Carnography

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996)

From this point on I'm going into the Children of the Corn series blind, as I've never actually seen any of the films beyond the third one. I'm not really sure why that is - perhaps my 90s brain decided after seeing Urban Harvest that nothing could possibly top what I saw in that film and to just not bother, or perhaps it was a defensive mechanism because I subconsciously knew things weren't going to get any better. Regardless, here we go with Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering.

Medical student Grace Rhodes returns to her hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska to take care of her mentally ill mother, who suffers from agoraphobia and paranoia and has recently started having recurring dreams of being attacked by mysterious children. Her return to the town is timed just right as well, as shortly after she arrives all the town's children fall ill with high fevers at the same time - including Grace's younger siblings, James and Margaret. The town's children all seem to recover from their fevers as quickly as they fell ill, but afterwards, they start to act strangely, claiming to be long-dead children of the town before starting to attack and kill various adults. The children are all being influenced by the evil spirit of a boy preacher named Josiah, who was born illegitimate and taken in by travelling preachers. When he turned out to have a talent for preaching they tried to keep him a child forever through various means before "giving him over to darkness", at which point Josiah killed the preachers and the townspeople retaliated by burning him alive and sealing him in a well. After the well was broken open Josiah's spirit awakened and he started using the town's children to be reborn into a special body, a "like child". Will Grace be able to stop Josiah from being reborn and save her family from his sinister clutches?

If you were to subtitle movies with the first thing someone said when they started watching it, Children of the Corn IV's would be Bloody Hell, Naomi Watts Is In This. Another possible title, after watching the film though, could be This Film Felt Longer Than 80 Minutes. Even now, after having watched it and having both the IMDB page and the Wikipedia page open, I'm technically drawing a blank as to how to actually describe and review this film, because it just feels so... flat. Yeah, sure, things happened, and there were some gory-yet-improbable kills (who makes a hospital bed with a retractable blade anyway?), but in between those brief moments it's just overlong scenes of kids getting their temperature taken, or blood tests, or Naomi Watts looking troubled as we wait for the final act plot revelation that most of us had figured out pretty early into the film.

And here's perhaps the biggest kick in the teeth for a film in the Children of the Corn series: there's no actual connection to any of the previous films, aside from there being evil kids, corn, and Nebraska. Apparently, there was a scene where we're told that Josiah was sometimes called "He Who Walks Behind The Rows"... but they deleted it. Why? Honestly, if things didn't seem to be claiming otherwise, I'd have believed that we were seeing the same thing that we saw with several of the Hellraiser "sequels" - completely unrelated scripts being taken and forced into place like a toddler trying to get the square block through the round hole.

There's also a subplot involving one kid who's a haemophiliac and his father, falsely accused of killing his wife (it was, of course, the evil possessed kids), running around the town with a shotgun trying to save his son before Josiah forces him to slice his hand open in a ritual and inadvertently bleed to death, but it doesn't feel tense at all because deep down, we all know no kids are dying in this movie, and I couldn't find it in me to really care about the father. He really felt like he was just there to drive Grace from one exposition spot to another - an exposition Uber, if you will - and provide her with a shotgun loaded with mercury shells (no, I don't know how that would work) because it turns out to be Josiah's one weakness and she'll need it for the inevitable showdown.

The Gathering is a dull non-starter of a movie. It adds nothing to the Children of the Corn series, and if not for the title you probably wouldn't even know it was part of the series because they decided to cut the one connecting reference to it. Everything else about it has been seen before and done before, and so unless you are a Naomi Watts or Karen Black completist, there really is very little to recommend it.

1 out of 5 stars.

 

Death House (2017)

Death House is one of those movies that I find difficult to pin down to a specific year of release. IMDB and Wikipedia list it as 2017, sure, but most other places list it as 2018 and it certainly didn't get a general release until this year. But since I'm currently at that time of year where I'm desperately trying to catch up on as many films released this year as possible to widen the pool for my best and worst movies of the year, I'm counting it as a 2018 release.

The Death House is a prison specially built to hold the very worst of humanity's killers. A government facility where serial killers are kept captive in virtual reality cells and studied for a greater understanding of evil, or subjected to psychological experiments to reprogramme them out of their homicidal urges and mould them into productive members of society. And then there are the "Five Evils" - five individuals so evil and depraved that they are kept in the facility's lowest level, the ninth, where it is hoped they will never escape. Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak are being given a tour of the facilities by one of the doctors running the experiments there, Dr Eileen Fletcher, when an escape plan is put into action by newly-arrived prisoner Seig, a Neo-Nazi with the ability to regenerate from any wound. Trapped in the Death House, the two agents find that their only hope is to descend deeper into the facility and reach the Five Evils, who apparently hold the key to stopping the escaped prisoners - as well as hidden truths about Boon and Novak's pasts, such as why both have tattoos on their bodies that they have no memory of getting...

Have you ever had a good friend or someone you really admire come to you and ask you to look at something they've done, and give your honest opinion on it? And you really, really want to like what they've done, but the more you look at it or watch it, the more painful it gets? That's kind of the spot I'm in right now. Death House was described as "The Expendables of horror", bringing together as many horror icons as possible in one film. At least, that was the original plan of Gunnar Hansen when he envisioned it and started to write the story, before his untimely death in 2015. After that, I suspect that having to get a new writer (eventual director Harrison Smith) is where it all started to go wrong because the finished film is a tangled mess of plot threads that go nowhere and wasted cameos. Why bother getting names like Michael Berryman and Sid Haig, for example, if they get either one single scene that goes nowhere or about two lines in the whole film? Not to mention Camille Keaton, who gets brought in for a brief scene as a rape and murder victim (with Danny Trejo as her killer). Yeesh.

There was clearly supposed to be much more done with the Five Evils, for example. An apparently immortal Nazi (not Kane Hodder's character of Seig, who was an entirely different unkillable Nazi); a woman clearly meant to be Elizabeth Bathory; a super-smart mutant with a giant claw for a hand, a necromancer and a man whose preferred methods of killing are "crucifixion and turning people inside out". Excuse me, movie? I'd like to learn more about these characters, please... Oh, we're just going to gloss over the mention of necromancy and the guy with a giant claw for a hand? Actually, there is apparently going to be a prequel made that delves into the story of the Five Evils, but right now that's too little, too late for me because the way the film used them they were equal parts MacGuffin and Deus Ex Machina.

Then there's Toria Boon and Jae Novak, two agents with dark pasts and tattoos on their bodies (that we get to see in the world's most plot convenient co-ed shower) that they don't remember getting. Now if you've been paying attention, you'll remember that they work for a government facility that specialises in wiping the minds of killers and reprogramming them to become useful members of society, and so you can see exactly where this subplot is going. If you didn't... well, you do now, but it's okay, it's not like this revelation had much bearing on the plot anyway. There's also the bit with The Russian Sleep Experiment, which isn't explicitly named as such, but anyone who knows their creepypastas will recognise it the moment they hear, "We no longer wish to be free." That comes out of nowhere as well - three of them just stumble on the room they're in and Dee Wallace's character says something about, "We don't know what happened here,"; they hang out there for a bit so we can get a good look at the practical effects, and then we move on. It feels like subplots were just being flung at a wall to see what stuck, regardless of how much sense any of it made.

Death House wants to wow us with philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil, and debates about transhumanism and morality, and shock us with its gore, and keep us interested with characters like the Five Evils and Seig, but it never really delivers on any of that except maybe the gore. How did Seig end up with his healing factor? What was the deal with that Nazi kid at one point? What was the point of the Icicle Killer? What was the deal with the Three Satans? Why don't we learn more about the damn necromancer and the guy with a giant claw for a hand in the basement? Not to mention, if I really wanted to see Barbara Crampton talk transhumanism, I'd watch From Beyond, because she's at least in fetish gear there.

 

 

Absurd (1981)

Here's some advice. Don't schedule a carpet fitting the same week as getting a Smart Meter fitted in your home, and only weeks after getting a complete house cleaning (which went so terribly, terribly wrong to boot). Don't do all this especially in the same month as you're trying to do 31 horror movie reviews, as you'll quickly realise that there are going to be some double review days in your future. It's all really quite absurd... which leads cunningly into today's review, Absurd (see what I did there?) - also known as Antropophagus 2, Monster Hunter, The Grim Reaper 2, Horrible and (for some reason) Zombie 6: Monster Hunter.

A priest chases a man through a wooded area until the man tries to climb a set of railings and ends up disembowelling himself, spilling his guts on the doorstep of a nearby house. The man is taken to hospital and operated on; he recovers remarkably quickly and escapes, killing a nurse with a medical drill along the way. The priest who was chasing him explains that the man, Mikos Stenopolis, was experimented on by the Vatican and has been given regenerative abilities; unfortunately, he was also driven insane and is now a homicidal maniac, and the priest is seeking to stop him and kill him via the only method that will work - "destroy[ing] the cerebral mass". Meanwhile, at the home that Mikos turned up at, the Bennetts are preparing to go to a nearby friend's house to watch the Super Bowl. Their daughter Katya is confined to bed and in traction due to a deviation in her spine, and her nurse Emily is due to stay the night to take care of her but gets delayed because of events at the hospital. The babysitter Peggy taunts the family's young son Willy by telling him that the man at the door was the Bogeyman and that he will eat Willy if he misbehaves, not knowing that Mikos is making his way back to the house with murderous intent...

From looking at some of the alternative titles of Absurd, you might think that it has some sort of connection with Anthropophagus, that 1980s film about a cannibal with a dreaded skin disease running amok on a Greek island, and you'd be half-right. Director of both, Joe D'Amato (here under the pseudonym Peter Newton) wanted to make a direct sequel to Anthropophagus and asked George Eastman to take part. Eastman, however, didn't want to do a sequel and agreed to only act; however, when he saw the script he felt it was so bad he decided to re-write it into "one of those American thrillers, Halloween style" (and did so under the name John Cart). And like Halloween it is, what with the stalking killer and references to "the Bogeyman" and even a stand-in for Dr Loomis chasing the killer throughout the film. Of course, it's not actually set at Halloween, lest they be accused of taking imitation a step too far - instead it's set on Super Bowl weekend, which also gives the opportunity for lots of filler scenes with a group of people dressed up far too well for watching a game on TV and snacking on pasta.

Absurd is also quite the who's who of Italian exploitation cinema. As well as George Eastman/Luigi Montefiori as Mikos, we have Annie Belle (The House on the Edge of the Park) as the quite saintly nurse Emily, Charles Borromel (one of the dubbing voices in Don't Torture a Duckling), an uncredited Michele Soavi (Stagefright) and Edward Purdom (Don't Open Till Christmas), just to mention a few. If I was playing Italian exploitation bingo, I think I'd have easily won with this film. Just about the only thing missing is Bob from The House by the Cemetary or Manhattan Baby in the role of Willy - instead, we get a dark curly-haired moppet for the cast to have to try and rescue, although he is still dubbed by an adult trying to do a child's voice.

For the most part, Absurd is pretty uninspired as far as early-era slashers go, not really bringing anything original to the table. The exception to this is the character and arc of daughter Katya, who spends the first two-thirds of the film confined to bed, and strapped down to boot. the scenes when she is desperately attempting to unstrap and unhook herself from the bed and traction machine as Mikos chases Willy and Emily around the house are really quite tense considering what they are (someone trying to undo leather belts without being able to see them), and when she inevitably becomes the Final Girl and has to face down Mikos she is really quite resourceful, using a drawing compass, loud music and eventually the axe from a convenient suit of armour to great effect.

Absurd was one of the "video nasties" in the UK, as one of the DPP's 39 titles successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. While the film is full of heads being drilled, heads being bisected by butcher saws and heads being impaled with pickaxes, the scene that most probably got it into trouble is the one where Emily is caught by the killer and has her head forced into a gas oven which is then turned on. We then get to watch as, over several minutes, her face is slowly cooked by the heat - with the camera "inside" the oven for that nice close-up view. It's hard to explain that away as anything other than an exercise in torturing a woman for the enjoyment of the audience and goes on for far longer than is necessary.

 

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Contracted: Phase II (2015)

Well here's a blast from the past. Way back in the distant days of 2015, I reviewed a little film called Contracted. The film was about a young woman, Sam, who contracts a necrotic STI after being drugged and raped at a party, and told the story of how Sam's body rotted away in parallel to her relationships with those around her. The film was body horror to the extreme and was quite effective in that area, even if it didn't really make Sam a particularly relatable character. Now here we are with the sequel to that movie, Contracted: Phase II.

Contracted: Phase II gives the spotlight to Riley, a secondary character from the first film who had a crush on Sam and finally got to have sex with her near the end of the film, before discovering that her nethers were full of maggots/worms. Lovely. From that and some scratches Sam gave him during the act, Riley is now infected with the same necrotic STI, and only has three days before he succumbs to it and becomes a zombie. He decides to use his remaining time to try to track down BJ, the man who raped Sam and gave her the STI in the beginning, and who's apparently been quite busy infecting prostitutes with the same STI and recording rants on tapes to send to the FBI about how he wants to eradicate humanity with his plague. As noble as Riley's quest to stop BJ before he dies is, however, he ends up inadvertently making matters worse as this disease can be passed on via any bodily fluid or physical contact, such as sharing a kiss or drinking from the same glass as him, and so he's creating more victims as he desperately searches for BJ. Will Riley be able to find and stop BJ before it's too late for him, and will BJ's plans come to fruition?

Contracted: Phase II has something for everyone (to be disgusted by). Vomiting! Pus! Teeth falling out! Eye trauma! Maggots/superworms coming out of various bodily orifices and being cut out of flesh! Abscesses! Self-surgery! Cold sores! People expelling massive amounts of blood via the nose or by peeing! People consuming food that has someone's blood in it without noticing! Much like the first film, Phase II is a body horror film, with the focus being on seeing and experiencing your body rotting from the inside out while you're still alive. That's a horrifying concept for sure, and so from that perspective alone Contracted: Phase II can be said to be a roaring success. Certainly, I don't recommend watching this film while eating anything with nacho cheese (shades of the custard scene in Braindead...) It's also an interesting and semi-original take on the zombie movie, looking at things not from the perspective of people trying to survive an already-started zombie apocalypse, but from the perspective of the very first victims of the zombie plague, before the dead have really started to rise en masse and people are still trying to figure out what is happening.

However...

If you read my review of the first thing, Contracted, and then read this review, you might notice that they're a little bit... similar. that's because the two films are very similar, in both themes and in plot, with the only differences being a different main character, a few more people getting accidentally infected, and a little bit of backstory given to antagonist BJ. Hell, even though they're different people, Riley's reaction to discovering he's infected and that his body is rotting while he's still alive is pretty much exactly the same as Sam's - a mixture of denial and refusal to seek help for their condition. I'm sorry, but I don't care how determined I might be to find the person responsible for the disease that's killing me, the very moment I fill a toilet bowl to the brim with my blood that I peed into it, I'm checking myself straight into the nearest hospital, probably at speed and while screaming incoherently. Then again, the people around Riley seem pretty clueless as well, not noticing when his nose abruptly explodes with blood while at a wake for Alice (who was killed by Sam in the first film). An argument could be made that it's just another symptom of the self-centredness of so many of the people around both Riley and Sam, but if that's the case then it's gone too far into Flanderization.

The other big difference in this film is that we get to learn more about BJ and his plans, but unfortunately he's been Flanderized as well, as well as beaten by the stupid stick. His plan to be a walking plague vector is all well and good and makes sense for a genocidal antagonist - if you need to infect a lot of people quickly with a zombie virus that can be passed via sex, then prostitutes are the way to go - but why on Earth does he decide to stalk and taunt Riley when he's not recording his manifesto in his house full of chained-up zombie prostitutes? He's also got a finger tattoo that says "Abbadon", but that's something that's left hanging until the very end, when someone else with the same tattoo is revealed and we're left with a setup hook for a Phase III.

There's also a sub-plot with a detective (whose actress tries and fails to hide her Scottish accent throughout the film, which was a little distracting) also trying to track down BJ that just feels like it's there to have someone else periodically remind Riley and us that there are far more sensible options than what Riley does throughout the movie. And in the end, that's really what Contracted: Phase II is - a repeat of the first film with some different characters and most of the same body horror spots. Still relatively good and original, but also still failing in some of the same ways as the first film.

 

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Alien: Covenant (2017)

We have finally reached the final film of this journey through the Alien and Predator franchises, and what a tangled and convoluted journey it has been. But here we are with Alien: Covenant, the latest film from Ridley Scott in the Alien franchise and the second film in a new prequel trilogy (or it might become another quadrilogy) happening before the original 1979 Alien.

It's 2104, eleven years after the events of Prometheus and the spaceship Covenant is heading for the planet of Origae-6 for colonization. A solar flare hits the ship and damages it, causing the deaths of 47 of the colonists in hypersleep as well as the ship's captain, who is burned alive inside his stasis pod. While repairing the ship, the remaining crew pick up a human radio transmission from a nearby planet that is meant to be uninhabited and seems to be far more suitable for colonization than Origae-6, which is still seven years away. They land on the planet to investigate and discover not only abundant plant life but also a crashed alien spacecraft. Two of the crew become infected with spores from some of the alien plant life on the surface and "give birth" to creatures similar to Xenomorphs but still noticeably different (neomorphs); the surviving crew meet David, the synthetic from the Prometheus who leads them to safety. David has been living on the planet for several years, he tells them, (after he and Elizabeth Shaw flew there after the end of the previous film) but he says that Shaw died when they crashed on the planet and that the planet's inhabitants - the Engineer race - were all killed when the ship released its bio-weapon payload on them. David has also been busy in the years since then, as he's been working to create a new species - the Xenomorphs. It falls to the few remaining crew members, including the captain's widow Daniels and Walter, the ship's synthetic who is a more advanced model than David but still looks like him - to defeat the new Xenomorphs and stop David from using them all in his science experiments...

Before we go any further, I need to get something off my chest. Alien had Ash. Aliens and Alien³ had Bishop. Alien: Resurrection had Call. Prometheus had David. And now Alien: Covenant has... Walter. What the hell happened to the naming convention? I don't get it and I don't like it, although I'm at least professional enough not to mark the film down too much for it.

The prevailing theme of Alien: Covenant, and indeed many of the Alien films, should really be that First Contact protocols are there for a reason. It wasn't too bad in Alien, as most people would be torn between doing what is right and following the rules as Ripley was (and of course Ash had ulterior motives in letting Kane back in), but several of the deaths in Alien: Covenant are because of people being stupid on an unexplored planet and sticking their noses right into alien plants and taking a great big sniff without any protective gear whatsoever. Weyland-Yutani really needs to make a safety video explaining this stuff because it would save them an awful lot of money in lost spacecraft and employees.

The return of Michael Fassbender as David (and Walter) is both a blessing and a curse for the film. On the one hand, Michael Fassbender is brilliant in his role as always and is far and away the best thing about the film. On the other hand, we know from Prometheus that David is an antagonist, and while that dramatic irony works well in Covenant when the crew first meets him, it also makes certain climactic scenes very easy to predict. After all, why have a second synthetic who looks just like David if you're not planning on having some sort of "which one is which?" twist somewhere in the film's climax (and the film really draws that one out, long after the audience will have figured everything out and gotten bored waiting for the film to catch up with them).

There are a lot of callbacks to Alien (and a couple to Aliens) in Alien: Covenant, most notably the character of Daniels, who is both our protagonist and a clear Ripley-substitute, right down to a similar hairstyle. Her inevitable climactic battle with the Xenomorph has elements from both Alien and Aliens, but unlike some of the other callbacks we've seen in previous films, this at least has enough of its own identity to not feel like pandering to the audience.

And on the subject of pandering... One complaint that people had about Prometheus is that it didn't really feel like a film in the Alien canon. Originally, Ridley Scott had wanted to explore the origins of the Engineer and of humanity much more than the Xenomorphs, because he felt that the Alien films were "overdone and overexposed". But after Prometheus's divided fan reaction he changed tack and brought the story back to the Xenomorphs more. Alien: Covenant does take a step back from the story of David the megalomaniac stalker synthetic (although he still has a key role to play) and so for the die-hard fans this should please them. Even then though, Scott said that he wants to focus more on David and other AIs for Alien: Covenant 2, which suggests to me that he really does not want to keep making films in the Alien franchise because that sounds a lot more like a Blade Runner universe (which I wouldn't be opposed to, but let's not get the two franchises blended together until they're indistinguishable).

So, that's all the Alien and Predator films up to this point (August 2018). It will remain to be seen if the Alien franchise can regain its impact with any future films, as plans are apparently on hold indefinitely after the divided fan reaction to the most recent two films. As for the Predator franchise, we only have to wait another month or so to see if The Predator will be a return to form, although the team of (Shane) Black and (Fred) Dekker as writers and director shows promise.

 

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Prometheus (2012)

And so, we return to exclusively Alien part of this series with Prometheus, which also returned Ridley Scott to the franchise as well. And if you're trying to follow continuity here's where it gets really complicated: Prometheus is a prequel to the four standalone Alien movies, but has no connection to the AVP movies. Meanwhile, the AVP movies are at least acknowledged in Predators but are said to not be connected to the upcoming The Predator movie, which leaves us with at least three divergent timelines. Ugh. This is enough to make even me want to give up trying to track everything.

An archaeological team discover a 35,000-year-old cave painting that not only implies an Ancient Astronauts theory for early human civilisation but also provides a star map to a moon where the originators of human life might have come from. Four years later, in 2093, the spaceship Prometheus arrives at LV-223 to investigate and try to find any trace of the creatures that have been dubbed "Engineers". Among the crew are Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway, who discovered the cave painting and "star map", and David, a synthetic who has been monitoring the crew while they were all in hypersleep for the journey. The expedition has been funded by the Weyland Corporation, whose CEO Peter Weyland recorded a message for the crew before he died, hoping they would find proof of humanity's origins. Exploring the planet, they find a pyramid-like structure that contains, among other things, the mummified and decapitated body of an Engineer and rooms full of mysterious stone cylinders. While Shaw and the others test the Engineer's remains and find that his DNA matches human DNA, David secretly brings one of the cylinders back to the ship as well and discovers that it contains a strange black liquid. But not everything is dead on this moon, and hidden dangers and agendas start to come together, threatening the lives of not only the crew of the Prometheus, but also everyone on Earth as well...

You know that feeling I've mentioned I have about Dario Argento now, as I look at his recent output (*cough*Dracula 3D*cough*) compared to his much earlier work and can't help but feel he's no longer at the top of his game? I'm starting to feel that way about Ridley Scott as well. He's done some absolutely brilliant films - the original Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator - but lately he seems to have slipped a little. Prometheus was supposed to be a return to form; coming back to what made the first film so legendary and iconic, but instead it feels as though it's abandoned all that in favour of exploring some all-new ideas of a much more metaphysical bent. If not for the almost-token nods to series continuity with the Weyland Corporation, the Engineers/"Space Jockeys" and a scene at the very end of the film, Prometheus could easily have been its own film, completely unconnected to the Alien series altogether. And that's disappointing.

Let's list the things I did enjoy about the film. Michael Fassbender was superb as David, of course, although I'm not sure if they intended to imply he was a slightly deranged and creepy stalker-type person from his very first appearance in the film, or if it just accidentally came out that way. Regardless, the man puts his best performance forward regardless of what film he's in, and Prometheus is no exception. Idris Elba is another standout, although I was slightly distracted for a lot of the film trying to place the accent he was affecting. Charlize Theron, also excellent. As for horror and/or creepy elements, the shot of one of the crew, presumed dead, turning up at the doors of the spaceship with his body folded up so that he looks like a crab was an image I really liked, which was added to when he "unfolded" himself to stand up straight (although if he'd scuttled around menacingly like that I probably wouldn't have complained either).

But these things can't quite make up for the weakness, the wishy-washiness of the rest of the film. Even ignoring the ancient astronauts theory that I hate so much but keeps coming up, the film's underlying themes of religion and children seeking answers from their parents is, to be blunt, prosaic and obvious. Even after two hours we still don't learn anything from the Engineers (who, under their helmets, look like albino versions of Dr. Manhattan wearing nappies); what they were doing on Earth or LV-223. David's role as secondary antagonist goes completely unnoticed by everyone else in the crew, which considering some of his behaviour - particularly towards Elizabeth Shaw, who I'm pretty sure we're supposed to assume he has some sort of android crush on - is just ridiculous. And as I said above, the film barely feels connected to the Alien series at all, which had to disappoint a lot of people who came to the film expecting to learn the origins of the Xenomorphs. I'll even go so far as to say that I think the film might have been better if it had no connection to the Alien franchise at all, and been its own film about people seeking answers as to the origin of their species and why that turned out to be a bad idea.

Oh, and my suspension of disbelief went and threw itself out of the window as I watched Shaw running and throwing herself around the place straight after having abdominal surgery and getting the incision stapled shut.

Perhaps the one theme that runs through both Prometheus and Alien is that first contact protocols should always - ALWAYS - be adhered to. In both films, so much could have been easily avoided if they'd done so. Don't take your helmets off in alien atmospheres; don't poke at the strange new alien species you've found; don't bring containers full of strange alien liquids secretly on board your ship to do experiments with, and if in doubt, get the flamethrower out.

 

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Alien: Resurrection (1997)

After the ending of Alien³, you'd have been forgiven for thinking that the Alien franchise had come to a logical end - or at the very least, that Flight Lieutenant Ellen Ripley's role in the franchise was over. But if you've been here a while, you'll also most likely remember some of the ways the studios had kept other franchises going despite the death/consecrated burial/destruction of the hell dimension that its antagonists resided in, and so it should really be no surprise to see that Alien: Resurrection manages to both continue the Alien series and bring back Ripley for another movie.

The year is 2379 - 200 years since the events on Fury 161. On the spaceship USS Auriga, a team of military scientists have succeeded in cloning Ellen Ripley from blood samples taken when she was alive. The reason they've done this is to extract the Xenomorph Queen inside her so that they can use it to grow their own set of Xenomorphs for use in military operations. The cloning process has also left Ripley with her DNA blended slightly with that of the Xenomorph DNA - she is now stronger and faster than your average human and has slightly acidic blood. Her fingernails are also Xenomorph Green. A crew of space pirates deliver a cargo of hijacked humans in cryosleep to be hosts for the Xenomorphs, but inevitably something goes wrong and the Xenomorphs effect an escape from their cells, running amok through the Auriga and killing anyone they come across. Ripley and the survivors of the pirate crew find themselves working together to try to escape the ship and prevent it from landing on Earth. Along the way, Ripley and the others discover the extent of the cloning experiments and that the DNA blending didn't just affect Ripley...

Stop me if you've heard this one. A crew of space pirates, led by a handsome rogue with flexible morals, whose first mate is a very capable African-American. Other crew members include a big guy who's not too smart but good at violence, and a female engineer. They come across a woman who has been experimented on by the government and as a result, has superhuman abilities but is also somewhat schizophrenic/autistic in behaviour. If you squinted hard and blurred some lines separating a couple of fictional universes, you could see Alien: Resurrection as a rather violent pilot episode of Firefly - which isn't all that surprising considering Joss Whedon wrote both of them. Whedon says that he didn't actually notice the similarities between the two until someone pointed out to him, but I have to say that it's glaringly obvious to anyone who's seen both, to the point that if there had been a beautiful and exotic escort onboard the ship as well, I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised.

This time around we have in the cast: Guy of Gisborne (or Top Dollar if you didn't spend a large portion of 1992 watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), Hellboy and Spock's mother. Oh, and the lead scientist on the Ripley/Xenomorph Queen experiments is Charles Lee Ray. Dourif does chew on the scenery somewhat, particularly in one scene where he croons at a newborn hybrid Xenomorph that it's a "beautiful, beautiful butterfly", but frankly that's a pretty average performance from 1990s Dourif and only slightly awkward to watch. Of the rest of the cast, only Ron Perlman as not-Jayne really stands out though - even Ripley feels less like the complex and, yes, human, protagonist of the previous films, as though she'd been stripped down to the barest essentials to make her a Generic Badass Female Action Hero.

There's considerably less CGI in Alien: Resurrection - or to be more exact, what there is of the CGI is a lot less obvious than the Amiga-level modelling that we saw in Alien³. The Xenomorphs are back to being portrayed mostly with practical effects, with the exception being mainly whenever their legs were in shot, as director Jean-Pierre Jeunet felt that it would be too easy for the audience to discern that they were actually watching men in suits. There was also a certain amount of digital "airbrushing" done to the Human-Xenomorph hybrid to remove its hermaphroditic genitalia after Fox and Jeunet eventually decided that would be a bit too much for the film.

Vastly improved effects aside though, Alien: Resurrection is something of a disappointment as a film that's part of the Alien franchise. Even Alien³, with all its faults, still had the basic idea at its core that the Alien movies are meant to be about running and hiding from the Xenomorphs, and only fighting them as a last resort. We've seen how lethally efficient they are at taking humans apart, even well-trained and armed squads of Space Marines, but in Resurrection they seem to be reduced to occasionally reaching up through the floor and grabbing someone every now and then. There's one good underwater scene, but for the rest of the film, they feel woefully underused. Instead, we have the hybrid Xenomorph taking centre-stage, and while it's an effectively unnerving image, with a more-human skull and actual eyes to push it into the outskirts of the Uncanny Valley, it still doesn't make as terrifying a threat as the traditional Xenomorphs. There's also the fact, that despite what the film is telling us, I don't think you ever really feel that our protagonists are really in any danger. Incidental characters, sure, but from about the halfway point you can pretty much tell exactly who's going to survive till the end of the film and that takes a lot of the tension out of it.

There were originally plans for there to be a fifth chapter of the series after this one, taking place on Earth, which might or might not have involved Ripley returning to battle the Xenomorphs once more, but those plans were eventually shelved in favour of going back in time a little and taking an idea born from that one brief shot of a trophy case in a certain film from 1990...

 

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Jigsaw (2017)

"On October 27 he returns to take back Halloween," the trailer for Jigsaw ominously informs us. I think Michael Myers might have something to say about that... Regardless, after seven years Lionsgate finally came up with a viable plan to resurrect the Saw franchise, having already gone and squeezed every last drop they could out of John Kramer's corpse after he died in the third movie, and so here we are.

A man is chased across rooftops by police before activating a device that he says he has to do or people will die. Elsewhere, fice people wake up in a metal room with chains around their necks and buckets on their heads. They all players in one of John Kramer's games, and a recording from him tells them that they will have to confess their sins in order to survive. But John Kramer has been dead for over a decade, hasn't he? As the police investigate, the heavily mutilated corpses of the game's victims start turning up, sending the media into a frenzy. We also discover that there's now a secret underground world of obsessive Jigsaw fans who work to build replicas of his traps, that there's DNA evidence that suggests John Kramer is still alive, and a circle of suspects that's pretty much all the characters we meet in the film, cops and medical examiners included. Is John Kramer actually still alive somehow, or has someone new taken up the mantle of Jigsaw?

Remember how, in the review for Saw 3D, I commented on how the number of secret apprentices that John Kramer apparently had was getting a bit ridiculous? Well, now I've come to the conclusion that he must have been standing on street corners and handing out flyers. "Become part of Jigsaw's Secret Apprentice Program! Learn a craft! Get revenge on your enemies!" Because guess what - there's another previously unknown Jigsaw apprentice here, and from the look of things, he didn't have any contact with any of the other apprentices either. Frankly, I'm most annoyed that Dr Lawrence Gordon didn't return in this episode, but apparently, this was down to a pay dispute that Cary Elwes had with Lionsgate after the first movie. It was eventually settled, but Elwes agreed to only return for one movie, and that was Saw 3D. So instead of my fantasy movie that pits Dr Gordon against [Mystery New Apprentice], I'm instead just imagining that he's running the website for all the Jigsaw enthusiasts/devotees.

One thing that I've not covered in most of my reviews of the Saw movies is its use of time. The series likes to play with audience expectations a lot with this - the prime example would be the events of Saw III and Saw IV, where it's revealed at the end that the events of the two movies have been happening simultaneously, to better confuse the audience and make the twists and revelations more obtuse. Well, without giving too much away, Jigsaw plays with time and setting again to hide its biggest revelations - although to be completely honest there's only really one way all of the events in the film could have gone down if you actually think about it.

John Kramer's bizarre idea of justice rears its head again as well. Of the five people playing the 'game', one killed people in a hit-and-run and got away with it; one was a purse-snatcher who let their asthmatic victim die; one sold a kid a dodgy motorcycle which promptly crashed and killed its new owner; one killed their baby and framed someone else for it; and one put the wrong label on an x-ray. One of these things is not like the other... Holy crap, John Kramer, brain tumour or not, you need to get some perspective.

But let's be honest: most people came for the traps, and they're suitably over-the-top here. Heads get sliced in two; people get injected with what's probably hydrofluoric acid (again); someone gets lowered into a giant blender... The trap that's featured so prominently in the trailer, however - two people buried up to their necks in grain and having various sharp implements falling on them from above - is both a giant red herring and a Rube Goldbergian impossibility, because at that point it's so much up to random chance that it's more unbelievable that the victims don't get hit by any of the blades, spikes et al. It's setpiece deaths, rather than anything truly plot-related. The laser collar trap at the film's climax is an interesting new addition, and is also very next gen, not being made out of purely mechanical parts like the other Jigsaw traps.

So that's the Saw franchise. At this point, I'm pretty sure they've done everything they can with the series (but then again, we all thought that after Saw 3D), so unless we are going to get that Apprentice V Apprentice episode, I think we can now safely lay it - and John Kramer - to rest for good this time.

Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010)

Shortly after I published my review of Saw VI, I was talking to a friend about the franchise. He read the latest review and then said to me, "Tell me they stopped making them." When I informed him that there were still two movies to go, he replied, "Oh, God damn it." So there you go: probably the average reaction to hearing that there are still two Saw movies left to cover.

At the end of Saw VI Detective Mark Hoffman, the new Jigsaw Killer had just seen his plans collapse before narrowly escaping being killed by Jill Tuck - tying up the last loose ends as per her ex-husband's last request - with a new and improved Reverse Bear Trap. Not one to just get out of town and start a new life somewhere else (perhaps building endless Rube Goldberg devices) though, Hoffman sticks around and two months later is running two new games and preparing to take his revenge on Jill Tuck, who has gone to the police for protection at this point. The main player of the new 'game', however, is Bobby Dagan, a man who has made it big with his self-help book 'inspired' by his time as a Jigsaw Survivor... except he never was one in the first place. As we (and, ironically, Hoffman) know, Jigsaw doesn't like taking credit for things he never did, and so Bobby soon finds himself playing one of Jigsaw's games for real. And is that Dr Gordon we see there in the Survivor group?

So, the Saw franchise gets to join the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises in having an entry that claims to be the 'final' one but isn't. Coincidentally, the same three series are also in the 3D club together - so be prepared for plenty of things to be thrown, shot, propelled and otherwise flung at the screen during the course of the film.

Something else that's apparently been thrown out of a window is the series' continuity and sense of disbelief. I assume that the studio, thinking at the time that this was going to be the end of the series, just decided to go all-out and not worry about any of those annoying questions, such as, "How did no-one see the Public Execution Trap (or as I like to call it, the Bros Before Hos Trap) being set up or anything until the very moment the 'participants' start waking up?" and "What do you mean, Jigsaw's been doing this for years? What sort of malignant inoperable brain tumour did John Kramer have, exactly?" Because remember, Saws III and IV took place simultaneously; there were only six months between II and III/IV, and V and VI happened immediately after each other and straight after IV. So the only way the timeline works is if there was one hell of a time jump between the first and second movies, or the first movie had a hell of a lot come before it.

But enough about the timeline: let's talk traps. As it was planned to be the end of the series at the time, they really went all out with them this time. People get ripped in half, have their heads crushed by spinning car wheels, have to rip the skin off their own backs, get roasted in Brazen Bulls... Furthermore, after seven films we finally get to see the Reverse Bear Trap in action as another gory money shot near the film's climax. With the originality of the traps in this movie, the so-called "Sentry Gun Trap" stands out as being quite laughably simple - it's a motion-activated machine gun. It was two smaller portions of larger traps that really made me squirm the most though - one scene where a key attached to a fish hook had to be pulled up from a victim's stomach and throat, and a scene where Bobby has to pull two of his wisdom teeth out with pliers.

The revelation of yet another secret apprentice of John Kramer's puts the film into French farce territory though. John Kramer must have had the best time-management abilities in the world to keep Mark Hoffman from knowing about Lawrence Gordon - I'm imagining scenarios in which one walks out of one door just as the other comes in another: "Who were you talking to there, John?" "Oh, just talking to myself. Hand me the welding torch and the really big spike set." And when you include the revelation of Jigsaw, it just gets even more convoluted. Perhaps John Kramer didn't even exist and was just a shared hallucination of several psychopaths with good engineering skills.

No, the series isn't that smart.

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Wish Upon (2017)

If I've learned anything this year, it's that month-long movie challenges are difficult to complete when you find yourself bedbound for a week right in the middle of them. Also, if you then decide to commit to writing 50,000 words of a "novel" during the month of November at the last minute because of a TV show you discovered while stuck in bed, you should be aware that your productivity for everything else during that month is going to take a serious nose-dive. But enough about where I've been - let's review Wish Upon.

Clare Shannon is your typical high school student outcast - she's a talented artist, she's way too nice and she's one of the school's 'poor' kids. Her father collects junk and scrap metal for a living, often dumpster diving next to her school, which only humiliates Clare even more. Things start to change, however, when her father gives her a strange box he found on an abandoned estate as an early birthday present. The box is similar to a Chinese Wishing Pot, but different - the writings on the box say that, by placing your hands on the box while making your wish, you can have anything you want... for a price. At first, Clare doesn't believe any of this, but after the school bully contracts necrotising fasciitis, her crush asks her out and she inherits a mansion and accompanying fortune, she starts to believe in the box's power. But with each wish, the 'price' grows... Will Clare be able to resist the temptations of the box and find a way to undo what she has already caused?

Wish Upon would probably have passed completely under my radar if I hadn't read an article about it several months back. In the article, one of the filmmakers said that Clare, our protagonists, wasn't necessarily a 'good' character because at one point she wishes harm on her school bully. I guess that puts me somewhere on the level of Lucretia Borgia then because I've got a whole list of people I regularly wish anal boils upon. Seriously, allowing us to see a character's dark side developing throughout the course of a movie is perfectly fine, but trying to tell us how to feel about characters before we've even seen the film (and when nearly everyone would sympathise with the point you're trying to claim is 'bad)', is not a good start to things.

Clearly, Wish Upon is another retelling of that old cautionary tale, The Monkey's Paw - aka "Be careful what you wish for." To those knowledgeable in horror films, it's also a rather awkward mismatch of Wishmaster and Final Destination, with maybe a bit of The Craft shoehorned in for good measure (because when Clare wishes for her hunky crush to "fall madly in love with [her]", I know all I could think of was how well that turned out for Neve Campbell's character). To add to all that, it's also a PG-13 horror film, which means that pretty much all of its Final-Destination-esque death setpieces are virtually bloodless or cut away from so fast that they might as well have been. And I've never enjoyed being blueballed by horror films.

The biggest issue I have with Wish Upon, however, is its ending. Here be spoilers, so highlight and read the rest of this paragraph at your own risk... At the end of the film, Clare thinks she's come up with a way to beat the evil wish box by wishing that the crane operator hadn't been drinking on the day they got the shipment in- no, sorry, by wishing to go back in time to before her father finds the evil wish box and gives it to her... and then she wakes up in bed and it's like the whole movie was just a bad dream. "But wait!" the film screams at us as it sees up preparing torches, pitchforks and a list of films where the "It was all just a dream!" trope has ever worked (it begins with The Wizard of Oz and ends with Inception, and there aren't any films between those two), "that's not the actual ending! See how everything's fine now and Clare's so happy with a new-found respect for what she has? Wait for it... BAM! Now she's dead! The end!"

...no, Wish Upon. Two audience-screwing tropes do not cancel each other out and suddenly make the film good somehow. It just makes everyone think that the writer suddenly died mid-sentence, Monty Python-like, or was perhaps kidnapped by angry djinn, and no-one else had any idea how to end the movie so they just went for the cheapest cop-outs they could come up with.

Wish Upon was directed by John R. Leonetti, whose previous directorial credits include Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Annabelle, among others, so perhaps the alarm bells should have started ringing there (although he seems to be a much better cinematographer than a director, so perhaps he just keeps having terrible luck when it comes to the films he gets to direct). In the end, it's a pretty insipid film that probably deserved to have been overlooked, as the alternative has just made me rather aggravated.

(And yes, in case you were wondering I did "win" NaNoWriMo this year.)

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