Reviews

The thoughtfulness of this script haunts me over time and revisiting it every decade reminds me that the mood and bleakness of this movie makes sense in the context of this story and theme. Sometimes a film will rely on an aesthetic of bleakness that actually has no purpose except as some fantasy in the cinematographer's mind that the bleakness "adds" to the film. Usually, it does not. But Jakob's Ladder walks so close to the abyss of existentialism and afterlife that one must see the darkness before the dawn.

If we take the story for what it presents then A soldier has been gravely wounded in Vietnam and is having flashforward visions of a life that he can never have. This is like the most haunted version of A Christmas Carol ever. Because the events in his vision take place after the war, they actually never take place at all. He doesn't survive the war.

Because there is a suggestion that the soldiers were drugged by the military and turned on each other, we are also forced to suspect the narrator himself. He is drugged, after all. Also, the suggestion that the platoon was drugged was made in the future vision, that doesn't exist, so how can we trust that information revealed in a future vision is accurate for the past? We do not actually know if the platoon was drugged, only that Jakob was having a vision of the future in which someone reveals that the platoon was drugged as an explanation for why he was stabbed by a fellow soldier.

If the vision, and movie, is Jakob's extrasensory journey to death, all taking place in his dying brain on an operating table in Vietnam, then this detail about the platoon being drugged may be his own rationalization process about giving some motive and meaning to his own death.

And the characters we are introduced to, Louis, Jezebel, Sarah, Eli...don't exist. Perhaps never existed. While It's A Wonderful Life gives George Bailey a chance to see what his hometown is like if he had never been born, Jakob is given a chance to see parts of a life he would never have. He's invented all these characters to complete the life stolen from him by war and he's invented the conspiracy to give himself closure. Eli, Sarah, Jeze, his job as a messenger (Mail Man) are all invented during his coma. This was the life he lost, with all the complications and disappointments . The struggle is building something so imperfect and still letting go without making amends.

I must deduct points for the use of the melodramatic photo montage that seemed low hanging fruit. It's noteworthy that at least 20 minutes of this was cut to dumb it down so an audience would grasp some thread of meaning. Maybe the extra scenes would have been confusing and diluted the impact of the film which really covers a lot of ground at breakneck pace.

Jakob's Ladder has a rightful spot next to The Seventh Seal and A Christmas Carol and The Family Man for existential twists. It's dark in places but the light is there if you look for it.

The personalities on display here are as wooden as a fence post. UnSalvageable story line meets actors pulled from the 1970 Hollywood bread line. So much does not make sense that i caution any viewer who is looking for closure. The hired gun is working for 1/3 his wage. The duel location was chosen to avoid the Marshall, who arrives anyway...the antagonists are actually the business partners who do not get their comeuppance. Not sure the status of the gunfighter at the end. Muddled and unsatisfying story where Dillon and Festus dont really participate and basically are derelict in their civic duty multiple times...miss kitty has one sentence of dialogue and everyone seems resurrected from previous stories.

"Again with the Evil!"

The production is dodgy, the lighting is all over the place. But the directing and cinematography is B +. I think a low budget actually works in favor of this kind of horror, because they made an effort to have long takes, ensemble scenes with everyone in the frame at the same time, memorization of lines of dialogue opposed to memorizing a single sentence at a time, and judicious use of a crane and "spooky cam" devices.

Witchboard's only hope was to avoid taking itself seriously and to stay within budget, finish the film on time, not kill any of the crew. It succeeded. However, the suspense is as obvious as allowed by law and the character arc has no time to play out, nor are the actors capable of living in the cardboard universe of the characters. The script asked too much of this cast, and then didn't even allow an authentic resolution to any of the soap opera elements.

There was no way that dimension of the story would work and fortunately it's hardly a focus.

The worst that can be said is the script was half-baked. There was a germ of an idea: portal to the dead; misdirection; unnamed evil; possession; nudity, unresolved emotions, but it all stays in development mode. In the end, no one changes, no one gets what they deserve, the status quo is maintained, several people are dead. This is a Pandora's Box fable, and that usually means the person who opens the Box is punished and learns a lesson, but I didn't see that. The fable falls apart into a messy series of conflicts caused by an incomplete villain.

So, the focus was spooky, horror elements, but these are scratched without drawing much blood. The antagonist is only partially revealed about 6 minutes before the end of the movie. He has no voice and only the outline of a past. Until that point the audience actually has no idea if anything is relevant since there was intentional misdirection for the last 50 minutes, we have no details, we have nothing but confusion and questions. And the ultimate answer, with no time to develop, lands flatly at the climax. The characters might be living a nightmare, but the audience is simply watching and wondering.

Witchboard is merely derivative. There are elements of Phantasm, Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm st, The Evil Dead and even Hardbodies. Night of the Creeps is more creepy, Halloween and Friday the 13th are more haunting, Scream is more comedic. Blend them all together with an after school special bromance and you have Witchboard and most after 10PM HBO content in 1986. Which was fine by me in 1986 because I thought it was heavenly. A movie without a rock music montage, gratuitous pot smoking, and nudity was probably educational. Witchboard has a brief rock music montage; Jim is smoking inside a hospital ICU; and the nudity was not as gratuitous as I preferred, but it was adequate. I should mention that the number of naked chests was 5:1 in favor of hairy male chests because when you cast Tawny Kitaen then of course everyone wants to see the male actor's nipples whenever possible.

Consider this universe: The protags went to Big Bear, CA...and walked into a Main Street Occult Merchandise store to buy a velvet wrapped Ouija board with cash...and the same store had a paper encyclopedia of mass murderers (and their residences) throughout history with research staff cashiers. This is Big Bear, CA...a ski town in the Sierra Nevadas on a man-made lake with one grocery store...in 1986?? Who opened an Occult Merchandise store in this town? They wouldn't last one week. The protags also live in a town where the only inept homicide detective is also the bomb squad and truancy officer?? But there's a local psychic medium who evidently doesn't drive.

Blake's insouciance was a perfect compliment to Kendrick's supermom role, but the children themselves limit this story not only by being bratty "normal" spoiled whiny brats that should annoy anyone, but because they would obviously be integral to the characters and they are basically accessories who dilute an otherwise sexy and scandalous story. The children are mouthy, misbehaved gimmicks and that doesn't work for me. Was the movie meant to be a diversion fantasy for domestic zombies or a domestic satire? I don't know. They had all the elements of a great movie but got off track in the plot department.

Maybe I got an immediate Wild Things (1998) vibe that steered me in the wrong direction because everything I sensed about the plot and the characters was pointing toward an ultimate alliance between Stephanie and Emily in their domestic limbo, or at least a twisted reversal of roles as darker and more dark backstories are revealed. Basically, you can't have two covetous women become enemies without very good reason because it spoils the dynamic. Someone has to win and this movie has no winners.

The Denoument is so convoluted that I'm not sure there were any losers either. Did Emily get what she deserved? Not really. Did Stephanie get what she deserved? Not really. Did Sean get what he deserved? I'm not sure. The fate of the characters is offset from their actions to the point that I don't actually know what were lies or the truth, so I don't know if anyone got their comeuppance. It's a sordid tale with lots of losing and some baffling choices for the sake of complication.

So, the candid performance by Kendrick, and the vulgar 'modern' woman as personified by Lively is enough to give this film a watch, (their personalities sparkle), but in the realm of cathartic dramatic experiences, this is a failure.

I can only comment on the interview style "search" portion of this multi-film project that James Mortellaro assembled over 4 years. I guess this was supposed to wet my appetite for the actual "footage" of video x, but I'm in no hurry to see that. I was in a media blackout era in the early 2000s so I honestly thought I'd not heard of Dwayne and Darla Jean's crime spree. And it's a testament to the baffling true news that I didn't doubt for a minute that such a crime spree could and did happen. A guy decapitates his mother for telling him to clean his room. A father throws his baby off a bridge. A mother drowns all her children. Anything can happen. It all seemed no more crazy or horrific than current events. If someone told me a robbery was perpetrated by a person wearing a werewolf mask I'd say that was a hoax. Or many other crazy things that turn out to be true.

Murder in the Heartland is indeed a fictional film about invented events and characters, presented in the style of a low budget documentary. With so many true crime/frontline/dateline/60 minutes style programs that are based on actual events the format is now almost paint-by-numbers. The twist here is that aside from interviewing the characters, it's revealed there is footage from the crime spree shot by the couple and the filmmaker tries to find the footage. That's plausible and now 12 years later obviously any crime spree by teenagers will probably include selfies and live chats and video footage. That's automatic so it's a good premise and that's sort of original.

I'd expect local actors pretending to be real people to do a much worse job than they did. The interviews did sound improvised and credible. I give the actors credit because they are being asked to portray parodies of themselves and that's a little humiliating but they pulled it off. Only during the final 15 minutes did I feel the whole presentation fell apart and it all became fake. The events themselves were sort of plausible (I guess everything is plausible today) but the presentation looked staged while the rest of the interviews didn't seem staged.

There were some major gaps in the story telling but I could attribute that to the amateur "director" forgetting to fill in the gaps or assuming all the facts were known already. Like, the hostage from the bank allegedly drove the getaway car? And she drove it over a cliff? So where was Darla Jean? She had to film the getaway? And what happened to Billy Epp? And a Los Angeles company is selling Video X openly, but the Sheriff and District Attorney can not comment? Maybe these were questions left unanswered so I'd watch Video X when it was released in 2007.