This Week’s Watches
Shark Night (3D) (2011)
Starring: Sara Paxton & Dustin Milligan
Directed by: David R. Ellis
Rating: 0 stars
The Creature: Supposedly, sharks. Not that we get to see them…
Here’s a simple question for you. What do expect to see in a horror movie called Shark Night 3D? If your answer was shark attacks, then you would be right. But you would be wrong for thinking that anything like this actually happens in the movie that is deceptively titled Shark Night 3D. There are three vitally important things missing from this movie: sharks, shark attacks, and a plot about sharks. How could this happen? You might ask. Who the hell knows, I would reply. Ironically for a film with 3D in the title, the plot, characters and situations they face couldn’t be any more two dimensional. There is absolutely no tension here, as CGI sharks rarely make an appearance, which is odd for a movie with the word shark in the title. It really should not have been promoted as a horror movie, because all that we see are University students disappearing under the water and a bit of blood. At two points we see a shark actually eat someone, but the fearsome fish (which has more facial expressions than the entirety of the cast) only seems to swallow its victim’s whole… which is not only incredibly stupid but very disappointing.
Why didn’t anyone involved in making this movie realise that audiences who have gone out of their way to pay to see a movie called Shark Night 3D might actually want to see people being eaten by sharks? They seemed to have missed the entire point of the horror genre: that you give the audience what they want. The script, acting and plot can be wafer thin, but as a bare minimum you provide gratuitous and/or exciting (or tense) death sequences. And this movie doesn’t even deliver that- people just die, mostly off-screen, in boringly unoriginal ways. To be honest, it’s pretty unfair to even call Shark Night 3D a movie, as it is just a series of awkwardly cut together scenes of people swimming in a lake, a CGI shark jumping at the screen, and an awful lot of poorly written dialogue.
In summary: Shark Night 3D is so boring it makes Deep Blue Sea look like an Academy Award winning masterpiece.
The Thing (2011)
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen & Eric Christian Olsen
Directed by: Matthijs van Heijningen
Rating: ★★★
The Creature: A shape shifting alien
Did anybody really think that they could make a prequel/remake of John Carpenter’s classic The Thing (1982) that could live up to the original (which technically wasn’t ‘original’ itself as it too was a remake of the 50s B-Movie The Thing From Another World)? But, even though it was a remake, not only is The Thing (1982) considered one of the best horror movies ever it is also considered by many to be a masterpiece in suspense as it took a lesson in paranoia one step further… And yet that didn’t stop Hollywood from halting production on more original ideas in order to make a quick buck by remaking/prequel-ing a film didn’t need improving upon.
The Thingin question, this modern rehash, in all fairness, is not terrible. But it isn’t great either. And as a fan of the Carpenter version on which it is clearly based, it was never going to eclipse it, or even add something extra. The worse part of this movie is that it (ironically) not only copies some of the best moments from the 80s version almost exactly, it also depends on CGI monster effects whereas one of the charms/terrifying elements of original is that it used incredibly disturbing puppets/animatronics. And what’s worse is that (most) of the effects look like CGI… and that kind of ruins a lot of the suspense.
There are other problems with The Thing, and these are mainly centred on the fact that there is little to no character development (so it is hard to remember people’s names as well as who is who, and who does what- something that is particularly important) and there is no real sense of menace or threat. But, in all fairness to the movie, there are a few very tense sequences, but these are ruined by badly executed and poorly placed reveals of who the alien is, and they are basically almost complete replicas of the same scenes in Carpenter’s classic (which is pretty stupid). There are some terrible problems with parts of the script too, for example at one point one of the characters says that under no circumstances should they split up, then says ‘let’s split up’.
On the positive side of the spectrum, the monster itself is disgusting and visceral and does work well at being horrific,(even though it is CGI) and the movie as a whole is a fairly entertaining, as it does become more unsettling towards the end.
It may not have been as bad as I thought it might, and as a prequel I guess it works in some ways, but it really only answers questions that we didn’t need to know the answers to. It might pass the time, and it has some good horror elements to it, but you’re basically better off just watching Carpenter’s version of The Thing (1982)- there’s a reason it is so highly critically acclaimed, and still holds up to this day.
(As an aside- it really really irritates me that from now on, when discussing the seminal horror tour de force, I will have to put (1982) at the end, to differentiate between them. Why couldn’t they have come up with a different title?)
Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
Starring: Lauren Bittner, Chris Smith and Katie Featherston
Directed by: Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
Rating: ★
The Creature: A ghost/demon
Another desperate (and surprisingly financially successfully) attempt at Hollywood trying to drag out an effective idea for all it is worth, Paranormal Activity 3 goes back in time to when the unfortunate Katie began experiencing paranormal activity as a child. Since the second one squeezed the life out of the franchise, this one has thrown it into a deep hole six feet under, as the only thing ‘different’ about it is the fact that children are the ones being terrorised and that there are so many plot holes it is mind boggling. The entire point of the movie makes no sense, as it ruins the entire franchise by establishing a continuity that clearly wasn’t in either the first or second film. I think that Katie and her sister would remember as children watching their mother and her boyfriend being brutally murdered in front of them by their grandmother, who, by the way, is the leader of an evil witch’s coven. And yes, this is exactly where the franchise takes us, destroying the minute amount of tension built up in the first half. There are some jump scares, but these are less subtle than in the original, and the stupid ending completely ruins the entire film series. It’s a shame because the movie actually does begin quite well, but just like the second one, it gets incredibly boring and tedious (especially the bit with the fan- seriously we stare at a fan for about ten minutes), and most important, we’ve seen it all before, except this time it is so over the top that it isn’t very scary. Paranormal Activity 3 is yet again a prime example of Hollywood milking another rotten cash cow.
Stake Land (2010)
Starring: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Kelly McGillis & Danielle Harris
Directed by: Jim Mickle
Rating: ★½
The Creature: Vampires. (Or is it really the humans…?)
Stake Landhas apparently been critically well received and so promotes itself as an ‘indie-darling’ in the horror genre, so I expected it to be somewhat entertaining. But it isn’t. It’s terribly slow-paced and incredibly boring: and for a movie about a vampire apocalypse, this really isn’t a good thing at all. Most of the movie relies on the narration of a teenager to tell the story, rather than actually show the story happening, a bad move for a visual medium. I think the main problem with this film is that it doesn’t quite decide what it is- it doesn’t know if it should be a gritty, realistic and raw unconventional indie flick, or a conventional Hollywood horror movie, so it teeters between the two for its entire duration and so never builds up enough to steam to be effective at becoming one or the other, therefore failing spectacularly on both counts. If the director had settled with a ‘realism’ vibe, it could have worked really well, but unrealistically convenient plot coincidences make the film wooden and clunky. Also, for a movie that is supposedly built around establishing and developing characters, we never really get to know, care about or like any of them. It does have some good gory action packed moments, but not enough to keep the sluggish pace interesting. So all in all, Stake Land is a jumbled and confused, and I definitely do not recommend it. Just watch 30 Days of Nightinstead: a slow burning vampire movie that actually succeeds at being horrific, terrifying, tense and involving.
My Pick Of The Week
Skyline (2010)
Starring: Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Donald Faison, Brittany Daniel, David Zayaz & Crystal Reed
Directed by: The Brothers Strause
Rating: ★★★½
The Creature: Brain sucking aliens (literally)
By choosing Skyline as my Pick Of The Week, I am already being incredibly divisive. Skyline seems to be one of those movies that you either love, or hate. It was generally critically panned, and most people I have spoken to about it seemed to think it was awful. But it isn’t. I can see why it is an ‘acquired taste’ and why some people might dislike it, but I don’t think it deserves the contempt that people seem to have towards it. It’s a pretty decent sci-fi action thriller. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s scary, it’s disturbing… what more could you ask for really? If a movie about a brain ripping alien invasion isn’t your thing, then steer clear of it. But if you like glossy, stylised action thrillers involving tons of aliens and their motherships, then you will like it. The CGI is astounding, the plot suspense filled and unpredictable, and the conclusion incredibly original: you won’t see a finale like this in most Hollywood Blockbusters, that’s for sure. It’s a very ‘different’, unique and wholly original disaster flick that takes the usually clunky B-Movie idea of an alien invasion and runs with it: creating a visually stunning and terrifying ordeal that places us squarely in the centre of it. With Skyline, one should expect the unexpected and prepare to be blow away, quite literally, like I was.
0 Yorumlar