In short: Bad Karma (2002)

Mental patient Maureen Hatcher (Patsy Kensit), violently breaks out of her cosy little hospital to finally get the opportunity for a decent get-together with her psychiatrist Dr Trey Campbell (Patrick Muldoon). You see, ever since she was kidnapped and tortured by a guy who thought he was the reincarnation of a victim of Jack the Ripper, Maureen has been convinced she is the reincarnation of Jack’s girlfriend and partner Agnes. And Trey for his part is of course supposed to be the unwitting reincarnation of Jack himself.

So off Maureen goes to the island where Trey and his family (Amy Locane and Aimee O’Sullivan) are on vacation to do a bit of psycho killing and family threatening to awaken the spirit of her beloved.

Now if you think all this does sound rather stupid, you really haven’t seen veteran director John Hough’s embarrassing presentation. It’s Hough’s final movie, and one can’t help but think it would have been less cosmically horrifying if the poor guy could have ended on a slightly less crappy note, like an episode of a soap opera or something. As the film stands, Hough – a man whose films I disliked more often than not but who clearly had all the basic competences of a filmmaker – directs the thing like a particularly bad TV movie, with no suggestion of a sense of atmosphere, going through the usual motions of the serial killer thriller without conviction or interest, adding some mild and boring sleaze to it while this long-suffering viewer can barely keep his eyes open. Not that there is much to see, mind you.

Hough’s non-efforts are further dragged into nothingness by a particularly stupid script with dialogue which finds that difficult to reach place where the insipid meets puffed up self-importance.

The only good thing about this is Patsy Kensit’s performance (how often do you expect to read that sentence anywhere?). Kensit is cheesing it up quite enthusiastically, making absurd crazy-faces, and putting extra emphasis on the most stupid parts of the dialogue, excellently wallowing in all that is wrong with the movie. Too bad the rest of the cast is so wooden and drab, because if they had been playing up the absurdity of the affair this much, too, Bad Karma might still have become an entertaining bit of nonsense, instead of the boring bit of nonsense it turned out to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,thriller,john hough,patsy kensit,patrick muldoon,amy locane

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Finders Keepers (2014)

Following the separation from her husband Jonathan (Patrick Muldoon), writer Alyson Simon (Jaime Pressly) and her little daughter Claire (Kylie Rogers) move into a surprisingly cheap house in what I assume to be one of these archetypal US small towns. Not surprisingly, there’s a rather violent reason for the new home’s excellent price, and it hasn’t got anything to do with home foreclosures.

Barely moved in Claire finds one of the most hideous dolls ever created by human hands (or is it?) hidden away in her room. The doll quickly becomes the girl’s only friend, but it’s a rather bad influence on her. Before you can even say dollmonic possession, Claire starts ripping off fly wings, cats are skinned, and various people are killed in various silly ways. This being a SyFy movie and all, Alyson will have to team up with Jonathan - as well as her very useful expositional anthropologist professor friend Elena Carranza (Justina Machado) - to set things straight again.

Because some things are just naturally creepy, it’s really difficult to mess up a horror film about a creepy doll, particularly when the film in question also uses the that other mainstay of utter creepiness, children. Consequently, Alexander Yellen’s Finders Keepers is watchable and mostly entertaining throughout.

Alas, it is also little more, for in the tradition of the mediocre third of SyFy originals (the other thirds are of course the genuinely good ones, and the atrocious ones, respectively), there’s not just a decided lack of originality on display but also a somewhat sad unwillingness – or maybe a lack of ability – to use the standard elements the film is built on to their full potential. So you have a film that first brings up a plot point where Claire’s psychiatrist (a very sleepy Tobin Bell who doesn’t look or sound like he actually wanted to be on set, or get up in the morning) has to think Alyson is abusing her daughter thanks to evil doll machinations but then doesn’t do anything worthwhile with it, never daring to actually dive into the combined anxieties surrounding child abuse and the horror it would be to be innocently thought to abuse one’s child. Instead of going this more subtle and potentially disturbing way, the film’s horror becomes increasingly silly, until Claire (not the most convincing creepy kid even in her best scenes) is plucking out eyeballs and setting anthropologists on fire. On the positive side, the film certainly doesn’t drag its feet or ever stays still long enough to bore, eyeballs are plucked out, and anthropologists are set on fire.

Technorati-Markierungen: syfy vs the mynd,in short,american movies,horror,alexander yellen,jaime pressly,patrick muldoon,justina machado,tobin bell

Icy May ( & SyFy vs. The Mynd): Ice Spiders (2007)

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. And what is more typical of the cold months of the year than spiders?

Panic in a small ski resort in the mountains of Utah. The neighbouring secret government lab experimenting on helpless spiders with gene grafts from their ancestors has hit a spot of bother, and now half a dozen hungry giant spiders on steroids (not a metaphor) are roaming the mountain looking for food, which is to say, ski resort vacationers.

Still, the spiders shouldn't be much of a problem, for spiders generally can't cope with cold too well, but mad scientist Professor Marks (David Milbern) has doped them up so much, they don't even care about the weather anymore. Since the soldiers stationed to protect the spiders aren't very good at their job (and, you know, not actually stationed where the spiders were but a twenty minutes drive away), it falls on not mad scientist Dr. Sommers (Vanessa Williams), skiing instructor, ex-marine and nearly Olympic ski talent Dash Dashiell (Patrick Muldoon), and ski resort owner Frank Stone (Stephen J. Cannell) to heroically fight off the ice spider menace. Unfortunately, our ski resort is the only place in the USA where no firearms at all can be found, so our heroes will need all their creativity and natural talents (skiing, pulling levers, running) to survive.

There's an old saying among my people that states "everything is better with ice and snow", and Tibor Takács' Ice Spiders clearly displays the truth of it, for the ice-bound nature of our SyFy menace of the week does provide ample opportunity for things like spider shenanigans on a ski lift (pro-tip: don't jump down) and a climactic race between our heroic ski instructor and three skittering, jumping, and tittering CGI spiders. Truly, it is a thing only possible in the Great White of Utah.

All of this is - obviously - supremely silly business, exactly the sort of thing that could descend into the deepest chasm of camp, but through powers won in a long career of films made from the most dubious of scripts (or at least with the most dubious of stories), Takács manages to keep things funny-silly instead of "oh-look-how-ironic-and-subversive-I-am-because-I'm-crap". It's mostly the director's judicious sense of pacing that makes the difference here, I think, as well as the ability to know when a silly joke works, and when making it would annoy.

The actors are no help at all: Muldoon, Williams, and Millbern are all kinds of dreadful and earnest, neither able to convey any believable human emotion, nor fit to deliver their lines; it says something rather rude about them that TV producer Cannell is the best actor in the film. But hey, it's not as if the rest of the cast weren't at least trying, and it just might be exactly the misguided earnestness of their performances which make our heroes somewhat endearing. It sure isn't the characterization. Truthfully, I don't really care (much) about the quality of the acting in a SyFy creature feature as long as I get to regularly see giant spiders munch on people.

This, Ice Spiders provides in spades, and tops it off with letting the munching happen in ice and snow, therefore earning itself my seal of approval.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,in short,syfy vs the mynd,horror,tibor takács,patrick muldoon,vanessa williams,stephen j. cannell