The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

Couple of five years Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) spend a night in a cosy, remote cabin next to a town full of mildly creepy movie hicks. The home invaders known from the earlier Strangers films start on a campaign of low effort terror – though its an earlier effort at the whole thing, because this is a prequel.

It isn’t usually a productive question to ask “why was this made” when it comes to pop and commercial cinema, because the answer is usually “to make someone money”, but sometimes, you stumble upon product so needlessly dire, you really can’t help yourself.

In the case of the first of three (an additional why for that one) prequels to the The Strangers films, a movie that in no way fulfils any of the functions a prequel is supposed to, I couldn’t help ask it, for there’s really not a single moment on screen that suggests anyone involved in the movie even wanted to make it. This begins with the casting – Petsch and Gutierrez sure are pretty but have not the tiniest bit of onscreen chemistry – continues through production design and locations – if I’ve ever seen a cozy horror movie cabin quite so bland before, I can’t remember it – certainly does not stop at the script – there’s not only the expected lack of ideas and cribbing of the tiredest old clichés in the horror book but also a complete lack of enthusiasm in their execution – and ends with direction by Renny Harlin that’s so lacking in character and personality calling it bland would be an exaggeration to suggest greater excitement than this thing could ever deliver.

And that’s really all the attention this particular movie deserves. Perhaps The Strangers: Chapters 2 & 3 will surprise me by having a point beyond being a movie that sort of exists?

In short: The Misfits (2021)

A bunch of, well, misfits on a Robin Hood trip (Nick Cannon, Jamie Chung, Rami Jaber and Mike Angelo) attempt to rope experienced conman Richard Pace (Pierce Brosnan) into their newest project of stealing terrorist gold. Even though his archenemy Schultz (Tim Roth) is involved with the terrorists, Pace is rather reticent doing anything for no monetary gain. Fortunately he changes his mind when he learns that his estranged do-gooder daughter Hope (Hermione Corfield) is part of the gang. So, after more than half an hour of feet dragging, a heist does eventually ensue.

Poor old Renny Harlin’s newest movie The Misfits has some major problems. Harlin himself isn’t one of them – while this isn’t one of his more interesting and stylish directing jobs, he does his best to get picture postcard shots of Dubai, Pierce Brosnan and the two or three fast cars that were in the budget.

Alas, he has to work from a terrible script by Kurt Wimmer and Robert Henny (who both have written some terrible films in their time, with a couple of decent ones sprinkled in) that seems to have little idea on how to properly structure and pace a heist movie. Sure, as with nearly every heist film made in the last decade or so, the Fast and Furious films have clearly become structural models, so one can’t go into a film like this expecting old school heist movie beats, but if you aim for being a big fat action heist movie with cars, you actually need to deliver the action early and often and find a way to sandwich the character work in-between. The Misfits seems to have been made in the belief that such a thing is easy, and so of course drags when it should move and moves when it should take a breather. It certainly doesn’t help that the film can’t actually afford big set pieces, and is simply not clever enough to then come up with clever ones it can actually afford.

Instead, there’s quite a bit of absolutely terrible comedy, drab character work, and a heist without tension with “twists” you can at best shrug about.

There’s also the little problem that an ensemble movie like this actually needs a fully capable ensemble: while Brosnan is certainly not unwilling to work, he also seems rather too conscious he is slumming. Chung and Corfield are perfectly decent presences throughout, at least. Roth – the villain with the most screen time and theoretically a great actor for this sort of material -seems too bored to do much whatsoever, and Cannon’s performance is simply terrible, not just because he has to deliver most of the “funny” lines (though that certainly isn’t helping). Angelo and Jaber for their parts are just kinda there, doing nothing any man-shaped piece of cardboard couldn’t do just as well. All of which makes it rather difficult to root for or against anyone here.

In short: Cliffhanger (1993)

This is neither a particular highpoint in the career of America’s second best mainstream action movie director of its era, Renny Harlin, nor of its lead, the sometimes redoubtable Sylvester Stallone.

Whenever the film about a tough free-climbing mountain rescue manly man fighting gangsters led by John Lithgow making an hilarious attempt at what I assume is supposed to be an English upper class accent (though I could be wrong) actually concentrates on tight action sequences cleverly filmed to produce vertigo in its audience, it becomes downright riveting. Plus, Cliffhanger teaches one quite a bit about all the ways gravity can kill you (and that in a genre and film that has a rather dubious grasp on gravity and all other laws of physics you might care to mention, treating them more as suggestions of physics than strict laws), and warns of the dozens of ways a manly man mountain rescue dude can kill you with whatever objects or natural features are available at any given moment. It also relates the tragically tragic tale of Sly getting his best bud Michael Rooker rather miffed at him via a very tragic girlfriend dropping into an abyss incident, and warns of the dangers of teaming up with Evil John Lithgow.

However, the film leaves these natural roaming places of the US action movie a little too often. An obvious example is the introduction of two extreme sports dudes that make Beavis and Butthead look downright realistic only to get them killed later on in scenes that mostly seem to be in the film to make it lose momentum (which is totally what you want in your big dumb action movie), awakening my inner editor rather fiercely.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, for a twenty minute shorter version of Cliffhanger would probably have turned it into the nail biter its title promises instead of the decent enough action flick with only mildly interesting idiocy it is.

Cleaner (2007)

Former cop Tom Cutler (Samuel L. Harris) has retired into owning his own business, a small cleaning company specializing in crime scene and general biohazard clean-up. He’s taking care of his daughter Rose (Keke Palmer) by himself, for his wife was murdered when he was still a cop. The killer was himself murdered in prison, and Tom and his partner and close friend Eddie Lorenzo (Ed Harris) only escaped jail time of their own for organizing the murder because Tom made a deal with one Vaughn, the godfather of the city’s corrupt cops, though Eddie doesn’t appear to no that part of the deal.

It’s clear that this past is something Tom dearly wants to bury under meticulous cleanliness, avoidance of all his old cop buddies including Eddie and, the good old medicine of pretending the bad shit didn’t really happen. The time for pretending is quickly coming to an end, though, when Tom is called into cleaning up a crime scene that will turn out not to have been an official one afterwards. Worse, Tom hasn’t just cleaned up the remnants of a crime, the victim’s a guy who turned witness against Vaughn. At first, Tom hopes if he continues his well-worn technique of ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away, nothing will happen, but neither this little problem nor his past will quite so easily stay buried.

The 21st Century parts of director Renny Harlin’s career are full of surprises, unless you share the distaste for the man’s body of work most mainstream film critics seem to have quite independent of the actual quality of any given film he turns out. Probably because pretending only tasteful middle brow directors making tasteful middle brow films are worthwhile is still a rather big thing in those circles, a gospel given unto them by the sainted Roger Ebert. If your background is in exploitation and cult cinema like mine, automatically disliking Harlin’s usually interesting, sometimes ridiculous and nearly always (that nearly is obviously important) worthwhile body of work after his time as Hollywood’s second greatest action cinema director seems somewhere between insane and hypocritical.

For its first two acts, Cleaner is very typical of this phase of Harlin’s career by not being typical whatsoever. Instead of the slam bang action he would have made out of this material in the 90s, the film at hand is a stylishly (but not so stylish it becomes distracting), slick, and calm (some may say slow) movie that’s much more focussed on its actors doing proper grown-up acting, with Harlin doing his utmost to step out of their way. Given that this is mainly Jackson’s and Harris’s show – with some very effective help from Luis Guzmán, Palmer, and even Eva Mendes – and these guys could obviously be involving and interesting when shot by an idiot on a phone or Stephen Soderbergh, this is certainly the right approach to the material, also providing the film with a human grit it needs to counteract the visual slickness a little.

This works well for the film, until the third act starts, and the whole film breaks down a little. It’s not just that the revelation of what’s going on is more than a little clichéd, it is also obvious from pretty early on. The way to that “revelation” is rather too messy, also, so messy, in fact, that even Jackson and Harris have a hard time actually selling the whole affair in the end. It’s also deeply unsatisfying in how little the film seems to realize how cynical its ending, where the only crime that’s actually punished is the one committed out of love and where all corrupt cops can merrily ride into the sunset, actually is, and how much it actually undercuts the whole “family first” shtick it is apparently trying to sell.


But then, the first two acts really are rather good.

Cutthroat Island (1995)

Lady pirate (it says so on her wanted poster) Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) is having a bit of a hard yet adventurous time. Her (gentleman?) pirate captain father is murdered by his own brother, notoriously sadistic (so definitely non-gentleman) pirate Dawg Brown (Frank Langella, not Christopher Lloyd), and dies in her arms. Dear Dad has left Morgan something rather interesting, though, one of three parts of a treasure map leading to untold riches tattooed right onto his head. The two other parts are in the hands of daddy’s brothers, so Morgan will have to fight Dawg rather sooner than later, if she wants to acquire the treasure as well as her vengeance, that is.

Other problems coming up are her decided lack of reading and specifically Latin – solved by stealing the obligatory charming rogue (Matthew Modine) out of slavery – as well as a rather mutinous crew, a corrupt governor and his troops, betrayal, and all the special dangers of your typical treasure island.

Married couple Renny Harlin and Geena Davis were not terribly lucky when it came to get their own production firm up and running, losing quite a bit of money in the endeavour of DeLaurentiis style hubris at hand. Despite the critical drubbings it received beside the commercial one, I actually rather like Cutthroat Island, at least looked at from today’s perspective. It’s a bit of a curious film, trying to tell a swashbuckler style tale not with the flash and elegance of the swashbuckler but in the language Harlin as a director spoke best, that of 90s excessive mainstream action movies, a genre nobody ever confused as being elegant; and all the flash it has, it gets out of explosions and the sort of loudness one can find obnoxious.

So historically minded mainstream film critics were bound to dislike the movie automatically, for the class is and was as a rule unable to resist the opportunity to write about how a film doesn’t live up to the one they had in their heads beforehand instead of meeting it on its own territory.

And sure, as a swashbuckler, the film isn’t terribly good, what with its general lack of swashbuckling – even the fencing and the swinging on candelabras has the heft and the bombast of  90s action movies and never suggests anything Errol Flynn might have been involved with – the only intermittently witty writing, and Harlin’s love for explosions.

However, watching it as a mid 90’s Harlin movie (what’s more US mainstream action than that?), I found myself enjoying the film quite a bit. Like Harlin, I rather like explosions, particularly ones shot as enthusiastically as the ones in this film, and I have a lot of time for the way Cutthroat Island takes the elements of the classic swashbuckler and turns them into a loud and a bit crass 90s action movie spectacle, or really, a series of spectacles, because the film would really rather like its audience not to catch a breath and think about anything of the beautiful nonsense going on.

Also like Harlin (I very much hope), I have a very soft spot for Geena Davis’s short phase as an action heroine. She might not be the physically most convincing female badass but makes up for that with throwing herself (and her stunt double) into the action scenes, the one-liners (horrible highlight is certainly “Bad dawg!”), and the swagger. And oh, does she swagger. Plus, in the mid-90s, mainstream cinema had even fewer female action heroines than there are today, so simply watching her beat up men, and do the Die Hard thing of getting ever bloodier and bloodied yet still coming out on top in her fights in the end, would be pretty enjoyable in itself, even if the film’s very diverse series of action sequences were less fun. Modine as the male romantic lead does stuff, too, but this is really Davis’s show, and he’s the support. And isn’t that just lovely, too?


Of course, it would have been nice if the film had found a bit more time to flesh out its characters beyond one character trait (though Langella does his one character trait as fantastic as Davis hers, so there’s that), or get up to a more convincing romance, but then, these aren’t really things big loud US action movies were made for, so I’m fine with the situation.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

A couple of years ago, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) was found with amnesia. Today, she’s a mild-mannered school teacher, a suburban wife and mother, and seems very happy with her lot.

Alas, a couple of things happening at now put a stop to her happiness. Her old personality starts to surface after she gets a good hit on her head in an accident, and her old self clearly wasn’t a very nice person, trained in all the arts of the movie spy assassin. Which turns out to have been exactly what she was when her old associates start trying to kill her after having seen her on TV in a small town Christmas parade (as you know, all Shane Black films are bound by law to take place around Christmas). At the same time, the last private detective Samantha hired to find out who she was before her amnesia, the decidedly shady Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson), finds some actual clues to her past. After Samantha, who is in truth called Charly, has fought off a first assassination attempt, she and Mitch go on a road trip together that will culminate in a lot of violence but will make clear who Samantha really was.

Put two lovers of excess in cinema like director Renny Harlin and writer Shane Black together, and you do indeed get a pretty excessive film. There’s violence I was really surprised a mainstream action film in the mid-90s got away with, there are explosions, there are so many people killed by our protagonist it’s difficult to describe this aspect of the film as anything but cartoonish. However, all this excess is based on what is to my mind probably Black’s most interesting script. It does of course contain his usual shtick about how horrible life and people are, but he’s exploring these ideas through an at first and outside of the action scenes very noir-ish and clever set-up that also concerns not just Samantha’s search for identity but also asks questions about what “identity” might even mean, and how fluent what we call our personalities are even when amnesia doesn’t come into play. Where did “Samantha”’s ethics come from exactly when she was birthed from the brain of a ruthless killer? This intersection of identity and ethics is also of interest to the film when it comes to Henessey, a guy who is as much of a con-artist as he is a private eye now, but who finds himself drifting back towards the better man he once was at the same time Samantha is going back towards the worse woman she was.

That exploring this through a big loud American action movie with conspiracy elements actually works as well as it does is a little wonder. But then, it also happens to be a fun and highly accomplished big loud American action movie delivered with all the excessive panache Renny Harlin (at this time still the second-best Hollywood mainstream action movie director after John McTiernan) is best at. But, perhaps because Harlin happened to be married to Davis at the time and really wanted to let her show off her considerable abilities after their curious pirate movie flop together, and clearly respected Jackson’s perfect rendition of the struggling private dick, he’s also giving the actors ample space to shine even when they are not murdering anyone. Add the horde of well-known faces and character actors (honestly too many to count) and you have yourself quite a bit of substance beside the explosions.


Really, my only actual caveat when it comes to The Long Kiss Goodbye is the set-up of a couple of its final action scenes where the wheels of the plot mechanics become so visible, it’s impossible not use the word “lazy” to describe the construction there. Fortunately, you’re not going to be able to hear me complain over the sound of stuff exploding.

In short: Die Hard 2 (1990)

Clearly, the only way to top an instant classic like the first Die Hard is to make a film that is basically the same but just a little different than the original, and definitely louder and bigger. However, Renny Harlin’s sequel still features a relatively constrained place for John McClane (who else but Bruce Willis again?) to get increasingly beat up in.

If you squint a little, you can see hints about the wrong direction the series will head towards in the future, but even though this one softens the class politics of the first film quite a bit – not so much discerning between working class and bosses anymore but more aiming for people willing to do their actual jobs versus those there only to play politics – and doesn’t really feature any of the random moments of veracity I loved particularly in the first one, there’s still quite a bit of humanity in here to ground the action. After all, how many other big loud US action movies are there whose hero breaks down crying after not managing to save an airplane full of people? Or how many of them realize that, if you want to make a guy’s wife (a returning Bonnie Bedelia with slightly less frightening hair than in the first film) a part of the film’s emotional and very real stake, you really need to show her coping with her own duress, too, which also turns her from a price to be won into a person an audience wants to see saved?

While it is completely outrageous and far-fetched, the sequel’s plot is still also well-constructed in its unfolding, playing fair with its plot twists, and not so much aiming to provide an excuse for the action sequences but making them an organic part of a flow. Things need to move in an action movie, is what I’m saying (alas too late for the writers of the next Die Hard film to hear), and it’s even better when they move in interesting and fun directions even when nothing explodes.


Speaking of explosions, I believe Harlin was at the time the second best director of big US action movies (after Die Hard’s John McTiernan, obviously), and it shows here. There’s an appropriate heft to many of the action sequences but also a sense of good fun that turns the potentially annoying smart-ass moments of the film into something enjoyable, like a corny joke told by a good friend.

Mindhunters (2004)

Warning: there are some structural spoilers ahead!

Controversial FBI profiling guru Jake Harris (Val Kilmer) is just about through with the newest bunch of psychologically highly volatiles trainees trying to become profilers. Their final test after training exercises that seem to have fuck all to do with profiling (which is a somewhat dubious “science” anyhow, but I digress) is to be dumped on an island for a weekend where they are supposed to hunt a fake serial killer.

The can of meat (Christian Slater, Kathryn Morris, Jonny Lee Miller, Will Kemp, Clifton Collins Jr., Eion Bailey, and Patricia Velasquez with bonus LL Cool J as a cop who’s there as an observer) will soon learn that that there’s something more going on than just a training exercise when a real serial killer starts picking them off one by one, apparently following their greatest strengths, or weaknesses or whatever. Will they soon turn on one another in the way that makes the least possible sense? You betcha!

Ah, the early oughts serial killer thriller, a genre that has caused more pain and suffering than the fictional serial killers in it ever could. How many films about improbably competent killers murdering a bunch of people in absurd and contrived ways do you need to screw in a light bulb, exactly? Clearly, director Renny Harlin wasn’t too sure about the genre being enough to carry another film either, so his Mindhunters does go on a spree of crosspollination with other genres. Most obviously, this is also a bit of a mystery in the And Then There Were None manner, bringing together a bunch of characters in an isolated place trying to figure out who is killing them off one by one. Just without characterisation, which is replaced by rather more unconvincing digital body parts flying hither and yon than you usually encounter in Aggie Christie’s work. And with no butlers in sight. The killings, though very much in the same spirit as Saw - which may or may not be a coincidence, since both films must have been shot at about the same time – also from time to time suggest the way Death in the Final Destination series works, only without the supernatural agency that makes their complicated and contrived manner plausible.

Because that’s clearly not enough of a melange, Mindhunters also aspires to be a twist-laden thriller, with mixed results. On one hand, one early character death in the spirit of Psycho does play well with an audience’s expectations about who is the lead character and star in this particular piece, when the film kills off the character that must seem most threatening to the killer first. On the other hand, the final twist regarding the identity of the killer is absolutely idiotic, making the way LL Cool J’s character acts in the scenes just before that completely inexplicable. That’s a sort of thing all too common in twist-heavy thrillers, but here it seems particularly egregious because it’s not just preparing the final sting but the actual finale. A finale, by the way, that consists mostly of two characters having a shoot-out underwater, for of course, there’s a bit of Renny Harlin-style action movie in the film too.

If you haven’t noticed by now, imaginary reader, Mindhunters is a film that very much wallows in the absurd and the contrived, seemingly on purpose choosing the least plausible and believable elements of all the genres it pilfers, so that Harlin can shoot them in a nearly absurdly slick mid-budget style. Turns out that adding gloss might not make anything going on in the movie more believable, but it sure makes it fun to look at.

And while the film really is as dumb as a whole congregation of rocks (having a rock party together on a rock island, I presume), it is not just fun to look at but indeed very fun to watch, for Harlin uses practically every single stupid idea in the script (and there are legions of stupid ideas in there) as the basis for some kind of exciting set piece, or at least a moment whose idiocy makes a guy like me chuckle in delighted disbelief. That last description also fits the clunky dialogue rather well, where no sentence sound good, or like anything an actual human being would say. Unless it’s a one-liner, then all bets are really off.


All these joys do make Mindhunters a highly entertaining watch, but the most glorious thing here is Jonny Lee Miller’s attempt at what I think must be meant to be some kind of US accent – Texan, perhaps? – as dreamed up by somebody who has only read about the way Americans talk. It is quite the thing to hear.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

As you may have realized, the whole horrifying project of wasting my life on slasher sequels hasn’t finished by Halloween. Because I really need to watch a decent film from time to time, the rest of the series will continue sporadically during the next month or so.

The lives of Kristen (now played by one Tuesday Knight, who wins the stage name competition) and the other surviving Dream Warriors from the last movie have returned to their normal teenage lifestyles again, and at least in Kristen’s case to her old cliché group of friends, the black nerd girl, the tough chick, the male love interest, the male love interest for the final girl and the very obvious final girl Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox).

Alas, lately Kristen has begun dreaming of Freddy’s house on Elm Street again, dragging her dream warring buddies in with her, without Freddy ever actually appearing. That is, until Roland (Ken Sagoes) dreams of his dog pissing fire on Freddy’s grave. During the course of the following fifteen movie minutes or so, all of Freddy’s old enemies are dead, Alice has acquired Kristen’s dream powers, and Freddy starts using said dream powers to get at new victims, because – apparently we’re supposed to ignore film number two again, hooray – he can on paper only kill the original Elm Street kids, which doesn’t go for people he meets through Alice’s dreams, even though she isn’t one of the Elm Street kids, because…umm, no idea.

Anyway, shy and rather wimpy Alice acquires additional powers with each friendly soul Freddy sucks up in the ensuing killing spree, so our sartorially impaired undead serial killer might just bring about the means of his own destruction – if Alice ever gets around to striking back, that is.

Remember how I praised Dream Warriors for building on the first Nightmare movie’s foundations, broadening the mythology, and so on? Turns out, the earlier film’s virtues are a bit bigger than that, for Renny Harlin’s The Dream Master takes a comparable approach but does succeed with it far less. Sometimes, and I am pretty sure this is one of these cases, it’s all in the execution.

Just take the sampling of clichés Freddy slaughters in this movie and compare it with Kristen’s friends in the one before. Both groups of kids are painted in the broadest strokes, yet where the earlier film uses exactly the right strokes to give us some basically believable kids we might even not want to see die, Harlin’s movie just puts up the blandest of slasher meat troupes, giving everyone a single identifiable mark that doesn’t seem to be meant to make them interesting to watch interacting but that’s only there to set up one of the film’s “ironic” (if irony is a sledgehammer) death scenes.

And in these scenes lies another problem, because with this film, the killings have lost all terror and are only ever meant as visual gags, Freddy now finally having turned into the ugly guy in the stupid outfit who never fucking stops making bad one-liners, the film’s sympathy in these scenes shifting completely to him whenever he isn’t fighting the final girl. Needless to say, I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with that, and not in the good way I want to be made uncomfortable by through horror. The film’s lack of empathy with its own characters weakens its impact as a horror movie decisively, for if the film I’m watching can’t be bothered to feel for its own characters, why should I as a viewer do, and why should I be afraid for them or disturbed or shocked by what happens to them? The same goes for Freddy, who loses all of his menace this way.

Of course, as a revue of pretty great special effects and surreal ideas, there is fun to be had with the kill scenes but it’s an approach to horror film I find rather alienating and just not that interesting to watch.

These problems are certainly exacerbated by the film’s somewhat lazy seeming script, where not even the mandatory revival of its bad guy is prepared with any sort of care and thought. So, Freddy returns because a dream dog pisses fire on his grave, presumably to counter the effect of the holy water applied in the real world in the last film? How could anybody involved think that’s a good idea, or really, any idea at all? And that’s not a one-off: little of the film’s mythological background is thought through at all, with many an opportunity for meaningful connection of single parts wasted because – I couldn’t help but feel – the writers just couldn’t be bothered to think about the implications of things like Freddy’s connection to the Elm Street kids, Alice’s new role as Dream Master, and so on and so forth. I have difficulty reading it as anything else than the film, as franchise horror loves to do, just declaring its audience to be only interested in the kills and therefore putting little to no effort into anything else. Which – surprise! – just might attract only the part of the audience that really is only interested in the kills.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,slasher,horror,renny harlin,lisa wilcox,robert englund

In short: The Legend of Hercules (2014)

Warning: contains rampant misuse of parentheses, but then the film at hand contains rampant misuse of any viewer’s time, so I can still feel morally superior to it. Which I do.

As long-suffering victims of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for all kinds of things in movies that make sane people cry, so when a film is as generally reviled by mainstream critics as Renny Harlin’s CGI epic about everyone’s third-favourite Greek half-god, I’m not too fussed by it. Unfortunately, this time around, it turns out I can’t disagree with the consensus at all, for this Hercules version really makes the baby Eros cry.

There’s bad writing (and I don’t mean bad writing in a “I don’t like the film’s world view, or want it to be exactly like something I would have written” way the phrase often means on the internet but in the “these people don’t actually know anything about writing for movies, not even blockbuster style ones where the writing flavour of the year takes care of most of your plotting anyhow”), dialogue to make one’s brains bleed with its combination of insipidness and lack of style (it’s high-falutin’ EPIC MOVIE talk time written by people who just don’t get how this sort of thing works, and wouldn’t have an ear for it even if they did), acting that is all too often bad in the most boring manner (except for Scott Adkins as – I kid you not – Amphitryon -, who clearly will make a great scenery chewer one day when his buffness has diminished and all evil ninjas have been ass-kicked), and special effects with a big emphasis on the “special” (and partying like it’s 1999). In fact, I have seen Asylum movies with better CGI. Well, and with better scripts, now that I think about it.

To really top things off, Renny Harlin – who really should know better – presents this mess as a piece of cargo cult filmmaking that takes the idiot surface of things like 300, The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones without a) realizing that these films and shows actually have diametrically opposite styles and approaches to storytelling from one another, and without b) understanding what functions any given stylistic element actually fulfils in them. It’s enough to make one look forward to Brett Rat(t)ner’s Hercules version, if only in hot expectation of the ways in which that guy will be able to make things even worse.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,fantasy,renny harlin,kellan lutz,gaia weiss,scott adkins

The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013)

aka Devil's Pass

Warning: while I'm not going into too much detail here, there will still be spoilers!

The by now proverbial group of student filmmakers (Holly Goss, Matt Stokoe, Luke Albright, Gemma Atkinson and Ryan Hawley) mysteriously disappears while trying to shoot a documentary solving the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. The footage we see is of course supposed to be the footage the students shot, freed from Russian military servers by hacktivists.

Turns out that, not surprisingly, the group's project did not stand under a good star, particularly once they set out in the direction of the Pass. Early on, still on their way to the pass, they are disturbed by curious bare footsteps in the snow around their tents, as well as by a mouth-less tongue lying around. Once they arrive at the place where the 1959 expedition died, things really get freaky, and soon, secret history starts repeating itself, or in a certain way actually starts happening.

For the first fifty or so minutes of its running time, Renny "Where Did I Go Wrong?" Harlin's Dyatlov Pass Incident (I disapprove of the Devil's Pass title that suggests an assumption of audience stupidity from the producers) plays like a slicker version of your typical POV horror movie, just one with more snow (snow makes everything better), not very shaky camera, sometimes suspiciously good camera angles on the action, and simple yet deft characterisation. Consequently, I made the rather obvious assumption that the rest of the movie was going to consist of tearful monologues into the camera, lots of running around in the dark, and screaming.

We do in fact get a bit of running around and screaming, yet Harlin goes for a somewhat different end game, replacing the more sub-genre typical inexplicable mystery with a big wallop of Forteana highly appropriate for something called The Dyatlov Pass Incident, a small bit of conspiracy thriller flair (it's not a Harlin movie when nobody shoots a gun, after all), and characters who actually fight for their lives (which is a bit more improbable than the usual POV horror whimpering messes but makes for a nice change anyway).

Sure, the hokum Harlin uses is far from original but it actually makes sense in the context of the movie, and sets up the thing POV horror very seldom has: a traditional ending that ties up most of the plot's loose ends and that leaves the audience with a pretty good picture of what has been going on. Now, while I love some mystery and weirdness in my endings, a lot of POV movies in the last few years seem to have used that sort of ending as an excuse not to have to think about what's going on in them, not caring if the open ending actually fits what came before in what it is difficult not to call cargo cult scriptwriting. Harlin's ending, on the other hand, actually fits his film well, while still suggesting some rather unpleasant ideas about the way the universe his characters live in (or not) works. Even better, if you think a little about what has happened in the movie after you have understood what's going on, there's a strong suggestion of a Lovecraftian universe at play here, even without tentacles, and a pessimism that has a lot more in common with 70s horror than most contemporary films that often don't seem to mean their kicker endings and only use them because they are a convention of the genre.

On the visual side, Harlin is clearly a friend of the philosophy I've seen in a few of the more recent POV horror films that an audience should get a good look at the interesting stuff in a film even when it is supposedly shot by amateurs. It works well for Dyatlov Pass Incident, even though the film's monsters do look a bit too much like cheaper, more aggressive versions of Gollum, or like less believable versions of the creatures in Neil Marshal's The Descent. There are some rather clever camera set-ups, and one or two moments in the film's last stages where the camera work will stretch belief to the breaking point for viewers who want their POV horror movies to be realistic instead of right. Harlin's action movie past shows itself in his very un-POV horror sense of pacing where every scene has (quite appropriately, one would think) an actual function in the movie, which again, is more "right" than it is "realistic".

I really enjoyed myself with The Dyatlov Pass Incident, certainly because I'm always happy with POV horror that tries to add some variation to the style, but also because Harlin is just a fine storyteller.

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