Case 39

"Some cases should never be opened"?  Consider that a warning from this film to not open the DVD case.  That might just be the most accurate movie tagline I have ever seen.  What's so bad about it?  It has star power and makes use of the "creepy kid" plot device.  What makes Case 39 so different from decent horror movies, like The Ring or The Others?  Aside from the lack of an article in the title, I would say quality and silliness.  Let me explain.

Emily (Renée Zellweger) is a social worker.  This tells us two things, right off the bat, given that this is a horror movie.  First, Emily has a good heart and wants to protect the innocent.  Second, she has an underwhelming social life because she is wrapped up in her work.  I'm not making any judgment calls on social workers as a whole, but that is the stereotype in movies for social working main characters.

The crooked smile means she cares for a living

She is overwhelmed with work, but she is making a difference in her thirty-eight cases.  When her boss drops case thirty-nine on her desk (oh...I see what they did there!  Clever!  Boring!), Emily is exasperated, but when she meets with the family of ten year-old Lilith (Jodelle Ferland), she forgets her annoyance.  Lilith's family is weird; the first time she visits their home, the father (noted Cylon Callum Keith Rennie) will only speak to Emily through the mother (Kerry O'Malley), and little Lilith shows the timidness of an abused child.  Playing a hunch, Emily decides to pay an unexpected visit to Lilith's home with her police buddy, Detective Mike Barron (Ian McShane), and times it perfectly; Lilith's parents had duct taped Lilith inside their oven, but Emily and Mike broke in just in time to save her.

"Seven hours at 275.  Baste frequently.  What's so hard to understand?"

The good news is that Emily gets the parents thrown in the crazy house.  They would go to jail, but...well, something about "I tried to bake my child" just sounds less than sane.  Emily takes Lilith to a foster home, but Lilith is clearly uncomfortable.  She wants to live with Emily.  And you know what?  Emily pulls some strings and makes it happen.  Finally, a family for big-hearted Emily!  Life is good!  Well, it's good until bad stuff starts happening all around her.  For whatever reason, everyone Emily cares about seems to either die or kill someone else.  What's that about?  And what does it have to do with little Lilith?  Hint: everything.

That doesn't sound like an awful movie, does it?  Sure, maybe it's a little predictable in general terms, but Case 39 spices things up a bit with demonic possession and hallucinations.

Hallucination, or one too many Jägermeister-'n'-wasp shots?

Technically, this isn't a bad movie.  I wouldn't call Christian Alvart's direction inspired or nuanced, but he does decently well with the special effects.  He doesn't handle actors well, as evidenced by how awful that cast played "scared," but he shoots a pretty competent film.  Like his other 2009 effort, Pandorum, Alvart tries to induce scares without building much of an atmosphere, so the end result is destined to feel hollow.  Thankfully, Alvart doesn't resort to much CGI and does not use darkness to obscure the movie this time.  He still appears to be incapable of conveying genuine human emotion, but at least his movie looks decent enough.

Well, it looks good most of the time

While I wasn't crazy for the acting in Case 39, I don't think that any of the cast did a particularly bad job.  Ian McShane played a good cop and gave a solid (if uninteresting) performance.  Bradley Cooper wasn't exactly charmless as Emily's child psychiatrist colleague/flirtatious friend, but his performance felt a little forced.  When he was shown trying to analyze little Lilith, he came across as someone who talks down to kids, which strikes me as incredibly unlikely in that occupation.  I'm not sure how good Jodelle Ferland was; creepy kids in horror movies usually just have dead eyes or look tortured, and she manages both. 

Despite hitting those standard marks, I thought she was just okay.  That leaves Renée Zellweger with the most interesting character, theoretically.  She is the lead, after all, right?  I'm not a fan of Zellweger usually --- something about her stupid face just irritates me --- but I have seen her do pretty good work in the past.  This movie just doesn't play to her strengths.  The role forces her to appear haggard, stressed, and frightened to a childish degree, none of which flatter her skill set.  It's not that she does a terrible job, so much as she is horribly miscast.  Surprisingly, that's not even the worst casting choice the filmmakers made.  After all, they took one of the more magnetic villains in Hollywood today (McShane) and cast him as a boring good cop.

"Are you sure I'm not supposed to kill her?"

The problems with Case 39 go a lot deeper than the casting, though.  This is just a tepid melodrama, trying to convince audiences that it is really a supernatural thriller.  The first problem is that the creepy kid doesn't do much that is creepy.  Instead of being a normal kid that bad things happen to (The Sixth Sense) or an evil kid doing unexplainable things (The Ring, The Grudge), Lilith appears to be a little bitch who is corteous to adults and does bad things behind their backs (kind of like The Bad Seed).  And what does she do?  She calls people and talks to them on the phone.  Scary.  The similarities in the setup of this premise to any number of other "bad kid" horror flicks makes the payoff particularly underwhelming.  I was hoping that we would see something cool or twisted happen, but Lilith doesn't physically do much of anything.  In fact, Lilith might just be the least frightening child antagonist since Problem Child.  That was a horror movie, right?

And what about that title?  "Case 39?"  Couldn't they have just given this any arbitrary title then, like "Case File 2172011-B: The Movie"?  Hell, even "The Social Worker" would be a better title than "Case 39."  They might as well have called it "Bland Bland Blandblandbland." 

Perhaps what makes Case 39 so bad is the inevitable climax.  I realize that you probably aren't going to watch this movie --- who the hell else would make the same mistake I made? --- but I feel obligated to say SPOILER ALERT: The way that the story progresses, it is apparent that Emily is not going to have a supernatural fix to Lilith's demon possession.  In fact, the most reasonable solution to the Lilith problem seems to have been her parents taping her inside the oven, which made me laugh when I realized it.  That means that Emily will have to either kill Lilith or be killed by her, and since this movie sucks, you know that evil won't win out.  I'm not saying that killing Renée Zellweger would have salvaged the film, but it would have made it watchable.  Instead, we have Emily pulling a Susan Smith to kill her child-demon.  And that's it.  Emily climbs out of the water, where her car (and Lilith locked inside) have sunk to the bottom.  Roll credits.  Is that supposed to be a happy ending?  This woman is going to get arrested and spend the rest of her life in a psych ward, but the film seems to be saying "...and that's the end of that chapter."  Star wipe aaaand...roll credits.  It's not that the ending is surprising, it is just cheap and lazy --- the two worst ways to end a boring and unimaginative supernatural horror movie. 

Pandorum

You would think that the science fiction and horror movie genres would be mixed together more often.  The core audience for both genres are roughly the same, right?  However, I can only think of a few films (notably Alien and maybe I am Legend) that actually have a hefty dose of both horror and sci-fi.  This might be due to the fact that it's easier to write a horror movie about dumb teens being way too curious about a creepy basement abandoned house murder factory for their own good than it is to write a script that has monsters and takes the time to logically plan out a future world or spaceship or whatever.  I like the idea of the sci-fi/horror hybrid, though, because a well-executed hybrid has a lot of potential.  So, with an optimistic heart, I watched Pandorum.

The movie starts out just fine.  Despite the credits, Ben Foster is the lead actor in the movie and Dennis Quaid plays a key supporting role.  Both men awaken from some sort of hibernation sleep to find themselves in a spaceship.  They don't remember their names, their jobs, what ship they are on, or why they are there.  Details start to come back to them, but only small details, and they come very slowly.  The only thing they do know is that there should be other people around, helping them get their bearings, but there are not.  The room the men awoke in is sealed off from the rest of the ship and the ship is experiencing frequent power surges.  Foster realizes that he is a technical somethingorother for the ship, so he has to find his way to the reactor core to reboot the ship's reactor and get power everywhere.  So far, it's a little dry, but there is a mystery established: what happened and where is everybody?  Ben Foster's pretty good and Dennis Quaid is the same character he plays in every movie.  Not fantastic stuff, but not a bad start.

Things start to get worse quickly.  Foster has to climb through some ventilation ducts that seem to have a lot of foam "We're No. 1" hands growing in them.  At this point, Foster asks Quaid over their walkie-talkie about the symptoms of Pandorum.  Hey...that's the movie's title!  It must be important!  Pandorum is basically the space version of cabin fever, where paranoia and homicidal aggression meet and cause ordinary folks to go crazy.  Symptoms include hands tremors (which both Foster and Quaid show) and hallucinations.  When Foster finds his way out of the ducts, he encounters two things: first, a survivor that attacks him and second, a monster that attacks them both.  Sure, the monster eats the survivor immediately, but Foster was able to learn that the survivor (Norman Reedus) had no idea what the monsters are or what happened to the ship, despite being out of hibernation for a few months.  These kind of things start to happen to Foster regularly.  He meets a survivor, they try to kill him (because...um...he is clearly not a monster?) and then the monsters attack, forcing Foster and his new friend to run.

Let's talk about the monsters for a quick second.  They are very bald, pale, and have beady eyes and sharp teeth.  They move like werewolves in the slow-motion scenes from the Underworld series.  They wear bizarre spiky armor (or is it part of them?) that covers their back and/or shoulders, like they went armor shopping at a Mad Max-themed discount store.  They don't talk.  They eat humans, live or dead, as well as their own wounded.  Basically, they are C.H.O.D.s: Cannabalistic Humanoid Outerspace Dwellers.  While nobody in the movie actually uses this phrase, that is only because they never thought of it.  When C.H.O.D.s are on the screen, ready for action, scenes have a strange habit of becoming dimly lit, poorly shot, and generally blurry.  I'm sure that's just an insight into their character, though, and not a lame way to disguise a low budget.

While all the monster chasing is going on with Ben Foster and friends, where's Dennis Quaid?  Right where we left him, in the room he awoke in.  He spends most of the movie sitting down, trying to walkie-talkie Foster (who lost his walkie-talkie about twenty minutes into the movie).  Quaid fills the time by finding another survivor (Cam Gigandet) in the same air vent that Foster escaped through.  This survivor claims to have killed his two crew mates because they had big time Pandorum.  Obviously, you don't want to restrain that guy.  So Foster is on the run from the CHODs and Quaid is killing time with a crazy.

This just isn't a good movie.  It''s trying to be two different things at the same time.  On the one hand, it is trying to be a creepy mood piece, like Alien.  On the other hand, C.H.O.D.s are eating people's faces.  The two styles don't go together.  All the subtlety of a suspense/mystery is lost as soon as albino cannibals show up.  The biggest problem with the movie is the title.  When the title happens to be an illness, one of the main characters is going to be afflicted.  If you make a movie called "Irritable Bowel Syndrome," it's not going to be an action flick...at least not one I want to watch.  But which which character has Pandorum?  The one that is trying to restart a nuclear reactor and save everyone, or the first billed actor that has been sitting around for most of the movie?  Hmm...tough call.

 The movie is not devoid of merit, but there's not much.  It's nice to see Ben Foster in a leading role for a change.  And...um...they had a pretty cool futuristic razor.  The first twenty minutes of the movie (basically, until the monsters show up) is promising, but then again, any movie can look decent for twenty minutes.  The acting isn't terrible here.  You know what you're going to get when you give a Quaid a role, but the rest of the cast (including Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue, Cung Le, and Eddie Rouse) was inoffensive.  If Quaid's role was played by an unknown like the rest of the cast, the movie's suspense would have been much more effective.  I will admit that it was a nice change of pace to see Norman Reedus playing a part that was not explicitly Irish.

Those somewhat positive accomplishments are nowhere near enough to salvage this film.   The writers and director have worked primarily in Europe until now, and it shows.  The dialogue is mediocre at best, and the explanations given for the key plot points (What are the monsters?  What happened to the ship?) are so poorly expressed, it feels like they've been mistranslated. I honestly don't think that the lead actors have anything to be ashamed about here (well, except for taking these roles), but the director is another story.  Christian Alavert not only directed this film, but he co-plotted it.  That means that he could have, at any time, said "Wait, that doesn't make much sense...let's try something else," but he never did.  Or, worse, he said that and this movie is the result.