Deep Evil

Ah, the Saturday night low-budget sci-fi horror movie. This week’s offering was Deep Evil, a 2004 offering starring Lorenzo Lamas. I know, the rest of the review practically writes itself.

In the 1950s, a meteor landed in Russia. In it was an alien microbe. Russian attempts to clone it ( as an aside, the movie uses the word “clone” a lot, but I don’t think they actually knew what clone meant)ended in disaster, and after the end of the Cold War, we ended up with it, although I don’t know how. In addition to the microbe turning into a monster that looks a lot like Creature from the Black Lagoon, it exudes water that it can control, making it form into any shape and infecting anyone it comes into contact with. I didn’t understand any of that, either.

In true sci-fi movie fashion, the military decides to turn the alien microbe and its water into weapons, which is never a good idea. If it were policy to have military decision makers watch a representative sampling of these movies, a lot of grief would be avoided. Anyway, they set up a secret research facility near Fairbanks, Alaska. As you might guess, things go awry, and soon everyone in the facility is dead, and the military is forced to send in a team. By this point, BW is complaining about how slow the movie is. She just wants to get to the monster, and who can blame her?

The team consists of a half dozen military types and a couple of civilian scientists, to exploit the movie convention that military personnel and civilians can’t stand each other. As is typical in these things, the team consists of four officers and two sergeants. Deep Evil is even worse than most films on military protocol, with no clear structure, as they can’t seem to decide if the major outranks the captain, and one sergeant addresses the other as “sir”. They also bitch constantly about information being kept from them, which was grating. Presumably, all these soldiers had some form of security clearance, and would understand how this works. In reality, if you are told you don’t have clearance to know something, that’s the end. If you gripe about it, they can your ass.

So, our motley team enters the facility, the water attacks (really) and ultimately things blow up, as they tend to do. You have to share my love of bad movies to watch this one.

Friday the 13th News

We're still almost a week away from the new Friday the 13th movie, but according to internet reports, the movie is generating such positive feedback, another F13 movie has been greenlit, for release in late summer 2010. If this is so, the movie would be the...13th in the series.
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Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

When the producers of the Friday the 13th movies decided to continue after the fourth installment (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) they faced a quandary: Since Jason died at the end of the previous flick, how could they continue the series? Actually it wasn’t a quandary, since Jason is dead at the end of eight of his eleven appearances, and the stock solution for the problem is to open the next movie with “He gets up.” Still, the producers thought it was a problem, so they managed to come up with a terrible solution for it.

The movie begins in a rainy graveyard at night. While Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) from the previous movie watches in fear from the bushes, two losers dig up Jason’s grave. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but Jason wakes up, kills the graverobbers, and prepares to resume his reign of terror. The movie is starting just like we thought it would. No, wait, it isn’t. It’s just a dream. Psych!

Back in reality, a now grown-up Tommy wakes up from his nightmare. It seems ol Tommy hasn’t been the same since his tete-a-tete with Jason, and he’s mostly been institutionalized since. He is going to a new home for mental patients, which apparently exists both in the South (judging by accents) and near Crystal Lake. The home has a novel approach to mental illness: Let dangerous psychotics roam around mostly unsupervised using dangerous tools until they kill each other off. Snicker if you must, but this movie was made in the 80s, and that pretty much describes the Reagan administration’s approach to mental illness.

One of the residents of the facility is Joey, a heavy, possibly retarded young man whose mental illness is an apparent compulsion to annoy the hell out of everyone, putting his chocolate stained hands on the newly washed laundry, and so on. After upsetting the girls with their laundry, he wanders over to where one of the patients, a psychopath with rage issues, is chopping wood with an axe. Joey begins to annoy the wood-chopping psycho, and before you can say “bad idea”, the axe is buried in Joey’s brain, and we have our first death. And Jason didn’t do it!

The head-axing either inspires him or makes him jealous, because there is soon a familiar, hockey-wearing figure chopping his way through the cast. Although…wasn’t the mask decorated in red instead of blue in the previous films? Where’s the axe cut in the top of the mask? Do we have massive continuity errors?

Nope. As it turns out, it isn’t Jason at all. Son of a bitch. Jason really is dead forever (Errrrrr). It turns out that one of the EMTs who responded to Annoying Kid getting whacked was secretly the kid’s father, and seeing his beloved son, who he had nothing to do with, killed caused him to go off the rails. He goes on a murder rampage and decides to kill everybody, even characters that had nothing to do with Beloved-but-ignored son’s death. And this is the biggest flaw of the movie, which is my least favorite of the series. Would you make a 007 movie without James Bond? Of course not. Then why make a Friday the 13th film without Jason. It just ain’t right.

A few notes:
A New Beginning features a staple of the series, the 50s-era greasers who get killed. Apparently Crystal Lake (or wherever this is supposed to be) has a time rift that allows refugees from The Wild One to enter our time to get sliced and diced by our beloved monster, and two of them bite it here.

There is a subplot of a hillbilly woman and her dim-witted son who lives next to the facility for the mentally disturbed kids, and hates them. Every time she was on the screen, I thought of Reba McIntyre.

One of the four black characters in the movie survives. If you’ve watched any slasher movies, you know an African-American character that doesn’t end up a victim has really beaten the odds.

Speaking of African-American characters, two of them figure in one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie. It seems the kid who lives at the camp has an itinerant brother named Demon. Demon has stolen Debarge’s wardrobe and wears enough Jheri Curl to solve the energy crisis. Demon offers everyone Mexican food, and then suffers the ills of bad tacos. He goes to the outhouse, and while noisily taking a dump, sings a duet with his girlfriend on the other side of the door. No kidding. When moments like this occur, people look at each other in amazement, but I was alone, so I just looked at myself.

Hide And Creep

I don’t often get a chance to review a movie made in my home state. Since you always want (semi)locals to do well, that puts added pressure on the hapless reviewer. I’m relieved to be able to say Hide and Creep has done Alabama proud.

It’s a slow day at Super Video in Thorsby, Alabama. All the zombie movies are rented, and Chris (Chris Hartsell), the store clerk, is arguing with customers about whether the Evil Dead movies can be considered zombie flicks (he’s right – they aren’t). The quiet is interrupted when the town comes under siege from – you guessed it – zombies. Even worse, the police chief’s out of town and his lone deputy got drunk and ended up with a girl in Panama City. Fortunately, it’s central Alabama, where guns outnumber people by a wide margin. Soon Chris, ex-deputy Chuck (Chuck Hartsell), and a group of gun nuts led by Ken (Ken McCracken) are taking the fight to those flesh-eating zombie bastards, with little help from the Homeland Security agent who parachutes into town. But they may have more trouble: Are aliens from space behind all this?

There have been a number of “zombedies” (zombie comedies) in the last few years, led by the classic Shaun of the Dead, and this is one of the better ones. The movie manages to hit the right balance of the comedic absurd and flesh-devouring mayhem. I do worry that people from other parts of the country will find some of the characters unbelievable. Being from here, I can tell you I know a real-life counterpart to every one of them.

The movie was reportedly made for $20,000, so it doesn’t exactly set the world on fire with dramatic special effects, but makes up for it with a well-written, witty script. Normally, in a movie with such a low budget, the acting is a major problem, but despite the limited credits of the cast, they acquit themselves very well. Speaking of the script, I was pleased to see the characters don’t need to waste any time being convinced there’s a zombie attack occurring. As soon as reanimated, decomposing corpses start showing up and eating brains, they know the score.

The movie is the work of Chance Shirley and Chuck Hartsell of Birmingham, through their Crewless Productions company. Anyone who likes zombie movies or redneck humor should give this one a try.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

I’ve gotten behind on the Friday the 13ths, and I wanted to be finished before next Friday the 13th (obviously). So we move on to the fourth installment, entitled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which as the title indicates was the last in the series. Ha ha! There are actually seven more to go, counting Freddie vs. Jason (and I do). At the end of the previous movie, Jason was dead, so this starts with his body being taken to the local morgue, where he gets better, kills a couple of people, and hoofs it back home, although his injuries in the previous installment have caused him to revert to 2-D. Meanwhile, a group of young people, one of whom is played in an early appearance by Crispin Glover, has booked a house for a party. Once again, I hope they got a deal on that, all things considered. The house next door is occupied by Mrs. Jarvis, and her kids Trish and Tommy (Corey Feldman, in his child actor days).

The kids are happy to see the party-goers move in, Trish to have someone her age to talk to, and Tommy because he gets to spy on one of the girls getting undressed. (Tommy celebrates this by jumping and slamming his body into the mattress, which is one of the oddest and most painful-seeming masturbation techniques in history) Soon things are proceeding in a familiar fashion, the girls responding to the nearby lake by getting naked and swimming, Jason by indiscriminate killing.

The increasing body count takes its toll, and we are quickly down to just Trish and Tommy. Jason is getting ready to deal with Trish when Tommy shaves his head, except for some long tufts, and confronts him. Jason can handle being shot, stabbed, electrocuted and drowned, but the sight of a poorly shorn Corey Feldman stops him dead in his tracks, as it would anybody. Trish and Tommy use the surprise to get the drop on Jason, and Tommy beats him to death maniacally. And he’ll stay dead an extra long time, but more on that in the next installment.

Incidentally, when the movie was first released, no one believed it would be the last one, and the common consensus was Tommy would be so broken by the ordeal, he would become the new killer. That didn’t happen, and Corey Feldman didn’t end up taking the place of Kane Hodder down the road.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe

The X-Files was a fluke from the time it began in 1993. Its first season’s ratings were among the lowest of any show at that time, and by all rights it should have been canceled. Fortunately for the show, it was on the fledgling Fox network, which didn’t have a ready replacement for the time period, and allowed it to continue (ironic, given that Fox now takes a lot of heat for dropping shows before they have a chance) The ratings moved toward respectability in its second season, and it finally became a hit in the third season. In 1998, a feature film, X-Files: Fight the Future, was released while the show was still on the air, with mixed results. After the show finally ended its run following its ninth season, there was immediate talk of another film, but it wouldn’t arrive until 2008.

Although I was a big fan of the show, I missed the movie at the theater, put off by extremely harsh reviews, and just now caught up with it on DVD. I expected the worse, but found I actually liked it.

One of the problems with the first movie was it tried too hard to be a big spectacle, probably to compete with its own ongoing series. It was full of special effects and explosions, and packed with things that required a deep knowledge of the TV show to understand. The second movie goes in the opposite direction. It is a small scale film (possibly better suited to be seen on home video than at the theater) and plays more like a long double episode of the series. Little or no familiarity with the TV series is required to enjoy the movie.

An FBI agent has been kidnapped in the snow-covered wastes of West Virginia (the movie was filmed in Canada; hence the large amount of snow). The only lead in the case is a local psychic, Father Joe, a former priest and convicted pedophile. Desperate to find the missing agent, the FBI reaches out to a former agent with experience in paranormal events: Fox Mulder. Mulder, who is still a wanted fugitive, is living in hiding with his old partner, Dana Scully, who is practicing medicine at a Catholic hospital. In exchange for amnesty, Mulder and Scully join the investigation, which leads to a conspiracy (surprise!) of Frankenstein-like medical experiments.

The script hits notes that are familiar from the series. There is doubt as to whether Father Joe truly is a psychic, or involved somehow in the case, and there is a subplot of Scully struggling to reconcile her religious faith with both science and the paranormal.

One of the things that set The X-Files apart from similar shows was its sense of visual style, and the movie does a good job of continuing this. Shots of bluish flashlights against the snow and snow falling through fog at night are beautiful and eerie.

For those of us who watched the show, it is like revisiting an old friend. I doubt it would cause a sensation if it was the only part of The X-Files in existence, but it is a nice treat for the fans. Chris Carter, the creator of the show, has been quoted as saying he would like to continue the movies (according to the last episode, there will be an alien invasion on December 12, 2012, so we’ll need Mulder and Scully back for that) if the movie does will enough. Did it? The answer is unclear. The movie’s production cost was $30 million, and its U.S. box office was only a little over $20 million. However, it did another $47 million in foreign box office; so, combined with DVD sales, there may be a chance.

The Alphabet Killer

The Alphabet Killer is a movie loosely based on a bizarre true case where three young girls, each with the same first and last initials, were raped, strangled and then dumped in a township whose name started with the same letter as their initials. This occurred in Rochester, New York in the early 70s, and the killer has never been caught.

Eliza Dushku (Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) stars in the film as a police lieutenant investigating the crimes. (My biggest criticism of the movie is it is a strain to believe a woman as young as Dushku could have made lieutenant) Her growing obsession with the case takes its toll on her career and personal life.

What makes The Alphabet Killer different from other serial killer movies is when the movie begins, Dushku’s character is suffering from the onset of schizophrenia. Her struggle is as much to hold on to her sanity as it is to solve the crimes. She is haunted by hallucinations of the dead girls, which lends a supernatural yet rational explained aspect to the story. I give props to the people who made the movie for not taking the easy way out and having Dushku miraculously cured of her schizophrenia. In truth, this terrible disease is considered progressive and incurable, and Dushku steadily loses her grip on reality.

Although some have criticized her performance, and in the past I thought she was sometimes flat as an actress, I thought Dushku did a fine job as the lead. It’s a difficult role, and I thought she pulled it off. There is also a good supporting cast, with Timothy Hutton, Michael Ironsides (I would love to see him play a kind and sympathetic character just once, as a change of pace), Cary Elwes, Carl Lumbly and others. There was a moment halfway through the film where I thought, “It would be a cliché if the killer turned out to be _______ _________”, and unfortunately it did.

Those who insist on having a definitive resolution to movies will probably be disappointed by the ending, but I thought it hit just the right note.