62 posts tagged “horror”

God bless The Asylum. When it comes to low-budget horror movies that are intentionally similar - at least in title and concept - to tentpole theatrical releases, they're basically the best there is, which is to say that their films are never more than incompetent and unwatchable. Last year alone, they distributed When A Killer Calls, Hillside Cannibals, The Da Vinci Treasure, Pirates of Treasure Island, Snakes On A Train, and Dragon. This year we're getting Transmorphers, The Hitchhiker, and The Apocalypse. Basically, if you want to make a crap movie that is a lot like a popular movie, The Asylum are the guys who will hook you up.

My plan with Snakes On A Train was to watch it drunk and make with a running commentary, a la my initial post on Skeleton Man. But Snakes On A Train is a movie that you need to really wrap your head around before you can really write about it. Why? Because the film is basically the story of the Nativity, except with killer snakes. And a train. Which the snakes are on.

Alma and Brujo are basically analogs for Mary and Joseph. With some slight differences. For instance, instead of riding a donkey into Bethlehem, Brujo drags Alma's unconscious body across the border from Mexico. Luckily, they aren't targeted by racist vigilantes, which would make for a short movie. On the other hand, where are the Minutemen?

If you didn't already know that 'brujo' is Spanish for 'male witch', it becomes readily apparent when he starts casting crazy spells. What do the spells do? I don't know. I'm operating under the assumption that they don't do anything and that Brujo is really just crazy. I do know that Alma starts to throw up a bunch of harmless garden snakes, who then go and kill some random cowboy with their nonpoisonous bites. After that, Mary and Joseph get on the train. Train = Manger.

Really, what writer Eric Forsberg is doing here is challenging the accepted notions of the Christian tradition, many of which are disputed by modern-day archaeology. Snakes on a Train is a brave allegory that says to its audience, 'Hey, maybe a manger isn't a barn. Maybe it's something more like...like a train.'

After giving the inevitable snake-victims some face time and introducing some danger to the Holy Family via a gang of surly undocumented stowaways, it's finally revealed that Mary has snakes inside her because of a powerful Mexican curse. Brujoseph is not strong enough in his shamany arts to cure her, so they're headed to the mystical center of Western civilization to find someone who can help her: Los Angeles. Little do they know that, upon arriving in LA five out of every ten people they meet will claim to be a magician, seven out of every ten people will assault them and beg to be in their movie, and only three of those seven will be wearing clothes.

The train passengers themselves are completely tangential to the movie. A pair of drug-running teen girls have a forced subplot that involves one of them getting naked, but that's really as engrossing as it gets. They're clearly people who are here only to die, but since this isn't a typical slasher/dead teen movie, none of them have even the requisite wisps of development that establish why they deserve to die.

Back in the cargo car, things get heated between our heroes and the illegals whose turf they're squatting on. Yes, illegal Mexicans = Herod. Obviously, Brujo's a bit on edge because of his magical snake-vomiting girlfriend, so he gets a bit violent with these guys. One of the things I never realized about Mesoamerican civilization is that all shamans are superninjas, and Brujoseph dispatches most of the gang with ease, except for a slouchy, out of shape guy who looks like Dave Attell. After a protracted fight, Dave gets stabbed with a knife that appears to be made out of tin foil and packing tape, and then he's thrown off the train. Which, you know what? No matter how bad the movie is, that's always awesome to watch. In fact, even with the admittedly poor quality of the fight choreography, acting, and effects, it's still satisfying to watch Brujoseph get down in the latter half of the movie, as he does awesome stuff like use magic to mess up the train's electronics, drive the train after the conductor gets eaten by a giant snake, and remove a snake victim's heart with psychic surgery in order to save his life. He's like Doctor Strange, except with an obvious fake knife and a less flashy wardrobe.

Now, Mary keeps throwing up more snakes, getting larger and larger. They get out into the train and start killing people. Nearly every death is completely unrewarding, but just like with the awesome of Brujoseph, there's a hidden gem here: one of the characters has a wound on his forearm that a snake leaps inside of. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. But you're watching Snakes on a Train. The inevitable climax is that the train doesn't get to L.A. in time. Mary turns into a giant CGI snake roughly the size of the train itself. Yes. Snake Jesus.

Snake Jesus starts eating the train, until one of the illegals, in true deus ex machina fashion, reveals that he's a powerful shaman, and magics SJ away. Of course, all of the survivors are stranded in the desert, but them's the breaks.

If you like bad movies, and you have a bunch of friends over, this is the exact kind of film you want to watch. It's easy to make fun of, has a bunch of unintentional comedy, and has one or two real diamond-in-the-rough moments. And it's the story of Christmas, to boot.

'Experiment' is an oddly prescient word, in the sense that The St. Francisville Experiment is a concerted, scientific effort to discover just how bad a movie can be.

The 2000 film follows a team investigating an estate in St. Francisville, Louisana - formerly the capital of West Florida - for evidence of the paranormal. The film purports to be a documentary, with the footage recovered from the team's abandoned cameras. The footage consists of the four wandering around the house, fussing and fighting amongst themselves, until spooky things start to happen.

You're probably thinking to yourself that it sounds a lot like
The Blair Witch Project, the divisive but unquestionably popular horror mockumentary from 1999. This is because, in true horror genre fashion, every wannabe filmmaker and their brother found a bunch of unknown talent, a camcorder, and a spooky locale and mixed liberally with poor lighting, stilted mythology, and a heck of a lot of shaky cam in order to try and make lightning strike twice. Unfortunately, the makers of St. Francisville remembered all of the ingredients save the most vital - The Blair Witch Project is actually good. Experiment, well, it's like me putting a green dress sock on my hand and pretending it's Kermit the Frog.

What is supposed to be tense infighting comes off as people just stepping on one another's lines, and the sense of verisimilitude that the low-budget faux-doc tactic is supposed to evoke is never fully sold. 'Psychic' Madison consistently hams up her dialogue about "the white light" which she believes to be protecting the team, to the point where it's glaringly obvious that no real person talks like that. Ditto for 'historian' Ryan's constant screaming and crying and 'film student' Tim's ever-present, over-the-top abrasiveness. The goal here seems to be the recreation of a by-the-numbers ghost hunt that goes horribly wrong - even the name of the film is a shameless grab at the parapsychology audience, with St. Francisville being a real-life paranormal hotspot. The problem is that the recreation comes off as so fake and hollow that the viewer is going to be constantly distracted by just how fake and hollow it is.

By the time the haunt begins in earnest, I've missed my window for becoming invested in these characters and honestly can't wait for them to die, but they can't even do that right. And speaking of lacking achievements, the few brief ghost effects we see on camera are godawful and will tear you right out of the movie, should you by some chance find yourself engrossed in it. In a movie so low-tech and so intent on establishing that ghosts don't want to appear on camera, the filmmakers go out of their way to throw some stale made-for-tv effects in at the last minute. The film's final scene tries hard to copy Witch's last few minutes, but as with everything else in the movie, the attempt falls flat on its face.

I never expected St. Francisville to be good, but I expected it to land squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory. I wanted to like it, and I kept holding out for it to get better, but it never did. On the heels of a post about my tendency to like things, it pains me to admit that there's nothing good about this movie at all.

File under avoid.

Between USA Today listing Supernatural as an 'on the bubble' show (in terms of its possible renewal for a third season) and "Hollywood Babylon" being maybe one of the best non-mythology episodes I've seen in a horror-themed hourlong since Millennium's "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," I feel like devoting some space to praising the show.

When The WB started airing promos for Supernatural back in Summer 2005, I honestly thought it looked horrible, but the pilot hooked me. It's a grifting, rock and roll X-Files that often manages to do everything right, which, frankly, is shocking when you consider the demo it's aimed at and the network it airs on.

"Babylon" manages to be laugh-out-loud from start to finish, but still cultivates suspense at the right moments and delivers a suitable amount of gore. Of course, making with the funny isn't hard when Ben "The Tick" Edlund is writing your script. Better still, it's got Gary Cole as a smarmy film producer.

The episode begins with a great Girlmore Girls joke at Jared Padalecki's expense, but perhaps the best thing about the episode, though, is the revelation of Dean's (Jensen Ackles) encyclopedic b-movie knowledge. He's basically memorized Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. Watching Dean steal from craft services, hit on starlets, and go native in his Production Assistant cover is relentlessly entertaining, and after a string of heavy, heavy episodes like "Heart" and "Croatoan," this is exactly the sort of thing the show needed. You'll barely miss the Impala, which doesn't make an appearance.

Next week, it looks like the Brothers Winchester allowing the FBI to arrest them in order to clean up a haunted prison, which sounds as dumb as David Goyer's Supermax on the surface, but strikes me as lavishly badass. The episode's even called "Folsom Prison Blues."

The Crow, the first one, wraps itself up pretty neatly. With a nice gothy bow, even. So why do they keep making sequels? Because I, and others like me, are rubes. Rubes who will watch in gleeful terror as the franchise is beaten, burned, and broken over and over and over again. And, much like Eric Draven, it refuses to die. Or rather, it is dead, and yet still lives. Each part of the saga makes less and less of an effort to bother tying itself into the original, so City of Angels is a direct sequel, Salvation was entirely tangential, and Wicked Prayer is like something a mental patient wrote down on the back of a napkin during a bus ride.

I don't understand a lot of the backstory in Wicked Prayer and, to be honest, it never bothered me much. What's going on on-screen is so puerile that I don't need to know the backstory. A cult of Satanist hot-rodders, led by David 'Angel' Boreanaz and Tara 'God, What Happened to Tara Reid?' Reid want to enact a ritual to turn Mr. Buffy into the devil (not just lose his soul, as is wont to happen). For this to happen, though, they need to execute Jimmy Cuervo (Edward Furlong), a name I swear I did not make up, and his starcrossed lover Lily (Emmanuelle Chriqui). After stealing Lily's eyes and Jimmy's heart, the two are dumped into an old refrigerator and tossed in a landfill.

Of course sometimes when a person dies with unfinished business, a crow carries them back to the land of the living. Or something. Armed with newfound invulnerability, angst, and the ability to make terrible puns, Jimmy dresses in black and paints his face to exact vengeance as...a doughy looking goth girl.

If you're dumb enough to watch The Crow: Wicked Prayer then at least let me suggest this drinking game:

Every time Jimmy wishes out loud that he'd stayed dead, take a drink.
Every time Danny Trejo is on screen, take a drink.
Every time Dennis Hopper uses urban slang, take a drink.
Every time Tara Reid annoys the hell out of you, chug.
Every time the movie cuts to a dreamlike scene of Jimmy and Lily near a tree in a field, take a drink.
Every time Boreanaz tries to be menacing but fails embarrassingly, take two drinks.
And if you actually find yourself understanding what's going on, then make everyone else drink, because you need to be cut off.

What's the best part? Danny Trejo does a shamanic dance to save The Crow's life.
What's the worst part? The sensation of having watched the whole thing.

This weekend, some thoughts on Supernatural's "Hollywood Babylon" episode, and an advance look at Severance.

Stephen J. Cannell needs to be stopped, people.

We cannot keep justifying his continued presence in film with, "But the A-Team!" Take a look at his IMDB listing, for crying out loud; it's like a war crime. The best thing Cannell's done in the past twenty years has been The Tooth Fairy, the saga of a ghost witch who kills people with a nail gun.

Wait a second.

I think I've made the movie sound oddly compelling in summary. It's actually very bad, though. Remember, I watch these things so you don't have to.

Tooth Fairy, however, is an evolution of Cannell's craft from 2002's aptly named Dead Above Ground, which is a tragically late and chronically atrocious Craven/Williamson cash-in about a homeless spree-killer masquerading as a vengeful ghost to get his five-minute-long horror film screened at Sundance.

Again, this is not as compelling as it sounds. Trust me.

Jeff Lucas is a troubled teen: he dresses in black, has spiky hair and quotes random bullshit Celtic mysticism nonstop. He even has a sycophantic goth girl who believes he's the reincarnation of some deity or another, possibly the god who rules over everybody's mom's basement or the god of hanging out at the Wal-Mart because this town sucks and you're all conformists, man.

Anyway, instead of making a documentary for his communications class as assigned, he makes an untitled, badly edited horror film where his classmates get butchered. He even makes a speech before the screening about how the film isn't titled because he defies labeling or some craziness. Of course you do, Count Chocula. Now go on down to the mall and hang out at the arcade. You know, with the 50 other teens dressed just like you. We get about thirty seconds into the film - the mark at which a blonde girl is decapitated with the aid of the free pack-in video editing software you get when you buy a new PC - before Jeff gets laughed off stage. His ire invoked, Kid Columbine curses his detractors in the most overwrought, sad, and painful dialogue ever written anywhere. "YOU SHALL DIE," he intones, "ON THE SEVENTH EQUINOX OF MABEN!" Exhaustive internet reseach leads me to believe that this doesn't even exist. Our hero is detained by the gym teacher and led off to the school counselor's office, where he promptly threatens her with a trophy.

Just a few days later, though, Jeff is in attendance at a pool party at the school principal's house. Before you can ask if this is in any way appropriate, however, he's punched a girl in the face and precipitated a car chase with the girl's jackass of a boyfriend - a boyfriend who's more concerned that his 80s-mobile is damaged than that his girlfriend, who he just swore he'd love forever, has been punched in the face by Fangs McDarkness. Proving to be as good a wheelman as he is a filmmaker, Jeff goes over a cliff while trying to force the guy - whose name I already forget - off the road. The car bursts into flames (this is the most exciting part of the movie).

We cut to one year later. Boyfriend (I'm not even pretending to remember names) is a suspect in Jeff's murder. Gym Teacher is now living in his van and camping in the school parking lot. Which happens all the time. Thrown out by a gun-toting principal (who's receiving threatening phone calls), he relocates (where else?) down by the river. Realizing that this moron is in fact living in a van down by the river is probably the second funniest thing about the movie after the 'seventh equinox of Maben' nonsense. Soon enough, a robed figure shows up and kills him with an axe. Pinned to Coach's chest by the axe is a picture of the principal.

The cops decide that this is pretty clear proof that the principal is the murderer. Because murderers leave pictures of themselves laying around at crime scenes. I mean, I don't read a lot of true crime stuff, but it happens, right?

And this brings me to the cop. The cop in Dead Above Ground may be the worst law enforcement official ever. I mean, he assumes that killers leave vanity shots of themselves on their victims. Once the principal turns up dead he's forced to forgo that theory, but he then starts to suspect one of the teens on the basis that the cop doesn't like him very much. I'm pretty sure that this suspect's death would make him come to an even broader, more unfounded new conclusion, like "The Irish must have done it," or "I knew it was the zombie principal!" This guy makes the sherriff in Nail Gun Massacre, a guy who stood around, looked at corpses and said things like, "I suspect she was killed with a nail gun," look like that author chick from Murder, She Wrote.

The sycophantic goth girl from earlier in the movie somehow manages to convince everyone that Jeff's vengeful ghost is responsible. Because ghosts kill people with axes. So the kids start to have a bunch of goofy seances, and this where they discover that the ghost will stop killing if and only if they can get Jeff's awful movie screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Why Sundance? Well, who knows. I mean, any savvy film buff knows that Slamdance is the better platform for a low-budget genre film. Then again, Jeff Lucas is not, as we've seen, a savvy anything.

The end of Dead Above Ground is a graveyard of forced revelations, cheap plot twists, and instances of the killer breaking his own rules, which long-time readers should know absolutely galls me. I won't ruin the ending, because I just know you're dying to see this movie, but here's one of those forced revelations I talked about: remember when Jeff threatened the counselor with a trophy? Well, the cop decides to dust the trophy for prints, one year after the fact. And he finds out that our favorite goth is actually the son of a recently murdered Hollywood director who'd been living outside town with a bunch of hobos. Why did he bother to create a fake identity and enroll in high school? Who knows. If hard-pressed, the writer probably couldn't tell you either.

The only redeeming feature of Dead Above Ground is that the overly sententious dialogue about the mystic arts and Celtic lore elevates the movie from 'irredeemable' to 'unintentionally funny'. Is it worth your time? Maybe two minutes worth of YouTube hunting with fingers crossed, just to see if someone's done a Good Parts version. Or if you need to know how not to make a horror film. In that case, this movie is like a textbook.

I went to church twice Easter weekend. The Friday night service was worlds better than the equally long affair the following night.

If you have the stomach for it, Grindhouse is the most fun you'll have at the movies for at least another month, and possibly even longer. If you're worried that it's too long and want to catch it on rental, just go. You need to see Grindhouse on a big screen; that's where it's intended to be seen, to the point where film crackle and missing reels and fake trailers, etc. have all been added into the proceedings. I love these movies, but I have no idea how they're going to play on DVD. The charm it has in the theater might turn annoying, or it might not.

Yes, it's ridiculously gory. But if you're reading this blog, I'm guessing you're okay with that.

Yes, Fergie is in it. But she dies. Painfully.

However, there's also a tow truck driver and a one-legged go-go dancer killing zombies. And explosions. And that's just the first half.

Everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Dr. Uwe Boll is not the worst filmmaker in the history of cinema. The honor has to go to Ulli Lommel, and if I'd known that just yesterday, I wouldn't be writing this.

The Raven makes Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children look like The Departed. That's really all I'm willing to say without risking some sort of PTSD flashback. I'll dare and provide a summary, though.

Lenore is an orphan who was raised in an orphanage by nuns. She was discovered as an infant by her 'grandfather', a man who rambles around the set in a leisure suit, captain's hat, and an eye patch. Grandpa is, according to Mother Superior, "a heroic airline pilot who lost his eye and was never able to fly again." So instead, he hung around this orphanage reading Lenore the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, he tells Lenore that she is the actual Lenore from the poems, and that the titular Raven is a powerful bird that will protect her.

I'm not sure what happens after that, but context clues inform me that Lenore is raped by her imaginary friend, whom she later kills by throwing a hairdryer into his bath. Years later, 'Skinner' (the imaginary rape guy) comes back and starts killing Lenore's boyfriend, bandmates and friends in a wooden yet highly oversexualized manner (my personal 'favorite', a highly subjective and ironically used term, being a topless woman who is bent over a table while he stands behind her and stabs her in the back of the head repeatedly). After each murder, some sort of message or editorial comment is played across the screen in scribbly red letters, usually something like, "I kill all bitches," or "All bitches will die," or "Lucifer."

After a good half-dozen people disappear in totally mysterious ways, Lenore begins to suspect that something is wrong. So she goes to the police.

Okay, I'm totally joking. She has her house blessed by priests. I guess to bring her missing friends back. I can sympathize with Lenore; by this point, I was praying for the movie to stop.

After this, Skinner shows up and kills Lenore after getting into a martial arts fight with Lenore's only surviving friend. Her ghost goes off to be with Poe forever.

Sounds great, right? Right.

Oh, I forgot! Poe appears as a character in the movie, who will often read snippets of verse from "The Raven" that are totally unconnected to the events portrayed onscreen, and will at other times, explain details of Lenore's backstory, which he does poorly. At other times, Lenore herself narrates, and this is even worse, since at least Poe doesn't sound like he's reading from a cue card while hung over.

Occasionally during transitions, the movie cuts to brief sequences of a man with furry, clawed hands driving a car aound a city at night. I call these sequences 'Monster Cab' and I think the concept could carry its own movie.

I hate dolls.  Maybe it's the uncanny valley at work, or the feeling that they're always watching me, but I hate dolls with a passion.  When I first started dating my wife back in antiquity, I ended up staying the night at her parents' house due to inclement weather, and the room I got put in that night had a giant glass display case full of porcelain dolls.  I got maybe 10 minutes of sleep.  Some of my wife's sisters believe the room is haunted, having reported similar discomfort to me in hushed tones, but after seeing Dead Silence, I'm open to the possibility that it's the dolls that are haunted.  And also murderous.

For those of you, like me, who wonder why horror fails so often, consider that a film is a bit like a magic trick.  More than a novel or short story or song or painting or any other work of art, a film - horror or otherwise - basically requires captivating visual stimuli, well-concealed artifice, and the wherewithal to direct the audience's attention to the right place at the right time.  And all of that boils down to selling a concept and then paying it off in a satisfying way, what Christopher Priest might call 'The Pledge' and 'The Prestige'.  The complication is that usually only one of these two things is done well, and that's generally because mad flashes of inspriation rarely give you both, and the conscious construction of 'quality' by forumla gives you neither.  Ideas give you the beginning and make you puzzle out the end, or give you the end and make you work backwards to create a world where your event can take place.  Which is fine, except we all know that people are lazy.  Or, at least that lazy people make lots of horror movies.

So, where does this leave Dead Silence?  The ending is really great.  In fact, in direct comparison to the hour or so preceding it, I'd say that the final portion of the film is monumentally successful. 

Some of you might be thinking that this is going to be another Child's Play or Demonic Toys or Puppet Master, or even The Gingerdead Man.  Based on the first 30 minutes, it seems like the writers have tossed their bucket down that well, but it's a bit of misdirection.  Unfortunately, the movie suffers for it, and many of the real groan-inducing moments in Dead Silence come about as a direct result of this decision.  The movie is not about dolls running around and killing people.  In fact, we never see the dolls do more than move their heads or their eyes.  It's minimalist, and it works.  The writers are also smart enough to not use Billy the dummy as the 'real monster' of the film, which salvages it considerably.  We see Billy too often, and while he exudes malice, he's also a ventriloquist's dummy.  And while Mary Shaw's 'Zeromus' form is not exactly terrifying, it is not a disappointment.   And while you might ask the person sitting next to you why, if the ghost's manifestation mutes all sound, creaking doors and footsteps are still audible, the choice is an excellent one for creating and driving tension. 

So what doesn't work?  The presentation of cg gore shots like mile markers in the film falls totally flat, because Dead Silence is not a gore film.  Not only are they unnecessary, they're presented in such a way that they seem funny, not shocking or scary.  The pacing over the opening and middle sections is generally poor and always slow, and the subplot with Donnie Wahlberg's 'look I'm Bruce Willis!' detective character is pointless.  In fact, way too much of the film fills like filler.  The creators obviously want to make Mary Shaw a character that has mythology to her, but it's the area in the film where they seem to skimp the most.  What's there is obfuscated by characters speaking cryptically or refusing to reveal what they obviously know just to eat up time between the inciting event and the fiery, doll-shotgunning climax.

You read that right.

Dead Silence was built on the cornerstone of one hundred dolls being exploded with a shotgun in a burning building.  I don't know if that alone makes it worth the price of admission, but it definitely salves having sat through an otherwise flawed film.  The Saw pedigree touted on all of the one-sheets implies that they could have done better, though.

About a month ago, Rich Drees gave me a nondescript-looking disc in an equally nondescript clear plastic case. "I know you like horror," he tells me. "This is the scariest film you'll ever see." I look down at the disc and, scrawled in marker are the words "Jesus Camp."

My first reaction was that this was Rich being snarky, which is something that I can count on a good 100% of the time, but after viewing the movie, I can't help but agree with the sales pitch I was given. Jesus Camp is probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen.

Despite the lack of violence or gore in the movie, I think the closest comparison I can draw to Jesus Camp as an experience is probably Hostel. There's an unsettling opening sequence that's quickly washed away by some earnest, slice-of-life stuff that sets up later events and introduces us to the central characters. It seems largely harmless. And then it reaches the point of no return, and the remainder of the film is spent trying to puzzle out why what you're seeing is happening and when it is going to stop.

Jesus Camp is a documentary.

The movie chronicles a summer at the "Kids On Fire" bible camp, which is hosted - for super irony - in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. While I'm not a parent, I think it's safe to say that there is absolutely no way I would ever send a child that I was responsible for to any place where they would be 'On Fire', even in name only. Over the course of the camp, we get to watch little children be shamed and indoctrinated into 'God's Army,' as they are consistently told that there is a war coming, or going on already. Who the war is against, I don't think we're ever told. The climax of the film depicts the campers chanting in tongues and smashing ceramic mugs - with the word 'government' scrawled on them in marker - with a hammer, which is according to the camp's founder, Pastor Becky, a prayer for God to install a righteous government. Which I have to assume means a government full of nothing but evangelical Christians.

There are some sad truths in Jesus Camp, not the least of which is that these children have abominable parents who are happy to teach their children willful ignorance and intolerance. "How would you feel about a school that didn't teach evolution?" A home-schooling mother asks her son. "I think I'd be okay with that," he replies with a cherubic chuckle. The same mother also points out that science "doesn't prove anything" and drills her children on statistics that can be used to disprove global warming. If there has ever been proof of anti-intellectualism permeating the American right, this movie is it. Another unfortunate realization is that some of these children are probably suffering from mental illness and will never receive treatment or medication for it.

Normally, I'm not one to trust documentaries. Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore have done a grand job of teaching me that they are almost total artifice and not the glimpse of verisimilitude the genre appears to be. However, despite some editing tricks and the subtle application of some ominous music at just the right parts, I can accept a lot of what I see in Jesus Camp at face value. There's no way to take a lot of the insanity that Pastor Becky teaches out of context, no way to misinterpret the agenda of the adults in this film and no way not to pity the awkward, earnest kids who are their victims.

It figures that I'd find some way to be let down by a movie about a demon apocalypse.  And not only because the movie was bad, but also because the entire film is predicated on a lie.

Now, I'm not criticizing a good mindfuck film, or even the 'everything you thought you knew is wrong' plot twist here, although that's maybe what it sounds like.  I'm talking about a film being sold to me, the viewer as one thing, and then having it not even be relevant to the story.  It's like, if you went to see Star Wars, and it takes place entirely in a Kansas Wal-Mart and there is no violent conflict at all in the film.  There are obviously films, like Cry_Wolf, where the ruse contributes to the viewing experience and reinforces the big plot twist, but Dead Mary isn't one of those films.

Dead Mary is, of course, a riff on the 'Bloody Mary' urban legend, which has been done to death - badly, in the case of Urban Legend: Bloody Mary, or surprisingly well in one of the stronger episodes in Supernatural's first season.  Or, if you prefer Tony Todd, Candyman.  And predictably, there's a scene where the characters in the movie stand in front of the bathroom mirror of the cabin they rented out in the middle of nowhere, and say 'Dead Mary' three times. And then people start dying.  As though this Dead Mary character was actually summoned and now taking out all of the particpants.

That's certainly what I'd expect to happen, given the title of the film.  But it's a complete red herring, and the supernatural goings on are totally unconnected.  Unfortunately for the idea - that there's this worldwide demonic attack occurring while these self-absorbed drunks are killing each other and whining about who's sleeping with who - there's insufficient context.  We don't see anything remotely resembling civilization and it's a severe detriment.  Pulse was at its best when we saw the hysteria happening in the background and watched it escalate while the main characters seemed too obsessed to notice.  Altered worked with a similarly claustrophobic environment for most of its screentime but still managed to create a believable world.  So ultimately, Dead Mary isn't held back by its concepts, but by their poor execution. 

Which is why there's such unsatisfying horror out there.  Misdirection.  Filmmakers are focused more on gore for gore's sake or cheeky in-jokes than they are on making a movie that viewers will care about.  The mise en scene tends to be ignored in movies like Dead Mary, which is pretty much backwards of the way it should go.