Piranha 3DD

Since the campy Piranha 3D made over $80 million (!!!) in the box office, it was inevitable that it would spawn a sequel. It's a difficult task to follow up a stupid hit with an inevitably stupider sequel, but the filmmakers got off on the right foot when they named the sequel Piranha 3DD.  That is simply sublime.  I don't think there is a better way to distill what this movie should be about than that: killer fish and big boobs.  Somebody give that title guy a raise!  Truly, this will live out its days with the royalty of movie sequel titles, like Electric Boogaloo and Die Harder.  Here's the thing, though: I didn't really like Piranha 3D.  Sure, it was campy and had some cheap nudity and gore, but it was too aware of its crappiness to for me to truly enjoy laughing at it.  I hate laughing with bad movies --- I want to laugh at them.  What are the odds that Piranha 3DD will be stupid, but still stupid-fun?

I started off liking Piranha 3DD's choices, right off the bat.  Piranha 3D set the stage for the inevitable sequel, but 3DD opts to completely ignore the ending of that movie; in a brilliant move, they acknowledge that some people died in a lake, thanks to some fish, but it's probably unrelated to what's happening in this film.  So, if you were hoping for some tighter continuity in this series, you're absolutely adorable.  And out of luck.  The story kicks off with Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) returning home from college, only to discover that the water park she co-owns with her step-father, Chet (David Koechner), is about to grand open with an all-adult section and a brand new name: "Big Wet."  That's a lot to take in at one time, I know, but try to digest it all.  Yes, a college student co-owns a water park.  Yes, it is creepy that her step-father is setting up a raunchy zone in said water park.  And, following that logic, the lifeguards in the adult section will be strippers.

"And the lifeguards can drop their kids off in the main pool while they're pool stripping!  Genius!"

As the days count down to the grand opening of the park, Maddy and her friends start to notice some strange things happening at the lake that is located near the park.  Luckily, Maddy is a marine biologist and quickly realizes that super-piranhas are entering the lake, somehow.  But that's just the lake.  It couldn't possibly affect the water park, unless it happened to be illegally siphoning water from that lake.

But then...how did...oh, I get it now.

One of the unexpected strengths of Piranha 3D was its surprisingly legit cast.  Piranha 3DD doesn't quite match its prequel in that department.  Danielle Panabaker was fine, I guess, as the character with the closest thing that passes for brains in this movie.I don't know why, but I keep expecting her to have a breakout performance one of these days, despite the fact that she doesn't even stand out in this crap.  Her romantic interests are played by Matt Bush and Chris Zylka; Bush appears to be doing his best impression of a young Seth Green here, while Zylka continues to play teenage jerks.  Both were fine for what their roles called for, but neither was particularly interesting.  Meagan Tandy and Jean-Lu Bilodeau  were only in the film briefly, but they were void of personality.  Paul James Jordan would have been completely forgettable, if not for the scene where he cuts off his penis to keep a piranha from eating him.

I don't know if I would be that calm, sir

David Koechner was his usual bawdy self, and it actually made sense for him to show up in this film.  He wasn't funny, but I kind of hate seeing him in movies, so this matches my opinion of his talents quite well.  I was a little surprised that Ving Rhames reprised his role from the first movie (as did Paul Scheer), but at least his small part had a moderately funny moment. 

...that had already been done in Planet Terror

Gary Busey and Clu Gulager showed up in the introductory scene and were reasonably amusing as idiot rednecks.  Ever since Scream revived the "kill the recognizable actor in the opening scene" film trope, I have enjoyed seeing how different films have embraced the tradition; I'm fairly sure that Clu Gulager is the most obscure horror actor I have seen in a scene like that, but I am definitely not complaining.  It may be nepotism on the part of the director, but it's obscure and fun nepotism.  I will complain about Christopher Lloyd's choice to return, though; for an actor that is as occasionally hilarious as Lloyd, he sure knows how to stoop to the level of whatever movie he's in.  He could have been one of the shining moments of this film, and he definitely was not.  David Hasselhoff was shockingly not terrible playing himself.  I definitely like his work in the Spongebob movie better, but his singing threesome scene was enough to balance out most of his all-too-aware-of-its-campiness part.  When you get right down to it, the only actor I liked in the movie was Katrina Bowden.  Her character was too stupid and sincere for words, but the more I see of her, the more I am impressed by her excellent comedic timing.  Plus, she had the best line in the entire film:

John Gulager directed Piranha 3DD, and it was written by his buddies Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan; the three worked together on all three of the Feast movies.  In case you're unfamiliar with those movies, Melton and Dunstan have also co-written the last four Saw movies, so if anyone knows how to make a stupid movie funny, it's...the guys who write torture porn?  That doesn't sound right.

If only they had this picture to inspire them to greater heights...

I'm not going to bother commenting on normal directorial stuff, like cinematography, editing, or tone, because this movie doesn't care about any of that.  Instead, I'll judge Piranha 3DD on what it obviously values.  It had to be campy, gory, prominently feature large breasts, and, as the sequel to an already unlikely and campy movie, it had to be pretty darn stupid.  If that doesn't sound difficult to you, think of the last movie you watched that was intentionally so-bad-it's-good.  They're rarer beasts than you might think.  So, how did Gulager do?  This movie certainly was campy, but nowhere near as funny as it seemed to think it was. 

Example page from the script: Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle [WAIT FOR APPLAUSE TO DIE DOWN]

Aside from Hasselhoff's narration-singing and bizarre post-credits scene, the only time I laughed was with the whole piranha-in-my-vagina explanation.  That's not a good thing, especially when you consider how many other characters are in this movie.  Instead of being ridiculous, like Piranha 3D, this movie was stupid, and then had the nerve to elbow the audience in the stomach and ask if they "got it."  As for the gore, there definitely was some.  My personal favorite moments included an annoying child's head being eaten, a cow carcass exploding, and (of course) piranhagina (AKA pussanha).

Thank God this didn't start with "This one time, in band camp..."

The rest of the gore was surprisingly tame.  There was a lot of fake blood in the water, but it definitely felt less explicit than the original film, and it sure was a lot less original.  The filmmakers went out of their way to show gratuitous nude shots at the beginning of the film, but I was surprised by how rarely I saw unnecessary nudity as the story wore on.  Wasn't the entire point of making this an "adult" water park to constantly have topless girls splashing in the background of scenes?  It seems like such an obviously exploitative move, and yet it was used so sparingly. 

Why is Botox 'n' Balloon Chest Barbie even in this movie if she's clothed?

How about the plot?  Yes, that was dumb.  I know, I know, the filmmakers had to come up with a way to get piranhas into a water park, and they did it.  I have no problem with whatever stupid justification they needed to get Jason into space piranhas into the water park.  My problem is that the writers felt that they needed to build up to that.  That meant there was less time spent in the novelty location (the water park) and more time spent rehashing the last film in and around a lake.  This is a movie about killer fish in a water park; if I needed a plausible concept, then I wouldn't be watching a movie about killer fish in a water park. 

Correction: a movie about killer fish in a water park that features Gary Busey exploding a cow

When it gets down to brass tacks, Piranha 3DD feels like the poor man's version of Piranha 3D, instead of the bigger and stupider movie that all sequels strive to be.  It wants to be dumb enough to love, that much is clear.  It is just missing the charm, wit, and tongue-in-cheek knowing humor that earned Piranha 3D 3.5 stars (out of 10) from me.  In other words, this movie sucks, even when compared to a movie I didn't like.  The humor is cruder, the tone was more irritating than campy, there were human villains for some reason, and there wasn't enough creative gore or nudity to keep me interested.  It just.  Wasn't.  Fun. 

When 60% of your jokes come from the Hoff, you have a bad script

This isn't just a bad horror movie, it's a bad horror movie when you compare it to bad horror movies.  I almost wish I had given Piranha 3D a better rating, just to illustrate how much worse this sequel is.  How about this: Piranha 3DD made about 10% of Piranha 3D's box office gross.  Ouch.  Comparing it to Piranha 3D isn't even an apples-to-apples argument, because that movie actually achieved its goal of being dumb fun.  This is a lot closer to Shark Night 3D; both movies tried to capitalize on the success of the last Piranha, but couldn't be bothered to be ridiculously over the top.  This was lazy and boring instead of dumb fun. 

"I'll have to scrub for days to get all the shame off me"

On the bright side, this isn't a movie that deserves active hatred, it had a few worthwhile moments, and about fifteen minutes of its runtime was devoted to the end credits/gag reel, so the pain was short-lived.  Let's just hope we don't see another sequel for a while.

Giallo

31 Days of Horror, Day 10

One of the reasons I spend all October reviewing horror movies is because I need to focus if I'm going to find good horror flicks that I've never seen.  When the mood strikes me to watch a horror movie during the rest of the year, my natural instinct is to find something godawful and laugh through it.  October is different.  I try to watch famous movies or styles that I wouldn't ordinarily check out.  This year, I realized that I had never seen a Dario Argento film.  That's kind of weird, right?  Well, I thought it was high time to put that wrong right, and I took up Netflix's suggestion to watch Giallo.

Giallo begins, like so many horror films, with a woman being victimized.  After partying in a club, an international model decides that she should walk back to her hotel.  All alone.  At night.  In a large city.  In a country where she doesn't speak the language.  Because international models wander off alone after a night of partying all the damn time.  Thankfully, this obvious rape setup is just a bit of misdirection.  When she feels threatened, the model hails a cab.  Unfortunately, the cabbie happens to be a serial killer who likes to torture, disfigure and kill beautiful people.  Whoops.  The next night, Celine (Elsa Patakay), another model, falls for the same trick as she left work to meet up with her sister, Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner).  The next morning, Linda tries to report Celine's tardiness to the police, but is rebuffed because you have to wait X amount of hours to qualify as a missing persons case.  The police also won't help her because they're fairly certain that Celine was just out late, getting her booster shot of Vitamin Bone.

Yeah, that's the reaction I gave myself after I typed it.  But then I high-fived myself.  I'm a contradiction.

The local cops decide to cut Linda a break and introduce her to Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody).  Enzo is the kind of detective that is so bad-ass that he gets a most of the police department's basement to himself; he doesn't have a partner, because he "doesn't exactly do things by the book"; he is apparently given free reign to solve whatever cases tickle his fancy; and he is apparently all the manpower needed to track down a serial killer, because he's the only one working this series of disappearances and murders.

"I'm so relieved that my survival is dependent on just one man!"

When Linda explains the situation to Enzo, she mentions that they were on the phone when Celine got in a cab and they lost the connection.  Enzo, being a sensible rogue cop, realizes that this fits his killer's MO.  So what does he do?  Tell Linda that he's on the case, pat her on the head, and point her out the door?  No.  He tells Linda --- that's Linda, the civilian, mind you --- that Celine has probably been kidnapped by a psycho killer who is going to be torturing her for the next few days, leading up to murder. 

"She'll probably look like this when it's over, but with less...face."

In what sort of world does a police officer tell anyone outside of the police about the inner workings of a case?  The sort of world where the same police officer takes that same civilian and lets her be his partner for the rest of the movie.  What.  The.  Hell.  Is this a Batman movie?  Is she going to be named Robin by the end of this?  Because that's probably what this movie needs; to get past the stupid, it's going to need a whole lot of ridiculousness.

Okay, that's a good start.  What's next?

The acting in Giallo is pretty inconsistent.  Adrien Brody plays both the detective and the killer (he's credited as Byron Deidra, which is an anagram of his name).  As the detective, Brody was pretty good, although his character was very cliched and spoke exclusively in movie-tough-guy-ese.  As the killer, he was pretty terrible.  The character was awful, sure, but it wasn't helped by the fact that Brody went cartoony to play the part.  And while his bad guy makeup and costume were just plain bad, I will admit that I didn't realize Body was playing both parts; I did, however, wonder how someone so terrible could have gotten the main villain part.

Adrien Brody, as the older brother from The Goonies

Emmanuelle Seigner is not very impressive here, either.  Again, a large part of that is thanks to her character being ridiculous, but Seigner is also guilty of practically sleepwalking through this film.  Elsa Patakay was better, but that's because she was a victim and was forced to show at least one emotion while on camera.

ACTING!

Okay, so I wasn't impressed by the acting in Giallo.  Perhaps the direction of horror master Dario Argento helped balance that a little?  I'll remove the suspense of that statement; Argento's direction does not help this movie.  I was disappointed that my first experience with Dario Argento had to be such a bland and uninteresting effort.  This is a poorly-paced movie for a horror/thriller.  There are only a few kills in the entire film, and most of the gore comes from photos of previous murders.  The editing is also noticeably bad.  There is no way for the audience to know how much times has passed between scenes, and that quickly becomes a problem.  We also can't tell how many people the killer has murdered; Enzo claims only four or five, but the killer has also been at large for several months --- and yet, the killer appears to be picking up girls every few days in this movie.  Perhaps the biggest problem with Giallo is the portrayal of the killer.  Never mind the back story and jaundiced skin, I just want to point out the makeup. It looks like someone used papier-mâché instead of makeup on Adrien Brody. 

I've seen more frightening Scooby-Doo villains.  He looks like a rejected member of an all-zombie E-Street Band.  An experienced director should be able to realize how awful this main villain is, which is why this movie is so disappointing.  I've seen some reviews that mention Argento has disowned Giallo because the producers re-cut it behind his back, but I seriously doubt anyone could drastically improve this film, regardless of the cut.

"Maybe I should have kept suing to keep this movie from ever releasing..."

There is very little gore, a low body count, a laughable villain, and poor editing in Giallo.  Is it bad enough to be good, at least?  Well, if you watch this movie, you will be laughing at it, but not enough to justify investing your time in it.  Yes, the killer is incomprehensibly weird.  Yes, he photographs his victims, uploads the images on his computer, uses a magnifying glass to enlarge the pictures (um, there's a zooming tool on your computer, dude), and masturbates, all while sucking on a pacifier.  Yes, Adrien Brody is awfully jowl-ly (jowl-ful?) as the killer. And yes, the back story explaining how Enzo became a cop is one of the dumbest you will encounter.  But that doesn't make this consistently fun to laugh at.  There are little things here and there that inspire snickers, like the nightclub that apparently specialized in 120-watt lighting or the cabbie who does the world's worst job of trailing a car, but they're not really funny; they are just signs of sloppiness. 

Even when I felt inclined to be charitable towards Giallo, it bent over backwards to do something irritating.  In the last act of the movie, there is a goofy-ass twist that was made even sillier by Seigner's wooden performance.  It boils down to this (SPOILER ALERT: you should not watch this movie): the killer dies before anyone can find Celine, so Linda blames Enzo for her sister's death.  Then cut to a parking garage, where the killer has stashed a bound and gagged Celine in the back of a hatchback --- so anyone walking by could see the body in the back --- and there appears to be a ton of blood pooling beneath the car.  A security guard notices the blood pool and hears Celine's grunts and --- cut to end credits. 

"...aaand CUT!  Should we roll credits here, or before the story can finish?"

So the hero and the sister don't know where the victim is, or if she's alive when the movie ends.  And the movie ends with these two partners being mad at each other.  And the ending is obviously not supposed to be a downer ending, because we don't find Celine in a remote location where she will starve to death, never to be found --- she is literally seconds away from being found by a security guard when the movie throws in the towel!  If you're going to quit so easily, Giallo, you should have done it an hour-plus earlier.

In case you were wondering what "Giallo" means, it's Italian for "yellow."  It is also used to describe the pulp books and movies made in Italy in the 60s and 70s that focused on crime and exploitative horror, which often used yellow covers to stand out.  Dario Argento is best known for his giallo movies.  Not this one, certainly, but others.  Oh, and "Giallo" also refers to the killer's jaundiced skin.  What a dumb movie.

The Wicker Man (2006) (Unrated)

31 Days of Horror, Day 8

I don't like to admit to lapses in judgment, but I was unjustly biased against Nicolas Cage for a good long while.  And, sure, he's been in some pretty awful movies and he's been known to overact a teensy bit on occasion, but I actively avoided The Cage for almost a decade. 

I would have been first in line to break his legs here.  Which means I own a horse costume, I guess

I don't know what changed my mind --- probably either the awesomeness of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or the awfulness of Season of the Witch --- but I now look forward to raging with The Cage.  He might not make good movies regularly, but he can be pretty damn entertaining, nevertheless.  Last October, Danny O'D suggested I check out The Wicker Man (2006), based on the fact that I enjoyed the original movie and because this compilation of scenes is hilarious:

Okay, that's pretty funny stuff, but it's obviously taken out of context.  The issue is whether this American remake can possibly live up to the weird (and fairly UK-centric) wonder that was The Wicker Man (1973) and still have all that goofy shit in it.  Show me what you've got, Cage!

The Wicker Man is the story of Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), a California policeman, as he investigates the mysterious disappearance of a young girl, Rowan, on the island of Summersisle in Washington state.  The disappearance is mysterious for several reasons.  First of all, the entire island is an enigma; its only contact with the world at large comes from a seaplane that runs supplies to and from the island --- visitors are not welcome.  Second, the person requesting Malus' help is his ex-fiance, Willow (Kate Beahan), who Malus hasn't spoken to in years, and the girl is her daughter.  Thirdly, there is a huge issue of jurisdiction; why would you call a California cop to police things in Washington?  And why would he agree to this?  What's wrong with Washington's police force?  Seattle seems nice enough.  Finally, the island is mysterious because it is a place where weird things happen.

Is that BZZ Top?  ...Because her beard is made of bees.

Whatever reason he had, Officer Malus did, indeed, come to Summersisle.  Once he arrives, he is surprised to find a matriarchy where there is a lot of talk about "the gods" and little girls recite their lessons on phallic symbols.  That would just be unsettling if it was not for the fact that Malus can't get anywhere with his case.  He can't even get the locals to acknowledge that little Rowan even existed at some point.

"Tell me what happened to Rowan, or I will punch you in the face.  Yes, I'd punch a woman"

Eventually, Malus meets the matriarch of Summersisle, the aptly named Sister Summsesisle (Ellen Burstyn), and she does little to lower his suspicions.  Not only is Rowan (probably) missing, but this is a culture that practices pagan rituals, like the "celebration of DEATH...pause...keep pausing...longer pause...and rebirth."  What the hell is going on in this town?  What really happened to Rowan?  And is there a police officer role that Nicolas Cage won't take?

"I can't believe they still let me keep this!"

Have you ever had your mind blown?  The acting in The Wicker Man (2006) absolutely blew mine.  Aside from the last half-hour or so of The Cage being The Cage, the movie is surprisingly well-acted.  Ellen Burstyn was slumming it a bit, but she played a strong, confident and ruthless a female character as well as it could have been played.  Kate Beahan was not as good, but she played her character well.  Her character was kind of annoying because she apparently had an allergy to clear exposition, but it serves a purpose in the overall plot, so I won't complain about it.  Much.  Even the smaller parts were handled capably; I don't think Frances Conroy, Molly Parker, or Diane Delano did anything spectacular, but their actions seemed natural enough.  Leelee Sobieski was a little weird, but I'll give her credit for taking a movie karate kick believably.  As for Nicolas Cage...well, he's Nicolas Goddamn Cage, people!  For the first 75 minutes of the movie, he was just a slightly condescending and strange policeman with odd line delivery.  For the last thirty minutes or so, though, he turned it up to eleven and went completely batshit ridiculous.  I thought he was hilarious, but I doubt that was the original intent of the filmmakers.

Then again...

Director Neil LaBute also wrote the updated screenplay for The Wicker Man (2006), so that means he's doubly responsible for what made the final cut.  From a directorial standpoint, I think LaBute has a fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to make a horror movie.  He uses the soundtrack to clue the audience in that something scary/important is about to happen, which would normally be fine, but he does this often and with no good reason.  Why would we need the minor chords of horror soundtracks within seconds of getting on the island?  Implying scares and not delivering them is not the same thing as building suspense.  Given how silly the movie can look when taken out of context, I was surprised at how serious the tone in this film is.

"Does that mean...?  Oh my God.  You're not in on the joke...!"

From a writing standpoint, I would feel better if the Writer's Guild of America burned his membership card.  This has nothing to do with the fact that he had the main character dress as a bear and start punching women.  I don't even want to know how the stupid doll got burned.

Best guess: falling asleep while smoking after doll-sex

What bothers me about the writing is that there are large chunks of this movie that could have been better spent elsewhere.  The entire prologue with the car crash was completely unnecessary.  The only reason it needed to exist was to provide motivation for Malus to go to the island; too bad the plot provides him with two better reasons for going.  Having Malus repeatedly flash back to that scene was also stupid and worthless.  The script is also jam-packed with red herrings that provide nothing to the overall story, like those fetuses that appeared to be embalmed in honey.  Things like that make me wish the tagline to this movie was "The Wicker Man: Wait...What?!?" 

...and this would be the movie poster

Even basic plot points, like the disappearance of Rowan's picture, were handled poorly.  The missing picture was an important piece of the puzzle in this story, but the way it was noticed --- a broken picture frame with broken glass all around it --- was clumsy.  If someone wanted to hide the picture, wouldn't they have just taken the whole frame?  Or at least swept up the glass?

Subtlety takes a back seat when you're wearing Braveheart makeup

The most frightening thing about this remake is that it's not all bad.  There are some interesting ideas in place here, even if they weren't executed very well.  For instance, naming all the women on the island after some sort of plant was a pretty cool idea, although it would have been cooler if The Cage didn't call it out relatively early in the film.  Not very many movies make use of bees, which made this isolationist society unique in appearance and language.  And then there is the whole matriarchy in place here; while it didn't quite fit in this plot, an aggressive female-centric group could make for a great horror story.  There's a lot that can be done with that idea through cinematography, too.  Speaking of which, there were some fairly striking visuals in The Wicker Man (2006). 

AAA!!!  Post-coital elephant man!!!

They weren't all of pretty things, but the set design and makeup teams did some good work.

The Wicker Man (2006) is simply a collection of parts that was never going to be good, but then had the opportunity to be so much more.  Even with the solid acting, the script and direction guaranteed that this film would be a miss.  This is essentially a mystery, but is treated with the same "gotcha" moments that you would find in a crappy slasher pic.  If you want to compare this to The Wicker Man (1973), go right ahead.  Everything that makes the original unique --- the disturbingly cheery tone, the subtlety, the randomness, and the religious aspects --- is missing in the remake. 

The original is missing bee-related hilarity, though

The first hour and fifteen minutes are boring to watch --- they're obviously bad, but not enough to amuse anyone --- but the viewing experience for The Wicker Man (2006) is saved by that last act.  The movie goes from being something worth occasionally snickering at to having layer upon layer of Lefty Gold.  Remember those scenes that were funny when taken out of context?  It turns out that there is no proper context for them.  Those scenes are always that funny, and they come out of absolutely nowhere.

This is Cage's "What's in the box?" moment

With that knowledge, I will watch this movie again, although I certainly won't be sober.  And I will be secure in my viewing choice, because I know how ridiculous the ending is.  Without that knowledge, I can see someone being worried that they're wasting their time with The Wicker Man (2006).  And that's a fair concern, because this is a truly awful movie, more than deserving the scorn heaped upon it.  As a reasonable bit of legitimate cinema, this movie truly fails. 

But this is one of those rare movies that is so consistently ridiculous that you can find brand new things to laugh at every time you watch it.  I might actually buy a copy of this movie, as long as it's the unrated one, because the theatrical version is missing the "not the bees" scene.  This is easily the best so-bad-it's-good movie I have seen in a long time.  It earns a Lefty Gold rating of

Abduction

With the recent announcement of the 2011 Oscar nominations, I took a few moments to figure out what 2011 movies I need to watch before the big awards show.  I don't necessarily like to just watch the good movies, though; my annual best-of list includes the best and the worst of the year.  Upon reflection, however, I realized that my hatred for Sucker Punch was skewing this year's list.  I needed another suitable contender for my Worst Movie of the Year award.  But what could possibly contend with the Punch?  And then I remembered Abduction.

I wish this was my reaction to Abduction

Abduction begins with Nathan (Taylor Lautner) being one crayzee dude, riding on the hood of his buddy's truck the entire way to a huge house party.  Whoa, man!  That shows attitude and baditude!  This movie has character development coming out its ears!  And it has great dialogue, too.

Example: "He who smelt it dealt it"

The first line (that isn't "Woooo!") is "Let's go, baby, we got bitches waiting!"  I love when an opening scene gives me an accurate idea of how good the rest of the film will be.  At the party, one of Nathan's friends (Denzel Whitaker) momentarily stops binge drinking to sell some fake IDs to other party-goers.  Wait...what?  Yes, despite the apparent ease with which the characters got alcohol, they are all supposed to be teens.  To be fair, at least the actors playing the teens are all either teens or in their early twenties, so this isn't as obnoxious as it can be in films.  That doesn't really have much to do with the rest of the movie, but it stuck out to me.  Anyway, Nathan is assigned a school project with his neighbor, Karen (Lily "My dad's Phil" Collins), which has them looking into child abductions.  This assignment guides them to the wonders of the interweb, where they find a website that takes child photos and runs them through a computer-generated aging process.  On that website, Nathan and Karen find one abduction victim who is projected to look exactly like Taylor Lautner!  Or, possibly the guy from The Hunger Games.  Or some other teenager with dark hair.  OMG, IDK, ROTFL, WTF.  No wonder Nathan doesn't look like the people who raised him (the fairly pasty Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs); he was abductioned kidnapped!  Nathan contacts the website, but is put off by their odd questions ("What is your location?  What are you wearing?"); it turns out that the website is run by terrorists, who were waiting to find Nathan for some reason.  A few hours later, Nathan's "parents" are dead, and he finds himself on the run from international black ops agents, the CIA, and --- cue dramatic music --- his past.

Cue glower

Oh.  My.  Goodness.  This movie is awful.  It's not just that Taylor Lautner is incapable of mimicking human emotion, there is so much more that is wrong with Abduction.  For starters, let's look at the conspiracy that is in place.  The basic premise here is that Nathan is being raised by people who are not his parents invaluable to international terrorists.  So that whole subplot of Nathan being a child who was abducted...?  That gets debunked pretty early in the film, which makes this one of the least accurately titled movies I can recall.  It's like calling Back to the Future "Late For School."  Still, terrorists want to find Nathan to use him as a bargaining chip so they could get...something.  To find Nathan, they created and actively maintained several websites that claimed lil' Nathan was abducted.  The odds of any of these sites getting a bite from their precise target is infinitesimal, but the sites are actively monitored by a trained black ops agent at all times.  Really?  You don't outsource that to some nerd?  You give that job to the same guy who is leading the first attempt to capture the target, once he is located?  Really?  And what are the odds of the website-monitoring location being close enough to Nathan's house for the monitoring guy to grab a partner, dress up like a cop and show up at Nathan's doorstep within maybe three hours?

Thankfully, Abduction has many instances where that logic seems downright plausible, when compared to the rest of the movie.  Let's say that you're the CIA agent (played by Alfred Molina) tasked with tracking down Nathan before the terrorists.  Ignoring the fact that the CIA probably wouldn't legally lead a manhunt on US soil for a non-terrorist American citizen, let's say that you finally catch up with the boy: what do you do?  Take him to a secure location?  Bug out of the area as quickly as possible, because the terrorists are close behind?  Give him a disguise and help him go underground?

If you answered "D: commandeer a mom-and-pop burger joint and sit the highly valuable target by a large glass window," then you are apparently smart enough to apply for a job in the CIA.  Not surprisingly, "D" turns out to be a poor choice.  The odd logic of Abduction doesn't stop there, but getting any more in-depth will just give me a headache.

The acting in Abduction suffers from the presence of its two leads.  This is the first time I have seen Taylor Lautner on screen for more than a few moments and he is just shockingly bad.  I'll give him some credit; it appears that he can memorize most of his dialogue.  But he's just awful!  You know how most actors will show emotion in their parts, and will carry that emotion from dialogue chunk to dialogue chunk or even (if they're mildly competent) from scene to scene?  That ability is light years beyond what this guy can pull off convincingly.  I hope he invests that Twilight money wisely, because he won't be on the cover of Tiger Beat forever.  Lily Collins isn't as bad as Lautner, but she's still a long way off from being good here.  Granted, her character is written as a typical girl-next-door crush, but she's awkward and whiny and...well...okay, maybe she acts like a real none-too-bright teen would in a similarly outlandish situation.  That still doesn't make her pleasant to watch or explain the caterpillars on her face.

Maybe she's trying to reform Oasis?

None of the adult cast really get enough screen time to balance the awfulness that is Taylor Lautner.  Maria Bello was halfway decent.  Jason Isaacs was surprisingly likable, especially when he was living out the fantasy of Abduction viewers --- he got to beat the crap out of his "son."  Alfred Molina was wasted in a stupid supporting role, while Sigourney Weaver got to play an annoying character in a stupid supporting role.  Michael Nyqvist was suitably foreign and evil-looking as the lead terrorist/bad guy black ops agent, but it takes quite a bit more than that to make an entertaining villain. 

The blank stare of evil

Elisabeth Röhm randomly showed up as Nathan's real mother; surprisingly, this was not a speaking part.  Dermot Mulroney had an uncredited part toward the end, and now that I've seen this movie, I think "uncredited" was the way to go.

Abduction was directed by John "I was relevant in 1991" Singleton, although "directed" might be a strong term.  Sure, part of the fault lies with the paper-thin script from first-time full-feature screenwriter Shawn Christensen, but Singleton is simply a hack here.  Do you like goofy editing (best example: the reveal of the CGI-aged Nathan)?  How about poor use of camera tricks?  And one-dimensional acting?

Literally phoning it in

Yeah, John Singleton delivers on all fronts.  What bothered me most about his direction in this movie was that it is so far from playing to his strengths.  Singleton's best films (Boyz n the Hood and Baby Boy, in my opinion) have a fairly nice but uncharismatic lead actor surrounded by colorful characters; they're dramas that focus on (fairly) small-level dramas that he blows up to big-time drama.  Abduction is an action movie that should have been a tense thriller.  I love the idea of not trusting the people who raised you, but that concept (the best part of this plot) is jettisoned almost immediately for a dull, substandard chase movie.  Oh, and John Singleton can't film an entertaining fight scene to save his life.

Does anything go right in Abduction?  Well...it's not so bad that you spend the movie hating everyone involved.  It's utter crap, though, make no mistake.

Here are a few of my favorite moments from Abduction:

• One of the reasons Nathan is convinced that he was abducted is because he recognized the shirt in the maybe-him child photo on the website.  Okay, fine.  To prove his suspicions are correct, Nathan looks for and finds this unremarkable, fifteen-plus years old shirt in a matter of minutes.  So...A) his "parents" held on to his pre-abducted belongings? B) a teenager knows exactly where his toddler clothes are stored and remembers them, down to the stains? C) his family held on to his toddler clothes instead of giving them away or selling them at garage sales, like every other American family?
• When Nathan asks his "mom" if she is his mother, she says "...No."  Well, that was easy.
• Terrorists looking to kidnap Nathan place a bomb in the kitchen oven, and it is working on a timer.  Maybe they should have acted like they were in a hurry then, hmm?
• Abduction is amazing with the ridiculous amounts of perfect timing and manhours used by the CIA.  A phone call to 911 goes directly to the CIA, without an operator putting Nathan on hold.  Within moments of being spotted on a security camera, underlings are on the scene, giving chase.  And yet...two dumb teenagers manage to avoid capture for days.
• The bad guy threatened to kill all of Nathan's Facebook friends.  
• My wife summed up the first half of the movie with "also, so far, Taylor Lautner's a dick."
• The bad guy steals Nathan's gun by reaching just under his crotch in a quick and sneaky manner.
• The movie ends with a Train song.  Because the movie wasn't bad enough on its own.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone!  To celebrate, I decided to review one of my favorite bad movies of all time, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  It doesn't take a bold person to claim that the seventh sequel of a low-budget horror movie is bad, but Jason Takes Manhattan is uniquely bad in a film series that is not particularly renowned for its high quality.  Needless to say, I have watched this movie at least thirty times, and am damned proud of it.

With a subtitle like Jason Takes Manhattan, you should know what's in store for you, as an audience: Jason Voorhies tearing it up in NYC spending a lot of time on a boat.  After the events of The New Blood, Jason Voorhies (Kane Hodder) was punished for killing the Weekend at Bernie's guy by having a rotting corpse psychically revived to drag him down to the bottom of Crystal Lake.  Really.  I'm guessing that a year goes by (which sets this 1989 film in 2003 by my math) before Jason is awakened by a boat anchor tearing open a hole in a power line (left conveniently uncovered at the bottom of the lake), after the anchor has dragged the power line into contact with Jason, of course.  Jason wakes up and is understandably cranky, so he kills a few naughty teens.

He then sails the boat (he can drive a boat?!?) back to the Crystal Lake marina (it has a marina?!?).  After that, he presumably jumps into the water and climbs up the anchor chain to sneak onto the Crystal Lake senior class's senior cruise ship.  Now, you may wonder why Jason bothered to sneak on board, since nobody could have stopped him walking up the gangplank.  My short answer is that Jason is quite a joker, but more on that later.  You may also wonder how a location that is known as a vacation/murder destination could get its own high school, but I have an answer for that, too: shh...!  The senior cruise sets sail to New York City.  Now you may wonder how Crystal Lake suddenly got a river attached to it, much less one that would connect it to New York; to you critics, I answer "the same way Crystal Lake suddenly became surrounded by mountains for the first time ever."  Now, Jason's only on the cruise for two reasons, to murder some asses and chew bubble gum --- but he's all out of gum!  The amazingly diverse class of Crystal Lake High (which includes a nerd, a rocker, some jocks, and a smart Asian(Kelly Hu))

Who happens to also be a mutant

is easy pickings for Mr. Voorhies, but Jason is just a little too efficient at ruining the ship.  He starts to flood the vessel, and five survivors and a dog make it to a life raft.  After a few minutes (or hours...or days...the movie doesn't really give any hints), the survivors manage to pass the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor.  That's right, kids --- these survivors sailed into NYC from the East, which gives Crystal Lake the approximate location of here:

So then what happens?  Well, children, you'll have to watch to find out.  Spoiler Alert!  You get to see Jason's face, or at least what it would look like if it was sculpted in outdated yogurt.

What makes Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan bad enough to stand out from the crowd of bad Friday the 13th sequels?  For starters --- but just for starters --- the movie spends only a few scenes in New York City.  With a subtitle like this, you might expect to see Jason scaling the Empire State Building or dropping bodies in Yankee Stadium, but all you see of the Big Apple is the Statue of Liberty and a brief shot of Times Square.  That's it.  The rest is on the stupid cruise ship or filmed in Vancouver, which looks a lot more like Detroit than it does Manhattan.

Perhaps the stupidest (and thus, my most favorite) thing about this film is the fact that Jason reaches New York City and hunts down the Crystal Lake survivors.  Imagine that...a city full of sinners, especially with all the gang and drug activity in the late 80s, and Jason decides to spare the sewers of humanity in an effort to track down five people --- who have split up, mind you --- in the biggest city on the planet.

He doesn't even take a swing at these punks!

It is also worth noting that in Jason Takes Vancouver, we are given some of the least likable heroes in a series known for making you hate the heroes enough to root for the killer.  For starters, there is the charisma-free Suzi (Tiffany Paulsen), who is afraid of water, wears a "stylish" vest, and takes her dog with her on her senior cruise.

Above: Nancy Grace's inspiration

And she's the heroine!  There is a total bitch popular girl, some inoffensive middling students, and the two teachers chaperoning the trip.  The teachers are interesting; the lady (Barbara Bingham, who you might recognize from Cop Target...or more likely, not) is suspiciously close to the heroine --- she hugs and buys the girl presents --- and the other is the heroine's uncle/guardian Charles (Peter Mark Richman), who is as evil and wrong as often as he can possibly fit into this film's 100 minute running time.  So, we have a sexual predator and an asshole.  Great.  Charles not only refuses to believe in Jason (strike one), he repeatedly blames the creepy longshoreman for the murders with little to no proof (strike two), and he acts like a complete dick to the people who are rowing his sorry ass to safety (yer out!).  I expect to dislike most of the characters in a Friday the 13th movie, but this was ridiculous.  Never have I wished so hard for Jason to amuse me with his deadly talent than in this movie.

Luckily, Jason provides.  There are an impressive nineteen kills in this film.  My favorite kill in Jason Takes Vancouver has to be the boxing scene.  Not only does it have the unprecedented choice of a character trying to out-punch Jason without a weapon, even though he knew damn well that Jason is an unkillable zombie, but Jason takes the Rocky approach to boxing; he simply blocks his opponent's punches with his face until his enemy gets tired.  Then, Jason punches his head clean off. 

It's like Rocky vs. Apollo Creed, but prettier

There are some other sweet moments, like when Jason kills the rocker chick with her guitar or when he punches a sauna stone into a dude's chest, despite having just about every other way to kill that particular victim available.  There are a lot of kills, but many are pretty basic, unfortunately.

The movie isn't all bad, though.  For instance, this is the film where Kane Hodder famously (and I use that term loosely) refused to kick a dog, because Jason wouldn't do something like that.  Except for the time when he maybe did.

The true hero of Jason Takes Manhattan

This film also shows off some of Jason's talents.  Manhattan is the first film in which Jason can obviously and indisputably teleport.  Granted, nobody says anything along the lines of "Whoa, that goalie sure can teleport," but it's pretty obvious.  Take his murder of the rocker chick.

As hilarious as this kill is, it gets better when you slow it down and examine it.  Rocker chick is hanging out in a secluded area, rocking out with her guitar and a tape deck that is either A) letting her play guitar over a track that is (karaoke-like) free of guitar chords or B) playing the guitar for her, so she is simply performing an elaborate air guitar.  Jason being Jason, he shows up, looking for blood, at the top of the stairs above her.  Rocker chick freaks out, carefully sets her guitar down and turns off the tape deck.  She then runs downstairs, where she is met by Jason, who swings her guitar into her face, making sure she dies before she gets old.  That means that Jason teleported to grab the guitar and teleported again to get in front of her in time to swing the guitar like a baseball bat into her cranium.  There is no other explanation that doesn't involve circus-like acrobatics that are not shown on-screen.  Of course, there is also the kill where the victim starts climbing a ladder, the camera looks down at Jason on the ground, then back at the kid quickly ascending the ladder, and back at Jason on the ground, and then back to the kid quickly ascending the ladder and HOLY CRAP JASON JUST THREW HIM OFF THE LADDER!

Like this, but effective

It is also worth pointing out that this movie came out the same year as the truly awful Friday the 13th video game.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yoooooooou dot dot

I can honestly say that I have stronger feelings about that game than about most international crises.  Which is sad, I'll admit, but still....it's a wretched game.

I would also like to point out that the inept screenwriting, editing and direction of Rob Hedden kept him from directing another feature film for eighteen years.  I'm sure this film suffered some drastic budget cuts, since the Fridays had been losing steam for a while now, but this is a classic example of how not to make a movie look like it is a big budget film.  The acting is pitiable, the direction is nonexistent (if you want to be kind) and the editing makes little to no sense.  Is the heroine hallucinating, or does she have an unexplained psychic link to Jason?  Um...yes.  Do the Crystal Lakians manage to find the only police officer in New York who has a Canadian accent?  Of course.  Does Jason explode through every door he encounters?  Why not?  Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination and is, in many ways, the low point in a series that never set the bar very high.  And yet I love all that this film does wrong.  Objectively, this movie definitely deserves a

 But how can you grade a movie like this objectively?  It brings me so much joy!  And it's kind of like grading the handicapped kid on the same scale that you would an astronaut.  This is one of my absolute favorite Lefty Gold movies, and it deserves my completely irrational rating of