Movies Schmovies

We started doing Movies Schmovies five years ago, so we've been around the block a few times when it comes to bad movies. Over that time, we've assembled a pretty consistent assortment of truisms. Among them: local video rental places are endless fonts of awful movies, large budgets and commercial success can produce low-quality shit just as readily as teenagers with camcorders, and vignette movies are always good for a laugh.

I've lost count of all the vignette movies we've rented, watched, and suffered through over the last few years. Off the top of my head, there's Tales from the Hood, Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror, Nite Tales, Creepshow 1-3, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Campfire Tales, Campfire Stories, Ghost Stories¹, Quicksilver Highway, and I'm sure there are several more. The vast majority of them have been really, really stupid--though there are some notable moments of stupidity--such as Buster Poindexter's Ranger Bill in Campfire Stories (the source of the blog's title quote), or Flavor Flav apparently being unaware that this genre existed prior to Nite Tales (or that he, as the film's host, should have some kind of personality).

So when a horror anthology actually turns out to be good...well, we don't know how to feel about that, really. With the possible exception of Twilight Zone, that hasn't really happened before (and even that's stretching a bit). It'd be like a Michael Bay movie without explosions, a Tim Burton flick that didn't extol the weird and decry normalcy, a video game movie worth watching, collard greens that don't taste good, or a tree that's not made out of wood!

This is the dilemma we found ourselves in when watching Trick 'r Treat. Direct-to-DVD horror vignette movies are always cause for celebration around the Movies Schmovies compound, so we were pretty excited about it long before we'd actually heard anything. And then we started hearing things, things like "it's really good." This, naturally, intrigued us--such a thing surely wasn't possible. And let's face it, people said Paranormal Activity was going to be good too.

So we decided that this past weekend's soiree would begin with Paranormal Activity and end with a rental of Trick 'r Treat. This plan hit a snag when I actually tried to rent the movie, and found that there was a waiting list. Another nearby video store was similarly devoid of the film, so I resorted to the purchasing option. Here, too, I was met with defeat: every DVD store I visited on this side of the Mississippi had sold out. We finally managed to pick up the last copy at a Wal-Mart in Iowa on the night of the festivities, shortly before our ill-fated visit to one couple's sprawling San Diego estate.

So perhaps it was just the lingering stupor of shaky-cam garbage, but we actually really enjoyed Trick 'r Treat. The stories were clever and fun, never taking themselves too seriously. We've seen attempts to intertwine vignettes in films like this before, and such attempts rarely work. Here, the storylines weave in and out of one another, jumping back and forth in time, and doing so with a natural fluidity. The real benefit of this method was that it allowed for multiple twists in each story, and tied up different plot and character threads in unexpected ways.

The cast is largely drawn from recent superhero movies, boasting one X-Man, one X-Man villain, and Spider-Man's professor. The presence of real actors--as opposed to rappers--already set this film above the bar set by its contemporaries. Some of the characters are certainly more developed than others, and I'm not sure Dylan Baker's character quite worked in all the ways they used him, but overall the stories were pretty good. Overall, the whole movie is a celebration of Halloween, at times creepy and at times goofy and reveling in both.

I could go into more detail, but you'd be better off finding out for yourselves. Netflix or Blockbuster or whatever, you might as well give Trick 'r Treat a try. You could do a lot worse.

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1. I hesitate to include this one, since it barely met the qualifications of "movie." It was more like a tape of community theater monologues.

Truly frightening horror movies scare people by creating a familiar situation that the audience can relate to, putting characters in positions of vulnerability, building suspense and delivering.
There is a short list of movies people people have, from time to time, considered the most frightening:
-- Halloween: Great movie, not particularly frightening, but easily one of the most innovative horror flicks. The original Halloween was particularly good at establishing familiar surroundings and playing on common real-life fears.
-- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Basically a more raw, visceral version of Halloween. It had the added element of being set in Texas, which is terrifying in and of itself. By pioneering the low-budget horror film, TCM is in many ways the grandfather of Blair Witch Project and, ultimately, Paranormal Activity.
-- The Blair Witch Project: This movie did many things right: it put viewers directly into a situation they could relate to, built a ton of suspense, and like Halloween, played on common fears (though not as common). But it never delivered. You don't see the witch, you don't see anything, and that's the problem. Anything from feet running past the camera to a full on witch sighting in the final frames would have made this movie great--or at least moderately satisfying. As is, it's just stupid. Ultimately, Blair Witch Project is remembered more for the hype that surrounded it and the disappointment that inevitably followed it than anything actually in the movie.
-- The Exorcist: Do you believe that the devil can and would possess the body of a 13-year-old girl? If so, then you might think that The Exorcist is deeply disturbing. If not, all you're left with is an image of the devil as a potty-mouthed 13-year-old girl whose most pronounced power is to beat a priest at the dozens.

Over the last few weeks, we've been hearing reports of a movie so scary that it has moviegoers rushing from the theater with a combination or shit, piss and vomit flowing from their various orifices. So, colostomy bags in hand, we set out to find Paranormal Activity.

First, a note on the marketing of Paranormal Activity. Regardless of the quality of the film, the marketing is a clear success. The TV campaign shows little to no footage from the movie itself, instead relying on night-vision shots of a shocked audience, and the promise that it's so frightening that it might not even be at a theater near you, unless you go to their website and "demand" it. It's all a throwback to the William Castle-era horror movies which made outlandish claims that "doctors trained in the treatment of fear will be present in the lobby during all showings." The fact that this movie went from being independently released in 2007, to topping the box office in 2009 is a success.

So after all the hype and stories of people unable to watch the end, "Paranormal Activity" had built some lofty expectations. What we got was evidence of how -- without the suspenseful music and jump cuts -- ghost stories are pretty mundane. But we'll come back to that.

We meet Micah and Katie, the young couple who make up half of the cast (and 90% of the screen time). Actually, perhaps that's unfair: Katie's cleavage spends enough time on screen that it might as well get billed on the marquee. Micah has decided that it would be fun to bring a camera into the bedroom; sounds good so far. Oh, he wants to film the ghost his girlfriend thinks has been haunting her since she was eight? Okay, we're here anyway, we may as well keep watching. The preceding paragraph accounts for the first 40 minutes of the movie.

Micah, we soon find out, is a deeply unsympathetic douchebag. Not that either character is particularly relatable, living opulently in a palatial San Diego mansion without any visible means of income. Micah claims to be a day-trader, who spent half of what he made in one day on a high quality movie camera to film the supposed paranormal events happening in the vast upstairs. He sincerely believes that filming his girlfriend's encounters will be fun, and openly taunts the demon, in hopes of capturing some cool video. He does all this despite Katie's growing fright, and the escalating intensity of the encounters. In fact, he regularly takes steps to get Katie to draw out the ghosts--which she refuses--and to ensure that the events will continue happening with greater theatricality. It's reasonably assumed that he plans to sell his footage, which may explain his repeated attempts to get Katie to have sex with him on film. One way or another, he would cash in--either on the public's fascination with lame ghost hunting videos, or on the increasingly expansive definition of "celebrity" in the term "celebrity sex tape." Katie is apparently on to his schemes, and so never sleeps in fewer than two shirts and an underwire.

Katie looks a bit like the love child of Zooey Deschanel and Rachel Dratch, and claims to be an English major. Despite a supposed literary background, the only book we ever see her reading is a "For Dummies" book with a blurred-out cover, which she treats like a textbook. Micah claims to be a day trader, though he never actually day trades anything, or appears to have any kind of job or friends outside of the house. This is probably an accurate depiction of life for a day trader. Katie has one friend, who comes over to lend a credulous ear and make bead jewelry with her (the main source of income of most English majors). A psychic who dresses like Carl Sagan rounds out the cast.

The demon joins, seemingly gladly, in an arms race of douchebaggery with Micah, escalating from stomping around the couple's stately four-bedroom Xanadu-esque pleasure dome, loudly thumping up the far too many stairs, slamming and knocking on their bedroom door, flipping lights on and off, and turning on their TV, all in the middle of the night, whenever the 3:00 a.m. freight train passes through their backyard.

As circumstances dictate, Micah is either an enthusiastic ghost hunter, or an avowed skeptic. He taunts Katie for her attempts to call in a demonologist and generally makes fun of the psychic, while he himself runs around the house experimenting with Electronic Voice Phenomena and spends his days dissecting the previous night's ghost videos like an even dopier John Madden.

"See Katie, the demon is going to send his cornerback on a zone blitz from the hallway. He's been beating our left tackle all night and when that happens you're going that leaves you vulnerable on the blind side. Boom! We need to shift our strong-side set if we're going to give you enough time in the pocket to not get possessed. The demon is going after the girl, because the only way he's going to get possession of the girls' soul is by going after the girl. What? Maybe I should sleep by the door? Yeah, I don't think that's going to help."

The movie bravely tries to eschew typical horror movie character archetypes. Our heroine, rather than being tough-as-nails and pure as the driven snow, is emotionally abused and utterly powerless. Our hero, rather than being a dashing crusader who rushes in to save his girl from mortal peril, instead always takes two steps toward rushing in to save her, then stops, returns for the camera, and meanders toward our intrepid heroine. And our psychic, who in any other film would be an endless font of information about the spirit world and how to combat its inhabitants, is more like a marriage counselor who exists primarily as a reason for the couple to relate their backstory. His only useful contribution to the story is the explanation that the haunting is due not to a ghost, but to a demon. Demons being outside his "expertise," he refers them to a Demonologist, then leaves. Later on, when it turns out his recommended Demonologist is out of the country (something he was apparently aware of), and since there are apparently no other Demonologists or Psychics or Exorcists within driving distance of San Diego, he returns. It's a short-lived return, wherein he gets really scared and runs away.

The demon and the douchebag's war of attrition continues throughout the film. The demon indecisively moves the door a few inches, so the douchebag conducts an EVP interview where he asks the Bridgekeeper's questions from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The douchebag gets a Ouija Board to communicate with the demon, so the demon spells out "Diane" then starts a fire that it looks like the planchette is hitting 88 miles per hour. The douchebag spreads baby powder on the floor so that the demon's chicken-like footprints show up, so the demon punches a portrait of the douchebag that's hanging on the wall. At that point, we decided to side with the demon.

During all this, the demon is continuing his assault on Katie, which includes such terrible torment as "making her stand staring at the bed for an hour, then making her go outside and sleep on a swing" and "pulling the sheet off her foot." If this had gone on much longer, we'd expect him to resort to drawing on her face in permanent marker and putting her hand in a dish of warm water. Perhaps she's just being haunted by the ghost of her douchebag boyfriend.

Ultimately, the demon has had enough (which shows a lot of patience, we'd had more than enough by the time the movie was half an hour over). He drags Katie out of bed and down the hall, where he bites her in the side, demonstrating (among other things) that he needs some serious dental work. Things ramp quickly up to the conclusion--and by quickly, I mean mind-numbingly slowly. Micah finally wants to leave the house and tries to convince Katie, but she strangely thinks everything is going to be fine, and (in an auto-tuned voice) says "I think I'd rather stay here, shaw-ty-ee." T-Pain would be proud.

The film ends with another bout of Katie's Ambien-induced sleep-standing-and-staring. She walks down the hall and screams, and Micah comes to her rescue. After some distant screaming and shouting, there's silence, until Micah's body is thrown against the camera by a blood-stained Katie, who crouches down to sniff at him, then looks at the camera and smiles with teeth taken from Jennifer's Body.

There are a couple of unimportant subplots we ignored, like the fire which consumed Katie's old house and the girl named Diane that this demon apparently haunted in the '60s, but if the movie didn't care enough to tie those up, then neither do we.

Did you think "Groundhog Day" was scary? If so, then maybe you'd find Paranormal Activity's habit of showing a ghost scene, then replaying the scene on Micah's computer the next morning absolutely terrifying. The rest of us realize why the trailer didn't show any scenes from the movie. The only two scenes the filmmakers could have shown would have shot their load before anyone bought a ticket, and why demand the cow when you get the milk for free. The filmmakers seemingly couldn't decide whether they wanted a shaky-cam "real footage" film like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, or a polished horror movie. Consequently, there are obvious cuts that somehow fail to interrupt the flow of scripted dialogue, and quite a bit of editing that makes one wonder who--since our principal characters are dead and missing respectively at the end--bothered to try to pare it down to a moderately dramatic narrative. Despite some kind of professional editing, a good 50% of the movie is spent on shots of two people sleeping with very little happening. The other 50% is spent on shots of two people arguing with very little happening.

By the end, "something happening" would have been a godsend. There aren't many movies that would benefit from someone in a big, fake, rubbery demon costume walking through a doorway and saying "hey, um...boo," but this is one of them. A horned devil, a creepy clown, a long-haired Japanese girl--basically any Tim Curry character would have been effective. When the footsteps were ascending the (far too many) stairs at the end, there were people in the audience who were quivering; they could have literally revealed anything and people would have screamed. Instead, they forgot the principal rule established by Blair Witch: the unseen is only scary if eventually it becomes the seen. Being a visual medium, movies require a visual payoff. Lacking that, you're left with a weak stage play, or a 1940s radio drama.

Don't get us wrong, we're glad to see a movie that values suspense over shock, but if the work of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth is waterboarding, this movie is solitary confinement. Sure, it's a different kind of torture, but it's still torture, and while it may qualify us to be Republican Presidential candidates, it's not enjoyable.

The Cold War spawned horror movies about invasions of outsiders and the threats of military science. Suburban anxiety in the '70s and '80s spawned horror movies about the dangers at home--psychos calling from inside the house, escaped mental patients on Halloween, Satanic cults everywhere. The '90s and early 2000s brought us J-horror and torture porn, an extreme dichotomy between bizarre and possibly symbolic, and bloody but mindless. Paranormal Activity is the inevitable result of a culture that supports innumerable shows like "Ghost Hunters," "Paranormal State," "A Haunting," and so forth, making mountains of ratings out of the molehills of mundane "paranormal" encounters. PA tries to skirt a line between "realistic"--inasmuch as any of these series about plumbers exploring hypnagogic hallucinations with EMF meters is realistic--and theatrical, but never commits to either one.

See, what this really shows is that, if these "real-life" hauntings were real, and if they could be documented, they'd be boring as all hell. The reason people watch shows like "A Haunting" is not (just) because of the "true" stories of ghostly encounters, but because of all the mood-setting music, dramatizations, jump-cuts and creative editing, and other elements designed to dress up otherwise boring night-vision and people telling stories. Remember, most of these events are the sort of things that reasonable people sleep through. That doesn't make for good drama or excitement.

All told, Paranormal Activity is very much the spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project, and consequently it's a lot like the paranormal events it's meant to explore: talked about by many, scary to those inclined to believe, but in the light of day and reason, completely without scare or substance.

In two weeks, The Fourth Kind will hit theaters, apparently exchanging aliens for ghosts. It seems like it'll be four times as scary as Paranormal Activity...what's four times zero again?

Join us next time when we review the award-winning shaky-cam exploration of oft-unexplored pleasure centers, Perineal Activity. Damned if it taint the best film we've seen all year.

The "Saw" series is approaching its sixth installment. There's a large part of me that wonders why the series continues limping along, dripping copious amounts of blood as it shuffles onward, apparently unaware that it died several films ago. The last one I watched was the third one, and that was at least one too many.

But as often (and justifiably) maligned as the films are, I don't think we should just throw the gory baby out with the bathwater. The series really started to lose me sometime during the first sequel, but I still think that "Saw"--sans roman numerals of any sort--is a good movie.

There's a lot going on in "Saw." You've got the police investigation into a killer who borrows a lot from "Seven," you've got the increasingly panicked banter of Cary Elwes and...that other guy as they try to figure out what's going on, you've got the stalking of Cary's family, and you've got Danny Glover stalking Cary's stalker. The core of the movie is the kind of clever dilemma that gets proposed in a philosophy textbook, with a twist ending that I thought was actually quite well done.

For that matter, I like Jigsaw's motivation. In a very bizarre way, it's kind of like "It's a Wonderful Life," where he's changing people's perceptions and making them appreciate what they have by putting them through incredibly terrible experiences. He's forcing a motivational speaker's background on his targets--new perspective through trauma and adversity.

It's also worth noting, I think, that the first "Saw" is relatively light on gore. Sure, there's the disgusting settings that permeate the film, but as far as blood, guts, and violence go, the sequels really ramp that up--much to their detriment. There were a couple of scenes in the second one that really made me squirm, chiefly the pit of needles, but I didn't think the first one had anything along those lines.

What I'm trying to say in this rambling post working from old memories is that I think the "Saw" franchise deserves a lot of the abuse it gets. It largely kicked off the "gore over substance" trend that's killing modern horror movies *cough*RobZombie*cough*, and its sequels have spiraled into self-absorption and obsolescence. But let's not judge a movie by its sequels; "Saw" stands on its own as a pretty decent horror flick.

And if they'd stuck with that, instead of getting bogged down in Jigsaw as a character and his henchmen and whatnot, it might have made for a good series.

With any new technology of sufficient utility, there comes a sort of window of time, where the technology is popular enough to be almost ubiquitous, but new enough to be largely mysterious. During this window of time, there are typically three types of movie released related to that technology:

• The Sci-Fi flick that takes the technology to a natural--albeit futuristic and entirely unrealistic--conclusions and sets some action around it.
  
• The Suspense Thriller that uses the new technology in unrealistic ways to accomplish a fairly straightforward (but fresh and exciting because it's got new technology) suspense plot.
  
• The Horror movie that suggests that the new technology is magical, incomprehensible, and evil.

Take the Internet, for example. In the first category, we have flicks like "The Matrix" and "Hackers;" in the second, "The Net;" and in the third, we have "Fear Dot Com" and its ilk. For video games, we have "The Last Starfighter," "Cloak & Dagger," and "Brainscan" (I think--haven't seen the last one). You get the idea. This phenomenon has led to some of our greatest artistic accomplishments, such as "976-EVIL," "Stay Tuned," and "One Missed Call." Recently we had "Eagle Eye" telling us of the dangers of surveillance technology, "Pulse" warning us of ghosts coming through the Wi-Fi, and the YouTube killer of "Untraceable" (who is still rated lower than Evolution of Dance).

Note that this isn't limited to movies, really. "Twilight Zone" had its share of ghostly telephones, bizarre TVs, and magical radios. Ray Bradbury has said that "Fahrenheit 451" is about how much he hates TV. "Cell" has cell phones killing people with stupid magic powers (I feel justified judging a book I haven't read since Stephen King felt justified writing about technology he's never used). Even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," as I recall, starts with some descriptions of electrical experiments on dead animals. There's nothing one medium likes more than to decry another medium as evil, which is why we have so many books about how TV rots your brain and so many TV shows about the terrors of video games. Of course, TV Tropes has us covered.

Incidentally, I'd really like to know how far back this trope goes. I know Socrates thought writing would rot the brain, but did he tell stories about how it could steal your identity and make you the target of a trans-Grecian conspiracy? The first things Gutenberg printed on his press were a Bible and some porn, but mightn't the third thing have been a script about how ghosts can come through the movable type?

But there is a limit. Eventually, the time window closes. A tech-horror movie about TV just wouldn't work today. They're omnipresent and nonthreatening. Similarly, it would be ludicrous to make a tech-thriller about the telegraph, since it's woefully obsolete. Once the technology stops being either ubiquitous or new-and-mysterious, movies which hinge on those factors end up looking like the silly products of runaway Ludditism that they are.

So, with all this in mind, how the hell did we end up with "The Ring"? It's undoubtedly a tech-flick of the third type, with ghosts on videotape following the basic tropes of the genre. And yet, it was released in 2002, well into the age of DVDs, when videotapes were letting the door hit them in the copy-protection tab on the way out of our lives. How did that manage to get released, let alone get popular?