Hatchet - Review

In the post-Scream era, it's been almost as tough for horror filmmakers to create effective slasher movies as it was for Hollywood to produce convincing Westerns after Blazing Saddles. Yet just as that genre rose from the (artistic if not commercial) ashes with masterpieces from the likes of Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, and Lawrence Kasdan, the far less reputable slasher flick has been reinvigorated in the last couple of years by a group of talented fans-turned-filmmakers. Eli Roth injected satire on contemporary American foreign policy into the mix with the HostelRob Zombie fused horror conventions with those of the Western for the masterful The Devil's Rejects, and Scott Glosserman deconstructed slasher clichés with wit and irony in the self-conscious Behind the Mask. Now we have Adam Green's Hatchet, a horror movie in the tradition of Friday the 13th and all its imitators that pretends the last ten years never happened. It plays its conventions straight, an approach that keeps it from working on as many levels as Zombie and Glosserman's films, but which ultimately yields its own rewards. It won't win any converts to the genre, but for people who are already fans Hatchet delivers the goods and then some, and Green's honest passion for the form in which he's working is admirable.

Hatchet's plot is a stripped-down premise with just enough story to motivate the carnage: a group of strangers gather on a boat tour of Louisiana's haunted swamps, only to become stranded in an area allegedly occupied by the region's most notorious monster. The killer, Victor Crowley, may or may not be a ghost. The legend is that he was killed by his own father in a horrible accident, but now, alive or not, he's on a rampage in the swamps. Green supplies a cross-section of victims, from a middle-aged couple to a token black guy to a pair of beautiful soft-core porno actresses (thus justifying the film's obligatory gratuitous nudity), none of whom are particularly engaging. They're mostly a shrill lot that range from the ineffectual to the aggressively stupid, and although Green aims for humor in their scatological banter, the vulgarity is nowhere near as colorful or clever as that found in the similarly profane Superbad. For the first 45 minutes or so the irritating characters seem like a flaw—who wants to spend time with these people? It doesn't help that Green is a lot less proficient as a screenwriter than he is as a director; his ways of showing the stupidity of one of the porn stars are pretty stale, like when she asks if 911 is the number for the police (that joke was old somewhere around Jack Benny's era).

But once Victor Crowley enters the action and starts killing people off one by one in classic slasher style, Green's intentions become clear. This isn't a horror film like Halloween or Psycho that operates on suspense; it's a body count movie like the Friday the 13th sequels, in which anticipation is the key. We don't fear for these characters' lives, we wait for them to die—and we want to see them die as disgustingly as possible, both because most of them are so annoying and because it gives Hatchet a chance to exhibit its true strength, some extremely inventive and graphic special effects. The gore is by none other than John Carl Buechler, an FX veteran (and, appropriately enough, the director of one of the better Friday the 13th films) who knows his stuff. The murders here are genuinely clever and shocking, no small feat in an era when the Hostel and Saw franchises have desensitized horror fans to the point of numbness. Yet the killings are also fun; in spite of the gruesomeness, Hatchet is so abstracted from reality (as opposed to the aforementioned Hostel and Saw films) that there's nothing remotely disturbing about it. And there shouldn't be—it's a rollercoaster ride, pure and simple, and once it gets going it's a great time. Green lifts from a bunch of early '80s slasher flicks, from The Burning to Tobe Hooper's underrated The Funhouse, and his obvious affection for the genre is infectious. His enthusiasm seeps into the celluloid, so that even when the plotting is routine and the dialogue obvious, the movie has a kind of giddy energy that carries the viewer through the static spots between the set pieces. Hatchet isn't all that original, but it gets the job done as a gory campfire tale—like its villain, its brute strength makes up for its relative lack of brains.

War - Review

War is a tremendous disappointment and here’s why: Nothing happens. The film is billed as a battle royal between big name action stars Jet Li and Jason Statham. That could have been awesome. But instead of actually having the two go at it, War opts to bombard its audience with buildup that never pays off. Statham and Li are on opposing sides of the law, but Lee Smith and Gregory Bradley’s script is too busy examining the inner workings of the Yakuza and director Philip Atwell seems more interested in shooting exotic automobile b-roll than actually having the movie’s marquee stars punch each other in the head.

The plot involves a cop named Crawford (Statham) whose partner is gunned down by a mysterious assassin named Rogue (Li). Crawford dedicates his life to avenging his partner by hunting his killer down and three years later he gets his chance when Rogue pops back up on the local radar. Rogue meanwhile seems unconcerned. Instead of worrying about Crawford he’s occupied with playing a dangerous (and rather boring) game of cat and mouse with opposing Japanese crime families. Whose side he’s on is a mystery, and ultimately pretty unimportant.

War’s script is so drab that most of the movie’s excruciating running time is spent on filler, with Atwell opting to replay flashes of things we’ve already seen over and over again or cutting to unnecessary, random club footage. I’m not saying there aren’t a couple of cool moments, every now and then the movie wakes up and does something interesting. Unfortunately, almost none of it fits together into anything you’ll care about; it’s a random collection of scenes separated by long, extraneous establishing shot after establishing shot. Atwell loves showing people walking into buildings or whirling his camera around dimly lit locales, for no apparent reason.

The best thing I can say for War is that at least it’s rated R. There’s this annoying tendency now to tone down action movies in favor of getting teenagers in to see them. I liked Live Free Or Die Hard, but the film could have done with a few more uses of the F word. Good action movies are supposed to be hard edged, violence isn’t supposed to be soft and fun. That’s why it’s violence. War, while it’s not exactly a bloodbath, doesn’t shy away from being an old fashion action movie with occasional gratuitous female nudity and a hard edge. It embraces being a guy movie, it's just not a very good one.

Of course what good is having an edge if you don’t use it. The worst thing is that when in its final moments War does get around to having Li and Statham’s characters confront each other, the fight is over before it gets started. You’ve sat through an increasingly convoluted plot to get to it, you’d hope they’d give you some sort of payoff, but there isn’t one. Statham and Li never really fight, except for thirty seconds or so of half-hearted punches. Then it’s over. There’s nothing here but a wasted opportunity.

Death at a Funeral - Review

The latest from director and beloved Mupeteer Frank Oz, Death at a Funeral is a painfully typical farce, full of wild coincidences and cliché plot devices; Luckily, it’s put together with such energy and aplomb that even though you may have seen some of it before it’s still surprisingly funny.

It stars a mostly British ensemble cast of unfamiliar names with familiar faces. If you’re not a hardcore Serenity fan then you probably won’t know who Alan Tudyk is, but when you see him standing bare-bottomed on a rooftop tripping on acid you’ll instantly think, “oh hey it’s that guy!”

As the title suggests, the film takes place mostly at a funeral, beginning with the arrival of family and friends and ending when the whole horrid, doomed to be botched affair is finished. Things go pretty badly from the start, with each family member dragging his or her own baggage to the thing, some spoiling for a fight. It goes from bad to worse when the sons of the deceased, Daniel (Matthew MacFadyen) and Robert (Rupert Graves), discover that their dead father has a dark secret which may or may not involve a midget (Peter Dinklage). Things fall completely to pieces when said small-statured sleazeball shows up at the funeral to blackmail them into keeping his mouth shut.

Around this central problem Dean Craig’s script introduces us to a motley assortment of characters who’ve shown up to pay their respects. If you have a family, then you may find some of your more annoying relatives represented quite accurately in them. In other instances, the movie relies rather heavily on wacky co-incidences like repeatedly mistaken hallucinogenic substances to amp up the comedy. Tricky to pull off without reeking of artifice, but Death at a Funeral is less concerned with being realistic than it is with getting that extra laugh. Like I said at the outset, this is a farce. Unbelievable and extreme coincidences are par for the course. Look it up.

Really, Oz lucked out on this one. His recent work as a director has been somewhat shaky. He put himself on the map as more than just a Muppet director by rattling off Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and What About Bob? in the late 80s and early 90s, but since hasn’t ever really found his way back to that kind of greatness. He brushes back up against it here in large part because his cast is just that flat out good. They’re a brilliant bunch of character actors completely let loose on the material, rattling off quips and grimacing for the camera in all the right places. The result is at times, gut-busting.

Death at a Funeral is a modest little film with modest ambitions. Oz and his cast showed up on set with one thought in mind: Get a laugh. That they do, to gasping effect.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters - Review

In recent years documentaries have garnered acclaim while pointing out the shortcomings of governments, targeting questionable practices of corporations, or educating people about the migration habits of European swallows… or is that an African swallow? It doesn’t matter; the point is that all of these are documentaries taking place on a grand scale. But not every conflict has to involve large-scale enemies like this. The simplest conflicts are battles fought between two people, man against man. With this in mind, The King of Kong shows how the most epic of battles can take place between two people, over something as simple as a video game high score.

We’ve all played a game in an arcade and a few of us have even had the fortune to have one of our scores show up on that almighty scoreboard. I’ve probably had the honor of putting my initials on an arcade machine a dozen times, but I never considered how competitive people could be over those scores. I guess it makes sense. My ninth place score in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knocks whoever was in tenth place off the list, so a little competitive spirit to keep a name on the list is only natural. Now take that one machine and increase the scale to a world-wide list, and the pressure to keep a name on top, and you have a sense of what The King of Kong is about.

The most competitive of these games are the most simplistic: Pac-Man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, you know, the classics. These games have been around the longest may be less complex, but become a test over basic video game skills: pattern recognition, timing, hand-eye coordination, and just a little bit of luck. Basic as it may be, somehow the national record score for Donkey Kong had been unchanged and unchallenged since the ‘80s. When Steve Wiebe found himself unemployed in 2003, he turned to Donkey Kong for comfort and set out to beat the store held by Billy Mitchell, a legend in competitive gaming organizations. What he didn’t count on was more than just a video game score, but also having to face personal vendettas, deal with favoritism, tolerate egos, and even have his personal credibility called on the line, forcing his submitted score to be negated. But if you can beat a score once, you can beat it a second time, right? That’s the battle The King of Kong captures on film, as Wiebe sets out not once, not twice, but three times to gain the high score on Donkey Kong and become a record holder.

The beauty of this man versus man competition comes from the two different types of people competing. Billy Mitchell is a “winner” personality. He’s very proud of his accomplishments, including his hot-sauce business and his Donkey Kong score. After listing his accomplishments he flat out tells the camera that with all of his blessings he’d hate to see the guy on the other side of the karmic coin. Wiebe certainly seems to be that person. Unemployed at the beginning of his Donkey Kong journey, Steve’s family talks about previous endeavors that were less successful for Wiebe, including a key state-level baseball game he couldn’t play in due to an injury, and an unsuccessful attempt at a musical career. The competitor breaks into tears more than once during his quest. The depiction of each person feels very honest, with both strengths and weaknesses being exposed and a conflict coming merely from their personalities, rather than an editor’s hand.

Despite an at-times-unflattering portrayal of these players (who sometimes appear to be the types who are far too old to still live in their mother’s basements), it’s hard not to get caught up in the competitive spirit, even over something as simple as Donkey Kong. By the end you can’t help rooting for Wiebe to get that top score. Not because he deserves it more than Mitchell (although Mitchell refuses to actually play throughout the documentary), but because he’s worked so hard for it and because the documentary makes it clear how much he wants it. Wiebe is the kind of hero we expect from fictional stories – a virtual Rocky who has been beaten down but keeps coming back for more – but alive and in the flesh.

The King of Kong is an incredibly compelling documentary that doesn’t rely on controversial subject material or fancy editing and storytelling to win over an audience. It’s a nice reminder that you don’t need flash and dazzle to win an audience and a video game score can be just as captivating as any other conflict out there. Take an evening off from governmental debate, explosive car chases, and high drama and enjoy The King of Kong, a thoroughly enjoyable documentary.