The Darkest Hour (& a half that I've watched in quite some time)

Sigh. 

For a movie fan, few things hurt quite so much as a strong young director following up something great with something awful. Thusly do we get Chris Gorak’s blander than a low sodium rice cake dud The Darkest Hour after his positively brilliant Twilight Zone episode of a film Right At Your Door.

I am sad.

Quick Plot: Two boring-to-awful young software developers are flying to Moscow to pitch their new social networking website. One is played by Anthony Mingella’s son with the personality of mayonnaise. The other is played by the usually charming, here just irksome Emile Hirsch.

I do not know or care what their names are.

Okay, fine. You might think I’m being overly harsh on a film that’s just begun, but this, THIS is the opening scene:

Two American dudes are on an airplane. The pilot announces they’re approaching landing mode, prompting the flight attendant to kindly ask Emile Hirsch to turn off his mobile device. Rather than, you know, TURNING OFF HIS MOBILE DEVICE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, Emile Hirsch launches into a smarmy, poorly written (by Prometheus scribe Jon Spaihts, I say with shivers) monologue that I assume is supposed to be charming about how that’s actually a myth and like, have you ever TESTED that theory?

This man is supposed to be our hero.

I reach for the barf bag.

Once in Moscow, our duo learns that their Swedish partner has hijacked their idea and already sold it. Naturally, two ugly Americans mourn by heading to a hip Russian club where everyone is incredibly attractive, including a fellow American girl (Brunette) and Aussie (Blonde, and yes, that will be their names for the rest of this review because I DON’T CARE). They’re making painfully dull smalltalk when suddenly, orbs of light start falling from the sky and dissolving any living thing that comes into their zone.

It’s an alien invasion! I use the exclamation point because finally, something happens onscreen that makes me actually want to look up from my burrito to my TV screen. The design of the alien attack is actually quite original: rather than big tentacled creatures, the monsters in this case travel via wavelengths. They’re mostly invisible to the human eye, appearing as spots of light that will trigger electricity nearby. So that’s neat.

If only I cared about a single character the aliens were attacking. Our quartet plus the nasty Swede hide out in the club’s cellar as a time stamp—no, seriously—tells us they stay there for “Monday” and “Tuesday.” THAT is the kind of movie this is: one so inept in its script that it can’t express the passage of a small amount of time without blatantly spelling out WHAT DAYS HAVE JUST PASSED.

Anyway, our boring white people emerge from the cellar to travel the barren streets of Moscow, perhaps the one other glint of neatness in the drudge of an 89 minute film. Seeing the Kremlin all but empty IS cool, don’t get me wrong. But seeing that the only people inhabiting it are like coffee break stand-ins for Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield in The Social Network is just sad.

At a certain point, our “heroes” meet a band of Russian badasses who are actively fighting the alien light thingies. These dudes ride horses clad in Tupperware, shoot machine guns with proud Russian bullets, and carry a wonderful sense of personality so direly lacking in our main characters. Why oh why couldn’t The Darkest Hour be about THEM?

Chris Gorak’s previous film was a smart and effective indie called Right At Your Door, wherein a stay-at-home husband had to decide whether or not to let his wife inside during a nuclear attack after she had already been exposed to deadly fallout. It was challenging and scary, filled with wonderfully rich characters and a brilliantly drawn sense of doom done with little budget. The Darkest Hour, in contrast, is a big, ugly, and worst of all, BORING retread through alien invasion. The film was released in 3D and ouch does that hurt its appearance on DVD. While I do think the concept of the monsters is quite different, the execution comes off flat. When we finally see the creatures, we might as well be watching test effects reels from the ABC miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s Langoliers.

Except we’re not, because for all its faults, at least The Langoliers had diverse characters. Towards the end of The Darkest Hour, one character starts screaming for Natalie, Natalie, we can’t leave with Natalie! My notes:

“Who’s Natalie?”

She’s the Brunette. The Brunette who I know nothing about, nor do I care to learn. I don’t expect rich Tolstoy-esque writing from a sci-fi action thriller, but that doesn’t mean you can just give mildly attractive 20somethings directions to run, look scared, and occasionally cry and I’m supposed to care an ounce whether they survive or not, especially when they’re essentially asking other, more likable characters to put their OWN lives at risk in order to do so. Who IS Natalie? There’s some mention about an ex-boyfriend and her being valedictorian. The Blonde has an Aussie accent. Emile Hirsch sassed a flight attendant. Anthony Mingella’s son…exists.

I count myself amongst the fairly vocal contingent that thought Cloverfield was a groovy exercise hampered by dreadfully unsympathetic characters. Well folks, I take that back: compared to The Darkest Hour, the cast of Cloverfield deserve to win every Oscar and Nobel Prize known to man.

High Points

It’s mildly surprising when a few of our leads meet the Invisible Smoke Monster of Dissolving Doom. Of course, it’d be more effective IF WE ACTUALLY CARED

Low Points

Aside from pretty much everything, how about the fact that we’re never really given any chance to consider the millions of Muscovites who were wiped out in the initial attack? Our barely legal leads carry no weight with them (which is bad enough) but considering this film had access to some truly amazing parts of one of the most interesting cities in the world, you’d think they could establish SOMETHING worth noticing, like an abandoned ferris wheel at Gorky Park or a grand theater just emptied of its ticketholders. There’s never the single slightest sense that a genocide has taken place, meaning not only do we already NOT care about the survivors, but we have no real context as to who they even outlived

Lessons Learned

Young people make rash decisions

Always carry a Sharpee when traveling

Hey screenwriters, here’s a lesson: if you want the audience to immediately hate your hero, have your opening scene involve him harassing a perfectly nice flight attendant just trying to do her job. Guaranteed way to get us off his side

Rent/Bury/Buy

I was enthusiastically looking forward to The Darkest Hour and even felt slightly bummed to have missed its brief theatrical run. I LOVED Gorak’s last film, and since I spent 9 months in Moscow a few years back as an ESL teacher, the chance to see the city onscreen in one of my favorite genres was incredibly exciting. All this makes the utter dullness of The Darkest Hour positively tragic. This is a boring, uninspired, and poorly constructed film. Hardcore sci-fi nerds might appreciate the new spin on the alien forms, but that’s the extent of my recommendation. Towards the end of the film, our leads reach a boat and suddenly I started thinking to myself “Hey! I wonder if Haunted Boat is still on Instant Watch.” Now kids, Haunted Boat was without a doubt one of the absolute WORST films I’ve ever watched for this here blog, and yet I would have traded my full stash of Tootsie Rolls won in a piñata raid to switch endings just so I could at least enjoy some aspect onscreen. It might seem like I’m being overly hard on The Darkest Hour, considering I’ve given a pass to such hated works as the Nightmare On Elm Street reboo—er, remake and… But truthfully, this movie made me sad and angry. That’s a dangerous combination.

Oh Hai George

As some of you might know, the ponytailed national (turned Canadian) treasure is responsible for my favorite film of all time, a little slice of zombie mayhem and mall madness known as Dawn of the Dead. Regarding the rest of his filmography, I can simply say it’s a mixed trick-or-treating pillow case from an economically challenged neighborhood, filled with some tasty, if cheaper store-brand candy, slick but tasteless Good ‘N Plenty, and a heavy percentage of frustrating Milk Duds.

To give a brief summary of my estimation of the Dead sextology, so you know where I’m coming from in reviewing Survival:

Night: Classic, brutal, groundbreaking and still effective. The modern horror movie.

Dawn: I hug it once a day, just so that it knows I still love everything about it.

Day: Though it's grown on me over the years, I still declare Day to be overrated and kind of obnoxious, filled with good ideas (Dr. Frankenstein), amazingly crafted zombies, and a batch of characters I would like to shoot myself

Land: Underrated, the kind of film that gets progressively better for me on repeat viewings. Once I got over my initial excitement-met-with-disappointment in the theaters, I’ve been able to watch this much more objectively to say it’s far more relevant and better made than I had initially thought

Diary: A mess, but not as embarrassing (in my estimation) as others make it out to be. I like the idea of going back to the start with a comparably low budget and believe it or not, I even like some of the themes. Unfortunately, Romero insists on molding said themes into a giant orb and bashing us over the head with it via a bland and awful narrator.

And thusly do we enter 2009’s Survival of the Dead, a continuation of sorts of Diary that mixes shambling “deadheads” with feuding Irish clans off the coast of Delaware (I’m serious). Let us begin.

Quick Plot: AWOL from the National Guard, Sarge (Diary cameo-er Alan Van Sprang) and a few of his cohorts decide to follow a suspicious ‘Net (yup, the same entity that robbed Sandra Bullock of her identity in 1995) advertisement to an island paradise off the coast of...Delaware (cue Wayne’s World clip of "Hi! I'm in...Delaware"). 

En route, the team picks up a moody, if efficient teenager and lands at the dock. Not surprisingly, they meet some opposition from both zombies and humans, in this case, Patrick O’Flynn, an exiled old man looking to send some trouble the way of his former home. I think. 

Anyway, a fairly interesting boat escape sends our gang on a ferry, O’Flynn hopping onboard to give proper directions to the oddly leprechaun-less island. Romero starts to have a little fun setting up the strange society fashioned by O’Flynn’s rival, Seamus Muldoon. Where O’Flynn had attempted to purge his land of all the undead, shooting any soul with gray skin, Muldoon sought to preserve all victims in their former state with the hopes that one day, some smart Frankensoul might discover a cure.

Such a conflict is interesting in itself, especially when we get a peek at chained zombie mailmen delivering some bills and undead farmers fruitlessly plowing the fields. Yes, it’s ridiculous for a rotting corpse to maintain enough tension in her body to ride a horse for three weeks (don’t those ankles give out, Mr. Romero?) but I honestly don’t mind a seasoned, somewhat bored filmmaker trying out new tricks with the genre he created.

Of course, ‘not minding’ the idea of experimentation doesn’t mean anything when it’s executed so poorly. Survival is a weirdly awful film, one that tries to be funny without telling any good jokes, then attempts to make a statement by forcing its who-cares narrator (another narrator? HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING FROM DIARY OF THE DEAD???) to deliver a lazy diatribe on What It All Means. The final image of Survival is interesting; it didn’t have to explain itself.

You can understand the uncomfortably picklish Catch-22 Mr. Romero has found himself in. For forty years, film fans have been crying for more zombie movies, but by most accounts, Romero ended that era with Day of the Dead. He found new ground with Land then, I imagine, realized he was out of gas once more. Rebooting the zombie myth with Diary made sense...it was just poorly done. So now, at the age of 70, everybody's favorite newly declared expat seems to say "Whatever. I like Westerns. They like zombies. Here's my compromise." The attitude is refreshing. The film is not.

By far, the worse thing about Survival is not necessarily its acting--none of which is particularly good, but hey: Romero’s always been more about presence than performance--but the ridiculous broad nature of its characters. It’s fine to have a diverse cast, but not when each is defined by their ‘thing.’ You know you’re in a bad low budget film, for example, not when there’s a lesbian character, but when said lesbian insists on telling you with every line of dialogue that she likes to have sex with women. Are all lesbians as horny as they come off in bad horror movies?

High Points

Considering the vast use of stereotypes to define virtually every character onscreen, I’ll give Romero minor credit for having a spunky Irish brunette that wasn't named, as most spunky Irish brunettes in film are, Kate. Also, it would have been so easy to add a leprechaun so you know...restraint.

At first, "Survival" of the Dead seems like an arbitrary word pulled from a dictionary to replace the already used times of day in the title. However, I will say that it actually fits the film and its storyline. So that's something.

Low Points

I don't want to hop on the boo-hoo-CGI train, especially since I think most of the Survival zombie kills looked fine. But did the first major headshot have to be more digitalized than something out of Left For Dead?

SPOILERS

I understand that ever since Barbra whined her way through the farmhouse and silly Judy went up in flames, George Romero has attempted to atone for Night's not-too-bright-or-brave female characters. Still, aside from Gaylen Ross's Franny, has there ever been a realistic or likable woman to survive his dead films? Making your female tough doesn't make her real, a trend continued here with the ridiculous, bland, and aggressively butch (and obviously named) Tomboy, played by Athena Karkanis (Saw IV-VI).

THUS ENDETH SPOILERS

Lessons Learned

With that, just in case you didn't know, this movie taught me that lesbians dig hot chicks

Handguns do indeed work after being submerged in water

People who grow up in Alabama will not in any way develop a trace of a deep Southern accent. Perhaps it's beaten out of you in the National Guard

Um. Zombies bite people. Just in case you forgot, despite living on an island with them for three months


Killing yourself is a one way ticket to hell

There is a magical Irish-filled isle off the coast of Delaware where all inhabitants dress like John Wayne or extras in the Oregon Trail

Rent/Bury/Buy

I so wanted to like, or at least not mind this film. Sigh. Maybe hybrid fans of cheesy Saturday morning Westerns and old school zombies will get the humor. I didn't. Then again, I do believe Romero, unlike someone more stuck in a bygone era of filmmaking like Argento, has a weird Cassandra-like power of making movies that look and feel better twenty years down the road. I do indeed cite Land (now 5 years old) as a prime example of a film that is simply stronger with so much time between its initial release. Perhaps Survival will follow?

So do I recommend the film? I can't tell you not to watch it:it's a Romero zombie movie for goodness sake. But be prepared to be baffled. Those who simply hate the idea of a childhood hero now slumming in a weird land of make believe may want to skip it. Better yet, if you were a Star Wars fan who considers the prequels to be dangerous to your health, then avoid Survival of the Dead. At the same time, you're a curious movie fan who needs to open Pandora's box. Maybe it won't be that bad. For you.


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Crazy In Love (but not with this movie)

Since seeing the trailer for Obsessed back in 2009, I've pretty much been convinced this Beyonce-powered Fatal Attraction rip-off was, in all likelihood, the best thing every made by human hands. It's a sad day when I learned otherwise.

Quick Plot: This is the story of Derek Charles (The Wire's Idris Elba, who will forever be known as Stringer Bell, will thus be referred to as Stringer Bell for the remainder of this review. I suppose by remainder, I mean whole thing).

Anyway, Stringer is a successful vice president of something at a coolly lit office somewhere in LA. Back at his new home, wife Sharon (Beyonce Knowles; remember, if it’s a serious movie, her roles are not played by the singer Beyonce, but by the actress, Beyonce Knowles...even though she sings on the soundtrack) spends most of the day not really fixing up the new digs and playing with baby boy. Life is filled with financial security, loving glances, and smooth R&B infused montages of happiness.

Cut to a meet-cute elevator encounter with Stringer and Ali Larter’s Lisa, a hot pantyhose-less temp eager to take his calls.

Literally, because she quickly ascends to serve as his makeshift secretary, a minor problem since Stringer had previously promised Sharon he’d only hire men for the job. Discrimination? Sure, but also some marital safety since the last femme to fix his coffee was none other than Sharon herself.

Naturally, Sharon has all the reason in the world to worry since Lisa turns out to be nothing less than a complete psychopath with the libido of Pepe Le Pieux. Luckily for Sharon, Stringer Bell is a loyal family man, something he’s quick to tell Lisa, sexist coworker Jerry O’Connell, Lisa, detective Christine Lahti, Lisa, Sharon, and Lisa, all about 35 times in the course of the film. 

And therein lies the biggest issue I had with what is otherwise not nearly as trashy a film as I was hoping: not once in Obsessed do we ever believe Stringer Bell will give in to the blond beauty thrusting herself at him with more earnestness than Nomi Malone. Not when she’s trying her damnest to fellate him at a Christmas party. Not when she’s clad in lingerie in the front seat of his car. Not when she’s wearing a dress straight from Kira Knightly’s closet in Atonement and slipping him Roofies at a tropical work getaway. This is a good, if rather daft and dull man and as a result, all we get to do is watch a strong well-dressed executive try his best to not touch a woman dry humping him at every turn.

Yes, there is some joyful bitch slapping catfighting rounding out the finale and yes, it’s the highlight of an otherwise inert film. At the same time, it’s not like we really know a single interesting fact about Sharon or Lisa to actually care about the outcome. Sharon is a married woman and mother. She wears colorful clothing and has big hair. Lisa is a crazy blond. She dresses like a skank and drinks dirty martinis. 

Whose side are we on? Wake me up when we care.

High Points

Larter doesn’t come near capturing a smidgen of the talent of Glenn Close, but the sheer ridiculousness of her character at least makes Lisa the most interesting thing onscreen

Low Points

So the day before I watched this film, I caught D.C. Cab, a truly joyful 1983 romp with not a single limit. You know what it DID have? A montage. An effing amazing montage. You know what Obsessed has? Two montages. A quiet, happy-family-move-in montage and another, Daddy-playing-with-kid-while-Mommy-watches-from-window montage, both with less pulse than a zombie flea.

Aside from the final countdown and a few random moments of embarrassing failed seductions, about 97 minutes of this 108 minute film

Lessons Learned

Cosmos will buy you all the info you need on the boss of a bitchy gay man

No matter what the film or target audience may be, Scout Taylor Compton remains a babysitter you should never trust with your children’s lives

The good ones are always married. Or straight. Or, one might assume, both.

Attractive women make popular additions to male-dominated offices. While this isn’t really a surprise, it is rather jarring to hear every heterosexual male in a suit comment so crassly on the newest employee

Rent/Bury/Buy

This is one of those days when I say a small prayer to the gods of Netflix for putting the right films on Instant Watch. I was truly excited to seeing Obsessed--one might go as far to say I was obsessed with seeing Obsessed, which would not be true but it would be exciting to say--and my hopes were dashed by the late night cable feel of a minor dud. There’s some fun to be had for sure, particularly in a bitchin’ girl fight and Beyonce Knowles’ attempt to be badass. Overall though, Obsessed doesn’t quite commit to the trashiness it wants to assume. 

What Goes Best With a Tux? Flesh Eating Bacteria, That’s What!

Cabin Fever was one of the oddest theatrical releases of the early 21st century, an overexcited, occasionally refreshing and often annoying mix of over-the-top gore, crass comedy, ‘80s homage, and pancakes. Perhaps then it’s only fitting that its sequel comes with a bucket of offscreen controversy and onscreen sloppiness.

In case you didn’t have your hopefully still attached ear to the horror news networks these past few months, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever was directed (near completely) by House of the Devil  golden boy Ti West, who pleaded fruitlessly to have his name removed from the credits. Word on the virtual street is that West disagreed with producers over the final cut during the post-production process, eventually stepping away from the project and letting the Powers That Be Lionsgate finish the film as they saw fit.

It shows.

Quick Plot: Top-billed Rider Strong reprises his quickly rotting role as he flees the titular cabin and gets splattered by an early morning school bus. Familiar local cop Winston (Guiseppe Andrews) misdiagnoses the gunk as moose and an animated credits reel reveal the town water soon to be bottled is infected by that same flesh-eating virus that tore through many pretty people in Eli Roth’s original.

We quickly move on to typical high school politics, where smart senior John (Deadgirl ’s jerk Noah Segan, still traveling via bicycle) pines for pretty, popular, and recently-broken-up-from-her-samurai-wannabe-psycho-boyfriend Cassie while chubby pal Alex smoothly enjoys a quickie--real quickie--from a randomly easy classmate. A frog dissection and near suspension later, it’s prom night (cue the song! seriously) and the high school’s a’hoppin’ with a disco beat.

If you’ve heard anything about Cabin Fever 2, it’s probably that this is not the film to watch while eating nachos. See, there’s a lot of blood, and guts, and viral warts on private parts, and bloodier semen than Wilhem Dafoe’s Antichrist  climax. That being said, it’s also really not that...well...disturbing.

Or particularly good.

As the school dance kicks in, Cabin Fever 2 kicks into gear with a gymnasium-full viral spread that starts with a poisoned water, infected urine-spiced punch bowl. An awkward sex scene between the prom king and token obese outcast in a pool seems only to hint at something interesting, while the dance floor erupts into a lightning fast bloodbath before the prom queen can give what was sure to be an Obama-esque speech. In almost no time (the movie is under 80 minutes, after all), we’re left with John, Cassie, Alex, and a few unexplained gun-toting officials trying to survive amid lots of gooey grossness.

Oh! And of those 80 minutes, about 28 or so are randomly assigned to Winston’s Adventures as the enigmatic, if also annoying and baffling cop hangs out with Judah Frielander and hits the road in his cousin’s van. While I enjoy the pure weirdness of Andrews’ oddball character, nothing in this storyline (if you can really call it that) ever feels in line with the rest of the film, making the many diversions to his aimless lollygagging an incredibly wasted amount of screen time with no real payoff.

On one side, we have a humorous, but also occasionally heartfelt teenage gorefest built on occasional suspense and realistically drawn characters. On the other, a simply bizarre and directionless tale of a dimwit. I kind of enjoyed the persistence Cabin Fever 2 had in NOT being your typical by the numbers sequel, but it was, much like its basis, all over the place, further scattered by a tacked-on, far too long 10 minute epilogue following a high school stripper.

I can’t really say where Ti West’s involvement ended, but the lack of a strong directorial touch in the editing finish is uncomfortably felt in the latter half of Cabin Fever 2. Honestly, I don’t know that this would be anywhere near a classic had he stayed on board throughout, but the messiness of plotting--much like the original--makes the viewing experience simply strange.

A recent article in Shock Till You Drop offered one tidbit by producer Lauren Moews explaining how fitting it was that Cabin Fever 2 was edited by the same woman responsible for several John Waters’ films, and there are indeed some similarities. West gives us plenty of gratuitously ick-heavy moments that dare the audience to look away, like a prematurely ended-by-puke lap dance or intensely detailed fingernail peel (the only one that got me wincing). There are plenty of refreshing little quirks that keep the film fun and it’s hard to argue with any movie that recycles the only great thing about Prom Night (namely, Jamie Lee Curtis’ disco tune). At the same time, it’s impossible to care about anything when the film seems so insistent on not taking itself seriously.

High Points

There’s some nifty practical effects at work, like an early diner scene featuring a blood-squirting voicebox

West tows a careful line with his high school characters, using honored archetypes but imbuing them with interesting enough spins, like the ex-boyfriend’s Japanophile quirks and John’s surprisingly refreshing honesty with his dreamgirl (not deadgirl)

Low Points

An overly headache inducing fire extinguisher attack would be impressive if we hadn’t seen it before in The Signal or Irreversible

We don’t need--or really want--a huge backstory in fluffy romp like this, but the fact that the army or FDA or FBI or whoever the men with guns and gas cans are never explained is one more missing piece in a film not fully put together

A few moments of tension are broken when you realize how ridiculous they play out. Would the soldiers--or whoever it is patrolling the school, see previous Low Point--really not hear the kids escape an empty classroom 4 seconds after exiting themselves?

Lessons Learned

William Katt’s Carrie tuxedo never goes out of style

Bitches value spite and money

If getting a touch of infected blood on your skin will infect you, then running said hand through a buzzsaw and watching the blood squirt all over your face will surely be the cure

Rent/Bury/Buy

Cabin Fever 2 is a manic viewing experience, but not completely devoid of charm. Fans of the original will probably get a kick out of it, as it shares much of the crass humor, all-out gore, and smarter-than-your-average teen sensibilities. If I believed in officially rating films, this one would fall in the negative side. I can't say I liked it (mostly because I didn't like it) but it's not a complete waste of 80 minutes, especially if you're simply too curious to let it pass you by.