SyFy vs. The Mynd: Dead in the Water (2018)

The all-female crew (Nikohl Boosheri, Nicole Fortuin, Bianca Simone Mannie, Skye Russell, Tanya van Graan, Christia Visser and Amy Louise Wilson) of a rust bucket of a ship is attempting to stop the illegal fishing practices of some Chinese trawler. That’s going to be their smallest problem soon enough, for when they rescue a man drifting half-dead in the water, they invite rather more direct trouble in.

As it turns out, the man is carrying something nasty an evil oil company brought up while making illegal preparations for starting on the exploitation of the Mariana Trench. Soon, paranoia and outright violence set in – their main engineer’s particularly murderous disposition certainly doesn’t help there – but fighting against the thing (cough) that got onto their ship with the stranger will eventually turn out to be more important then fighting each other.

Dead in the Water’s writer/director Sheldon Wilson is still the guy responsible for my favourite SyFy Original, Carny. While the quite considerable number of films he made for SyFy in-between hasn’t always held up to this gold standard, he is still one of the better choices when it comes to making traditional TV genre fare that isn’t infected with the cancer of “irony”. Consequently, this concoction made out of slightly rejiggered bits and pieces of infection horror and The Thing is a neat little movie, unless you turn to SyFy Originals to be blown away by their originality instead of their hopefully deft handling of well-known bits and bobs.

This one’s main claim to originality is obviously its diverse, all female except for a couple of bit parts, cast, the sort of thing that’ll have a certain type of nerd demonstrating their particular brand of heterosexual manliness by running to the hills of movies without girl cooties, or go review-bomb something like real mencowards. The rest of us will happily realize how well Wilson handles this, mainly by not making a thing at all out of his characters’ gender, letting them fulfil the functions in this genre plot in pretty much the same way male characters would. So everyone here is as competent, incompetent, emotional, calm, or violent as in pretty much every other genre film of the same style. Why, it’s as if Wilson believes women are simply people who work like other people! The cast, though not exactly full of well-known faces, handle themselves very well, which is to say, they go through the genre standards they have to handle with competence, dignity, and the calm demeanour of professionals doing their jobs.

The script is just as calm and professional as these performances, hitting the right plot beats at the right moment, and making do with what clearly must have been a tiny budget even for a SyFy Original. Production wise, this is very much “Bottle Episode: The Movie”, with a handful of sets, special effects that barely get the job done, and a pretty impoverished air.


Still, Wilson’s by now so experienced in handling this sort of thing, the resulting film is actually thoroughly entertaining, and generally suspenseful. It’s certainly not an overlooked masterpiece or anything of that sort, but it’s a fine example of straightforward genre filmmaking that’s perfectly alright with being just that.

Past Misdeeds: Carny (2009)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

And because I am a mad genius, I this is also part of Accidental TV Movie Week.

The very peaceful working life of small-town Sheriff Atlas (Lou Diamond Phillips) and his lone deputy becomes quite a bit more straining when the carnival comes to town. High-strung and melodramatic local pastor Owen (Vlasta Vrana) must have studied theology during the Dark Ages. Therefore, he is sure the outward deformity of people is proof of their inner sinfulness. Ergo, the arrival of a carnival equals the devil making the town his new vacation home.

Alas, in this particular case, the pastor isn't completely wrong. The carnival's boss, Cap (Alan C. Peterson), at least, is the kind of guy who doesn't even stop at murder to get what he wants, and uses a spiel about the outsiders of the world having to stick together to keep his people in line. This week's murder has brought Cap a nice little winged monster he plans on selling on, but surely, there's no problem with exhibiting it before that happens? It's not as if Cap's measures to keep the monster in its cage were half-assed at best, and the thing really not a fan of audience participation, right?

So, obviously, the monster escapes, and it's now the Sheriff's job to kill it before it eats everyone in town. This job is not made easier by the crazy pastor who will find reasons to become even crazier in time, nor by Cap's own, ruthless, attempts at catching his monster again. On the plus side, the affair does give the Sheriff opportunity for researching what monster of urban legend he is confronted with (I see no need to spoil it, unlike everyone else on the 'net) together with the carnival's authentic fortune teller Samara (Simone-Élise Girard).

Sheldon Wilson's Carny, ladies and gentlemen, might very well be the perfect SyFy/Sci Fi/Sci-Fi Channel movie, at least of the serious "monster munches through small town" variant. At the very least, it's among the best examples of the species I've yet encountered - I'm not sure I'd survive the joy if found one I enjoyed even more than this one.

Carny's just pretty much perfect as a clever little low budget monster movie in every respect. Wilson, working from a rather tight script written by Douglas G. Davis, is a deft hand at using visual short-hand and small bits of dialogue to do expository work, establishing character habits and expecting the audience to get them without feeling the need to point everything about its cast of small town characters out with grand gestures. Quite a few films of this type make their generally not very original characters less believable by having them talk everything out; Carny often just shows something. That doesn't sound like much, but it demonstrates a basic trust in Wilson's own abilities as visual storyteller, as well as in the audience not being too stupid to understand the basics of a monster movie without having them pointed out.

This approach leaves space for some advanced narrative elements, like actual subtext - if ever there was a SyFy Channel movie seriously sceptical of the kind of working class small town values these films generally espouse without demonizing every working class small town denizen, this surely is it - and the clever little touches that turn a competent little monster movie into something special. Just watch the Sheriff's first walk around the carnival, and try not to be impressed by how the film establishes Atlas as a good guy, not someone completely without prejudices but trying to work on that and the carnival people as protective of each other, because they are used to be treated with prejudices, without making everything too demonstrative.

I very much appreciate how messy the script is willing to keep everything, with the pastor and Cap both crazy men keeping their respective communities in line through fear - in the pastor's case, the fear of god and everyone who is different, in Cap's case the fear of (and often painful experience of) being mistreated for being different. Everyone in the movie is flawed, even our Sheriff hero, the difference just seems to be that some people are able to see their own flaws and try to work through them while others very much prefer a scapegoat. Carny is even willing to follow this line of thought into rather dark places for a SyFy movie, without laying it on too thick.

Whatever flaws the script has - let's be honest here, even carrying some thematic depth, the characters are still far from original and certainly rather on the broadly drawn side, and US small town horror is a sub-genre rather too common on screen and in print - the actors very much make up for. It's no surprise to anyone that much-loathed - but if you ask me just unlucky in his career - Lou Diamond Phillips was pretty much born to play this kind of laid-back, quietly competent small town sheriff. I am in fact quite sure that a mysterious fortune teller foresaw his fate as an actor when he was still a baby, and convinced his mother to proceed accordingly with his education, making him even more perfect for this kind of job.

However, the rest of the cast - probably not honed from birth for their parts - is equally wonderful for their roles, with Alan C. Peterson rendering his sleazy and absolutely ruthless carnival owner convincingly without resorting to too much scenery chewing. That part of the job is left to Vlasta Vrana, whose frequent outbreaks of melodramatics and loud preaching of nonsense should be ridiculous but really rather fit Carny's mood of macabre threat with a side dish of the quotidian turning a little bit mad.

Talking of said threat, the monster here is one of the better SyFy CGI (with a bit of practical effects magic in the appropriate places) creatures I've seen, with a simple yet cool design, showing little of the apparent sloppiness often characterizing this aspect of the Channel's movies. Even though it's pretty great, Wilson does put a lot of effort into not showing too much of his monster without resorting to overly fast editing, for once actually providing a SyFy monster with a feeling of menace.


Carny is also just very good at being an old-style creature feature, with just as much small, clever moments connected to the monster attacks as there are to the film's thematic interests. The finale is particularly cool, even turning towards a somewhat (small town) apocalyptic mood with excellent effect. The film's just lovely all around.

SyFy vs The Mynd: Scarecrow (2013)

Detention - it's more dangerous than you think, at least if it's the very special kind of detention teacher Aaron (Robin Dunne) offers his misguided students (among them Chupacabra vs the Alamo's Nicole Munoz). It's off to the supposedly haunted farm just in the process of being sold off by Aaron's ex-girlfriend Kristen (Lacey Chabert) for them to do some good for their community.

Unfortunately, the haunting's not just a supposed one, and soon, Aaron, Kristen, Kristen's other ex-boyfriend and the kids find themselves hunted by a black husk of a thing that really, really likes to kill people in messy ways. There's also a bit of time for awkward moments of teenage romance, and even more awkward moments of grown-up romance for all and sundry but mostly, it's time to run, scream, and die, and for some people to show their most unpleasant sides in the face of death.

Sheldon Wilson is one of those curious directors who are actually doing much better work when working for SyFy than when on their own. Scarecrow isn't quite as great as Wilson's magnum opus Carny but it's such a fine, well-paced piece of low budget horror it's difficult to feel too disappointed.

It's all very traditional in form and set-up, of course, but Wilson has the required pacing for this sort of thing down pat, with little time wasted on filler. Instead, there's a lot of fun monster action, a smidgen of gore, and characterization that is just the decisive bit more interesting than in other movies of this type. Why, before the first hour is over, you can't even play "who dies next" bingo properly because Wilson doesn't follow the very specific order of deaths as closely as you'd expect - Chabert's the obvious final girl of the piece, though. This doesn't sound like a big thing, but really, shaking up traditional genre structures in little ways is a good method to make the well-known interesting again.

It does of course help Scarecrow's case too that the acting's mostly decent and that the design of the not-exactly scarecrow monster is pretty creepy, its abilities not without their surprises. There's also rather well-done feeling of escalation to the plot, and some rather clever use of the characters moving from unsafe looking claustrophobic places to supposedly safer open ones, and back again. Again, it's these little structural changes (generally, horror movie characters move into increasingly claustrophobic places) that help make Scarecrow work as well as it does.

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SyFy vs The Mynd: Epysode 3

Dragon Wasps (2012): In theory, I should come down hard on a movie whose depiction of the Central American population is quite as ooga booga, whose female lead (Dominika Juillet playing a "scientist") seems to read all of her lines off a teleprompter, making Corin Nemec look like a charismatic actor in the process, and which knows even less about the science of insects than myself. But then, this is also a movie about giant, fire-breathing wasps, containing lines of eternal dialogue like "Many insects are repelled by the smell of their dead. This bug may be our best defence", repeatedly letting its heroine call something "nature's napalm", finding its protagonists going into the final battle hopped up on coca (to repel the wasps, obviously), and really being rather good fun in its stupidity for most of its running time. So I think I'll just let it slide and call Joe Knee's Dragon Wasps the kind of film that is bound to have an average user rating of 3 point something on the IMDB while actually being pretty darn entertaining.

Arachnoquake (2012): If you have dreamt about a movie whose every character is a prime example of odious comic relief, then you'll pretty much hit the jackpot with this one. As nearly all consciously humorous SyFy movies I've encountered, Arachnoquake (blind, tongued, fire-breathing, on-water-walking albino spiders attack New Orleans would have been a bit too long a title, I suppose) suffers from not being funny for a single second, and spending not a single thought on suspense or actually making a film that's entertaining beyond being the butt of a joke.

I still find films saying "look how dumb I am, isn't it funny!!!" while adding mean-spirited frat boy-style humour quite the opposite of funny. It doesn't help Arachnoquake film seems to giggle at each of its own jokes, which never works at all.

But hey, at least aging actors like Edward Furlong and Tracey Gold get some food and medication on their tables through Arachnoquake's existence, so there's something to be said for the film.

Mothman (2010): And then there are movies like this, a perfectly serviceable version of a neo-slasher movie with Jewel Staite being as much star power as it can afford (with a plot hook borrowed from I Know What You Did Last Summer, of all films) that replaces the usual killer with the Mothman, adds a bit of mythical mumbo-jumbo, and stirs. Yet still, despite two or three truly atmospheric scenes and a pretty entertaining ending that puts out all the stops a movie of this budget and production style can put out, Mothman's a bit of a disappointment to me, for it takes one of the weirdest pieces of modern myth and turns it into another serial-killing monster. It's not so much the lack of originality that irritates me (this is a SyFy Channel movie after all), but the lack of imagination Sheldon Wilson's film shows, even though it is entertaining enough.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,horror,corin nemec,joe knee,edward furlong,jewel staite,sheldon wilson

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Killer Mountain (2011)

Aging millionaire Barton (Andrew Airlie) convinces retired mountaineer Ward Donovan (Aaron Douglas doing an excellent straightforward likeable no-nonsense hero, and saying "frak" once) to help him out with a little problem. About a month ago, Barton had started a highly illegal (so illegal, Barton disguises his project as humanitarian help effort like the obvious jerk he is) climbing expedition for jaded rich people on a forbidden and clearly very dangerous mountain in Bhutan. Now, all contact with the expedition has been lost, and Barton needs an expert climber like Ward to mount a rescue. Because he retired after a catastrophic climbing outing, Ward isn't wild at all about the whole business until Barton discloses that the lost expedition was led by Ward's ex-wife Kate (Emmanuelle Vaugier), for whom, this being SyFy standard operating procedure, he still carries more than just friendly feelings. Consequently, Ward can't say no to Barton any longer.

Once Ward and a handful of helpers (Paul Campbell, Crystal Lowe, Torrance Coombs and Mig Macario) are on the go, things turn out to be rather different from what Barton told them: the expedition must have been running for at least a month longer than the millionaire said, and they clearly were looking for something specific(as we will learn later, a certain lost city of myth), which doesn't fit the whole "jaded millionaires" story at all. Things also turn out to be even more dangerous than expected, for the mountain harbours, apart from its more usual dangers, rather unexpected and dangerous fauna, and most members of the old expedition seem to have died in rather disturbing ways. Ward and his team will need quite a bit of luck if they're planning on surviving their rescue mission, and - perhaps - pick up a survivor or two of the last one.

Sheldon Wilson's Killer Mountain is a bit different from your run-of-the-mill SyFy movie in that it is neither a creature feature - though there are creatures here - nor a disaster movie - though nature shows itself from its ruder side - but a fantastical adventure movie in the spirit of old pulp tales. Films of that particular genre aren't very common anymore, so I approach every occurrence of one of these rare beasts with a certain, if cautious, degree of enthusiasm.

In Killer Mountain's case, that enthusiasm is very much justified. Wilson juggles the plot's various elements - there's a whole minor parallel storyline about what happens around Barton when Wade's team is gone that I haven't gone into in the synopsis at all, as well as the continuing adventures of Kate, plus there are creatures, climbing movie mainstays, a lost city, and a cure for everything to handle - with verve and what seemed to me a certain joy. One might argue that Wilson is keeping a few balls too many in the air here, and so plot elements like the healing power of slug leech thingies or the whole mythical lost city are given comparatively short thrift, but to me, this only adds to the pulp charm of the whole affair. For pulp adventure (in print and in the movies) really isn't a genre about slowly pondering the complexities of situations and thinking ideas through, and rather one of racing through as many exciting elements quickly and energetically during the course of a novella or a ninety minute film.

And that, Killer Mountain does exceedingly well. Sure, from time to time the film can't quite hide its TV budget, can't quite sell a CGI-ed British Columbia as Bhutan (though it does give it such nice try with some very fine location shots I'm far from complaining here), can't find a CGI effects crew with the ability to create a believable helicopter (which is rather curious, seeing as how they're quite good when it comes to the landscape bits), and really doesn't work enough at changing up its favourite pulp clichés a bit (the racial politics here are problematic, for example) but Killer Mountain demonstrates so much of the right energy and spirit I can't bring myself to care much - if at all - about its flaws.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,reviews,adventure,pulp,fantasy,sheldon wilson,aaron douglas,emmanuelle vaugier

On Exploder Button: SyFy vs. The Mynd: Carny (2009)

People will call me mad when I tell them that this Lou Diamond Phillips starring SyFy movie by the director of Kaw is one of the best pieces of US small town horror I know, but then, we can keep this our little secret, right?

To share in it, just hop on over to Exploder Button and KNOW.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,horror,syfy vs the mynd,sheldon wilson,lou diamond phillips,alan c. peterson,vlasta vrana,simone-élise girard

In short: Kaw (2007)

US small town sheriff Wayne (Sean Patrick Flanery) is going to be whisked away to the Big City by his newly acquired wife Cynthia (Kristin Booth) soon. Cynthia's a professor of Cultural Anthropology and initially only came to town to study the (single) Mennonite family of the place, but probably realized how ridiculous that project was and instead grabbed herself an ex-teen star.

I don't think Wayne did expect his last day as a sheriff to be filled with all the fun you have when fighting off a swarm of mad-cow-diseased, hyper-intelligent ravens who decide that now is a good time to improve their diet with human flesh.

Then there's some business about Cynthia spending half the film hiding in a well because she thinks the Mennonites want to sacrifice her. I mean, she's a Cultural Anthropologist, so she's gotta know best about the Mennonite sacrificin' ways, right?

Not that the day of school bus driver Clyde (Stephen McHattie, for some reason acting as good as if he were in a real movie) is any better. Protecting three annoying teenagers and their teacher from birds with the power of tool use ain't a tea party, either.

What starts out promising deeply derivative yet competently made 90 minutes of birdsploitation soon turns into a ridiculous pile of bad and deeply idiotic ideas delivered with all the style a film directed by some random dude the producers just grabbed from the street can muster.

I actually did like Sheldon Wilson's previous film Shallow Ground quite a bit, but that one seems to have been made by a very different person - someone who cares about making a good movie.

This isn't to say that Kaw isn't an entertaining film. In a "point and laugh at the movie" way, this can be a whole lot of fun. There are incredible amounts of lazy stupidity to laugh about, starting with the whole Mennonite business which is incredibly offensive, yet does make no sense whatsoever. Obviously "screenwriter" (and I use the term loosely) Benjamin Sztajnkrycer didn't even bother to research their religion and mores on Wikipedia, or he would have stumbled upon that whole non-violence thing.

The best, or most painful, moment goes to the birds, though. Nothing can beat the scene in which the (improved by mad cow disease!) ravens throw rocks at the school bus window to get at the tasty treats inside. Bruno Mattei himself would be proud.

Equally brilliant is the way the film keeps the characters isolated from each other in times of the cell phone. It just ignores that cell phones exist and are used by nearly everyone you'll meet in the real world. Obviously, if the film doesn't mention them, its audience won't realize that they are there. It's also possible that everything takes place in an alternative history where the cell phone was never invented, ravens are more clever than dolphins, and Mennonites are reeaaal frightening. Alas, the film never bothers to tell us.

The only thing the Kaw has going for it (well apart from surprisingly decent effects, but how cares about them in this context?) is Stephen McHattie, who puts so much more effort into his work than anyone else connected with the film that the words "tragic waste" can't help but come to mind.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,stephen mchattie,sheldon wilson,in short