(2000)
Dir - Bryan Johnson
Overall: MEH
As the only directorial effort to date from View Askewniverse member and Comic Book Men wise-ass Bryan Johnson, Vulgar is an odd, uncomfortable, ultra-cheap, tonal mess. While it it clearly meant to be fearless and deranged in its subject matter, Johnson's rookie filmmaking chops certainly confuse things along the way. He never manages to properly divulge either how funny or deadly serious his film is supposed to be. The amateur production values are rather akin to a Troma movie, (poor film quality, lousy cinematography, uneven performances), but the presentation never goes quite so comically juvenile or ridiculous. That said, it certainly gets dark and large portions of the movie are so miserable that it seems to be so for humorous purposes, be it of the disturbed, "I don't know what else to do but laugh at how fucked up this is" variety. Clerk's Brian O'Halloran makes a sympathetic lead who does not seem capable of catching a break even when he catches a break, Kevin Smith shows up as a gay television executive, Jason Mewes as a shirtless guy who has guns for some reason, and Johnson himself plays a lowlife with a heart of gold and a mouth for reason, yet none of them exude any of their usual silly charm. Pretty much every other character is just different levels of awful and the whole thing ends with more of a whimper than a bang.
(2002)
Dir - Eli Roth
Overall: MEH
Eli Roth's full-length debut Cabin Fever is an equal parts derivative and staggeringly obnoxious, juvenile gore-fest and rather unapologetically so. Ever since the slasher heyday of the 1980s, it has been a well-established cliche to load your horror movie with one mind-numbingly annoying character after the other so the audience has no choice but to wish a slow, painful death on all of them. Such is assuredly the case here where a group of stereotypically horrible, horny, foul-mouthed college kids square-off against almost equally unlikable rednecks. Throw a ravenous dog in there, a hillbilly kid who likes to bite people because it is supposed to be funny, and an infectious disease that makes everyone's body break out in gross rashes as they puke blood on everything and your movie is served. It is all loud, squishy, and stupid while rather blatantly calling back to numerous, much more lauded horror outings in a pretty obvious way. Though it does not fall into the deplorable torture porn genre which Roth would unfortunately help popularize with his following Hostel films, it is a tonal misfire in every capacity and still highly unenjoyable in its own right.
(2009)
Dir - Joel Schumacher
Overall: MEH
The last proper horror movie from Joel Schumacher Blood Creek offers up a sufficiency bloody hodgepodge of occult, vampire, and zombie tropes. The always busy filmmaker stays current with dizzying, handheld camerawork, masculine, tough guy posturing, opaque cinematography, splattery CGI gore, obnoxiously aggressive sound design, and a pacing the cruises by at such a rate as to lose the audience from time to time. The script by David Kajganich, (the Suspiria remake, The Terror television series), makes a genuine attempt at creepiness by fusing vague, Norse occultism with an immortal, Nazi monster villain played by the consistently excellent Michael Fassbender who is here rendered unrecognizable under grotesque makeup. The dialog is quite corny to say the least and all of it is delivered with the utmost, dire sincerity. Schumacher's presentation is loud and boisterous, resembling a big, dumb action movie even as the tone stays consistently dark. The result is perhaps too unintentionally schlocky to work as it becomes quite impossible to take the movie anywhere as seriously as the people in it are.
No comments:
Post a Comment