Three Films Make A Post: It's diabolical! It's daring! It stalks, it cuts, it rips!

Debug (2014): Call me conceited, but I always get a bad feeling when a movie is written and directed by somebody who is mostly working as an actor, despite there being clear and rather fantastic exceptions to the rule that actors can’t write and direct for shit unless they bring a ghost writer/director or two. David Hewlitt’s Debug is not going to change my mind on the matter either, for while the film’s technically competent on the direction side, it’s also a text book example of a film that makes the wrong choices for mood, characters and everything else with every single edit.

And that’s before I’ve even come to the atrocious script, a kind of lite version of the lovely but already not exactly intellectually brilliant Event Horizon. The script doesn’t know how or when to exposit effectively, how to build up to its supposed scenes of suspense or fright, and instead just lets things happen without seeming to have any control over its own narrative. The characters are one-dimensional and – despite a decent cast – uninteresting, and the dialogue’s just embarrassing, with no single line that sounds as if an actual human being would speak it, nor one that at least sounds cool. I thought I’d be so easy to please with SF/horror that no film in the small sub-genre could manage to not entertain me at least a little, but this thing’s beyond any hope.

Timebomb (1991): This action film with conspiracy thriller elements by Avi Nesher featuring good old Michael Biehn and Patsy Kensit as the least believable (and impressively stupid) psychiatrist imaginable on the other hand did entertain me quite a bit. The script doesn’t exactly hold up to scrutiny (but then it’s not paced to be scrutinized, really) but Nesher’s a consistent director with a decent eye for keeping things rolling, there’s some entertaining nonsense about brainwashing, and the cast (also including a ranting Richard Jordan, a completely wasted in a non-role Robert Culp, our old friend Billy Blanks and Tracy Scoggins) is getting into it with a degree of enthusiasm.

There are even one or two scenes – the shoot-out in the porn cinema in particular – that are as good as US low budget action gets, and given these scenes aren’t in a film that bored me before them, this is a minor for me.

Eden Lodge (2015): Despite marketing material that makes Andreas Prodromou’s film look like a British version of slasher, torture porn and backwoods cannibal flicks, this is actually much more in the tradition of 70s British thrillers, with some bits and pieces of the more hip genres stitched onto the proceedings (one suspects for better saleability). Unfortunately, it’s not a very gripping entry in any of its genres, with not terribly much happening in it that’s actually very thrilling at all, the psychological suspense never really arriving, and a hesitant air to the proceedings.

The film is pretty to look at though, and, as it so often goes with films that leave me absolutely cold, clearly made by basically competent filmmakers making a basically competent film without anything in it you’ll remember a day later, and not much more you’ll actually be interested by while watching it.

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In short: Rage of the Yeti (2011)

Billionaire Mills (actor turned director of this thing David Hewlett in a series of smug cameos) hires a bunch of idiots (actor names redacted to protect the guilty) to rescue another bunch of idiots (names also redacted) who got into trouble trying to steal an old Chinese codex from a Canadian Arctic island.

The book came to the island via the wreck of British ship carrying crap the Chinese emperor didn't care for and so loaded off onto the British (no, really, that's the backstory). Alas, besides the book, there was also a group of Yeti on the ship (yup, they were other crap the Emperor didn't care for). The creatures survived the wreck and have somehow managed to eke out a living from the barren wasteland they were stranded on, so that their descendants can now threaten - and hopefully eat - both bunches of idiots.

As if being dumb and having Yeti trouble weren't enough, our heroes also have to cope with traitors working for another billionaire in dire need of a codex among them, as well as the fact that their own billionaire wants his own life yeti once he realizes those are available.

I think I may have made my general position about the SyFy [sic] Channel's movie productions already clear. I have probably used terms like "crap", "not fun", "not funny", "lazy writing", "certainly not as clever as it thinks it is" and "painfully bad CG effects" when I did, so colour me somewhat surprised when I realized that I was kinda-sorta okay with this one.

Sure, Rage of the Yeti's script has all the originality and depth of something put together during the course of thirty minutes (and probably put down on a paper napkin), but unlike a lot of other SyFy movies I've seen, it's decently paced - for once in one of these films, we actually start in medias res and don't really stop for long until it is over -, and shows a sense of fun. Sometimes, that sense of fun goes a bit too much in the direction of the loathsome "we know this is crap, but it's all, like, ironic, man" I still blame on Wes Craven's Scream movies, but more often than not, the film gives the impression of being written by people doing their best to throw cool shit on screen because they actually want to entertain their audience with a decent monster movie, instead of promising things they aren't then willing to deliver.

David Hewlett's direction is basically okay. He doesn't have much of a visual imagination, his action direction is pretty pedestrian, and he seems to have a thing for his own - and other people's - feet that reminds me disturbingly of Doris Wishman, but there's not much truly wrong with anything he does. Well, except for the foot thing. This puts Hewlett above most of the directors (except for Tibor Takacs) slaving away for SyFy, and about on par with your typical point-and-shooter, so I'm not going to complain.

Rage of the Yeti's major downside are clearly its special effects, with the expected boring and ugly monster design (what's with the teeth?), as well as the usual lack of physicality of everything on display. I am, however, willing to overlook crappy effects in a film like this that is working hard at wringing some excitement out of them, for that is all I ever ask of a low budget monster movie.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: So Daring We Recommend A Babysitter!!

Fear in the Night (1972): One of only three movies directed by Hammer's veteran writer, the late great Jimmy Sangster. It's a variation on the old "driving the wife insane" number, enhanced by some clever, low-key twists, a bit of Peter Cushing being eccentric, Joan Collins being not very nice, and some fine shots of autumn countryside.

If there's a real problem with the film it is perhaps that it does not make as much use of the inherent strangeness and creepiness of parts of its backstory as it could have.

Highlander: The Search For Vengeance (2007): Regular visitors to this blog will know of my unhealthy love for the work of anime director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, but as much as it pains me to say it, his untimely addition to the Highlander universe is not a very good film, nor is it a very entertaining film. Part of the film's problem surely is that it was made for the US market first and Japan second, leading to Kawajiri having to scale down his usual excesses of violence, sex, weirdness and women with vaginae dentatae. There's still a bit of his strangeness hidden away in the mess, and what the film presents of sexual subtexts sure ain't healthy, but it's all a bit timid compared to Kawajiri's usual style.

Then there's a script that suffers from a boring and unsympathetic hero, and pacing that's again and again dragged down by unnecessary flashbacks that just don't add much to the film as a whole except running time.

It's all a bit naff, really.

Elevated (1997): Vincenzo Natali really likes films about a handful of people (rather inevitably including David Hewlett) trapped in some sort of enclosed space, surrounded by unexplained danger. Case in point is this short film about a handful of people (including David Hewlett) trapped in an elevator and slowly losing their grip on reality while unseen monsters just might threaten their lives.

It's a pretty neat little film, short, to the point, pleasantly acted, and gifted with a very fine ending.

 

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