Fear Dot Com (2002)

Directed by: William Malone

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone, Stephen Rea, Udo Kier

(out of 4)

disappointed in the American Idol finale

fear dot com is the kind of horror movie that is 75% derivative and 25% wasted potential. There are scenes that stand out for their striking nightmarish quality, but these are scenes that belong in a better film. Stephen Dorff plays a cop who is on the trail of a serial killer who taunts him with occasional letters. There is no real fleshing out of the backstory involving the relationship between cop and killer, but no matter.. the bulk of the movie concerns a website which kills the viewer 48 hours after accessing it. Apparently, the unfortunate surfer ends up dying from his/her greatest fear, but even this plot point seems underused and glossed over - one can imagine fabulous death sequences involving one’s worst fears, but, with the exception of one clever sequence where a computer expert dies from a multiple onslaught of bugs (get it?), I suppose we’ll have to make due with the Elm Street movies.

Shoulda ran the GNU Debugger

It seems that the director decided to throw bits of other films into the mix, and stir them around, hoping for a brand new concoction; there are elements of old silent horror movies, bits of Videodrome, Strangeland, Seven, and even some of the anime series Lain. Yes, of course, the movie is a total ripoff of the Japanese film Ringu (no coincidence that this movie and The Ring were made around the same time in 2002). In addition, the technological side of this killer-web-site scenario is barely touched upon - why, for instance, is there no attempt to track down the source of the fear.com website? (Does anybody know how to do a traceroute anymore?) The philosophical undertones of the film are reduced in importance to throwaway ramblings by our serial killer (”We will provide a lesson that reducing relationships to an anonymous electronic impulse is a perversion”), and abandoned in the end to a simple track-down-the-killer horror film. While there are interesting elements scattered through fear dot com, the end result is not worth the download time - if you’re looking for a movie about a virus-in-the-wired, try The Ring, Ringu, Lain, or Ghost in the Shell; if you want merging-of-the-virtual-and-reality, see Videodrome; if you want a good noirish serial-killer movie, go with Seven.

- Bill Gordon

lonelygirl15 gets out of hand

The Crazies (1973)
Directed by George Romero
Starring Lane Carroll, Will MacMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar, Lynn Lowry

28 Days Later (2002) 1/2
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Noah Huntley, Brendan Gleeson

…biggest bug we ever saw!

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is a horror film about a small band of survivors in Britain trying to stay alive 28 days after a viral apocalypse. Not so much an update to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, its closest relative would be Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies. Both films concern an outbreak of a virus created by the government, both films have the virus in question causing rage and madness in the infected, and both films share a strong distrust of authority (the military), painting the enemy as both the contaminated and the army. The major difference between the two relates to stages of the viral apocalypse - while Boyle’s film shows us what happens a month after the outbreak, Romero’s film shows us what happens during the outbreak itself.

As The Crazies begins, little Billy is trying to scare his sister by pretending to be a monster, but it turns out the real monster is daddy, who goes mad, kills mommy, and then sets fire to the house. It turns out that a secret bio weapon has been accidentally released into a small town’s water supply by the military which either turns victims mad, or kills them. (The “bug” in question is referred to half the time as a virus, while the other half it’s called a “bacteriological weapon” - well, which is it?) The rest of the movie concerns a small group of confused citizens fighting off the army’s attempts to quarantine them, intertwined with scenes of an inept military trying to contain the situation.

um… yeah, I think I’ll just try FedEx

The Crazies was Romero’s second horror film, made a few years following Night of the Living Dead, and it definitely bears a resemblance to that film given its plot, but this movie is much more political, commenting on the debacle going on in Vietnam at the time. But that’s not what dates the picture (it could be shown today, substituting Iraq) - the main problem with the movie is its execution. I love strange, threatening guys in white suits and masks as much as anyone, but much of the film is content to stick us in the middle of a military bureaucratic nightmare as soldiers and medical doctors spend as much time fighting red tape and inefficient procedures as much as the virus itself. It’s like being stuck inside a day-long corporate executive meeting, where a lot of people are shouting but nothing is getting done. It’s nice to hear Richard France shout “Stick it up your big, fat electronic ass!”, and nobody can deny the grand commentary on society and the Vietnam war, but the mostly bland performances and extremely low budget (I couldn’t understand the dialogue half the time due to the muddled Dolby 2.0 soundtrack) get in the way of caring. Given some eye-opening scenes, like the old lady who stabs a soldier to death with a knitting needle and then goes right back to knitting, a father/daughter incest subplot (daughter being played by cult film heroine Lynn Lowry - who later ends up in the similar-but-superior Cronenberg movie Shivers), and the ironic ending involving one of our heroes with natural immunity to the virus, the movie’s unfocused editing style and uninteresting characters makes things all the more frustrating.

Fast forwarding about 30 years, we come to 28 Days Later, which improves upon The Crazies in many areas, but at the same time doesn’t offer a message ambitious enough as The Crazies (or Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, another obvious influence). Here we meet Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bike courier who wakes from a coma a month after a deadly virus infects the entire city of London. Some of the movie’s best scenes involve the sequence where we see Jim walking around the eerily empty city. He discovers soon enough, however, that he isn’t alone, and his situation becomes one of basic survival. Meeting up with a female survivor (Naomie Harris), a father (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter (Megan Burns), the foursome make a break for Manchester after hearing a recorded radio message from the military. The middle act of the film covers their trip to reach the military blockade while trying to avoid getting attacked or infected; the final third of the film tells what happens when they arrive to find a less than pleasing situation involving soldiers who are just as dangerous as the infected.

here’s blood in yer eye

It is this third act that is slightly disappointing - after going through a living hell involving raging infected maniacs, the movie bogs down into a battle of wills between Jim and the military (like in Day of the Dead). While Boyle stirs up some genuinely creepy scenes and gives us a proper atmosphere (helped along by the peculiarities of the digital format he shot the movie on), 28 Days Later fails to build up to the grand conclusion that you are led to believe is coming. (But perhaps, in retrospect, there is no grand conclusion in these kinds of movies - you either return from the world of the animal back to civilization, or civilization is completely consumed). However, if the message of the film is simply one of man being little more than an beast at his core (and the possibility to triumph over that instinct), that’s all well and good, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The movie seems to work better as a paranoia-laced cautionary tale against tampering with nature (again, nothing new). I could just be nitpicking - it’s a superior work to The Crazies (but not to the Dead films), with good performances, and until the final third act, it’s quite eerie.

laser eye surgery gone horribly wrong

Both DVDs have some interesting special features. The Crazies has audio commentary by George Romero as well as an interesting mini-documentary about Lynn Lowry, including interviews. 28 Days Later gives us audio commentary by Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland and some alternate endings (the original ending still being the best, and incidentally, not because of its hopeful message). - Bill Gordon

Buy The Crazies and 28 Days Later on DVD

Van Helsing (2004) 1/2
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale
Director: Stephen Sommers

it is so totally not cold out at all

If you wanted to take a look at everything that is wrong about big budget Hollywood films of today, you would pay very close attention to Van Helsing. Mind-numbingly awful, the movie plays like some kind of endurance test and is proof positive that Stephen Summers merely got lucky with The Mummy. Instead, Van Helsing is more like The Mummy Returns - full of fake CGI effects, insipid dialogue, and unbelievable physical laws. It is so ridiculous that it could almost pass for camp, except that there’s no fun to be found anywhere during its two hour plus running time. It is in love with itself and in love with excess - it doesn’t know how to establish characters to root for or create action scenes that make sense, and what’s worse is that it doesn’t care. It has no originality, stealing from every film imagineable, from Aliens to Indiana Jones to James Bond films. And perhaps worst of all - it’s PG13.

Hugh Jackman plays Van Helsing, accompanied by a friar version of Bond’s Q as he fights every monster you can locate in Universal Studio’s backcatalogue. Working for the man (Vatican), he’s sent off to kill Dracula, and if his missing memories don’t give you a clue that he’s a carbon copy of Wolverine, perhaps his transformation into a werewolf later in the movie will convince you. I half expected Patrick Stewart to come out in a wheelchair. Later he hooks up with Kate Beckinsale, playing some variation of her vampire character from Underworld, except with a really bad Romanian accent and the cheese factor turned way up (yes, even more than Underworld).

don’t you be seein this movie now!

There’s not much left to say about the plot, which doesn’t really matter anyway, since it, along with character moments, are secondary to the horrible CGI effects. I’m sure it took a lot of hard work to render computer generated horses hopping over a huge canyon like flying reindeer, but did anybody stop to ask why? By the film’s end, you’ll be asking many more questions like: why is Dracula’s clothing invisible in a mirror, why do naked vampire chicks have no nipples, why does an exploding light grenade fill up an entire castle, and why is Dracula a whiny goth-boy?

…the bats have left the belltower.. the victims have been bled…

I can’t answer these questions, but perhaps they would have been avoided if some of this movie’s 160 million dollar budget went towards a writer worth his salt. Someone needs to tell Sommers that not every moviegoer is a mindless zombie waiting to be numbed with meaningless eye candy or exhibit a Pavlovian response to Alan Silvestri’s by-the-numbers score. If he really wanted to pay tribute to old Universal Horror perhaps he would have given his film some atmosphere and fright instead of turning it into an empty lightshow. Van Helsing is truly soul sucking cinema, but it did make me sympathize with Dracula - after watching it I felt like I aged hundreds of years. - Bill Gordon

Hey Carl… what exactly are we anyway?

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Cube 2 - Hypercube (2002) 1/2

Director: Andrzej Sekula

Starring: Kari Matchett, Geraint Wyn Davies , Grace Lynn Kung, Matthew Ferguson

at the center of nothingness lies… Cube 2

The first Cube was an interesting indie horror flick that made the most of its claustrophobic setting and bizarre deathtraps (even if the ending deteriorated into typical slash-formula). Well, Cube 2 is a mere shadow of the original that fails on just about every level, especially the ones that worked in the first film.

There’s this cube, you see, made up of a seemingly infinite number of white rooms all similar in appearance. As in the first movie, a bunch of people wake up in it and have to figure out a way to escape the cube, while fighting each other, of course. The difference this time is that the cube is a “hypercube” - a tesseract of four spatial dimensions. The filmmakers, of course, take liberties with this theoretical structure and interpret it to mean “weird” and “strange”, as in: differing time-speed rooms, antigravity rooms, rooms with flying killer rotating blades, etc..

blind girl and annoying old lady … waiting to take their act on the road

A quick and dirty dissection of Cube 2 reveals it to be a virtual carbon copy of the original film, and everyone knows that a copy never has the same quality as the original. A deeper probing of Cube 2 reveals it to be… nothing else, really. What makes the sequel different, as far as I can tell, is that the acting has gotten worse, the dialogue has gotten worse, the characters have gotten worse, and the mathematics have gotten worse.

Cube 2 is so bad that it’s a wonder to behold. It features characters that are so annoying and unbelievable that one could never care about their fate. The hypercube is more interesting than they are, and trust me - the hypercube is not that interesting. That’s because the movie doesn’t derive its suspense from, say, the concept of a tesseract and its implications - instead, it is perfectly content to recreate the psycho killer (played by Maurice Dean Wint in the first film, Geraint Wyn Davies in this one) as a antagonist. How boring. By the end of the film, we learn that every character has a secret that ties them to the shadowy organization which created the cube, but the question that is never answered is - why keep any secrets to begin with? If I was stuck in a strange laboratory experiment, I would want to contribute and collaborate as much as possible to facilitate an escape. Wouldn’t you? Not these people. A psycho, a senile old lady, a blind girl, and a few other forgettable characters are all we have to root for, but trust me, you can’t. The only character left to root for is the cube.

late hours at the lab

The biggest disappointment of Cube 2 is its lazy writing. I didn’t really care for the low budget Primer, but at least it tried to develop its concepts. The writers * don’t seem to care about showing us the possibilities of the hypercube as a mathematical model given physical form; he thinks that the name itself will wow us, that inserting the concept of parallel universes will fulfill the film’s “cool factor” quotient (admittedly, the scene of Davies’ character wearing badges from multiple killings of the same guy as trophies is amusing), that showing decaying corpses dancing around in an antigravity field will polish over the turd that is essentially a bunch of hateful characters bickering in white rooms. The strange numbers that appeared in the first Cube turned out to be variations on the prime number set ; the strange numbers appearing in the sequel refer to a clock time - that should give an insight into the intensity of thought put into this experiment. Where’s the administration building? I’m dropping this course. - Bill Gordon

shadowy man, shadowy government, military industrial complex, secret experiment, blah blah blah

*

Since this review, Sean Hood has stated that he only wrote an early draft, and that everything was rewritten. See comments below.

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House of 1,000 Corpses (2003)

Directed by Rob Zombie
Starring: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black

who’s # 1 ?

Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses is a curious freak show of a movie - a fun house of horrors that wants to aim for cult status but doesn’t quite have the authenticity to pull it off.

It starts out promising enough - bringing us into Captain Spaulding’s (Sid Haig) Museum of Monsters (and Chicken) off a lonely highway in the middle of nowhere, America. The date is October 30, 1977, our first tip-off to Zombie’s love for 70s grindhouse and Texas-Chainsaw-style goings-on. Haig’s performance as the hilarious (and dangerous) owner of the creepy establishment at the edge of Roadside America is a masterpiece of slow-building intensity that takes us to a campy high point the rest of the movie (post-opening-credits) can’t seem to find its way back to.

two great tastes that taste great together

We are soon treated to four idiot teens who, after paying a visit to Spaulding’s attraction and learning of the possible location of local scary legend Dr. Satan, decide to take a trip off the beaten path to find out more. Running into a sexy psycho cowgirl (Sheri Moon, hot!), they eventually make it to the requisite house of the title, run by a family best described as the Texas Chainsaw clan version 2.0. Idiotic decisions are made and soon enough our foursome become unwilling playthings to the house’s resident redneck freaks.

What’s frustrating about the movie is its inability to figure out what it wants to be. Scenes of sadistic shocks involving naked dead cheerleaders are intercut with fast camera moves and changing color tones, 2 second edits and skewed camera angles with monologues by each psycho meant to give some insight into their personality. On one hand, we get a brutal stabbing death of a helpless victim; on the other hand most of the murders are hyper-edited, as if Zombie suddenly turned squeamish on us, and are soon replaced by quick faded jump-cuts or black-and-white television shorts of a Dr. Paul Bearer wannabe introducing the next fright-fest on the tube. There’s even one sequence that has its impact diminished by the playing of Brick House by the Commodores.

cheerleader tryouts get harder every year

Admittedly, there are moments of brilliance here - take the Tarantino-esque sequence where the police stumble upon a horrific scene of tortured and mutilated victims to the tune of I Remember You being sung by Slim Whitman. After this, the camera pulls back slowly with complete silence on the soundtrack; then the tension is broken with the sound of a gunshot. These kind of sequences belong in a more serious movie, and I can appreciate a serious attempt at hard-core horror at the same time I can appreciate a campy attempt at making a partying haunted house attraction, but when Zombie tries to mix the two it’s more like trying to assemble incompatible parts from other (better) movies. Better to go with the superior sequel Devil’s Rejects. - Bill Gordon

I’ll be lurking for you

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