CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Uninvited (2009)

The Uninvited (2009) is one of those horror movies that Hollywood seems to specialize in a lot lately.

You know the type I'm talking about: everything about the production looks so damned good that you're almost distracted from the fact that the plot doesn't make a lick of sense. You're almost oblivious to the fact that all the ingredients in the film are derivative and overly-familiar.

Almost.

Directed by the Guard Brothers, The Uninvited is a remake of a 2003 Korean film called A Tale of Two Sisters. I have not seen that film, so I'm not in a position to make comparisons between productions.

However, I can note that The Uninvited certainly boasts the familiar flavor of Asian horror as we've come to understand the form during the last decade, or at least since the remake of The Ring (2002). What that boils down to here is the presence of a long-haired, crouching ghost that skulks across the floor, head down, body contorted. And naturally, the ghost is angry about some transgression in the past.

The Uninvited's narrative revolves around a teenage girl named Anna, a character played with entrancing innocence by young Emily Browning. Anna has been living in a mental asylum for nearly a year now following the accidental death of her sick mother. As the film commences, Anna is released from custody and brought home by her Dad (David Straithairn), a successful author.

But Anna is not happy to learn that good old Dad is already shacking up with the lovely Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), Mom's home-care nurse. Anna is also disturbed by the fact that she still has memory gaps surrounding the night Mom died and the boathouse exploded.

Once at home, Anna experiences ghostly visions of her Mom; visions that suggest the sick woman was actually murdered by Rachel. Anna informs her older sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) about this vision and her suspicions, and together they begin to investigate Rachel's history. They quickly learn that Rachel is living under an alias.

Then Anna's would-be-boyfriend, Matt confides in Anna that he "saw what happened" the night of her Mother's accident. But before Matt can explain further, he inconveniently dies under mysterious and tragic circumstances...

To reveal any further detail about the plot would no doubt ruin the film's many surprises. But suffice it to say that The Uninvited features a third-act twist that the experienced horror fan will see coming from a mile away.

Actually, that's not quite precise. The intrepid viewer need not know horror well. He or she just needs to understand in general how movies are structured. If you think about that, it's easy to correctly guess which character is really behind Mom's "accident."

A little hint: a horror movie like this is never, strictly-speaking, totally straight-forward (not even if it runs under 90 minutes). If a horror movie starts out by pointing the finger at one particular character, that character is, inevitably, not going to be the guilty party. He or she is a red herring. But you knew that already.

Unfortunately, The Uninvited doesn't quite plays fair with its last act revelation. I like and admire Elizabeth Banks a great deal, but she's really and truly lost here. Frankly, I don't see how some of Rachel's behavior and actions (particularly involving a hypodermic needle) can be interpreted in two ways, as the screenplay ultimately demands.

Furthermore, if we are to believe The Uninvited, ghosts apparently displace water when they go swimming...

There's also the not inconsiderable matter of the film's closing lines. Someone says something along the lines of "I'm finishing what I started." This declaration is supposed to be ominous and a bit ironic.

Yet, a careful watching of the film -- and particularly the revelatory flashback -- calls the remark's accuracy into question. Strictly speaking, this character didn't really start "the thing" she's referring to. And, oppositely, "the thing" the character did start, is actually left unfinished at the end of the movie, especially considering the sole survivor left alive and free. And yes, I realize this paragraph probably reads as maddeningly vague. Sorry.

The funny thing about The Uninvited is that no expense has been spared on the production. Anna's house (in Maine) must be a million dollar house, conservatively-speaking. The location, the structure, the interior everything -- it's all absolutely gorgeous. The ghost effects are handled well too and there's even one honest-to-goodness, jump-out-of-your seat jolt moment involving a kitchen stove. The actors all do their best, and occasionally rise above the material.

So it's easy to sit back, look at all these admirable surface qualities and then be lulled into believing that you're seeing a good horror movie.

In fact, you're seeing warmed-up leftovers from approximately a dozen recent and not-so-recent films. Though audacious, the story resolution here just doesn't make any sense. It depends on a weird coincidence involving jewelry. It depends on a convenient memory gap. It depends on the whole movie being interpreted as a "point of view" when the film itself doesn't embody or express a particular point of view.

The Uninvited's last moment is a total deal killer. It reveals that an important character knew all along -- from the first scene -- that the very conspiracy she was investigating was a fiction. In other words, even if the only way to "read" The Uninvited is as the crazy delusion of an insane mind, the movie is still inconsistent with itself.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The House of the Devil (2009)

While many terrific horror movies have been released in the last few years (especially in 2009), only a select few have achieved greatness in the impressive fashion of Ti West's The House of the Devil (2009).

Because West wrote, directed, and most importantly, edited the piece, the film evidences a real sense of unity in terms of presentation. The cumulative effect is, in a word, powerful.

The House of the Devil is a throwback to an older genre aesthetic, one in which a sort of free-floating, generalized sense of anxiety is generated and escalated through modest, subtle means. The aura of terror arises from periods of silence, a minimum of dialogue and adept film-grammar-styled compositions. In the tradition of all great genre efforts, the movie's stylish shape also reflects the film's narrative.

Specifically, The House of the Devil is set in the early 1980s, around the time that paranoia about "Satanic Ritual Abuse" overtook the nation's middle-class. This strange fear might have been due to the rising influence of fundamentalist Christians in the Reagan Era, and their belief (still held today, vis-a-vis President Obama) that anything not born of the extreme right-wing is the work of the Devil.

Or the paranoia about Satanists in our midst could have been the result of collective parental guilt and shame over the fact that -- in the yuppie era of upward mobility and two-income households -- it was deemed necessary to outsource child-care to day-cares, nannies and other "interlopers." After entrusting their children to strangers all day, parents -- when faced with changes in their little darlings, --may have found it easier to charge "Satanism" than look in the mirror.

The F.B.I investigated the strange charges of Satanic Ritual Abuse and never found substantial evidence that worship of the Devil was involved even in a fraction of cases where it was raised. The House of the Devil, however, trenchantly utilizes this context as a springboard for its tale. It offers some brief information about SRA in its opening title card, which feels reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Return of the Living Dead (1985) and other genre classics.

But the undercurrent or vibe established so brilliantly and thoroughly by West in The House of the Devil is that there is something wrong...or off with the world at large as presented in the film. The source of this problem may not be easily pinpointed (especially at first...), but lurks just out-of-sight, slightly beyond our perception.

One of the ways that West forges this "free form," generalized sense-of-anxiety is to deny the audience a sense of visual comfort from the very first shot. As the movie opens, West's camera captures a long-shot of a figure, but one seen only from the back. She is also some distance from us -- through a door-frame -- and we get no details. In other words, her face is withheld from us for an abnormally-long spell, and the effect, visually, is to unsettle us. The camera zooms in, but still reveals no additional details.

It turns out that this is Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), our college-age heroine. And she's not doing anything suspicious here, merely admiring the interior of an apartment that she hopes to rent. But how the camera views Samantha begins to make us feel uncomfortable. For one thing, her space in the frame is limited by the surrounding "box" of the door-frame. And indeed, this is a set-up that West frequently repeats; cutting off Samantha's available space in the wide-screen frame.

The free-floating anxiety the audience feels grows deeper as it observes apparently mundane details of Samantha's life. She needs money desperately if she is to rent the apartment she desires. She can't get back into her dorm-room (her roommate is having loud sex..). She waits all morning on campus for a man who doesn't show-up; a would-be-employer seeking a baby-sitter. Her friend, Meghan, does something unethical, and that Samantha feels reflects poorly upon her. The pepperoni pizza at the local dive doesn't taste good today.

Again, not one bit of this material is earth-shattering or overtly horrific in and of itself. Instead, as the soundtrack suggests -- to the lyrics of The Fixx -- "One Thing Leads to Another."

The movie thus makes us acutely aware of how each little step that Samantha takes brings her closer to the precipice; closer to her reckoning with terror; closer to her "destiny" that she is asked to accept. Specifically, Samantha takes a babysitting job at 7714 East Beaumont -- way out in the woods -- and then is confronted with further...discomfort.

Her would-be employer, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) is a liar. There's no child to "sit," only an old woman locked away in an upstairs bedroom, and this makes Samantha (and the audience) uncomfortable too. This man isn't trustworthy in the slightest but Samantha feels put-upon and he keeps throwing money at her (400 dollars for four hours work). Eventually, an uncomfortable Samantha acquiesces to take the job. On the night of a total lunar eclipse, no less.

Once alone in the old, spooky, Victorian house, the camera's views of Samantha through a door-frame recur repeatedly, symbolically cordoning off her free space in the frame. One long-lasting but utterly still shot even establishes the parameters of Samantha's "safe zone." We stay in the room -- the camera unmoving -- as Samantha starts to probe out, deeper and deeper into the quiet, dark house.

And then more discomfort comes. While dancing on the staircase (wearing her Walkman), Samantha accidentally breaks a valuable vase...and then finds evidence that her employers were lying about something important...

Most of The House of the Devil is over before Satanism overtly enters the proceedings...and West truly provides one of the great set-ups in horror movie history here, assiduously ratcheting up anxiety along the way. When Samantha finally finds her way to the attic -- where she observes a light on under the crack of a closed door -- you'll find yourself perched on the edge of your seat. Through an unforced but deliberate pace and a canny sense of visualization, West thus brings the audience to throat-clutching terror. The House of the Devil is patient. It creeps up on you. It knowingly and methodically pulls down your defenses until you are absolute putty in West's hands.

West has a great eye for detail too. The film is set in the early 1980s, and the period detail is perfect, from the Sony Walkman to the Isotoner gloves to the rotary phones. Even better, the lead actresses actually seem to belong to this era. They aren't simply playing dress-up. Donahue, in particular, gives a fantastic, internally-driven performance. We sympathize with her as Samantha's day goes from bad to -- uh -- really, really bad.

If The House of the Devil fails to please in any sense, it is simply that -- after the exquisite and terrifying build-up -- the film's resolution comes a hair too quickly. But this is indeed a minor quibble in what is frankly one of the finest, most-carefully-crafted new horror movies I've seen in sometime. I especially appreciate the fact that West opted to tell his story straight, with no self-referential humor or easy jokes to leaven the mood of unease. This movie is practically a machine built to scare you and there's never a moment where you get to breathe because the director releases you with a laugh; finding a moment outside the confines of the narrative. Even a TV clip (on "Frightmare Theater") of Romero's Night of the Living Dead isn't used as jokey allusion, but suggests a deeper narrative purpose. Samantha's daylight existence has been -- step by step -- literally "eclipsed" by evil and darkness. From the light of the moon outside, to the TV inside...horror bleeds in.

Ti West's name has been bandied about a lot in the blogosphere of late, and now I understand why. The House of the Devil is a modern genre masterpiece of mood and escalating terror. My only recommendation to West is this: as he grows more established and powerful within the movie industry, he should negotiate to be his own editor. This is important. The House of the Devil looks and feels like the individual work of a unique artist -- an early Romero or Carpenter picture, even -- and that's largely due to the careful, accomplished editing. I hope West doesn't accept any Faustian bargains for big budgets, because The House of the Devil proves that -- left to his own devices -- he's already got all the right moves.

Klaatu Barada Nikto: The Day(s) The Earth Stood Still

In 1940, as war raged across Europe, author Harry Bates' (1900-1981) short story "Farewell to the Master" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction Magazine.

"Farewell to the Master" depicted mankind's first real engagement with other-worldly life. In particular, a spherical or "ovoid" alien vessel materialized in Washington D.C. on September 16th of some future year, arriving in "the blink of an eye."

Aboard this highly-advanced craft, which showed "not the slightest break or crack" in its "perfect smoothness" were two "time-space travelers." One was a humanoid named Klaatu, described in prose as a "benign God" and possessing "great wisdom." Klaatu was accompanied by an imposing, green-hued robot called Gnut.

Unfortunately, these alien representatives were greeted with violence by the human race. A religious fanatic, fearing that Klaatu was "the Devil," shot him dead. This act is described by Bates as "the shame of the human race," and the remainder of the story involves photographer Cliff Sutherland's discovery that Gnut is attempting to resurrect Klaatu. The final twist: the robot Gnut is not Klaatu's servant, but rather...his master.

Considering this ending, Bates' tale concerned our human-centric assumptions; our arrogant belief that the human shape of life would -- even on other planets -- be blessed with a superiority over other forms. But clearly, on Gnut's world, robotic (or what we term artificial) life had flourished, rising above familiar biological forms like man. So "Farewell to the Master" served, perhaps, as an object lesson that mankind was not the center of the universe.

On another level, the tale might have been interpreted by some -- especially on the eve of the most destructive, technological war in all of human history up to that time -- as a warning not to permit our modern machinery to overwhelm and dominate us.

If you are interested in knowing more about "Farewell to the Master," Bates' original story is available online here, for your perusal (and free too, I might add).

Join us and Live in Peace, or Pursue Your Present Course and Face Obliteration: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

In 1951, director Robert Wise brought to the silver screen a big-budget (for the time) adaptation of "Farewell to the Master" by Edmund H. North, titled The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Once again, the context behind the film was international warfare. At the time the film was prepared and released, the Korean War was being waged. But there had also been a dramatic shift since 1940 and "Farewell to the Master." By 1951, the atom bomb was available for use (after deployment at the end of World War II in Japan), and now, it seemed, mankind truly had the means by which to obliterate himself and even his planet

In The Day The Earth Stood Still, the humanoid Klaatu (Michael Rennie) -- now the master -- and his robot servant, re-named Gort, land in Washington D.C. in a flying saucer. They are met by the U.S. military. Klaatu is again shot and injured, this time by a twitchy American soldier. He recovers, and asks to meet with world leaders. Instead, American authorities hold him in custody, and Gort escapes.

Under the alias "Mr. Carpenter," Klaatu soon intermingles with the citizens of Earth. He befriends lovely Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son, Bobby Benson (Billy Gray). He talks to a leading Earth scientist (Sam Jaffe), visits Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Monument, and is ultimately sold-out by Helen's boyfriend, Tom Stephens (Hugh Marlowe). When Klaatu is shot dead by U.S. authorities, the hulking robot Gort resurrects him and permits the visitor to deliver a final, staggering message to the people of Earth. In part, it goes like this:

"The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all, or no one is secure.

Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them.

We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.

The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war. Free to pursue more... profitable enterprises. Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder."

In a time of war, when the "Red Scare" (fear of Communism) was in full swing, it was downright shocking for an American studio film to suggest that America and the world, literally, disarm. Though there's still the possibility of capitalism encoded in Klaatu's speech (he mentions the pursuit of "profitable enterprises," specifically), this lecture calls for not just an end to war here on Earth, but an end to gun ownership all together. I can't imagine that message playing particularly well in the American south. In 1951 or now.

Some people have suggested that Klaatu's solution to world war in The Day The Earth Stood Still is fascist in nature (since everyone is under the thumb of robot police force...), but in some ways the fictional solution of Wise's film actually mirrors the eventual Cold War accommodation over nuclear Armageddon. The threat of mutually assured destruction served as a deterrent to their use. We lived under this fear for decades, and neither The Soviet Union nor the United States ever launched missiles against one other. We didn't have omnipotent robots watching over us, but we knew that the first sign of aggression on our part would merit an equally grievous response on the part of our enemy.

Other scholars have interpreted The Day The Earth Stood Still as as an overt Christ metaphor. A man of peace, Klaatu, descends from the Heavens and is killed by ignorant men representing conventional authority (not Rome, but America). Klaatu is then resurrected, and walks among his fellow man with a message of peace, and yes, cosmic brotherhood. Afterwards, Klaatu returns to the Heavens above, rejoining his kind.

Even Klaatu's alias on Earth -- "Mr. Carpenter" -- suggests Jesus of Nazareth's one-time occupation. And, further inclined to analyze the film's details, one even might suggest that Tom Stephens is Klaatu's "Judas," betraying the alien for the promise of riches (alien jewels, in particular). Authors Kenneth Von Gunden and Stuart H. Stock excavated this Christ metaphor in detail in their text, The Twenty All-Time Greatest Science Fiction Films (General Publishing Company, Lt., Canada, 1982), noting that screenwriter North "admitted" that the parallels "were intentional."(page 44).

Today, there's little doubt that The Day The Earth Stood Still powerful message of peace and brotherhood would be greeted by some audiences as a socialist treatise, one that impedes personal liberty, and threatens the Second Amendment. On the other hand, look where our continued violence has brought us in 2010. Six decades after The Day The Earth Stood Still, the world is still at war, and mankind is still divided. No doubt this is why the film is still revered today. Humanity seems on stuck on a dark path unless there is an intervention, divine or alien, in our future.

Your Problem is Not Technology. Your Problem is You: The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008).

If the Robert Wise Day The Earth Stood Still posited a kindly, mankind-loving Jesus-styled alien in the person hood of Michael Rennie's Klaatu, then the remake directed by Scott Derrickson in 2008 lays down God's law, Old Testament-style. This movie returns to "Farewell to the Master's" vision of the alien craft as a featureless, smooth ovoid, but sticks to the Klaatu-Gort relationship of the 1951 film.

Klaatu himself, however, has changed dramatically from his previous incarnation. Here (as played by Keanu Reeves), he is a wrathful God who adopts human form (as God often adopted human form in the Old Testament stories).

After Klaatu/God's "angel" -- a man who has toiled on Earth in human form for seventy years -- reports that mankind will never change his destructive ways, Klaatu makes plans to wipe the slate clean; to erase human sin from the surface of the Earth. "If you die, the Earth survives," he tells one human.

The first thing Klaatu does, however, is preserve all the other animal species of the planet in small spheres explicitly termed "arks" by the screenplay. This development also harks back to the Old Testament, Book of Genesis tale of Noah and the Great Flood. The Earth is to be destroyed because of "man's wickedness."

Then, Klaatu lets loose a swarm of all-devouring metal insects to destroy man's technology and even mankind himself. This severe punishment serves as the technological equivalent of the Book of Exodus's Plague of Locusts, visited upon Egypt at a time of corruption (and a belief in "false" gods). The destruction caused by these technological bugs in Derrickson's film echoes the warning from Exodus. "They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields."

Finally, when Klaatu experiences a change of heart and decides to save mankind, this God-figure visits the last Plague of the Book of Exodus upon our planet: "The Plague of Darkness." Specifically, Klaatu's ship emits an electro-magnetic pulse that destroys all technology on Earth, plunging the species both metaphorically and literally into "night." In the Old Testament, the darkness lasted but three days. On Earth, our technological"night" is to be the new normal, with no end. Ever.

In Wise's atom-age film, the Jesus-like Klaatu issued Earth the verbal warning I reproduced above, but he also revealed his "miraculous" powers. For a half-hour, he interrupted all electrical power on Earth before restoring it (hence the title of the film).

By contrast, in the 2008 version, Klaatu adopts no such half-measures. He punishes us for our mistreatment of the planet and each other, thus acting as a wrathful judge, and cold, emotionless lawgiver. No warnings this time.

The message is clear: in 2008 the human race is past ultimatums and warnings from space. The only thing that will change the human race is a wiping of the slate, pushing us to "the precipice" of extinction. This is the course God in the form of Klaatu ultimately chooses for us, and his change of heart (opting not to destroy us), also fits with Old Testament theology. In the Old Testament, God could not predict would agents of free moral choices would do; and here, Klaatu is unexpectedly swayed by the humanity of Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) and her son. He alters his trajectory, but the punishment he selects is hardly mild.

The remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still was not warmly received. In part, this is because it is a remake of a remarkable and landmark film; one that has been lauded as one of the greatest in the history of the medium. Longtime fans of the 1950s version feel nostalgia about it, and will clearly accept no substitutes. Or remakes.

Yet this is a clever, careful and knowing remake in so many ways. It cannily re-contextualizes the original film's Christ analogy as an Old Testament metaphor, down to its concepts of apocalypse (orchestrated by locusts) and Klaatu's aloof, cold-hearted demeanor.

And, in keeping with the post-911 world, this Day The Earth Stood Still also plays dramatically for keeps. It acknowledges that we have reached a "tipping point" in terms of our mistreatment of the environment and notes that things "can't be the same" if the Earth is to survive; that our current lifestyle is unsustainable.

My appreciation of the 2008 remake may not sit well with some -- especially with fans of the original film, I suppose -- but in all the right ways, this Day The Earth Stood Still speaks to us with the same urgency that Wise's film spoke to the men and women of the early atomic age. Some viewers complained of the remake that it was too personal, too intimate; that Klaatu should have -- in the tradition of the original film -- issued a speech and a warning to the world. But in keeping with the Old Testament contextualization of this story, it's clear that God has no responsibility to okay his actions with us. He moves in mysterious ways, and owes us no explanations. And as I stated before, the time for warnings and brief demonstrations is long past.

In 1940, 1951 and 2008, the story of The Day The Earth Stood Still has carried a didactic purpose. The written words of Bates alerted us to the reality that technological warfare could overwhelm us and make us slaves to the machine. The 1950s movie from the great Robert Wise obsessed about our drift towards self-annihilation. And in 2008, the classic tale was angrily, vehemently re-parsed to comment on our mistreatment of the planet.

In all versions, however there exists hope. The steadfast belief that, as Helen Benson puts it -- "we can change" before it is too late.

We should all hope she's right.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Gamer (2009)

It's funny how certain concepts bubble up from the collective subconscious and find a voice in the mainstream pop culture. For instance, the year 2009 will likely be remembered as the year of the avatar in science fiction cinema.

Human beings operated perfect robots "surrogates" in the Bruce Willis cop-thriller Surrogates (2009). Sam Worthington operated his test-tube, blue-skinned N'avi in James Cameron's box-office shattering epic, Avatar (2009). And here is Gamer (2009), the extreme Neveldine/Taylor action-opus which dramatizes the creepiest, darkest avatar scenario yet put to film.

Set "some years from now," Gamer occurs in an America dominated by two popular video games. The first is "Society," "the ultimate simulation experience," in which human gamers pay to control other real humans (avatars) in real settings. The controlled avatars or icons are paid to be controlled in this fashion; their natural brain cells replaced by artificial "Nanex" cells, Nanites that enable remote control, and which pin the game avatars with a specific IP address.

In other words, you can "get paid to be controlled" in "Society" or you can pay to control the actions of another human being. Why would someone agree to be physically controlled by someone else? Desperation and poverty are two answers. Another: "No tough choices" and "no responsibility" for your actions.

The second popular game depicted in Gamer is entitled "Slayers," and it is more overtly violent than "Society." Here human gamers again pay to control other human beings. In this case, however, the game is a battle scenario during which death is often the result. Death-row convicts are the played characters/avatars, and if they can survive thirty bloody missions intact, they are released from incarceration. Less skilled, less violent criminals can play "genericons" who populate the game world, and they only need to survive one mission to be released. But given the level of mayhem and destruction in each mission scenario, surviving even one arena hardly seems likely. Actor John Leguizamo's character learns this the hard way in the course of one ultra-violent mission.

The mastermind behind "Society" and "Slayers" is billionaire Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), the very man who bailed out America's bankrupt prison system, and devised this new method of handling prisoners.

Pitted against Castle in the film is our hero, John Tillman, or Kable (Gerard Butler), an icon/avatar who has survived twenty-seven of his missions and is thus positioned to be the first death-row convict ever released via "Slayers." Kable's human "player" is Simon, a 17-year old rich kid (who looks like he's twelve years old).

In the world beyond "Slayers," a battle terrain which resembles -- no doubt intentionally -- Call to Duty: Modern Warfare, Kable's little girl has been moved into foster care. Worse, Kable's wife Angie (Amber Valletta) is an "actress" in "Society," meaning that she is a controlled avatar too. In her case, Angie's player is an obese, sweaty pervert and perpetual coach potato: a man who plays his game while dipping frozen waffles into maple syrup by the bucket-full.

Gamer and Surrogates share an idea here, and even, specifically, the fat man controller/player character. In the "anonymous" world of future human interaction, both films suggest, the hot woman you are having sex with may be the ugliest, fattest, most grotesque human being on Earth. Caveat Emptor.

Like The Running Man (1987) or Death Race (2008), Gamer revolves around one good man's concerted efforts to escape the corrupt establishment that has made him both a prisoner and a media superstar. And yes, this facet of the film is likely a subtle comment on the highs/lows of celebrity.

Here, Kable wants to free his wife from her avatar slavery, and recover his daughter too. Along the way, however, during his heroic journey, he must also take down Castle (who has a plan for global domination, naturally), and collaborate with a homegrown resistance movement, here termed "Humanz" and commanded by Ludacris.

You may remember that Surrogates also featured a resistance movement (likewise led by an African-American man, played by Ving Rhames); one that resisted the so-called "progress" represented by a new, de-humanizing technology. Here, Ludacris, Allison Lohman and a few others toil in a basement dominated by anachronistic 1980s arcade video games (Defender, Missile Command, Galaga), hoping to undo the effects of the Nanex technology and the new age of human-based video games. These old arcade games are thus positioned in the film's text as a more wholesome, more innocent form of game recreation.

As I wrote above, Gamer is an absolutely extreme film. It is brutal and violent, but, importantly, never gratuitous. All the considerable violence in the film carries a heavy dramatic purpose: these are human beings dying in futuristic gladiatorial games and urban battlefields, not just pixelized, computerized soldiers. When Kable is able, under Humanz's auspices, to communicate with his player, Simon, he reminds the boy that those being chunked and splattered across the game's bloody streets are actually thinking, feeling, human beings. Simon is able to separate himself from that fact, however, with remarkable ease. They are "death row psychos," he replies without sympathy. "They had it coming."

This cruel remark is part and parcel of the film's overriding conceit. When personal actions become totally separated from results, from consequences, we are capable of terrible things, terrible rationalizations, Gamer suggests.

For instance, Angie's disgusting, lip-smacking "Society" player, sends his character (Angie -- a real, flesh & blood woman) into the most degrading, humiliating sexual situations he can imagine. He does so because he does not have to deal with the results of his actions himself. He is not the one getting fucked in the ass by unsavory, sicko degenerates. He is not the one submitting his body to the dangers of communicable diseases. He is just having fun, and hey, his avatar is being paid for the use of her body, right?! In this world, that fact seems to make it all okay. Slavery has been re-imagined as a win-win financial transaction. The slave gets something (money); and the slaver gets something too: the chance to act out the darkest fantasies without fear of repercussion. It's just a game, after all. Right?

I particularly admired in Gamer how the filmmakers use the pop song Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart as a leitmotif. The lyrics read, in part:

"Everybody's looking for something/ Some of them want to use you/ Some of them want to get used by you/ Some of them want to abuse you/ Some of them want to be abused."

These words perfectly express the film's dark argument about our human nature. Everyone is looking for something in Gamer, but some of the things they seek are not only unhealthy, but sick and perverse. When other human beings become our toys, and we can imprint our deepest fantasies upon them, we become inhumane, monstrous.

Gamer reaches its thematic pinnacle, perhaps, when -- via Tillman's attempt to save Angie from further sexual degradation - - the film's two video games, "Society" and "Slayer," become one in the same, merged, at an overpopulated Rave. Violence and sex suddenly become intermingled in one explosive, debauched scene.

Blood spatter, under ultra-violet light, looks just like semen spatter, we quickly learn. The gyrating, appetite-sating revelers don't know the difference. It's all just body decoration.

In its action-packed tale of a computer icon who becomes a pop culture icon, Gamer succeeds in painting a dark picture of human nature, one extrapolated from current trends in our society. The makers of Gamer seem to understand, particularly, that movies (especially with the advent of 3D) are becoming more experiential and less narrative-based, less character-based. Accordingly, they have crafted a loud, jittery, explosive, sense-shattering experience. Those who don't like it will complain about the pervasive quick-cut editing style and the shaky cameras, no doubt. But like the overt sexuality and extreme violence on display, this is not a gratuitous approach; it's a pointed commentary on contemporary film style.

Still -- and again, much like Surrogates -- Gamer doesn't quite hold together by the end of the third act. Castle -- a man holding all the cards -- is dispatched a little too easily in the finale. And once more, a worldwide system of control ("Society" and "Slayers") is rendered inoperative in somewhat unbelievable, clean fashion. In reality, the world just doesn't spin that way.

Some aspects of the film's villains are a little too cartoony for my taste, as well. A soldier villain seen in much of the movie just....seethes. Scene after scene, he sits...and seethes. It's so broad in performance and presentation that it's comical. And when Hall, playing Castle with an effete Southern lilt, pauses to perform Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin" in a dead-on impersonation of the late Sammy Davis Jr., the film grinds to a campy (if distinctive...) halt. The song works thematically (since Castle controls everybody, under the skin...), but the moment is nonetheless a versimilitude-shattering train-wreck in terms of the film's sense of gritty reality.

Despite notable flaws, mainstream movie critics seem to have missed the point of the incendiary Gamer. It holds something like a 29% percent approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes at present, and that's way too low given the film's sense of imagination. Reviews pretty much dismissed it as a generic action flick when the opposite is actually true. For most of its running time, the Neveldine/Taylor movie is a vital indictment of generic, mindless action flicks (and video games), as well as of the people who derive vicarious thrills from them.

But perhaps that's too much like biting the hand that feeds you. And perhaps that's why, in the last act, Gamer seems to fall from grace and rely too heavily on age old, trite, action-conventions. The movie almost hammers home its dark commentary on human nature, but then decides to pull its final punches in favor of a Hollywood happy/crappy ending.

Game Over.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: 2012 (2009)

Once upon a time, producer Irwin Allen (1916 - 1991) was nicknamed "The Master of Disaster" because of his considerable efforts -- primarily during the 1970s -- shepherding disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), The Swarm (1978), When Time Ran Out (1980) and other epics to the silver screen.

Today, however, director Roland Emmerich has -- with the very important assistance of CGI technology -- largely assumed Allen's crown.

Emmerich has already obliterated the White House (ID4 [1996]), stomped Manhattan (Godzilla [1998]) and buried the globe in ice (The Day After Tomorrow [2004]). And now, in 2009, Emmerich presents his masterwork in the disaster genre: the epic 2012, which, in every tangible way, one-ups his own previous efforts, as well as Allen's now-quaint-appearing contributions.

Want to see a capsized ship? 2012 has it. Want to see buildings on fire? 2012 has it. Want to see massive volcanoes erupt (taking the initiative from Dante's Peak [1998] and Volcano [1998])? 2012 has it. Want to beat Allen's made-for-TV disaster, Flood (1976) too? Well, 2012 offers mountainous tidal waves wiping out whole populations. Oh, and I almost forget: there are also earthquakes in 2012, thus burying the non-Allen 1974 disaster epic Earthquake directed by Mark Robson (and written by Mario Puzo).

The only cataclysm Emmerich leaves out of 2012? The killer bees from The Swarm. Perhaps for his next project...

Besides CGI and copious amounts of green screening, what permits Emmerich to depict all of this global destruction is the screenplay's conceit of huge solar coronal ejections. In 2012, the sun roils with colossal solar storms, and the Earth is bombarded with neutrinos. These neutrinos create a "new kind of nuclear particle," ones super-heating the Earth's core and acting "like microwaves." This means that the world "as we know it...will soon come to an end." Humorously, the film also terms the event "the biggest solar climax in recorded history."

I sure hope the sun lit up a cigarette when that king-sized climax was over...

Following this giant solar climax, the Earth buckles under "crust displacement," otherwise known as cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis. What does this mean? Well, let's just say Wisconsin is the new Antarctica.

In more human terms, Emmerich's film follows the efforts of failed novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) to get his estranged wife and two children from Los Angeles to China, where the world's governments have constructed vast arks that can survive the end of the planet and re-colonize the globe. So, Curtis and his family outrun an earthquake that plunges Los Angeles into the sea, the fiery, volcanic destruction of Yellowstone Park, more earthquakes in Las Vegas, a crash landing on an ice glacier, and other calamities. They are literally only seconds ahead of every single disaster that befalls the planet. The Curtis family is clearly the luckiest one on the face of the Earth, given their survival success rate as dramatized here.

2012 is extremely lucky itself, to have a great actor in Chiwetel Ejiofor playing Dr. Adrian Helmsley, another lead character and the heart and soul of the film. He's the scientist who reports to the U.S. President (Danny Glover) about the coming end-of-the-world scenario, and fights, at every opportunity, for some humanity to dominate plans for "continuity of the species." Ejiofor invests every one of his key moments in the film with gravitas, decency, and emotion. It's a vain effort, but damn, he gives it his all.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed The Fourth Kind (2009) on this blog, and noted that any carefully-considered opinion of the film had to take into account the kind of movie it wanted to be: a pseudo-UFO documentary, like those crafted in the 1970s. I would be hypocritical if I did not, similarly, judge 2012 by the conventions of its form: the disaster epic. At a whopping two-hours and 38 minutes in length, 2012 is an example of this film form on steroids. It features dozens of characters, multiple subplots, and more impressive scenes of destruction than any you've ever seen. The shots of L.A. falling apart (with parking decks spitting out cars by the half-dozen...) are jaw-dropping.

2012, also like other disaster films, concerns itself with last goodbyes, heroic sacrifices, and human bravery in the face of terrible circumstances. I confess to feeling a lump in my throat during one moment, near film's end, when a sweet family in India is overcome by a tsunami. A tender father gazes down at his little boy's angelic face, and holds that precious visage in his hands...and then the tidal wave takes them away in an instant.

Outside that moment and a few others, however, I feel -- as I often do with Emmerich's work -- that despite rigorous adherence to the disaster formula, he relies too heavily on low-brow humor and cliched conventions for us to really connect meaningfully with his characters or storylines. This writing/directorial approach actually undercuts the formula in my opinion.

2012's final scene illuminates well both the highs and lows of Emmerich's approach. A few arks (think When Worlds Collide, but with ships...) have survived the crust displacement and solar climax. The exhausted survivors face the dawn of a re-shaped globe. Our heroes see that one continent, Africa, has survived the catastrophe, resurfacing and proving habitable. The captain of Ark 4 makes sail for the Cape of Good Hope. We get a good, lingering look at the continent of Africa on a computer display, and even get to ponder, for an instant, that this is exactly where mankind was born, generations ago. In all senses, we have returned to the beginning. Mankind has been given a second chance, and, ironically, it's where we began our first chance.

Then, this moment of quiet reflection, which actually approaches poetic levels, is immediately usurped by a scene in which John Cusack's seven-year old daughter tells him she no longer needs "pull-ups." Yep, his daughter is potty-trained...and only 6 billion people had to die!

A happy ending, right?

Emmerich's film veers wildly from high camp to human tragedy in just such dreadful fashion throughout its overstuffed running time. Though 2012's effects are no doubt impressive, the film never truly generates the impact of, say, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005). Whatever that film's flaws, it did capture, in vivid terms, the sense of terror and dread as human civilization falls apart, and whole populations are displaced or destroyed. Here, ninety-nine percent of the human race dies horribly, and we're supposed to be soothed at the coda because one little girl is no longer wetting her bed.

Another cringe-worthy moment arrives relatively early in the film. Kate Curtis (Amanda Peet) and her new husband, Gordon (Thomas McCarthy) argue in a grocery store. Right after Gordon states (out-of-the-blue, really...) that something "is pulling them apart," a fissure opens up between them on the ground...and literally pulls them apart. See? It's just...unnecessarily jokey.

The film also works against itself. 2012's central narrative conceit is that Jackson is an unabashed optimist and humanist. He believes that we stop being human the moment that "we stop helping each other." The last quarter of the film involves a pertinent question of morality aboard the ark, as Helmsley and the others must decide if they can take on additional passengers, even with a tsunami just fifteen minutes away and closing. This is an interesting take on human nature and our responsibility both to the species and our fellow man.

But, you know, 2012 doesn't walk the walk. At all. Why? There's a scene earlier, set in Las Vegas, during which Cusack's family and another family flee a packed airport and board a Russian jet filled with probably a dozen empty cars in the hold. It's obvious to anyone with eyes: the plane could house everybody in that airport if you dumped the cars. Not comfortably, perhaps. But adequately. But not once - not once -- does "Mr. Optimism" Curtis (or anyone in his group) think about saving his fellow man in this crisis. The Curtis family just flees the disaster and leaves everybody else to die in the earthquake. Don't tell me there's no time. Because there's no time to get those people aboard the ark in the finale, either, but Curtis and Helmsley still make the attempt in that situation. So the movie is inconsistent in approach and in the voicing of its theme.

Later in 2012, as people riot to board the parked ark, several rioters fall to their deaths off a high ledge. But Emmerich is more concerned with a pet dog walking a tight-rope to get back to its worried owner. Again, cheer for the dog! (And never you mind those human beings plummeting to their doom!). It's like the movie is schizophrenic. It has to pay the God of Generic Movie Blockbusters by offering bread and circuses -- and deaths by the hundreds -- but it also wants you to feel good about human beings. Yay us!

This is emotional manipulation pure and simple, and not good manipulation, either, since we see through the cynicism so easily. How is Emmerich's "disaster" approach different from Allen's canon? Well, in those older films, at least you felt sad when people died. Here, for the most part, the computerized victims (hanging on to perforated skyscrapers) are just pixels to be manipulated, and you don't, in general, feel so deep a sense of loss. Somehow, the destruction here -- while beautifully rendered -- feels a lot less human, a lot less personal.

2012 is the kind of movie that Hollywood does well, but that doesn't mean it is actually good. It features a lot of big names for marquee value, but the performances are all over the place in terms of tone. Danny Glover and Ejiofor grant the film some fleeting sense of dignity, while Woody Harrelson goes way over-the-top in a camp portrayal of a conspiracy theorist. Somewhere in the middle, between these approaches, is John Cusack...who showed up and read his lines.

2012 indeed hits all the notes we expect of the disaster film. Audiences get to vicariously experience something awful and wonder what they would do if facing the same crisis. We get to laugh and cry, and the special effects are amazing, but still 2012 doesn't manage to satisfy as a film. This is a movie about the end of the world; about the fact that there's nowhere to run, and half the time the movie just wants to play the circumstances for laughs.

Look at those two old ladies driving slowly through an earthquake! Look at the Tibetan priest handing over the keys to his pick-up truck and warning the driver about the "clutch!" Look at George Segal (our venerable movie-star elder) singing a song about the end of the world during his love boat routine with Blu Mankuma! The world is ending, but Emmerich wants to work in his shtick.

Blockbusters fail or succeed, I suppose, by trying to please everybody. All the demographics need to be satisfied. All the bases need to be covered. The irony is that by trying to satisfy everyone, by trying to cover everything, 2012 emerges a huge, inconsistent, manipulative mess.

Nice special effects, though.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Carriers (2009)

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper," wrote modernist poet T.S. Eliot in 1925, not long after World War I.

I couldn't get that famous passage from The Hollow Men out of my mind while screening Carriers, one of the bleakest and most emotionally-wrenching end-of-the-world thrillers I've seen since the age of The Day After (1983), Testament (1983) or Threads (1984).

Those films all arose out of the Cold War and the pervasive fear of a nuclear winter during the Age of Ronald Reagan (who insisted, wrongly, that a submarine's nuclear missiles could be recalled after launch, and famously joked about bombing Russia in "five minutes" on an open mic).

In keeping with these modern times, however, and with the rise of the H1N1 flu, Carriers has updated the specifics of the global apocalypse.

This time, it is a terrible pandemic that has wiped out most of the world's population. Billions have died, gas is scarce, the Federal government is absent, medical science has all but surrendered, and the uninfected are left to carry on in a kind of moral abyss.

At one point during the film, we see a normal suburban town in middle-western America, or what's left of it. A truck marked "Bio hazard" and packed with human remains is abandoned on the side of the road, garbage is strewn everywhere across the avenue (as infrastructure fails...) and homes have been spray-marked in code by authorities, just like we saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It's a grim portrait of collapse.

Carriers stars Chris Pine (Star Trek [2009]) as Brian and Lou Taylor Pucci as his brother, Danny. These siblings are a study in opposites. Brian is tough, brutal and adheres mercilessly to a set of rules. These are: avoid the infected at all cost, disinfect anything that was touched by the infected, and most importantly, "the sick are already dead." Danny, nicknamed "Ivy League" by Brian is a well-meaning intellectual without a cutthroat bone in his body. He is Brian's conscience when needs be, but he also hides behind Brian, who does the dirty work for his little brother.

As the film opens, these brothers are making an end run across America's back roads. Their destination is Turtle Beach in the Gulf of Mexico, where they hope to settle until the disease dies out. They are traveling with Brian's girlfriend, Bobby (Piper Perabo) and a girl they rescued at a "McMansion," Kate (Emily Van Camp).

The best-laid plans of these siblings fall apart, however, when they encounter a desperate man, Frank (Christopher Meloni), and his eight-year old girl, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), who is infected with the disease. Frank informs the travelers that he has heard of a new CDC center in a close-by town that may possess a vaccine. He is desperate to get his daughter to that cure. Brian simply wants to appropriate Frank and Jodie's car and continue on their way to Turtle Beach, but Danny insists that they help out. So they help out, and events begin to snowball...

The remainder of Carriers involves the moral choices that these brothers must forge in the face of apocalypses both biological and personal. Early on, the film depicts a quick encounter with a murderous redneck, who shoots down an American Asian. The murderer ties a sign around the corpse's neck that reads "Chinks Brought It." So yes, the Tea Baggers and their nativist beliefs have survived the apocalypse too. They're well-armed (The 2nd Amendment Lives!), drive their pick-up trucks on patrol, and have graduated from shouting "Baby Killer" to cold-blooded murder.

But Carriers isn't a movie about politics, it is a movie about moral choices. Simply put, the "rules" that Brian so assiduously lives by are not quite as intractable when applied to those he loves, or even to himself. It's easy to say "the sick are already dead" when your lover is healthy, or you are healthy. But when those you love are sick, clarity is gone. As humans, we cling irrationally to things like hope.

The early portion of Carriers belongs to Meloni, who delivers a raw, understated and unforgettable performance. Frank does everything he can to save his sick little girl, and, in the end, is left with no options. He deals with his daughter's mortality in a way that will break your heart; by being , simply-- until the bitter end -- "Daddy" to his child.

There's a shot here that will remain in your psyche long after the film has ended: Frank walking in foreground, Jodie in his arms, while Brian, Danny and the girls drive away in abject cowardice (in the background), abandoning the man and his child. The car peels out in the distance, and Frank is fully aware of it...but he focuses, laser-like on the child in his arms, never looking back, never breaking composure. Instead, he asks Jodie to sing a particular song that he likes; as if they are the only two people in the entire world. She starts to sing it in that little, innocent, childish voice, and that's the last we see of Frank and Jodie in the film. But if you are a parent, trust me, you'll return to that image in your slumber.

If the early part of Carriers belongs to Meloni, then the last act certainly belongs to Chris Pine, who demonstrates here (as he did in Star Trek) that he is an actor of interesting and unusual dimensions. At first, his Brian is arrogant and cruel, but as the movie goes on you see another side of the character. He is the one who makes hard decision after hard decision...for his brother. In fact, Brian's final, irreversible, aggressive decision may play to some in the audience as selfish and desperate, but I propose the opposite. It's his final gift to his brother; the last bit of toughening-up he can give to a kid who is constitutionally unequipped to live in this sad new world.

Again and again, Carriers asks the audience to consider the moral dimensions of the actions we see undertaken by Brian, Danny, Bobby and Kate. At one point, Bobby commits an absolutely immoral act, but does so after trying to save Jodie's life. Still, she hides the fact that she may be contaminated, and in this particular world, that's absolutely tantamount to committing murder. She jeopardizes everybody by clinging to irrational beliefs about the disease, and about her own mortality.

We also encounter that Tea Bagger, still eager to kill someone who looks different and place blame, despite the fact that blame, at this point, is certainly immaterial. In one town, Brian and his group also encounter a doctor from the CDC, one who makes an absolutely brutal-seeming choice regarding the dying children under his care. But even here, the film is honest. "Sometimes choosing life is just choosing a more painful form of death," he tells Frank. Not a happy message, but not an untrue one, either.

In another harrowing scene, two male survivors decide to abduct the girls (Bobby and Kate) for their own personal "use," but do so as easily as Brian acquires gasoline from passing travelers. In this world, people are simply another resource to be exploited. We see it happen again and again.

Carriers evidences some visual acumen, too. The movie opens with shaky home movies of Danny and Brian as youngsters. They play at Turtle Beach, feeding seagulls and running in the surf. The camera pans up to the sky and then we transition literally, into an upside down view of the world as it is now, as topsy-turvy a place as you could imagine. The image itself tells us how wrong things have become.

Directors Alex and David Pastor also have an eye for expressing irony. At an abandoned high school, a classroom has been converted into an emergency medical ward, but all the trappings of the classroom are still there. Namely, a banner over the chalkboard which reads "Career Day: Your Future Depends on It." In this new world, the banner is absolutely meaningless, and worse, a painful reminder of what has been lost.

Perhaps what I found most compelling about Carriers is that it is entirely devoid of typical Hollywood bullshit. There's no last act miracles for these characters; there's no sudden reversal of fortune for the world; there's no mock heroics to save the day. When beloved characters -- and children -- get the disease, they die. The film never succumbs to schmaltz or sentimentality. Instead, it ends with a simple and devastating admission: that Danny, sans Brian, will now spend the remainder of his days "alone." There's nothing to look forward to anymore.

In Carriers, the world is really falling apart a piece at a time, leaving only "places" like Turtle Beach, but no people there to comment on them. The silence in and of itself is devastating. Many apocalypse movies (zombie apocalypse movies particularly) are noisy, busy and crowded, so that you don't think about what's lost; instead you just think about staying ahead of the drooling hordes. Carriers looks into the abyss, and there are no distractions from the view.

So, no, Carriers isn't spectacular, it isn't pacey...but it is elegiac. "It's a beautiful day," says Bobby (paraphrased) "but it shouldn't be a beautiful day." Mankind is ending with a whimper, and the Earth is still spinning along. The sun is still shining...

Above all, Carriers makes you wonder how you would behave in such a situation. As a Father. As a brother. As a human being. Would you cling to your sense of morality in a crisis, or just act, to utilize the movie's most dynamic visual metaphor, as a vicious dog feeding off the corpses of the dead?

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Fourth Kind (2009)

In terms of UFO stories, there is this strange tradition in the modern cinema of the pseudo-documentary: a film that mixes stock footage of purported flying saucer sightings with newly-filmed, "dramatized" material.

For three decades, the "real" and the staged have been mixed in movie ventures including Target: Earth?, a film which featured actor Victor Buono playing an alien, plus real scientists including Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov.

The 1970s and early 1980s truly represented the heyday of UFO pseudo-documentary explorations like that, including UFOs: It Has Begun (1976), UFOs are Real (1979), UFO-Exclusive (1979) and UFO Syndrome (1981).

In the same decade, there were also a number of pseudo-documentaries pursuing author Erich von Däniken's popular hypothesis about "ancient astronauts" visiting man in pre-history, the whole Chariot of the Gods (1970)/In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973) approach.

Surprisingly, the year 2009 brought a dedicated revival of these "alien encounter" formats...with a new twist, director Olatunde Osunsanmi's out-and-out horror effort The Fourth Kind.

Here, the filmmakers have also adopted The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity's (2009) marketing scheme: selling their genre film as being entirely based on fact. The truth, of course, is that all the "authentic archival footage" featured throughout the film (captured by police cameras, home video cameras and other sources) is staged; prepared exclusively for this movie. Like the first-person camera approach of Paranormal Activity, this conceit is designed specifically to scare viewers: to make audiences believe that what it is witnessing is authentic.

The underlying conceit here is incredibly interesting, if a little complex. Director Osunsami employs split-screens on several occasions to place purportedly "real" archival footage (say of a police hostage situation on a front porch...) side-by-side with his staged representation/re-enactments of the same moments.

The trick, of course, is that both incidents are staged for the film; both are faked. Yet placed side-by-side in one frame-- with one heightened artificial image reinforcing the authenticity of the other -- audiences are asked to seek out the visual differences between grainy home video and apparent Hollywood confabulation. In this hunt, our eyes conclude that the home video is realistic, and actually buy into that (false) footage as being truthful. In other words, Osunsami deliberately deploys slightly-exaggerated Hollywood artifice to make us believe in the veracity of the cheap, home video material. And he's largely successful in his clever game too.

Indoctrinated in everything from America's Funniest Home Videos to Cops to World's Wildest Police Videos, modern TV and film viewers have come to instinctively trust the shaky, grainy, cheap approach to filmmaking, and, oppositely, inherently distrust the more accomplished, romantic, Hollywood approach. The latter is exemplified here by the presence of movie star Milla Jovovich in the lead role of "Dr. Abigail Tyler," a woman who uncovers a rash of alien abductions in Nome, Alaska during the first five days of October, 2000. Modern audiences crave (and subscribe) to naturalism in films these days, eschewing artifice and theatricality as much as possible. This movie encourages that impulse; asking us to reject the artifice of the Jovovich dramatizations and believe the naturalism (the lie...) of the 911 tapes, the police camera videos, the home video sources, and so forth.

Case in point: our main character. The Fourth Kind also presents another woman as the real Dr. Abigail Tyler, and let's just say, to paraphrase Wes Craven's Scream, she's no Milla Jovovich. Presented in an archival video "interview" from Chapman University (with director Osunsanmi, no less), we come to believe this unglamorous woman as "the real thing" because she is awkward, halting, relatively unattractive, and distinctly un-movie star-like. Of course, she's an actress made to appear that way.

This is where the movie proves genuinely smart. The "staged" re-enactment of scenes feature lovely Jovovich looking great and sexy in her stylish wardrobe, playing out hypnosis regression scenes against backgrounds that are more romantic, more affluent than what we see in the home video. Osunsanmi deliberately plays up the exaggerated production design in these sequences; they are an artist's heightened version of reality and we detect that fakery. Thus the documentary footage, lensed in less elaborate, less-stylish surroundings, seem increasingly real. The supposedly "documentary," archival footage moments deploy available light, less attractive actors than Hollywood would permit, poorer sound, and more naturalistic blocking and camera work. People step out of frame. The blocking cuts off heads during shots, action occurs off-screen, at the corners of perception, etc.

It takes about twenty-three minutes or so for the head to get accommodated to The Fourth Kind's fashion of operating, and you have to get through a cheesy opening by Jovovich, directly addressing the audience. She comes out of a blurry fog, as if awakening from a dream, and breaks the fourth wall. But here's the thing: we must remember that this is all part of the format and genre (the UFO pseudo-documentary) too. Hollywood "stars" (often slumming it, in need of a paycheck) were always asked to front this goofball stuff with all sincerity and pomposity, whether it was Jose Ferrer, Burgess Meredith or Rod Serling.

And Osunsanmi is uncannily skilled even at excavating the right visuals in the movie's re-enactments too. For instance, he finds exactly the right shot during a domestic dining room scene to visually express the absence of Tyler's husband, Will (who has died under mysterious circumstances). He also forges a scintillating sense of uneasiness and scope with the first shots of Tyler arriving in picturesque Nome, an isolated town that can only be reached by airplane. You get the impression from Tyler's flight over Nome -- an outcropping of human technology and community blanketed on all sounds by green mountain ranges -- that the town is the perfect "test tube" environment for alien abduction and experimentation. And no one has to say a word about that idea for it to carry thematic currency.

Occasionally, the movie missteps, no doubt. Early on, there's a crisply-edited montage of hypnosis sequences (featuring three of Tyler's clients) as they all discuss exactly the same thing: a menacing white owl watching them from their bedroom windows. The montage, a time-saving measure, actually deprives us of Abigail's "learning curve." It's the wrong technique for the sequence because we should gradually learn that all of her insomniac clients have experienced an identical terror -- the presence of the owl (actually a mnemonic avatar for the extra-terrestrials). And we should see this unnerving truth dawn on Abigail slowly too. Instead, by cutting between three separate hypnosis sessions at lightning speed, there's no sense of learning, no graduation of suspense, no escalation of terror. It's one of the few scenes in the movie that absolutely doesn't work.

Yet what does work, remarkably well, actually, is Osunsanmi's "documentary"-style footage, which -- at about the forty-five minute point -- kicks off into absolute horror when two patients, named Tommy (Corey Johnson) and Scott (Enzo Cilenti) are regressed to the time of their alien abductions. These actors (and the ones in the side-by-side "documentary scenes", featured in split-screen) do an absolutely amazing job of expressing and countenancing terror, using only their body movements as vehicle for expression. You actually think they are experiencing alien-generated seizures or spasms.

And then, later, we see archival footage of Scott actually being "possessed" by an alien and the static-ridden, rolling video footage provides a psychic jolt. Against your better judgment, you feel frightened (or at least unnerved), and in part it is because of Osunsanmi's conceit of pitting the documentary-style faked stuff against the Hollywood-style faked stuff. I also especiallyadmired the way that the film attempted to bring in the Chariot of the Gods aspect of the form, by explicitly referencing Sumerian cuneiform and artwork. Again, some people may claim that this subplot is a real stretch in believability (that ancient astronauts or aliens formed our race's perception of "God"), but the movie is working in a specific genre and therefore must abide by the rules of that genre.

By and large, critics absolutely hated The Fourth Kind. It has something like an 18% positive review rate on Rotten Tomatoes. I submit there are two important reasons for this, and they have nothing to with the technical skill or entertainment value of The Fourth Kind.

The first is that many modern journalists/critics may not be familiar with the style and history of the UFO pseudo-documentaries of the 1970s, and thus don't understand the genre the film is deliberately and delicately aping. They have no idea that this is an updating of a historica moviel form. Therefore, they have no way to put The Fourth Kind into any kind of meaningful context for their readers.

And secondly -- by and large -- critics really, really don't like to be tricked or outstmarted by movies. They don't want to admit, essentially, that a movie has gotten one over on them (which is why they all watch M. Night Shyalaman movies obsessed with picking apart a so-called trick ending...whether there is one or not) .

Therefore, it is easier to belittle or dismiss that which they don't "get." For example, many critics found the "dramatizations" of The Fourth Kind to be cumbersome, the Hollywood scenes over-designed (Abigail's "log-cabin Arts & Crafts office looks like it was surely subleased from a (Bulgarian) millionaire" wrote Roger Ebert in his review, for example). Yet this is the crux of the issue; it's the point of the movie. It's a leitmotif. The Fourth Kind encourages our eyes to note the unrealistic, romantic affluence of Abigail's surrounds (typical of Hollywood movies since at least the 1990s...), and then note, by side-by-side comparison, the relative naturalism of the archival, supposedly-documentary footage. In that distance between staged, A-movie re-enactment and "direct cinema"-style documentary footage, the movie pushes us to believe the veracity of the latter over the former. The point is to scare us silly and, again, as a horror film, The Fourth Kind is supremely effective on that front.

Ironically, all the same critics who disliked The Fourth Kind fell all over themselves loving Paranormal Activity, and sure, that film was easy to get...obvious even (especially by comparison). For me, that's what killed my enjoyment of Paranormal Activity. The camera there captured "supernatural" events absolutely perfectly; a feat which no one in real life has managed to do in a hundred years of photography and cinema. But this Micah chap accomplished it effortlessly. A ouija board explodes into fire on cue, perfectly framed in the middle of one composition. To me, that's just tipping the filmmaker's hand. It lacks not just subtlety and skill, but artistry.

The Fourth Kind is never that obvious; and you watch as some sort of technical (alien?) "interference" scuttles our attempts to witness alien saucers, and alien possession. We make out enough to be horrified, and to get a general visual impression of what is occurring. But critically, we're never spoon fed CGI-close-ups of demons, for instance, in The Fourth Kind. We are asked, instead -- again in cheesy pseudo-documentary format -- to consider simply what we have seen, and what we believe. And yes, it is a little cheesy, but once again: that's the nature of the form. It is part and parcel of the pseudo-documentary paradigm. We don't have hard proof of UFO alien abductions, so what we're left with is earnest "believers" like Milla Jovovich, (or in the earlier instances, Rod Serling, Jose Ferrer or Burgess Meredith...) building a spine-tingling but sensational case for us.

The Fourth Kind involves some splendid trickery and it is a good, effective horror movie. It won't make you believe in alien abductions or UFOs, but it will scare you. It certainly scared me. The exciting thing is the fashion in which it visually generates its overaching mood of terror. Here, something as simple as an audio-tape recording that starts normally and drifts off suddenly into nightmare territory is more than enough; thanks especially to the way the director laboriously sets-up and rigorously maintains his real/fake dynamic. He is aiming at something deeper too (and we see that in the explicit comparison of the aliens to "God"): we deeply fear being powerless in our own lives. The Fourth Kind gets at that idea; how our sense of purpose, superiority and direction is undercut if there are indeed "higher beings" acting upon us with impunity and without mercy. Our human connections (to our children, for example), mean nothing if we're just laboratory rats.

Is The Fourth Kind's all-out attempt to subvert our "truth radar" just some intellectual game? Perhaps so, but in vetting this particular game, the director of The Fourth Kind has successfull updated a genre (the UFO pseudo-documentary) and breathed new life into the currently in-vogue mockumentary horror film. This film just reinforces my belief that 2009 has been the best year for horror in a long, long time. The year brought us Trick'r'Treat, Drag Me to Hell, Pandorum, Zombieland, Halloween II, Paranormal Activity, Antichrist and The Fourth Kind. Even the "failures" on that list are ambitious, original, and endlessly fascinating. And -- taken on its own terms, and in the right context -- The Fourth Kind is no failure.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Collapse (2009)

Forget Orphan, Pandorum or Zombieland, the Chris Smith documentary Collapse is one scary-as-hell movie. Basically, it's a talking-head documentary about the end of the modern world. And it features one riveting speaker at center stage: a man named Michael Ruppert.

Some critics and journalists uncharitably term Ruppert a conspiracy theorist and others have labeled him an alarmist. Yet there's one thing you absolutely can't dispute after watching this film. The man is absolutely spell-binding; electric.

When Ruppert expresses himself, he does so with such great confidence, such incredible intelligence, you virtually hang on every syllable. He's profound and he's compelling, but, of course, what we really want to know is this: is he also right? Is he predicting the shape of things to come?

Over an 82-minute span, this former Los Angeles Police officer and self-described "cartographer" -- who maps how the world really works, not the way we think it works -- describes in excruciating detail why the end is nigh not just for America, but for the entire industrialized world.

For human civilization itself.

The lynch-pin, of course, is Peak Oil. Oil is the very commodity that allows for the production of plastic, that enables modern farming, that helps us build electric plants and nuclear reactors, and more. Take oil out of the human equation, and suddenly everything from the food distribution chain to commuting to your day-job is right out the window. Goodbye Wal-Mart. So long, Target.

What's worse, according to Ruppert, is that the world has no realistic Plan B. There's no back-up paradigm to keep society solvent, secure and productive once oil runs out. Ruppert also alleges that the CIA has known about Peak Oil since the 1970s, and that Dick Cheney's secret energy task force in 2001 concerned this very topic; how to secure the oil fields of Iraq in what is, essentially, a resource war end-game.

In riveting fashion, Ruppert escorts the audience right through every detail of the Peak Oil scenario, explaining why A.N.W.R. drilling, Arctic Drilling and even new Iraq pipelines are -- at absolute best -- momentary solutions to the crisis. Furthermore, Ruppert dismisses Ethanol, electric cars and other "alternatives" with withering but indisputable logic. Without oil, you can't make tires, he reminds us, so what the hell are electric cars going to ride on? Finally, Ruppert does hold out some sliver of hope for solar and wind power.

Late in Collapse, Ruppert mentions Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief, and notes that the modern world is now firmly ensconced in the stage between denial and anger. And that more anger is on its way, as more of us realize a paradigm of "infinite growth" is contrary to the very laws of physics.

To boil down "infinite growth," what Ruppert is saying here is that our economy isn't going to get better...not so long as money and oil are finite commodities. What he's saying is that we're in for more wars to control the last drops of oil. What he's saying is that our way of life is unsustainable.

And if you watch Collapse, you'll see a man who is absolutely anguished over what he believes. Ruppert's beliefs have made him Public Enemy Number #1 to many in rigid ideological circles (think Cheney), a pariah to others, and just a nutcase to the masses. Given this, Ruppert seems to have made no recent emotional attachments to other human beings, though he loves his dog, taking long walks on the beach, and rock'n'roll music.

Collapse concerns global apocalypse, but in some meta-fashion, it's actually about Michael Ruppert's personal apocalypse. What he knows -- or what he thinks he knows -- keeps him isolated, alienated and marginalized. And he will absolutely not compromise his beliefs. No matter what. He likens himself to a German citizen in Hitler's Third Reich; one who could see, ultimately, Hitler's destination and the pain and trauma it would cause the world. If Ruppert were living in that time and place, he would never put down his beliefs and go along with Group Happy Think. And he feels the same way today: he's not about to stop conveying his message of collapse when there's the chance -- even a slim chance -- that he will be heard by someone who can come along and change things.

"We're trapped by old ideas," Ruppert states at one point (and I may be paraphrasing a little). He insists we need a President like Thomas Jefferson who will spark a revolution. Not a violent, physical, bloody revolution but one of fresh ideas, of new thoughts. We need to tear down the conceits we have blindly accepted for decades and start again, he says, with the concepts of balance and sustainability replacing dead ideologies like socialism, communism and -- yes -- capitalism. As Ruppert points out, all of those systems of belief are predicated on the idea of infinite growth.

Throughout Collapse, Michael Ruppert makes his case in a compelling manner, and one bordering on arrogance. When questioned repeatedly about "human ingenuity," he never really answers. Isn't it possible to *think* our way out of this brewing crisis? He doesn't seem to think so, but the movie suggests that Ruppert is as trapped in his old ideas as are the people he so vociferously criticizes. He has -- for good reason, no doubt -- lost hope. He sees only a coming "suicide" of the human race on the horizon.

I agree with Ruppert on the facts (about Peak Oil, about the love of money being the root of all evil, and on the need for a new renaissance in human thought), yet throughout the film I couldn't completely buy into his doomsday interpretations.

Here's why: human beings remain adaptable and inventive. Oil has brought us great riches in the last 120 years, but it wasn't "oil" that imagined X-Rays, CAT scans or MRIs. It wasn't oil that mapped the human genome in less than twenty years. It wasn't oil that conceived the cure for Polio, or invented the Internet. Resources are limited here on Earth, it's true, but the human mind's capacity to grow, evolve and seek new knowledge is infinite. There are probably a million minds in America today working on the problem of Peak Oil, and also considering realistic energy alternatives.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the great sweep of human history has always been towards improving the human condition. I don't believe we're going to sacrifice everything we hold dear because oil runs out. We will transition (a term Ruppert also uses) -- and there will be some tough times -- but I believe we will endure, and ultimately prosper. That's why my favorite part of Collapse involves Ruppert's stirring lecture on two countries that have been forced to transition: North Korea and Cuba. In North Korea, Ruppert tells us, there was starvation and death after the collapse of the Soviet Union, primarily because it was a top-down, centralized country. In Cuba by contrast, the government liberated and encouraged the people, telling them to take local ownership of their own survival and food-growing facilities. That's actually what happened, with a sort of mini-boom of organic gardening taking hold across the nation.

So yes, ninety-nine percent of all life forms that have ever evolved on Earth have suffered extinction.

But again, alone among these life-forms, man boasts the capacity to re-build the world to his liking; and even seek resources beyond the limits of the Earth. Our understanding of our universe is growing at a rapid pace; perhaps even a rapid enough pace to out-march dangers like over-population and Peak Oil.

Ruppert would no doubt call me a Pollyanna (or at the very least ask me what energy source will power our rockets when oil runs out...) but, as Collapse makes plain, for this man the sky has already fallen. The film neither endorses nor rejects Ruppert's view of things, but instead paints a picture of a man who could be a modern Cassandra...or who may have trapped himself in a purgatory of his own depressing construction.

As citizens of planet Earth, we should deal with cold, hard facts -- yes. But we should also realize that no single doomsday outcome is pre-ordained. To quote a famous science fiction franchise, there's no fate but what we make. And even though we're silly, argumentative creatures, we've accomplished amazing things during our ascent. We've touched the stars.

A thousand years ago, there are many people who would have said such an accomplishment was against the laws of physics too. But we did it, and we're still here. How did we do it? Creativity, imagination, team-work, a sense of belief in ourselves, in our community. Michael Ruppert understands these elements are important, but he is so alone in his own life, it appears, that perhaps he doesn't give these variables the weight they deserve when calculating catastrophe.

See this movie and decide for yourself.