the movie focuses on Rapace and her less interesting arc.  A character whom we thought was dead--and did not particularly miss--makes an unnecessary late return, and only gobs up the later scenes in the film.  The climax essentially boils down to stop-bad-guy-from-doing-bad-thing, and is a cookie-cutter action scene that is unworthy of the big ideas that Prometheus presents.

The movie ends on a preposterous note of light and hope, setting up the obligatory sequel and casually ignoring that most of what preceded it was a fable about the doom of mankind.  Scott and crew appear to have learned the wrong lesson from the film.  It leaves its characters still proudly in search of meaning in the universe, when the movie has given them only ugliness.  You know it's a bad moment in a sci-fi film when you want to say to the explorers, "Nothing to see here--just go home and mind your own business from now on."

** 1/2 out of ****

THE WICKER TREE (2012): Cowboys for Christ take on heretics from the Highlands

 

The Wicker Man remains one of the most sublime mystery-thrillers ever made, and director Robin Hardy has long been promising a sequel, even before we were treated to the abysmal 2006 remake via Neil LaBute.  Now it has arrived in the form of The Wicker Tree, and, sad to say, it is a big letdown.  Though it boasts the same director as the original, it's a dull, ham-fisted, thrill-less retread with lousy performances and no surprises.  I might even go so far as to say that the LaBute film is better.  At least that one had Nicolas Cage chomping on scenery, Ellen Burstyn decked out as Braveheart, and a fresh take on the story which brought it into modern-day gender politics rather than religious fervor.

The new film follows pretty much the same arc as the original.  Pop singer Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol), once a boot-stompin' beer-drinkin' man-crazy "Redneck Woman"-style country singer, has found Jesus, reformed her ways and committed herself to chastity until marriage.  She takes off for Scotland along with her similarly chaste boyfriend Steve (Henry Garrett) to preach the Word, and finds herself in a small secluded town where the townspeople take to her very nicely.  Too nicely.  And their oddly pagan springtime celebration is coming up soon...

No points for guessing what the town is up to.  The two lead characters certainly don't.  One reason why the original worked so well was that its main character (a policeman played by Edward Woodward) was no dummy, but was closed-minded, boorish, and curious enough to get into the plot over his head anyway.  Beth and Steve, contrarily, are two dim bulbs who make every wrong move even when everything is spelled out for them.  The original film was about how religion blinds smart people to the truth; this film is about naive people who do stupid things.

For a film whose predecessor was constantly surprising, The Wicker Tree has considerably little suspense and no surprises at all.  The film has no thematic element that wasn't explored in the original, nor any particular plot point that differs.  The only thing new about the film is the character of a local prostitute (Honeysuckle Weeks--yes, it's her real name) who falls in love with Steve, I think, or at least feels sympathy for him and tries to help him, I think.  Her "warnings" to him, suitable for sloppy horror films like this one, are needlessly ambiguous when she might have just come out and told him what the danger was.

The one redeeming aspect of the film is the return of Christopher Lee, who played a cult leader in the original and appears briefly here as the same character.  His cameo has almost nothing to do with the story, but look at him.  Pushing 90, he looks great and can still act.  Even with a two-minute appearance his presence is deeply felt.  For the rest of the movie we are dearly missing him, as well as Nicolas Cage, and the angry bees.

* out of ****

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (FULL SEQUENCE) (2011)

To call The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) one of the most disgusting films ever made is probably a misuse of the phrase "one of." This pronouncement would no doubt be music to the ears of Tom Six, its director, who desires so desperately to offend that he didn't blink once when the UK banned his film from release.  They claimed it could actually cause harm to audiences.

Shock filmmakers like William Castle used to market their films with promotional gimmicks: The House on Haunted Hill featured "Emerg-O," in which a fake skeleton emerged from behind the screen; and the producers of The Screaming Skull famously offered free burial services to anyone who died of fright from watching their film.  Six should have taken their cue and offered vomit bags at the entrance and a free therapy session on the way out.

The British Film Council's claim does more than lend Six's film intriguing notoriety and free advertising: it plays right into his theme.  The Human Centipede, you remember, was about a mad surgeon who surgically attached people together mouth-to-anus in order to create the title creature.  The Human Centipede 2 is about a mentally unstable man who's obsessed with the original film and decides to create his own.  You see?  They were right.

Martin (Laurence R. Harvey--no relation to the other Laurence Harvey, I assume) is the archetypal psychotic case.  He's a parking garage attendant living with his abusive mother (Vivien Bridsen), who constantly derides him for ratting out his pedophile father.  Oh, and he loves The Human Centipede.  In the first few minutes we see him watching the end of the film, then he dutifully rewinds all the way back to the beginning and starts again.  Of all the atrocities committed in the film, I think this is the most horrifying.  Very soon he gathers victims of his own and puts into action his plan to create a bigger centipede.

The point--I suppose--is that violent movies inspire violence in those who already have a predilection toward it.  This idea comes not without a huge portion of ego.  The notion of someone being driven to murder by a movie is interesting, but the possibility that anyone could be inspired as such by The Human Centipede is slim.  It may have had a dastardly premise, but it was the biggest bore of a shock film I've ever seen.  It lacked the courage of its convictions to be either a classy suspense film or a splatter fest.

Six avoids that pitfall this time around by upping the gore ante extensively.  While the first film surprisingly pulled its punches in the disgusting department, this sequel delivers what many were probably expecting all along.

One of the most disconcerting things about The Human Centipede II is how well-made it is.  It's beautifully shot in black and white.  The atmosphere is chilling and Mr. Harvey's performance is quietly affecting (he never speaks a word).  A tongue-in-cheek appearance by Ashlynn Yennie (the C spot from the original) is surprisingly clever.

Mr. Six is, I fear, not a rabid splatterer but a legitimately talented director whose cinematic ambitions have been outweighed by his desire to offend.  The movie doesn't simply offend; it's exceptionally good at offending.  Six shows quite a bit of restraint in his use of gore, as many brutal moments are left off-screen.  But rest assured that this is not because of any human decency; rather, it's because he knows that what's implied is often more disturbing than what's shown.  He knows that too much in-your-face violence is numbing, so he is careful only to show what is necessary.  Here is a movie that is finely tuned to be as squirm-inducing as it possibly can.

It all culminates in a final half-hour that is the closest a movie has ever come to making me vomit.  But to willingly watch a movie like The Human Centipede II is to ask for it.  The titular creature is cobbled together in sloppy and sick fashion.  Martin, being no doctor, screws up from time to time, sometimes at the expense of his subjects.  There are scenes here which are a trial to sit through.  The bit involving the pregnant woman is particularly unforgivable, which I'm sure was precisely Six's intention.  The supposed climax involves the brief addition of the color brown to the palette.

In its own way, The Human Centipede II is an effective social comment, though a tad self-defeating; it brutally mocks anyone who watches it by equating their curiosity with that of a mentally challenged lunatic.  But Six's work here is less graceful than, say, Michael Haneke's Funny Games, in which the movie never quite lowered itself to the level of its villains.  Here, the movie drags us right down into depravity with its lead character.

So what do we make of The Human Centipede II?  Is it a good film or a bad film?  Well, let me put it this way: there's not a thing it sets out to do that it doesn't accomplish.  It's without a doubt the Human Centipediest movie that's ever been made, and if you watch it, you get exactly what you deserve.

Note: I've been predicting ever since the release of the first Human Centipede that Tom Six has a career ahead of him.  Not unlike John Waters, as soon as his notoriety as a purveyor of trash jettisons him into the mainstream, he'll make some actual good films.  The IMDB reveals that his next film is... The Human Centipede III.  For Christ's sake.

See also:
Shock and Yawn: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (2010)