Third day of the Salem Horror Fest, and my second day there. It started with a screening of The Substance followed by a live episode of the Faculty of Horror podcast discussing the film, and ended with a horror trivia contest at the Bit Bar, Salem's retro barcade. (I had fun, let's just say.) In between, I checked out two additional films, the first of which wasn't nearly as good as I hoped it would be and the second of which was exactly as bad as its reputation suggested -- and I wouldn't have had it any other way.
First up...
House of Ashes (2024)
Not rated
.jpg)
Score: 2 out of 5
House of Ashes is a film I wish I liked far more than I actually did. It was competently made, it had a compelling lead in Fayna Sanchez, and it touched on a lot of heavy and timely themes that could've made for an interesting film... and yet, not only did it fail to stick the landing, but all too often I found myself wondering if this was actually a horror movie. Over on The Writers' Haven, a message board devoted mostly to movies (especially horror movies) that I've been active in for years, they created a subforum for something they call "Fake-Ass Horror," their self-explanatory term for dramas and thrillers that wear the trappings and aesthetics of the genre without actually committing to the bit. They're the kind of films that give the phrase "elevated horror" a bad name, films that feel ashamed to be called horror movies and fail to understand what makes those kinds of movies work, instead thinking that you can throw some ghostly or witchy stuff into an otherwise ho-hum domestic drama and come away with something deep, profound, and bone-chilling. Here, the exact nature of whatever is bedeviling the heroine felt incredibly inconsistent and vague, with a slew of subplots that all went nowhere even after the film built them up to seem more important than they actually were, all while the male lead's performance was far outclassed by his female counterpart. I can tolerate ambiguity in a film, but not when it gets to the point when, even after the movie is over, I'm wondering if anything I saw actually mattered. This film drove itself into a ditch and never got out, and while writer/director Izzy Lee may have had good intentions, it otherwise felt like a bad, unintentional parody of everything wrong with modern supernatural horror.
The plot was this film's biggest weakness, and the thing that dragged everything down around it. The basics are that our heroine Mia is under house arrest after the death of her husband Adam in a situation that also saw her have a miscarriage, and while she was cleared of involvement in her husband's death, a new law that's been passed means that her miscarriage is treated as manslaughter. Unable to step outside of her house, she's living with Marc, an old friend of hers, so that he can support her and go out shopping for her. Unfortunately, Adam's ghost is haunting her house, and it means trouble. There are a lot of subplots piled on from there, including some people stalking the house, a true crime podcaster who thinks Mia murdered her husband, Mia possibly going insane, and a parole officer who exemplifies every stereotype of power-tripping cops, but here's the thing: you could cut all of them from the movie and not only not lose anything, but make it feel more coherent. The stalkers are nothing more than a red herring, while the podcaster and the parole officer are complete nothing characters. The plot element about the dystopian new law cracking down on miscarriages feels like a contrivance that only comes up at the very beginning, the excuse for why Mia is under house arrest, like how the first Purge film used its worldbuilding solely to give an excuse for the events of the story. Even the exact nature of the haunting is shrouded in so much ambiguity that, when the film finally revealed what was actually happening, I found myself wondering why it played so coy for so long. After seeing what this film was going for, I'd have written it not as a straightforward supernatural horror film where the ghost is spending more than half the runtime terrorizing our heroine, but as a gothic romance where it is trying to save her from an all-too-human evil in her life. This film is so filled with ideas that nothing in it has room to breathe, leaving a story where only about thirty minutes' worth of it actually seems to matter.
Competent production values were really the only thing that saved this movie, and even then, just barely. There are some nifty special effects shots later in the film as the ghost's presence becomes increasingly overt, and even before then, director Izzy Lee did do pretty good work building atmosphere, especially with how the film used mist to signal the ghost's presence. While Mia as a character was all over the map, her actress Fayna Sanchez did her best making her feel like an actually coherent character, somebody who was still grieving the death of her husband and whose situation is only made worse by the people who falsely suspect that she killed him. Unfortunately, I can't say the same of Vincent Stalba, the other half of what is mostly a two-person show here. His performance as Marc felt flat, to the point that it arguably telegraphed certain plot twists way too early in the film, making it hard for me to buy him as a supportive friend for Mia. What's more, inconsistent writing meant that his behavior and motivations seemed to constantly change, making it hard for me to get a grasp on his character at all.
The Bottom Line
This film had too many redeeming qualities for me to really hate, and the Salem Horror Fest did a screening of the infamous Troll 2 later that day to remind me what a truly awful movie is. Those are the only reasons why this didn't get a 1 out of 5. This was a forgettable, overstuffed nothing of a film that was made with good intentions but felt like every bad stereotype of "elevated" horror brought to life.
----------
Fortunately, the final movie I saw on Saturday sucked in the way you actually want a movie to suck...
Troll 2 (1990)
Rated PG-13
.jpg)
Score: 1 out of 5 (objectively), 4 out of 5 (unintentional comedy)
"They're eating her. And then they're going to eat me. OH MY GOOOOOODDDDDD!!!"
Troll 2. What is there to say about Troll 2 that hasn't already been said before by bad movie aficionados? It's my generation's version of Plan 9 from Outer Space, widely recognized as one of the worst movies ever made to the point that Michael Stephenson, the actor who played its kid protagonist Joshua, later made a 2009 documentary about its cult fandom that was titled Best Worst Movie. Nothing about it works. The protagonists are stupid, the acting is either wooden or overwrought across the board, there's an evil witch character who feels like she stepped in from a completely different movie, the special effects are comical, the monsters are just people in cheap goblin masks and sack clothes, the story is largely an excuse for writer/director Claudio Fragasso's wife to vent about her hatred of vegetarians, the dialogue is written by somebody who didn't speak English natively yet insisted it be delivered as written, Fragasso seems convinced that he made high art with this movie, the behind-the-scenes stories that have been told about its production are more interesting than anything that happens in the film itself, and if you go in trying to take it seriously as a horror film, you will break your brain.
I loved it.
Joe and Sean, the hosts of Bloody Disgusting's podcast The Horror Show, handled the screening of this film, and they treated it like old-school horror hosts with regular breaks during the film to laugh at the things we'd just witnessed. Everybody in that little theater went in knowing to expect a slow-motion trainwreck, the kind of film that has given hope to countless amateur filmmakers on the grounds that surely nothing they make can be this bad. It's a movie where the badness is so over-the-top that it loops back around at some point and you're actually watching a comedy, and a damn funny one at that. When "the line" came, I, somebody who'd never seen the whole movie from start to finish but damn well knew that line by heart thanks to how it's been burned into movie geek lore, recited it right along with the character, and I wasn't the only one in the theater doing so. And that wasn't the only line in the film that got the crowd roaring, either. Make no mistake, this is a truly wretched film with absolutely no redeeming qualities on its own. But in that, it accidentally stumbles upon an unintentional one: being an object example of everything wrong with the B-movies of its era to the point that it becomes great entertainment in its own way.
The Bottom Line
There's really no way to describe the experience of watching Troll 2, especially in a live screening with a crowd. My reviews for good comedies are usually short, lest I give away the best parts, and so too is it the case with this. If you wanna laugh your ass off at one of the worst movies ever made, throw this on, preferably with some friends and some quality intoxicants, and have a blast.
No comments:
Post a Comment