Dunno if I’ve mentioned this video before or not…  But it’s a great video, and Dead Space has me thinking about The Thing, so here it is.

We were desperately looking for a decent horror movie over the weekend.  We don’t have anything from Netflix at the moment, there wasn’t anything good on TV, we couldn’t find anything that looked promising on Netflix’s Watch It Now selection…  So we went to Blockbuster and Terri grabbed Experiement.

It looked promising…  Terri’d heard good things about it…  It had some awards plastered on the box…  And the teaser on the back sounded pretty good…

A young woman, Anna, walks the streets of a foreign city. Her mind full of pain. No memory of who she is. and plagued by nightmarish visions. Then she meets Morgan, a man who also has no memory. Forced to trust each other, the two feel a mysterious connection. A strong powerful feeling that bonds the two together Unknown to them their every action is being guided by unseen forces from the dark underground shadows of the city. Anna and Morgan are part of a frightening experiment that will have a terrifying and shocking conclusion.

Sounded a bit of Dark City, which was a terrific movie.  So I certainly thought it would be pretty good.  But it just did not deliver…

To start with, the opening credits are cut with scenes of someone being operated upon.  It is obvious that humans are operating on her, and she’s not very happy about it.  So we establish pretty quickly that these amnesiacs have been experimented upon by other people.  Right there we’ve eliminated a good amount of the suspense that was suggested on the back of the box.

And shortly after the movie starts rolling we actually meet the people responsible for the condition of these two amnesiacs.  They’re apparently some kind of paid thugs…  Terrorists maybe, or mobsters, or something like that.  They’ve got a computer, and some device implanted in the woman’s head, and they’re manipulating these two people from afar.

There’s very little self-discovery on the part of our amnesiacs.  They don’t remember much.  They never do figure out who they are or what is going on.  One of the thugs has to get a conscience and try to save them, because they’re obviously unable to save themselves.

In the last few minutes of the movie we discover that they’ve got a daughter, who is also being manipulated.  She’s going to be used to kill some diplomat.  It looks like she’s going to be saved…but then things don’t work out and the credits roll.

That’s really how much resolution you get.  You don’t get to even see if the good guys win or if the bad guys do.  It looks like the bad guys are going to win…but you don’t know.  Maybe their device malfunctions?  Maybe the diplomat finds out what is going on?  Maybe they all have a change of heart?  Who knows…

The whole thing was unimpressive.  I can only assume it was shot on a fairly limited budget…  Which can be OK, but wasn’t in this case.  The acting was not impressive.  The few special effects were not impressive.  The plot was very slow-moving.  Nothing really seemed to make a whole lot of sense.  Folks just kind of wandered around aimlessly.  And the whole thing just dragged on and on and on.

It was fairly obvious what was going on early in the movie.  There wasn’t a whole lot of suspense involved.  But they wouldn’t admit to what was going on.  The characters were all acting as if they didn’t know what was going on, when it was transparently obvious to the audience.  And the movie just wasn’t engaging enough for me to actually want to watch the movie.  I didn’t want to watch these people stumble around.  I just wanted them to get on with it.

I was genuinely glad to see the closing credits roll.

I enjoyed Sixth Sense and Unbreakable…  But since then I haven’t really enjoyed any of Shyamalan’s movies.  They’ve gotten too predictable.  You know that whatever you think is wrong, and there’s going to be some kind of twist or surprise in the end.  And frequently that you believe to be the main premise of the movie really isn’t.  It’s hard to get into a movie when you’re waiting to be told you’re wrong.

So I wasn’t terribly interested in The Happening when it came out.  And the reviews that followed up shortly after certainly did nothing to encourage me to see it.

So I don’t really know what posessed Terri to rent it…  Especially after we were so thoroughly disappointed by Experiment just the night before (more on that later).  But she wanted to see it.  She figured if everyone else hated it, when they liked the rest of his stuff, then we would probably like it.  Can’t really fault her logic…  But logic doesn’t necessarily apply to Shyamalan’s movies.

So…  The Happening…

Something weird is happening.  People suddently decide to kill themselves in various creative ways.  Nobody knows why it happens or who is doing it.  Folks think it’s a terrorist attack.  So people try to get out of town…only to find that smaller and smaller towns are being attacked…  We follow a group of people as they try to find safety from the happening.

I honestly don’t know where to start.  There’s so much wrong with this movie.  Even if we ignore the blatantly impossible stuff like plants suddenly evolving the ability to emit this horrible neurotoxin, there’s still truckloads of stuff wrong with this movie.

I love how disorganized the non-response is.  Folks think there’s a terrorist attack…  So they let the kids out of school…  And some random people decide to get on trains and busses to leave the city…  But there’s no organized evacuation or anything.  I didn’t even see any police involvement, emergency services, national guard…  Nothing.  And then the train just stops in some random town because they lost touch with everyone.

And then everyone is hanging out in a random diner just killing time…  Everyone watching the same television programs…  And everyone’s content to sit there and twiddle their thumbs until somebody puts two and two together and realizes that they aren’t safe.  And then everyone clears out of town in a matter of minutes.  And everyone, except for our protagonists, has a car.  Even all the people who were on the train with our protagonists.  They all leave town in cars, and only two vehicles are nice enough to pause long enough to give our protagonists a ride.

Then you’ve got the idiot who entrusts his daughter to a woman he obviously does not trust, while he goes off to nearly certain death.  Good call.

Then you’ve got Shyamalan basically having to explain the premise to us because he can’t come up with a good way to show us.  Our protagonists wind up in a car with a couple treehuggers who explain that they think the plants are trying to kill humans.  They explain how plants can communicate with eachother and release chemicals and whatever else.  The whole premise summed up in a few lines of dialogue.  Any possible suspense or wonder immediately wiped away.

So, of course, where do our protagonists go to get away from the killer plants?  Why, into the country of course!  Leave all that nice, safe concrete behind and go out in the lush, green countryside.  Sounds like a great idea to me!

Along the way they run into some other people - random victims-to-be, really.  Different folks with various cardboard personalities.  A couple annoying kids, a military guy who’s obviously out of his legue, assorted random people trying to find safety.  And, of course, none of them do.  They all wind up dying, except for our protagonists.

Periodically we’ll get a glimpse of some news program or hear something on the radio…  And they keep insisting that they have no idea what is going on, but these things typically peak and then end very quickly.  So it ought to all be over soon.  I’m not sure how they know that these things typically peak and then end quickly…if they don’t know what this thing is…but they sound certain, and I guess that’s all that matters.

Eventually our protagonists wind up at some cranky lady’s house.  I’m not quite sure why they think it is safe to stay there, but they do.  So they spend the night…  But then she gets a little looney and wants them to leave…  But then the toxin gets her and she’s dead…  And our protagonists are split up but they can still talk to eachother through a speaking tube…

Now, our scientific hero-guy has already decided that this event is going to come to an end soon, and that they just have to be alive when it is all over.  And they seem to think they’re relatively safe inside this crazy lady’s house.  So I don’t know why they’d decide to go outside and die together…but they do.

But they don’t die, because the event stopped before they went outside.

And then we fast-forward a few months and things become even less comprehensable - because the entire northwest was basically wiped out, and nobody seems to care.  It’s back to business as usual.  Literally millions of people dead and the world keeps on turning.  Seems to me that folks would want to know what had actually happened, and want to prevent it somehow.  Seems to me that there’d be a massive deforestation project or something like that going on.  But no, they just kind of sum it all up as an “act of nature” and go on with their lives.

Much like with Signs, I suspect that The Happening was less about the strange events that were advertised to get people into the theater than it was about our protagonists.  The key journey doesn’t seem to be a flight from certain doom, but a path to greater communication and understanding in their relationship.  The killer plants were just the crisis that pushed them far enough to break down their walls and start talking again.

And, frankly, that annoys me.  I really don’t mind going to see a love story with supernatural trappings…but I’d like to be able to make an informed decision.  If I think I’m going to see a horror movie, I want a horror movie.  If I think I’m going to see a love story, I want a love story.  I don’t want to be told I’m going to see one thing, and then wind up with something else once the film starts rolling.

So, yeah…  Obviously I was not impressed with The Happening.  It was not suspenseful, it was not dramatic, it was not scary or disturbing or disgusting…  I was more-or-less bored throughout the movie.  If it had just been myself, or if it had been on TV, I certainly would not have watched it through to the end.

I really don’t know how Terri stumbled across The Curious Dr. Humpp…  And I’m kind of surprised that Netflix carried something that unusual…  But they do, and she did, and we watched it last night.  Wow…

The Curious Dr. Humpp is a 70’s era sexploitation film, which means it’s basically some goofy softcore pornography.  Sure, there’s an evil scientist and a bunch of weird henchmen who are conducting strange experiments on people…  And there’s a plucky reporter who’s out to make a name for himself…  And some police officers trying to apprehend the villain…  But it’s all basically just an excuse to put naked people on the screen.

Dr. Humpp is a mad scientist obsessed with sex.  Since sex dominates humankind, he seeks to dominate sex…and therefor humankind.  He’s got an army of brainwashed robot-people to do his bidding, and some kind of sex-derived fountain of youth formula.  He kidnaps young folks, dopes them up on aphrodesiacs, forces them to have sex, and then extracts some kind of chemical from them to keep himself alive.

But, like I said, that’s all basically an excuse for some weird softcore pornography.

The thing was filmed in 1971, in black & white, so it isn’t exactly the most stimulating pornography available.  Everyone is very hairy, and the women look like they need to eat something.  There’s lots of moaning and groaning, lots of kissing and fondling.  But nothing actually explicit.

And, of course, you’ve got mad scientists and weird henchmen walking through every few minutes.  And some hilariously bad acting.  And all sorts of terrific mad scientist props like lightning machines, a talking brain in a jar, and plenty of bubbling and smoking beakers.

It was an interesting movie…  Certainly unique…  But I can’t say I really enjoyed it.  The movie was just too weird and dated.

Last night we watched Diary of the Dead.  It had George Romero’s name on it…but I still didn’t expect much.  There have been so many movies lately that are somehow associated with his original trilogy…  And so many of them are just plain crap.  I really enjoy zombie movies, but it is getting harder and harder to find decent ones.

So I was quite surprised when Diary of the Dead turned out to be pretty decent.  Not absolutely amazing, but not bad either.  Surprisingly not bad.

Everyone could, for the most part, act.  It seems a shame that this is worth pointing out, but it is.  I was not grossly insulted by any of the attempts to act.  The characters were generally convincing, if a little shallow.

The special effects were decent, but didn’t feature very largely in the movie.  It was more about the experience of a few people trying to live through the zombie apocalypse.  You didn’t see a whole lot of blood and guts, there weren’t armies of zombies everywhere.  Instead you saw people trying to deal with their new world.

The movie was filmed largely in the first-person perspective, which I typically hate.  But in Diary of the Dead it seemed like they actually just filmed it from the first-person perspective, rather than try to convince you it was first-person by rattling a camera all over the place.  Sure, there were some shakey bits…  And some gratuitous static…  And an on-screen battery warning or two…  But it wasn’t really that disruptive.