Beneath The Mississippi (2008)

I just looked over my list of “Crap” films on HMAD (refresher – films without any redeeming value whatsoever; the worst of the worst in other words), and I am hard-pressed to find a movie of less value than Beneath The Mississippi, which fails on nearly every level a film can be measured by. In fact, some of these films I should probably “de-tag”, especially the earlier ones in HMAD history as I was naively thinking it couldn’t get worse than things like They or The Breed (let alone harmless, forgettable junk like Pulse or Prey), but believe me, if 3-4 years from now I am reviewing something and saying “you know, in retrospect, Beneath The Mississippi wasn’t THAT bad”, I will quit on the spot.

Honestly, apart from a fairly decent main theme, there wasn’t anything even remotely approaching a decent movie here, or even a watchable one. Hell even in Dead Calling or Drive Thru (frequent punching bags) my reviews point out that at least there was a cute girl to look at or something, but this can’t even offer that much. And it’s not a slam on the actresses, it’s the fact that I can’t SEE THEM CLEARLY enough to judge whether or not they’re attractive or not.

The Caller (2011)

If you’re the type of person who hears the fantastical plot of a movie (say, “Oil drillers go into space to blow up an asteroid”) and says “That sounds stupid, to hell with this movie”, then avoid The Caller like the plague. Not only does it revolve around a woman from 1979 “stalking” a woman in 2011 via the telephone, but (spoiler?) they don’t explain WHY this is happening. So not only will you get enraged at the plot, you won’t get the satisfaction of complaining about how their explanation was equally stupid.

For the rest of us less ignorant folks, the movie’s actually pretty good. It might have been a better long-form episode of an anthology series (like Masters of Horror), as it gets a bit drawn out, but as it was originally a short film I guess that is to be expected. And they could have filled that time with nonsensical exposition, explaining how this thing worked, and maybe even worked in some sort of deus ex machina that allowed the minor “time travel” element to be used in order to secure a happier ending, so we should be grateful that they opted to just sort of “double up” on certain scenes.

For example, our heroine, Mary (Twilight’s Rachelle LeFevre, who is quite good and endlessly watchable) has a violent ex husband, and he seems to be hellbent on getting their dog back. So we get not one but two scenes where he comes over, plays with the dog a bit, and then makes vague threats and grabs her arm or something (with the dog making no effort to protect her – why does she want him?). And without getting too far into spoiler territory (for now), our evil phone caller plays a very unusual card against Mary twice, with even the dialogue sounding pretty much the same. So again, it’s not the tightest script in the world.

But it more or less works. First off, it’s a remarkably good looking film, with Matthew Parkhill directing more like an indie drama than a horror film, to its benefit. A giant chunk of the film takes place in Mary’s kitchen, but it never gets visually dull (having LeFevre front and center doesn’t hurt – swoon), and I actually kind of dug the lack of “horror” scenes, i.e. we never actually see any of the terrible things that Rose does, and discover what happened from Mary’s point of view. The Puerto Rico locale adds plenty of rarely seen flair (I was so happy to see that the film didn’t take place in Los Angeles or some other traditional city), and you can actually feel how hot it is – for a while I was wondering if Mary was simply cracking up, with the heat making her condition worse.

Plus, LeFevre is backed up by a good cast, including fellow vamp actor Stephen Moyer as a potential love interest, and the always welcome/awesome Luis Guzman as one of her neighbors. It’s not a very action packed movie (the plot dictates that nearly everything happens off-screen, in fact), but that allows us to spend more time than usual with these folks and actually care about their fate. I legitimately felt bummed at some of the events in the film, which is rare, and even more impressive when it occurs in such an admittedly far-fetched narrative.

Spoilers ahead!

See, the nerve-wracking thing about the movie is that the woman on the phone (Rose, played by Drag Me To Hell’s Lorna Raver) holds all the cards. She’s in the past but has the ability to affect the future, i.e. Mary’s life, which at first she does in harmless ways (drawing things on her walls), but ultimately gets crazier and more violent. However Mary has no way of fighting back – no matter what she does in 2011, she can’t exactly “send back” a way of stopping her, and thus sits helplessly on the phone even as Rose does harm to her younger self. I read someone say “Don’t answer the phone”, but it’s not that simple – by this point Rose knows everything about Mary and can still do damage to her in the past whether she answers the phone or not. It’s actually quite a creepy scenario, and the turn of events are unexpectedly sad and grim.

Of course, when dealing with this sort of stuff, the logic part of your brain might kick into overdrive, not unlike a typical time travel movie. And that’s where the script’s drawn out nature hurts a bit. If they had kept up the suspense/scares/action, it might be easy to miss a few of the unexplained minor plot holes. For example, at one point Rose kills someone in 1979, thus preventing their existence in 2011. LeFevre remembers this person and asks around, but Moyer cannot remember him. Why does LeFevre retain this memory and not Moyer? Also, whenever you’re dealing with any sort of “change the past to affect the future” you know at some point you’ll see something change right before your eyes, which never makes any sense. LeFevre sees something change as she hears it happen on the phone, and while it’s a very cool effect, it’s nonsense – it should be an instantaneous change, not one that you can see form in “real time”.

So if you’re an overly analytical type, you gotta be prepared for some eye-rolling, and if you can’t “just go with it”, then again, find another movie to watch. This one’s aimed toward folks like me, who judge a movie not on its actual plot but how well that plot is conveyed, regardless of whether it holds up to real world logic. And by that measure, I have yet to see a better movie that blends Single White Female style “unhealthy obsession leads to murder” thrills with a magic telephone. It’s coming out in limited release this weekend, but I think it will play just as well/better at home - especially if you have a landline that might ring to spook you. I don’t, because my cat ate the damn wire that leads into the house and I’m too busy defending magic telephone movies to get it fixed.

The Reef (2010)

If you thought the only problem with Open Water was the lack of victims, then The Reef is the answer to all of your prayers; mimicking the plot and pace but with FOUR people instead of two. To be fair, there’s a sort of plot beyond waiting around to die – they had recently left an island (by boat) and plan to swim back to it, instead of just treading water in one place like the Open Water folk, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same damn movie, albeit with far more tolerable characters.

In fact one thing that struck me right away after their boat sunk was how relatively calm they were about the whole thing. They had no means of communication, no food/water of note, and were not in any flight paths – in other words, they were screwed even if there weren’t any sharks around. But yet once they all climb up on the bottom of their boat (still floating above water, though not for long) there’s no panic, no idiotic arguing, nothing. They’re all just sort of sitting around calmly planning their next move as if they were only mildly inconvenienced by the whole thing. Not, “OH SHIT! WE’RE FUCKED!” but more “Oh, *sigh*, I guess we’ll have to swim 20 miles back to shore and hope the sharks don’t get us. Anyone got any gum?”

Of course, this means that you won’t be wishing the sharks will eat them sooner than later, but this also makes it more of a shame that Andrew Traucki’s script doesn’t really develop any of the characters beyond the basics (name and how they relate to each other). There’s plenty of time before the sharks start eating our heroes, but the time is spent on a lot of generic dialogue that doesn’t really make these folks any more interesting to us, as well as repetitive “I saw something!” scenes in which one person sees something (we never do) and the guy with the goggles scans around underwater. Sometimes this bit will end with the sight of a shark way off in the distance, but usually not. There’s some minor suspense to the affair, but Traucki could have really made things interesting if we had more reason to care about these folks (let’s be honest – no one is watching hoping that they ALL make it out alive, or else there’s no chompy-chomp).

OR, he could have given some more inner conflict to the group, as even what little there is of that sort of stuff is pretty generic. Our two obvious heroes used to date and are still sort of in love, so you know that A. they’ll make up and B. one of them will die saving the other. It’s just how these movies go, and the predictability of this, the only “subplot” of note, doesn’t help the movie feel like a giant rerun. It was far more interesting when the 5th member was trying to mess with the others’ heads before they separated. This guy didn’t want to swim, opting to stay on the floating remains of the boat, but that didn’t stop him from trying to con one of the women into giving him her wetsuit in case he had to go in the water later. The movie definitely could have used more of that; not outright villainy, but just more “I’m out for myself” behavior or minor conflict to keep the tension up.

Spoiler in next paragraph!

I was also disappointed by the lack of balls in the climax. Throughout the movie there’s one guy doing all of the heavy lifting – he goes back into the sunken boat to find some supplies, he figures out which direction to swim, and he finds a surfboard (and cuts it in half, a sound that makes my ears bleed) for the others to use while he relies only on his legs/stamina to keep him afloat. In other words, if anyone deserves to live, it’s him, since the others are just a bunch of dead weight. Naturally, at the end, he dies, after helping the girl to safety. But it’s not in a heroic way, which would have been fine (like, cutting his leg and swimming in an opposite direction to ward the shark away) – he’s begging her to help him up and she, worthless person that she is, uselessly attempts to pull him up. Worse, in the real story that this is partially based on, the male was the only survivor, so they changed the “facts” and ended up with the most blandly traditional ending ever, instead of doing something a bit more interesting and having a true story to back them up if anyone questioned it.

But while it doesn’t live up to Open Water’s anti-commercial tendencies, it certainly LOOKS much better than that film. Both used only real shark footage, but this one is the better made film, hands down. The scenery is gorgeous, and even when things are hectic the camerawork is much more cinematic, as opposed to Open Water’s very shaky, almost documentary-esque approach. And the scares actually work better, IMO, not only do we have more victims (and thus more tension to the attacks – in Open Water we knew they’d both be alive at least until the final 10 minutes or so), but they’re staged a bit better when they do occur. Plus, the fact that they are actively attempting to reach safety makes their plight much more nerve-wracking, particularly when minor “islands” (rocks that break the water, one of which not even big enough for them all to fit on) are in sight and the sharks are seemingly trying to block their way. In OW they just floated around in one basic spot, yelling at each other, so when the sharks came it was like “oh no, an asshole who isn’t doing anything might get eaten!”

Also: scary ass turtle corpse. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m afraid of pretty much all fish/water mammals, including turtles, so when they find a corpse of one (presumably eaten by one of the sharks) I actually jumped a bit at its reveal. Dead or alive, those things freak me the hell out. I’m also inexplicably afraid of slicing my foot on some jagged rock or coral or something (that scene in Cast Away – GAH!), so I liked that they worked in a bit of that as a possible danger as well.

Basically, I don’t like the water much, is what I’m saying, so there is a sort of basic “what if this happened to me” fear that allows me to get caught up in this stuff much more than say, a movie about some folks that were stranded in the desert or the woods. However, even with that on the movie’s side, I can still recognize that they were just sort of going through the motions, doing nothing beyond what you’d expect to see from this sort of movie. It’s enjoyable to a degree, but cripplingly unimaginative and “safe”.

Amityville: Dollhouse (1996)

Believe it or not, Amityville: Dollhouse is actually the EIGHTH film in the series, and actually the final in the original series before the Platinum Dunes reboot. There are currently a couple of films in development but I’m not sure what continuity they belong to, if any – but does it matter, at this point? This is possibly the most tangentially connected major franchise of all time. It’s basically a series of movies about a particular window pattern.

Anyway, this one continues the sort of anthological idea set up in the 4th movie – objects from the house carried its “legacy” around the country, so there was a lamp, a clock, a mirror, and now, obviously, a dollhouse. It’s a shame that they all went with big house movies though; the concept seemed to be design to free the filmmakers to do something different each time out, but this (and what I know about the others) is pretty much the same sort of shit – isolated house, slightly fractured family unit, etc. Why not do an inner city one, or Christ, even set one in a snowy climate?

So basically, as you may have guessed, this one doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. At times it almost feels like a straight up remake of the original, right down to the fact that the dad is newly married to the mom, except two of the kids are his (the mom left for reasons left maddeningly vague). His new wife has a son who doesn’t really like any of them, and he’s also a major geek, testing his pet rat in a maze and playing with microscopes and what not. I kept thinking that he’d be a major character, like maybe his bookish ways would lead him to be the one to discover the history of the place and the haunted dollhouse, but no. Instead he just sees a zombie apparition of his dead dad, another potentially interesting subplot that has no meaningful payoff. Before he even really DOES anything, the kid suddenly knows zombie dad is bad news and instantly switches allegiance to his stepdad. Way to flip-flop, ya little bastard.

In fact each family member has their own issue with the house, and like the kid’s, none of them really have a satisfying arc. The stepmom suddenly starts fantasizing about the teen stepson, but never does anything about it (if anything he seems to be hitting on HER at times despite not having any supernatural reasons for doing so). He has a girlfriend that seems to enrage the house, as every time she comes over something freaky happens, always with unintentionally hilarious results. I should note that the girlfriend is played by the girl who played Eric’s sister on That 70’s Show until she got canned for being too drunk all the time, and if anyone was inexplicably crushing on her over Mila or Laura, you should be happy with one particular scene.

But most obnoxiously underutilized is the fact that the dollhouse acts as a mirror for the much larger, real house. So when the kid’s pet rat runs into it, all of a sudden there’s a giant rat in the house (easily the film’s highlight, even if all you see is its ass sticking out from under the bed). Or when a window opens on the dollhouse, a real one opens in the house and a minor tornado blows in. If I was making this movie, I’d go nuts with the potential – have someone spill a drink in it and cause an interior flood, or maybe have an insect fly in and then suddenly the family would be terrorized by Mothra. But no! After the rat they barely ever do anything fun with the idea, opting for typical (read: boring) haunted house scenarios and a ridiculous demon that is somehow behind all of the supernatural goings-on.

Worse, I don’t know if it’s just the shit DVD or the original movie, but either way this has one of the worst sound mixes I’ve ever seen in a professional production. Everything sounds looped or dubbed, and random sound effects like people opening doors or brushing off a table have this strange electronic quality to them, like they were using old Nintendo games for their sound FX library. The dad in particular always sounded more like a narrator than an on-screen character, and things that SHOULD be kind of under the breath (like “I thought I closed that...”) or whatever are booming and distinct. Very weird.

In short, somehow manages to be the weakest entry in a very underwhelming series. Most telling is that most of the scares in the first act revolve around a light turning on by itself inside the dollhouse, and none are ever as creepy as the moment where the same thing happens at the end of Dream Warriors. As I’ve said in the past, haunted house movies aren’t exactly my favorite sub-genre, but I can recognize a good one when I see it. This ain’t it. No wonder it killed the franchise for 8 years or so.

Camp Hell (2010)

As I’ve mentioned before, I was raised Catholic. Not strict, but I went to church every Sunday (actually usually Saturday afternoon) and on the Holy Days, and 8 years of Catholic school. Never had much of an issue with it beyond the clothes, and even continued going to church for a while once I went to college and thus didn’t “have to”. I didn’t switch religions or have some sort of epiphany - I just sort of let my obligations drift away, not unlike how I stopped watching The Simpsons. Missed it once or twice, got used to it, and before you know it it’s been like a decade since I went to mass. Sorry, God/mom. But anyway, I think that should make me an ideal viewer for Camp Hell (formerly Camp Hope), since it doesn’t seem to really take a stance for or against religion.

Now, they’re marketing this thing as a horror movie, and while I don’t have a problem qualifying it as one (there’s a demon lurking around), what I found most terrifying was the idea that these places exist as depicted in the film. I mean, I know some forms of Catholicism are stricter than others, and that these religious camps can be found pretty much everywhere, but are they THIS strict (read: insane)? I get that they teach kids about the importance of abstinence and require them to pray seemingly every other hour, and even when one of the counselors finds/destroys one kid’s "Spawn" comic book, I figured it was within the boundaries of what they actually do (since Spawn is actually from Hell and depicted as a hero).

But then a kid has to apologize for listening to Journey, and he is reprimanded. I’m sorry: JOURNEY? The band whose big hit is called “FAITHfully” (not a religious song, but you know what I mean)? If they wanted to condemn the idea of listening to evil rock music, why pick one of the least offensive rock bands of all time? Even fucking Train is more hardcore. Marilyn Manson or even Metallica would have been at least somewhat understandable, but by name-checking Journey, I suddenly realized that the filmmakers were possibly depicting the religious folks as the evil ones.

And then throughout the film I remained confused as to whose “side” the filmmakers were on. It’s a “Christian horror film” so you assume that the movie exists to promote and maybe even recruit folks (youths, specifically) to religion, but even The Exorcist makes a stronger case for the importance of having religion in your life. Hell, the only character in the film who is seriously harmed (catatonic, in fact) is the priest! Bruce Davison is the head of the camp who tells the kids that they’ll go to hell if they masturbate and all that good stuff, and even though he never does anything against God, he ends up being “fouled” by the demon and basically left for dead. So it’s anti-religion, then? Make up your mind, movie.

It certainly couldn’t possibly inspire any kid to pay more attention in church, let alone devote his life to his beliefs the way some of the older characters do. At one point our hero Tommy has to apologize for making out with and dry humping his girlfriend (well, I guess friend that is a girl, for these yahoos) to his very religious father (Andrew McCarthy, for some reason), who tells him that he is disappointed in him and he will burn in hell or whatever. I’m sorry, but if I told my dad that I brought a girl to orgasm when I was 16, I think he’d buy me a beer, and he didn’t even drink! But jokes aside, it doesn’t make it look like a very fun or even worthwhile way of life, since they pretty much keep you from doing anything fun (they’re not even allowed to go to a carnival). Nor does it seemingly present any sort of cautionary tale – Tommy does these terrible things (this is the most vivid dry humping I’ve ever seen in a movie, I think, the girl even comments about his now sticky pants) and then the demon takes out the priest and leaves him alone. Then he renounces his faith and throws his bible out the window. So uh... win-win, I guess? No demonic possession, and no more waking up at 7 am on Sunday. What is the drawback? I could see if he renounced his faith and then got run over or was diagnosed with instant death cancer or something, so the movie could just be a giant “You see what happens when you go against God!” message, but the movie seems to suggest God would rather you just enjoyed your life as long as you weren’t doing anything too terrible.

Oddly enough, the girlfriend is named Melissa and played by actress Valentina de Angelis, who played a Melissa in yesterday’s Bereavement. Oddly, both films were shot in 2007 and have been on the shelf for a while as well. I like to think that it’s actually the same character; after her shameful dry humping escapades that got her kicked out of Camp Hope, she was ostracized from her family, and moved on her own to a small town in neighboring Pennsylvania (this movie takes place in Jersey), where she got a job at a shitty diner while working toward completing high school. And thus, God, much like Final Destination’s Death, finally caught up to her and used his mysterious ways to have her killed for her sins. That or it’s just a weird coincidence.

The DVD case prominently features Jesse Eisenberg and even puts his name above the title, even though he’s only in two scenes (actually one scene and a shot) and never even sets foot in the titular camp. He’s another kid who has “let the demon in” and is thus all messed up (so now we’re back to “Believe in God... OR ELSE!” land), and Davison, who visits Eisenberg in the mental institute before heading off to camp, believes that the same thing is now happening to Tommy. It’s pretty obvious that this thing is just seeing release now thanks to his newfound fame, but the funny thing is that it’s actually one of his more unique performances, in that he’s not playing a snarky, “smarter than everyone else” type of guy (it’s closer to Donnie Wahlberg’s performance in Sixth Sense, if anything). Good to know he CAN actually play other types of roles, just a shame we had to learn about it in such a silly, pointless flick.

His abbreviated 2nd scene is presented in full along with two other, wholly worthless excised bits featuring more praying at the camp, as if the movie didn’t have enough as it was. The only other extra feature is a trailer, which misspells Dana Delany’s name and shows pretty much every horror shot in the film. It also employs the “Heavenly gates” version of the Lionsgate logo, whereas the film itself goes with the “Dungeon/Hell” version (so even the damn logo can’t decide which side the movie falls on). Sadly, there is no commentary or making of where first time director/writer (but longtime producer) George Van Buskirk explains just who in the hell he was making this movie for, exactly, because I swear it exists solely to be made fun of by people like me. You hardly need a movie to convince a regular person that extreme religious beliefs can endanger people, and any random pamphlet you find on the ground outside a ball game or concert can do a better job of promoting a particular faith. Camp Hell seems to suggest both things are true, and thus just wastes the time of a bunch of good actors.

Twilight (2008) 300MB MOVIES

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