The problem with being a critic is that eventually someone will ask if you can do better. I enjoy Ain't it Cool News, and I enjoy writer Drew McWeeny aka Moriarty, and so I was looking forward to him writing for the legendary John Carpenter.
The plot is as follows. A washed out theater owner is asked to retrieve a lost film, one that inspired its audience to rip each other to shreds. He's haunted by his past drug use, and vision of his druggie girlfriend who committed suicide in his bathtub. Her father is the one that gave him the money for the theater, and he wants his money back now. He sets out to retrieve the film, despite warnings that it was produced by evil. He runs across a snuff filmmaker, and the director's wife before he actually gets the film. Apparently it gets its power because the collector (Udo Kier) tortured an angel and recorded it. Eventually, the film causes everyone to hallucinate and kill each other. The angel escapes and takes the film.
A lot of this plays like a gory version of Ringu. The cigarette burns that appear on screen before something happens, look and are treated like Verbinski's Ring jump cuts. The film causes bad dreams, and eventually becomes real...just like The Ring. At the end, the visions step out of the screen...just like the Ring. Sadly this episode isn't as deliberate as the Ring, since it had various set pieces of gore for gore's sake.
In one scene a woman is beheaded by a snuff filmmaker (she is rather calm about it too-) and our hero is in danger...until he blacks out. When he wakes up, everyone is lying on the ground. Huh? Our hero was given $200,000 to open a theater by his girlfriend's father, and he is fighting to keep it open, but I'm not sure why. In the end, the angel takes the film, and says thank you, to the room full of dead people. Why did he take the film? Where is he going to go? Why wasn't the hero more surprised to see him when he was revealed? I guarantee you, if I see an angel chained in a hidden room, I'm going to have lots of questions.
But the most damning thing, the worst mistake of all, is that Carpenter shows us the film. Its been built for an hour as the most horrible thing ever, and it looks like a student music video. The audience should never have known what the film looked like.
The plot is as follows. A washed out theater owner is asked to retrieve a lost film, one that inspired its audience to rip each other to shreds. He's haunted by his past drug use, and vision of his druggie girlfriend who committed suicide in his bathtub. Her father is the one that gave him the money for the theater, and he wants his money back now. He sets out to retrieve the film, despite warnings that it was produced by evil. He runs across a snuff filmmaker, and the director's wife before he actually gets the film. Apparently it gets its power because the collector (Udo Kier) tortured an angel and recorded it. Eventually, the film causes everyone to hallucinate and kill each other. The angel escapes and takes the film.
A lot of this plays like a gory version of Ringu. The cigarette burns that appear on screen before something happens, look and are treated like Verbinski's Ring jump cuts. The film causes bad dreams, and eventually becomes real...just like The Ring. At the end, the visions step out of the screen...just like the Ring. Sadly this episode isn't as deliberate as the Ring, since it had various set pieces of gore for gore's sake.
In one scene a woman is beheaded by a snuff filmmaker (she is rather calm about it too-) and our hero is in danger...until he blacks out. When he wakes up, everyone is lying on the ground. Huh? Our hero was given $200,000 to open a theater by his girlfriend's father, and he is fighting to keep it open, but I'm not sure why. In the end, the angel takes the film, and says thank you, to the room full of dead people. Why did he take the film? Where is he going to go? Why wasn't the hero more surprised to see him when he was revealed? I guarantee you, if I see an angel chained in a hidden room, I'm going to have lots of questions.
But the most damning thing, the worst mistake of all, is that Carpenter shows us the film. Its been built for an hour as the most horrible thing ever, and it looks like a student music video. The audience should never have known what the film looked like.