That said, I accompanied my mom to a Redbox unit last night. I have Netflix and usually take full advantage of that, but I wasn't quite ready to send back my copies of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and also, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guatanamo Bay, because I love stoner comedies even though I've never been high in my life. I like to live vicariously through Seth Rogen and Cheech Marin and other people who look like their lives are a lot more fun than mine.
So we go on an Academy Award spree, figuring for a buck each we'll fork out for Precious and Up In the Air. Then I see it. The bright orange cover, the horribly-Photoshopped superimposed skull over a school bus. And I know that I must have it... I reach for the touch-screen, my finger quivering in mid-air. Do I dare? This one is untouched by Eli Roth's amazing vision, and is mostly unaided by Ryder Strong's beautiful face. I would watch that man talk about a dishwasher for hours, and have felt that way since 'Boy Meets World'.
Oh, I dare.
So we head home with our movies, and we watch Up in the Air, a delightful film with a wonderful cast and such. I should've saved it for last, it would've been a great cleanser for my palette after the crap sandwich that was Cabin Fever 2.
As I mentioned, I love cheesy B movies, as long as they have heart. The charm of the old drive-in classics and the campy horror films of yesteryear was the amount of love that went into them; they worked because people genuinely thought they were making good movies. This allows the audience to laugh at the film's flaws but take them with an affectionate headshake, like the crazy uncle that shows up every holiday and brings great presents but talks about his dogs like they're human beings and always smells a little like cabbage. You put up with his shenigans because in the end, he delivers. Period.
This film, sad to say, does not.
If you want a complete gore splatterfest, a contest to see if they can make you retch, then this might be the film for you. It's made in a very irrelevant, immature style that goes for the gag reflex, and the overabundance of gruesome effects transcends the plateau of even my tolerance. It didn't make me sick to my stomach; it just made me annoyed, and counting the minutes until the stupid thing was over. No one can say I'm not a trooper, since I decided to see this thing through to the end.
What sucks is that the few genuinely decent performances in the film are overshadowed by everything else's crap; it's as if by mere proximity to the script the actors begin to suck more and more with each passing scene. Anything from the first film that was suspenseful or terrifying has been thrown out the window and peed on by the neighbor's dog. I remember being horrified by the idea that you could be sick with the virus for several days while it incubated inside you and rotted you from the inside out; I remember how disgusting and well-executed the scene was where the girl is shaving her legs and the leprosy has struck those by then. There were moments of absolute sickening disgust and moments of laugh out loud humor, in a combination only Eli Roth can master--- he even brought this mix to his role as the Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds, because I couldn't decide if I wanted to kiss Donnie Donowitz or have him committed. That balance of psycho-endearment is what makes Eli a special find in the horror community.
It's also a fine line that must be handled with a light touch, and that was not a skill possessed in this atrocious sequel. The black comedy falls short and instead relies heavily on gross-out gags and shock value for its own sake. You get gratuitous nudity, but it's decidedly unsexy. There's also a scene that I personally found distasteful, where a cute jock decides to have sex with the morbidly obese girl at prom because his friends "told her she'd be an easy lay". She confesses to him that she's a virgin and they begin to make love in the pool. The girl is pretty much a gag joke from the beginning, designed to freak out the audience with plentiful shots of her back-fat rolls and drooping breasts, even though the girl is probably quite pretty for a larger actress under normal circumstances. And of course, she promptly dies a horrible death while the jock's is much more merciful and quick. Ain't it always the way?
The film is full of truly disgusting moments, a few of which actually had me turning away from the screen. Scenes like an infected man peeing blood into a punch bowl (and then shots of the teenage prom-goers subsequently drinking glasses full of the bloody urine), a girl vomiting what looks like congealed caramel syrup into a man's mouth while giving him a lapdance, and for those of you who've seen the first film, let me pose the question to you--- what would happen if a nine-months-pregnant teenage girl got infected with a virus that rots you from the inside out? I'll leave the answer to your imagination, but the scene made my stomach churn.
In addition to the poor writing and the shock-value special effects, the potty-humor and the badly-conceived plotline, the film makes no sense and is completely out of continuity with the end of the original film. Parts of it make you wonder why the director wouldn't scream 'cut' when he realized how wooden the delivery had become. Other parts lapse entirely into cartoon animation, suggesting that the budget had either reached its breaking point and the shots couldn't afford to be filmed, or that they were trying an edgy crossover technique between cartoon and live-action, in which case it fell flat on its face. The soundtrack was uneven and cliched, and mostly ineffective; the music didn't warn me of danger or give me false security. It was simply there, something to drown out while watching the ridiculous scenes on my screen unfold in gory full-color.
In short, only the most die-hard fans of gratuitous gore will appreciate the film. Fans of the original will cry foul for its diversion from Cabin Fever's plotline, while the casual filmgoer will be turned off by a level of sickening shameless splatter that makes Sam Raimi look like a nun. The film can't decide if it wants to be seen as an actual follow-up and thus a contender for an actual horror title, or a self-deprecating black horror comedy that merely manages to fall flat. Either way, this indecision and unwillingness to committ to the film's execution is what damns it, and the credits couldn't roll fast enough for me.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment