scrappybilly Reviews

Exit 0 (2019)

Flirts With Coherence

[2/10 · 29 November 2019]

You know those movies that approach, and flirt with, greatness but never quite achieve it? Most of the movie will be fine, or even good, but there are glimmers of a *great* movie hidden in there somewhere. If only the script had had a second draft, or if they'd had a more brutal editing process and trimmed some of the fat.

Exit 0 flirts with competence and coherence. Every now and then you'll see these glimmers and glimpses of a movie that could have at least made sense. There are some effective moments that hint at a movie that could have been okay.

Without giving away too much of the plot, there are two potential threats that appear to be at odds with each other and never wrap up in any meaningful way. Our two main characters, Billy and Lisa, are staying at a hotel that may either be haunted, or the owners of the hotel are, somehow, in cahoots with these local hillbillies that torture, rape and kill the hotel's guests. Or maybe it's both things-the hotel is haunted *and* these murders also happen to occur. Are the ghosts involved in making this happen somehow? Did a ghost leave a videotape for Billy as a warning, or as a threat? Do the hotel's owners answer to the spirits of a shipwreck? What must these meetings between hotel management and the apparitions look like, I wonder?

Billy, I think, is supposed to be a character you're meant to care about. However, he spends the majority of the movie berating his girlfriend for existing. And in a moment meant to hint at a larger, more ominous threat, he notices that time moves at a different rate at the hotel. This could have been spooky if done right, but instead Billy winds up bragging about owning a Rolex, shaking it in the face of the hotel's front desk clerk. Exit 0 is full of moments that could have been good if characters had behaved like human beings.

Instead of ending the movie on a mysterious note, leaving the viewer to wonder about the truth, the movie just sort of shrugs and admits, "I don't know." It's less ambiguous and feels more like the actual last ten minutes of the movie got lost somewhere.

Suspiria (I) (2018)

Starts off well, but after that....

[4/10 · 1 November 2018]

Suspiria, as I'm sure anyone reading this is aware, is a remake of the 1977 Dario Argento film of the same name. This time around, it's directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call me by Your Name) and David Kajganich (who worked by Guadagnino on A Bigger Splash and created the AMC limited television show "The Terror"), and expands upon the folklore of Agento's "Three Mothers" trilogy. 2018's Suspiria is less a remake and more of an expansion on the world of the Three Mothers, even boasting a post-credit sequence, like an entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Dakota Johnson plays Susie, an American ballet dancer who joins a world-renowned German dance company, that harbors a dark secret. It is, you see, run by a coven of witches. Anyone who discovers the secret, or goes looking too deep, disappears-usually in a violent dispatching. Their motives are unclear, but they feed off of the energy of the young dancers and when one goes missing, it's easy enough for them to find another to replace her.

Tilda Swinton plays Madame Blanc, the face of the dance company, a dancer and a dark entity that takes Susie under her wing. The most interesting scenes in Suspiria deal with their relationship. They're at once predator and prey, mother and daughter, and two old souls who've known each other since before time. Their interactions, and the way they involve, showcase a much, much better movie than the one we ended up getting.

The problem with Suspiria is that it's a mess-in every conceivable way, it's a mess. As a horror movie, it isn't scary; the scenes of suspense are taken to comical extremes. Whether these comical extremes are intended or not are up for debate, and in a better movie, that would be a subject of interesting conversation. Here, it's simply confusing. As a drama, it's incoherent. Twists in the plot occur without any real logic behind them. As a horror fan, I love movies that boast their own kind of self-contained logic, but that requires a certain suspension of disbelief that Suspiria just didn't earn.

Suspiria is a unique paradox of having both too much and too little plot. It has too much plot dedicated toward dead-ends and too little dedicated to big reveals, where they wind up confusing and pointless. In a movie where about five notable things happen, to say its 2.5-hour-long run time is bloated would be a generous understatement. In what will surely become the film's most infamous scene, Susie dances, while her movements magically contort and mutilate another dancer. This scene goes on and on and on, and the thing is, it's not even particularly well-edited. Susie will do a pirouette, and the victim on the receiving end of it will... just sort of crash into a wall, or her jaw will unhinge. None of the movements match. It would have been interesting to see one movement darkly mirror another, or vice versa, but instead it looks like we're watching two unrelated occurrences take place. It's like watching someone eat cereal juxtaposed with a violent car wreck.

I don't believe it's a spoiler to reveal that Tilda Swinton also plays the character of Dr. Josef Klemperer, because it's worth noting that her performance as him makes zero sense in the context of the movie. It's a distraction. She also has an annoying acting tic as the doctor in which she clacks her jaw or smacks her lips every three seconds or so. It's a bizarre choice that I think the filmmakers were proud of, but was a miscalculation from beginning to end. In an interview, David Kajganich said, "Both Luca and I were adamant that the male gaze never intrude," and if that was their thinking here, it was a total failure.

Some of the more head-scratching decisions in the film can best be summed up the the terrorism subplot, an event never directly witnessed, but terrorists have kidnapped a group of people and a days-long event unfolds surrounding the school. At first, it adds a certain ambiance to the film, and it works really well in establishing the unease of the world outside of the dance company, as though the coven of witches are affecting the world at large around them. A girl named Sara (Mia Goth) hears something and pokes her head outside and says it was a bomb, that she can smell it. This helps put us, the audience, in the world with these characters. And then, this plotline just sort of drags along and becomes, strangely, a series of news reports, as though the movie we're watching is being interrupted by an unrelated documentary. It never ties into the narrative as a whole, it's just a distraction that, like the Tilda-as-a-doctor story, should have been left on the cutting room floor.

The film's finale, in which everything comes together, just sort of staggers into place. Usually, getting everyone together all at once for the finish requires events established earlier, where a character will do this or that and everything pays off. This is just a scene that sort of happens, doesn't have any real tension, and contains revelations that undo the entire plot that had preceded it. It's also an extravaganza of terrible-looking effects and smeary frame rate that looks like it was inspired by the German shot-on-video horror entry The Burning Moon, but The Burning Moon was made for maybe a few thousand dollars and is genuinely unnerving.

To me, it feels like 1977's Suspiria is the remake. It feels like that film took the 2018 version, looked at all the plots that went nowhere, trimmed them out, boiled it down to its purest essence, and made a crack rock of horror. The problem, I suspect, was the director's desire to make this the first part of a trilogy, instead of a standalone movie. So, as a result, we're left with some threads that may pay off later, but sure as hell don't pay off here.

Suspiria is going to be a love-it-or-hate-it type of movie. I could see loving it, it just had a certain divorce from reality I didn't think was earned; its surreal qualities weren't enough to afford its more outlandish aspects. Its grounded-in-the-real-world vibe clashed with the horror instead of holding up a mirror to it.

Fateful Findings (2013)

No more books!

[8/10 · 31 January 2014]

Fateful Findings is a new film directed by the up-and-coming and relatively unknown Neil Breen. It is a political thriller of sorts with paranormal and cosmic undertones including, but not limited to mushrooms that turn into magical crystals, spiritual beings and a car accident that turns someone who already had special abilities into some sort of super genius who now has incredible hacking abilities, is a scientist and well-regarded novelist.

This movie is being touted as a new The Room, a movie so bad that its badness transcends everything that we know about bad movies and becomes sort of brilliant.

Take, for instance, a series of scenes in which the main character, also played by Neil Breen, appears to transport himself into a magical crystal, and the set inside of the crystal is clearly just a basement lined with trash bags to give the illusion of a shiny, black stone. Or the awkward sex scenes, or the insistence that he definitely show off his ass for some required auteur-related nudity.

I'm a lover of bad movies. I think that bad movies can be equally entertaining as a great movie. The only difference is that what is so enjoyable about a bad movie is unplanned and completely unintentional. They work as the best kind of comedy, being totally devoid of self- awareness. A certain amount of schadenfreude is involved when you get so much pleasure out of these movies, because you're always aware that the director and his cast and crew set out to make something legitimately great and entertaining, but failed miserably along the way. We laugh at the movie screen not because of some wonderfully witty banter, but because each reaction shot seems to be filmed on a different day with a different lighting set-up and no consideration for the audio matching the rest of the scene.

If you, too, are a lover of bad movies and cinematic failures, Fateful Findings will be perfect for you. It was a sincere effort to say something meaningful, obscured through bad writing, terrible performances and direction that never really found any sort of groove. The opening shot of the movie is pretty damn masterful and builds tension and you're thinking that you might be watching a movie from a skilled craftsman, but immediately after that, the movie looks like an after school special from the 1980's, and then the cinematography only gets worse from there. It's like the quality declines and then does a reverse plateau somewhere near the bottom and flatlines from there until the movie is over.

Fateful Findings is good, very good, but not great. It won't rank as highly as The Room, Birdemic or Troll 2 in years to follow. It just doesn't have the personal auteuristic passion of a romance that had gone sour, obviously inspired by a real breakup. It doesn't have the spectacular set-pieces involving birds that crap acid and explode when they hit buildings. And no one pisses on hospitality.

"No more books!" is going to be the oft-quoted line from this movie, when our main character chucks a book he wrote at one of his five laptops that he utilizes for hacking "the most secret government and corporate secrets" despite never being on. He mostly just sits at a black screen and clacks away and nods, letting us know his efforts are successful.

Through a series of events including a pretty realistic looking car accident, our main character meets up with his childhood love, now working in the hospital he visits during his recovery. He mentions to her that he knew he was in love with her when they were 8 years old, which means I guess that they're the same age, even though he's gotta be at around 60 and she at least half that age. Because this movie was written and directed by the star, every woman in the movie seems to have a huge boner for him, everyone from his drug-addicted girlfriend to his former childhood love to the teenage neighbor next door.

I'm unable to write a straightforward review for this movie because it doesn't follow any sort of traditional narrative. I mean, it has a beginning, it has a middle, it has a climax and some sort of resolution at the end there, but the plot itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is magic and gems and floating vapors of ghosts and mysterious men with strange abilities, leading to a massive exposé on corruption, but how all of those things actually fit together is anyone's guess. It could be argued that Neil Breen is employing some Lynchian, dreamlike logic to his movies and has created a low-budget surrealist masterpiece— the black gem of this movie is like the blue box from Mulholland Drive. If that's the way you want to read into it, awesome.

If you have an interest in cult movies, watch Fateful Findings as soon as you can at your local grindhouse or when it inevitably becomes available on home video.

21 Jump Street (1987–1991)

Hoaky, but fun

[18 August 2001]

21 Jump Street was a show where it showed cops as attractive, ultra-hip, stylish people. The time at which it came out was when cocaine and heroin were really cool, so this was kind of like a propaganda show, where it had the up-side to not doing drugs. Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise were always fast-witted cool kids because they were drug free and upholded the law. It usually seemed corny, but something about it was fun, always seeing them having fun while doing their jobs was so cool.

I can understand how Johnny Depp wanted to quit, because it didn't show a lot of things, like police corruption, or that it was completely unrealistic and the plots were contrived. But, with adequate directing and campy script combined with good acting, it was a great show.

-Billy