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Homecoming (2009)
For die hard Mischa Barton fans only.
We've seen it all before nicely sums up "Homecoming." Plot, characters, twists and turns (Such as they are) are all strictly out of the stock Hollywood thriller handbook.
The stock plot revolves around small town football star Michael (Matt Long) coming home to see his High School jersey retired with new girlfriend Elizabeth (A very cute Jessica Stroup) in tow ostensibly so she can get to know his old friends and meet his parents. Unfortunately for Mike and especially unfortunate for Elizabeth, Mike's old flame from his high school days, Shelby (Mischa Barton) is still in town and still believes he carries a torch for her as she so obviously does for him. When she discovers her old love has a new lover and is no longer interested in her she's devastated.
Shortly Elizabeth falls into Shelby's clutches and becomes her prisoner as Shelby hatches a plot to make her rival miserable while trying to win back her old boyfriend.
Virtually every cliché in the "desperate to escape" victim playbook is used and most are presented only half-heartedly at best. Eventually all the players come together for the clichéd ending and anyone who's surprised by how it all plays out has never seen a modern Hollywood thriller or has an IQ lower than Forrest Gump himself.
There are plot holes galore and the story requires otherwise intelligent characters to act stupid or at least do stupid things no one in such real life situations ever would. Elizabeth is presented with several obvious methods of escape or at least chances to alert other people to her predicament but passes up the most fundamental means at her disposal simply so the writers can extent her pain and suffering and make the movie last the requisite hour and half viewing time. (One obvious case is when a loan officer comes to visit Shelby at her house and when he leaves a supposedly desperate Elizabeth can only meekly tap at the window to try and gain his attention when she has over a dozen devices around her in the room she could easily use to smash the glass and alert him to her presence.) Certain plot points never add up and simply become distractions as the movie plods along. Although Elizabeth is supposed to be the love of Mike's life he and his policeman cousin Billy (Michael Landes) accept Elizabeth's disappearance fairly casually. At first Mike acts extremely upset at her apparent last minute ditching of him on the eve of her finally meeting his parents, yet never goes beyond a few vain attempts to call her for an explanation. Mike's parents never seem to upset at possibly never meeting the woman that might be their future daughter in-law and no one else in town ever seems to ask Mike about his girlfriend's absence.
Elizabeth discovers evidence Shelby poisoned her mother yet Shelby's motives for doing so are never explained. She seems to have only inherited a tremendous amount of debt from her mother's death as both the business and house she left behind are near foreclosure. At one point while trying to affect an escape, Elizabeth smashes Shelby in the face with a porcelain toilet tank lid only to have Shelby quickly cover up the damage in the next scene with a light touch of make up. No one even asks her about her head injury throughout the rest of the movie! And why a character so obviously demented as Shelby went unnoticed all her life in such a closed, rural small town, especially by her long time boyfriend, is beyond explanation.
The biggest plot hole of all is why Shelby keeps her rival alive at all especially when her homicidal tendencies become evident half-way through the film.
I could go on but you get the idea.
Mischa Barton, for all her off screen real life escapades, is turning in to a very competent actress. She's really the only reason to sit through this thing to the bitter, hackneyed end. She's obviously about 4 points better looking than anyone else in the film and another plot hole is why anyone so attractive would have such a hard time finding a decent replacement for an old high school boyfriend in the first place.
If you really want to see a good, tightly scripted thriller about an innocent victim held prisoner by a psychopath rent the much better "Misery." You'll get Kathy Bates instead of the fetching Mischa Barton but you won't regret the time you spent watching it either.
The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)
A cult classic everyone should see at least once!
The Legend of Boggy Creek is one of the seminal movies of my childhood. Like many children growing up in the early '70s I remember the massive television ad campaign around this film and how spooky and mysterious it made the movie appear. Heck, even the movie poster that ran in the paper with it's hunched over figure slogging through the swamp scared me. I just had to go see it when it first came out!
And I was not disappointed. Shot in a docudrama style, the film is atmospheric and moody from the very opening scene of a young boy running across empty fields stopping occasionally to glance back and make sure the "Wildman" wasn't following him to the final scene of the young boy now grown up walking through the dilapidated ruins of his childhood house looking forlornly out at the nearby dark woods and wondering if the creature was still out there, "Still watching me, even now." Even the opening credits are creepy with scenes of a southern swamp, dark and gloomy overlaid with the constant croak of a frog broken only occasionally by the sound of a splash (Was that the creature!?)
Produced and directed by the late Charles B. Pierce for a reported $160K (Money he reportedly borrowed from a trucking company) the film was a hit with the drive-in and Saturday afternoon horror crowd grossing some 20mil at the box office in its original run. Shot using locals instead of professional actors (Many playing themselves) the film is based on actual incidents that occurred around the small southwest town of Fouke Arkansas in the 1960's and early 70's. The sometimes hammy acting and thick southern accents of the players lends an almost home-movie quality to the film that actually adds to the believability rather than detracting from it.
The creature itself (A kind of swamp dwelling Bigfoot from all accounts) is never shown clearly during the film, no doubt due the cheap gorilla costume used to impersonate it. This stunt, much like Spielberg's shark in Jaws, adds a mystery and suspense to the goings on that modern CG effects could never hope to equal and although the creature is never clearly defined it is present in almost every scene in the movie if only in the glimpse of a shaggy leg or arm. Various accounts of run-ins with the creature and re-enacted (Often by the very eye-witnesses themselves) and the entire movie is narrated by Vern Stierman (Who voiced several of Pierce's other movies) ostensibly playing the part of the little boy seen in the opening moments of the film running to tell the local men folk that his mother was scared of a "Wildman" lurking in the bogs near their farm.
His narration takes us from one local's monster story to another with a short break in the middle of the film to follow a local boy (Travis Crabtree) as he treks back into the dark, mysterious swamps of Boggy creek in search of adventure and to meet up with an old man who lives alone on one of the swamps many islands. (And a man who adamantly states he doesn't believe in monsters!) This interlude provides the movie with its two signature songs, "The Ballad of Travis Crabtree" ("Hey Travis Crabtree/Wait a minute for me/Let's go back in the bottoms/back where the fish are bitin'/Where all the world's invitin'/And nobody sees the flowers bloom but me.") and "The Legend of Boggy Creek" both quite effective and both at least on some level, quite humorous ("Here the Sulphur river flows/Rising when the storm cloud blows/This is where the creature goes/Lurking in the land he knows/Perhaps he dimly wonders why/Is there no other such as I/To love, to touch before I die/To listen to my lonely cry.). How many monster movies can you name that have a monster love song!?
Apart from the two ballads the soundtrack itself is outstanding, rising and falling with each shot of the monster and its pursuers. Jaime Mendoza-Nava, who did the music for this film, sometimes uses one of the ballads themes as background music to emphasis the loneliness of the swamp and no doubt the creature itself. It's all very surprisingly effective for such a B-movie soundtrack.
The climax of the film has the monster attacking a group of people who've rented a house near boggy creek. In what has now become a classic of B-movie monster scenes one man is attacked while sitting on the pot!
The film ends with the aforementioned scene of the narrator now grown up standing inside his childhood home, staring out at the nearby gloomy woods and wondering about where the creature is now adding, "You don't have to believe any of this."
Whether you believe any of it or not, the whole thing makes for a wonderfully scary flick. Watch it late one night with the lights out and see if you don't agree, and remember, "He always follows the creeks
."