The Entropy Pump

Cloverfield is basically the meeting of Blair Witch Project and Godzilla. On one hand the overall story is about a big monster tearing through a city (New York), on the other hand it’s the personal perspective of some party goers who find themselves in the midst of the destruction brought on by the monster (all filmed with a shaky camcorder). It’s not a movie I care much for, but despite not really liking it I have to admit its effectiveness at being genuinely pulse-pounding and adrenaline-inducing. It’s an incredibly intense experience; you feel like you’re in the middle of the destruction zone and never before has a gigantic monster felt as threatening as in Cloverfield. But there are some really stupid choices the plot makes, like the three survivors going right into the hot zone and into a building to save the girlfriend of one of the guys. The girlfriend is in a partly destroyed building, which leans onto the building they other three went in. I can’t believe that people have such a disregard for their own survival, especially not people who have been depicted as being completely shocked and frightened by what is happening.

Zombieworld is a typical dramedy, one of those strange beasts of modern TV/movie narration that effortlessly mix drama and comedy without one aspect completely dominating, where both aspects somehow manage to complement each other. It’s about yet another zombieapocalypse, which sees most of humanity reduced to blood-splattered, flesh eating monsters. Nothing particularly original there, but the approach certainly is funny. The main character is your everyday shy geek who doesn’t have many friends, thus easily surviving the infectious early days of the zombieplague. He’s on his way home, following a set of self-imposed rules that seem completely arbitrary and mostly humorous, yet are often quite helpful. On his way he meets a gun-tooting hardcase who loves nothing more than killing zombies and two trickster sisters.

The comedy aspect is easy, think Shaun of the Dead but even more tongue-in-cheek and IMHO funnier. The drama aspect stems from the main character’s search for a family, which he finds unexpectedly in the other survivors. Like most successful dramedies it’s highly entertaining, but has enough brains to also appeal on more than just the pure fun level. The characters are real and their personal problems, despite zombieapocalypse, touching and something you can relate to.

Soon after I started watching Hellseeker, the sixth Hellraiser movie, I got the bad feeling that someone was trying to do something similar to the previous movie. We see the return of Kirsty Cotton, the main character from the first two movies, who has been killed in a car accident. Her husband, the focus of the movie, has been in the same car and he’s trying to find her missing body and making sense of what happened. Soon we realize things aren’t as they seem. Clever people will realize that the whole movie ends with just another revelation that is somehow similar to, but not exactly the same as “It was all a dream”. Worst kind of ending you can do. Pinhead and his Cenobites still play only minor roles and it’s less about the gore than about someone trying something more subtle. But subtle and Hellraiser isn’t a good match and not much fun to watch.

The fifth part of the Hellraiser series is a sharp departure from previous movies. Instead of emphasizing overt violence and gore, Inferno tries a more subtle approach, showing a bad cop’s descent into madness. This sadly translates into a very slow and often tedious movie that ends with an expected, well, not an “It was all a dream” but something very similar, that amounts to the bad cop ending up in hell and reliving his last days over and over. The Cenobites and Pinhead only play minor roles and function more as a moral arbiter than as truly threatening horror monsters. Not that they were really scary to begin with, from the first movie the gore was more important than psychological horror. This is the reason Inferno doesn’t work so well. All you’re waiting for is Pinhead to appear and do his gruesome chainhook dance, but when it actually happens you probably have already fallen asleep. The most positive thing that can be said about the movie is that it still looks like a big budget production and not the direct-to-video production it was, which can’t be said about the sequels.

It rarely happens, but sometimes I like prequels. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is not one of them. I’m not sure exactly why I generally don’t like prequels. My default answer is that already knowing how the story turns out takes all the fun away, but that doesn’t really make sense, since I love some movies despite having seen them countless times. I think what makes me go sour on prequels is something a little more subtle. It has to do with how you approach writing a story, where the biggest constraint on everything is a fixed ending. Even if you have an ending in mind when you normally start writing a story, you pulp it as soon as you realize it doesn’t work anymore. With a prequel you can’t do that, the ending can’t be pulped. It’s a constraint not easily evaded and often this fact harms the whole story. Not that Underworld is somehow bad, but like many prequels there’s a predictability to how the plot unfolds and how everything plays out that’s not much fun to watch. Plot and characters are mere puppets, only there to string you along to arrive at the already known ending (the conflict between werewolves and vampires that is the background for the first two movies). It’s not really bad, but I wasn’t really engaged or interested. Hopefully the next Underworld is more satisfying.

My threshold for accepting stupidity in movies can be relatively low, but not for science fiction. Pandorum, while good looking, managed to irk me in a number of ways. Two fictional and unlikely medical conditions that only exist to drive the plot (amnesia from long hibernation and insanity induced by being in space or something like that), overpopulation as part of the setting, which is as disconnected from reality as you can get these days and the implausible explanation for the monsters on board (sure, sounds cool the first moment you hear about the adaptive response to environments and how the colonists have adapted to the ship instead of adapting to the new colony, until you go “Wait a moment, that doesn’t make a lick of sense”). All that wouldn’t matter if the movie was any fun (the new Star Trek has its share of movie stupidity, but I loved that one). It isn’t. I’m not even sure why, whether it’s the tired plot or the unappealing characters or the annoying camera work or these little moments of movie stupidity I mentioned above. Maybe all of the them together.

The sequel to the first Nation Treasure has the same mix of qualities that made the first one so endearing: a cool treasure (the golden city Cibola) and the likable characters from the first part trying to find it. There’s some action, some break-ins into famous places and some pretty unbelievable plot developments (Cage gets to hijack the US president). All in all it’s excellent popcorn entertainment: highly implausible in places and yet very entertaining. Thinking too much about the movie doesn’t help, it’s a wild ride and either you’re going with the flow or you’re trying to pick it apart. I think each of us has a different threshold for accepting movie stupidity, when it comes to an adventure yarn like this my own is very low, as long as I like the characters and its fun to watch. The only weak point is the villain, whose motivation for doing what he’s doing is pretty sketchy, especially since he doesn’t has to act this way and could have easily just asked for help.

While National Treasure isn’t really all that original, it exhibits exactly the same formula that made the Indiana Jones movies so successful. There’s a famous treasure, a overly complex way to get to it, that more often than not defies logic (how come these century old machines and clues always work or still exist to this day) and most of all there is a motley crew of treasure hunters that goes after it and the complementing bad guys. Yet formula alone doesn’t guarantee success. National Treasure works because the characterization and the character chemistry are perfect. I’m not really a big fan of Cage, but this role really was perfect for him. He goes all out and somehow makes it, if not overly realistic, at least believable in the context of the story. It’s fun to watch him scrabble for overly far fetched clues, for pieces of the puzzle that leads to the treasure of the Templers. But there’s more to his character, a childish naivety, the ability to believe in something that most grown-ups would have accepted as unrealistic. He’s someone who hasn’t given up his dreams, which looks endearing in the movie.

Another element the movie does right is the treasure. Really, the big climax of any treasure hunt is finding the treasure, but to make something like that fully satisfying it has to have grandeur. And the scene with Cage lighting the cave where the treasure is hidden achieves that. You really feel like the whole hunt was totally worth it.

Whenever a horror series goes into space (Jason X, Leprechaun 4) the result is often hilariously bad, but also quite entertaining in a very campy way. Hellraiser 4 is a bit of a departure, as it is a more ambitious than merely putting the Cenobites into space. Sure, there’s the obligatory sequence where a team of space soldiers, who are completely sure of their skills (I think that one is an endless repeat of Aliens), get slaughtered by the supernatural creatures. But overall Bloodlines tries to trace, via flashbacks, the history of the creators of the puzzle box.

That amounts to a scene in1784 in Paris and shows the creation of the box by a toymaker called Lemarchand and a scene in the present that takes place after the third Hellraiser and shows an architect who is from the Lemarchand line. The parts in the future are about the last Lemarchand, who wants to complete the Elysium configuration, a counter to the original Lemarchand configuration, that has the power to destroy the Cenobites.

The movie is an odd departure from the Hellraiser series, both due to its narrative structure (which feels pretty incoherent) and the fact that it effectively ends the whole franchise on the story level (Pinhead and his cohorts get completely destroyed). There were also elements that made not much sense or where glossed over far too fast, like L’Isle death, why Angelique was summoned, what the connection to the puzzle box was and so on. Still, as the finale for the first four Hellraiser movies it’s okay, even if it’s not as much fun as the first three movies.

The third Hellraiser movie follows closely on the heels of the second one. Pinhead, who has become the dominating character of the series, has been frozen in a pillar, which has been bought by a nightclub owner. There’s also a reporter who becomes aware of Lemarchand’s box and she tries to figure out what it all means. The acting is pretty bad, but the movie provides exactly what you expect from a Hellraiser movie: inventive new Cenobites, gruesome death scenes (a friend remarked how often we see someone skinned alive in Hellraiser movies, the third one has a pretty good scene like that too) and a good gal who stops Pinhead and his cohorts in the end.