Monday, September 24, 2018

We Are Still Here / *** (2015)

Families trapped in the throes of grief have been lured in by more haunted houses than you can fathom, and in nearly all cases their tragedies supply an emotional shield that supernatural horrors mistakenly see as an exploitable weakness. Perhaps that’s because ghosts and demons just don’t understand how human nature works – that for every terrible event or shocking impulse, a person’s sense of fear is tightened by an exterior that hardens with time, allowing its wearer to face an abyss that couldn’t possibly match the pain they’ve experienced. There are some, however, who wear their suffering like an open wound, and certainly the evils of an alternate plane are eager to feast off whatever they can. Meanwhile, the dangerous entities that lurk in the house of “We Are Still Here” have a more sinister agenda: every 30 years they awaken from a slumber and devour the souls of any family living within its halls, as vengeance for a terrible act that was committed on them a century prior. Apparently, time does little to diminish grudges, especially when you’re in a dimension that ought to be free of earthly attachments or emotions.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Unbroken: Path to Redemption / zero stars (2018)

“Unbroken: Path to Redemption” is a film that begins and ends with one fatal mistake: forgetting to tell its actors that they are accomplices in a cheap, patronizing melodrama. All the dramatic cues are there, and many of the faces convey an eagerness that is admirable, but every simpering scene of false sincerity moves to the rhythm of some shallow after-school special, where most of the conflict is resolved by broad strokes and nonsensical flash-forwards. For this, yet another aberration in a growing list of exercises by director Harold Cronk – and one that shamelessly follows a far better retelling of this story from only four years prior – the offense is greater: he takes a potentially meaningful discussion point about the traumatic aftermath of war veterans and reduces it to an arrogant demand for Christian unity. That some of it plays as convincing to these on-screen players indicates he has assembled a plausible ensemble to sell his message; that he doesn’t bother to supply them with a shred of intellectual context makes the film not only bad, but irresponsible and corrupt.

Monday, September 3, 2018

The Meg / ** (2018)

A band of rich investors, marine biologists and deep-sea divers gather aboard an underwater laboratory in the middle of the pacific to plunder the secrets of the deep, and while searching through a new hidden habitat they inadvertently unleash one of the murkiest special effect creatures seen this side of the Anaconda. Among them, a wisecracking daredevil who once assisted in an ill-fated rescue emerges as the lone force of reckoning who can challenge it in the open waters, where it threatens to destroy an entire eco-system (not to mention feast on the swimmers of public beaches). His sarcastic demeanor, of course, comes as a lighthearted contrast against the more sobering faces of the others, who regard their predicament like slabs of bait waiting for a noon feeding. And why wouldn’t they? The story will rarely provide them, after all, with a chance to flee the danger or head for land, because that would negate the opportunity for them to become casualties in the hungry jaws of a monster. Assemble any number of these clichés together and you create the cheerful delusions of a modern creature feature; supply them further with a studio budget and familiar names, and you get something resembling “The Meg.”