In short: Prowl (2010)

Late teen Amber (Courtney Hope) is desperate to leave her dead-end small town, her alcoholic mother and her all-around shitty prospects behind. It's the last straw for her when her mother - of course mumbling in alcoholic stupor - confesses to her that she's been adopted.

Amber even has already found an apartment in Chicago. The problem is, she needs to give her security deposit to the guy renting her the apartment in person, because…um…there are no banks in the USA? Anyway, for various reasons, she has to ask every single one of her small-town friends for a ride. It takes some time to find someone to take her, but at that point, the whole affair has turned into a road trip - for some reason that, again, eludes me.

This being a horror movie, Amber has had quite a few foreshadowing nightmares and visions these last few days (which also make the third act twist glaringly obvious), so it comes as no surprise when the road trippers' van breaks down in the middle of a very empty Interstate. Fortunately, and after some begging, there's a friendly truck driver bound for Chicago willing to help them out. Alas, this still being a horror film, the friendly trucker is in truth the food delivery man of Chicago's vampire orphans, and unloads the teens in the obligatory empty warehouse. Empty, except for a horde of loud and fast vampires, that is. Fight for survival, and etc. and so on.

Despite plotting that takes two steps towards the painfully stupid, the difficult to believe and the clichéd, only to take one step back again, Prowl is a pretty entertaining little film. I just hope you missed our old standards of idiot plotting - the drunken truth or dare game that nearly leads to mock-lesbian shenanigans and the cell phone that doesn't function when it's used to call help, but works perfectly fine to betray a victim's hiding place to hungry vampires, because they, and a few of their friends, are out trying to bury the film in the same annoying crap that already didn't work in the last hundred films that used it.

It's actually a bit of a surprise how decidedly not terrible a film this full of badly digested dumbness can still be once its director - Norwegian Patrik Syversen gone Hollywood, in this case - lets loose with some very traditional, but also very tightly done, action-y horror scenes. It's surely no masterpiece, but Syversen manages to turn a miserable script into a watchable movie through a fine sense for pacing and a solid handling of old-fashioned suspense techniques colliding with wobbly camera and loud, loud noises.

Courtney Hope is pretty good too, acting with an easy-going charisma that helps the film over some very rough scripting patches (if having plot holes the size of cities and a horrible love for everything that's bad about horror can still be called "a rough patch"). In the film's better moments, Syversen and Hope could nearly convince me that Prowl (a film, by the way, not containing a single second of prowling) is actually sort of good.

Just imagine what would happen when someone would write Syversen a better script for his next outing.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,patrik syversen,courtney hope

In short: Rovdyr (2008)

aka Manhunt

It's 1974. The siblings Mia (Nini Bull Robsahm) and Jorgen (Jorn-Bjorn Fuller-Gee) are going camping in the deep dark Norwegian woods with Mia's best friend Camilla (Henriette Bruusgaard) and Camilla's boyfriend Roger (Lasse Valdal).

It's going to be their last real get-together for a long time because Camilla will be studying abroad for a year. Looking at how tense and passive-aggressive Roger acts around her, that will probably be for the better for her.

Or rather, would be better for her if their trip wouldn't end in blood and guts. At the last rest stop before their planned camping side, the friends pick up a girl who seems terribly frightened of three men with hunting gear driving around in a jeep.

After one of the less clever script ideas to get a group of protagonists out of their car and into danger (yes, let's throw away our car keys!), the hunters ambush the friends, killing some of them and leaving the three survivors tied up somewhere in the woods. They're not tied up too good, of course, or they wouldn't be able to free themselves to provide an interesting hunting experience for their captors.

Camilla, the least obvious candidate, will turn out to be quite a survivor.

I'm really of two minds about Rovdyr. On one hand, the film's director Patrik Syversen manages to create a film with a unified aesthetic on very little money. The woods, the muted colour palette, the excellent yet never gratuitous gore effects and the subtly clever sound design unite to a direct homage to the mood and feel of a 70s piece of grindhouse survival horror. If you add the solid acting and the (mostly) tight and tense script, you have a film that's as technically excellent as you could wish for.

On the other hand, it is also a very empty experience. It's one thing to make a homage to the style and feel of 70s horror, but quite another to keep as slavishly to that formula as if you'd believe it still were 1974.

What Rovdyr misses for me is a reason to care for it beyond its considerable technical achievements. Everything here happens exactly as you would expect it to happen in a film written in 1974. The film never deviates from its sources for a second, even the semi-downer ending is there and accounted for exactly as expected. The big difference between this film and its models is that Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on Dead End Street had something to say about the state of the world they were made in or the state of mind of the people who made them. Rovdyr seems to lack this kind of resonance completely and has nothing else to replace it.

This is by no means meant to bash Syversen's work. Technical perfection is hard enough to achieve on its own, and if a director's first feature film has a surface this well done, I expect something truly exciting from his next one. After all, the director is already much farther along on the road to making a good film than most people working on this (non-)level of budget.

 

Technorati-Tags: norwegian movies,patrik syversen,in short,horror