The Screengrab : lionsgate

Saw: Ride the Torture!

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A long, long time ago -- no, really! It was five whole years ago! We'd just won the war in Iraq! -- a movie came out called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Professional movie watchers like myself were a tad taken aback, largely because we had severe doubts about the quality of a movie based on a theme park ride. As it happens, the movie was actually pretty engaging, and for a few years, before Pirates of the Caribbean went to hell and became as bad as we thought it was going to be in the first place, people got to cluck their tongues at us and go "See? You never know."

Unfortunately, that's not entirely true. Sometimes you know. For example, I know that, even though amusement park rides based on movies are far more common, and generally of higher quality, than movies based on amusement park rides, the recently announced Saw: The Ride is going to go down in history as nothing but one more step towards the ultimate humilation, degradation and sad, slow death of the human race.

No, we're not kidding: there really is going to be such a thing as Saw: The Ride. Based on the depressingly popular torture-porn horror series, it's set to open at Surrey's Thorpe Park in Britain in March of 2009. Alleged to be the first roller-coaster to be based on a horror movie, the ride features a 100-foot vertical drop in free fall, which is so scary that it induced Saw producers Lionsgate to release a suicide-inducing press release claiming that "Saw: The Ride is a reflection of how thoroughly the Saw franchise has crossed over into pop culture at large." The rides will evoke the nausea-inspiring horror caused by serial killer Jigsaw as he systematically murders people for your amusement. Bring the kids!

If that was the worst of it, we probably wouldn't care so much; but with Saw V (there have been five of these already? Seriously?) opening worldwide, it's almost a certainty that by the time the franchise drags out to its ninth or tenth installment -- and assuming no one has actually been killed on the ride -- the idea-bereft producers are sure to release a flick in which Jigsaw menaces people on the roller-coaster, confronting innocent human beings with Saw: The Ride: The Movie. When will the suffering end?

Related Posts:

Take Five: Take Four

ARRR! Another Pirate Movie

When Good Directors Go Bad: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000, Joe Berlinger)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The box-office success of The Blair Witch Project made a sequel inevitable. However, despite the ongoing profitability of horror franchises, most sequels to classic genre films suck. Hoping to avoid falling into this trap, the bigwigs at Artisan Entertainment made an inspired choice for the sequel’s director: Joe Berlinger, an acclaimed documentarian who co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky the excellent Brother’s Keeper (1992) and the Paradise Lost films (1996 and 2000). Surely he would turn an admittedly unnecessary and money-grubbing sequel in an interesting direction, right?

Sadly, it wasn't to be. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is not simply another in a seemingly endless line of lousy horror sequels. Tt’s practically unwatchable, easily the worst film I've watched yet for this series, which is no mean feat when you consider I've already reviewed The Serpent's Egg. The fact that I’ve had to see it twice in my life should dispel any illusions you might have that a critic’s work is glamorous.

Book of Shadows mostly ditches the faux-documentary style of the original film in favor of more conventional direction, but it still begins promisingly enough, as a take on the Blair Witch phenomenon as seen through the eyes of four Blair Witch enthusiasts visiting the film’s locations and the would-be tour guide who leads them on their journey. But after that interesting setup, the movie goes wrong. So, so very wrong.

Berlinger complained at the time of the film’s release that Artisan took the film from him, shot some new scenes, and re-cut it in order to make it more commercial. So it’s entirely possible that he’s not entirely to blame for the film’s overwhelming awfulness. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I’d guess that he probably had little say about the film’s gratuitous use of “boo!” moments, such as the brief flashbacks to the killings at the center of the story.

However, the problems with the film run far deeper than a handful of gratuitous scare tactics. For one thing, there’s the misguided use of the old unreliable narrator trick. It’s bad enough that the protagonists of Book of Shadows all conveniently black out just before they go on their killing spree and only discover their misdeeds after they’ve discovered the video footage. But the movie can’t even decide whether video is reliable- first we’re meant to buy that the killings (and drugs’n’booze filled Wiccan orgy beforehand) happened like we see on the tapes, but then the circumstances of Tristan’s death are differ between what we’re show in the film and the video footage of the incident. Or did the Blair Witch manipulate the footage? Oooooooooh, scary!

In addition, Berlinger should bear most of the blame for the amateur hour performances by most of the cast. It's difficult to say which of the principals is most embarrassing: Jeffrey Donovan as the ex-mental patient tour guide with his repertoire of roughly three Crazy Faces, Stephen Barker Turner and Tristen Skyler as the world’s blandest couple (no mean feat in their histrionic later scenes), and late-period Woody Allen supporting player Erica Leerhsen as the foxy Wiccan whose primary qualification for the role appears to be her willingness to disrobe. Of the principal cast, only Kim Director as the requisite Goth emerges with her dignity relatively intact, largely by virtue of playing the most grounded character. And the less said about lawman Lanny Flaherty, whose jaw-dropping performance is too broad to pass inspection in a barn-door factory, the better.

But what takes Book of Shadows from the simply awful to the truly reprehensible is the way it exploits the case of the West Memphis Three, the subject of Berlinger’s Paradise Lost films. In those films, Berlinger and Sinofsky documented the case of a group of young men who were convicted of the killings of three young children largely (in the film’s view) due to their affinity for black clothing and heavy metal music and their curiosity about witchcraft. Watching that film, one could see the sympathy the filmmakers had with these outsiders. By contrast, Book of Shadows paints its outsiders as a bunch of black-wearin’, metal-listenin’, witchcraft-lovin' crazies who are but a beer and a toke away from going a killing spree. In doing so, it essentially buys into the same anti-outsider hysteria that convicted the West Memphis Three. Near the end of Book of Shadows, as the survivors are being led into the police station, we overhear a newscaster who says the line, “sadly, as has happened so many times in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence.” Really, Berlinger- you ought to know better.

In an uncharacteristic display of good taste- or perhaps because they were simply sick of all things Blair Witch- the moviegoing public roundly rejected Book of Shadows. The film scared up barely 20% of the original’s domestic gross, thus causing a proposed prequel to be directed by original Blair Witch filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick to be mothballed. Berlinger, no doubt smarting from his less-than-amiable flirtation with studio filmmaking, high-tailed it back to the land of documentaries, directing 2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and an episode of the mammoth History Channel miniseries Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. And Artisan Entertainment, once riding high on the success of The Blair Witch Project, struggled for a few more years before being sold to Lionsgate in 2003.

Links to previous When Good Directors Go Bad columns can be found here.

Trailer Review: The Midnight Meat Train

John Constantine — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Look at that title. Go ahead, you can laugh. Despite sounding like a budget-rate porno made in 1976, the first impression left by this trailer for The Midnight Meat Train is that Lionsgate is treating us to yet another westernized Japanese horror flick. This is only kind of true. MMT is being directed by Ryuhei Kitamura — Kitamura earned his J-cinema cred making cult fodder like Versus and Godzilla: Final Wars — but it’s actually based on a short story by Clive Barker. Looks like pretty standard stuff: guy uncovers/witnesses bizarre/supernatural killing, nobody believes him, he decides to solve it on his own, things get super scary. What’s interesting about Midnight Meat Train is that it’s got Bradley Cooper in the lead. The thirty-three year-old Cooper has been popping up all over television in the last seven years but has yet to make much of an impact on screen. The thing is, every time he’s played male lead on a show, it’s died. Just look at Kitchen Confidential and the truly awful Jack and Bobby. Somehow I doubt The Midnight Meat Train is going to be his big break.

Note: This is actually the Screengrab's second look at this trailer. You can check out Paul Clark's write up right here.

Morning Deal Report: Who're You, One Of The FREAKS?

Peter Smith — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:55:00 GMT

"Salma Hayek to play bearded lady" — the headline film writers dream of. She's returning from maternity leave to join John C. Reilly in the horror film Cirque du Freak. Now, John C. Reilly is highly capable, acting-wise; playing a vampire is well within his range, I'm guessing. But after years of toil as a character actor, he's finally become famous for goofy comedy. So the question is whether audiences will be able to hear "John C. Reilly as a vampire" without giggling. And frankly, I'm giggling already.

Christian Bale may join Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies. Kind of a dream team here; Depp plays Dillinger and Bale would play Dillinger's nemesis, FBI agent Melvin Purvis.

Lionsgate will distribute the new Conan the Barbarian movie. Hail Crom?