Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

2014
Directed by Christopher B. Landon
Starring Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz and Gabrielle Walsh

Never underestimate the power of low budgets combined with the power of horror fans hungry for anything new.  Yes, folks, we're up to Paranormal Activity 5, a.k.a The Marked Ones.  While the overaching plot of the series was wrapped up in the last one, the massive amounts of profit that these flicks continued to pull in meant that it was too much to ask that the series end there.  Thus, it's time for the spinoff, baby.  Or, more accurately, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Brace yourself.

While I saw the first two films in theaters, I was at least aware of the release of the third and fourth movies during their original theatrical runs.  Not so with this one.  Maybe I was just in some sort of boredom-induced coma in January of 2014.  Maybe I was still reeling from reviewing all of those godawful Leprechaun films.  But for whatever reason, the last two movies in this franchise completely slipped my radar.  Apparently I was in the minority, since it once again grossed a king's ransom on a budget of only $5 million.  The important thing that you need to know is that the folks at Blum House still had a legitimate cash cow on their hands, and even though this film is pretty bad all things considered, I can't fault them in the least bit for keeping the gravy train going.  And while it is technically a spinoff, it also links up with the original series at the end in a way that I promise not to spoil.  Once again, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Ch ch ch ch.

I'll be the first person to admit that I knew nothing about this movie going on and had no idea what I was in store for, but I certainly didn't plan on what we got, and that's a story set in a Latin neighborhood in California.  The switch in locales actually was a very fresh idea that gave the story all kinds of new possibilities.  Maybe.  But the characters that inhabit this story...oh man.  Broken record, I know.

The main duo consists of Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and his best friend Hector (Jorge Diaz).  The former is a good student/good brother/good son/all-around good guy.  Hector is just kind of...there.  I don't know.  He's there to be Jesse's slightly more irresponsible best friend, and if you put a propeller on this guy's cap I wouldn't bat an eye.  These two are just criminally uninteresting, and since the main crux of what is to come places one of them under consistent eternal damnation, that's a problem.  We DO get the character of Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh), the two guys' female friend who actually does command the screen with something other than apathy.  She's also pretty hot.  The three have just graduated high school and are ready to have fun throughout the summer until the ghost dimension comes a-calling.  There's also a few side characters like Jesse's dad and grandmother, but they're not important.  And there is your Paranormal Activity character wrap-up.

If you've been reading these reviews, you know what comes next:  The Set Up, and this time around it's actually pretty nifty.  Hector has a new camera and carries it around everywhere, providing all of the convenient first-person perspective that by this point I had just accepted.  One night at Jesse's apartment they hear strange chanting coming from the apartment below them.  They use some MacGyver-esque cunning to look at what's going on, catching a naked woman standing utterly still while the crazy neighbor lady draws a symbol on her stomach.  Not soon after, crazy neighbor lady is found murdered by one of their classmates.  And not soon after that, the three best friends (Jesse, Hector and Marisol) invade murdered crazy lady's apartment and find a demon book, quickly perform one of the rituals inside, and then funny stuff starts to happen.

In many ways, this flick kind of reminds me of your typical Twilight Zone episode.  Regular Guy gets Amazing Power.  Regular Guy reacts to getting Amazing Power, usually in very irresponsible and greedy ways.  Regular Guy then gets comeuppance in the end for his arrogance in the face of using Amazing Power for evil.  That's what we get here, as the ritual seems to result in Jesse being impervious to being hurt.  It first manifests itself at a pickup basketball game where the local hoods intervene and start to shove Jesse around, only to be shoved something like 357 feet away by an unseen force.  It seems that whatever Jesse does, there is some invisible force protecting him.  But since this is a scary movie, it also starts to control him and make him do bad, bad things.  Slowly, I assure you.

This is one slow movie.  Sometimes, that can be good, as there's nothing quite as satisfying as a good scary slow burn.  By this point, though, the whole concept of these movies had worn thin on me and I was just waiting for the whole thing to be over.  Having said that, there is one NIGHTMARISH sequence that actually did frighten me as it happened, with Jesse waking up in the middle of the night, heading down to the cursed apartment, finding the trap door in said cursed apartment (in a sequence involving a hot girl that Jesse almost hooked up with earlier in the movie, no less)...and, yeah.  Watch for yourself.  To me, there are few things scarier than being trapped in a confined space, trying to escape, and then watching in terror as you're locked inside.  So A+++ to the movie for this sequence.  And...it has a final scene that actually works despite its clunkiness.  If you just watched all of these movies back-to-back like I did, I suspect that it probably was a little more effective than if you'd seen them all in theaters months and years apart.

Out of all five films thus far, this is easily the most cringey when it comes to the subject of realism.  We're asked to believe quite a bit when it comes to Hector's camera that everyone always seems to have at all of the best moments, but you're probably sick of me beating that dead horse.  But some of the things that camera CAPTURES...like Jesse going full rampage mode in the middle of a convenience store.  Or that bit right before the finale with the two gangsters arriving at this movie's Cult Compound (Trademark Sign) and blowing a couple murderous cultists away with shotguns...yeah, it was comedic gold, but not in the way the movie would have liked.

Oh, and there's a recurring bit involving an old Simon game that serves a a stand-in for a Ouija board.  Yeah.  It happens.

The biggest strike against this movie is that the story itself just is not very interesting.  Jesse gets a demon friend.  Bad things happen to people.  A mystery is unraveled about a worldwide cult using firstborn sons as some sort of possessed killer army.  It's actually an interesting idea that could be FANTASTIC if this movie weren't a found footage film, but the way it's portrayed here on such a small scale is terminally boring.  And the characters that we take the ride along with don't make the ride any smoother, believe me.  Well, except for Marisol.  She's captivating for any reason that you want to interpret.

* 1/2 out of ****.  I didn't think it was any worse than the last installment, but boy is this series starting to show its age.  Again, however, this movie grossed $90 million dollars.  We horror fans...we're a loyal bunch.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

2012
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Kathryn Newton, Matt Shiveley, Aiden Lovekamp, Brady Allen and Katie Featherston

Folks...just because it's there doesn't mean you have to watch it.  I posted an entire rant on this very subject several months back, and it's required reading for everyone in the entire world.  For everyone who missed it, the gist of it is this: I continue to be amazed (literally, it boggles my brain) how many people continue to force themselves to watch every movie franchise or TV series that they no longer enjoy with the rationale being "well, I've watched everything up until this point, so I guess I have to watch the rest."  Um...no, you don't.  Unless there is some law on the books that says that once you see the first film or episode of something that a man hides out in your closet with a gun trained at your head unless you follow said thing to completion, you're perfectly free to, you know, skip out once it starts to suck.  The Law of Diminshing Returns tends to hit like a motherfucker, and I present Paranormal Activity 4 as the proof.

Oh boy, this film.  'Memba how I said that I gave up on this series in theaters after the second one because it wasn't as good as the first?  Well, the twenty bucks I spent on this box set is going to have to motivate me to keep going forward, because this one just wasn't good.  The first, again, was a legitimately scary flick.  The second had its fair share of shocks, and the third at least had that great sequence with the sheet and the rotating fan cam.  In this one, there's a whole lot of nothing.  It does have a few redeeming factors that I'll get to a few paragraphs from here, but overall it's just a very tepid and borderline BORING time.  The market seemed to agree; while this movie still made a massive profit off of its $5 million budget, the gross was significantly lower than the first three films.  There really is only so much you can do with this formula, but let's see how much more I can pull out of my ass in explaining it.  THE MOVIE!

For those keeping score, Paranormal Activity 3 was a prequel film that gives us the back story and motivation behind everything that has happened so far.  I threw a little spoiler alert in the last review before I mentioned exactly what it was, but hell, these movies are already old by this point, so what does it matter?  Think lots of witches' covens, first-born son sacrifices and other assorted demonic debauchery.  That one handled the back story, and this one is actually a sequel to the second movie, which ended with cursed Katie from the original film killing her sister and taking her infant son away.  Five years later, and here we are.

The setup:  This time around, your main character is a teenage girl.  Named Alex, she's played by Kathryn Newton, and the character is unfortunate.  See, this isn't just a teenage girl; it's a 2010s teenage girl brought to life on the screen, which means Converse sneakers, skinny jeans and constant phone browsing every time there is a dull moment.  I don't know if a single paragraph has ever made me feel older typing it, but here we are.  Can't close that Pandora's Box.  She has a boyfriend named Ben (Matt Shiveley), and during the course of their Titanic-esque courtship Ben records their Skype sessions and begins seeing weird stuff happening in the house.  There's your recording motif, as computers are what captures everything this time.

The meat:  The rest of the family consists of a pretty nondescript mother and father, along with Alex's little brother Wyatt.  The ghostly visitations come once a weird neighbor kid named Robbie starts hanging around the house, with the movie springing its first effective jump scare on us as Alex and Ben go up to the tree house in the middle of the night only to find Robbie there staring into a corner.  Fairly normal behavior, if you ask me.  Robbie just moved into the neighborhood, and his mother is soon revealed to be in the hospital for some unknown reason.  I'll give you one guess as to who said mother figure is.  At any rate, Robbie is now staying with the family for a few days, which means that the plot can jump start.

There are two long-running motifs in this series.  I've brought one of them up, which is that every movie seems to have a "signature" camera shot.  This time around, it's the family living room with the lights off, dots of light illuminating the surroundings.  It's creepy and leads to a few good ghost reveals, but it's nowhere near as effective as that "oscillating fan camera" from the last one, or even the overhead kitchen shot from the second.  The other motif is that whenever the movie wants to spring a surprise on us, we have this guttural, bass-filled "rumble" that fills the soundtrack.  I remember sitting in the dark theater when I saw the first film and thinking that it really added to the atmosphere.  By this point, the shine was off and I just found it annoying.  Yet more A+ film criticism from this reporter.

What more is there to expound upon?  Well, Katie eventually reappears from the "hospital," and I have to admit that it was good to see her in a fairly regular role again.  Featherston is actually a pretty good actress, and I would certainly have liked to see her in more horror films because she has a very good, relatable quality when she's not possessed by demons.  Spoiler alert.  All throughout the film, the entity appears to have been targeting Wyatt, and I will also give it to the movie in this regard as it sprung a surprise on me when it comes to this kid that I genuinely did not see coming.  But it's kind of a sprinkle in the shit sandwich.

The reason?  This movie just isn't scary.  At all.  Maybe I'm just jaded, but I was able to call every jump, every time that a door would slowly creak open, every time a shadow would run past the camera, etc.  I'd seen this three times before.  The thrill was gone.  Without spoiling everything that happens, I'll also say that I felt extremely let down by the ending.  These days, it almost takes incredible balls for a horror movie to NOT have an open-ended final sequence, and given that this flick had the tagline "All the Activity Has Led to This," this would have been a good opportunity for the good guys to actually pull one out for a change.  Nope.  But...that probably would have led to no additional sequels, so we can't have nice things.

That's what we get with Paranormal Activity 4.  It's competent and well-produced, but with pretty much every specific it just feels there.  The acting is by and large bad, with the exception of Featherston in her brief scenes.  The kid who plays Wyatt in particular is grating to the core.  The camera gimmick feels even less believable in this one than it does in previous installments, especially in the finale.  And the plot springs that one good surprise on us, but even that isn't enough to barely lull us out of submission.  Suffice to say, I can't recommend this one.

* 1/2 out of ****.  And I realize that there are two more of these things to cover before I'm done.  But if anyone wants to call me a hypocrite for breaking my own Golden Rule of Entertainment, I say...screw it.  I spent $20 on six movies and that's a pretty damn good ratio in my book.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

2011
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Lauren Bittner, Chris Smith, Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown

So it's come to this - back to the Paranormal Activity films.

A preface:  I saw the first two films in theaters, and liked the hell out of both.  I'll never forget watching the first movie and then driving 40 miles back home in a rain storm through the middle of nowhere in rural Minnesota, my mind playing tricks on me the whole time because I'm a giant wuss.  The second one didn't have any experience that memorable, but I still enjoyed it.  The ironic thing (did I properly use the word "ironic" there?) is that if you go back to the the handy-dandy October 2010 section of this here blog and read my original review, I was already hoping that the series was over because I didn't know what else you could do with the concept.  Well, lo and behold, there's been something like 19 additional films since then.  And I kept my word and totally ignored all of them.  And there they stayed buried in my subconscious for five years...until I saw a box set of all six movies last Halloween for the low-low price of twenty bucks.  It's hard to say no to that kind of horror collection padding.  I'm just now getting around to watching them, which means...buckle up.  There is a good chance that this series of reviews is going to suck.

I say that because reviewing movies like this are a challenge.  Found footage...yeah, it's a genre that is VERY easy to get some cheap scares, but it's one of the hardest things on the planet to make feel authentic.  The $10 million question in all of these films is always the following:  WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE STILL FILMING??!?  While The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first movie done in this vein, it actually did make an attempt to explain this question and feel as authentic as possible.  The PA movies and a lot of what came after have a tendency to feel like traditional horror films shot in the first-person.  These movies also tend to be very short and minimalist, so there's only so much padding out that I can do with my writing.  I've often been accused of having diarrhea of the keyboard, but what you're about to witness is someone attempting to pull off some kind of minor miracle the likes of which Jesus himself would be damn proud of.  Is that enough introduction?  Probably too much.  Let's go.

Upon re-watching the first two films, my opinion of them is confirmed.  The first is still a damn scary time with only one dopey plot move (the demonologist who conveniently has to disappear just as the movie approaches its final trimester), and the second is a fun enough time that has the weakness of the husband character.  For the uninitiated, the two films are the stories of sisters Katie and Kristi, each of whom finding themselves dealing with a demonic presence in their house.  At the end of the first, Katie is possessed by said demon and kills her boyfriend, leading to this really nifty sequence in the second where the events sync up.  This movie explores the events where it all began...which means we're heading back to the past like the Angry Video Game Nerd.  The second movie was also a prequel.  We'll be back to horse and buggy days by the time this series is over, even though cameras hadn't been invented yet.  I'm 47% positive that this wouldn't stop any screenwriter.

So the film opens with Katie (the older sister, for those keeping score) delivering a box of old VHS tapes from their childhood to Kristi, currently pregnant with the kid who would serve as the plot lynchpin in the second movie.  This would be your epic set-up, as we're looking at the old tapes from their childhood.  Flashback to 1988, where we meet young Katie, young Kristi, and their mother Julie.  Julie is living with her boyfriend Dennis, a confirmed slacker whose job is videotaping weddings.  Oh-so-convenient for the plot, I know.  Early on in the film, Dennis talks Julie into making a sex tape, only for them to be interrupted mid-coitus by an EARTHQUAKE and the camera to catch dust falling onto an invisible person.  It actually is kind of creepy, I must admit.

Well, Dennis sees this and immediately sets up surveillance all around the house to catch the invisible intruder.  This enables Dennis to discover that Kristi's relationship with her invisible friend Toby is deeper than he initially thought; she gets up in the middle of the night and talks to him, for starters.  Seems normal to me. 

If there is one thing that the Paranormal Activity movies do well, it is set up at least one true money sequence that builds and builds and eventually explodes.  This one is no diferent, as Julie and Dennis head out for a night on the town and leave the kids in care of a babysitter.  Cue a really creepy sequence that takes the concept of the classic "sheet with two cut-out eyes" ghost and brings it to the 21st century.  I'll admit that I was biting my nails during this stuff, and it's unfortunate that the next attempted trademark scare sequence involving Dennis' Shaggy-from-Scooby Doo work partner and more earthquakes isn't anywhere near as cool.

Believe it or not, we're already something like fifty minutes into this movie, which means that it's time to wrap things up.  Dennis eventually finds a Pagan symbol in the girls' bedroom, and once the disbelieving mother has something happen directly to her, it's off to the home of the adoring grandmother.  Everything that happens from this point on is entirely predictable, and it's also where the movie feels its LEAST authentic.  Particularly in the final five minutes or so, when I was left to perform mental gymnastics at the thoughts of how and why Dennis was still recording all of this stuff.

SPOILER ALERT for anyone who doesn't want such things, so skip this paragraph if you don't want key surprising-but-not-really twists revealed.  Julie's mother, and the kids' grandmother, is actually the leader of an honest-to-goodness COVEN that has been causing all of this demonic activity.  It's probably spelled out more in further sequels, but I think the idea is that they sacrifice each family member's first-born son, which explains why the grandmother was so adamant about Julie trying for more kids and so disappointed when she announced that she was done.  It actually is kind of an interesting idea, but the second that the family shows up at grandma's house, it's projected from a mile away.

Is this movie any good?  Kind of.  For starters, the actors playing the young versions of Katie and Kristi are pretty bad.  Chris Smith is also pretty grating as Dennis.  Emotional stakes just aren't there in this movie, and it's the nature of the beast when you're dealing with prequels.  We already know how the story ends, so a lot of the suspense is kneecapped before the story even starts.  The concept had already been stretched almost as far as it could be at this point, and we're only on movie #3.  Thus, the only thing that this flick could do was craft some shocks.  There are more than a few things in this flick that will make you jump, but you know my stance on those.  You jump, you recover, and you forget aout it approximately 2.7 seconds later.  Thus, this movie wasn't my thing once the end credits rolled, but once those end credits roll it doesn't matter.  The proof?  This movie set records for highest-grossing midnight showings and opening days for a horror film.  And what that ultimately means for you saps is the aforementioned upcoming reviews.

** 1/2 out of ****.  I actually did enjoy this film while I was watching it, but not in the way that I would ever want to watch it again.  That prequel thing really does kill it.  Supposedly, though, the next film is actually a sequel to Paranormal Activity 2, and given the explanation that we get in this one, I would be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued by that prospect.  Stay tuned.  /thundercrash

Alligator (1980)

1980
Directed by Lewis Teague
Starring Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger and Henry Silva

Before I get going with this review, I'm going to pull back the curtain once again in regards to how these things are written.  I have a lot of down time at my job, and during that dead time I tend to dig out a few sheets of paper and jot down ideas for films and/or subjects to be covered here.  I was all ready to go this week with a rare non-movie review post about things that legit frighten me in real life.  Spoiler alert: I'm a huge wuss with no less than 1,478 irrational fears, many of them due to watching a lot of Unsolved Mysteries as a kid.  But I quickly noticed that there was one recurring theme on that list.  Namely, big scary animals.  I've said this before, but film-makers, take note - when you make things like spiders, snakes and large predators scary, you'll get me almost every damn time.  Except for those abominations on the SyFy channel.  F**k them.

Which brings me to alligators, crocodiles and the movie in question today.  I first saw Alligator some Saturday afternoon on one of my local channels many, many years ago, and it scared the crap out of me then.  It actually inspired me to do a lot of research into the ACTUAL subject of the urban legend that it's based on - the story of alligators living in the New York City sewers - and the truth is no less fascinating.  Google it.  The movie definitely isn't perfect, but it still holds up very well today for one simple reason: giant reptiles are friggin' scary.  I don't know exactly WHERE being eaten by a huge creature with giant teeth that can rip you to shreds within seconds ranks on the "bad death" list, but it has to be pretty high.  And the creative team behind this film - director Lewis Teague and screenwriter John Sayles - understood that and then some.  I really didn't intend this, but Sayles ALSO wrote last week's four-star classic Piranha.  He's been nominatd for Oscars since then, but to me he'll always be the king of aquatic horror, baby.  It's brie time.

While the plot of Alligator eventually does tread into some dirty territory, the thing about the presentation is that it's deadly serious and occasionally dingy.  This is readily apparent from the prologue, as a young girl buys a baby alligator while on vacation in Florida and brings it back to her home in Chicago.  The alligator is promptly flushed down the toilet by her snarling dad...and I think you know where we're going from here.  What you might NOT think is just how the baby alligator becomes the monster of this creature feature, as it spends the next several years feasting on animal carcasses deposited in the sewers by a super-mega-evil company experimenting on animals with growth formulas.  This would be the classic "derp" moment that brings us our Mrs. Deagle-esque human villain character, but we'll get to him later.  In short order, the alligator - now fully grown to Brobdingnagian proportions and boasting an insatiable appetite to go with its size - starts attacking sewer workers, and we get to meet our truly Shakespeare-worthy characters in charge of tracking it down.

And boy, what a hero character this movie has.  Folks, Alligator has Robert Forster.  I've been a huge fan of this guy ever since seeing him in Jackie Brown, and yeah, I know that it wasn't his first movie, but at the very least you can see his face and know that he's bringing the goods.  In this film, he's police officer David Madison.  John Sayles must have a real hard-on for hero characters who don't give no f**ks, because Piranha had the drunk outdoorsman guy, and David Madison is the same type of dude.  With all of the dead bodies piling up, it means that our investigator is going to need a plucky partner.  Said partner is reptile expert Marisa Kendall, played by Robin Riker.  The "derp" makes a return when we realize a very important thing - this is the same person who bought the alligator all those years ago.  Coincidence, thy name is Alligator.

So far, I'm sure that you've noticed that this film is very similar to Piranha.  Not that that's a bad thing; there's certainly not many low-budget creature features that you can choose to crib from, especially when you have the same guy behind the writer's desk.  The movie compensates by giving us - I s**t you not - a QUIRKY ROMANCE between Madison and Kendall.  This includes a scene where they visit Kendall's house, and Madison butters up to his new love interest's abrasive mother.  No joke, there's like a ten-minute subplot in the middle of this movie where it turns into your average Julia Roberts crappy rom-com flick.  Amazed, but not in the good way.

Now let's get to the creature itself.  It definitely looks cool, and the body count has already more than reached its government minimum, so we've seen it in action.  From what I can tell, the big gator was brought to life mainly through the arts of puppetry, forced-perspective photography and stop-motion animation, and there's only a couple scenes that look truly dated by today's standards.  From a "monster" standpoint, it definitely fits the bill, so three cheers for conventional special effects!

Alright, back to the show.  Thus far, all of the victims have been nameless sewer workers and other scrubs, but we need some truly sweeping emotional stakes for the second half of the film.  The first guy that we get is Slade (Dean Jagger), the businessman who was the guy in charge of all the illegal animal experiments that created the beast.  Dr. Frankenstein, this guy ain't, although it does give us a pretty satisfying kill scene later on.  There's also a lab scientist providing the injections who hilariously has his wedding invaded by the gator (not kidding, folks, it happens).  Last but certainly not least, we get the intervention of a grizzled monster hunter played by Henry Silva who is about as effective as Creighton Duke on his best day.  Not his worst day, but his best day, although that's still pretty bad.

When holding this movie side-by-side with Piranha, this one definitely treads a lot more into hokey territory.  And while that film definitely had its humorous moments, I think this one is just generally a lot more goofy in tone.  Sometimes, that works, as the movie definitely has its laughs.  But sometimes it also takes away from what should be a very freaky story.  There are few things on Earth that scare me more than these animals; I've had no less than two nightmares in the past year where I suddenly find myself in a muddy river in some remote location and know - just know - that there's a giant saltwater croc on my tail.  Then I wake up and cry.  Well, maybe not, but that 25% exaggeration serves a purpose (I think) - this movie could have been really, really scary.  And while the movie has good performances, good effects and an all-around fun pace, I can't say that I was frightened by it on this re-watch.  So, yeah, the flaws are there, but it really is hard to go too wrong with this formula.  Current film-makers, more aquatic horror, please!

As for a rating, let's give the flick *** out of ****.  Good, but not great, but it also served as the precursor to Lewis Teague's next film - the certifiably terrifying Cujo, truly one of the best movies EVER in terms of taking something ordinary and making it freaky as all get out.  But I've reviewed enough Stephen King movies on this here blog, so that one won't be coming for a while.

Piranha (1978)

1978
Directed by Joe Dante
Starring Bradford Dillman, Heather MEnzies, Kevin McCarthy, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele and Dick Miller

There is something on the ol' Lick Ness Monster archive that honestly amazes me.  'Memba the summer of 2010, when Alex Oja's remake of the film in question today hit theaters?  I 'memba.  Promising a whole bunch of blood, boobs and general mayhem, it was one of the first films of this great 3D revival that has somehow turned into general practice since then.  I also remember James Cameron in all of his douchebaggery stating that this was "exactly the type of film that SHOULDN'T be in 3D" (/sniff).  Because only stuffy polemics about planets full of giant blue dudes deserve that treatment.  Well, for the first time, I re-watched said movie on TV recently.  And it's pretty bad.  The thing on my blog that amazed me?  I gave it FOUR STARS when it came out.  Man, what was I thinking?

Yeah, that movie is some kind of disaster, alright.  Bad characters, bad script, nonsensical editing, it's all really some kind of beautiful disaster.  It makes me even sadder when you consider that the 1978 original is arguably my second favorite aquatic horror movie of all time.  The remake might be this amazing conglomeration of bad stuff, but this one has everything going for it.  It's produced by Roger Corman, the legendary low-budget guru who once said that he could take a sandal, a loincloth and a spear and recreate the Roman Empire.  It has a cast of actors that actively seem to care.  And it has Joe Dante in the director's chair.  This dude is simply one of my favorites.  By and large, his films all have this great mixture of humor and horror, and 50% of the time, it works every time.  He spent much of the '70s as Corman's protege, and this was his big break into "major" movies.  Quotation marks because this is a movie about mutated killer fish.  Get ready for some fun.

You have to read something an average of seven times before committing it to memory, so here we go again: The most important part of the script is the first ten pages, and Piranha has an opening sequence for the ages.  A happy and horny teenage couple make their way into an abandoned government facility where they find a giant water tank.  Seems like a perfectly good idea to do some skinny dipping, doesn't it?  They strip down, begin the opening stages of macking it, and are then summarily attacked and gutted by an unseen force in the tank before agents try in vain to stop what's going on.  And it's an undisputed masterpiece.  In all seriousness, it certainly catches your attention and lets you know that this isn't your ordinary Jaws ripoff.

This prompts the arrival of insurance investigator Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies).  You wouldn't think that an insurance investigator character would be one of your linchpins in a movie like this, but there she is, and she actually manages to hold her own.  The REAL star of the show, though, is the guy that she hires to guide her around the wilderness.  Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) is kind of this mix between a drunk, a rugged outdoorsman, and a guy who pretty fairly does not give a s**t.  Welcome to the "Ruh-roh, Raggy" portion of the movie (third week in a row!), as they find the facility.  Once there, Maggie wants to see what's in the tank and promptly drains the water.  Derp.  One guess as to where this leads...

Yes, folks, the nearby lake/touristy community and summer camp where Paul's daughter is in attendance.  Yeah, emotional stakes.  There's a bit more buildup before we reach all of the great stuff in Piranha, most of which involving the back story of just how these fish came to be.  The specifics aren't important - it's all Vietnam War government experiment cover-up stuff that you'd see on The X-Files.  What's important about it is that it's quick and painless, and that the "chase" element is actually suspenseful.  Meaning, Maggie and Paul actually chase down the fish on their journey to the lake and try to cut it off, only to get thwarted at every turn - including this one really nifty sequence as the duo, along with the government researcher who has kept this whole project going, rescue a small boy on a raft and then watch in horror as the fish turn on the wood itself.  Great stuff.  They also succeed in shutting off a spillway that opens up their access to the population, and then realize that there is a tributary.  Derp again.  Of course, while ALL of this is going on, we also get graced with the presence of the second best thing to God himself, Dick Miller.

Ahhh...Dick Miller.  A legendary Roger Corman collaborator in front of the camera who has played a character named Walter Paisley something like 67 times in various Corman productions (no joke), the dude is definitely one of my favorite "that guy" actors of all time.  So many memorable characters and lines can be given to this man.  The occult library owner in The Howling, the gun shop dude in The Terminator, Murray Fudderman...he's done everything but Miami Vice.  This time around, he fulfills the Mayor Vaughan quotient, and he does it to PERFECTION, maintaining while all of this mayhem is going on that the tourist situation can be saved.  It really is this character that raises Piranha above its budget and into the realm of the truly awesome, because he's simultaneously hilarious and despicable.

And that third act, where the weaponized fish reach the summer camp and then the water park?  Awesome.

This is one of those movies that is comprised of a lot of different things together that SHOULDN'T work - and yet they somehow do, and they work fantastically.  The acting by both Menzies and Dillman is solid and to the point, and Dick Miller is simply unforgettable.  The kill scenes are genuinely suspenseful, and while you won't be pissing yourself in terror or anything, there are definitely more than a few cringe-worthy moments.  Again, though, I have to go back to that tried-and-true cinematic universal that practically gives me an erection - three-act structure.  This movie has it, and it plays it out to perfection.  When your flick has a defined beginning, middle, and end, it makes the ending actually feel satisfying.  Seeing fish gut a whole bunch of people can be satisfying, believe me.  And not just because I'm a psychopath.

Rating time.  Wait for it...**** out of ****.  This flick is just a damn fun time that I can't recommend enough.  And retroactively, I award the 2010 remake * 1/2 out of ****, and that extra 1/2 * is solely for Kelly Brook's boobs.

Blair Witch (2016)

2016
Directed by Adam Wingard
Starring James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Valorie Curry, Corbin Reid and Wes Robinson

I don't know exactly what Dan Myrick and Ed Sanchez had in store for the Blair Witch series when the first movie became such a mammoth phenomenon.  All I know is that they wanted nothing to do with the second film.  And then said film underperformed, and this series laid dormant for a decade and a half.  The Haxan Films crew went their separate ways, doing some of their own movies of varying quality and genre, and the entire world seemed to forget about the little movie from 1999 that came along and wiped the floor with all of the slick, witty postmodern slasher flicks of the era.  Until Adam Wingard came along...

The reports that Wingard was going to be involved with this project had me excited.  He's been one of the supervising producers of the V/H/S films, and while some segments in those are definitely better than others, they're loads of fun regardless.  His movie You're Next is one of my top 10 horror films of the decade so far.  The Guest is also pretty damn good, with Dan "The Man" Stevens turning in a tour-de-force performance.  The advance ad campaign was also pretty creative, with a poster saying merely "The Woods" and Wingard's name attached to it.  And then the reveal that this was Blair Wich 2016.  Hells yeah.  Do people still say that?  I doubt it, but count me in.  In short, everything seemed to be lining up for a big triumphant return of the movie that was such a huge part of my high school days.  The epic conclusion: I went on opening night.  And...it sucked.  Man, I've been on a real negative role lately with this here blog, eh?

Sitting in the theater a few months back, the first thing that jumped out at me was that it had a setup...that was essentially the exact same thing that I would have written.  Meet James Donahue (James Allen McCune), all around nice guy who is, you guessed it, the little brother of Heather Donahue from the original film.  Obviously, the disappearance still haunts him, and the discovery of a weird YouTube video that indicates that his sister may still be alive sets the plot in motion.  We have a logical story device, a solid emotional hook in the sibling searching for his long-list sister, and even a decent-enough actor in McCune playing the lead.  Unfortunately, we soon begin meeting the rest of the characters who head out into Burkitsville woods to solve the mystery (ruh-roh Raggy - second week in a row that I get to dust out that joke!). 

The secondary characters consist mostly of his friends.  There's Ashley (Corbin Reid) and the requisite film student character Lisa (Callie Hernandez), which gives us the reason for the whole being filmed.  She also had the foresight to bring a drone to tail them into the woods as aid in case of being lost, a gimmick that will pay off later in one of the most unintentionally funny kill scenes in horror history.  There's also a couple of locals who know the area in Talia (Valorie Curry) and Lane (Wes Robinson).  All of these people?  Pretty vanilla, and not terribly captivating.  But the person that I want to talk about is Peter. 

Played by Brandon Scott, he's James' best friend and going by what we get in the opening trimester of this flick one has to wonder why he ever agreed to come along in the first place.  Affectionately referred to by someone walking out of my theater viewing as "Mr. McBitchypants," he immediately begins complaining.  About everything.  The walk.  The legend.  The Witch.  Everything is dumb, an everything is a massive waste of time.  In short, the dude screams "cannon fodder" from the second he appears onscreen.  For everyone who complains about how unlikable Heather was in the first film, she ain't got nuthin' on this guy.

You might be wondering what we get from this point on in terms of a story.  Well, this is the most disappointing aspect of the movie to this reporter.  Last week, I admitted that Book of Shadows was a terrible movie in execution but that I give it massive props for at least trying something radically different from the formula.  This one?  If you've seen the first movie, you've seen this one.  Every single beat is repeated, from the getting lost, to the wandering in circles, to the arguing, to a character or characters (spoiler alert) vanishing only to reappear later, to the big finale in the creepy house.  Surely I don't even need to spell out the final scenes, amirite?  Amazingly, though, it's in the particulars and the way that this film differs from the original that depresses me the most.  Not in concept, but in execution, because this is a flick that shows with pitch-perfect accuracy at just how homogenized all of the found footage films that came in the wake of the 1999 film have become.

For starters, we see the witch in this flick.  Fairly regularly.  It looks just as stupid as you would imagine, but we see it, so everyone who hated this aspect of the original, here's your answer.  I hope you're happy.  Secondly, there's a body count this time around.  In true modern-era found footage fashion, there's no less than five onscreen murders captured on the cameras, with the aforementioned death following the drone (which gets caught in a tree for one of the characters to fish out, only for the witch to come along and wreak havoc on said tree) being the Eddie Murphy-esque comedic highlight.  Oh, and jump scares.  Jump scares aplenty.  The first movie was all about agonizing silence.  Even if you hated it, I think you would agree that it was all about psychology over shocks.  This one is all about the shocks.  LOUD NOISES (insert Steve Carell gif).

Now to be a little more constructive.  I can't help but wonder if this movie had come ten years earlier, before the huge wave of found footage movies overtook the marketplace and essentially established all of the techniques that would define the subgenre that this one adheres to like Bible.  I actually think it's kind of a shame, because this movie DOES show glimmers of potential.  Again, McCune is fairly likable as the lead guy, and Ashley is also a pretty likable character despite her decided lack of tree climbing prowess.  With more stuff left offscreen, a severe cut in the amount of sound scare stingers, less blood, less screaming...there's actually the framework of a decent story here.  Oh, and much less stuff at the end about being stuck in an interdimensional time warp.  It happens.  In that regard, Wingard (way too much use of "gard" in consecutive words there) actually did his job.  He injected the modern horror stuff into what had come before.  The problem is that he did this while keeping every single story element of the original, and as a result, all it does is make me want to watch the original.  How many times have I used the word "original" in this review?  Probably too much.

* 1/2 out of ****.  There are definitely horror movies I've seen recently that I disliked more, but this was one of the biggest disappointments I've had considering the name on the poster and the director involved.  Avoid this one.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

2000
Directed by Joe Berlinger
Starring Kim Director, Jeffrey Donovan, Erica Leerhsen, Tristine Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner

Oh boy, the time has come to review Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.  I reviewed the original movie last November here on the ol' blog, and for those of you who scan right through my reviews on Twitter, message boards or your Facebook feed (for SHAME!), the gist of it is this: I really, really love the first movie.  It's a polarizing movie, to be sure, but I happen to fall in the camp that feels that it was not only scary as f**k back in the day but still holds up in 2017.  When the flick came out, I was borderline obsessed, tracking down all of the tie-in novels and nonfiction/fiction books that went along with it.  And then news comes out that there's a sequel?  Color me there.  And I was - on opening night, no less, with a theater consisting primarily of the remainder of my high school graduating class.  And I thought that it sucked.

It sucked then, much hardly.  I remember walking out of that theater pissed off that they took something that I was really into and "raped" it, or some really profound critical thought process thing.  I re-watched this film for the first time since then late last year and again a few days ago, and I can now report that it sucks...decidedly less than it did back in 2000.  All these years later, now without the prism of how original and fresh the first movie seemed back then totally washed out of my mouth, I can actually appreciate what writer-director Joe Berlinger was trying to accomplish here.  I repeat, trying.  In execution, it was still a failure.  But it's a failure in that oh-so-lovable way that you can see that there is a decent movie desperately trying to escape somewhere here.  Occasionally, that movie does peek through.  Mostly, though, it doesn't.  The film criticism just don't stop here on the Lick Ness Monster blog.  Where did this movie go wrong?  Let's recap and find out.

First things first:  This movie is definitely WAY different from the original Blair Witch Project.  So if you weren't into the found footage thing that the first film didn't exactly invent but definitely popularized, you might be willing to give this movie a bit more of a chance.  Nope, instead, what Joe Berlinger wanted to convey here was an actual narrative, with a full script, characters, three-act structure...you know, all the stuff you hear about in writing class.  I'll give credit to Berlinger for his original idea - he did not simply repeat the story of the original.  Not even conceptually.  The general idea behind the film concerns the impact that the first film had on its group of characters.  This fact depresses me, because it means that I have to talk about them.

Yes, folks, let's talk about the characters in this movie.  It doesn't take long for us to meet them, and they're almost funny in their pitch-perfect stereotypical notes.  Stephen and and his pregnant wife Tristen are your resident nice characters, researching a book about the Blair Witch after the events of the original film become public.  They're not terribly interesting people, but they are definitely the most tolerable people that you're about to meet.  The side characters, however, are your real main eventers.  Believe me, it's for the worse.  We have Jeff, the group's guide who is sort of a mix between Burt Gummer-style survivalist and basic weed-smoking anciliary guy.  We have Erica, a trendy Wiccan who eventually has one of the greatest nude dancing sequences in cinematic history (and it is a Patrick Bateman-style undisputed masterpiece).  And then there's Kim.  Ahhh...Kim.  She's Goth, that Kim.  Even better, she's PSYCHIC.  Talk about a movie that covers all of its bases when it comes to covering all of the high school demographics that it desperately needed to connect with to turn a profit.  Which it did, by the way - as poorly reviewed as this film was, it still grossed almost $50 million worldwide on its $15 million budget.  Call it residual after-effect from 1999's popularity or just the fact that people will go to anything just because it's there (hello Avatar sequels that are about to gross 60 gajillion dollars), it happened.

Halfway through this review, and I've already run off the beaten path.  I will wholeheartedly admit that the movie actually roped me in on that first watch all those years ago, showing us all of the characters' motivations and reasons for being interested in the Blair Witch.  I will also admit to feeling a sense of dread when the characters find the Rustin Parr household from the original movie, set up camp and spend the night.  It also seemed like a logical next step in the screenplay when it plays the Ruh-roh, Raggy card on us and has the group wake up the next morning with no memory of the previous night.  I was very intrigued by where we were going with this as the movie starts to get weird.  Unfortunately, it's also where the movie flies off the rails.

The first curveball that this movie throws at us is Tristen's miscarriage.  Yeah, 'memba Tristen?  'Memba that she was pregnant?  Well, she was.  After this second Ruh-roh, the group head back to Jeff's house (which, amazingly, is in an ABANDONED BROOM FACTORY - now that is some amazing storytelling) to review their tapes from the previous night where we get the first of many hallucination sequences featuring the strange ghostly children.  These kids show up a lot as this movie gets weirder, so get used to them.  We get the aforementioned naked Erica dancing sequence on one of the tapes, as well as each member of the group experiencing visions of themselves doing terrible, terrible things...things that gradually come true.  And, unfortunately, there isn't an ounce of tension to be had with any of it.

It's hard to explain why.  Reportedly, the version of the movie that we got was a very different one than what Joe Berlinger originally intended.  His flick was much more of a slow burn leading up to a horrific climax.  Also, the music and tone of the film he shot was totally different.  There were reportedly no supernatural elements whatsoever to the plot - it was all about media obsession and mass hysteria.  Well, the studio didn't like this and massively re-cut Berlinger's footage, inserting new music and ordering new scenes to be shot.  A good example of what this means is an eerie, atmospheric piano score being replaced by early 2000s heavy metal music.  In short, all of the tone that Berlinger was going for was essentially lost with this re-cut, and it's a damn shame, because all indications are that his vision for this film actually would have been pretty freaky.

Oh, and the actors?  I haven't mentioned them for a reason, because while I'm sure some of them did go on to other things...f**k me if I know what they are.  Yeah, they're pretty bad. 

Still, the movie isn't a total failure.  Yeah, once it gets going with it's "forced amnesia and hallucinations" plot, we can take a guess where it's going.  But the opening 20 minutes or so is actually very well done, even in it's non-director-approved version.  The Stephen and Tristen characters are rendered pretty well, the setup seems like the solid logical thing to do after the massive success of the original film seemed impossible to replicate, and there's even a good air of mystery after the initial night spent at that creepy house in the woods.  In short, it's unique and definitely carves out its own identity - thus, why it was so damn hated back in its day.  And while the movie is a failure in the form that it exists today, I now nonetheless have a soft spot for this entry in the long list of "screwed by studio involvement" feature films.  It had ambition.  That's more than I can say for, say, Rings.

I know it sounds like I've bashed on this movie a lot, but there are parts of it that I actually enjoy.  Thus, I'll give Book of Shadows ** out of ****.  Hopefully, someday Berlinger can give us that director's cut that this film's grand total of seven fans are clamoring for.  Also, amazingly enough, this film is actually better than the follow-up that pretends this one doesn't exist. /teaser