Ghostbusters

Director: Ivan Reitman
Writers: Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis
Released: 1984
Cast: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, Annie Potts, William Atherton

The Orphanage

Director: Juan Antonio Bayona
Writer: Sergio G. Sánchez
Released: 2007
Cast: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep, Geraldine Chaplin

100 Feet

Director: Eric Red
Writer: Eric Red
Released: 2008
Cast: Famke Janssen, Bobby Cannavale, Ed Westwick, Michael Paré

NIKKI says: Here's a story... about 14 years ago, I was reading a magazine that featured a large advertisement for Kevin Costner's movie, Wyatt Earp. I looked at the cast list and right after the title, was the name JEFF FAHEY. Now, at this time, I was mildly obsessed with the Lawnmover Man. I know, I know... but I was 15. (Incidentally, Jeff Fahey was 42!)

So, if Jeff's name is right after the title in the poster credits, I felt safe to assume his role would be quite large. I went to this movie in Melbourne on, I believe, opening night. I sat, and waited... and kept waiting... and waited some more. Two hours later, Jeff Fahey shows up for about eight minutes.

I realised later, that his name was only first because the cast was listed on the poster alphabetically.

Why is all of this important? Because 100 Feet promised me some Michael Pare, with whom I am infatuated only slightly less than Jeff Fahey. But Michael Pare was not in this movie. A CGI version of him with cartoon blood all over his face WAS in this movie. Why did they get him to be in this if they weren't going to even have him say anything or do anything? Surely I'm not the only one who who thinks more of Michael Pare than as good for a CGI ghost with no lines. ESPECIALLY when he is credited as "and Michael Pare" -- that's the special credit, for special actors, isn't it? So, clearly Eric Red thought he was worth getting.

Maybe it was some kind of ironic joke? Like getting Val Kilmer to stand in the background in True Romance completely out of focus? Whatever it was, it was LAME.

And so was this movie. Interesting premise, entirely ruined by bad writing, poor direction, and the worst special effects since The Lawnmower Man. At least in that movie, we got to watch Fahey without his shirt on!! Mowing the lawn... with that orange hair... and those pants...

1/5

Shutter, dir. Masayuki Ochiai (2008)

NIKKI says:

Oh man. We knew it was going to suck. So, we have no one to blame. But, you know, it didn't suck as much as it could have. There are so many Asian-horror remakes around that star teen TV stars from the '90s, and for one to stand out as not totally lame is really pretty good. This one wanted to be smarter than The Grudge remakes and The Eye, and it really showed. It's just a pity it didn't come together. The chick in it acted her heart out, and I think her intensity was one of the main reasons I felt it was almost very nearly a sort of okay movie.

The scares were better, as in, not so CGI. But the end was a dead giveaway from the start. Why else is scary-faced kid from Nip/Tuck even in the thing? But ... meh. And who still uses film anyway? So much film-use in this movie ...

2/5

STEVE says:

Yeah, it was lame. But something was different.

This wasn't like The Ring or The Eye or The Grudge or Pulse or Premonition or any of the other myriad remakes of Asian horror flicks in the cineplexes these days. I'd like to say it was because I hadn't seen the original, as we had with The Eye and The Grudge and The Ring, and therefore had nothing to compare it to, but I hadn't seen the original Pulse or Premonition before we watched those remakes, and both bored me up the wall regardless.

Something about Shutter seemed... earnest. Someone was trying their damnedest to make a scary movie here, and - though failing on many, many levels - it shows. The performances by Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor were honest, real. While much of the plot was pretty standard, we could overlook it because these characters weren't just plodding their way through the paint-by-numbers script like Sarah Michelle Gellar, Naomi Watts and Sandra Bullock before them.

I want to shun all Asian horror remakes, but when something like this comes along, something that raises the bar, even slightly, I know I'll end up seeing the remake of A Tale of Two Sisters when it's released next year as The Uninvited. Maybe someday they'll get it right.

2/5

The Eye, dir. Xavier Palud, David Moreau (2008)

NIKKI says:
I don't know what drew me to watch it -- could be my desire to see every horror movie ever made; could be my need to be culturally aware about every damn movie-related thing; could be that addiction to shite I need to see someone about. Whatever the case, there was no way I wasn't watching this. And even though it had no chance of living up to its Chinese predecessor, it wasn't as bad as some American horror remakes, like The Ring. It was still lame.

I expected it to be lamer, especially with Gothika "writer" Sebastian Gutierrez responsible for the screenplay. Gutierrez also wrote Snakes on a Plane which was utter trash as well. He tries here to stick to the original, and while there are some major plot disconnections for me, he's not the reason this doesn't work. That issues hangs on Moreau and Palud who clearly have little idea how to scare an audience. I don't get why guys like these who have been given the chance to direct a scary movie don't go out and research scary movies. They needn't go that far even -- just hire out the original Eye and DO EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. Instead, those ultra-creepy scene from the original are watered way down with stupid CGI ghosts effects and absolutely zero tension.

If you've seen the original -- remember the dead guy in the elevator? Why was that so frightening in the original, but borderline funny here? Do the Chinese just have a better sense of overall atmosphere when it comes to films like this? Remember the school scene with the calligraphy? "Get out of my chair!" Oh my god! That scene is probably the scariest I've ever seen on film. Why can't the remake replicate that? Does putting Jessica Alba (or any well-known, mainstream actress) just negate the scary? Does a US setting add a been-there-seen-that quality to such flicks?

Let's explore... Calligraphy chair, as well as the girl under the sink in Tale of Two Sisters, Sadako coming out of the TV in Ringu, the little boy in the banister in Ju-on -- these are all officially my most memorable movie moments for sheer freak-out factor. Like, not just the creeps or the chills or a slight jump, but heart-pounding, vomit-inducing, CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE kinda stuff. Coincidence that they're all from Asian horror flicks? I really don't think so.

The Asians just do it better. It's the only conclusion I can come to. It's like Italians and red wine. They just do it better. They can't help it. Although, the Asian horror flick fest of awesome has dried up over the past few years. Are there new Pangs out there? Have I just not found them?

2/5

STEVE says:

It took two directors to screw up the work of the Pang Brothers. I like that kind of symmetry.

This movie followed the original almost shot for shot, and still managed to be piss-weak. There oughta be some kind of award for that.

Palud, Moreau: How do you fuck up that elevator scene?

It's like this every time. Why do we keep watching these remakes? I blame Nikki. But mark my words - there's no way in HELL I'll be watching Quarantine...

2/5

Fingerprints, dir. Harry Basil (2006)

NIKKI says:
So much potential! This is one of those horror movies that annoy you not because it's lame or because the kids are annoying or because the story is stupid -- yes, it has elements of all three of those things, but it's actually really, really close to actually being kind of okay. Just a script tweak or two and maybe we would have had something. As it is, it's yet another bad movie that tried.

I'm starting to think Bad Movie That Tried could become a new tag.

This movie is based on a Texan urban legend about a bus and train collision that killed a bunch of school kids. The legend posits that if you drive up to the train tracks where the accident occurred and put your car in neutral, the ghosts of the dead children will push your car over the tracks to "safety". The filmmakers say in the DVD special features that this happens "every time" someone pulls their car over and while I find that ridiculously hard to believe, it's a decent enough starting point for a horror movie.

So, a new girl comes to town (fresh out of rehab and all) and sees one of the ghosts of the kids, follows her home, and begins to unearth a seedy mystery from the town's past. Why the girl chose our heroine isn't really defined, especially as the girl had been appearing to all and sundry for years. Anyway, we don't sweat the small stuff in movies like this, otherwise we'd have to question about three deaths in this one.

The heroine discovers that maybe there never was a crash after all, which makes that urban legend basis a bit meaningless, and that something else was happening down by the tracks. So, it's okay what eventually happens, but it's riddled with plot holes and random things that just don't make sense. And the twists don't really twist, and the turns, don't really turn. Nothing new is attempted.

It only succeeds because it's not completely awful. The kids are okay, the story starts out well, and some of the scares work. I spent much of the film weirded out by the fact that little Andy Lawrence has gone from this:


... to this:


... while I feel like I haven't aged at all since Brotherly Love. What happened?

Fingerprints didn't totally suck. But it came dangerously close.

2/5

STEVE says:
Fingerprints is a thrilling tale of supernatural suspense ripped whole-and-breathing from real life! If, that is, real life is an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

Even so, it was hard to hate this movie. Yes, the script was uneven, the pacing was off, the story contradicted itself at every turn... but everyone involved was just so earnest. I'd really like to see what they could have done with more of a budget and a tighter script.

No kidding, though, I truly expected Sally Kirkland, once unmasked, to exclaim the time-honoured line, "...and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids."

2/5

Sometimes They Come Back, dir. Tom McLoughlin (1991)

NIKKI says:
It's no secret -- back in the day, I had the majorest thing for Robert Rusler. He was just so tanned and manly, and cool and evil in pretty much everything. I first saw him in, I guess, Vamp, which I watched over and over because of him. And he was in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, which I watched over and over because of him. And he was in Thrashin', which I watched over and over because of him and Brooke McCarter, who I thought was cool until I found out he was responsible for this.

He was just showing up all over between 1988 and 1992. Sometimes They Come Back was on high rotation for me because of him, too. I couldn't get enough. I remember just fast forwarding to the bits he was in. Those were the days.

Tonight, Steve called him a low-rent Matt Dillon. He just doesn't understand. Man, my taste in men was weird when I was 12.

So, the movie... not the worst Stephen King adaptation, but not great, either. We realised last night that the problem is really the cheesiness of the kids and how it conflicts with Tim Matheson's ultra-serious performance. It's hard to balance the high-pitched laughing and dog howling of the deadly teens with Matheson's great drama. Still, it's a decent watch. King adaptations have been much worse.

It was a fun night of nostalgia, this one.

3/5

The Attic, dir. Mary Lambert (2008)

NIKKI says:
It looked like it could have been a nice little gothic thriller. A girl moves into a new house with her parents and think she has a twin sister living in the attic. It's all very M.R. James. But instead of offering creeps and ghost-y scares, this one provides only boredom.

There's really nothing to say about it. You'll guess the ending before you get there and it won't mean much that you do. I also felt, from the very start, that this one was off-key -- as in, you know how there's a beat to a scare? Set it up, give us a fake scare (cat jumping, window slamming, tree rustling), let us calm down, then... one, two, three, REAL SCARE. This tried to scare us like that, but seemed about three beats off where it needed to be.

So without good thrills, without a decent script, and with actors who should fucking not need to pay rent this bad (John Savage?!?!?), it makes for a gigantic mess.

.5/5

Death Row, dir. Kevin VanHook (2006)

STEVE says:
We should have watched April Fool's Day. Too predictable? I don't know. We actually did watch it last year on this date and were both kind of surprised to find that it was neither as good nor as fun as we'd remembered from our respective wonder years. Which is just mental because even when I saw it in the theater at age 15, I remember thinking that the only good thing about it was the presence of Amy Steele and the use of Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not To Come" on the soundtrack. But memory is a funny thing. It's like Austin O'Malley says: "Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food." I don't know what that means.

Someone actually remade April Fool's Day just this year. Also shite, I'm guessing, though I haven't seen it. The synopsis on IMDb leads one to believe that it's one of those trendy "re-imaginings" that basically take the title and an element or two from the original story, then turn around and go a whole other way, and you're left going, "What the hell?" Like the Day of the Dead remake. Clearly just an attempt to cash in on the tenuous link to George Romero. Makes me sick.

I guess I'd better say something about Death Row. You see Keach's name there on the poster, second to Jake Busey? Yeah. I'm not sure what's more insulting: the fact that Keach is given such huge billing and is in reality only in the movie for like five minutes, or that he's listed second to Jake Busey. Rounding out the star-power here is Danny Trejo. He's only got one scene so his name's not on the poster. Lucky bastard.

Death Row is about a gaggle of wanna-be documentary filmmakers who get trapped in a haunted prison with a bunch of diamond thieves and they start getting knocked off by the ghosts of past prisoners because Busey's grandfather was a guard at the prison before he got locked up for, I don't know, something, and - oh who gives a fuck, anyway? A haunted prison? Really? Have we learned nothing from Renny Harlin?

I'm going to try to go hoard some colored rags, throw away some food and forget this movie ever happened.

1/5

NIKKI says:
Something made me think this movie might be a kind of In the Line of Duty-type hard-ass thriller with Stacy Keach as a vitriolic prison guard and Jake Busey his small-time crook in need of some rehab. But fantasies are often just that.

Within minutes I knew we'd made a mistake. Twas the acting gave it away, believe it or not. Awesome as Stacy Keach is, even he can't make a reveal of two lopped-off legs anything but comedic. The kids he was talking to were terrible, and you think, not even a Jenna Dewan or a Jonathan Tucker here? It was to be the lowest of low-grade. No plot became remotely discernible in the film's fist act, making it impossible to know who to follow, who's arc to watch for, or basically anything making us care at all about anyone. Except ourselves.

And then it's worse. The ghosts are stupid, the scares are lame, nothing is scary, and Jake Busey plays the whole thing like he's Beavis and/or Butthead, grunting all the way through the thing. And though the horrifying effect of a guy being pushed through a chicken wire fence was gross, it didn't look at all real. I've cut myself numerous times, and I've never found my skin to splurge around like old Spam.

The rest of the effects were just lame. I spent from about 25 minutes in just longing for the end. I was also hoping Steve wouldn't storm out and toss away Between Pictures altogether. He didn't, but, you know, I wouldn't have blamed him.

<--- April Fools! 1/5