Cynical Cinema

The original Prom Night movie, while by no means a classic, was at least profitable. It made 15 million dollars upon it’s 1980 release, and inspired at least a few cult followers. It sucked, but that has never been a huge determining factor when it comes to cult followings. That cult following, however, was enough to spawn three sequels (Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 made about 2 million dollars) and now a bigger budget remake in 2008. That remake comes to DVD today, August 19th, from Alliance Films, and it may even be worse than the original. Which, as I have already said, sucked. The only thing Prom Night of 2008 has in common with Prom Night of 1980 is the title. Well, that and the fact that it’s a horror movie that happens on prom night. The 2008 version, in an absolutely amazing feat for a movie that was this bad, made 43 million dollars at the box office. Here’s the basic plot:

You see, there was once a teacher at this school who became obsessed with one of his students. He murdered her family, and came after her, but was caught and locked up. Now, on Prom Night, he has managed to escape from prison. The cops know exactly where he is going - to the prom, to get Donna (played by Brittany Snow). So the cops go to the hotel where the prom is being held. And they stand around foolishly, sucking at their jobs so much that not only does this killer get into the hotel, but he is able to check in and murder four people before the alarm bell even sounds. Once that alarm bell is sounded, the girl whose life has been traumatized by this predatory stalker is…the ONLY one who doesn’t leave the hotel in single file like everyone else. You see, she forgot her SHAWL upstairs. So she goes back to her room, where of course the killer is waiting.

After a narrow escape, she runs out the door with the killer in hot pursuit, right into a bunch of cops. Who still can’t catch him. With this killer still on the loose, they bundle Donna up into a car, and take her to the only other place in the whole city where the killer would know to look for her - her house. Now, with the young girl hiding out, all alone in her room, at home, the cops continue to sweep the hotel. It’s not just that these cops have never seen a horror movie, it’s just that they are terrible police officers. And Brittany Snow is a terrible victim. She does this thing where she scrunches up her face to cry, and her screams are at best unconvincing.

The biggest problem with Prom Night, however, is that it follows every major slasher-film cliche to the T, except for the most important one. The obvious stuff is there. The cell phones that are out of service. The cop in the car outside the window that is protecting the girl, and then the second look out the window and…his car is empty! But the one horror cliche that could have saved this movie, or at least given it a moderately cool factor, is not observed. That being the cliche where no one knows who the killer is until he is unmasked at the very end! We know from the very beginning WHO the killer is, WHAT his motivation is, WHERE he will strike, WHO he is after, WHEN he will get to her, and HOW he will get to her. Which leaves precious little drama in the process.

All the worst cliches in horror movies, and none of the charming ones, combined with a film in which absolutely nothing interesting happens, makes Prom Night one of the worst films of 2008. Garbage!

Yes, The Love Boat has returned to DVD, on August 12th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Season One, Volume Two comes out on that day, and boy, was it worth the wait!  It turns out there are twelve episodes on Volume Two, on four discs.  And I know what you’re thinking - why not just throw the whole thing together into one glorious Season One Package?  Well, it turns out that if Paramount had done so, it would be too much Love Boat for just one person.  As it stands, there are many reasons to pick up Season One, Volume Two.  Here they are:

Kathy Bates
Leslie Nielsen
Pearl Bailey
Shelley Long
Monty Hall
Annette Funicello
Frankie Avalon
Pat Morita

I have chosen all those whose names I thought might be sought-after by completists.  Like, if you have every single movie Pat Morita has ever done, all the Karate Kids, Bloodsport III, Karate Dog and all the others, and you find out that Pat Morita appeared on the Pacific Princess Overtures episode of The Love Boat, then you would want to complete your collection, would you not?  You see, this is why I gave Season One Volume Two one more star than I did Season One Volume One.  Because I have a particular affinity for Kathy Bates.  For further guest stars, please check out the links at the bottom.  Oh - but be warned.  Annette and Frankie appear in separate episodes.

I’m watching American Mall right now and my brain hurts. My whole body hurts from being so tense in the ball into which I have curled myself. There is no word I could use to describe this movie other than “painful”. This is a film brought to DVD today, August 12th, by Paramount Home Entertainment, who I don’t hold responsible for this, and by the producers of High School Musical, who I DO hold personally responsible for my current state of agony. This travesty to popular culture is referred to as “a 2008 MTV Original Musical Movie”. Which begs the question for me:

Who, exactly, is the MTV target audience? Judging by The Hills and A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, it is vain, airheaded twenty-something high maintenance bimbos who care more about their hair and their last date than they do the war in Iraq and the state of the environment. That is, if they have heard of Iraq. Or the environment. Judging by Cribs and My Super Sweet Sixteen, it is vain, airheaded seventeen-year-old high maintenance bimbos who care more about the latest shade of nail polish and how cute Zac Efron looked on that Rolling Stone cover than they do about the presidential election or health care policy. Judging by the abundance of Ashlee Simpson and Hilary Duff shows, it’s vain, airheaded 12-year-old high maintenance bimbos who care more about High School Musical and the cute guy who’s friends with their older brother than they do about their grades or any constructive extra-curricular activities.

And judging by The American Mall, their audience is a bunch of bedridden, shallow, airheaded seven-year-old future sluts with the collective IQ of a potato. There is one character in this movie who uses the phrase “wait - backspace!” at least six times. The only movie in the world more idiotic, with a worse message for young girls, is Bratz. The only movie ever made that is more formulaic is Busty Backdoor Babes Volume 112. (Volume 111 actually featured one girl who was NOT a babe - surprise! And that makes it more unexpected and original than this garbage.) And there may not be another movie experience more painful than this one. Well, discounting any movie “starring” Paris Hilton.

The main message of this movie, as I understand it, is that a lovely young girl works at a mall for her lovely young mother. Who looks to be seven years older than her daughter. She has been accepted to university, but she isn’t excited about it, because she wants to be a rock star. And who doesn’t? But she meets a guy - who also wants to be a rock star! Amazing coincidence! And they fall in love! (With him listening to her through a wall, and singing along, and peeping through windows, like an uber-creepy Phantom of the Opera.) But will mom understand that she doesn’t want to go to college? Or that she can become a rock star overnight if the right person just happens to walk by? Will she and her new love form the band that will set the world on fire? OF COURSE THEY WILL.

There are several supporting characters. The star girl’s shallow slutty friends, and the star guy’s lazy stoner friends. Then, there is the Evil Bitch Girl who runs the mall even though she is clearly sixteen years old. Her daddy owns the mall, and she walks over people, and she just wants daddy’s approval and she hates everyone else and she’s so horrible! She’s going to tear the happy couple apart! She’s going to close the good girl’s store! She’s going to…drive me absolutely insane! But she’s not the only one. Every character in this movie is either painfully ordinary or agonizingly irritating. Every scenario is cliched and stupid. And the musical scenes? Enough to make me suffer skin failure.

If you pick up The American Mall, you will be willingly subjecting yourself to the 100 worst minutes on DVD this week. And if your young daughter specifically asks for it, that is great. That will indicate to you that she is already careening down a terrible path, and it’s time to do some serious parenting. She’s headed for almost certain disaster in life, and you might actually have time to stop it. Here’s step one. Don’t let her rent this movie. Rent Brokedown Palace instead and make her watch it. Step two is up to you.

Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay hits DVD today, July 29th, from Alliance Films. It picks up right where the last one left off, with the pair having just returned home from White Castle. And now, they are preparing to go to Amsterdam to track down Harold’s new girlfriend Maria so he can profess his love. As they get onto the plane, Kumar makes a reference to the film Eurotrip. He says “this is gonne be just like that movie Eurotrip, only it’s not gonna suck, it’s gonna be awesome”. Well, it turn’s out he’s mostly wrong. While the new Harold and Kumar IS better than Eurotrip, that isn’t saying much. It still sucks.

The opening scene, picking up right where the superior Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle left off, involves a really gross fart joke and an even grosser masturbation scene. It’s not funny, it’s just gross. As far as opening scenes go, this is one of the worst in movies. Now, the film does get (marginally) better as it goes on. There is a good scene at customs that pokes fun at racial stereotypes and airport terrorist profiling. When they get onto the plane, that stereotyping continues, and it’s good for a few more pointed and clever laughs. When Kumar pulls out his smokeless bong in the airplane washroom, however, the laughs end as the incredulity sets in. Rob Corddry, from The Daily Show, provides a few funny moments as the federal interrogator, but again the possibilities for serious social commentary through humour are completely wasted.

Quickly, the pair get arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where the inhumane treatment of prisoners is played for laughs, but not clever or pointed ones. And it isn’t funny either. They escape Guantanamo right away, hitch a ride to the U.S. with a boatload of Cuban refugees, get to Miami and go visit a friend. The Cuban immigrants could have provided a pointed satire on American policies on immigration…but they are wasted as well. Instead we get a party with hundreds of hot chicks naked from the waist down. That Eurotrip comparison is getting more and more apt. Harold and Kumar quickly manage to acquire a fancy sports car, and set across the country to finish two gigantic movie cliches - one being clearing their name, and two being to break up a wedding between the love of Kumar’s life and the Bad Guy of the movie.

This cross-country trip is the bulk of the movie, and has some decent moments. There is a lot of satire involving racial politics - the big scary basketball playing black guys who are actually upstanding citizens and orthodontists. The redneck inbreds who have a totally modern trailer equipped with all the modern electronic gizmos. And Rob Corddry, who shows complete insensitivity and utter idiocy when questioning black people, jewish people, Indians and Koreans. But the title of the movie is Harold And Kumar Escape From GUANTANAMO BAY. Guantanamo Bay. One of the most reviled, infamous and easily-lampooned American institutions. So why focus the satire on racial differences, instead of on Guantanamo Bay? Or terrorism? Or the treatment of Arabic-Americans? Or anything that is evoked by the phrase “Guantanamo Bay”? Every single moment that appears to be a set-up for that kind of sharp, intelligent satire is utterly wasted. For example:

Rob Corddry, berating witnesses, uses the phrase “you thought our national security was a joke?” Which is clearly a set-up for a good bit but…nothing. Harold and Kumar are in Gitmo, and they begin to get into a very interesting dialogue with two Middle Eastern men who clearly are terrorists. But just as the conversation reaches the level of interesting, the gay oral sex jokes begin. And then they escape. They are in Guantanamo for what appears to be a total of two minutes. And on their cross-country road trip, the only person they meet who is even close to a Muslim is their buddy who’s throwing the pantsless party. And rather than delve into something deeper, the big joke they get out of this guy is gross full frontal nudity. Hahaha…his penis is gross…

Once again, just as in the first film, the best moments in Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay come courtesy of Neil Patrick Harris, who has a slightly longer cameo in this one. With Doogie Howser, the boys make it through a roadblock, visit a whorehouse, and have drug-induced hallucinations about unicorns. These are the best parts of the film, and the meeting between Harris and Corddry verges on classic. But as far as the rest of the film goes, it’s pretty difficult to appreciate. I understand why it was made - White Castle was a big, surprise success, so it would stand to reason that they would attempt to capitalize by making a second feature. But a little effort in doing so would have been nice.

The effort, in this case, appears to have been made entirely with the DVD. The bonus features are pretty neat. You can watch the movie on a different setting, one that allows you to control the outcome. Some of the changes are throwaway changes - like, you can make the pantsless party a topless party. Why the filmmakers would have bothered re-filming that entire scene with bare boobs instead of bare bottoms, I don’t know…oh wait. I do know why they would have done that. Other options allow you to change the movie so that you’re watching an entirely different movie, one that was filmed long after the first one was over. If you decide not to let Kumar smoke his bong on the airplane at the beginning, for example, you get a twenty-minute alternate version of the movie where they actually make it to Amsterdam and meet up with Maria, and Kumar falls in love with a new girl and gets married.

But the problem is that these are special features that force you to watch more of a movie that already sucks. And I wouldn’t recommend that.

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

The biggest problem with The Ruins is that it tries to be something it’s not. And by that I mean - it tries to be something new. And it isn’t. You see there are four hot college kids…stop me if you’ve heard this before…who go on a vacation to a foreign country…still with me?…and decide to check out an area off the beaten track that isn’t on the maps or the tourist brochures…is it different yet? Is it new? No? OK, how about this - there are plants. That kill people! Which is a little different. I guess. But the plants are not used for the scares. In fact, nothing is really used to scare us. And it’s supposed to be a horror movie. This supposed horror movie comes out July 8th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The thing is - the plants could actually BE scary if they were used well. The plants are able to imitate people, and cell phone rings, in order to lure people to their doom. This could be scary, or at least interesting. But this takes up about four minutes of the 93 minute running time. So the rest of the time we have the standard hot-teen-in-a-foreign-country horror cliches. Like, the fact that each of the hot kids takes turns being the sane one while everyone around is losing their minds. And the standard, gratuitous boob shot. The boob shot wouldn’t have made sense later on in the film, so they get it out of the way in a totally gratuitous way as early as possible. Then the cheesy, ridiculous lines that are supposed to be prescient - “four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear!” Come ON!

Then, of course, the torture-porn. The one kid, you see, is studying to be a doctor. So he knows when legs need to be amputated. Which is a great excuse for some seriously disgusting, over-the-top gory detail, which proves to be useless anyway, and certainly not scary. So, where does the “horror” come from? It isn’t the plants, because although they’re the villains, they’re underused. It doesn’t come from the gory gross useless flesh-cutting. And it doesn’t come from the people, who are just annoying. The best they can do are some vaguely creepy medical explanations from the vaguely creepy wannabe-doctor guy. So - there are no scares. And no scares in a horror movie makes for a bad horror movie. And The Ruins is certainly a bad horror movie.

Superhero Movie comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films. And it’s better than Epic Movie. For a moment there, I almost said that this was the equivalent of saying it’s better than nothing. But then I realized that I was wrong. Superhero Movie, despite being superior to Epic Movie, is not better than nothing. You are far better off watching nothing. In fact, you are better off seeing nothing, doing nothing, touching nothing and sitting in a sensory deprivation box for an hour and a half than you would be watching Superhero Movie. There are three main reasons it’s better than Epic Movie.

First, it has a story line. A loose, crappy one, but at least it’s there. Secondly, it’s reasonably understated without as many disgusting gross-out “jokes”. And third, I smirked once, when a guy spoofed that Tom Cruise Scientology video that has been circulating the web. That guy was really good. This was one more smirk than I had at Date Movie, which makes it a guffaw-fest compared to Epic Movie. The basic premise here is that superhero movies are going to be spoofed. So the people in charge of the film wrote a list of superhero movies. Spiderman was big at the time, let’s make that the main one. Let’s see…X-Men, Batman, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man…any more comic book movies we can think of? Nope? OK, let’s go.

So they take the nerdy photographer from Spiderman and turn him into the hero, with the hot girl he lusts after and the superpowers. Then they take the villain and put him in an Iron Man costume. And they throw in the guy who lights himself on fire from Fantastic Four, and add the parents-getting-killed bit from Batman. Then they add Professor Xavier from X-Men, and we’ve got ourselves a movie! Wait - you have the characters, now shouldn’t you write something for them to do? No? Just having them means the movie’s already done? OK…now, to be fair, there are twists. The Professor Xavier character is black, and cheats on his wife. The Fantastic Four guy sits on a Batman-esque gargoyle atop a Gotham-esque city. And the parent-killing is done to comedic effect. Sorry. “Comedic” effect. So…sound funny so far?

The cover of the DVD box features Leslie Nielsen, who at some point had some weight in movie spoofs, weight that disappeared when he starred in Spy Hard and Mr. Magoo in the mid-nineties. And even he’s only in this crap for about nine minutes. Pamela Anderson is prominently displayed on the box as well, because she is the second-biggest name in the film. She is on screen for maybe four seconds, total. No one else in the movie is useful or of note, so forget any further description of the cast.

The thing is, this would be a great premise for a film. With the abundance of comic book movies that have been brought to the big screen lately, there is ample material for a spoof. And at certain points, Superhero Movie seems to get that, if only for a moment. Like the big final scene where the real heroes crash into a nerdy superhero convention. There are some great comedic possibilities! But then…nothing. And that’s what this movie is. Just like Date Movie and Epic Movie and Meet The Spartans, this movie is a whole lot of nothing. Well, except that it’s worse than nothing. In that it will make you stupider simply by watching it.

Why do I bring up Epic Movie and Date Movie constantly? Well, because the people who distributed this DVD were smart about one thing. They did NOT mention those two piles of garbage on the DVD case. They mentioned Airplane!, which the producer, David Zucker, did indeed direct, and The Naked Gun, which he directed as well. They also mention Scary Movie, because their director wrote Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, which were no classics by any means, but was miles above this turd. However, in the years since those films came out, the producers and directors have obviously found something to like in the Epic and Date Movie and Meet The Spartans mold, and they have employed it here. With disastrous results. Seeing Scary Movie and The Naked Gun on a DVD box might make you want to rent this. Which is where I come in. To warn you against it. This movie will make you thirty percent dumber overnight, leaving you so badly illiterate that you won’t be able to write me a comment to say “you told me so”.

Shannyn Sossamon looks to be the Jamie Lee Curtis of the last few years.  After One Missed Call came out on DVD a few weeks ago, she adds to her horror resume with Catacombs, a new horror flick about the Catacombs that apparently exist under Paris.  This myriad of tunnels apparently also houses thousands of dead bodies that couldn’t be buried elsewhere.  Well, this is actually true.  And they are actually lined and paved with human skulls.  That seems far-fetched to me, but wikipedia says it’s true, so I believe.  There is a cult classic called Les Gaspards, starring a young Gerard Depardieu, that was filmed and set in the creepy Paris catacombs.  It was far, far better than this one.  Here’s an indication that should have tipped viewers off - Les Gaspards, (The Holes in English), had permission to film there.  Catacombs didn’t.  Maybe because the people in charge of the catacombs knew how stupid this movie would be.

But here’s the thing - this movie should be good!  This is one of only two major motion pictures that has made use of the creepiness of the Paris catacombs, one of the most naturally creepy places in the world!  So how can you make a non-creepy movie about it?  Well, you can do a movie like this.  Catacombs reminded me a lot of one of those jokes that goes on for ever and ever and then has no real punchline, or an obvious one.  For example:  that joke about the guy who stays overnight at a monastery, and hears some really weird noises, but the monks say they can’t tell him what it is.  They say “I can’t tell you, you’re not a monk”.  So he becomes obsessed with finding out, so he sets out to become a monk.  And he takes eleven years of theology, and four years of monastery training, and becomes a junior monk, and moves up through the ranks until he gets back to the monastery (all explained in FAR greater detail in the joke).  And once he gets there, he can finally find the secret of the bizarre noises.  So he opens the door and you know what he sees?  I can’t tell you.  You’re not a monk. 

That’s the joke, where the punchline is irrelevant, the fact that it took two hours to tell the joke is what is supposed to be funny.  That’s how this movie feels.  The ending is not only a sour punchline to a pretty boring film, but it’s also completely implausible given the rest of the film.  (And, for those of you who have seen this, completely forseeable for the people involved, which makes their reaction idiotic.)  Shannyn Sossamon is actually a very hot, very good actress, and I really hope she manages to move on to something other than annoying horror movies very soon.  Also starring in this film is Pink, the singer, who is bizarrely hot in a goth-freaky-chick sort of way.  She’s pretty good too, but this movie is so boring it doesn’t matter. 

Getting lost in this creepy place could be good for some scares.  Especially if, somewhere in the shadows elsewhere in the catacombs, there was a homicidal maniac wearing (for some odd reason) a pig mask.  But just being lost in a creepy place could make for ten minutes of fright.  Not sixty.  The beginning is promising, with Sossamon arriving in Paris to meet Pink, her sister, and being taken to this creepy rave party in the catacombs.  She drinks some absinthe, and the guys try to creep her out with a story about a crazy dude in a pig mask who may very well be the antichrist who lives in the catacombs and kills everyone he meets.  Although it’s supposed to be a silly story, we know very well that it will turn out to be true.  And therefore…silly.

The first twenty minutes are like some sort of bizarre, obnoxious music video, with lights flickering so fast that you can hardly make anything out, and the strobe effect obscuring the right things at the right times which could lead to a huge scare…but it doesn’t.  Even the flickering camera and lights can’t pull off the most obvious scare, which is intended to begin the proceedings.  More flickering obscures other seemingly important plot points - like, did the cops actually kill that guy themselves?  Or what…who knows?  Then the catacombs.  Which are dark.  And full of skulls.  And creepy.  For ten minutes.  Then there are the noises in the distance, which are not frightening at all, but rather irritating and lame.  Of course, she has to eventually meet another guy lost in the catacombs, because one woman walking around, alone and lost, for an hour would be…tedious?  But the new guy is useless and is gone quickly.

This whole movie is basically useless, and was gone quickly.  It premiered on a scary-movie channel in the States called FearNet, and disappeared onto DVD almost right away.  Likely, it will disappear from there soon too.

10,000 BC is unfortunate in that it occupies some distressing middle ground.  It IS too stupid to be a movie, but not stupid enough to be hilarious.  Which means it is just one long, boring, irritating, idiotic ball of suck.  This movie has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.  Ostensibly, it’s about a clan of cavemen from the mountains.  Cavemen who are not especially hairy, and who seem to have a fairly good command of the English language.  Which is fine, if you want to just assume that they know English, so the movie can be in English.  Like in Hunt For Red October, where all of a sudden they started speaking English.  That was fine.  We, the movie-goers accept that.  But the cavemen in this movie (so we don’t forget they’re primitive) talk in broken English.  Look - they couldn’t possibly know English.  It’s one of those suspension-of-disbelief movie devices.  Why not make them at least competent in English?

Then, the hero of the story kills a mammoth by himself, and becomes…the hero of the story.  But his heart is torn, because his new status means he will get to be with his girlfriend, but he knows he was only half-assed attempting to kill the mammoth, and whole-ass running away from it.  So, it being a matter of honour, he…camps thirty feet outside the village.  What?  It’s a good thing he does though, because it means he can see his gorgeous girlfriend (who wears makeup the whole time, by the way) get kidnapped by a marauding band of thugs on horseback.  Who speak another language!  With subtitles!  NO ONE KNOWS A LANGUAGE YET!  Make them all English!

Then the narrator comes in, several times, talking about “many moons this” and “many moons that”.  Ummm…OK…so now they’re native?  And the narrator, who talks like he is one of the tribe, is British?  Or is he modern…ancient…native…British…demented?  We just plain don’t know.  Or care.  What we DO care about are things like - why don’t they just call the mammoth a mammoth?  They’re speaking ENGLISH, why don’t they have the ENGLISH word for things?  Why call it a maddott, or whatever word they’ve invented.  And why does the bad guy have a computer-generated voice when he isn’t even speaking ENGLISH?  And at the end of the movie, when the good guys triumph over the aliens, did they do a ‘hip-hip-hooray’ cheer?

Yes, I said aliens.  And Gods, and supreme beings, and slavery, and pyramids, and a bizarre scene where the hero talks down a sabre-toothed tiger.  (By the way, THOSE things look bad-ass.  Why don’t the fight those, instead of the giant Moas?)  But anyway, who cares?  This movie stinks so bad that nothing could redeem it.  The great thing, usually, about caveman movies, is the loincloth-wearing brief glimpses of nudity.  Well…that and Ringo Starr.  And there’s none of that here - after all, this movie needed to keep it’s PG rating to reach a wider audience.  So no nipples, no nudity.  But lots of loincloths and exposed skin.  This, despite the fact that they’re in the mountains.  So, they’re basically wearing bikinis on a glacier.  And we’re basically turning this off at the twelve minute mark.

Seth Rogen was clearly the fat kid in high school. The funny fat kid, mind you, but also the one who was picked on a little. Which is why, in every movie he writes, the fat kid gets all the best lines. It worked amazingly well in Superbad with Jonah Hill, and it works almost as well in Drillbit Taylor, out tomorrow, July 1st, from Paramount Home Entertainment. The fat kid in Drillbit Taylor is played by Troy Gentile, who is almost as good as Hill in Superbad. It’s too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that promise.

Because really, Drillbit Taylor is nothing but a “prequel” to Superbad. The same characters are there - the geeky best friends, one fat one mild-mannered and skinny. Their third friend who is far geekier than either. And the fat kid is still actively trying to get rid of the even-nerdier kid, because he will bring them down in the eyes of the “cool kids”. So - the kids from Superbad, four years earlier. Seth Rogen co-wrote the script for this film with Kristofor Brown, and Judd Apatow produced the movie, so the pieces were in place to make something on the level of Superbad, if not Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin. But…this movie sucks.

It’s not Owen Wilson’s fault. He plays his standard, overly-sincere loser character. But the movie isn’t written to fit his style, his style isn’t adjusted to fit the movie, and he feels miscast because every scene he’s in is worse than every scene where it’s just the kids on their own. And Wilson is in almost every scene. He plays a homeless man who poses as a bodyguard to get hired by some kids to protect them from the high school bully. In order to do this, he poses as a substitute teacher at the school. Making him a homeless guy posing as a bodyguard posing as a teacher. Why is he homeless? He doesn’t have a substance abuse problem or a mental problem. And he seems to be more than willing to work for money - in fact, he’s going WAY out of his way to fake his way into this job…it doesn’t make sense.

Also fairly strange is the school bully. I don’t remember school having bullies like this, ever. Bullying in schools usually involved the threat of force and the teasing and the shoving, but never punching kids and beating them and attacking them on a daily basis. These bullies are implausible, but then if they weren’t so mean and violent, the little kids wouldn’t need a bodyguard. I guess. And the young kids are bullied their first day of school in grade nine by some kids who are 18 years old and clearly, at least, in grade twelve. So…how come they’re in the same classes? Are we to believe that the bullies have failed every single year they’ve spent in high school? Or just that nobody bothered to think that through?

In the end, these are the minor problems with Drillbit Taylor. The major problem, amazingly enough, is the script. Other than some truly memorable lines from Troy Gentile, there is nothing funny about the rest of the movie. At all. Owen Wilson is not funny. His character is not funny. His sexual conquest of another teacher at the school is not funny. The other two kids are not funny. The bully is not funny. And the concept, while kind of interesting on the surface, is never explored at all. This ends up being exactly like every other overcoming a high school bully movie, and might actually be the most predictable movie in years. The second we meet Owen Wilson, as Drillbit Taylor, we know exactly what will happen, in every scene, for the entire rest of the movie.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow have managed to turn standard movie arcs and plots into true gold. Superbad was so funny and smart that you forgot very fast that you had seen this exact movie many times before. Just never that funny. Knocked Up was a movie many others have made in the past - but writing it from the guy’s perspective was something the fifty-five movies like it had never thought to do. And it was so funny and smart that you forgot you’d seen it before. But Drillbit Taylor is not one of these movies.

I think the success of their oeuvre has made Apatow and Rogen such sought-after commodities that studios and producers will purchase absolutely anything they do. And if that includes a throwaway script that they wrote in high school and never edited and forgot about for fifteen years, then so be it. Which is, I think, what happened in the case of Drillbit Taylor. This movie is a total waste of time.