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Reviews
Spiral (2019)
Fun Horror Film; Good Cinematography
This movie was a fun psychological horror film that feels like it had more than a few hints of "Get Out" going on. There were also a lot of moments where I really enjoyed the cinematography, the camera work was quite skilled with a lot of really interesting shots. The story is slightly "standard faire", but overall, it was fun to watch it play out, and the acting is really quite good here. Nobody was too over-the-top, everything felt natural. There were even a few small surprises near the end.
The characters are believable, and relatable, I grew to like everyone, even the moody teenage daughter. I found myself engaged to see what happened to everyone involved.
Yes, I would have preferred to get a little more explanation about "the lore" going on in the movie's universe. I like to understand exactly who is doing what, and why, and just have a complete understanding of the world a movie inhabits. I also get why you wouldn't do that in a movie like this.
I hear the complaint, and I understand the desire for explicit closure in movies. I know that my fellow Americans really hate ambiguous endings, but when you realize this is a horror movie, the genre that practically invented the "open ended ending" (the killer is never truly dead, right) I think it's an appropriate way to end this movie. The movie ends with heavily-implied closure, so just trust that implication.
If you like psychological horror, then give this one a shot. It's worth it.
Abattoir (2016)
This is Simply Not a Good Movie
Let's get right to it, this is simply not a good movie.
I'm sure a lot of people worked really hard on this and there are some good points, but overall this movie isn't worth the one hour thirty-eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds I invested.
Let me start by saying that I am a big-time horror movie fan. I watched this on Shudder, and I've seen some good stuff on there, but this was a "miss".
The story here is about a reporter on the real-estate beat whose sister, brother-in-law, & sick nephew get murdered and then someone mysteriously buys the house like the next day and tears out & takes away the "murder room". Mystery! The buyer is also a mystery man (because of course he is), and then mysterious hijinx ensure. So, it's not a terrible premise, I felt like there's room for a fun story here, they just kinda ... bungled it. I discovered, after the movie, that this was a graphic novel with the same name, and I suspect it's much better. I was a huge fan of the Locke & Key graphic novel series so I'll probably check it out. It's just unfortunate that the movie did the source material such a disservice.
First problem to discuss, there are significant pacing issues here. The process whereby the lead solves the mystery is straight up compressed into a single bad montage that makes the discoveries cheap & weightless. I feel like that mystery solving process would have been far more entertaining than where they chose to focus a lot of their storytelling time. I'm assuming the decision was made to hurry up and get the lead to "crazy town" so that crazy stuff can start happening fast, but I think this movie would have benefited from taking a page from "The Ring" and spending more time following the mystery solving process. Then we spend a boatload of time belaboring the research in crazy town and spending way too much time dealing with people repeatedly spouting the ol' cliché "some secrets are better left unknown, go home, stop searching". I mean how many times do we need to see the local cop tell our leads the same thing? I'm seriously asking because I think the answer for this movie was like four.
Second let's talk about the dialog. The entire first act feels like someone was trying to write a noir detective movie set in the 20's with all the cheesy dialog and run-on sentences, where everyone says their line IMMEDIATELY after the previous person finishes. If you're a fan of Broad City, like I am, then just imagine when Illana does her "Roaring 20's Gibberish" in the "Val Episode", and you pretty much got the first act down. The lead actress's styling in the first act looks like it was lifted right from Dick Tracy, and she drives the perfect 1960's hipster Plymouth coupe in baby blue. The lead dude wears a shoulder holster for his 1911; you know the gun that no police department has used since the 50s, but it looks really cool in movies, so go with it. And, of course, he comes complete with all the accessories, like the leather shoulder holster that every cheesy noir detective wears and then dramatically takes off before getting blitzed on cheap bourbon? Yeah all that's in here.
Speaking of cars, all but one car in this movie is at least forty years old, thus making the entire movie seem like it's not happening in modern times, even though it is. And the one modern car, a Chrysler 300 driven by lead cop, the townsfolk straight up steal it, without keys. The one car in the entire movie that would probably be the most difficult to steal is the only one to get stolen because ... convenient plot devices are convenient, I guess?
The dialog is just abysmal. When the movie started me & my s/o looked at each other and said, "Are we watching the wrong movie? Are they joking with this?". We legit thought it was some sort of plot device where they were going to pull back and reveal that the main character was an actress on a soap opera set or something goofy like that. But no, it was just their awful dialog and their pseudo noir detective first act nonsense.
Allow me to give you an example of the awful dialog, "Is this about my copy (article)? No it's about blah, blah, blah. So what is this about? It's about your copy?" ... UGH! Humans don't speak like this. Get out of here with that.
Side note ... this newspaper must be rolling in cash because their office looks like the kind of huge, trendy, industrial office a startup gets when their swimming in millions of investor cash. I've never seen a newspaper office this swanky, but I digress.
And then people say & do things that are just ludicrous; such as, "Hey! This dance we're doing has a pretty short song. Comes a time we don't move forward we're just gonna be two people standing in the dark, okay?" ... wait, WHAT?! What is that? Who talks like that? And the context around when this line is vomited onto the screen just makes no sense. I mean I'm sure that line would have impressed the writer's creative writing prof at film school, but no ... just ... just stop.
Even terrible dialog can be elevated by good delivery and/or good acting. Unfortunately we have none of that here from the two leads. I'm sure they're good people, but their chemistry in this movie is just awful, they're supposed to be in love and they come off more like brother/sister, at best, and at worst stalker/victim, because homeboy throws off some straight creeper vibes at times. He just magically shows up at the house the lead chick is in and explains it away with "magic cop powers" or something equally stupid. I'd like to say he put a stalker app on her phone, but OF COURSE her cell phone doesn't work throughout the entire town, so I'm left to assume he went the extra creeper mile and lojacked the Plymouth solidifying his "stalker" badge. I honestly felt nothing when these two characters died doing something stupid in the end, "meh, that was predictable". I honestly think I chuckled a little when she slashes his throat.
However, inexplicably, this movie got their hands on Lin Shaye with four decades of good acting, including good horror movies like the Insidious franchise. She takes this schlock writing and elevates it to it's highest possible quality and god bless her for that, but there's only so much she can do with bad material. The material has her playing "generic local crazy lady who turns out to be the leads mommy, because of course she is we needed another convenient plot device", and she does it really well, but in the end you can't rise above bad writing. She is the solitary bright spot in the acting department in this movie.
The only other recognizable actor is Dayton Callie. You know him, no trust me you do. He also has about four decades of experience. He's been in a boatload of stuff that you've seen, you just didn't realize it. He was the crooked local town sheriff in Sons of Anarchy, I think he was in Walking Dead, he's been in a lot of stuff. And I like what I've seen him in before, but I think he was miscast here. He's not a scary guy, so he makes a bad villain. He's the primary antagonist in this story but he's got more of a "crotchety old man who wants you off his lawn" vibe rather than a "dude back from hell building a murder house" vibe.
The word "abattoir" means "slaughterhouse". So knowing that you get where this is going. The antagonist is building a house in the woods out of murder scenes from other houses. He's building a literal "slaughterhouse". The bad CGI smoky ghosts are reliving their deaths & then rewinding to relive them over and over again forever because their voodoo energy is somehow going to allow him to get his kid and wife back from Satan, or something like that. So he needs lead chick because she's the last survivor of some elementary school fire that was actually a sacrifice to Satan of all the town's kids because ... reasons. So he lures her in and runs her through the fun house so she can see her sister again. Stalker cop runs in after her and finds her but he startles her and she slices his throat because obvious plot development is obvious. Then 'mom' shows back up and shoots her in the back, for some badly-written plot device of a reason, killing her too and now "slaughterhouse" is complete (YAY!) and antagonist can go get his kid & wife back in some sort of jacked up "Take a Penny Leave a Penny" policy that Satan has.
Side note thought, why was 'mom' so happy about murdering her daughter and letting antagonist 'win'? I didn't get that at all.
So are there any redeeming qualities, well yes. Besides the few I previously mentioned, the kills were fairly graphic and most of them were pretty entertaining. There were some really good practical effects, and the design concept behind the "smoky ghosts" was interesting, but the execution was little hit/miss. I wish they would've done more practical effects and less CGI, but I think that about every movie these days. I also like that this was an indie project. I also appreciate seeing projects outside of Los Angeles. Not every frigging' movie has to be filmed in California people! There's a whole big world out there! If you don't want to leave the United States there are 49 other WHOLE states. Check it out sometime, you might like it. This movie was shot in New Orleans; and there are some really beautiful places in Louisiana to shoot a creepy/scary movie, so I appreciate any movie that makes an effort to get out of Los Angeles for their movie, props to them for that decision. I think set design for the house was interesting (although I expect most of that was straight lifted from the source material, so I think those kudos go to the graphic novel).
In the end, I get what they were trying to do here. I respect anyone who can complete a project like this and I expect the source material is probably pretty awesome, so they get an 'a' for effort, but this thing was just a mess start to finish and that's unfortunate.
Defiance (2013)
Lackluster Start
I beta tested the game, and then purchased it. I held out high hopes, but the end results were severely disappointing.
I still hope the series will improve, but it felt very low-budget even though I hear it wasn't.
So here's the bad:
#1: The CGI was painfully obvious CGI, like bargain basement Korean CGI. There's a scene where the main character is chasing a beat up Chevy Caprice Classic at about 1:15 into the 2 hour premiere and the quality of the CGI seen through the windshield looks like it would be at home on Atari's Pole Position.
#2: These same problems plagued the majority of the green screen shots too, very poor quality.
#3: The action sequences seemed to be divided into 2 categories: those with CGI and those (mostly) without. The ones without had shades of Hercules (that's right Kevin Sorbo, late 90's Hercules) with crazy frenetic action punctuated with over-the-top sound effects and an obscene number of cuts; to the point that you weren't exactly sure who just got stabbed and, wait ... who the @#$% is that guy that just got killed? Thank god I have a DVR! I had to rewind the bar-room brawl where the lead character inexplicably removes the slide/barrel from the bad guy's hand gun like he's a freakin' ninja that doesn't need to engage the take-down latch, why? Because @#$% your logic, that's why! The whole sequence was shot so insanely quick I didn't know exactly what had stopped the bad guy from firing until I rewound it and watched it again. And then the other kind of action sequence, the ones with heavy CGI were too detached from the actors green-screening it up in the same scene. Almost like you were watching two separate scenes.
#4: The acting was pretty bad, so overwrought during the emotional plot points that I felt like I was watching a high school play. There were a few minor exceptions to this general over-acting policy for the show, but they were very few.
#5: Where's the space ships? OK I get it, aliens screwed up the planet and now it's all post- apocalypticy everywhere, resources are scarce, yada yada yada. I just find it weird that in a world where aliens invaded that no one's got a space ship to fly around in and all of humanity has been relegated to driving around in dune buggies and gators.
OK, so what was the good:
#1: The sets were decent, unfortunately their camera-work was all about closeups so you didn't really get to take them in. And I seriously don't want to see more of that awful CGI so I guess closeups it is! You actually have to wait for the very final scene of the 2 hour premiere to get a CGI pan out of a nice chunk of the town of Defiance and it has a very neat, Fallout 3 vibe going on that looks like it would be fun to explore. But because of the extreme closeup policy here you never even really get a feel that this place is a town of any size/population until that shot.
#2: The premise is fun & fairly fertile ground to write some interesting stories, unfortunately they seem content on re-telling generic/familiar stories about the Hatfields and space McCoys and their little Romeo & Juliette story brewing during a less-epic Battle for Helms Deep from the Lord of the Rings. Do you see what I'm saying here? They seem content to re-create, not create. It has hints of Farscape (seriously, the co-star is basically female Dargo & they do the "fake cusswords" thing too), Firefly (main character is basically Mal, but not as cool and with worse dialog), Jericho (looks like the outlaw with the heart of gold is the new sheriff despite the fact that you have an entire town full of potential candidates who are likely to be better suited for the job, why? I believe I already said @#$% your logic, that's why.) Unfortunately this is not as good as any of those.
What would I like to see happen? Seriously up the quality of your CGI first and foremost; then have everyone pull it back a little bit in the overacting department. Next build more physical set pieces and pull that camera back a bit. And finally, pick a style and run with it, because the shotgun approach is not working for me. And that means everything from camera-work to story telling. Trying to be too many shows to too many different people and then screwing them all up in the meantime. Remember when you were a kid at the soda fountain and you made a "suicide" with a little bit of every flavor on tap and it ended up tasting awful? Yeah that's what's going on here right now. If you go ahead and decide to be either Dr. Pepper or Coke or some other singular flavor then you'll win over the fans of that flavor. Sure it won't be for everyone but at least you're giving your fans what the like.
Again, I reiterate that I hold out hope for improvement. My DVR is set to record the series. There are actors in this series that I like and I know they're capable of so much more. I enjoy the game and I like the combo approach of simultaneous game/show, but I'm afraid that this show is destined for only a single season if they keep this up.