Three Films Make A Post: Fear comes to the surface

The Ice Road (2021): Look, I don’t expect a movie about Liam Neeson doing dangerous ice road trucking to save some miners to have a deep, involving script, but the series of painfully obvious clichés and embarrassing “characterisation” writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh offers here really doesn’t cut it. The writing’s so needlessly bad, you won’t be surprised to realize Hensleigh’s one of the main writers of sodding Armageddon; and unlike J.J. Abrams, he has apparently learned nothing in the decades between.

Compared to the writing, the action sequences are downright decent, but not so good as to be able to make up for how crap and boring the script is. Neeson phoning the phoned in script in doesn’t help, but you only could help this one out by having a hundred minute Nicolas Cage-style freak-out – and not even Cage would be putting that amount of effort into a film this bad.

What Lies Below (2020): Fish people still want to inseminate human women. Spoiler, I suppose? Anyway, speaking of films with weak scripts by their directors, this one always threatens to become good or interesting and to explore any of the themes it just touches on the surface a little, before running away afraid of its own courage. So if you’re looking for a film that explores the horrific elements of budding sexuality, the rifts even in happy families, or the destructive abilities of a really hot guy, or even one that just tells its tale of theoretically fucked up interspecies sex in the appropriately sordid manner, this ain’t it. I’d love to say what Braden R. Duemmler’s movie actually is. Alas, the film itself doesn’t seem to know what to do with material rich in resonance and can’t even manage to get its easy (given the set-up) #metoo points in. Let’s not even speak of finding an identity beyond mishandled horror and suspense sequences, and a tendency to mess up scenes by showing too little. An extra raised eyebrow to casting a grown woman (Ema Horvath) closer to thirty than to sixteen as your sixteen year old lead.

Vampira and Me (2012): After the horrors of the first two movies in this entry, Ray Greene’s loving and exhaustive documentary about Maila Nurmi aka Vampira’s short time in the spotlight feels particularly wonderful: it’s a film made by a guy with great love and personal knowledge of his subject, with a great ability for digging out archive material as well as an eye for the use of found footage. Greene does great work putting his friend Nurmi into her proper historical context, arguing for her importance and import in a convincing and non-manipulative manner, and painting a picture of her life and times through rare interview footage of a very intelligent and charming elderly Nurmi and all those enticing and interesting details he managed to dig out. One could argue that Greene’s a bit too close to his subject but the film seems so driven by genuine compassion and love, critical distance just isn’t the point. Bonus points for avoiding the talking head effect.

The film’s only weakness is that the writing of Greene’s narration can tend to the overblown (“Midnight struck hard. And then it wouldn’t leave.”), but it doesn’t get quite this silly often enough this would threaten to overwhelm everything that’s great about the film.

In short: Welcome to the Jungle (2007)

Four horror movie meat idiots (as played by Sandy Gardiner, Veronica Sywak, Callard Harris and Nick Richey) decide to wander into the jungles of Papua New Guinea to find a decades lost millionaire's son on account of some vague rumours and dubious information. After forty-five painful minutes spent in their company, the local population of gene-pool cleansing natives take pity on the audience and kill them off. Hooray, the end.

To begin with the positive, unlike all other cannibal movies, Jonathan Hensleigh's POV horror variation on the theme does not include real (or simulated, for that matter) violence against animals, so kudos for that. Alas, that's all positive aspects of the movie right there. The rest is annoying and idiotic characters - two of them with the superpower to carry enough alcohol for weeks in their backpacks - bitching, bickering and shoving each other, doing things too stupid even for people under stress, and finally, finally, dying in ways that could be shocking if I'd give a crap about any of these twats. Of course, to achieve that sort of connection to the characters, the film shouldn't have gone out of its way to make them at best annoying, but mostly vile and too dumb to believe in them as human beings.

To make matters worse, the film takes way too much time coming to the interesting parts, and once it reached them, I couldn't help but see the film as some sort of lite version of Cannibal Holocaust that not only excises the really morally repugnant parts (like the animal violence) of that movie, but also leaves behind the original's ambiguity when it comes to the treatment of race (in Welcome, all brown people are bad, all white people too stupid to live), the rather complex meditations about the nature of civilization and barbarism (Welcome is a film proudly not containing a single thought), and the still shocking nature of the violence (Welcome just has a bit of gore). This leaves Welcome to the Jungle as the most curious of rip-offs - one that ignores all the good parts of what it is ripping off.

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