jmclennan Reviews

Scare Me (I) (2020)

Cringe-inducingly bad

[2/10 · 14 October 2020]

Scare Me is probably going to end up fighting it out with the Black Christmas remake for the title of worst film, in any genre, I have seen this year. Which, considering the competition includes The Room, is quite some achievement. Well done, Mr. Ruben. You must get up very early.

How can I summarize this cinematic treat? Imagine an hour and 40 minutes of improv, put on by the freshman class of the gender studies course at your local community college, and directed by a guy who has seen The Shining way too often. Now imagine something less entertaining than that. If you wanted to get a federal law passed to stop people from writing, directing and starring in the same movie, this film would be Exhibit A.

Peelers (2016)

A remarkable amount of fun

[8/10 · 25 July 2017]

There have been films about zombies before. Hell, there have been films about strippers fending off zombies before (the subtly named Zombie Strippers, for example). But this one adds, of all things, baseball into the mix, so with three of my favourite things included, how could it go wrong? Okay, I was pretty much already sold at zombies. Or strippers.

Anyway, this takes place on the last night of business at a small-town strip-club which is about to be sold. It runs under the watchful eye of manager Blue Jean (Walker), a former ace pitcher who handles the girls and deals with troublesome customers, while also wrangling her kid brother and personal life. These, however, are trivial concerns, compared to tonight's main issue. A bunch of workers at the nearby mine show up, ostensibly to celebrate one of their number's birthday. However, one of their number was exposed to a mysterious, unpleasant black ooze seeping up from the ground, and is feeling increasingly ill as a result.

You don't have to be psychic to figure out where this is all going, and there aren't many surprises in the plot – except perhaps the story of why Blue Jean drives around a police-issue motorcycle (frequently referenced during the film, finally explained in a scene inserted into the end credits). It's still a remarkable amount of fun, an unrepentantly trashy romp that embraces both nudity and violence with equal enthusiasm.

The first half is mostly about the flesh, as we get to know the patrons and, in particular, get up close and personal with the staff of the establishment. Certainly raunchy stuff, culminating in one stripper giving the whole front row a golden shower. (Nothing like that ever happened in the Canadian strip-clubs I went to, but that was back in 1998!) However, I should stress, the script and direction still put the effort in to create decent characters. Blue Jean, in particular, is a great bad-ass, but the rest have their quirks and foibles which make them seem more like real people, rather than just lightly-clad zombie snacks.

Which brings us neatly to the second half of the film, where the carnage kicks in, and since the monsters here are damn near unstoppable, they require appropriately heavy-duty opposition. Things are artfully constructed to work within the single location, and this, along with a brisk pace, should distract the viewer from tricky questions like, "Why doesn't everyone just leave?"

It's certainly a sharp change from Schelenz's debut feature, Skew, a found footage film which relied on atmosphere for almost all of its impact. This is far less thoughtful – and doesn't give a damn either, being more than happy to function as a pipeline for copious quantities of the three B's beloved by Joe-Bob Briggs: blood, breasts and beasts. Though here, we can perhaps add "baseball", since according to Schelenz, "the structure of the film itself is revealed like a 9-inning ball game." I've now seen the film on multiple occasions, and I'm still not sure if he's serious. Guess I'll just have to watch it again – and, this time, try to be less distracted by the other three B's

Black Widows (2016)

Bland misandry masquerading as female empowerment.

[3/10 · 18 March 2017]

Three women friends - Darcy (Elizabeth), Nora (Graham) and Olivia (Kocee) - are all having terrible luck with their relationships. Olivia is in the middle of an ugly divorce from Adam. Nora's boyfriend Ryan is a control freak. And while Darcy's new friend Blair (Brown) initially seems fine, he turns out to be the worst of them all. After he refuses to take no for an answer, the trio decide revenge is a dish best served naked in the middle of the desert. Unfortunately for him, Blair ends up lacking a pulse. Unfortunately for the film, it takes forever to get to this point, and for the vast majority of its running-time the promised "dark comedy" is neither dark nor comedic.

The writer of this was a date-rape victim herself, and it pains me to say so, but this might be the problem. According to the director, "This was an opportunity for her to wrestle with her demons." It would probably have been better if she'd gone to therapy, written bad poetry or anything, rather than trying to turn those demons into a movie - especially one apparently trying to occupy any subgenre of comedy. For what comes over here is a relentless, bitter tone of (probably understandable, I will admit, given the writer's history) distrust and loathing of the opposite sex, which permeates every scene of the film to such an extent that any potential humour is strangled. You can't even call it dark, it's closer to... jaundiced.

If the film had started with the three women standing over Blair's body, and gone forward from there, it might have worked. For the trio have a cheerfully apathetic approach to the escalating mayhem, and there finally is dark comedy present, in the way they bicker about trivia like getting blood on their shoes. However, it is the very definition of "too little, too late," and any interest and attention was already pushing up the daisies by this point.

Zombie Beach (2010)

Not good.

[2/10 · 17 July 2011]

While not without promise, this is mostly amateur work, with a poorly thought-out script, cringeworthy dialog and a grand total of about five zombies. From what I could tell, there's a beach where the undead are able to walk the earth, and woe betide anyone that goes there - for example, for a swimwear photo-shoot. Meanwhile, there's a policeman trying to figure out what's going on (I guess the 'Zombie Beach' sign didn't give him a clue), a holy man who provides all the necessary exposition, and leading man Roshan, played by director, producer and co-writer Asopa.

He's hardly the heroic type, possessing little in the way of screen presence, but he's hardly the film's worst element either. That would be the awful pacing, that lurches and lumbers like the titular monsters. Officially running 71, it is barely past 50 before you get to the zombie-themed rap (z-rap?), very slow credits crawl and out-takes. And it's 30 minutes before any meaningful z-action shows up, with far more time given to the "zany" antics of Roshan's chums, trying to scam girls into posing for them. Oh, the laughs just never start...

I always look for positives in micro-budget horror, and here, the look of the film is decent enough, with some interesting cinematography. The zombie make-up also does the job, and despite my previous sarcasm, the z-rap is actually not bad, part of a soundtrack that is all over the place style-wise, yet somehow works. But these don't come close to balancing the major problems with the script; Asopa might be better off deciding whether to write, direct or act, as on the evidence of this, dividing his talents among all three is spreading them perilously thin.

Shellter (2009)

"It has a philosophy — and that's what makes it dangerous."

[9/10 · 17 January 2011]

Firstly: yes, that IS how it's spelled, for reasons that will become clear once you've seen it. With that out of the way, the summary is a line from Videodrome that's appropriate here. On one level, this could be seen simply as torture-porn, with Zoey (Sanders) awakening to find herself in a underground bunker. There's been an outbreak of something very nasty above ground, it appears, and she is now trapped with a doctor (Tulin), and an apparently insane nurse. However, as events unfold, it becomes clear that it's the doctor who is the one who has all the issues here, and with the world outside out of bounds, Zoey has to decide how far she is prepared to go along with his psychotic actions, in order to survive. The answer is, much further than you would probably expect. The scene which demonstrates this most convincingly is one which explicitly evokes the infamous Milgram Experiments of the 1960's at Yale, which found out that about two-thirds of participants would inflict what they believed to be lethal electric shocks on others, at the verbal urging of an authority figure. There, of course, the 'punishment' was faked: in the depths of Das Bunker and at the crazed hands of Herr Doctor - not so much.

The 'twist' towards the end is not exactly much of a surprise - we worked it out almost at the beginning. Fortunately, this is not M. Night Shyamalan, and the movie doesn't rely on it for impact; a double twist came to mind, which would have been impressive, if pulled off. Tulin delivers a very unsettling performance, with every line and look conveying just how far gone he is beyond sanity. Sanders is less obvious, of necessity, and Zoey has much more of a character arc to play with, while the script is carefully written to work within the budgetary limitations - it's almost all set in one location. If it certainly contains its fair share of scenes that will make the viewer squirm or go "Ew!", the progression of Zoey from victim to unwilling participant to active perpetrator should also make you wonder how far you might be willing to go, given the necessary circumstances and provocation. It's probably no coincidence that the director has a master's degree in psychology - and that's why I say the film has a philosophy. This is what lifts it up above its retarded cinematic cousins, and why it'll stick in your mind when Saw VI has long been forgotten.

Sick Girl (2007)

The heart of darkness is in small-town rural America

[9/10 · 31 August 2008]

Let's cut to the chase. The creator-provided synopsis goes, "A girl who wants to protect her little brother, f*ck her older brother and torture everyone else out in the barn." Any questions? Well, while undeniably accurate, the film isn't quite as simplistic as this would suggest. Izzy (Andrews) is left to bring up her young brother (Trepany) after her older sibling heads off to Iraq with the Marines - both parents are absent, and the reasons for this are, interestingly, never made entirely clear, though we have some evidence for Izzy's involvement. The only one who helps out is Barney (McGarr) a biker who plays Santa Claus at the local hospital, but it's soon made clear that Izzy is entirely capable of fending for herself. Especially when a proto-thug at the local school decides to pick on her kid bro.

Izzy is an intriguing mix, a character somewhere between Juno and Dexter; to those she loves, she is fiercely loyal, yet anyone else had best not cross her, or the results will be horrific, in ways beyond your imagination - certainly, at least one sequence goes well beyond **our** imagination! I think it's her sheer cold-blooded approach that is the most chilling thing here, and Andrews is simply phenomenal in the role, possessing a calmness which is completely unnerving. Even when engaging in brutality of the most appalling sort, you suspect her heart-beat rarely goes above 85. She even takes time out to lecture small children on the evils of bullying, where her philosophy is, "There's nothing wrong with hurting things smaller than you - providing you also take on things bigger than you. Then size is irrelevant." Cold: very cold. If you want to peer into the abyss which is the very darkest corner of the human psyche, then this is low-budget cinema at its brilliant best. However, you should be aware that you might see things you will not easily forget.