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Reviews
The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Kiss me on, kiss me on the liptacles
They're going to try to capture the indescribably horrible Cthulhu on the screen? So one worries before seeing this film, but Lovecraft also contradicts himself by describing Cthulhu and a parade of other ineffable horribles. He means that one couldn't fully convey the horribleness of it. Cthulhu is, however weird, a part of the natural world, and when the movie finally reveals him fully, it's scary. What cannot be described is what it was like to be there when Cthulhu emerged, but we see this indirectly in people's reactions (e.g. in one person dropping dead from fright). The creature himself is a stop-motion triumph, and the city on the mysterious island reminds one of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari's amazing art direction. The movie is faithful to the story, as I remember it.
This long wished-for experience is marred only by a super-annoying fake aging effect--hairs and specks and holes in the "film." That is an incomprehensible lapse of taste in a scary and otherwise stylish movie. (I especially liked the authentic-looking period handwriting and printed documents--nice touches for a story in which much of the narrative action emerges through the act of reading.) These talented Lovecraft-lovers demonstrated the continuing vitality of black-and-white and silence as stylistic choices, by making a good BW silent movie. To hide their light under a bushel of fake digital pubic hairs (just guessing from the length) was a misstep, and had me looking for a "view movie with hair turned off" easter egg. Maybe in the next edition--and, let's hope, in their next "film."
Rest Stop (2006)
Insultingly stupid pastiche of p**p
Vapid and cute Jesse and Nicole take off for California. When they stop at an isolated rest stop, he disappears, but she spends most of the rest of the movie there at the rest stop. (So, then, does the viewer, and the experience shows why they're called "movies" instead of "resties." Maybe this movie stays in the toilet in abnormally lucid self-commentary.) A sadistic psychopath has been abducting, torturing, and killing unlucky patrons of this rest stop for an incredibly long time. Missing-person fliers thickly cover the notice board. Nicole has a lot of time to reflect on this history, since she keeps returning to the toilet to hide from the killer (who of course always looks there first), but she never figures it out. In fairness to her, it doesn't make sense. The policeman who shows up in response to her plea for help on the CB radio won't solve the mystery, because he's apparently retarded. The family of religious freaks (that is, freaks who are religious) that picks her up might know what's going on--maybe they're in on it, since they do loop out of their way to take her back to the rest stop after she peeks behind the curtain in their RV and spies their deformed child. Boo! More seemingly pointless things happen; skip with me to the end. We think the killer's dead. But he's not! Boo! This cliché of the horror film has become like the ever more tiresome joke a dotty old man keeps forgetting he's already told you 1,000 times. A recycled cheap and dumb device, it suits this film fine.
The filmmakers assembled bits of various commercially successful horror movies and filled the very large gaps that remained with the bland stuff of their own thoughts. They used the low-budget gore too sparingly to make torture-porn or go for the gross-out -- two approaches that sometimes make up for plotlessness. With no substance and no style, there is only one s-concept left for this movie to realize. Hint: it's in the toilet.
Murder-Set-Pieces (2004)
An ugly, stupid waste of time
Murder-Set-Pieces piles atrocity upon gross-out in search of controversy and shock in the absence of merit and talent. While its tagline proclaims it "visceral," seasoned gorehounds are more likely to roll their eyes than to feel it in their guts. In plot, acting, and above all directorial style, this film is so bad it's embarrassing not so bad it's good. A serial killer kills (and sometimes brutally rapes for a long screen time) dumptruckloads of women and a few children. The villain, whose actor does not deserve to be named and whose face seems stuck in psycho killer mode (though none of the other characters notice), is a photographer with a Nazi obsession (and even dumber facial hair than Hitler's) who occasionally spouts off in German (no subtitles, but from what I could comprehend and judging from the English dialog, nongermanophones won't be missing anything). The grue factor is no higher in this film than in some of our old Italian favorites; what distinguishes it, if anything, is how long and lovingly the camera lingers on rapes of screaming, battered, and blood-streaked women. But those who like rape-and-torture softcore, which is what this is, can find movies that dish that out without this clunker's pretentious trappings e.g., without stock footage of the World Trade Center burning to illustrate the killer's inner life. Yes, it's really that lame.