freeist Reviews

Stephanie (I) (2017)

Low budget, high quality

[8/10 · 28 September 2018]

I don't remember if there were any jump scares in "Stephanie," because it had me always ready to jump, and that might be the best thing I could say about a horror movie these days.

This is the sort of horror movie that could only be made with excellence today. It's low budget, but looks great. It takes place primarily in one house, but doesn't become dull. Instead of special effects, It depends on atmosphere and its actors' performances. In the few places where there are special effects, they don't invite doubt.

I commend the actors, especially child actor Shree Crooks, who hits it out of the park. Was it possible before now to get child-actor performance this strong in a low budget horror movie? Crooks is in every scene and never slips.

My only caveat: the first part might not appeal to some viewers, but if they spend the time looking carefully, they'll see that things are even more amiss than they seem. And if they stay with it, they'll be happy anyway.

An excellent largely ignored film. They used to call these sleepers.

As Above, So Below (2014)

Pretty good, but a little too shaky

[5/10 · 23 September 2018]

This movie is a combination of "National Treasure," "Tomb Raider," and "The Descent." Perdita Weeks plays the manically obsessed archeologist, Scarlett, looking for the Philosopher's Stone. (I forgot to include "Harry Potter" in the mix, didn't I?) A clue from Iran leads her to believe the Stone is somewhere in or around the Paris catacombs. She enlists the help of a reluctant ex-boyfriend George (Ben Feldman) for his skills in Aramaic. He then ends up going along for the whole trip. They need help for the more remote areas of the catacombs, so they hire three guides, played by Francios Civil, Marion Lambert, and Ali Marhyar.

Unfortunately, Benji (Edwin Hodge) a videographer making a documentary about Scarlett, also comes along. I say this not due to anything about Hodge's performance, which was solid. No, I say it because a documentary-maker on the expedition could only mean the rest of the movie would be in shaky-cam.

And man, was it. "As Above, So Below" is ruined by the old shake 'n' quake gimmick. This isn't even a horror cliche. It's just a mistake. What's worse, there was a time that Scarlett is alone without Benji or anyone else to agitate the camera at her. For once I thought I'd be able to follow what was going on. Wrong. The camera was attached to her for more jolting and jittering and even less visual coherency.

The movie only has a $5mil budget. So, most of the thrills in the dark never rise above the Halloween haunted house level. These are mostly leering weirdos and creepy sounds that never come to a coherent cause. If the shaky cam is used to obscure poor makeup jobs, then it works. However, cheesy masks than motion sick.

Weeks character spends most of her underground time trying to interpret ancient verse, which strangely enough rhymes in direct translation from Aramaic. That, more than anything else, should have alerted Scarlett that there was some bad magic afoot.

The acting was more solid than usual for a low-budget horror movie. This makes a few awful lines bearable. Weeks performance as Scarlett lifts the rest of the movie. So, it isn't a complete loss. I don't know how anyone prepares to watch for watching a shaky cam movie, but if you don't mind the jerking and jarring, you can mark my rating up three stars.

Lucy (I) (2014)

Better than I thought, not as good as it could have been.

[4/10 · 25 July 2014]

I couldn't expect very much from a movie based on the myth that humans only used a small percentage of their brains. This notion, harped upon very much by nuns making the point that their students were lazy, was debunked sometime in the pre-mythbusters era. So now it doesn't even make good pseudo-science for a fiction plot.

It's rather startling that Lucy director-writer Luc Besson apparently never got that memo, and its more startling that nobody bothered to correct him before he made a whole movie based on the idea.

If the scientific basis is poor, the plot concept is solid and absorbing: an American woman is captured overseas by a crime syndicate and then is used as an unwilling mule-vessel for some new street drug. She's captured and tortured by a rival gang (I presume, anyway, see below.) While being "worked over" the drug packet in her breaks open. This might not be such a spoiler, because it's all in the trailer.

Oddly enough, even considering it's based on nonsense, I enjoyed Lucy. Scarlett Johansson does a good job as the title character. Of course, you can't find many people who look better on the big screen than Johansson. The problem is, after the first five scenes, she's not really a character anymore. She's become more like a force of nature--a monster really. Usually a friendly one, but still not one anybody can reason with or oppose.

That does get to another flaw in the film. You aren't given a lot of time to get to like the main character before she becomes a monster, and she seemed likable. At about 90 minutes, the film felt too rushed. In fact, it almost becomes incoherent at one point. They seem to have over-edited and left out a scene where Lucy is captured and tortured by a rival gang. (I presumed that's what happened. The trailer seemed as clear on this point than the film did, which is to say not very.) The movie has a lot of gun play, of which Lucy is generally not involved because if she's there, she wins. It sports an international cast, including, Chinese, French and Italian. If I'm not mistaken, it probably has a radically different cut in China and Europe than it does in the US, which is hardly an excuse for leaving key scenes out.

Another problem with purported "underused brain" notion is that Besson inter-cuts scenes of a Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) giving a lecture on that basis. The lecture parts are dull as any lecture, even with Freeman giving it, and are made duller by the fact that it's all nonsense. Nothing Norman says even touches on the real world.

Besson compounds his error by showing us the running percentage of Lucy's brain usage. In short, you're not allowed to forget the stupidity of the "underused brain" myth and just go with the fact that Lucy is becoming mentally more supercharged.

Besson tries to make a deep philosophical point about the nature of existence and time, even within all the shooting and action. He might have succeeded in his philosophical point, except the movie has no credibility due to its basic stupid brain hypothesis. It's the old paradox of science fiction: how does a writer of average intelligence or less write characters of extreme intelligence? Lucy crashes into this paradox like a mack truck into a concrete pylon.

But, if you ignore that, and just accept that she's becoming more and more superhuman, Lucy's not a bad movie.

I would rate it a 5. Despite the lectures, the film kept my interest, and I wanted to see what happened to Lucy. It loses another point, though, due to its major editing error. I don't care how many markets they edit for, in this day and age, there's no excuse for that.

Carrie (2002 TV Movie)

Weak adaptation of Stephen King novel

[3/10 · 9 November 2013]

I love Stephen King's book and I couldn't get through this movie in one sitting. It seems long and the directing shows a flawed vision. Such as the child Carrie bringing fireballs down on her house. It would seem to me that people in the town would never, ever forget an incident like that. Scientists would be investigating it. Or when students have a prank planned for Carrie, why she doesn't notice the crowd gathered around like they're getting ready for a surprise party? One problem is almost all the actors look too old for their parts and the gym teacher (Rena Sofer)--who is older--looks younger than some of the purported high schoolers. Sue Snell's part was totally ruined for me because the actress Kandyse McClure couldn't convince me at any point that she was high school age. That character is so important in this movie. If can't believe her, it's hard to buy the rest of the story.

The few that do get over the hurdle of looking like teens turn in above average performances: Emile de Ravin as Carrie's arch-enemy Chris, Meghan Black as Norma, Chelan Simmons as Helen, and Katharine Isabelle as Tina. Katharine Isabelle is a standout in this film. She's beautiful and she steals every scene she's in. Except for her death scene, where bad CGI ruined it for her. It also ruined the rest of the prom scene. I'm not against CGI, either, except when it is done this poorly.

Nevertheless, this version does a few things I wish the two other versions would have done. Angela Bettis isn't as good as either Chloe Grace Moretz in the recent (2013) version or Sissy Spacek in the original (1976 version). She looks too old for the part (she's 12 years older than her character). However, they made her up and costumed her perfectly to look like a real harassed, depressed, high school outcast. I wish they had done that with the other two actresses. This version spends a lot more time with the secondary characters, so you get to know them much better. It takes its time setting up the prom scene for the famous "bucket of blood" prank. The movie unfolds as a police investigation, and so everything is a retrospective on events. They show Carrie suffering multiple pranks and incidences, letting you know bullying's a constant her life. All of this is good if the movie does seem a little long.

However, I mentioned something in the directing is off. They overplay Carrie's powers at the beginning. There's no way a desk could move across a room and slam into a wall, as opposed to an ashtray falling off the desk, without people suspecting Carrie having a power. What should be unmistakable to people in the movie becomes laughable when the CGI is done so badly.

They also implied that Carrie had something like a multiple personality, and after she's soaked in blood, she snaps and her unconscious takes over the power without her remembering what she does. I don't like that interpretation. It makes the rest of her character moot, also her unconscious appears to have some knowledge of electricity and water. In this one, she does wreck the town, as I always thought she should, but the CGI is so cheesy it looks like an early '90s music video.

I'm not sure how much of it is the direction and how much is Bettis' performance, but Carrie spends a lot of her screen time rolling her eyes, squinting, and fluttering her eyelids. Other characters mention Carrie having had a seizure in the past. I can accept her being epileptic, the problem is, as they show this so much that you don't see much else about her character. Carrie's character shouldn't be reduced to a neurological dysfunction. They also have her having hid teen magazines in her prayer closet. That does not make sense for this character.

Patricia Clarkson as Margaret White, Carrie's mother, is suppose to be a hyper-religious fanatic. She's supposed to be extreme even for a fundamentalist (which she isn't. She's a psychotic.) This must have some fire and brimstone to it. I hate to say, Clarkson is just boring in the part. The director seemed to be shooting for an "American Gothic" look to her, but to me she just looks and acts tired. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who could bully Carrie worse than her schoolmates do, and that's more what Margaret White is. Carrie as a character only makes sense if her mother is that way.

If the special effects are a throwback to the 90s, the music is standard '70s TV-movie garbage.

Read the book. See the other two version. If you like the story, you can miss this adaptation without any great loss. Except for Katharine Isabelle's parts. Find those on Youtube if you can.

Carrie (2013)

Best Carrie movie yet.

[8/10 · 26 October 2013]

I wrote an original review of this, but after I kept thinking about it for a week, I decided to see it a second time. I'm ready to upgrade my rating and declare I believe this is the best screen adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 novel yet. It surpasses Brian De Palma's film in every way. I don't care what category you're talking about, directing, acting, music, special effects, any category.

I'm fan of the original. I saw it thirteen times and had a crush on Sissy Spacek's. Even so, I think that if this version had come out in 1976 and De Palma's came out now (with some adjustments for making special effects better or worse according to the period) this would be considered a classic and De Palma's would be considered "unnecessary" and "pointless." Personally, I think I would have had a crush on Chloe Grace Moretz.

Yes, and I believe in twenty years, this is the version that's going to be remembered and that people will watch it rather than De Palma's. The box office receipts have been disappointing, but I think this version is going to gain stature in hindsight, like John Carpenter's The Thing, like Blade Runner.

The plot of Carrie is about a high school outcast, bullied by peers at school and abused at home by a hyper-religious mother. Isolated and uninformed, Carrie (Chloe Grace Moretz) gets her first period late at 17, and panics. This attracts the ridicule from the girls in her gym class. Her peers get in trouble, then set her up at the prom for the cruelest high school prank in cinematic history. However, the pranksters don't know that Carrie's sexual maturity has brought a side-effect: extreme telekinetic powers.

Chloe Grace Moretz seems an odd choice to play Carrie White. The main complaint circulating has been about her looks: she's attractive. Carrie described in King's book emphatically isn't attractive. The choice of Moretz works, in fact, it's inspired. For one thing, she's sixteen and looks younger. Moretz' Carrie is more isolated because of her mother Margaret White (Julianne Moore) and only second due to her classmates. Carrie's socially backward due to a few key years of socialization missed by being home schooled. Unlike De Palma's film, Carrie's also sexually harassed by boys. Moretz shows Carrie's constant anxiety and fear with her body tension, restrained gestures, and fearful eyes. With tight shoulders, wringing hands she looked like a kid who's being extremely bullied at school and expects no help anywhere, especially from home.

Moretz is required to do much more than Spacek was in the part. This version requires Carrie to have more emotional range. Added to that, the part is physically more demanding. Carrie does stand up to her mother's horrid religion and paranoia. However, their relationship is more than just abuse, psychosis and bad religion. Beneath the violence and terror, the two actresses manage make tender moments between the two convincing.

When it comes to the telekinesis, especially at the prom scene, Moretz has to show it with body movements, which--with any less skill--would have evoked laughter. She goes from innocent and beautiful to menacing and creepy. Her gesticulations drip with power (and blood). She's helped with a great use of CGI special effects. The pulsing of her pupils and blood dripping upward off her arms were breathtaking.

In fact, the entire prom scene rocked. Moretz successfully bridges the gulf from likable kid to monster and then to broken child. I believe it was every bit as good as Spacek's, and Spacek got an academy award nomination.

The script owes an awful lot to the original, but it makes additions that drastically improve the story and characters. The supporting cast shines in these scenes. Carrie's arch-enemy, Chris (Portia Doubleday) stands out as a seemingly normal girl who's actually a psychopath. Her lack of a conscience challenges another girl Sue (Gabriella Wilde) to prove the sincerity of hers. Sue puts her boyfriend up to taking Carrie to the prom, which is something that practically no high school girl would do. Yet, the film ignore that as Wilde portrays Sue's anguish at her own sacrifice convincingly.

The rest of the supporting cast all deserve praise: Alex Russell as Chris' thug boyfriend Billy, Judy Greer as the gym teacher Ms. Dejardin, and a funny performance by Barry Shabaka Henley as the principal.

Kim Peirce's directing is fresh, and her perspective on the story is different. The prom scene surpasses the original. She gets good support from a great musical score by Sally Boldt et al. The music doesn't call attention to itself, but at any time, if you listen to it, it's effective.

The only thing I found a bit disappointing was the ending. They were in too much of a rush to wind it up after taking their time to turn Carrie into a monster. Interviews, rumors, an aerial shot, and the trailer all suggest there was a lot more to this film that got cut. I hope it's all restored in a later version.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Very faithful adaptation actually supplements the book.

[8/10 · 19 July 2013]

"The Hunger Games" seemed a natural book for a movie. Written by Suzanne Collins, the book was already cinematic. Still, Hollywood is full of egos trying to one-up each other in creativity, and this usually spells doom for book adaptations.

Fortunately, director and screen writer Gary Ross was wise not to tamper with the book's winning formula. The plot: a female teen protagonist, Katniss Everdene (Jennifer Lawrence) living in an impoverished dystopia is forced to participate in an annual gladiatorial games against twenty-three other teens. It had vivid characters from Katniss on down, her ally, Peeta, their mentor, the disturbed but sympathetic Hamish and all the other characters minor and major. It had great action, it had depth, and had social commentary with the contestants having to gain sponsors while murdering each other on camera. The plot, the characters, are almost exactly what you find them in Collin's work. If you hadn't read it, you can pick up the story fresh from the movie and miss almost nothing.

Nevertheless, the movie isn't limited, as the book is, to Katniss' first person account. Ross takes advantage of this and shows you what's happening out of the Katniss' sight. All of his additions improve the story and give it a wider scope. You could vividly see this society operating around Katniss, and it is one of the best futuristic depictions I've seen since Blade Runner.

I did have a few small quibbles with it. The film started out a little too weepy.I thought of Katniss as more stoical and I don't remember the beginning being so wet. The movie needed make the audience like her as soon as possible, I guess, but it really does lessen the impact of the tears later on, when the character does have a real tragedy to cry about.

My other quibble was with President Snow (Donald Sutherland). There was nothing wrong with Sutherland's performance, but his character seemed more like Colonel Sanders than Josef Stalin. People didn't respond to him with the restrained terror that would have sent the message about him home.

I disagreed with those creative decisions, though it's probably only my preference. However, I highly recommend this movie. It's a rarity: well conceived and thoughtful action adventure.

The Fountain (2006)

Ambitious Film Overreaches, has Great Moments

[4/10 · 18 July 2013]

I've been impressed with director Darren Aronofsky ever since I saw his first, and very off-the-wall independent movie, Pi. Nobody else is filming on the themes Aronofsky does, and with The Black Swan he has since proved his value to Hollywood. He also has about the best name an auteur could be born with.

So when I saw The Fountain and was disappointed and watched it again, but it wasn't any better. A pre-Black Swan movie, The Fountain is ambitious, but it overreaches badly. It tries to tell three different stories about eternal devotion with the same couple playing out a love story in different settings and times. Unfortunately, it was too much for the resources he had. The result is a movie that has all the ambition of a student filmmaker trying to shoot "War and Peace," with exactly the kind of errors you'd expect him to make.

There's nothing wrong with the central plot of this movie, in fact it's an excellent romantic tragedy. A cancer researcher, Tom (Hugh Jackman) is desperate to find a cure for his wife, Izzy (Rachel Weisz) who has already accepted and embraced the inevitability of her death. Tom is obsessed with saving her, while Izzy only wants his comfort and love for the little time she has left. His tireless drive to save her ends up separating them. Great story, operatic and ironic, I loved it.

The problem comes in because Aronofsky adds two other stories. They both take place in different settings, different centuries, maybe even different universes.

One of them being a novel Izzy is writing, it at least has a loose connection to the central plot. The story is set in sixteenth century Spain and Central America. Jackman plays a conquistador, Tomas, and Weisz plays Queen Isabella (in a very inaccurate historical depiction) who sends him on a quest to find the Tree of Life. The Maya paradise of Xibalba, which is also a star, figures prominently in the book, and Izzy refers to it in the main plot.

Nothing in that plot was worthwhile, nor did it really connect well to the "real" Tom and Izzy. I also had an issue with Izzy's imbalanced historical research. I don't know why she, (and that is to say, the movie's writers) would research into so much into the Mayans only to get the 16th century Spanish so wrong. The conquistadors were some awful people, and making Tomas a heroic conquistador is to overlook the massive genocide they committed all for sake of telling a historically unbelievable romantic tale.

The third plot is more vague, because it seemingly takes place in the future where a pseudo-Zen version of Tom is taking the "Tree of Life," to the Xibalba star, that is, the Maya heaven. The shooting of the scene leaves no doubt the tree is really Izzy, symbolically depicted, and it is dying. The things connecting this to the other plots, the star and the tree, and of course, Jackman. This thread has metaphoric imagery but no plot or logical connection to the central storyline.

It's a beautifully shot scene, but slow, and hardly lit, giving you a long time straining your eyes to resent the incoherence with the real story. He's traveling through space in a kind of bubble terrarium living off the bark of the tree, which makes for a disturbing comparison to cannibalism. Wouldn't an easier way to the afterlife be to let it die? Unlike the conquistador plot, we don't the least explanation of what this is. Is this a science fiction maybe Tom was writing? He didn't mention it, and didn't have the time. Maybe it's Tom's unconscious narrative. Unless you're excited to see Jackman out-acting the hunk of wood at center stage, it's pretty boring, not to mention confounding. My question all along was who gave spaceman Jack this mission? Though these two parallel plots have some striking images, you almost can't see them because the lighting is so dark, probably to hide the poor production values. Apparently, the movie was supposed to have an $80 million budget but was made for a fraction of that. It shows. Actually, with the horror movie/film noir it doesn't show-- enough. This pretty much wipes out the color palate, and it somehow doesn't fit a romance story, even one this heartrending.

The Fountain might have been only a short subject without those two parallel plots, but it would have been a better movie. They add nothing but murkiness to the story. Without the funds he needed, I wish Aronofsky would have focused on the best plot he had.

In its favor, the film is well acted no matter which sequence it's in. Jackman and Weisz do a great job, and for many people, the acting, the beautiful, stirring score by Clint Mansell, and the occasionally- discernible, breathtaking images are enough for them to rate this film very highly.

Not for me. I'd say it's a 4/10 which is a major disappointment. But I could see how great it might have been.

American Mary (2012)

Beware: The Doctor is In!

[8/10 · 18 February 2013]

The Canadian film industry is beginning to make its mark. American Mary is the second film written and directed by Sylvia and Jen Soska, also known as the Twisted Twins. Their first was the comical 2009 Grindhouse take-off, Dead Hooker in a Trunk. Hooker was not only better than watchable, it was fun; for a movie made on pocket money and a cast doubling as the crew while doing their own stunts, that's like saying it's an Oscar winner.

With their second movie, the Twins have exceeded my expectations again. American Mary is extraordinarily good, and the sinister duo have assembled an exceptionally talented and professional cast and crew here.

The film is about Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) a struggling medical student wanting to be a surgeon, and who stitches up turkeys for practice (while wearing lingerie). The film begins with her behind on her bills and falling out of favor with her mentor (David Lovgren). She decides to answer a strip-club ad. When word spreads in the club that she's a surgeon, and quite a good one, one of the dancers, Beatrice (Tristan Risk) offers Mary a lot of money to complete a friend's radical (and hideous) body modification. From there, Mary drops from medical school and ends up in the world of underground cosmetic surgery. She finds her new skills especially useful for exacting revenge.

This shouldn't be mistaken for a revenge movie, however. It neither begins with the offending act, nor ends when vendetta is complete. No, the Soska's have made something more sophisticated, a story of a woman who becomes alienated from her dream of being a healer, and realizes the people she admired most are contemptible.

Isabelle does marvelous work as Mary, who starts out as a charming ingénue with passive aggressive tendencies. When her life reaches a crisis, she turns into a ruthless monster with a heart of ice, who fights like a cornered rat. She gets a piercing glare, when she realizes people in the underworld fear her. She takes to carrying her surgical tools around with her, you know, just in case. She even offers to help an underworld friend with enforcement. By the end, she regains some sense of mercy, I think, but that's a matter of opinion.

Isabelle's costuming is outlandishly sexual, though Mary doesn't seem to be aware of it. She does surgery in stiletto heels and has black surgical gloves. The film obviously has a lot of costuming appeal for fans, and a lot of fetish appeal for the kinky. I could see this might start a surgeon fetish.

In fact, all of the production values in this are good, superior for an independent film of this budget. The cinematography is splendid with a beautiful color palate. The make-up and prosthetics are superior, and it has an attractive score. For horror, the movie is not as bloody as you might imagine. The most disturbing detail is not the blood, but what is being cut and bled.

Isabelle shows herself to be an actor of the highest caliber, and I hope this starts to bring her the recognition she deserves. The supporting actors behind Isabelle do great work. Tristan Risk is a standout as Beatrice, who's modified to look like Betty Boop. Risk has to play her part from beneath a mask that makes her look not like a cartoon, but an android. Yet, with her body and eyes brings Beatrice out, humanizes her, and matches Isabelle's virtuoso performance. Her accent and speech do sound authentically cartoon-like. I almost thought they were dubbed. Risk, a burlesque player in Vancouver, shows she has remarkable talent and skills. She becomes this character, who herself became Betty Boop.

Antonio Cupo as Billy Barker, a strip club owner, does a good job with a part with almost as many challenges as Risk's, though different ones. How does one make a goon who beats people mercilessly and sexually abuses the strippers into anything likable? This is not a Martin Scorsese gangster. He develops a painful crush on Mary. The choice of him for the role seems quirky, however.

Another odd choice of casting was John Emmet Tracy as Detective Dolor. A British accent for an American cop? Unlikely but not impossible. He still does a good job in the role. I was never sure if the character was as sympathetic to Mary as he made it look. I hoped so.

The film is not perfect, however. The Soskas' make a cameo. They put themselves in a key scene as wealthy, depraved German twins seeking some radical modification. The Soskas cast themselves into these juicy roles, which they devour. Isabelle anchors the scene, and plays off of them straight. I think they had too much fun and needed a director to tell them to tone it down. However, a good friend of mine said it was his favorite scene, so I guess it can go either way.

The only other problems are all minor. The sisters write the gangster parts to be likable, stretching believability. Billy seems less like a goonish strip club owner and more like a college dropout writing poetry in a café. The movie, which is so original with its plot, seems to stagger randomly at the end, where the time progression also becomes confusing. The Soskas chose to shoot many scenes in a crowded club, forcing them to turn down background noises when the dialog began, which detracts from atmosphere and immersion in the story.

However, this film is remarkable considering it's only the Soska sisters' second movie. They're showing a steep learning curve, as American Mary is far above decent in quality. Mary is a monster that will haunt your wet dreams and your nightmares.

(Rating upgraded from 7 to 8 since first version of review. It gets better the more you think about it.)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Cigarette commercial. Too long, unoriginal, but not bad.

[5/10 · 8 January 2012]

Though you might have read synopses, I'll give it in brief: the movie, like the book, is set in Sweden where a disgraced reporter, Mikael Blomvist (Daniel Craig) is hired by a wealthy family to investigate an unsolved murder in their history, and is then teamed with the investigator who shamed him, an eccentric, antisocial young woman Lisabeth Salander (Rooney Mara) .

I have to hand it to director David Fincher. Though not overly suspenseful, the movie also isn't boring, and the plot is never confusing, though it's complex with a lot of characters. This is no small accomplishment for Fincher because it's also bloated with many unnecessary scenes. It could have lost close to an hour's worth without losing anything on plot or characters.

The story starts with a parallel structure, Mikael's being one, Lisabeth being the other, then they converge. At least four scenes at the beginning seem to serve only as back story for a rape, which means that scene can accurately be called gratuitous, and not from being graphic, which it is. They could have easily dropped it and instead started with the next encounter between those characters, which told you everything you needed to know about Lisabeth and what previously transpired. Mikael's side of the plot similarly belonged in the back story that should have been started later.

Then at the end, the movie continues for another twenty minutes after the story is over. The whole point of this seemed to be to set it up for the sequels, but it was so rushed. They could have made a whole sequel based on those scenes alone. Abbreviated like that, it's pretty unsatisfying, especially to an audience waiting to leave.

Despite the title, Mikael is in so many of the opening scenes where the story takes shape it's easy to think he's the protagonist, whereas Lisabeth is. The title should have tipped me off, but I knew nothing about the story coming in, and didn't know if The Girl would be the murder victim, MacGuffin, the protagonist, the antagonist, or part of the set decoration.

A lot of the other things in the movie were very standard. I not only called the final plot twist twenty minutes into it, but I called it as the least satisfying conclusion that wasn't downright dumb.

Also, and this is not a spoiler as much as a general observation that every movie-goer knows: when a family has Nazis in it, it does narrow down the list of suspects considerably. I was hoping this part of the film would be a tease, or background. I know Nazis were 20 million lives worth of evil, but the Hitler mustache has also been out of style for close to seventy years. Surely there are more modern brands of evil writers can think of. Like even Neo-Nazis? Though that does require a movie to be original, relevant, topical and clever, things Hollywood definitely won't go near.

Making Lisabeth a neo-punk with her tattoo doesn't ring true for a Asperger's savant and social outcast to me. Not in an age where seventy percent of people under thirty have tattoos and piercings, but it's Hollywood's perception of what an outcast looks like. A much more accurate, if comical, portrayal of an outcast was, ironically, in Fincher's earlier movie, "Fight Club": Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer.

The whole cast is good. The only one that looked questionable is the rapist, but that's because he's stereotype only in retrospect. Rooney Mara has received a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal. Problem is, for most the movie, she isn't supposed to show any emotion. I'd have to watch a few scenes again, but I'll say I'm not sure it was that good unless GG were grading on a curve. She did well at the parts she was required to show range, but, for me, she also didn't steal any scenes.

Hollywood, and apparently the book's author, have a very exaggerated picture of what hackers can do. At one point Lisabeth sneers at Mikael's encryption like it was no problem to crack. And I thought, as the Lisabeth said, "Oh, plu-ease!" The reality: even with inexpensive encryption programs, it's not possible cracking it was easy unless he had a weak pass-phrase. Otherwise, does she carry a pocket quantum computer?

Finally, just how much money did the tobacco industry plow into this movie? I know it sounds like an unfair criticism or pet peeve, but it isn't. It effects the way the film is handled. An opening scene goes out of its way to show a character buying cigarettes and asking for a brand name (not a fictional one, as movies usually do). I wouldn't object, except the scene had no other point. From then on, characters, especially the protagonists smoked in about 75% of the scenes, and Fincher starts at least two scenes, not with dialog, but with a character lighting up. At the end, Mikael says he has quit (just like that, because anybody can quit smoking just like that at any time). I know realistically, people smoke, but this was something other than adding realism, and it was very distracting. It's a fair question to ask whether sponsorship and product placement weakens this film, tobacco being a bit more insidious than most.

Fincher did much the same thing in "Fight Club." But if it were paid for there, and it likely was, it did fit. The characters were hardly heroic, and it added just enough realism without making me too suspicious that the movie was made as a cigarette commercial.

This all being said, I did enjoy the movie enough, though I'm not going to recall it frequently my whole life. It's competent, but nothing great or original. It's standard, and not stupid. However, it is far too long, and you should bring your nicotine patch.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Two to Go (2002) Season 6, Episode 21

A hopeless flaw.

[4/10 · 7 October 2011]

This for me was the least engaging of the series finals. The world is endangered again. Okay, they did that in season 1, 2, 3 . . . and I guess that's a hard one to top every time.

My main problem, though, is with making Willow the agent of the Apocalypse. Not that I think Willow was too nice to do it. I know this is fantasy and all, but am I supposed to believe that getting powerful enough to destroy the universe takes less time than getting your Bachelors' Degree? Without any "gift" like Buffy's or grant from something powerful? I accept the Buffy fantasy overall, but if this were true, somebody would have destroyed it by the 10th century, by accident. Even if Willow "stole" the power late in the show, she did it magically, with little effort, and as a witch with only six years experience this was just unbelievable. I must have missed the episode where Willow is sucked into a time-slow dimension and studies magic for a thousand years without the Scoobies knowing. It would have fixed this whole thing.

Well, not completely. There were other flaws less glaring. I thought it was unintended irony that Xander would become the heavy-handed Christ figure in this (the carpenter reference must not have been lost even on Xander) after earlier arguing why they shouldn't save Warren.

Which brings up another problem: Buffy's moral arguments all through this sound very thin and trite. When she fights Willow, she has nothing interesting say. The dialog then is just very flat, so atypical of this show. Not only did Willow kick her ass, but she won the argument, too.

There are a few good parts. Giles' entrance for one. Anya's knowledge and teleporting around does add a dimension here and makes her good for something. The show has other things to recommend it.

But it just wasn't a very good story idea.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Just May be Worthwhile with 3-D Glasses and Acid.

[1/10 · 28 September 2011]

This movie fails like an iron kite: it just has a serious design flaw. Usually I could find some saving grace about a bad movie. Most often I think I could see what the director or scriptwriter probably intended, especially when they make an effort to select rich source material, like a Philip K. Dick's most personal story, and then film it in such a different way.

That's not true here. I can't really see what Director/Screenwriter Richard Linklater intended with this adaptation. There's no spark; I can't admire anything here. It's one thing to not be impressed, but instead of wishing scenes were better, or wishing he had given the script just one more rewrite, I wish he hadn't tried at all.

Why? First let's talk scenes that come to nothing. Such as the car being sabotaged. Don't get your hopes up, it doesn't lead to anything. Or ones like the bicycle scene, where the stoner humor was so lame Cheech & Chong should have busted them. Then whimsical scenes like James Barris' (Robert Downey, Jr.) "silencer," designed for slapstick, ends with a lame punchline and also leads absolutely nowhere.

How about characters that also go nowhere? Major characters, like Ernie (Woody Harrelson), who simply drop out of the plot never to return. In his last scene, he almost died, setting up some major character conflict. But I guess it wasn't important after all. Sorry I almost got interested. How about other, purportedly important characters who seem like walk-on parts, like Winona Ryder's?

The film has no flair or style to it. When I saw the look, I thought things would bet interesting once the hallucinations started, but so little was done with the animation (except for the scramble suits, interesting for ten minutes), I began to wonder if the entire purpose of the rotoscoping was to camouflage Keenu Reeves' usual flat performance and immobile face. If so, it didn't work. He was still uninterested, and uninteresting. When it comes time for some philosophical narration, his flat voice just does wonders for it. It's like Linklater wasn't happy that I just didn't understand it, he wanted to make sure I didn't care, either.

I swear, if this movie didn't have the muddy, slapdash animation, nobody whatsoever would be praising it. It would universally be considered a bomb. The Philip K. Dick fans would be calling it a total misfire, the animation fans (a lot of crossover there) of course, would say nothing, and drug crowd (pro- and anti-) would both admit it's dull and jumbled.

I could think of only two things I liked: Robert Downey Jr's performance as Barris (though he does seem to be doing a Jeff Goldblum imitation), and a suicide scene that was hilarious. Even with the latter, though, the character offing himself seemed to have almost nothing to do with the plot. I can't figure out why he was in there to begin with.

However, those count for little in a movie that's so boring. Even a hundred minutes felt long when most the scenes seemed like they could be cut without losing anything. It's talky. There's no action. There's no chemistry between Keenu Reeves and Winona Ryder. Add to that the fact that the characters don't look real enough, and the animation doesn't make them more intriguing. It simply gets in the way of connecting with any of them.

Generally, I don't take drugs, don't recommend them, but if you're given a choice between meth and this movie, take the meth.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004)

Few Scares; A sad creative mess; Out of its depth.

[3/10 · 8 June 2010]

I'm saddened. I really wanted to like this movie as I am the biggest fan of the original Ginger Snaps; and its leads, Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins for their work in the original, and Perkins even more so for almost single-handedly saving "Ginger Snaps: Unleashed." Alas, I am afraid that this series is like the original Highlander: "There can only be one."

You know you're in for a long ride from the very beginning. It breaks a rule of cinema narration that no scriptwriter was dumb enough to break prior, a rule so dumb to break nobody thought previously to make it a rule: it has two introductions. The first introduction is in screen text, about a hunting party never returning in 1816. Stark, dark, and ominous. Except then they followed it with a narrated introduction by Isabelle. The latter, I am afraid, is an incoherent train-wreck about the curse of the red and black (checkers?) having a chance to be stopped . . . blighting the land . . . the white man bringing diseases . . . oaths higher than God or fate . . . or something. Even Ed Wood, Jr. would have been embarrassed enough to rewrite it. Unfortunately, Isabelle drew the short straw on reading the mess, and I felt sorry for her.

This "has-it-begun-yet" effect starts the movie out at a leaden pace, from which it never recovers, and creates a half-assed horror-myth for the story to depend, which insults the audience, not to mention, perhaps, Native Americans.

The story starts in 1816 as two orphaned teenage girls Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) come to a fort in the wilderness that has been under siege for months by some kind of diabolical creatures (I think they might be werewolves). The remaining men in the fort are just a little suspicious since the sisters were able to reach it untouched when nobody else could reach it or set foot outside it without getting ripped to shreds. Except an Indian called Hunter.

It is apparent that the entire production was in over its head at attempting a period piece like this, from the producer, the scriptwriter, to the director and crew, to the actors. The dialog sounds anachronistic, and isn't very good anyway. The characters do not act 21st century, but neither do they act in a way that's believably 19th century. Isabelle and Perkins, and the other actors, are given no historical point of reference and no dialog coaching to be able to pull this off. I could forgive the dialects being inconsistent; if anything, I think dialects were far more diverse in that area then, but they sounded too commonplace. At this budget, they could have aimed for a squalid, scaled down, timeless feeling, but they did not. I could not believe that Isabelle and Perkins' characters fit into the early 19th century at all. The movie tries to joke about this. Ginger (Isabelle) occasionally pipes in with modern swear words that so lilted her dialog in GS1, but given that this movie never sounded 19th century anyway, the comical contrast never works.

Music was a plus in both the original and "Unleashed." In this movie it is just awful. It sounds like they hired a single cellist to play four notes and then looped them repeatedly.

Then there was Ginger's transformation: at least they should have made it somewhat consistent with what occurred in GS1, instead of making her feverish and dizzy. Please. To see a young woman in that time period misbehaving Ginger did. THAT would have been exciting. What we got was boring.

The rest of the cast tries with varying degrees of success. J. R. Bourne does well as the second-in-command, but his character is just two-dimensional, the a—hole dimension and the d—chebag dimension. Hugh Dillon as the Reverend, also a villain, is allowed to overplay his part, and his accent sounds jarringly anachronistic. In writing his role, however, it's apparent that the screenwriter took care to consult neither the Bible, nor sermons written at the time. The Reverend's preaching sounds almost as nonsensical as the werewolf myth given at the beginning, and I don't think it was deliberate. Matthew Walker as the doctor and Brendan Fletcher as Finn give very good performances, and Fletcher's was so good I was surprised and saddened he did not have a larger part. Tom McCamus does a fair job as the fort commander, or would have done one had the makeup department not given him such a silly wig. He almost makes it look dignified, but his gravitas was one false move away from side-splitting comedy.

I think I'm the wrong gender and sexual orientation to judge Nathanial Arcand playing hunter. Moreover, he reminded me too much of David Carradine in Kung Fu, and that probably means I'm the wrong generation, too. It makes me want to recuse myself from reviewing him.

The movie never rises above its leaden pace and never becomes actually scary. Then there are the little things, like the aforementioned music, or that a werewolf makeup was an immobile mask that was a throwback to the 60s. The werewolves looked like neither wolves nor men, nor anything like the werewolf in GS1.

The only good thing: the ending. No, I'm not being the droll critic talking about what a relief it was that the movie was over. It did have a good ending. You should decide fifteen minutes in if you think it's worth waiting for. Unfortunately, I think this was a desperate endeavor to try to cash in on a great movie's name while putting forward as little money and effort in as possible.

(Upgraded one star from my original review. It is very good to see Perkins and Isabelle work together, and sisters' bond was still evocative and interesting.)

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Somehow, it never comes together.

[4/10 · 14 April 2010]

Jennifer's Body seems to have everything needed for a good horror movie, but it never comes together. It just seemed like the plot needed to re-arrange a few things, the dialog needed just one more draft, the directing needed just a little more imagination, the acting needed a little more inspiration, and the music . . . needed to be there, and so on. Taken separately, they are all little things, but together they cause the movie to, if not sink, at least run aground.

That being said, there are no big mistakes that would make Jennifer's Body a truly bad movie. The plot is: two teenage girls, who are close friends from childhood, become enemies after a brush with the supernatural changes one of them. If this sounds familiar, it is because maybe you have seen Ginger Snaps, which did this plot concept first and better, and where the leads looked like real high-schoolers. Jennifer's Body is what results when Hollywood tries to do a ground-breaking movie like Ginger Snaps. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable for that reason.

JB's take on the concept is that Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) have been friends "from the sandbox." Jennifer is the class champion in beauty, and Needy is the smarter, shyer one. Being under the mistaken impression that Jennifer is a virgin (Megan Fox?), an independent band made up of satanists lures her into being sacrificed for their success. She returns to life with a demon fused to her soul, which we are told is the inevitable result of not being virgin when sacrificed.

The movie does try for a heavier subtext. The imagery in the forest scene seems to be reaching for something, with all kinds of herbivorous animals show up for the killing and acting like carnivores. In other scenes, there is some Christian imagery that is suggestive. Unfortunately, unless you are very forgiving of the lack of atmosphere and the inconsistent tone running through the scenes, it is hard to be impressed by this. The animals gathering to wait for the slaughter kill and comes off as an absurdity, and the cuteness cancels the horror. There was a way to bring that scene off, and director Karyn Kusama does not find it.

Too often Diablo Cody's wry script and Kusama's directing clash rather than compliment each other. For example, in a scene where Jennifer gets impaled, which seems like it should be a very solemn scene, which includes stark imagery, but Jennifer suddenly says to Needy, "You have a tampon?" A funny line but it hits a flat note in the context and kills whatever horror there was. This happens all through the movie.

It has some good scenes, however. The sacrifice scene turns funny as the band-leader apologizes to Jennifer, telling her how hard it is to make it as an independent band, and how badly they need some extra edge, before slaughtering her. The opening scene in the mental hospital is also good, where Needy's chart warns that she is a "kicker." Also, Jennifer's return after the sacrifice is scary and weird. The movie's sexual boldness also works. The much misunderstood lesbian scene serves to strengthen the characters and plot rather than to just titillate.

Unfortunately, all of these occur in the context of scenes that do not work at all, but should have. The bar burning down, a scene early in the film, should have been scary. I can't point to any mistake, but it was totally flat and felt staged; somehow I knew there was a camera crew there somewhere. The director just failed to make it real enough, and the music just seemed absent. There were all kinds of scenes like that: the overgrown pool, Jennifer's encounter with the school jock-- for not even a second did those scenes "look" real or generate scares.

The major problem is really with Kusama's direction. Though she's competent overall, she seemed to have no idea about the basics of how to film horror, much less meld it with comedy and subtext.

Megan Fox did a decent acting job, I thought, though this is not a vehicle that let her show much emotional range. Diablo Cody's dialog is written with the kind of wry slang that might have worked in Juno (which I haven't seen) but which has mixed results here. I cringed to hear Fox say "move on dot org" but I have to hand it to her, she said it in the exact dry tone that had the only chance of making it work, and her being the one saying it at least did not make it any worse. Also, even though Fox is . . . a fox, and so a traditional asset to a horror fantasy movie, she looked too old for the part.

Also, Amanda Seyfried does a very good job as Needy, but even here, I have to qualify it. She, like Fox, looked too old for the part, and there was very little chemistry between her and Fox. This chemistry had to completely work for the film to work. Dialog between them at the end, which should have said so much about their now-defunct friendship, were so detached from the action that they sounded like lines Diablo Cody forgot to put in sooner. Seyfried and Fox could not saved it no matter how well they delivered it.

Again, if you want to see this concept done right, and be moved by it, see Ginger Snaps instead. It achieves more atmosphere in a playground setting than Jennifer's Body does with a derelict house, a burning building, an overgrown pool at night, and a forest. It also had a better wit and chemistry between the leads that worked one hundred percent.

The Wrestler (2008)

A slow, but good, movie.

[5/10 · 10 December 2009]

This movie is about Randy the Ram, a washed-up, big-name wrestler trying to draw together his tattered life outside the ring before he must retire to it. It is the kind of movie people love to give awards to, but that probably says more about what they think movies should be rather than what movies they really enjoy. This is the kind of movie that is given plenty of awards but that few people remember after five years.

That might sound all unfair, especially when in most ways, this movie is excellent. The acting, cinematography, and dialog are all excellent. So what's wrong? Only that it's a simple story told slowly, and to make that worse, it uses a shaky camera, imitating a documentary for whatever artistic reason. I have loved other movies by this director, Darren Aronofsky, because anybody who could make a subject like mathematics into a cinematic horror story is always capable of walking on water. Nonetheless, I watched "The Wrestler" on DVD, and there's no way I would have survived seeing it at a theater. I had to take ten minute intermissions three times. That's not true of Aronofsky's other movies.

Nevertheless, when it was over, I must admit I liked the story. And Mickey Rourke as Randy is as excellent as they say. Marisa Tomei as Cassidy, an aging stripper, is also excellent, and I was impressed at how fair this movie was toward that character. Evan Rachel Wood plays Stephanie, Randy's alienated daughter, and she gives a performance on par with Rourke's and Tomei's. This was another part that, if not skillfully written and acted, could have easily become trite.

Plus, between the slowness, there are very beautiful scenes. So, I could say that even with the drawbacks, "The Wrestler" is worth it, depending on your attention reserves.

Tideland (2005)

Boring & foul, bad screenplay and a (temporarily?) insane director.

[1/10 · 29 November 2009]

SPOILERS ARE MARKED AT THE BOTTOM.

In the beginning of this film, Terry Gilliam gives a short, pompous introduction to his masterpiece, telling us we should experience it the way a little girl does. Implied message is: the non-elite among you will not understand a child's mind like I do. The marketing psychology seems to have worked. Otherwise, I truly cannot account for why so many people consider this movie so good.

I believe that any little girl watching this movie would be mercifully asleep within 20 minutes. The plot is simple: a little girl, Jeliza Rose, with drug addict parents lives in a world of fantasy that continues when she becomes an orphan. Within that simple paradigm, the action wiggles around like snake with head-wound-- for two hours. With five minutes left in the movie, there was suddenly a plot point-- and I was stunned. Then it was over.

That is hardly the main problem. This film was just ill-conceived to begin with. It's like hearing a tone-deaf band playing a song about the resilience of children. Jeliza's lack of response to her parents' dying says to me damaged child, not resilient child. Even if I believe that a girl could have such a terrible childhood that she would unknowingly snuggle for a sweet night's sleep with her father's corpse, I still wonder what kind of teenager and adult is that child, Jeliza Rose, likely to turn into? When all the theatrics she uses to get through the traumas are no longer possible, likely she will feel self-disgust and trauma-- for her whole life. When she looks back on her father dying, is it going to be talking with her dolls' heads she remembers, or the fact that she prepared the father's deadly shot? Or alternately she might just grow up and stay in her psychotic state. A child's resiliency is only to get through childhood itself, and the only purpose of childhood is to become an adult. This story struck me as a ruination of a child.

Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose gives the only good performance in the movie, but not good enough to carry whole scenes by herself, as she has to repeatedly. Too many scenes are just her talking to her doll-heads or her other imaginary friends. And she does all the voices in those scenes. If scenes of a little girl playing alone were truly interesting to adults, then adults would be acting out in this way every day. Gilliam doesn't help Ferland any great special effects that would make them interesting. There is nothing about the doll heads that makes them real characters, and at times, of course, you have trouble knowing who is talking to who.

Brendan Fletcher plays the mentally retarded Dickens with a Forest Gump accent so thick I thought I was watching Gump audition videos. Jennifer Tilly plays his sister, Dell, who dresses and acts like the Wicked Witch of the West. Neither of these characters were believable at any point, but it is not the actors' fault if they are given a bad script and directed by the insane. These were exactly the kind of characters you'd expect in a very cheap horror movie by a first time director/writer. The movie meanders around them and Jeliza and you wait in vain for the character scenes to end and the story to return.

If it had a real story, 30 minutes might have been cut from this. The film looks like Gilliam started shooting without having a story, and then tried to find it in the editing room. That's good way of producing bombs and running movies over budget.

Fans of this movie like to describe how well it is shot, but a good director of photography cannot save a movie from an criminally insane director with warped script. Buy the 500 frame slide show and not the movie. Besides all else, This movie was absolutely offensive. Those interested, read below.

******SPOILERS BELOW************

You have offensive moments in this movie that are supposed to impress us with their artistic daring. My blood curdled at the very suggestion that the Wicked Witch of the West would proposition the delivery man. The delivery man! This original idea is stolen from a billion different pornography scenes. Gilliam adds his artistic kink to make it more unbelievable and horrifying. I couldn't believe the guy didn't make roadrunner dust out of there. Then, Gilliam makes it truly obscene by having Jeliza witness it, while the doll's head (in Jeliza's voice) describes explicitly what sex act was being performed and how. It wasn't even a plot point. It was just there.

The scenes of the little girl preparing daddy's heroin shots are played for laughs, as are the deaths of both parents. I could understand some dark humor in these scenes, but not to this degree. The mother's death is filmed with 1960s Batman dutch angles.

Jeliza finds her grandmother's old wardrobe, which just happens to fit (another believable point), and her grandmothers makeup, which is still fresh enough to use. She then makes herself up as an adult and has a scene with Dickens where they get so close to pedophilia that I'm surprised the FBI did not investigate what Gilliam might have cut out.

Need I add the cruelty of a little girl watching her father's body get taxidermized? There's more than this. This movie so seriously disturbing, but it doesn't give you a plot to give it meaning, its theme has no credibility, and therefore the movie doesn't make your effort worth it.

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)

An inspired idea vegetates, and then turns into an idiot plot, with stupid makeup!

[5/10 · 20 November 2009]

I am a die hard fan of the original Ginger Snaps, and this sequel is like having to use Windows 3.1 my whole life. I tried to allow for the curse of high expectations. What I did not expect was that this movie would raise them by starting with an excellent, original story concept, good music, an edgy atmosphere and a solid gold performance by Emily Perkins. Those are the only things I can recommend about this film, however, and half of those are thrown out midway through the story.

The film's downfall is the screenplay, which was written by Megan Martin, who apparently had no previous screen writing experience. True, Karen Walton, who wrote the original (with director John Fawcett) also had no experience, but she also worked on that script for four years. It is harder to write for somebody else's character creations. For a sequel to a successful movie with a fan base, only chintziness could explain hiring a first-time writer for the sequel.

So, with practically no help from the dialog, Perkins carries the entire first half of the film as the lonely, doomed Brigitte, bereft of Ginger, and bitterly fighting her own animalistic changes. The difference in Brigitte's character after the traumas she suffered in the first movie are both believably sad and shocking, showing that Perkins is an actress of the highest caliber. When Brigitte is found unconscious on a street with needle and cut marks on her arms, authorities assume she is a junkie and put her into a teen rehab center. It turned out that monkshood did not cure the curse, it simply delays it. So, she is trapped and can't prevent her transformation in a place where she endangers many people, and, of course, the staff doesn't believe her.

From this mind-blowing story-concept we go to tedium, as the movie puts 75 minutes of material into 90 minutes. Midway through, it comes to life briefly, and then changes directions giving up everything it had going for it. Martin had written Brigitte into a corner, and so changed subject. I must admit here that I did not like the approach of dooming Brigitte from the beginning, and the twist at the end made me want to shoot the DVD as a traitor.

Martin has made Brigitte far too restrained, including with people who would turn a Quaker homicidal. She only partially loses her temper once, and as a character noted, it was measured. Brundel's law as it applies to werewolves is, there are no such thing as pacifist werewolves, or rather, any werewolf movie depicting them is a bomb. While Perkins does her best, in the many pauses in the dialog, depicting Brigitte as holding back her fury, it simply does not work in a werewolf movie, or in a horror movie. If the audience is asked to believe that a werewolf could be that restrained, they begin to doubt it is even a problem.

Katharine Isabelle continues her role as Ginger, who is dead of course, and who only Brigitte can see. Isabelle only has about fifteen lines, though. These are the sorts of lines that can only be delivered in the sleepiest way possible, and it can't be called dialog because usually Brigitte doesn't answer. Isabelle's part is almost all commentary and adds nothing to the plot. Her role seems half contractual obligation, half trailer-bait material. Mostly she just taunts Brigitte's about her futile efforts to fight the curse. Of all people, Brigitte and Ginger should still have a lot to say to each other. This is a huge waste of an actress who showed her mettle in the original.

No, instead, the movie is wrecked by Martin's new character. Tatiana Maslani as "Ghost" does a good job as a mentally ill young girl, obsessed with comics. It's a good character concept, really, and Maslani does do an excellent job. Even so, putting Ghost in and making her a major character respectively required an unbelievable explanation and an idiot plot. I felt like she belonged in her own movie and was just an intruder here. Worse, she crowded out a larger part for Katharine Isabelle, and the movie is called "Ginger Snaps: Unleashed," right?

About the idiot plot: almost every character is shown to be an idiot at the end, with the possible exception of Ginger, who likely isn't real. Idiot Ghost is lucky everyone else is an idiot. Even Brigitte becomes an idiot at the end, I lost respect for her when she was previously heroic. I can't believe she trusted Ghost, a character who gets introduced by taunting her!

Finally, I have to point out the werewolf makeup is BAD in this film. I never knew werewolves had sow's ears and third-degree burns on their lips. At one point, they make Perkins look like Keith Richards, and by the end, she looks like an orc with an immobile mask so embarrassing that would have looked cheesy in the '60s. Except for the mask at the end, this is probably not the make-up artist's fault. The makeup actually looks better on the DVD extras and in the publicity photos than it does in the movie. This suggests the problem was with the Lighting, the Director of Photography, or the Director.

Nevertheless, the movie does get the special effects right for the fully animalized werewolf.

Other fans of the original seem to like this movie, but I can't help but see it as a major disappointment, though not a disaster. There was a much better story to be told here. Unlike the original, this did not have Karen Walton and four years of work on the screenplay. It falls short of its own promise, and not that of the original.

(Upgraded two stars from my original review. Perkin's performance was that good, & liked seeing her and Isabelle together.)

Ginger Snaps (2000)

A great, largely overlooked horror movie that's more complex than it looks.

[9/10 · 13 November 2009]

The only reason why I do not rate this movie a 9 or 10 is that the characters will not appeal to everyone, and that's essential to liking this film.

This is a horror movie Hollywood would never make and would screw it up totally if it tried. A small Canadian movie, with few production values but with an original approach to an old horror motif: the werewolf story. This movie is pure horror: harsh, suspenseful, violent, bloody, and in every way disturbing. However, it had a very low budget for special effects, and therefore much of the horror depends on the acting and on identifying with the the characters. Provided that works for you, Ginger Snaps will shake you and stay in your mind and gut afterward. It is a horror movie with enough connection to real life to stir your emotions and thoughts for days, and with characters that soak into your heart and stay there.

At its core Ginger Snaps is actually a more complex story than it appears, it is about the meaning of devotion, and its failure. It is also one of the few horror movies that succeeds at also being a classical tragedy, though many try. The film is about two teenage sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, born close enough together to both be fifteen, and totally devoted to each other. Ginger, is the older, dominant and prettier one, and Brigitte is the younger, shy and nerdy one. The simple fact that they look like real high school outcasts and not buffed-up Hollywood androids adds a lot to the movie. The sisters are not exactly outcasts, however, unlike "Carrie," their isolation from others is their preference. They take a "circle-the-wagons" approach to peers, and are captivated by death. The movie begins by them staging photographs of themselves dying violently. This has to be the best credit sequence I have ever seen. The dark humor from the "fake" violence at the beginning is totally at odds with their response to the "real" violence and death later, starting when Ginger survives an attack from a werewolf.

When this happens, the sisters had been approaching a crisis over a blood-oath they swore when they were eight, to be "Out by sixteen or dead in the scene, but together forever." It is no accident that an implied argument between the sisters in their first scene over this oath is settled in the very last scene with the last two last lines of dialog. Listen and watch closely when the oath is mentioned in the movie, and you might appreciate it more.

The werewolf attack itself is a very graphic savaging, and it contains very unsettling childhood motifs, suggesting child-rape. After that point, the movie turns into a nightmare about puberty making Ginger into something ugly and vicious, straining a childhood bond with her sister that had previously seemed eternal. The connection made between puberty and werewolfism is original, and is made stronger with a female character whose first menstruation attracts a monster whose life is also dictated by a 28-day cycle. This is only werewolf movie I've seen in which there are no shots of the full moon. Instead, the time of the werewolf cycle is marked by Brigitte on a menstrual calendar. Writer Karen Walton and director John Fawcett have created a werewolf story so outstanding that it is almost a correction to, rather than a revision of, the werewolf myth.

For Ginger, you have very little time to get to know her before grouchiness and then violent insanity take hold. Brigitte shows courageousness in helping her sister, and has the most mature concept of devotion of the two, but she wavers at bad time. Even so she gains independence and stands up to Ginger even as Ginger becomes stronger, less human, and more homicidal. Some might call this a "coming of age" story, but that does not describe the tragedy evoked. It is more like a loss of childhood story.

For the acting, Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle as Brigitte and Ginger, respectively, give performances worthy of Shakespeare. They are perfectly cast, and play off one another with style. Kris Lemche does equally well in his supporting role as Sam, a drug dealer, who is the only other person to know about the original werewolf, and who tries to help the sisters. You might occasionally find performances just as good in a horror film, but you will never find performances that are better, and this movie has three.

This has to be the most closely edited movies I've ever seen. There is nothing extraneous here. This, and some well-condensed dialog, make the film move FAST-- until near the end. It was closely edited, however, because independent movies by little known directors usually must run under 110 minutes to get distribution. Some good material was lost.

There are some cons to the movie. First thing, I'll repeat, if you don't like the sisters, turn it off immediately because this movie will not work for you. Also, the editing is almost too close. The production had a lot of trouble raising money. The time and budget constraints leave little room for establishing atmosphere in many scenes, and it barely gives the viewer enough information to follow the plot. Budget constraints also meant scenes had to be altered and scaled back to bear bones. The party scene toward the end comes to nothing, it was cut and scaled back so much from the script. It just makes the ending longer. The special effects may be called adequate only because of the acting around them. Perkins, Isabelle and Lemke probably saved the movie ten million dollars in special effects needed to otherwise make it work. Finally, it could have used just one totally dazzling scene showing Ginger's superhuman strength and speed.

Yet, it's an awesome move. Personally a 10 star for me; for others, I give it an 8.