Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by recurring nightmares of a big, bloody and very digital catastrophe in a sky-view style restaurant. It’s getting so bad, her once famous academic prowess is suffering. Because these dreams star a young version of her grandmother, she decides to return home to dig for family secrets.

There she encounters an older generation that doesn’t want to talk about family secrets like the fact that Grandma is living in a weird cabin in the middle of nowhere thereby trying to stave off the death of her whole family line (or is plain crazy), and a younger one wont to not very interesting whining. Everyone’s also prone to the kind of melodrama without which the amateurish script would screech to a halt. One can’t blame death for trying to wipe them out in the series-standard gory accidents. One can blame him for taking his dear time with it.

Sometimes, you should really cut your losses – unless somebody with an actual sense of imagination gets their hands on the Final Destination franchise again, there are only ever drearily “funny” death pinball entries in the franchise’s future.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the former of which already tried my patience with crap like Dead Rising: Watchtower and Leprechaun: Origins a decade ago, or one of the five people listed with scriptwriting and story duties try to turn the whole death business into a family affair, during which death doesn’t only try to wipe out the unplanned survivors of catastrophes but also their spawn, I mean, descendants. And yes, of course the film is not going to really hold to these new rules, because that would take actual effort by the filmmakers. Obviously, the only effort anyone’s taken here with anything are the death scenes. Ironically, these try a bit too hard to be clever and twisty in the way only the most stupid things do, so there’s only a small degree of joy to be found here. The film’s painfully digital look – not something I tend to complain about – robs most of the killing of any physical weight anyway, and the film’s insistence on digital blood really doesn’t help here at all.

The character work is dull and mechanical, with everyone being either bland or annoying, probably to fit better with the CGI.

The only moment of actual humanity here is the final appearance of Tony Todd in a scene not even Lipovsky and Stein can rob of it. Still, I would have wished the man could have gone out with a film worthy of him.

Three Films Make A Post: Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.

Young Adult (2011): On one hand, I have complete respect for Jason Reitman’s willingness to make a film about a woman hitting a tough spot and returning to her small town home that doesn’t espouse small town virtues as the be all and end all of “true” life and adulthood. On the other hand, the resulting film is then - quite consequently – about a character who experiences things but never learns anything from them, who doesn’t change for better or for worse, the only point seeming that some people can’t change, even if they are shitty and broken enough to need it, which is neither news nor particularly interesting to me. Sure, there is a lot to be said against all those movies about the cleansing power of returning home, but replacing hope with nothing isn’t a terrible convincing proposition either, however well Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt are selling this (Patrick Wilson is his usual nonentity, which might be a purposeful casting decision here).

Prince Avalanche (2013): Also not exactly to my tastes is this one, directed by David Gordon Green, in which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch at least do make something out of their experience of doing – sometimes – road work on a godforsaken road. I’m not terribly convinced by the tone of the affair, though, Green desperately trying to elevate the pretty bare script into something universal but never quite succeeding for me. But then, I usually have the problem with Green’s more serious-minded films of not seeing that he’s actually saying those as much about life, love and the rest he seems to think his films do. That might just be me, though.


Freaks (2018): Let’s finish on this film by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (of Leprechaun: Origins “fame”) which first casts what turns out to be a really bad X-Men movie as an intriguing and atmospheric mystery about a little girl (Lexy Kolker) building the wrong picture of a complicated world her father (hey, it’s Emile Hirsch again) doesn’t bother even attempting to explain to her. The more the film explains about what is actually going on with and in the world here, the more stupid it gets, though, reaching a sort of apex of awkward dialogue, bizarre writing choices and characters who will do any damn shit because it is in the script in a climax that has to be seen to be believed. And to think that much of what’s happened could have been avoided if any of the grown-ups here had at least attempted to explain the world to Chloe, the kid character, something like “some of us have special powers, bad people hunt those with special powers; we have special powers, therefor we must hide, yes, even from ice cream vans and the lady next door”.

In short: Leprechaun: Origins (2014)

Little does Sophie (Stephanie Bennett) expect her little trip to a village down in the boons of Ireland (a place also often known as “the Brown Isle”, at least going by the film’s colour scheme) together with her boring boyfriend, her boring best friend, and her boring best friend’s boring boyfriend to end up as badly as it will.

For the villagers lock the quartet in a hut even more out in the boons so the local Leprechaun can kill them. It’s to make amends for the gold the villagers stole from it, or something along these lines. Turns out these particular tourists aren’t very easy to kill.

So, to ask the most obvious question first, why would you reboot a series of films about a wisecracking magical murderous little person only to turn said little person into a grunting and snarling monster played by some wrestling dude (Dylan “Hornswoggle” Postl, whoever he may be, though it’s not important anyhow, because we never get a good look at the monster anyway, and there might really be anybody doing the snarling) that might as well be a rabid dog or a mentally ill leopard, because it attacks everything it sees anyway, gold or no gold, and never does anything that says “Leprechaun” instead of completely random monster? Why would you choose an approach to this particular monster that isn’t just the anti-thesis of what the handful of people who’d actively seek out another Leprechaun film would want to see but also one that is this bland, boring and generic?  Then, why would you design a creature suit you are so ashamed of you never actually show it to the audience in full, in good light, or without adding a digital out of focus effect that also looks really crap?

Why use a script for the film that is so generic even lesser SyFy movies (well, not director Zach Lipovsky’s) have better ideas (and certainly are more fun to watch), that uses no even vaguely interesting mythological ideas whatsoever and does not contain a single fun or clever or just not actively, painfully bland idea or line of dialogue? Why direct a film when you don’t have anything to bring to the table beyond bland competence and a visible disinterest in actually entertaining your audience in any way, shape or form?

And why, last but not least, call this lame concoction of boring boredom from planet bore “Origins”, when it’s neither a prequel nor about your franchise monster hero’s origins?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,zach lipovsky,stephanie bennett,dylan postl

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Y, Robot

Triassic Attack (2010): I know SyFy Channel movies are an easy mark for getting criticized for being particularly generic, but there's an entertaining, even clever, way to work inside the specs of SyFy moviedom, and then there's Triassic Attack whose only point of interest is its insistence on casting its supposedly corn-belt American leads (including a pre-Game of Thrones Emilia Clark) with people who have to attempt (emphasis on "attempt") fake American accents. There's the usual stuff about divorces, native Americans, wayward teenagers who aren't actually wayward, and silly monsters, but nothing of it is delivered in anything but the most perfunctory manner. Fun clearly lives elsewhere.

Tasmanian Devils (2013): For example in about half of this movie about perfectly stupid base jumpers and perfectly incompetent (well, female lead Danica McKellar's assumed trait is "competent" but that never really happens outside of dialogue) national park rangers and their run in with the the ancestors of the Tasmanian devils. Though really, despite all attempts to pretend for Australia, the poor monsters seem rather more Canadian. It's again a very generic movie even for SyFy standards but when it's not wasting its time on the usual plot contortions (why can't our park ranger heroine call for help? - because the magic ranger radio only connects to her home base, and there's nobody there with her two now dead colleagues and her all romping through the national park) but where Triassic Attack never really gets up to much of anything, Tasmanian Devils is at least well paced and incident-rich enough to entertain, which is all I ask of it. And it's directed by Zach Lipovsky, the director of the coming Leprechaun reboot to boot.

Hybrid (2007): So, turns out getting a wolf eye transplant is the sort of thing that makes a guy pretty wolf-y. Because that's not enough to fill ninety minutes, there are also Tinsel Korey and Gordon Tootoosis doing Dignified Native American Mythical Kitsch stuff while the film's very un-SyFy draggy pacing slowly but surely makes eyelids drop and provokes soft snoring sounds. Sometimes, SyFy movie life ain't pretty.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,canadian movies,american tv,in short,emilia clark,danica mckellar,zach lipovsky,tinsel korey,gordon tootoosis,horror,syfy vs the mynd