And Soon the Darkness (2010)

I didn't mean to watch this movie, I swear I didn't.  I saw it on Netflix and confused it with A Perfect Getaway; I'm starting to really enjoy Timothy Oliphant, thanks to Justified, and I was curious to see a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth.  Well, And Soon the Darkness is not that movie.  At all.  I wish it was --- and A Perfect Getaway probably isn't that good, either.  But, since I started it, I figured I might as well finish it and never be tempted to watch it again.

And Soon the Darkness is a remake of a 1970 horror movie of the same name, and it probably follows the same basic plot.  I don't feel like checking, so we'll just assume that's true.  The film opens with a woman being held against her will in a basement or torture room or someplace scary and dank.  We hear her crying and screaming for a bit, and then we see someone (presumably her captor) motivate her silence my whipping her with some stripped (but charged) electrical wires.  If you want more of that story, you should really just switch to Hostel or Hostel II, because this film doesn't really go back to this point.  Instead, it skips ahead three months to find two stupid American ladies vacationing in Argentina; Stephanie (Amber Heard) and Ellie (Odette Yustman) are part of a larger tour group, but they decided to spend their last night in Argentina on their own.  Being attractive and young only amplifies the pair's stupid American-ness; neither of them speaks much Spanish, or knows anything about the area, or can pick up on subtle warnings.

I'm glad their helmets are protecting their handlebars.

And when I say "subtle," I mean multiple people telling them to stay together and not leave their friend alone.  They stick together at first; they go to a bar, where Ellie hits on anything that moves and eventually drunkenly stumbles  off with a sexy Latin man.  She doesn't get kidnapped here.  I point that out because the movie clearly sets up the expectation of her kidnapping with several instances of Stephanie having difficulty finding Ellie; Ellie is sometimes found in another room or, in one case, one camera pan away.  Well, when Ellie stumbles back to their room in the early AM, she accidentally unplugs Stephanie's alarm clock, so the pair sleep in late and miss the daily bus out of San Frankidnaptown.  Both women have cell phones, so I don't know why they were relying on a hotel clock, but whatever, that is certainly not the biggest flaw in this movie.  When they miss the bus, the girls decide to try again tomorrow.  What should they do until then?

If you answered "Roll over and kiss," you will be extra disappointed.

That's right, they find a nice, secluded area and tan for a few hours.  Eventually, Stephanie decides that they had better get going because...um...they have to meet a bus in another twenty hours?  I'm not quite sure.  Anyway, she wants to leave and Ellie wants to stay, they start bitching at each other and they split up, with Ellie opting to sunbathe alone in a forest clearing.  Shockingly, Ellie disappears.  When Stephanie realizes this, she starts looking and does everything in her power to find her friend.  No luck.  What can she do to find her friend so far away from home?  And is Ellie really in trouble?  The answers are "not a whole lot" and "yes," respectively.  The real question is how long before Stephanie disappears?

I don't have terribly high standards for movies that fall in the horror genre, but even I have my limits.  Before I say anything mean about the acting, though, I should point out that this is a poorly written script.  That said, I think I can honestly say with some assurance that Odette Yustman is not a good actress.  Yes, she's attractive, but that doesn't give her the right to annoy me with her voice or soulless eyes.  Here, she gets to act bitchy and vapid.  And later, scared.  It's quite a bit of range for her.  Amber Heard is not much better.  Her well-behaved idiot is boring and charisma-free, so you never actually care if she is going to find her friend or if she will remain unharmed.  She's not annoying, but she never gives you a reason to like her, either.  Karl Urban plays the mysterious and creepy other American that just happens to be in St. Kidnappey.

Yeah, he looks trustworthy.

His character is annoyingly and foolishly close-vested about his motives, but Urban's performance was a revelation for me.  Namely, he isn't a very good actor, and it becomes more apparent when he's not playing a medieval-style warrior.  Cesar Vianco was mediocre at best as the villain, and that's all the effort I want to spend thinking about him.

As for the work of first-time feature film director and co-writer of And Soon the Darkness, Marcos Efron, I just have to say this: boo.  I went into this movie thinking it was another film entirely and I was still very aware that this was going to be a movie about kidnapping.  That is terrible direction.  There was no suspense.  There was no logic to the camera work.  All the actors sucked, so he certainly didn't direct them.  This isn't even an original screenplay, since it's a remake --- and the story is still awful!  Here's a hint for future writer/directors: if your South American characters are speaking Spanish (without subtitles) throughout the movie, they shouldn't be speaking in English when they discuss the most illegal parts of the plot.  That's stupid.  Not as stupid as the fates of the characters, but it's still dumb.

Like, "Run, Forrest, run!" dumb.

Since this is a pretty horror-free horror movie and there is no nudity in the film, there really isn't any reason for this movie to exist.  Sure, Odette Yustman sings along to the Divinyls' "I Touch Myself," but that's a pretty piss-poor highlight for any movie.  The characters act without any semblance of personality or logic, the script is dull, and the plot is obvious.  The only aspect of this movie that keeps it from being utter trash is the very legitimate fear of kidnapping while traveling abroad.  There is a good movie to be made with this idea.  This isn't it, but the basis for this plot could inspire something that isn't soul-crushingly bad.  As for this movie, I wish I could bass slap (that's swinging a bass --- the fish --- like a bat into somebody's face) everyone involved.

Operation: Endgame

When I saw the cast for Operation: Endgame, I wondered how I could have not heard a peep about this movie.  Seriously, it has Rob Corddry, Ellen Barkin, Zach Galifianakis, Ving Rhames, Maggie Q, Adam Scott, Joe Anderson (from last year's awesome The Crazies), Odette Yustman (from the awful The Unborn), Brandon T. Jackson (from Tropic Thunder), Emilie de Ravin (from...um...Maxim magazine, maybe?), Tim Bagley, Michael Hitchcock, Bob Odenkirk, and Jeffrey Tambor.  Admittedly, the cast isn't exactly full of Oscar winners, but I recognized every single billed actor.  Somehow, the familiarity of the stars didn't gather enough interest to get this theatrically released, so straight-to-DVD it went.

The premise here is pretty simple ridiculously convoluted.  There is a government agency that is in charge of super-secret black ops, but the agency was so dangerous (um...JFK, anybody?) that they needed to be kept in check.  However, they also needed to remain clandestine and shadowy.  So, the agency was split into two forces, Alpha and Omega, and they spend most of their time out-super-spying the other team, essentially canceling each other out.  Every member of Alpha and Omega is a deadly assassin, but each has their own particular skill set.  Each member also hands over any weapons as they enter the office every day and they are only referred to by their Tarot card-related code-names.  And yes, these super-secret assassins all work out of the same cubicle-filled office.  The movie begins with Fool (Joe Anderson) coming in for his first day of work, and we experience all the weirdness with him.  It's not all fun and murder, though; the boss for the two teams, The Devil (Jeffrey Tambor), gets himself killed and a fail-safe self-destruction program is set off.  Alpha and Omega have about an hour and twenty minutes (or, the run time for the movie) to either escape the escape-proof office, or disable the bomb.  You would think that would lead to cooperation between the two groups, but instead, it leads to lots and lots of killing with non-traditional weapons.

Improbably sharp paper cutter, meet shockingly dead-eyed actress.

I'm not going to focus much on the acting in this movie, because there isn't really a whole lot of it.  The dialogue is surprisingly funny for a direct-to-DVD release, but other than that, everybody is in this movie until they get killed.  I am surprised that I actually enjoyed Rob Corddry in this movie; it's pretty much the same bit he always does, but a little less desperate and more vulgar this time.  Ellen Barkin was also surprisingly funny and shockingly good looking for a woman her age.  There were no other surprises in the mix, as far as the actors go.

The dialogue is the star of this movie.  Every character is impressively witty and most are creative with their cussing and sexual references.  Corddry and Barkin clearly had a great time saying so many awful things, but they had the lion's share of the good lines.  Many of the actors spoke three or four lines total before getting killed, so it was hard to actually like any of the characters.  That's kind of the point, though; these people are so evil that they supposedly have to kill a puppy to join the agency.  Even the less evil characters, like the guys observing all the action on closed-circuit video feeds (Tim Bagley and Michael Hitchcock), are hard to like; in their case, it's because they're just there as reactionary characters that say "Ooh, gross!" when someone gets killed.  Since every character is a deadly assassin, there are no innocents in this movie.  Since there are no innocents in the movie, it's a lot harder to pinpoint who to like.  In the end, you end up rooting for whoever you think is the funniest, and then they probably get killed.

There is a huge body count in this movie.  It's not just the less famous actors who die, either.  Every character is willing and able to kill any other character, so you might find yourself surprised at who dies when.  Unfortunately, you probably won't be surprised by the ones who die last.  This is a movie that wants to feel unpredictable, but once the movie is halfway through, you should have a pretty good idea on how it's going to end.  That's not necessarily a bad thing (in broad strokes, anyway), but it is if the movie is putting a lot of effort into being clever.

The movie's not bad, but it's nowhere near as awesome as its script thinks it is.  I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the first half of the movie, but it started getting formulaic and was pretty dull toward the end.  This movie worked a lot better with (most of) the characters alive than it did with them dead.  I like dick jokes as much as the next guy, but many of the characters used distinctly different types of sarcasm; the main ones left standing toward the end were basically telling the same jokes coming from different mouths.

Yeah, that's how I felt when the movie ended, too.

This was director Fuoad Mikati's first movie, and it's not a ad first effort.  He lets the actors do their thing --- I'm guessing that he didn't handle them much, since they all act about as well as ever --- and he keeps the pace moving.  Personally, I would have significantly cut down on Bagley and Hitchcock's screen time, but the movie wasn't even an hour and a half long, so it's not like they broke up the flow of the movie.  they were just annoying.  The special effects indicate that this was a pretty low-budget for what is essentially a funny action movie, so I think Mikati did a decent job with what he had to work with.

Having said that, I ended up not enjoying this movie.  It had potential and there were a decent amount of funny one-liners, but that's about all it had.  It misused most of the cast, killing several characters off early for shock value and not getting anything more than that.  The story throws a couple of twists in, but the plot is so convoluted and stupid that you never care why things are happening, as long as Corddry gets to insult Barkin's vagina again.  He does.  And she gives a rebuttal.  But that's only kind of funny.  The action takes up a lot of the film, but it's not all that amazing, probably because it is performed mainly by comedians.  Ugh, and Bagley and Hitchcock end up spending waaaaay too much time commenting on the fights they are watching; in an action movie, do you want to react to an awesome kill, or do you want some other, Rob Schneider-like character do it for you?  I would have called this a perfectly mediocre movie, but I really hated those two guys.

The Unborn (Unrated)

Sometimes you watch a movie because it stars an actor that you like.  Sometimes, you're a fan of the director.  Big film buffs (like me) will even choose films because of the writer.  It is unusual for a movie to use the writer as a big selling point for a movie, though.  The writer/director of The Unborn happens to be David S. Goyer, whose writing credits include Dark City, the Blade trilogy, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and, uh, Kickboxer 2: The Road Back.  That's a pretty impressive list of credits.  The Unborn also features actor's actor Gary Oldman and Idris Elba in the supporting cast.  This is definitely a film with promise.

But before I go into the plot, I would like to point out the promotional poster for the movie.  Judging from that image, I would assume that the plot of The Unborn is heavily involved in female butts.  Perhaps this is a supernatural thriller about an entity that has one of those FoodSaver vacuum sealers, only instead of vacuum sealing food pouches, it sucks the air out of panties.  And that creepy kid in the mirror is like, "Hey, that can't possibly be comfortable, lady."  Or maybe later, he asks, "If you fart in vacuum sealed underwear, is that smell kept fresh?"  Yeah, I feel pretty safe assuming that this movie's story follows something along those lines.

The film opens with Casey (Odette Yustman) jogging down a road, when she sees a blue glove in the road.  When she stops to look at the glove, the movie takes a brief detour into my favorite string of commercials.  Look at the glove.  Now at me.  Now, look behind you; there is a creepy and possibly dead child staring at you.  Look again; he has become a dog wearing a mask.  Look down, now up; where is the dog?  He is gone, but you hear him scampering in the woods.  Follow the dog, find the mask, dig under the mask and you find...a fetus in amber.  And it's looking at you.  And all this time, you have kept your iPod earbuds in.  Anything is possible when you smell like Old Spice.  Or when, in Casey's case, you are dreaming.

Yeah, it's a dream.  Too bad, since that scene was decently creepy.  The film then cuts to Casey discussing her dream over the phone with her friend Romy (Meagan Good), who reads from her Psych 101 textbook and tells Casey that dreaming about dogs can mean something about death.  I bet that doesn't foreshadow anything.  Casey goes to check on the baby that she's sitting and finds the infant's four year-old brother, Matty (Atticus Shaffer), holding a small mirror up to the baby, trying to get it to look at itself.  When Casey asks Matty what he's doing, he surprises her by smashing the mirror into her face (HA!) and telling her "Jumby wants to be born now."  That doesn't seem so bad; that poor genie has been a disembodied head since the 80s.  Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho, right? Oh, wait, that's Jambi.  Never mind.  For a while after this, Casey starts hallucinating all sorts of things, like seeing the phrase "Jumby wants to be born now" and the dead kid.  She handles these images in stride, offering just a quizzical tilt of the head.  But when her hallucinations start to include bugs, GET OUT OF HER WAY.  Bugs?  Game over, man, game over.

About this time, one of Casey's eyes starts to change color, from blue to brown.  Like a smart lady, she gets it checked out; her doctor (CS Lee) asks if she was a twin.  Apparently, she's not sure, so she asks her father (James Remar), who tells her that, yes, she had a twin in the womb, but her brother choked on her umbilical cord early in the pregnancy.  Did he have a name?  I knew you'd ask that.  The answer is no, since it was so early, but they did have a pet name for him: Jumby.  That's right.  Casey was damn lucky to get named "Casey" and not, say, "Fu Schnickens."  Okay, so dead baby brother wants to haunt his big sis/murderer.  Not a bad premise.  Apparently, that was not nearly enough plot on David S. Goyer's proverbial dinner plate.  The second half of the movie ties into Auschwitz (the concentration camp, not the theme park), Nazi medical experiments, Jewish mysticism (specifically Kabbalah), and exorcism.  What the hell, Goyer?

As you might imagine from the plot vomit, this movie is a mess.  There is way too much exposition in this film and none of it get more than a few moments to sink in.  To be fair, the awesomely overcomplicated plot does try to distract viewers from the main actors' talents.  Specifically, Odette Yustman is better off playing that girl in Transformers whose car attacks her than an actual character with dialogue and alleged depth.  The best thing she did in this movie was allow somebody to airbrush her underwear on for the promo poster.  Her fellow actors are no big help; Meagan Good and Cam Gigandet (Casey's boyfriend) are just as vapid as she is.  That's too bad, since the adult supporting cast consists of solid actors who don't have the opportunity to shine.  Gary Oldman is pretty decent, but his role is not extraordinary.  Idris Elba, James Remar, and Jane Alexander all make brief appearances, but none of them are memorable.  I will give writer/director Goyer credit that the movie does maintain a decent pace through this breakneck plot.  He needed to spend more time on his principal actors, because they were, without exception, dreadful.

That's too bad, because this movie had a lot going for it.  Like what?  Oh, lots.

• The script has plenty of hep sexual dialogue that is not awkward at all.  I love to hear characters reference their "wood" and "disease filled vagina," especially when the characters are not in raunchy comedies.
• All the college age characters attend the same university, and yet all of them live with their parents.  Really?
• When women are home alone, in an obviously chilly house, their comfy clothes are always paper-thin tank tops and tighty whities. 
• After hallucinating in a club, running to the bathroom and vomiting in a stall, does Casey take the opportunity to peer into her stall's glory hole?  Of course she does.
• Little known fact: Odette Yustman is Megan Fox's long-long, less talented sister.

What utter garbage.  I will give Gary Oldman and Idris Elba credit for pretending that they were in a legitimate exorcism movie, but that is nowhere near what this movie needed to not be awful.