Chopping Mall

Chopping Mall
Starring: Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Russell Todd, and Karrie Emerson
Directed by: Jim Wynorski

Style: Killer Robots
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 3
Weapons of choice: Items found in a mall
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

If you are a teenager, your life revolves around the mall. Unfortunately, there are things outside The Steak Shack that could kill you. That's right: security robots. In yet another foolhardy move to trust robots with our safety, Park Plaza Mall installs high tech security with low tech lightning protection, leading to the robots chasing down teens who just want to sneak into the mall and party all night. The robots must be stopped to make the world safe again for trespassers of the world.

This movie falls into the classic conventions of 80s horror: teenagers threatened by things outside the realm of reality. It's not intended to have real fright connotations and instead is supposed to fall into the category of cheap thrills with some comedy to boot. The trouble with this formula is that a lot of the 80s horror films are interchangeable, distinguishing themselves more with their villain than with the movie itself. This movie is no exception, to the point that I remembered it for a long time as "that mall robot movie" before I learned it was called Chopping Mall.

A lot of this film will be forgotten, and the performances are passable but are nothing special. Where this film fails is that the death sequences aren't even that interesting. If you are going to forgo quality on everything else, you still need to have interesting death sequences. This movie tries a few things that fail to impress, leaving the audience to wonder why they didn't rent something better.

As a result of the generic tone of the film, I'm kind of left with little to say about this movie other than to call it run-of-the-mill late-night fare for television. If it's on and you're bored, you'll watch it. otherwise, no real reason to seek it out.

Terrible Thursday: The Happening

The Happening
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Style: Unexplained happenings
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Anything nearby to the afflicted
Overall rating: Terrible

Philadelphia has never been a wonderland of joy ever since Benjamin Franklin robbed that cobbler for the Washington Elite series clog. However, Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) finds himself having to flee the city after New York is hit by some sort of attack when people outside suddenly all kill themselves in whatever way happens to be handy. Soon, other cities and towns are affected, targeting smaller and smaller groups of individuals. Where can you escape to, if you can't go outside?

There are several fundamental problems with this film. Many people criticize its ridiculous nature, which Shyamalan has countered by saying he was making a B-movie. This seems like an excuse, but let's approach the film as a B-movie. We'll even ignore that the marketing department in that case mispromoted the heck out of that, because that's not Shyamalan's fault.

Firstly, Shyamalan took the completely wrong tone to his film for it to pass off as a B-movie. Yes, all of his actors are ridiculously over the top, from Wahlberg doing his best Napoleon Dynamite impression to Zooey Deschanel having moon eyes the entire film to Betty Buckley showing up as an batcrap insane recluse, everyone is hamming it up. Where this tone fails is that at no point does the movie insinuate that it is purposefully bad. There is no subtle wink to the audience. Combine this with the fact that the rest of the production strives to be realistic, down to graphic death scenes, and you have actors who look out of place rather than ones who are laughing it up.

Next, you have the fact that Shyamalan does not know how to do violence. In interviews he gave about this film, he talks about how he wants to break all conventions and hit audiences with things that they felt they would be safe from. This translates to I am going to kill kids in the film, and you'll never see it coming. Except for the fact that it happens when they are trying to break into an inhabited house and suddenly go from normal character kids to hooligan tactics. Not two minutes before, they were waxing philosophical about respect and relationships, and then they are trying to kick down doors. In fact, the first violent deaths occur about 2 minutes into the film, and the convention is set that when things go wrong, people will kill themselves. Knowing that convention tips his hand, and from then on, nothing we see will shock us as much because it's is completely and utterly expected. By the time you get to the lawnmower incident, the part of the trailer that people found most shocking, it is a ho-hum effect.

I'll skip the ridiculousness of the science in the film, because it is B-movie, so it doesn't matter, but what this film comes down to being is a very boring, rather uninventive movie about the possibility of humanity ceasing to exist. It's not fun, unless maybe you are very drunk. It's not exciting, because everything is telegraphed. And it's not scary, because nothing sneaks up on them. They are chased by wind in a scene reminiscent of when frost chased people in The Day After Tomorrow. So what is it then?

Terrible. Just terrible.

Terrible Thursday: Lake Placid 2

Lake Placid 2
Starring: John Schneider, Sara LaFleur, Sam McMurray, Chad Collins
Directed by: David Flores

Style: Creature Feature
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Firearms, biting
Overall rating: terrible

Anytime your town suffers from an attack by some giant killer animal, odds are that you should just nuke the entire town afterwards and start from scratch. Why? Because there are always offspring, and these offspring will inevitably seek revenge, even if the people from the original incident pass on appearing in the sequel. This brings us to Lake Placid 2.

Once again, giant killer crocodiles have returned to Lake Placid. Once again, the sheriff (Schneider) and Fish and Wildlife Services (LaFleur) must do battle with these killers to save a town too stupid to move away from the lake, even though people continue to disappear there for years. Throw in an ornery old woman, who happens to be the sister of the ornery old woman from the first movie, and a big game hunter (McMurray), and you have yourself a race to see who can be the last one chewed on.

For the most part, this film is terrible from beginning to end. All of the characters lack any sort of enthusiasm or intelligence at all, to the point that the first ten minutes talk about how everyone is vanishing on the lake. One character even strips off her clothes and goes diving in her underwear, and she is the EPA / Fish and Wildlife person. I was hoping for some sort of skin infection to punish her with. Everyone else has one goal and will ignore all sorts of rational thinking to achieve it. For example, the sleazy reporter is led to the edge of the dock and left there as an old woman runs away, yet he fails to be suspicious.

The crocodiles are decent but look so out of place. All of the violence is from people writing on the ground pretending to be eaten as digital blood and croc mouth surrounds them.

To give you an idea of what this film is like, the characters just happens to have a grenade launcher lying around. And then, they try to not use it as much as possible. Terrible.

Timber Falls

Timber Falls
Starring: Josh Randall, Brianna Brown, Nick Searcy, Beth Broderick
Directed by: Tony Giglio

Style: Backwater kidnapping
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Double-bladed scythe, firearms
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Mike (Randall) and Sheryl (Brown) are looking for a nice weekend getaway in the national park, free from all the craziness of the modern world. Instead, they find themselves victims of the crazy world of a fanatically religious couple living off the beaten path. Between the dark intentions of their captors and the deformed maniac that is the captors’ son, Mike and Sheryl can only hope to survive long enough to escape.

This film struggles throughout the story to engage the audience, and that is its biggest fault. The actors all appear to be trying their best, but there are a lot of moments that are very hollow and flat, particularly between Mike and Sheryl. As a result, there is never a strong, believable connection between them, so the rest of the plot that hinges around them drawing strength from one another to survive, is left out to dry. Other characters suffer too. At one point, it seems like the director is trying to make the point that not all country boys and actually malicious, but then it decides to portray its characters as that anyway.

The main antagonists all do well for themselves, but the story seems to be aiming for a much more deep-seated, psychological horror and ends up being too subtle with all of the events. In fact, the early scene where Mike and Sheryl are intimidated by some country boys coming back from a hunting trip has a greater sense of danger and malice than anything else that comes after it. As the movie progresses, it has to stretch more and more to even have a sense of danger conveyed, something that is not helped by the fact that Mike struts around like he knows he has a 95% chance of survival no matter what.

Not all of the movie is disappointing. The maniac son with the double-bladed sickle and some decent makeup effects feels at home to this style of film, though it is a shame that the movie instead tries to be something it isn’t by focusing on the kidnappers and not their homicidal kin. While it is noble to try other avenues of horror, one cannot get away with psychological horror without very strong characters and an excellent sense of atmosphere and timing, something this movie lacks. Nothing proves this more than the final shot of the film ripped off from a genre already suffering from cliches.

In the end, this movie suffers from being far too generic and dull. No matter how many seemingly new tricks it pulls out of its bag, it still feels like its clunking along thanks to a few wooden performances and a lack of decent story development. With a few revision drafts to refine the story down to something solid, this movie could have been decent. Instead, it feels too sloppy and falls to the wayside.

The Reaping

The Reaping
Starring: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba
Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Style: Demon spawn
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Plagues, knives
Overall rating: 1 out of 5

Katherine Winter (Swank) has made an academic career out of disproving miracles. She and her assistant Ben (Elba) travel the world to find the deeply spiritual and make it mundane. All of this stems from Winter's daughter being sacrificed to lift a curse during a trip to to the Sudan. However, the town of Haven seems to be different. Their entire river turns to human blood, the cattle waste away with no biological explanation, and things only get worse from there. In the center of it all is a girl said to be a demonic child prophesied about in Biblical texts. Katherine must find the answers before the town decides that destroying the girl is the only way to stop the plagues.

This movie feels very rushed, like everyone started working when it was only half-developed, and as a result they have a jumbled mess that they released as a movie. For example, it is about ten minutes into the movie that you get a sense of who these characters actually are. They start off with a priest that has something weird happen to his pictures, then we meet Swank's character but have no idea what she is doing or why. It is only after that scene that she is introduced as a professor at a university studying miracles. Seriously, the beginning was like watching Outbreak.

This entire movie suffers from lazy storytelling. There is no real time for any suspense to be built as all of the plagues come almost on top of each other. They arrive and the river is blood. Next scene, the cows are having trouble. Next scene, the frogs fall from the sky. Also, there is a dream within a dream sequence that is supposed to leave us wondering if it happened but instead leaves us wondering what happened. Many scenes do not really advance a plot more as allow room for metaphors and flashbacks that try poorly to serve as suspense devices.

Meanwhile, all of the characters besides Katherine only have a cursory characterization to them. When the town is riled up and wants to murder the girl, there is never really a sense of danger because we don't really see the town as anything but crazy people who are about to fly off of the deep end. Subsequently, the ending of the film suffers because there is no connection or attachment to anyone. We don't see paranoia brought to a broil. We see people wanting to kill a kid to save their town, and that doesn't hold up for an entire movie.

Finally, there is the ending. I won't give it away, because unlike the movie, I have the ability to respect a surprise. However, the last shot is so hackneyed that I wanted the director to appear in the corner of the screen and wink at us. People need to realize that some hooks are not clever if you do not build the entire story with care.

Overall, this movie commits one of the worst offenses a horror movie can commit: it is dull. Very few scenes hold any interest, including when characters are in danger. It doesn't really offer anything new that we haven't seen in other demonic seed movies, and on top of it all, it thinks it is clever. By the end, I was the one feeling reaped.

Mulberry Street

Mulberry Street
Starring: Laurel Astri, Kim Blair, Ron Brice, Bo Corre, Nick Damici
Directed by: Jim Mickle

Style: Creature feature
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting, fists, baseball bats
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

New York just can't catch a break. However, it does catch a plague pretty well. This oft-besieged-in-movies city this time faces an outbreak of people turning into vicious rat creatures. One bite from an infected rat or ratbeast is enough to turn you, and the city soon finds itself in quarantined lock down. On Mulberry Street, tenants of an apartment building have to buckle down for survival while others caught outside struggle to make it back home.

One of my biggest problems with this film is that it takes a very interesting idea and slowly bogs it down with bad directing, uninteresting writing, and very rough cinematography. There are quite a few moments where scenes happen in darkness, making it very hard to discern what is going on. This can work, but the way it is utilized smacks of trying to hide incomplete make-up and blood effects. It seems cheap rather than effective. If you are going to do a close-up and point the camera directly at something happening, we need to be able to see what it is. Otherwise, insinuate and put it behind a table or in a long shot.

Meanwhile, all of the characters are incomplete. They show the beginnings of characterization but never really develop past the survival instinct and a few broad generalizations. There are some moments, but they are so fleeting that nothing sticks. Thus, when the story gets to the point when a well-liked character almost escapes only to be dragged backwards to his or her doom, the movie acts like the audience should care. There are several moments like that, when the directors seems to say, "Oh ho! I bet you didn't expect I'd kill THAT character," and instead the audience doesn't really care one way or the other.

The entire film feels like it was taken from a horror movie text book. The writers and director went down the check list of everything a creature movie should include, but they don't quite know how to utilize the convention. For example, a character is killed right at the beginning to introduce the danger. However, it is a character we see for literally 2 seconds before that, and it is in the middle of character introductions. You either start the movie with a death and then start the story, or you weave the death into the story. Don't just show a body in passing. Also, you can't use the technique of trying to be quiet only to make noise more than once or twice. Every character in this film seems clumsy because they always give away their position by knocking into something.

This movie has no drive to it, which means even the good aspects like the few make-up effects we can see or the occasional good chase sequence gets lost in a film that unforgivably drags along. In capable hands, this film could have been a slick little creature feature. Instead, it should be buried.

Day of the Dead (2008)

DAY OF THE DEAD (2008)
Starring: Mena Suvari, Ving Rhames, Nick Cannon
Directed by: Steve Miner

Style: Zombie horror
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting, firearms
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Life is never easy in secluded towns in Colorado. The isolation is a highly desired trait when scientists look to build labs for controversial research, and there is much wildlife nearby prone to mutation from said experimentation. However, this movie decided to tackle the tried and true threat to humanity: zombie outbreak.

The story follows Sarah Bowman (Mena Suvari), a tough-as-rock corporal charged with quarantining her home town. Things go bad when her sick mother needs to be taken to the hospital, as she has a flu that seems to be afflicting most everyone in town. Soon, the hospital becomes a madhouse of zombies and she must fight their way to survival. Joining her are several disposable army faces, most notably Nick Cannon, and later on, her mopey brother and his girl, and together, they must find a way to escape the town and its hungry, hungry inhabitants.

My first problem with this movie is that it has nothing to do with the George Romero original, yet they claimed adaptation so that they could use the notable title to drum up an audience. As hip as this movie tries to pretend it is, they could have done better than just ripping off a title. In fact, the entire movie feels like a project that was abandoned and rushed to DVD release. Why else would you have B-list stars, the director of Lake Placid, and the writer of the Final Destination series dump this crud directly onto DVD?

Another issue is that the zombies are of the fast variety, so that "suspenseful" chase sequences can be added, but the movie fails to employ this as an interesting technique. Instead of making the zombies run at breakneck speed and with pure rage-filled intensity, they run like guys in makeup that are struggling to make it across the street. They even go so far as to occasionally crawl across the ceiling like spider monkeys. The person who made that decision should be forced to watch the zombie classics for 3 months to learn why that is ridiculous.

Acting-wise, Mena Suvari does her best to look tough but just never gets there. Ving Rhames shows up for 5 minutes to out-act the entire movie, much like Sid Haig in Night of the Living Dead 3D. However, the "Murder him please" award goes to Nick Cannon. It's not his fault. His dialog was written by someone with a random urban banter generator. It was like a Will Smith Character but written by the Waynes Brothers.

Overall, there are one or two interesting ideas in this movie, but they are never given time to develop, and the whole movie gives up on any semblance of plot and just pumps in more zombies. It becomes just a half-hearted attempt at a zombie movie, and in my book, any film that goes with digital blood shows any lack of commitment to quality.