31 Days of Halloween

Anyone checked out Gerald's game yet?

That hand scene... Yikes.

I'm planning on watching Gerald's Game for sure.  Maybe this weekend, if I get the chance.

Cloverfield is awesome.

The influence of Roman Polanski on the horror genre is becoming more and more clear to me as I see more and more psychological freak-out movies in which the viewer follows a character as he or she slowly goes insane. The new franco-Belgian film Raw is also one of these movies, but it also has elements from Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon and Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. The film concerns a freshman student who is starting out at a truly out of control veterinary school that puts her through some absolutely wild hazing rituals, one of which involved eating a raw rabbit kidney, which really sets something off in the mind of this former vegetarian and sends her off in some rather murderous directions. The film is plainly a metaphor which takes the anxieties that students feel when suddenly on their own and surrounded with various pressures to conform to the sometimes wild things that the people around them are doing and tells it from the perspective of someone who maybe can’t handle those things as well as the others. Not the most insightful metaphor but one that certainly leads to some memorable moments like a very awkward scene about half way through the film involving Brazilian waxes, a pair of scissors, and cannibalism. I’m not sure that it ultimately adds up to something profound and I also wasn’t a fan of the film’s ending, which offered something of a pat explanation for what came before, but there’s no doubt that it’s an interesting little horror film for the adventurous viewer.

*** out of Five

It's Friday the 13th! I wish I had an actual Friday the 13th movie for you, but much to my chagrin Rifftrax never bothered to riff one of those. But the movie I wound up watching today wound up somewhat perfect for the day anyway.

Unlucky Day Thirteen:


Film Year: 2008
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo
Riff Year: 2008
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Selected Short: Why Doesn’t Cathy Eat Breakfast?/Petaluma Chicken

At long last, the question of the ages is met head on. No facet of the issue is left unexplored. The philosophical, eschatological, teleological, epistemological, and cosmological aspects are all given a thorough exegetical going over. Just one viewing of this ground breaking short will see you fully prepared to engage the weighty issues and answer confidently and with authority when someone asks, Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast? To further expand your mind, RiffTrax is proud to offer you the weirdest thing ever - weirder than a million Crispin Glovers starring in a million remakes of The Wicker Man - a short subject called Petaluma Chicken. If you have any interest in omelet making history, you owe it to yourself to see this.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill will be your guides through this hugely important double feature.

To best simulate how it feels for me to watch an M. Night Shyamalan film, here’s a strange duo of shorts that Rifftrax paired off for some reason. It starts out with a semi-serious rhetorical question and then left turns into something that’s just batshit insane.

Insert Robot Chicken “WHAT A TWIST” meme here.

The first short was made by the Dairy Council and features a young girl harassed by a narrator who insists that she tell him why she doesn’t eat breakfast. Cathy doesn’t answer, because Cathy is a cold-hearted bitch that likes to lead men on. This leads to an ending that asks the question “Why doesn’t Cathy eat breakfast?”

I’m not sure who this is for or why the Dairy Council would care why this girl doesn’t eat breakfast. This short just stumps me. She doesn’t eat breakfast because she’s not hungry. The end. Moving on.

I’m not sure why this footage dubbed “Petaluma Chicken” was latched onto the Cathy short, though I imagine the guys at Rifftrax really liked both and since neither was up to their normal short runtime they stapled both together. Petaluma Chicken is about a group of people making the world’s largest omelette. I’m not sure if they’re doing it right myself, but I’m pretty sure making an omelette doesn’t involve doing jumping jacks on the eggs.

For whatever reason, these two totally different shorts work well together. The riffing is certainly in a heckling mood in giving the narrator a bit of a tough time for not leaving Cathy alone, leading up to the unresolved cliffhanger which leads to one of my favorite riffs…“WHAT?! No Country for Old Men had better closure!”

Petaluma Chicken is so wonky and strange that it’s no wonder why they chose it to complete this riffing session. The footage seen has so little context and is so battered and choppy it seems otherworldly. The riffers take that strangeness to the next level by embracing and enhancing it.

But now we must take that giant omelette and FORCE FEED IT TO CATHY!

And now our feature presentation...

The Happening is a departure for director M. Night Shyamalan: he abandons his trademark conceit of the twist ending to tell a straight-forward tale of horror. It's like going to a Gallagher show where he refuses to smash watermelons with a giant mallet. The only difference is that Gallagher's comedy is grim and depressing and The Happening is hilarious.

Yes, the plants of the Northeastern United States are fed up with how we've been treating them and decide to simultaneously release a toxin that causes humanity to commit suicide in various comical ways. Evidently this is something that is entirely scientifically valid, because a hot-dog obsessed lunatic says so at one point in time during the movie. Mark Wahlberg baffles as a Lemon Drink-eyeing science teacher and the part of Zooey Deschanel is ably played by a Tarsier. Mike, Kevin and Bill lend intentionally funny riffs to this masterpiece of unintentional comedy. (Unless there's some sort of real-life Happening, in which case they pre-emptively announce their allegiance to the plants.)



Back in 2002 the movie Signs came out, and I thought it was garbage. This was not a good time to hate an M. Night Shyamalan film, because you would be labeled a moron who “didn’t get it.” I didn’t particularly care for The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable either, but I didn’t feel as insulted by them as I felt with Signs. If that was the Shyamalan masterpiece then I just threw my hands up and backed away from the table and told myself to never bother watching another Shyamalan movie again.

In the years that went by I saw the anticipation for The Village swelling, only to hear people bitch about it afterward. I heard people call Lady in the Water his eventual bounce back to brilliance, only to meet the same result. The same happened with The Happening. The same happened with The Last Airbender. Then people stopped giving a shit. And maybe he’s making movies people like again. I guess. But who cares at this point?

But I suppose my point is that as I stopped watching his films it seemed more and more people started noticing the things that were grinding my gears about them the whole time. Even years later I saw the Nostalgia Critic review of Signs and he pretty much repeated EVERYTHING that I said against that movie in the first place, right up until the moronic ending where the aliens are revealed to be allergic to water after having invaded a planet that is over 75% water. I don’t want to sound arrogant and say I’m vindicated after this turn of tide (though I am arrogant enough to say it), but let’s just say it feels somewhat good to not be alone on this opinion on this director anymore.

But there is one thing that always bugged me about this: if the films I watched were the good ones, how bad were the ones I didn’t watch? I still haven’t seen a lot of his work. But after all these years I have since lifted my Shyamalan self-restriction and have caught a few. I saw The Last Airbender with Rifftrax years ago and was indifferent to it (but I never watched the animated series either), and I saw Split earlier this year and it was fine, I suppose. But the question is do I dare venture back to the absolute dogs of his career? What would I think of Lady in the Water or After Earth?

Basically what I’m saying is that I’ve never watched The Happening before today. Not even with Rifftrax.

And now that experience is over.

Wow.

I don’t throw this around often, but this is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

I mean seriously, yesterday I dogged Cloverfield pretty hard for simply being a dumb movie, but how dare I? What bloody right did I have to knock that movie when it came out the same year as this? I feel so angry at myself right now.

Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about this movie just feels wrong. The acting looks clueless and lost, which maybe they might have salvaged something had the script gave them dialogue worth saying. One of the biggest problems I’ve ever had with Shyamalan is that he never seemed to have a clear grasp on human emotion, and I hereby offer The Happening as proof. All the blank stares this movie offers at what should be horrific sights. He'll, I knew this was going to be a rough ride the minute I saw all those people leaping to their doom early on as a man stares blankly at them like he has indigestion. “Holy mother of god,” he says. I concur, but I’m witnessing something else that’s leaving me in shock.

Shyamalan’s direction and visual eye, usually one of things about him that I don’t have fault with, also seems off. The visuals just look silly, as Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel run from the wind and victims of “The Happening” walk backwards in and ill advised attempt to look creepy.

And what kills me is that I like the concept of this movie. The idea of a natural cause beyond our control affecting our mental health. The visual terror of people killing themselves for no reason. The suspense of running from something you can't see, or possibly right into it. This could have been a really good movie.

I almost feel sorry for Shyamalan. I think way too many people praised him for The Sixth Sense and he felt pressure to just keep delivering thrillers like that in the aftermath, even after he ran out of ideas and scraped the bottom of the barrel. The Happening might have started as a promising idea, but somewhere early on it took a wrong turn and a domino effect started, and the result is this abomination.

I need to shut up about this movie and remind myself that I’m actually reviewing a Rifftrax. This is the first Shyamalan riff they released, and for a while they seemed gung ho about riffing Shyamalan’s work and the fans seemed to embrace the idea. In the end they only riffed three of his films, the only other of which I’ve seen is The Last Airbender (I’ll be watching the other later this month). From what I remember of Last Airbender, I think I found The Happening to be funnier, though truth be told I also found The Happening as a movie to be far more unintentionally funny as well. This riff starts a bit uneven, but the more balls out insane the movie gets the more inspired the quipping seems to be. By the climax I was steadily laughing, and sometimes to the point I couldn’t breathe.

Okay, I’ll fess up. It was Mark Wahlberg having a conversation with a plastic potted plant. It sent me into a giggle fit and I never recovered.

I had Schlocktober all scheduled out for quite a while now, and I’ve intentionally kept some of the worst movies for toward the end of it. If I had known of how bad The Happening was I might have saved it for that run. I mean, I had been warned about this movie, but to an extent I thought it was hyperbole. How bad could it be?

Pretty fucking bad. It’s no Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, but this is a genuine contender for worst movie ever riffed. Right now I’m actively considering watching it without the Rifftrax to see if I really saw what I thought I saw and prove that it wasn’t the riff that was swaying my opinion. But do I hate myself enough to risk it?

 Humans landing on Venus would have the sense to wear protection from the hostile environment.  If the local wildlife was composed of mostly acid, we would avoid them if our suits were vulnerable to acid.

Not to mention if Venus were a habited planet by creatures who could easily weaponize its most abundant resource with something as simple as a garden hose or a Super Soaker we'd definitely think twice about invading it.

I can't help be reminded of that episode of the Simpsons where Kang and Kodos invade Earth but are chased off by Moe with a board and nail.

SPONSORED BY HAPPY DEATH DAY, NOW IN THEATERS



31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981)



From the director of the original Cape Fear and the latter Planet of the Apes movies from the original series, comes a slasher film that was already outdated by the time it hit theaters in 1981.

If Hollywood is great at one thing it's beating a dead horse. After the successes of Halloween and Friday the 13th (hey that's today!), Hollywood rushed out a slew of holiday-themed horror movies. Trying to standout by centering on a personal celebration is Happy Birthday To Me. It's about a rich girl in a rich school and the rich people dying around her birthday.

You can already guess what happens based on that description. It's boring. It's too long. The killer is forgettable. The deaths, although slightly more violent than its contemporaries, aren't anything special.

There's a bit of a twist. Instead of the killer lurking in the shadows, everyone knows who the person is and their death is more of a betrayal than a random act of violence. We just don't see the killer's face so we have to figure out who it is based on the process of elimination. Who's still alive and has a motive? It's interesting on paper but isn't executed with any effort aside from the special effects.

Only memorable thing about Happy Birthday To Me is the girl who kinda has a squirrel-looking face. That's how horrible it is. If someone asks if I've seen Happy Birthday To Me, all I can say is "isn't that the one with the girl that kinda looks like a squirrel?" That's the legacy of the film.

Yeah, but that's like totally not the point of the movie. It's supposed to be a look at how people react to the possibility of an invasion looked at from a single family's perspective. Getting bogged down in the details of their invasion plan just seems silly.

So we are seeing a trend of #1godziila fan not liking good movies for nitpicky reasons.

Not that nitpicky, really.  The invasion in Signs was massively flawed, with no apparent reason for it to have occurred in the first place.  The invaders vulnerability should have been something that wasn't blatantly obvious to the aliens.  Sci-fi is full of such examples which don't require the aliens to be total morons in the context of the story.

But as Dracula pointed out, and I agree with, Signs isn't about the invasion itself.  It's a movie about a human response to an invasion, namely that of this one family, and that aspect of the film is so strong, any inconsistencies regarding the invasion don't matter so much to me.