Lightning Round: Theater Halls of Horror

Because nothing says horror like murder, PureFlix, and of course, Sony.

Some would look at the slate that I have planned and perhaps question its timliness or adherence to theme. Valid as those concerns may be, I confess that one driving factor in tackling a few of them is their possibility of being outside of the home media release window required for my annual gauntlet of cinematic garbage, Crapshoot.

Time will tell if they garner mention in a few months time for that series but rest assured, there's plenty of horror to be had. For instance, "Flatliners" opens up with an image I've come to feel great anxiety and dread over.

I often make concerted efforts to avoid going for the easy jokes but the aptly named “Flatliners” is one of those movies that makes doing that so damn difficult.

This is a movie that isn’t simply dead on arrival so much as it is the cinematic equivalence of a false pregnancy; the outward appearance of life at conception that isn’t really formed.

“Flatliners” is a remake of the 1990 Joel Schumacher film of the same name, in which a group of young medical students, seeking to document the experience of human consciousness after death, resuscitate themselves after initiating their deaths under controlled circumstances.  Upon revival however, the students are haunted by disturbing visions related to what they believe they saw in the “afterlife” of their ethically dubious experiments and band together to survive their apparent hauntings while attempting to discern how to fix things and discover whether their experiences are truly paranormal rather than psychological.

Although the film is by no means a classic, Schumacher’s flair for intimate storytelling and capability of directing actors made it into a serviceable thriller with an intriguingly novel concept at the very least.

“Flatliners (2017)” on the other hand, fails to take any decent advantage of its concept but doesn’t even seem to fully grasp what it wants to accomplish as an alternative.

Ignoring the utter lack of conviction towards selling the crux of its own material, including a cast of hot and pretty CW-essque actors that feel more like they’re being explicitly directed to act like fake television drama doctors than real medical professionals, it’s hard to criticized a film that so clearly doesn’t care enough about its own existence to perform even the basics of its premise correctly.

The ambiguity of the psychological experiences plaguing the staff of poor performers is undercut and poorly executed by a sloppy indistinguishable perspective that makes unclear whether or not these things happening are subjective reality or otherwise but the biggest sin is just how laughable the effort is made to market these sort of shenanigans of speculative medical science to a crowd of lowest common denominator millennials that clearly would care less even if everything else was on point.

Where the titular flatlining of the original was treated as something somber and contemplative regarding the fragility of life and the place it holds within existence as we know it, this movie can’t keep straight whether it’s a scientific discovery that would be beyond their pay grade or some sort of nonsensical experience akin to a drug high as the people that can barely muster passing grades in class that barely even look like they study go out partying and drinking after their hearts and brains have been restarted like they just dropped ecstasy.

The only people that actually show up to work are Kiersey Clemons and Diego Luna, who between a dedication to actual medical industry protocol and showing the harried results of difficult study, actually do come across as mildly authentic thanks to their undeniable screen presence and charisma.

Their worth is the only thing that keeps this from hitting the bottom of the scale but although the movie isn’t particularly painful, the laziness of “Flatliners *(2017)” is so apparent that it doesn’t even bother making a plea for cutting slack.

2 DOA's out of 10

In lighter fare, the Christianity focused PureFlix have managed a genuine surprise in making a movie that isn’t a horrifying experience to sit through while still managing to be every bit as bad as its predecessors.

“The Stray” is the apparent true story of a Hollywood studio executive whose life journey to becoming screenwriter was inspired by his relationship with the family dog that saved his life on a camping trip gone wrong.

On screen, that qualifier of gone wrong could not be more appropriate, as “The Stray” may very well be the most ineptly made film that PureFlix has thus far produced. From the opening continuity flubs of weather between shots strung together with laughably jerky editing and the lightning strike of a man that appropriately aims for horrific but ends up being flat out hilarious, the movie takes the awkward ball and just keeps on running with it.

The Davis family is composed of representatives of the entire spectrum of bad acting and their life of privilege is interrupted from perfection by their Disney Dad head of household daring to work hard at his demanding job to give them the luxuries and opportunities to build a happy life.

Their journey through his self discovery takes ups and downs through some of the most hilariously overblown and saccharine sequences of “comfort” and “drama” brought together by people that have clearly never worked on a film production before.

It’s a film that sounds like a glorified Hallmark Original Movie primarily because it feels like just that, only with a sort of adorable amateurishness that permeates from start to finish, even as it begins to enter more conventionally bad territory in the second half.

What you may be wondering is where the dog factors into all of this. I’d be happy to inform you dear reader, if I had the answer myself because the most hilariously baffling thing about the movie is that the titular stray of the film could be written and edited out of the final product as presented in less than 2 days of editing with absolutely nothing lost in between. I don’t mean to take away from the relationship that this real man may have had with his dog but it seems that if your movie almost actively forgets that it’s a character, the focus of the story may have been in the wrong place.

The nicest thing that I can say about “The Stray” is that outside of being an unintentionally comedic goldmine, the likes of which a “Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque” show would have a field day with in about a decade and a half, it only works out that way because it is ultimately sincere in its emotions and convictions, while also lacking all of the argumentative strawman hatred and misinformation that makes despicable movies like the “God’s Note Dead” series so contemptable and promoting of an unflattering and undeservedly nasty image of Christian art and its audience.

It has a surprisingly sweet nature to it but that only serves as icing to a cake of bad decision-making in film production that make this feel less like “The War Room” and more like “The Identical.”

3 Animal Saviors out of 10

Sitting here days after mulling over “The Snowman,” I still question whether or not this is even within my jurisdiction for assessment. I review movies and this isn’t even a complete film by admission of its own creators.

Based on Jo Nesbø’s book of the same name in his Neo-noir series about the cases of self loathing Norwegian detective Harry Hole, whatever was contained within the missing chunk of the screenplay that director Tomas Alfredson failed to produce in the mismanaged scheduling that seems to have plagued this film was clearly key in snapping the entire production together for better or worse.

The skeletal structure of “The Snowman” is mostly in place for a tense, fascinating, thriller bolstered by a capable cast and atmosphere provided by excellent cinematography as Hole works to uncover a serial killer using snowmen as a calling card. Unfortunately to say that the struggle of the editors to make the existing material work is apparent on screen is an obvious overstatement akin to describing snow as white stuff.

It seems to want to be character driven but never delves deeply enough into the defining attributes and mindset of its individuals as the mystery meanders with no real rhythm or impact towards a cartoonish conclusion that feels as hollow as the people inhabiting this world.

Alternatively, the movie can’t dedicate to the scope of its narrative, incorporating aspects of political espionage with no pay off or connection to the direct threat of the killer, which attempts to settle on certain themes of childhood trauma caused by perceptions of societal propriety to no avail because everything from character  motivations to scene by scene connective tissue seems to be outright missing giving off only a vague overview of what the final product was supposed to be.

Alfredson’s atmosphere and performances along with the direction of cinematography bring together the hollow shell of a film that’s beautiful and brimming with visible potential on the surface but what little “The Snowman” lacks in the key areas of storytelling turn it into a poorly edited catastrophe that’s damn near irredeemable in its current state, making for a movie that’s unintentionally funny at best and nap inducingly boring at worst.

While the excellent execution of production and solid performances prevent me from hating it as much as the world seems to be, I think back to the similarly nightmarish production of 2015’s “Fantastic Four” with the understanding towards any Jo Nesbø fans that as bad as this movie already is, if this were done to something that I personally loved, I would be outright pissed off.

4 Production Screw-Up Mysteries out of 10

Making his Halloween season rounds, producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity) leaves the high school kiddies with a PG-13 goody to call their own in the form of “Happy Death Day,” just about everything that you would expect from a conceptual mash up between a slasher movie and “Ground Hog Day.”

Theresa Gelbman is a tortured but shallow sorority girl forced to die at the end of her birthday over and over again until she can successfully find and kill her killer before they get to her.

For a glorified indie movie and what few resources it has to play with, the film is undeniably inventive on a funhouse level, with all of the fun little tricks of alternate routes through the same circumstances that the premise entails. The movie may have been born from something of a lazy premise but it’s executed with a level of sincerely infectious energy that will at least leave anybody out for a good time at least mildly satisfied. It’s for those reasons that I wish I could have enjoyed it more.

Although it defies the trend of every other movie rounded up this week by actually making decent usage of its own concept, “Happy Death Day” also represents a sort of half-measure on the part of mainstream Hollywood that I am increasingly growing sick of.

The college setting of the movie represents the sort of cynical one note parody of its own culture that’s typically reserved today for bad network television while Theresa herself is about as one dimensional and stupid as a horror movie scream queen victim can get.

Were these elements meant to be some sort of exaggeration prime for deconstruction or commentary, I’d be forgiving of this, and between Jessica Rothe’s admirably invested performance and the occasional revelation that comes to light across the different variations of her time loop, the movie almost seems to tease moving in that direction.

Ultimately however, it chooses to merely embrace its own atmosphere of being fun for fun’s sake. While these underdevelopments aren’t inherently damaging for this type of movie, the unfortunate effect that it play’s in “Happy Death Day” is that there is a distinct disconnect between the notion of Theresa undergoing character development and the caricature that she is regularly presented as.

Even when her circumstances are laid out, you never quite find her fully likeable, robbing the third act of the movie of its full impact but the major frustration is what occurs in between.

Being witness to almost all of iterations of the time loop that play out, you never watch her actually learn from the experience in an active capacity and that is ultimately the film’s greatest mistake. Think back to a film like “Edge of Tomorrow” and how what made most of the deaths that Tom Cruise suffers in that film so funny is that he approached his scenario from an analyst’s mentality. Each of his failures was more or less at the expense of trying a new solution, which he brutally learned from in order to refine for the next go.

Theresa not only continues to make the same mistakes while failing to catch on to what she could be obviously doing to help herself, but manages to solve the mystery by the end through leaps in logic so vast you would swear the grand revelation scene was intended for parody. The impact that this has on the film itself, is like watching a really cool adventure game that you would love to try out but being forced to watch it played by somebody that has no sense of skill, respect, or even interest in the game in question.

I really do appreceiate “Happy Death Day’s” back to basics approach in an age of Hollywood excess and special effect bloat but I just don’t feel right about fully praising what essentially feels like the first step of a retraining process, requiring the entertainment industry to regress before it can properly expand once more, akin to breaking an improperly set arm for it to heal all over again.

 5 Death Day Candles out of 10