Before Moonrise

An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) directed by Anthony Waller

“She’s not interested in douchebags like us. European babes are charming and sophisticated. Especially the French.”

Tom Everett Scott is a lucky lucky man. You can consider 1996-1997 to be the highlight of his career: a popular bubblegum movie about a faux bubblegum pop song (That Thing You Do!) and then he got to hold Julie Delpy’s breasts while she says “This will relax you, no?” (Relax may not be the word for it. I would say, maybe, soothe.) James Dean’s career looks like a failure by comparison. (Holding Sal Mineo’s man-boobs in Rebel Without a Cause just doesn’t make the grade.)

Now that I’ve mentioned the reason I loved this movie in 1997, we can move on to some other things of interest in this movie. I was never a big fan of An American Werewolf in London, so even the tentative (and underplayed) relationship between the earlier film and the new one didn’t really resonate with me. Maybe it’s time I took another look at the original. The thing I wasn’t expecting on watching An American Werewolf in Paris again was how much it screamed “Mid-1990s” to me.

The Americans in question (Andy, Brad and Chris) are backpacking through Europe with their Eurail pass and engaged in a running contest to see who gets the most points for doing x-treme™ things like bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower. X-treme™! And if that doesn’t scream x-treme™ to you, maybe the music of Smashmouth will. Ah, 1997. The only thing that would have made this film more 1997 would have been if the climax of the film had featured a retro-swing bar populated by werewolves doing the Lindy. Granted the motif of sensitive 90’s American college student (“No one as beautiful or as sensitive as you deserves to be so sad,” he says to her.) in Europe trying to score with a French girl is really more 1995, but the fact that for both Ethan Hawke and Tom Everett Scott the femme in question is Julie Delpy…well, that really speaks to my generation in a special way. Very special. Very…way.

Anyhow, in the wake of Hostel it was interesting to see an earlier film tackle the idea that there are people in Europe who are just looking for novel ways of dispatching and brutalizing American expatriate college students. Spend your year abroad studying in Fiji and you’re fine. Spend a summer in Europe, though, and you’re one party at the Clube Lune away from being eaten by a werewolf. (And elitist, America-bashing Social Darwinist French werewolves, at that.) Just how old is this distrust of Europe as expressed in horror stories? Older than Smashmouth, I would guess.

The werewolf transformations and lore are pretty good for 1997. The CGI is tolerable, as is most of the humor and action. For a movie that closes with a song by Bush (yeah, it’s just like 1997 all over again) it has aged pretty well. (Though, if this movie was a George Lucas film he would probably have changed the New York skyline for the ending when Serafine (Julie Delpy) and Andy (Tom Everett Scott) jump off the Statue of Liberty. Vince Vieluf (Brad) has a couple of good scenes after his character dies, as does the hilarious Julie Bowen (who attempts to have sex with Andy on Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery). Two Julies for the price of one! And only one of them will make you drink a heart smoothie.

I’m not saying this is one of the best horror comedies ever. I’m not. But it’s pretty good and it’s a really entertaining time capsule of a special, more innocent and yet, more x-treme™, time. So, if you’re tired of brooding werewolves, werewolves who must fight vampires, or would like to see a mix of Hostel without the torture, and Before Sunrise but with Werewolves with a little bit of Eurotrip thrown in, with a pair of Julies, and a French cop (who must be friends with the one from The Transporter) and love Smashmouth, then this is a good fun movie to sit through.

Extras
Trailer
“Things are going to get a little hairy…” Yep, they are. Good trailer.

Additional Titles
The posters for Scream 2, The Crow and Playing God, or as I like to call it, The World’s Most Unlikely Triple Feature.

Jess Franco’s Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (Singing Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat”)

Count Dracula (1970) Directed by Jess Franco

You have learnt much. You can do nothing. – Dracula

Many films claim (with varying degrees of pretension) to be faithful to their source material, and few come really close. It’s gotten to the point where it would actually be refreshing to see a film open up with a title card that reads “based tentatively on the hideously uncinematic novel by ___.” We can have a whole argument about why a society that supposedly values original thought and intellectual property should be so demanding of products that are sold as “based on a true story” or claim to be as faithful as possible to someone else’s intellectual property. And we can have another argument about why anyone should or shouldn’t bother to be faithful to Bram Stoker. We can have both arguments right now. Seriously.

But the funny thing is that we should be discussing this at all while talking about a Jess Franco film. My introduction to Señor Franco’s filmmaking efforts began when I stumbled upon a VHS copy of Oasis of the Zombies in the clearance bin at Woolworth’s in Waltham, Mass. For the longest time I thought I had in my possession one of the worst films ever. I have long since stood corrected. The thing about Jess Franco’s Dracula, and what gives it an edge over that other monstrosity (I’m looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is that, bless his heart, Jess Franco obviously tried to get it right.

For one thing, he managed to do a pretty good job of hiding his small budget. Dracula’s castle is as good as anything from the contemporaneous Hammer oeuvre. The plot follows Stoker in most cases and if you’ve sat through any three other Dracula films you can almost forgive the changing of the various characters around Mina and Lucy and Jonathan. (It almost seems to be a point of pride amongst Dracula adaptors to see who can make the most hopeless jumble of Harkers, Holmwoods, Sewards, Westenras and Morrises. How hard could it be to keep track of five characters? Maybe they need a soap opera writer to do an adaptation from Bram Stoker.) The most telling detail is in the way Dracula becomes younger and more robust in the course of the film. This is straight out of Stoker, and this was the first film to remember that part of the story and try to represent it. And that’s just one example of Franco’s attempts to keep his film faithful to Stoker. The fact that he makes a halfway decent film while doing it is to his credit. It proves once and for all that he’s not a shitty filmmaker because he doesn’t know how to make a good film or what a good film should look like.

So, maybe you don’t care about whether or not a Dracula film is faithful to Bram Stoker. What else could make you want to see this film? Did I forget to mention that Christopher Lee is Dracula? Yeah, I forgot to mention that. As inconsistent as this film is, it’s probably the best Christopher Lee Dracula performance ever. If you don’t believe me, just skip ahead and watch the monologue that Dracula delivers to Harker about the history of the Draculas. It’s terrifying, awe-inspiring, oddly touching, menacing and simply brilliant. It’s not just the acting there, but the writing is good too. It pains me to think that people will continue to watch that craptastic BS Dracula from the 1990s and will never bother to see a moment of brilliance like Christopher Lee saying “I am not young, yet I am restless.”

And did I mention that Klaus Kinski plays Renfield? I did now. He looks like a blonde Mick Jagger in a strait-jacket. And when you find out he’s gone insane because his daughter was killed by Dracula, he becomes suddenly much more interesting than just some crazy guy who likes to eat flies and lives in a padded cell.

And did I mention that Herbert "Chief Inspector Dreyfus" Lom is Dr. Van Helsing? (Apparently he was the second choice, because they couldn't get Vincent Price.) The only way it could have been better is if they had gotten Alec Guinness for Dr. Seward and Peter Sellers as Quincey Morris. Lom is a great Van Helsing. He could easily have gone head to head with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing and is a sight better than most of the other versions. (I’ll make an exception for Christopher Plummer’s Van Helsing from Dracula 2000.)

I think what really impressed me (and which felt more true to Stoker than other versions) was the absence of exploitation. There’s no gore or grotesque effects, precious little in the way of blood and nary an exposed ankle’s worth of sexploitation. It’s a film that is almost as repressed as Stoker in its sexuality. For the director of Vampyros Lesbos to show that kind of restraint shows just how well he understood Stoker’s novel and just how true he intended to be to it in spirit. The latent sexual metaphor of vampirism loses its power if you actually show other forms of sexuality. What makes it fascinating in Stoker and in this film is how it is a form of release, if you will. And it makes us more fully understand Lucy and Mina’s mesmerized attraction. Soledad Miranda does a particularly wonderful job of playing the hypnotic hunger when she’s trying to hunt the little girl in the cemetery. It’s seductive without being obviously sexual, which is a good way to describe the best parts of this film.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a real Jess Franco movie without the scene that makes you either groan or laugh like a maniac at the absurdity. In this case, it’s a scene in England where Dracula’s lair is populated with various examples of rural taxidermy that turn and shake a little (like a really piss poor haunted house exhibit) while lights shine and various animal hisses and screeches are heard. Franco says the scene is symbolic of Dracula’s violation of the natural order of things, presumably because Dracula can wire up the forces of taxidermy and a reel-to-reel tape player. It’s the only scene that reminded me that this was a Jess Franco film and it made me smile a little (yes, that’s a badger over there, and not just any badger but Dracula’s Badger, with pointy buck teeth) even if it felt very out of place in an otherwise noble effort.

Extras

If Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom and Soledad Miranda weren’t enough for you, then maybe you’ll want to stick around for the extras.

1. Christopher Lee reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula
It’s an abridgement, but it clocks in at around 84 minutes, so it’s a good night’s entertainment and a great moment in audiobook history. You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard Christopher Lee narrate the entirety of Dracula. Also, if you had any doubts about how faithful Jess Franco really was to Stoker, you can actually listen up. Again, I think it shows a respect and love for the original on the part of both Jess Franco and Christopher Lee.

2. Beloved Count
A retrospective documentary featuring interviews with Jess Franco and others. Besides stories about Klaus Kinski (who apparently gave Jess Franco no trouble at all but allegedly bothered the producer Harry Alan Towers in novel ways, if Towers is to be believed) the most amusing part is to see Jess Franco (subtitled, even though he’s speaking in English, allegedly) trash-talking Francis Ford Coppola’s Mary Shelley's Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “I know that Coppola said his adaptation is more faithful to Dracula. It’s not true. The meaning of the film is completely wrong…” I can’t do full justice to either Jess Franco’s mangled English or his hilarious delivery here, so you’ll just have to watch it yourself. In another context I might consider it would be ironic, absurd or surreal to watch any filmmaker being taken to task by Jess Franco, but the thing is, when he says that Coppola’s Dracula is absurd, he’s right. And there’s something entertaining about watching Jess Franco be right about something.

One more thing that Jess Franco may be right about is Klaus Kinski. Franco’s response to one anecdote is the best demythologizing line I’ve ever heard: “I can’t remember that because it’s not true.” The story in question is that Kinski had no intention of doing a Dracula movie and that he didn’t realize he was in one until a moment of clarity while working on a scene with Maria Rohm (wife of producer Harry Alan Towers) and said to her “That bastard husband of yours has got me in a Dracula film.” For this story to be believable we’d have to think that Klaus Kinski didn’t read the script (or didn’t have a script) that he didn’t know his character was named Renfield or that he was in a scene with someone named Mina or that he was so drugged up that he only became lucid halfway through filming. Makes a great story, but maybe it’s one more thing that Jess Franco is actually right about. But lest we completely dispense with the legend of Klaus Kinski, Difficult Actor, Franco does mention that Kinski wanted them to shoot his scenes in a real asylum. Franco recalls, “I said if we start shooting with you in a real cell, they hear you, they won’t let you out.”

More difficult than Kinski were the Catalan police dogs, which prompt this aphorism for filmmakers: Always in cinema you have problems because of the dogs.

3. Soledad Miranda essay
A brief bio about the late Soledad Miranda who died in a car accident in 1970 not long after making most of the films she is remembered for.

4. Still Gallery
Be sure to check out all the foreign posters for the film.

Lorenzo Lamas Sucks...Blood

Blood Angels (2004) dir. Ron Oliver

Also titled Thralls, there are several reasons to actually see this film:

1. Lorenzo Lamas as a jerkwad vampire named Mr. Jones. As if being a vampire doesn’t make him enough of an asshole, Mr. Jones also drives a Hummer—thus making him an energy vampire as well. Nice symbolism.
2. The pathetic assistant Rennie (Richard Cox): it’s hard to label him “comic relief” in a film that is laughable enough most of the time, but he is worth a few chuckles. Silliest Renfield I’ve seen in a long time.
3. Leslie (Leah Cairns) should be familiar to BSG fans as “Racetrack.”

If that’s not enough to get you to see this, then…well, I suppose there is something to be said for the entertainment value of just sitting in front of a bonsai tree and watching it grow. But if you’ve had enough of vegetation, this isn’t a bad alternative.

To begin with, why does it have to always have to be about the end of the world?
It’s not enough that Mr. Jones’s thralls (sub-vampire concubine-like servants) have escaped and he’s going to chase them down—no, they also have to be duped into organizing a New Year’s Eve rave that will provide enough psychic energy to power up the ritual opening of some sort of hell-gate that will unleash Belial, a world-killing demon. I know the importance of raising the stakes, but sometimes a film can benefit from kicking them down a notch. In this case, the problem is that when you promise a world-killing demon and you deliver a worm with a puppet head at the end of the movie, you have not impressed upon me the high stakes you were going for. And all this building up psychic energy nonsense through intense rave dancing is almost as lame as counting up midi-chlorians. Almost.

But let’s backtrack a second to what this film does right: a band of attractive women kicking ass and sucking blood while being chased by a smug Lorenzo “It’s demon time!” Lamas doing his best Billy Zane impersonation. The “psychic energy” might be a lame excuse for the Coyote Ugly-style grrl bar scenes at the rave, but hey if that’s what it takes to get writhing thralls, then so be it. And the best part about these thralls is that they are about as nice as vampires can get. They don’t kill anyone, they just apply a light draining to over-eager guys. The best example of this is the lucky bastard whose punishment for starting a fight at the rave is to be taken to a back room by Brigitte (Moneca Delain) and given either the world’s worst fellatio or the world’s most awesome leeching.

It’s great how Mr. Jones keeps his thralls dressed in white, shackled together in an upstairs room bathed in white light. Nothing says “vampire” more than bright white lights. And is it bad that when Roxie (Fiona Scott) takes off her top while taking a break from deejaying my immediate thought was that her breasts would turn into snakes and bite Doughboy (Kevan Ohtsji)? (By the time she says “You like ‘em? Good. They like you, too,” I had already long since foreseen the eel-like serpents that would attach themselves to the poor sap’s neck and drain him.) I think I’ve seen too many movies like this when that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I see a topless girl. Let’s hope this doesn’t bleed into my personal life.

Of course, all this wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t have Leslie’s innocent pig-tailed sister Ashley (Siri Baruc) who is being abused at home and is a cutter. It may be a little trite to throw something serious in here, but it’s not a stretch to say that the super-human vampire strength is a wish-fulfillment metaphor for feminist empowerment. Speaking of which, when the thralls have to turn Ashley into a fully fledged vampire to save her life she instantly loses the pigtails—because vampirism is the opposite of frumpiness.

One liners abound and there’s even an appearance by a Hunter Thompson look-alike talking about bats and we are even set up for a sequel (did they really think that would be forthcoming?) by ending with Lorenzo Lamas’s detached head attempting to give someone the finger.
Good vampires triumph over the bad ones and the one thrall who sells out the rest gets her comeuppance by dying in an embarrassing way with Rennie the loser. Let’s here it for Girl Vampire Power! (Thrall-power?) Or something like that.

And if all that wasn’t entertaining enough, the credits sequence is interrupted with a music video for “Lady Venom” by the Swollen Members, which I’ll admit after a second viewing I think is not a terrible video for a song that has a decent beat and could be a lot worse. And why did I see this video twice? Because the movie was actually amusing enough for me to go watch the whole thing a second time. If you’re up for a decent crappy movie (I warned you about how awful Belial looks but I forgot to mention that the opening scene of the movie looks like an out-take from a Church of the Subgenius video.) then Blood Angels sucks in just about the right way.

Extras
I have to admit that I’m especially fond of trailers and other previews, even the annoying ones that automatically come on at the beginning like these.

1. Evil Remains (featuring Kurtwood Smith, from That 70’s Show) as some guy who is evil and is…remaining…somewhere and Estella Warren as some girl who has possibly remained somewhere that is evil.

2. The Life featuring Daryl Hannah and Denise Richards as prostitutes. This is like the Platonic form of a Skinemax film.

I’d like to say that I’m immune to advertising, but I’ll have to admit that I’ve been tempted by both of these flicks when I’ve seen them inching their way to the clearance bin. So far, I have resisted the temptation, but of course, if I had enough time on my hands to see Blood Angels twice…you might be seeing a review of those movies coming soon. (Call it a titanic struggle of willpower, if you’d like.)

Who Haunts the Haunters?

The Haunting (1999) directed by Jan de Bont

Who knew that ghosts could be in conflict with each other? Or that they can make phone calls? These were just a couple of things I learned from The Haunting, a salute to overwrought architecture.

As haunted house movies go, this is a relatively decent one. I don't know why anyone would build a house with so many exterior and interior elements that look like eyes, but then that sort of decrepit Gothic Revival creepiness is what makes haunted house stories possible. There aren't many stories about haunted bungalows or scary log cabins—they just don't have the right architecture to put a fright in a person.

The scenery is probably the best reason to see The Haunting. There were obviously some ridiculous sums of money thrown into this production and that kind of spectacle is worth taking a look at. Hill House, as envisioned here, is really something else: giant fireplace, a greenhouse the size of Denver, a mirrored carousel room, a hallway with standing water and stepping stones that look like books that have fallen into the pond, the requisite ominous looking portrait of the scowling master of the house and, of course giant statues that come to life and try to attack people. This is a truly extravagant haunted house.

Depending on how you want to feel about this film you can call it simple or rudimentary. To be fair, a close look at even some of the best of classics in any genre can prove to be disappointing if you start seeing all the flaws. On the other hand, it's always a bit disappointing when you get the feeling that either the writer forgot to finish a thought that was set up earlier, or the director didn't care about it, or it got edited right out.
Case in point: Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is introduced to us as a ravenous bisexual. Shortly after that she brushes Eleanor's (Lili Taylor) hair provocatively (Hair brushing?! Good heavens, what next?) and when Eleanor flinches at the touch that's the end of that.
Now, there are a lot of horrible horror movies that would have proceeded to turn that moment into a soft-porn debacle, but would it have been so bad to actually develop that thought further into, say, a dramatic subplot? Are audiences so dumb that we can't be trusted with a subplot in a film? Is Desperate Housewives the last bastion of subplots?

I make the above complaint not because this is a terrible movie, but because it seems like a film that wanted to be about an hour longer with much more character development and possibly even a few more frightening incidents. Instead we have a spare/rudimentary movie that is technically impressive and which has a decent storyline but that feels like it could have given us a few more rooms of the house to look at.

Yes, that is Virginia Madsen as Eleanor's sister Jane in the opening scene, and no, although I love Virginia Madsen, I didn't expect to get a well-developed subplot about her and her annoying son. It’s enough to know that Eleanor has no place to go now that her mother’s dead and her sister is kicking her out of the apartment. (This lack of feeling explains why the ghosts of dead children didn’t bother calling Eleanor’s sister to help them.)
But I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a Victorian novel lost in the relationship between Eleanor, Theo and Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson). And we could definitely have done better with more of the plucky comic relief from Owen Wilson. (Owen's character is named Luke, which means that either they got the wrong Wilson brother or Luke Wilson was otherwise engaged playing a character named Owen.)
And what’s the deal with the creepy caretakers Mr. & Mrs. Dudley (the truly great Bruce Dern and Marian Seldes)? I half expected to find out they were behind the whole thing and I genuinely wanted to see Bruce Dern say “and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

But back to the big question of the plot: if ghosts can place telephone calls to living people then how come they need Eleanor to show up and go head to head with her evil ancestor? Why don’t they just try to call up an arsonist to burn Hill House down and free them from the evil?
At any rate, the actual struggle of the story—between the ghost of the evil industrialist child-killer Hugh Crane (assisted by his malevolent house) and the ghosts of the dead kids (championed by Eleanor Vance) is actually a good conflict. The aesthetics and symbolism are well thought out (is it a coincidence that Eleanor drives a Gremlin? I think not.)—and there are some really good lines. (e.g. “Did you study art?” “No, I studied Purgatory. I was there for eleven years.”) And it has a mercifully low body count (if you don’t count the ghosts. Luke is beheaded by a giant swinging lion’s head and Eleanor sacrifices her life help the kinderghosts get to heaven. A different kind of haunted house movie would have populated the screen with several more thinly sketched characters to kill them off in clever ways around the house, but not this film. The Haunting seems to strive for a more thoughtful psychological approach, but this is somewhat undercut when we start to actually see the physical manifestations of the house’s malevolence.
Dr. Marrow is trying to study the roots of fear. I would venture to say that we have certain fears and subfears: the fear of the unknown (or unknowable) and the fear of the known (and especially the fear that you cannot defeat the object of your fear whether you know it or not.) Once you have a giant statue try to grab a character and drown him you’ve lost the fear of the unknown and replaced it with the fear of the known, which makes for a fun ride, but doesn’t unsettle you. What makes this movie less chilling is that it gives us an out—the mystery is explained (except for the mystery of the creepy caretakers) and evil (Hugh Crane and the malevolence of Hill House) is vanquished by good and specifically by the sacrifice of a good person.
In short, The Haunting is a moral fable that offers the comfort of salvation, so no matter how scary the unknown horrors are we can be comforted by the thought that all can be known and that good can overcome evil (and that there is such a thing as good and evil, for that matter). Compared to the unremitting unsettling horror of something like Darkness, that makes this a romantic comedy.

Special Features

Theatrical Teaser – Okay, houses that look like faces are frakkin’ scary.

Trailer – I’ll have to admit that I like the little poem about the house:

There once was a house, a bright happy home
Something bad happened
Now it sits all alone.
Its pillars are its bones
Its wall are its skin
Its windows are its eyes,
Won’t you come in?

No, I’m going to the next town over to have a sandwich with Bruce Dern.

Behind the scenes feature

Hosted by Catherine Zeta-Jones, this is better than the average Entertainment tonight promo reel that passes for a making-of feature. You get a nice look at the difference between the computer animation and practical effects, you get a standard set of interviews where the actors talk about what scares them and everyone talks about how spooky the set was and that no one wanted to be around it at night. The first highlight is a look at the horror movie pedigree of the producers of The Haunting. Susan Arnold is the daughter of Jack Arnold, the man responsible for The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Donna Arkoff Roth’s father was the renowned B-movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff.
But the highlight of this special feature is the extra bit where we get a tour of some real haunted houses like Harlaxton Manor (the actual exterior set of The Haunting), a nearby haunted hotel and the infamous Winchester House which is always worth a scare.

Darkness

Darkness (2002) Directed by Jaume Balagueró

Darkness was a good reminder to me of why I enjoy bad schlock-horror movies—because they’re not really scary—at best they’re sometimes creepy, and most of the time they’re more amusing than frightening. If I want the shit scared out of me I can read the news or The Weekly Standard. Mostly my taste in horror leans toward the all-time classics that are stylish and thought-provoking but not so chilling to me anymore. Granted, I can remember when I was very little being so scared of Frankenstein that even Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein gave me nightmares. Darkness, though, is a genuinely creepy and frightening film. I don’t know what possessed me to watch it twice (maybe it was “the Darkness”) but even though I knew everything that happened and when it would happen, I still found myself trying to read a book (about the archaeology of Pompeii, if you must know) while “watching” it the second time because sometimes knowing what’s coming doesn’t help.
I have to admit that in the light of day and with a little bit of thought I can think about how silly the main premise of this film is and I start wondering about the giant plot holes. But after midnight, in a darkened quiet room all by myself, I’m more than a little creeped out by this film.
So, what’s so damn scary?
1. Jaume Balagueró seems to understand that even in a motion picture it’s what you don’t see that can be the most frightening. You might think it’s a cheap trick to have the antagonist of the film be “darkness” thus implying sinister motives to every shadow, but it’s hard to pretend that it’s silly when you get a flash of something crossing the screen or—in the most godawfully nightmare inducing moment--a flash of light reveals a room full of ghost children in the foreground with their backs to the camera as they (and we) look beyond them to Anna Paquin in the well-lit room beyond. She never sees them, we do, and it’s not funny, it’s not silly, it’s not cheesy, it frankly still scares the everlasting crap out of me. You can have the world’s best special effects create the world’s ugliest monster—but while that may be grotesque, it’s not necessarily as frightening as a brief glimpse of nothing and the suspicion that something may be amiss.
2. Children, as has long been noted, are the perfect targets of potential victimhood in fiction because we (most of us) are hardwired to want to protect the little ones. So, the first time Paul (Stephan Enquist) watches his colored pencil start twitching like a compass needle and rolling under the bed (into the “darkness”) of its own accord, or when his toy carousel lights up and starts whirling about on its own, it activates that child-saving part of the brain even as it also sparks the visceral memories of being afraid of the dark and all the unknown potential malevolent entities that might be lurking about in the great big world.
3. Anna Paquin in peril sparks a very different, but similarly essential desire to protect and serve.
4. There’s nothing scarier than not knowing where the danger is coming from. The great red herring of the film is the father (Iain Glen) whose fate is the crux of the film. Even when I knew he was going to be the victim his snapping rage was a bit creepy.
5. There’s nothing more evil than being betrayed by your own grandfather. Grandparents are supposed to be even more kindly than parents, so when Giancarlo Giannini turns out to be evil, it’s disappointing enough, but when he reveals why his evil ritual didn’t work out in the first place he turns out to be two different kinds of evil.
6. Real horror is unremitting. In a different kind of horror movie Anna Paquin and her boyfriend and little Paul would make it out alive and then you’d get some sort of ominous thing following them—thus setting up the sequel. Darkness, on the other hand, is as bleak as the title—no one makes it out alive. The father is killed by his own loving family in a botched tracheotomy. (Don’t swallow a whole bottle full of pills when you’re angry.) Lena Olin’s blood is sprayed all over the kitchen. The real Carlos is suckered into the house where he will be taken care of. The architect who tries to help is killed in the subway and Regina and Paul close out the film by being driven into their end in a tunnel by the fake Carlos. That’s a pretty brutal body count.
The real reason to see Darkness is for the visual style. It has some of the best use of background light and practical effects you’ll ever see. The scene with the architect walking through the subway tunnel with the lights going off behind him in stages as the darkness catches up to him is as brilliant as it is simple. Balagueró and his cinematographer Xavi Gimenéz are consistently clever in their use of practical effects and simple light and shadow to give us a sense of evil. I thought even the orange juice in the house was evil.
On the nature of that evil, though, the attempt to make this something bigger than a haunted house movie comes up with mixed results. Sure, the house and the darkness are eerie, but once you throw in the visit to the library to look up the conveniently located tome describing an ancient ritual unleashing the original evil darkness the mystery is gone and suddenly I’m not scared. (How scared can I be by something hidden in a library in Spain?) And here’s the key question: if the darkness is already capable of imitating people and beating up children in the house, and if it is already capable of hunting down and killing people in the subway tunnel, then what purpose does it really serve to complete the ritual to “unleash” the darkness? It would seem that the darkness is already pretty fucking leashless.
And are those the actual ghosts of the children in the house, or is it just the darkness using their apparitions? I can only assume that they’re just creepy minions of the darkness because otherwise I don’t understand why the ghosts of the murdered children would want to be so cooperative with the agenda of the darkness.
Also, why is it that the electrician who shows up to work on the house is Scottish? I guess the EU’s employment rules have really opened things up for Scottish Electricians.
Now, you might take issue with all this overthinking of the details, but it sure does take my mind off the creepy things lurking in the shadows—and you might need to use a similar technique to get to sleep after seeing Darkness.

Acting
Iain Glen comes off like a creepy version of the dad from Malcolm in the Middle (Bryan Cranston) and does an incredible imitation of a cuisinart. My favorite moment is when he gets loopy and gulps down a whole bottle of meds while trying to batter down the kitchen door.
Maybe it’s just the legacy of Romeo is Bleeding, but Lena Olin always has something of an edge to me. That explains why I thought she might be in on the evil plan.
Anna Paquin is obviously really good in the vulnerable role, though there were several times when I wished she could just go ahead and mix up Regina and Rogue into one character and just start kicking ass. Also, I have to hand it to the filmmakers that they managed to work in both a scene with Regina in a bathtub and one in the changing room of a natatorium without ever going for the exploitation angle.
Giancarlo Giannini exudes weariness and between this film, Hannibal and Dune he’s mastered the ways of people secretly up to no good. His best moment is when he explains that he knew that killing his own kid wouldn’t complete the darkness ritual because he realized that he didn’t love his son. Heartbreaking…and creepy.
And a special notice goes to Fermi Reixach, whose character of Villalobos, the architect is my personal favorite. His scene in the subway tunnel should be iconic as a symbol of man limping forward with determination in the struggle against evil. Yeah, I got all of that from Fermi Reixach walking down a subway station hall.

Special Features
Yeah, the trailer and the teaser are as scary as the film itself. The teaser asks "Will you dare enter?" and I can only respond with a resounding "No, not really, I think I have to go mow the lawn or something."
“Darkness Illuminated” features director Balagueró explaining how most of the effects are done in camera and how the most effective frights are what you don’t see. As a matter of cinematic technique it's worth hearing someone talk sense and not hide behind technical wizardry. And Lena Olin sums up the film with “It’s a very specific way of scaring the crap out of people.” Only too true. Sometimes watching these behind-the-scenes featurettes helps take the edge off a horror movie. Not this time.

Stories of Lost Souls

Stories of Lost Souls (2006) was one of those rare delightful surprises in life—like picking up a penny from the ground and realizing that it’s a Mercury dime. In this case, I can only blame the folks at marketing for my low expectations. The DVD package said that this anthology collection was like The Twilight Zone and the title and packaging seem to indicate a low-key Tales from the Crypt or Outer Limits. In fact, Stories of Lost Souls is a collection of short films that were produced between 1999 and 2004 that were put together with a loose idea of theme added in circa 2006 to string them together. The sum of the parts here is better than expected from the way the whole is put together. It would have just made more sense to say “Here are several short films….Enjoy!” than to retroactively force a theme onto these films. (But then, I firmly believe in the greatness of the short film as an artistic medium.) As for the content of the films, the menu and its background music seem to indicate the title should be “Stories from a Winter in Purgatory.” It’s all very ominous, and that really colored my perception of the first film. The only other framing device is a tagline that precedes each film that indicates “Lost in” something.

1. “A Whole New Day” (1999 dir. William Garcia)
The tagline for this one was “Lost in a daze…” and that would have sufficed for a title for this film as well. In a way, this film benefited from the suspense generated by the Twilight Zone-ish marketing because I spent the whole time waiting for the other shoe to drop. James Gandolfini (as Vincent) is a less musical and less likeable version of his character from Romance & Cigarettes. He wakes up hungover in an empty apartment which he thinks is his own. For a while we are led to suspect there’s been a rift in the space-time continuum causing him to exist in an alternate reality. Instead, it turns out he woke up in the wrong apartment. Oops. I was a little relieved when I realized that these were not in fact going to be spooky stories, but still, how you’d have to be pretty drunk to go into an empty apartment and black out and you’d have to be severely hung over (and more than a little paranoid) to not figure out the truth sooner than Vincent does. Not bad for an opener, but I think it benefits most from the element of surprise about the kind of short film it is.

2. “Euston Road” (2004 dir. Toa Stappard)
If you’ve ever played the London edition of Monopoly you have the key clue to solving this short mystery. Paul Bettany is brilliant as Y (no, it’s not a Samuel Beckett film) a man with a proposition. The whole thing is clever—it’s like the shortest heist film of all time and the end-credit sequence is worthy of a Bond film. Not every short film has such memorable dialogue, but I really love it when Y says “You can be a sick puppy when you put your mind to it. So come on, put your mind to it.” Get yourself a bottle of champagne and treat yourself to this one.

3. “New Year’s Eve” (2002 dir. Col Spector)
This one played out like a Seinfeld episode as written by John Osborne. It’s New Year’s Eve and British Seinfeld (Stephen Mangan) and his friend British Kenny G (Amit Lahav) are headed to a party hosted by a friend of a friend’s girlfriend. They get guilted into inviting their cab driver up to the posh party. Seinfeld shows up and immediately embarrasses his friend British Paul Rudd (Bohdan Poraj) with the following exchange.

David: Where are the actresses?
Michael: This is not a cattle market.
David: No, I know that…where are the actresses?

So David ends up spending the night talking to Leah (Keira Knightley) who says she’s 17 but turns out to be 15. So, Faux Rudd’s girlfriend makes him throw Limey Seinfeld out of the party. Don’t expect too much out of this. I’m a big fan of Keira Knightley, but there’s not much to work with here and even if she’s not 15 or 17, it’s a little creepy seeing her flirting with someone who looks like Seinfeld.

Meanwhile the cab driver (Philip Herbert) has an argument about art with the host’s kid (“My father paid a lot of money for that painting.” “Well, he wasted it then.”)is confused by a woman doing a terrible Robert De Niro impersonation (“I’m the taxi driver.” “You talkin’ to me?” “Yes.”) and proceeds to get so high on the wacky backy that he can’t drive anywhere.

The highlight of this film is one of the interactions that Matt, the man who stole Kenny G’s hair, has with a flirty girl after she reveals that she has a boyfriend.

Matt: Why do women always do that…flirt and give the impression that they’re single?
Flirty Helen: It’s a shame we didn’t meet six months ago. I was really desperate to meet someone then.
Matt: Thanks.

Yeah, that about killed me. I’m never going to another party again. I’m just going to work on getting a time machine so I can find the people who were available six months ago.

4. “Standing Room Only” (2004 dir. Deborra-Lee Furness)
This is by far the best film in this anthology. It’s brilliant, it has an all-star cast and it’s almost a silent movie. The director is Mrs. Hugh Jackman, which explains Hugh Jackman’s presence in it. The cast includes Michael Gambon, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Joanna Lumley and Sophie Dahl, but the real star is Andy Serkis who proves that he is the new Lon Chaney. This is the best film about waiting in line for show tickets ever. Any more words in praise of it would be pointless.

5. “Sniper 470” (2002 dir. Paul Holmes)
This one’s for the sci-fi fans. It’s a story of a space-sniper (Billy Boyd) who resides in his own private asteroid fortress of Navarone in an alternating life of sheer boredom punctuated by terror. The sheer boredom is demonstrated by the bags of liquid vegetarian main dishes that he consumes, taking out the space trash and seeing the space cockroaches scurrying around. The terror is shown first as a series of vague radar splotches that our gunner takes shots at, but eventually we get war at its most personal and terrifying. We never know what it’s all about, and though we do get to see the face of the enemy it doesn’t answer any questions. This is a great short film and it has remarkably good effects.

6. “Bangers” (1999 dir. Andrew Upton)
Andrew Upton is Mr. Cate Blanchett, which explains her presence in this one. (Maybe they should have called it “Stories of Nepotism” or “Spousal Shorts.”)
This film veers into Pinterland or Beckettville as it consists mostly of a monologue delivered by Julie-Anne (Cate Blanchett) while talking to her cat, Mr. Funny Bones and making dinner for herself and her mother after a long day at the office. It has some creepy funny moments, some creepy scary moments, some creepy and vaguely sensual but somewhat funny moments (rubbing up against a catsup bottle, nearly sitting on some sausages and the furious whipping motions of mashing potatoes that looks at first like something else entirely.) I’m not sure if we’re watching a character slip into insanity or, (and this is more frightening) if this is about as normal as it gets for Julie-Ann. The only thing keeping it from being funny is the feeling that it might actually be as terrifying as “Sniper 470” if you think about it too much.

So, overall, this is a great collection of short films that I highly recommend. Bring over some bangers and mash, and you’ll have a good time with this collection.

48 Blocks, or 3 Ways to Think About 16 Blocks

I have to admit that I avoided 16 Blocks for a long time for reasons similar to why I didn’t feel compelled to see that remake of Assault on Precinct 137 D, or whatever—I was pretty sure that this was just going to be a terrible redo of The Gauntlet, and it’s not like I was a fan of The Gauntlet. (For one thing, I had only seen it a couple of times when I was a kid and for some reason I thought it was actually part of the whole Dirty Harry cycle, and not even the best of those. Still, the long bus ride under fire was somewhat iconic, if not exactly one of my favorites.) So, it took a serious recommendation and some prodding before I took the time out to see this pleasantly surprising film.

The Aesthetics of 16 Blocks
I felt a moment of trepidation when I noticed that this movie was produced by NU Image, the same folks who brought us the Shark Attack series and that nearly unwatchable classic of the sci-fi shark ‘n’ submarine genre—Raging Sharks. But apparently they are also capable of making good films and this is the proof.
Bruce Willis turns in a worthy performance as the down and out alcoholic cop Jack Mosley. He looks so tired in the opening scenes that it makes me feel exhausted just watching him struggling to make it to the next donut and bottle of booze and then in a moment he wakes up and suddenly becomes something else. What is most enjoyable about the ensuing heroism is that he doesn’t miraculously turn into a gunfighting ballerina—he’s still an old man with a drinking problem who’s in no shape to be jogging around Manhattan. It’s not the physical feats that make Jack Mosley a hero—it’s the moral choice, the moral growth of his character from a schlub with dubious ethics to a stand-up guy. It’s to Willis’s credit that he can handle all of this and throw in just enough of his sense of humor to give us a character who we actually like.
And then there’s Mos Def as Eddie Bunker, the jailbird witness who just won’t stop yapping. It takes a little while to really get to like his character but something about Mos Def makes me want to believe him from the beginning. He’s an obsessive chatterbird, but his obsession with cake recipes is charming and as yappy characters go he’s profound without being overwritten. And like Willis’s character he’s got his flaws, though his ultimate moral redemption is in what he does after the main action of the film is over. (Like the real life Edward Bunker, he does make good with his second chance.)
Bruce and Mos both deserve a really big cake for their acting here.
The gang of corrupt cops is solid—they generally look like people you might otherwise mistake for protagonists in a different story. (Except for the guy playing Det. Shue (Robert Racki) who looks like a weasel-eyed dirty cop, and of course the semi-dirty Deputy Commissioner—are there any good police commissioners in films?) And then there’s David Morse, who I’ve liked since St. Elsewhere and who still manages to fool me into thinking he might be a good guy in films like this. So, maybe a smaller cake for Mr. Morse.
Honorable Mention Cupcake Award goes to Kim Chan for speaking the words Yu-Gi-Oh! and thus making me cringe and laugh at the same time. Another honorable mention goes to Jenna Stern who plays Bruce Willis’s sister, Diane (she got the prettier genes) and who deserves more screen time. In fact, Diane’s timely appearance is just about the only thing that keeps from the gender imbalance of the film from being too noticeable. (The ADA doesn’t really count.)
The cinematography is solid with some exceptionally good visual moments. (Granted, the NYC landscape at close quarters doesn’t afford any opportunity for the grandness of a David Lean film.) The Richards (screenwriter Wenk and director Donner) each deserves a tray of cupcakes for their work here. They obviously benefited from having a dynamic improvisatory duo like Mos Def and Bruce Willis, but the mere fact that they knew what they had shows superior judgment and skill on their part. And the more or less real-time chase of the film is gripping and more or less realistic without being dull and exciting without being too unbelievable.
Also, their commentary on the deleted scenes is simply hilarious. I think the next time they announce a Will Ferrell movie he should be kidnapped and replaced with Richard Wenk. As for Richard Donner, this film can certainly stand up there with The Goonies, Superman and Lethal Weapon.

The 17th Block: A Tale of Two Endings
The greatest feature on the 16 Blocks DVD is that you can play the whole film with either the theatrical ending or the “alternate” ending. Frankly, every DVD with such endings or deleted scenes should give you an ala carte buffet option of watching a film with whatever combination of scenes you want. Of course, even if that wasn’t a technological nightmare it’s enough to give every film director, editor, and all the assorted corporations, guilds, associations and covens fits and nightmares just thinking about it.
Now, the cover calls the alternate ending “shocking” whatever that means, but it’s not really shocking. All it really does is highlight the point that each ending represents a fundamentally different philosophy. The ending you like most is likely to reflect your belief system. The film’s overall theme is that people can change and (with a little push from fate) do something right with their life. The theatrical ending rewards the belief that people can change by having both Eddie Bunker and Jack Mosley survive to continue the changes in their lives that they begin here.
The alternate ending, on the other hand, is predicated on the notion of sacrifice: that the act of doing the right thing is its own reward and that the hero must sacrifice his life to make good—possibly in expiation of his sins. Is this a necessary sacrifice? (And come to think of it, the jail term that Jack Mosley serves in the theatrical cut is a sacrifice too.) It’s not necessarily a darker ending, but it is a bit of a downer watching someone open up a box with a dead man’s cake in it. The alternate ending makes the story more of a redemptive tragedy, but I think I prefer the theatrical ending since it gives everyone a second chance to prove that people can change. The best part of the alternate ending is the line “They say that when a man faces his destiny, destiny ends and he becomes the man he really is.” It’s one of the best lines in the movie, and it’s a shame it’s not in the theatrical cut.

16 More Blocks
16 Blocks can also be a corrective to a problem that continually faces society: the immunization of brotherhood. There is a tendency these days (reinforced through art, film, literature, public opinion and fawning historians) to not just celebrate hero culture, but to afford the actions of any “band of brothers” immunity to any rules of civilization. The gist of this is: “They do what they have to do get the job (whatever that is) done and unless you’re there and sharing their burdens you can’t judge them and (and this is the really dangerous part) no one can really judge them.” The idea has been promulgated that soldiers don’t fight for a cause or a policy, they fight for survival and the safety of their comrades. Even insofar as this may be true on a day to day basis, lionizing mere survival is no way to run a culture. And while it is borderline treasonous to suggest the notion that soldiers are doing a bad thing if they kill innocent people in order to “do the job” the culture (mostly) does not extend that bit of patriotic immunity to the police. In fact, there is a long and glorious history of corrupt cops in cinema—cops who are just plain evil, cops who cross the lines, cops who suggest that any criticism of their actions is invalid because they cannot be judged by anyone for what they have to do. Most of the time the arguments of the cops sound eerily similar to the military arguments; in many cases the cops make a reasonable case for the idea that they, too, are fighting a war—a never-ending dirty war. Detective Frank Nugent (David Morse) even uses the phrase “collateral damage” to describe the innocent people who had to be killed in order to prevent them from ruining cases and otherwise getting in the way. Eddie Bunker has to be eliminated because he might send one of the “good guys” to jail and what good would that do? The disturbing thing for humanity is that all you would have to do to eliminate the moral quandary of this film is to change Mos Def’s Eddie Bunker to Ali Baba and change the uniforms from NYPD blue to desert camo and there would be no problem. No crisis of conscience at all. Which begs another question: if we (as a people) have decided that protecting the lives of soldiers is worth the deaths of any innocent civilians (well, foreign civilians) then why haven’t we extended that belief to the police? And why aren’t we torturing repeat sex offenders? Why aren’t we waterboarding cop killers and rapists? Why isn’t Detective Nugent right? Or is it that’s he’s right about our attitudes, and just mistaken about the geography where we hold that to be true?
The good news is, there’s a place where we still have a conscience and we can still imagine that doing something right for once is what makes a real hero—that it’s not just “us” and “them” but “right” and “wrong” that define the “good guys” and the “bad guys” whether it’s in a film or in real life. That idea, the idea that we are defined by what we do and not merely by who we are or who we have been—is worth baking a cake for and celebrating.

Highlights from Shark Attack 2

Morton: Well, there goes Mr. Warmth…
Nick: Mm-hmm.

Yep. Very eloquent. That's a whole scene right there.

Francisco: It's like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey. It's not bad. That's not bad at all.

The problem with this analogy is that no one ever goes chumming for donkeys and your end goal isn't to tranq a killer donkey and get it on your boat. (Though, a movie about a shark-toothed killer sea-donkey would be original.)

Tom Miller: Looks like a 12 footer.
Nick: No, this one's 16.

Classic.

Samantha: You didn't see Amy's eyes.
Because a shark ate her eyes! And her face, too!

Samantha: Save your promises.

And then stick those promises in a sack and then come back and hit me upside the head with your sack of promises--then you'll see what those promises are good for.

Mayor Shandu: Sharks really are not as dangerous as people think, as long as you don't antagonize them, yeah?

Does that mean that seals go around picking fights all the time? Seals are pricks.

Francisco: Let's give them something for the evening news.

That kind of line never leads to good things, because the evening news is always about people being killed and never about sharks being fed in a routine way.

Nick: Kenny's dead, you son of a bitch.

Bastards.

And Van Hunt, he's just casually smoking away and he says, "Ahh. You've outsmoked the Devil himself."
So, whenever we see that smoke coming off the mountain like that we say 'Ah, Van Hunt's at it again.'

Who the hell is Van Hunt? The scene just opens up on a bearded bartender telling this really dumb-sounding pseudo-Afrikaaner folk tale and it makes no sense.

Marcus: Damnit, Tom! I told you not to tie up the phone. Get your own line if you want to download porn all night.

Cape Town needs some DSL for the shark boat boys.

Roy Bishop: What's it like knowing someone died because you screwed up?

It's a lot like the shame you feel when you're in a terrible shark movie.

Nick: Michael, do me a favor. Get Crocodile Dundee out of my face.

I'm surprised Paul Hogan didn't do a cameo so someone could say "That's not Crocodile Dundee. THIS is Crocodile Dundee." But maybe he was too busy doing Sharkadile: The Revenge.

Nick: Which one of you guys dresses up as the Indian?
Roy: You're funny.
Nick: I just wanna know.

Not counting the romantic montage sequence this is the funniest bit.

Marcus: Capturing a great white? Jesus! Next thing Francisco will have you out looking for Moby Dick.

No, he's already got a copy.

Marcus: So, what's your plan?
Nick: We'll bait him, drag him near the boat, I'll hit him with a tranquilizer dart and we'll tow him in. It's a piece of cake.

But what will we do about the shark?

Marcus: Piece of cake, my ass.

Tom: These girls are babes. You're gonna owe us big time.

I'll give you some cake and a copy of Moby Dick. How about that?

Morton: We'll have to do it on the sly. I've got Francisco breathing down my neck.

You could dangle a donkey in front of him and then dangle a carrot in front of the donkey and that might distract him.

Pricks.
Nick: Pretty much.

Yep.

Tom: Hey bra, I'm just saying.

I think it should be a rule that if you utter the word "bra" and you're not talking about underwear you should be eaten by a shark. This rule should also apply to movies.

Nick: Fuck you, Michael. This is your mess and you know it.

And if you'd read that copy of Moby Dick by now you'd understand it better.

Roy: What's the matter? Rubber band break?

No, that was the sound of the plot, character and dialogue snapping.

Nick: This isn't a competition, Roy.
Roy: The losers always say that.

That's what she said.

Roy: Look here, you little beaut. I'm just here to help and if it's good for my TV show I'm gonna shoot it before somebody else steals it.

Or, you could steal it before somebody else shoots it.

Roy: Know what? You fix up your hair and face a little bit, I might even let you be on my show…
Nick: Was he talking to you or to me?

I think he was talking to Nick.

Nick: Is there anything I can say to make it easier?

Say that the movie is almost over.

Nick: Well, we've got some spare time.

Dangerous sidetracking montage sequence alert! If a character says "we've got some spare time" then you might as well just throw in a sequence where all the characters pile into a car and go on a road trip to another college so Otter can pretend to be a dead-girl's fiance.

Samantha: Maybe they're sick. Like rabies, or something.

I lied. This is by far the funniest line in the movie. Sharks with rabies? Why do male writers give the dumbest lines to women?

We're in bigger trouble than I thought.

Someone may actually see this movie. That's big trouble.

Roy: Are you guys getting a case of the pussies on me?

No, but I've got a box full of Moby Dicks you could suck on.

Roy: We're gonna kill the sharks, but not on this dive. Not until I get enough footage to make the Discovery Channel wet their little panties.

The folks on Animal Planet, meanwhile, are going commando.

Roy: Sharks are evil. They need to be destroyed.
Nick: They're not evil, Roy. There's only a handful of shark attacks every year compared to the millions we slaughter.
Samantha: What do you call something that indiscriminately attacks and kills people?
Roy: It's a murderer.
Samantha: Right. And they deserve to die.

What do you call something that indiscriminately attacks and kills people? A Black and Tan.

Nick: I grew up off the coast of Florida, swimming before I could walk. I used to dive all the time—school, no school—drove my mom nuts. And I remember one day, I'd just turned 16, I was diving on a coral reef, had a big cave underneath. I followed a yellowtail inside. And somehow I lost my bearings. It was pitch black in there…very, very quiet. And a chill ran up my back, 'cause I could feel that there was something else in there, watching me. Next thing I knew, I was in the jaws of a nine foot tiger shark. The pressure was intense, like a—a vise. But it didn't really hurt that day. Guess I must have been in shark, because he bit right through to the bone, punctured my stomach. Took 297 stitches to sew me back up. And I remember thinking that at that precise moment I could live or die. I was at the mercy of a force of nature that recognized me as the enemy. A very humbling experience, Roy. For whatever reason, he decided to let go. The killing machine let me live.
…
Now because some so-called scientists have tampered with nature in the name of progress these sharks are very screwed up. And that is why we have to put them down. As for the rest of the species, they've been in their domain for almost 450 million years and I think they've earned the right to stay.
Having said that, are we all game to finish this?
Roy: Abso-fucking-lutely.

A good monologue, but the finish is lacking elegance.

Nick: I have no intention of dying now. Besides, Super Roy seems to think it's a good idea.
Samantha: Roy would jump in the water with a snorkel and a hand grenade.

Given the sharks involved here, that's not a bad idea. Roy would only be crazy if he jumped into the water with a banana and a copy of Moby Dick.

Nick: Someone has to end this.

Let that someone be Connor MacLeod, the Highlander.

Samantha: I've already lost my sister. I don't want to lose you, too.
Nick: I don't wanna be lost.

Don't let the shark eat your eyes.

Best closed-captioning stage direction: (Samantha moaning.)
Because otherwise, the hard of hearing would assume Samantha wasn't deriving any pleasure from the swimming pool sex.

Roy: Should be enough to turn those bastards into a bloody shark smoothie.

Great moment in merchandising: bloody shark smoothies from Long John Silver's.

Nick: How about a little optimism here. You got a nice coin out of it.

It is a nice coin.

Roy: Let's give these bloody dingos what they deserve.

Um, Roy, they're sharks.
Roy: Oh...we're gonna need a bigger boat.

Nick: Bite this, motherfucker.

If they had put this line on the dvd cover they would have sold a lot more copies.

Nick: I have a problem. What am I gonna do with a beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman who's willing to risk her life for me?

That thing you did in the swimming pool comes to mind.

Shark Attack 2, or Shark by Numbers

Shark Attack 2 (2001) Directed by David Worth

Just when you thought it might be safe to go near water, here comes Shark Attack 2. Now, after Raging Sharks you might think I’d keep away from bad shark movies, but I didn’t stumble into Shark Attack 2, I actually sought it out. Why would I do that? One reason: Thorsten Kaye.
While I will admit that watching the occasional soap opera is a guilty pleasure, I refuse to apologize for wanting to see a movie with All My Children’s Zach Slater because Thorsten Kaye deserves to be a movie star. He’s got a certain smarmy charm that is just begging for a good action/adventure film where he plays a loveable roguish archaeologist. I hope he gets that film one day. In the meantime there’s Shark Attack 2.
The completist in me was tempted to start out by watching Shark Attack before moving on to the sequel, but that movie "stars" Casper Van Dien and that should be enough to drive me away. Even the presence of Ernie Hudson can’t make me go out of my way to see that. But Thorsten Kaye is another matter.
I’ll have to admit that I did have a bit of a shock when I realized that Shark Attack 2 was produced by NU Image, the folks who would go on to make Raging Sharks. I had a bad feeling when I saw Danny Lerner’s name flash up on the credits as a producer. If the sharks in Raging Sharks were just a recycling of the best of these sharks—well, that was a possibility too horrible to dwell upon for too long. The fact that the opening shot of the film is the same flying over the water shot that would be later used in Raging Sharks did not bode well for the rest of the movie, but my worst expectations were not to be realized.
Instead, Shark Attack 2 is like a compendium of all the elements that have gone into every other shark movie that has come before it. It’s like the Rosetta Stone of shark movies. And like the real Rosetta Stone, it isn’t very entertaining.
The movie begins with the introduction of two unnamed women who are diving on a shipwreck. The underwater footage isn’t bad, the shipwreck is a good visual and the real shark footage is decent. Then the shark makes its move and one of the women is attacked while the other one pulls a knife to try and fight it off in the course of which she manages to take out one of the shark’s eyes. The close-ups of the white teeth in this sequence are actually well done and quite frightening, mostly because they stay true to the Jaws Principle, which states that the less you see of the shark the more frightening the glimpses you get of the shark will be. Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not follow this principle.
Meanwhile we are treated to Key Shark Plot Element #1: Revenge. The woman who survived the shark attack was Samantha Peterson (Nikita Ager) and the woman who was killed was her sister Amy. (A sideline here: the back of the DVD says that the character’s name is Samantha Sharp. Whenever there’s a discrepancy like this it means one thing: the person who wrote the copy not only didn’t see the movie, they might even have just been guessing what the movie is about. Which begs the question: why do these people have jobs? I could do that job just as easily as the schmuck they’ve got.)
So, we jump to a week later (just a week?) and we see Key Plot Element #2: The grand opening of an aquatic park. Michael Francisco (the greasy & obviously villainous Danny Keogh) is rushing forward with the opening of Water World (which looks like a pet store aquarium), but he’s going head to head with his best marine expert Dr. Nick Harris (Thorsten Kaye). Just to reinforce their differences we see Francisco drive up in his Mercedes Benz and the first time we see Nick he’s underwater—in his element, as it were. And of course Francisco has to commit the obligatory blunder of revealing what an ass he is early by registering a scientifically dumb complaint about something. (Why is the tropical tank empty? Because the water’s too cold and the fish would die. Doh!) This is also where we meet the good scientist Morton, who walks around with a limp and a walking stick, sort of like a nerdy good-natured Ahab. Morton, like many of the other actors has been dubbed over from the original actor’s voice—because apparently South African accents aren’t mellifluous?
The most horrific example of this is in the scene on a dock in a suburban neighborhood where a couple of kids are playing with a radio-controlled boat and their voices sound like they were supplied by the same people who do the American voices for the Pokemon gang. I don’t know who those people are, but I really wish a shark could eat them and their annoying voices. Meanwhile, back to the film. The radio-controlled boat is attacked by the one-eyed shark. Authorities are alerted and our hero Nick is called in to get the shark out of the inlet. But Francisco wants him to capture the shark and bring it back to Water World for their grand opening. This is a bad idea that’s as old as The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Maybe older.
So Nick goes to his friends, The Miller Brothers who have a boat called the Wet Dream, which predictably has two girls in bikinis partying it up onboard. And like a real wet dream the fantasy ends with the girls dumped off the boat in favor of an actual paying gig with a vicious shark that would rather go after the boat than the bait. This then gives us a chance to hear the grizzled sizing up moment: “Looks like a twelve footer.” “No, this one’s sixteen.”
So, the shark comes back to Water World just in time for the grand opening. But the shark has one eye and that brings in the vengeful woman who sneaks in like a ninja assassin and attempts to gun the shark down with her shotgun. Nick stops her and the romance begins.
Opening day brings the mayor of Cape Town, Mayor Shandu, who was apparently named by George Lucas and of course Francisco decides to give the crowd a treat by having the shark fed in front of the crowd. This task is left to a poor schmuck named Kenny who throws a hunk of meat attached to a rope down into the water. Meat goes on the rope, meat goes in the water, rope follows meat, bad idea to not watch where the rope goes especially if you’re standing in the middle of it. Kenny gets dragged into the water and the shark ignores the dead meat and goes straight for the live flesh. That’s right. They killed Kenny. Meanwhile the shark makes a break for it because the gate to the sea was open. Morton closes it in time to force the shark to have to batter it down in an embarrassingly poor understanding of marine biology. Nick apparently ran out of tranquilizers so his only hope is to make a slow-motion running javelin throw to get a transmitter onto the shark. It’s just like Chariots of Fire, only there’s a shark and the javelin looks like it bounces off the shark.
With a killer shark on the loose Francisco puts the blame on Nick, fires him and brings in an arrogant Aussie adventurer/Discovery Channel faux Steve Irwin named Roy Bishop (Daniel Alexander) to catch the shark with his impressive boat, the Down Under. That leaves Nick, Samantha and the Miller Brothers to go after the shark as a rival team. Unfortunately for them the Wet Dream’s engine starts smoking (just like the Orca) right after Samantha took a few shots at the shark with her shotgun.
But Crocodile Dundee comes back with a mangled shark and everyone feels safe—safe enough to go on with the obligatory big surfing competition the next day.
Then comes an impossibly silly romantic montage sequence where Nick and Samantha spend a day going to all the romantic places in Cape Town, taking a skyride, feeding squirrels, standing at several attractive vistas. That night they discover a whole cave full of sharks (What is it with this fear of sharks hunting in packs?) and that they’re the offspring of the sharks from a genetic mutation experiment (presumably what Shark Attack 1 was all about).
Mayor Shandu (who has a big portrait of Nelson Mandela behind his desk) must ask himself “WWNMD?” and sends Roy Bishop to check out the cave while Francisco convinces him that the competition must go on—because this may be the only chance to get people naked on the beach of Cape Town.
Greedy capitalism is, of course, very wrong and the pack of mutant great whites wreaks havoc on the surfing competition (killing the less annoying of the Miller brothers and severely wounding the other one) but not before we get a glimpse of a topless woman sunbathing and reading a magazine because apparently that’s what people do when they go to see surfing competitions.
Now it’s time for some payback and Nick, Samantha and Roy team up to get the mutant sharks. (Roy is getting revenge for his lost crewmen Hootie and Pierson.)
Then we get the obligatory showing of the shark scar and the old shark story. This is the one really shining moment of the film because Nick’s speech about a childhood shark attack represents the philosophical great leap forward since the time of Jaws and it’s the one reason why, as shark movies go, Jaws is slightly retrograde. Because in Jaws the shark isn’t just a primal killer, it’s a force of evil in a world meant for humans. It’s vicious and must be destroyed. It’s a battle of two species who cannot co-exist.
But the new philosophy of sharks is that they have a right to be left to live as they are meant to live, and that it is only when we interfere with them—when we sin against nature and corrupt it in some way—that the result is a monster that must be destroyed. That’s why we have all these movies about mutant sharks. It’s because we can no longer simply vilify the shark for being what it is—in fact it’s even hard to fear the shark simply because it can kill us. Our real fear, as it is in many monster movies, is the perversion that we humans inflict on a nature that, if not benign, is at least the way things are and (perhaps) should be. Is it even possible for us to have a simple shark movie where there’s a shark that kills people and that must be hunted? Maybe not—not without having some sympathy for an animal that has no recognizable specific motivation for viciousness. In the Jaws films there was always a sense that this great white had become evil when it had acquired a taste for humans, but even then it was a natural development. Here, the real villains are the scientists of Shark Attack 1 who screwed around with shark DNA and the venal money-worshippers like Francisco who will do anything for a buck without regard for either human or animal life.
Does any of this make Shark Attack 2 a better aesthetic experience than watching Jaws?
No. It’s mostly a collage of the elements of other, generally more interesting shark movies. But philosophically, Shark Attack 2 is a step forward because it represents a conscious desire to set the record straight—to stop blaming sharks for being sharks, even in a shark movie which in essence trades on the primal fear of sharks many of us have.
It might be worth saving this film, just for that message. And Thorsten Kaye? I hope he gets another better film soon, but in the meantime there are a couple of moments in here that give us a glimpse of a great actor and that, too, might be a good reason to take a look at this one.

Special Features: Trailers
Shark Attack – This may be about as much of the first Shark Attack movie as I could stand. Ernie Hudson? What happened to you, man?
Shark Attack 2 – This might be about as much of Shark Attack 2 that most other people can stand.
Octopus – If you’ve seen Raging Sharks (Why, though, really?) then you’ll recognize some of the underwater shark (now I suppose Octopus) POV shots in this trailer. And it’s a film about a giant octopus that’s going after a submarine named the Roosevelt, same as the sub in Raging Sharks. And for some reason even the trailer seems to cut off abruptly--one can hope that the movie doesn't just cut to a freeze frame of an octopus mouth.
Crocodile – It’s spring break and some college students looking for swampy debauchery (there’s nothing like a marsh to get people naked and drunk) are about to be terrorized by a giant killer crocodile. The croc effects actually look good and the film is directed by Tobe Hooper. Might be worth seeing if you’re tired of watching Friday 13th or Jaws and want to see a new monster and new victims.

Raging Sharks

Raging Sharks (2005) Directed by Danny Lerner

Is the world ready for a Sci-fi/Horror/Action/Submarine/Spy/Shark Movie? Sure, why not? Raging Sharks is not that movie.

Let’s start at the beginning: I knew Raging Sharks was not going to be a great film. I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I thought this was a cross between Jaws and Raging Bull. In fact, I thought that this would be some sort of Deep Blue Sea knockoff. If only.

The first big surprise that director Danny Lerner had for me was the opening sequence—which is in space. Yes, space—the final frontier. I thought for a second that my disc had the wrong film recorded on it, but I wasn’t about to complain because maybe the movie that was actually on the DVD would be a rollicking space opera--and that might be better than a rollickless shark operetta. Then, for a brief second I dared to dream…of space sharks. How cool would that have been? Very cool.

Cooler than what I actually got—which was an exterior of some spaceship cruising along in space followed by a foggy interior of another ship where a pair of space aliens are sitting around and doing something with a big set of glass tubes. (Upon closer examination of the packaging I discovered that the back cover shows a pair of scuba diving space aliens exploring underwater. How did I miss that?) Suddenly the other ship rams their ship and both ships explode sending a glowing orange-red canister hurtling through space and then all the way to earth where it crashes into an indeterminately Eastern European freighter sending it to the bottom of the ocean after a violent (and trailer-worthy) explosion.

Flash forward to five years later at the impact zone which just happens to be in the Bermuda Triangle. Why is it in the Bermuda Triangle? No good reason.
The research ship Paradiso is waiting on the undersea research station Oshona to send their chief up to catch a helicopter—which turns out to be an unnecessary complication since geography seems to mean nothing in this movie. According to the Physics of Raging Sharks a helicopter can get to Boston from Bermuda fast enough for someone to get there in time to be called back to Bermuda for something that happened minutes after the helicopter took off in the first place and a submarine taking off from Boston back to Bermuda can make the same trip in the other direction--only faster. Now, maybe the helicopter was ferrying the passenger to a jet—but still. Why bother including that complication? Isn’t there a better way to introduce the chief villain of the story as well as getting an attack submarine into the mix?

But wait a minute—aren’t the raging sharks supposed to be the main antagonists? Nope. Because this isn’t a shark movie; it’s a sci-fi/submarine/spy thriller shark movie. So, our main characters are the crew of the Oshona—a ramshackle mobile undersea research platform (MURP?) that is full of “80’s technology” that is falling apart because of the shoestring budget and ragtag crew: which is a good description of Raging Sharks, too. Dr. Mike Olsen (Corin Nemec—you know, Parker Lewis from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose) is the man behind the Oshona and yet he keeps telling his wife Linda (Vanessa Angel) that he’d rather start a family and live in a real house in a place whose name “doesn’t begin or end in ocean.” So, why does he bother doing undersea research if he doesn’t care? Why am I even curious about this? And why is Corin Nemec’s name on the cover? How many Parker Lewis fans are there out there? Why isn’t Vanessa Angel’s name on the cover? She was in Spies Like Us. And what about Corbin Bernsen? Why isn’t his name on the cover? People might actually want to see a movie that has Vanessa Angel and Corbin Bernsen—which of course may have been enough reason for those two to hide and give way to Corin “Who the heck is this guy?” Nemec.

Meanwhile, back in the movie: As soon as Dr. Olsen leaves the Oshona, the lab loses two of its expendable divers to the raging sharks. Linda goes out to see what happened and is swarmed by the sharks and barely manages to make it back on board alive. The sharks, at their most rage-y, proceed to chew off the Oshona’s air and power lines prompting the big crisis of the movie. All attempts to fix this are met by the same clips of sharks raging—a combination of real shark footage, digital sharks, and an animatronic shark—and, of course, some very vague shark’s eye POV shots—presumably from the lead raging shark, because there are never any other sharks in those shots.

So, Dr. Olsen has to come back from his fundraising trip to Boston—but how can he make it back in record speed? With the attack submarine U.S.S. Roosevelt, of course, under the command of Capt. Riley (Corbin Bernsen). So, the Oshona is running out of air near Bermuda and their rescuers are booking it down from Boston and the sharks, they are a-raging. A diver from the Paradiso is sent down to a certain death prompting an old bearded sailor on the bridge to pull off his knit cap and weep silently. Who was that old guy? Who knows? We never saw him before that moment and we never see him again. I think he might have been one of the financial backers of the film watching the final product.
Then the coast guard sends a seaplane to—well, who the hell knows what the seaplane was going to do to help—and the diver from the seaplane falls off the float of the plane, cartwheels along the surface and is then torn to pieces by the sharks, who are still a-raging. And the silliest part of that sequence? The mountains behind the seaplane. Let me get this straight, you have enough of a budget to make digital sharks, but you don’t have enough time/money/inclination to wipe out the mountains behind the rescue team. That can mean only one thing: the producers must have assumed that no one would actually be watching this movie. (They were wrong because obviously they didn't know what $2 and a momentary lapse of reason will do to a man.)

Although there are movies that are more shoddily made than this one, many of them betray a certain quirkiness and complete lack of ability when it comes to details that make them (unintentionally) hilarious. Raging Sharks, though, is a movie that is carefully scrubbed of anything that approaches character, and which is, conversely, relatively solidly acted and produced. It's just like a solidly produced bowl of plaster. Sure, it fills you up, but it has no taste.

It’s the writing here that really stinks. The screenwriter in this case is named Les Weldon. (Less Well Done?) If there was some justice in the world he'd have to take a defensive writing class to make up for this movie. At one point Vera (Elise Muller) says “It’s not our faults. It’s not.” I don't think Les Weldon wrote that line. It was too genuine. I don't think it was part of the movie. That line sounded to me like a plea for understanding—understanding which I am happy to provide, even to the weakest link in the chain. (I’m looking at you, Bernard van Bilderbeek aka “Binky.”)

Yes, according to IMDB Bernard (or Binky) van Bilderbeek is the real name of the actor who plays Harvey, the cowardly undersea technician whose only character trait beyond cowardice and idiocy is saying “bloody ‘ell” every time he speaks. He’s awful, but on reflection it’s not his fault either. I doubt he ever said “you know, I think Harvey would say ‘bloody ‘ell’ here.” No, that sounds like some bad writing to me. Just like the part where the lab technician looks at something and just says “interesting…fascinating.” That’s a whole scene. It’s no wonder the sharks are raging. I am too, at this point.

Meanwhile an opportunistic camera crew is attacked and killed by the sharks for no reason. Either before or after that (I can’t remember which, and I assure you I don’t care anymore) the sharks go on a tear on the beach at Bermuda and eat a whole mess of people. You see, the sharks (a coalition of 12 species) are hunting as if they’re all part of a unit. They’re coalescing, they’re cooperating, they’re coordinating, they’re organizing, they’re…unionizing. Why? Something to do with the alien fuel that they have apparently been eating. One of the sharks gets caught in a net after the Great Bermuda People Eating Excursion and it gets cut open revealing the little red-orange alien fuel.

Meanwhile the USS Roosevelt has another passenger, Ben Stiles (Todd Jensen) supposedly some sort of agent for the Marine Oceanic Agency but actually an agent of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) who’s there to make sure that no one else finds out about the alien fuel source, which, it turns out is some sort of cold fusion version of extra large pop rocks that “the government” doesn’t want to have to share with the rest of the world. Shadowy government within a government that is willing to kill people to hide secret technology in the name of national security? That’s the one part of this movie that actually seems believable.
For a brief second it looks like this movie will attempt a message.

Vera: You don’t own the goddamn ocean.
Stiles: We own whatever we want.

Dick Cheney couldn’t have said it better. And if this wasn’t a movie where sharks made sounds like lions, hyenas and wild pigs that last exchange could have had some impact. Instead, it just falls as flat as a flapjack and before you know it Stiles is machine-gunning the crew of the Oshona. (Except for the lab tech, who gets stabbed in the back at his desk. "Interesting...fascinating...sharp--ahhh!") I was curious as to how Stiles managed to sneak his HK onto the Oshona when his method of entry was scuba diving without so much as a fanny pack or a messenger pouch, but maybe the HK was disassembled, or maybe it was in the sleeve of his wetsuit or maybe he hid it Papillon-style. And the parts work well after being brought through salt-water because it’s a “sub” machine gun. Ha ha ha. (Please kill me now.)

I actually felt bad when Stiles riddled Vera in the back, and not just because Elise Muller is kind of cute, but because in the course of an hour of film we knew nothing about her character. It’s as if the writer didn’t even care enough to create a character there. Then again, maybe that’s just as well given how ham-handed the attempts to make us care about other characters end up being. The phrase “It’s my little boy’s birthday” might as well be replaced by “I am a human being about to be eaten by raging sharks, please care about me accordingly. I am not expendable.” Oh, but you are. You all are.

And so are the sharks. At one point the submarine is called upon to fire a torpedo into the swarm of sharks killing many of them. (Roy Scheider never thought of that, did he?)It's that easy? Why didn't they just finish off the rest of the sharks that way?

So, the evil government agent kills off the crew members who weren’t eaten by sharks leaving just Parker Lewis and the girl from Spies Like Us. Cue "Soulfinger." That’s when everything becomes mysterious. The aliens show up in an operatic musical sequence—one of many times where there’s actual opera music in the score (Verdi, Catalani)—and they recover their fuel as the Oshona implodes. Corbin Bernsen mourns (in a manly way) even though he'd only known Dr. Olsen for a few hours. But wait! Dr. Olsen manages to get his scuba gear on after semi-consciously watching the aliens through the picture-window as he and his wife run out of oxygen—just like the movie. Stiles, who also miraculously survived the implosion, tries to stop the Olsens, but he is torn apart by the still raging sharks leaving the way clear for Arnie Becker’s submarine to rescue Parker Lewis and his wife. Linda, though, wasn’t conscious and didn’t have her scuba gear so the last bit of suspense is the fifteen second drama of “is she drownded or will she breathe?” and you can imagine how that ends. Happily ever after, of course, though no one on the submarine believes the story about the aliens that Dr. Olsen saw.

So, what the hell happened here? Was this a shark movie? Not really. The sharks are still there at the end. Some of them probably still have bits of alien fuel in them. Will they keep raging and keep getting smarter? Probably. Was this a spy thriller? Not really. The entire thriller angle consisted of one government agent showing up and killing some people only to be eaten by sharks. Not really a John Le Carré story. And isn't the government still going to come after the fuel and anyone who might have known about it? Was this a sci-fi movie? Not even as close as The Abyss. This is the kind of movie that gives hybrids a bad name. It pleases no fans of any genre. It probably doesn't even do much to please people who just enjoy moving pictures with no regard to content at all.

Raging Sharks is a homunculus of a movie cobbled together from several genres or ideas of genres and thoroughly bleached of any character.

So, is there anything of value in there?

There’s the (most likely) unintentional humor of Harvey lighting up a cigarette several minutes after it was announced that the station is running out of air. There are some decent miniature sequences and some of the action sequences in the Oshona are okay. The interior scenery of the Oshona is good and there’s a dream sequence with a shark in the picture window that is completely inexplicable and unnecessary and yet one of the better crafted moments in the movie.

Probably the best thing I can say about this movie is that it doesn’t have the obligatory exploitation moments that you might expect in something like this. You never watch anyone taking a shower. There’s never a boatful of college students having a wild drunken spring break orgy interrupted by killer raging sharks. Even the beach scene in Bermuda is remarkably chaste. Is that a good thing? Well, it’s refreshing, I must say. It evinces a lack of desperation on the part of the director and producers that is to be admired--if only for the audacity of it.

Does that make Raging Sharks worth seeing? Jeez, no. Please, I have sacrificed myself here so that no one else will need to.

On the other hand, I might say that the best acting on this DVD is in the “Behind the scenes” piece: The Terror Below: Making Raging Sharks. Here is where the most earnest performances and deepest characterizations can be found. Just look at the way Vanessa Angel wrings her hands in her interview. There’s some real anguish there—most likely about the horrible script and its impact on her career. When she says “But ultimately it’s really a story of survival and trying to get out of this really horrific situation they’re in,” I think she’s actually talking about the actors on this movie. “It’s about how different people deal with adversity,” says another actor. Yeah, I believe it. Look at the smarmy way Les Weldon says “I think the audience will respond to the story because we’re not just giving them sharks and/or aliens but we’re actually bringing together what has previously been two different and distinctive genres.” Those two genres being: crappy movies and painfully crappy movies. The editor of the movie, Michele Gisser says proudly, “The sharks in Raging Sharks are not your average sharks because they’re just extreme.” Extremely what? I bet you don’t even know what extreme means. Corbin Bernsen describes the set as a “One hundred million dollar submarine.” Really? Would that be in Bermudan Dollars? Todd Jensen goes out of way to ingratiate himself by saying that someone should write a book about the director. “He’s the encyclopedia—the dictionary—of filmmaking.” I think I’d prefer to find the thesaurus of filmmaking. Meanwhile Danny Lerner, the director, inflates the importance of the movie. “People been asked what is the most fear subject in the world—including terrorism—and number one was come the shark.” Yes, number one was come the shark, indeed. And finally Michele Gisser closes out this mercifully short cruise into the abyss: “It’s a roller coaster ride that will keep the audience on the edge of their seats ‘til the end.” Yes, it sure kept me on the edge of my seat all the way ‘til the end, because I was always on the edge of getting up and leaving my own house to avoid watching the rest of it.

Somewhere out there is a good sci-fi/submarine/action/shark/thriller/buddy-cop/comedy movie. I hope we find it someday soon.