How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Underworld

When the first Underworld arrived in 2003 - a film that no doubt owed its existence to the then-current Blade series which had made the mix of action/horror and vampires a hot box office commodity - I felt lukewarm towards it. It was a little too glossy and a lot too CGI - not the kind of werewolves vs. vampires movie I was looking for.

In 2003, Underworld was too easy to shrug off in favor of more diverting offerings. You know, like Wrong Turn, Haute Tension or the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But while genre trends have come and gone in the years since, Underworld has kept chugging along. And while the films haven't gotten any better, I like the fact that the new Underworld movie in 2012 looks exactly like the original Underworld movie from 2003. Same blue/black lighting, same costumes, the same shit CGI. While Underworld: Awakening represents no special leap in quality for the franchise, I've come to appreciate the fact that these films are stylistically frozen in time. Their unchanging nature has made them into a comfort food kind of experience.

I didn't pay enough attention to tell you who directed this latest Underworld or who wrote it and I'm uninterested in looking up that information so don't consider this a real review of any kind. All I can say is that I had a fair amount of fun watching this, more fun than I've had with any other Underworld film. That might have to do with my mellowing attitude towards the series (or my mellowing attitude toward life in general) but I also would say that this has substantially more action than the previous installments (it seemed to me that Kate Beckinsale had even less dialogue here than non-actress Gina Carano did in Haywire*). Maybe the people behind the series finally realized that there was never anything interesting to be said by any of the characters in these films so it'd be better to just have them all fighting non-stop.

If so, I applaud that decision.

* By the way, if I can make a non-genre recommendation, Haywire is a really solid piece of work. For some reason, audiences seem to be down on it (it earned a D+ on Cinemascore) but I think anyone with a taste for action cinema will enjoy it.

The Upside To "Inside"

By the time its first showings had ended last week, The Devil Inside was already infamous thanks to an abrupt ending that had audiences booing the screen. And yet this low budget shocker cleaned up at the box office on its opening weekend to the tune of almost $35 million.

Will it fall sharply going into its second weekend? Sure. Horror pictures are typically front loaded anyway but even if it vanished from theaters today, the movie would still be a huge success. Some fans might (understandably) grouse about how unjust it is that The Devil Inside is a box office blockbuster while so many better horror movies often go ignored during their theatrical runs (or don't even get theatrical runs). Personally, I celebrate any genre film's success.

Obviously I prefer to see good movies do well but even when a mediocre-to-poor horror movie is a hit, I see it as an overall victory for the genre.

There's been a lot of gloomy talk lately about theater attendance, with 2011 having the lowest turnout to theaters since the mid-'90s. Some commentators have looked at those figures and wondered whether Americans have fallen out of love with going to the movies but the massive turnout for The Devil Inside is an encouraging reminder that audiences will still pack their local theaters if they're genuinely excited about a movie. Of course, it'd be better if most of the audience didn't leave feeling like they've been ripped off but whenever studios are reminded (for the umpteenth time) that horror is a hot commodity, it gives other, hopefully better, filmmakers a chance to make the kind of horror movie that really deserves to be a hit.

With Any Luck, This'll Be The Worst Horror Movie Of 2012

It's never fun to report that the first horror movie of the year is lousy but yet that seems to be an annual tradition. January releases are notoriously bad, with the likes of The Rite (2011), Legion (2010), and One Missed Call (2008) standing as evidence to that. Now we can add The Devil Inside to that list. No doubt looking to score another Paranormal Activity-sized hit, Paramount has heavily promoted this exorcism thriller. What a shame that they couldn't have spent a little of that ad money on fixing The Devil Inside's dismal climax so that the word of mouth wouldn't be so poisonous.

For most of its running time, The Devil Inside is agreeable nonsense. Director and co-writer William Brent Bell plays it all straight-faced and faux-educational. Even if you think exorcisms and religion are a bunch of hooey, the clinical presentation that Bell goes for early on is involving and seems to show some research into the subject (Did you know that a key sign of possession is extreme pupil dialation? I didn't.).

With cameras documenting her journey, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), travels to Rome to visit her institutionalized mother Maria (Suzan Crowley) who Isabella believes may have been possessed when she committed three murders twenty years earlier. Isabella's investigation into her mother's condition puts her in contact with Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth), two priests who are conducting exorcisms without the church's approval. Together they attempt to discern the true nature of Maria's condition.

From this set-up, there's the potential for an eerie, ambiguous film. But Bell and co-writer Matthew Peterman aren't out to make that kind of movie. Instead they're going for all the satanic (tubular) bells and whistles they can conjure. Once the first onscreen exorcism hits, and any doubt in the supernatural goes along with it, events become more crazed and mad-cap as the movie hurtles towards what promises to be an exciting climax - but then it all abruptly comes to a (literally) crashing halt in a manner so sudden that audiences will do their own version of Linda Blair's 360 degree head spin.

The sizable audience I saw The Devil Inside with was totally on board with the movie up until its final seconds - screaming, gasping, and occasionally chuckling throughout its running time. But when the movie suddenly cut to the credits (with a helpful web address provided for anyone who wants to learn more about the case!), the unanimous outburst of disappointment was loud and immediate.

No ad campaign can keep bad word of mouth from spreading once a film is out - especially not in the age of the internet - so instead of studios putting so much money into tricking people into seeing a turkey, shouldn't they do all they can to make a movie that people can legitimately enjoy and recommend rather than just leaving them feeling suckered? I just don't get it. And the selling of the movie aside, when filmmakers bungle a horror movie so badly, I have to wonder - is it because they don't have the talent to do better, or because they don't have a feel for the genre, or is it because they have such a contempt for the audience that they don't think anyone going to see a movie like The Devil Inside has any critical faculties?

Whatever the case, The Devil Inside is a letdown. Bad horror movies don't dampen my love of the genre but they do make me feel had and that's never a good feeling. Here's hoping that with the release of The Devil Inside that the worst of 2012's horror crop is already out of the way.

A Very Cobra Christmas

I understand that most of you might already be out of the Yuletide spirit what with the clock about to turn over to 2012 but until the New Year is officially rung in, I feel like it's not too late to show some appreciation for an unsung holiday romp - Sylvester Stallone's action/horror hybrid Cobra (1986).

Before we go any further, for anyone who might be questioning Cobra's status as a Christmas movie let me offer a few screen shots as evidence:








See? Cobra is as Christmas as jolly ol' St. Nick! This George P. Cosmatos-directed film belongs to that small but much-loved subgenre of Christmas-set action movies - a group that houses the likes of Invasion U.S.A. (1985), Trancers (1985), and Die Hard (1988). Apparently the opportunity to juxtapose violence with the iconography of Christmas is too hard for filmmakers to resist. And frankly, who can blame them?

Despite its cop movie trappings of shoot-outs and car chases, Cobra represented a throwback to the seedier slasher stylings of the early '80s (one hospital-set sequence recalls 1982's Visiting Hours). In 1983, it would've fit in perfectly on a drive-in double bill with the Charles Bronson film 10 to Midnight, another film that straddled the action and horror genres by having a cop pursuing a vicious psycho.

And what a four-star psycho Cobra had in the form of Brian Thompson as the Night Slasher. A pure, unrepentant homicidal maniac, the Night Slasher is a killing machine who would eat lesser psychos for breakfast. The Night Slasher isn't one of those psychos who seems mild-mannered on the surface, either. No, just by looking at him there'd be no mistaking what this guy's favorite past time is. You'd be like, "That guy loves killing people. He loves it like kids love ice cream."

While even Joe Spinell's title character in Maniac (1980) tried to spend some time developing a social life outside of his hobby of scalping women, you can't even imagine the Night Slasher ever having the least passing interest in anything that doesn't involve snuffing out human life. I wouldn't even be surprised if his name had been legally changed to "Night Slasher" because, you know, why not? There's no way this guy is ever planning on holding down a job of any kind so there's no need to have a regular name like Bob or Chuck.

Worse yet, he's the leader of an army of kill-crazy sickos who travel around in a van at night and randomly jump out with their axes and slaughter any lone woman they come across.

Because he looks like a guy who could kill you with his bare hands without even breaking a sweat, Thompson is scary as hell just standing around but Cosmatos goes ahead and gives him a blade with a spiked handle that would make you nervous even if a little old lady were holding it, never mind a hulking psychopath.

In the annals of cinematic psychos, Thompson doesn't seem to get much attention (his most famous role remains that of the Alien Bounty Hunter on The X-Files) but I'm all about the Night Slasher. You could say that Thompson is playing nothing more than a one note character here but if the Night Slasher was more layered, he'd have much more to say to Cobra when they face off than "I want your eyes, PIG!" and personally I love that The Night Slasher never, ever has anything remotely clever to say. He's all business and he gets more mileage out of the word "pig" than anyone ever has.

As Cobra is an 87 minute movie that seems to only have about 20 pages of script (the entire last half hour seems based around a few loose ideas for action scenes), there's plenty of room in Cobra for time-filling montages - my favorite featuring Brigitte Nielsen as statuesque model Ingrid Knudsen posing with a group of robots.



I don't know what magazine or product these pics could possibly be for. Personally, I suspect that Stallone just wasn't over with his robot fetish from Rocky III (1982).

At the time, I was surprised that Cannon never went ahead with a Cobra sequel as clearly this was meant to kick off another franchise for Stallone. I don't know why a Cobra 2 never came to be but I think the real bummer is that no one ever had the notion to mount a dual sequel/crossover with the Chuck Norris hit Silent Rage, the 1982 film that pitted Norris as a small town sheriff against a nearly invulnerable, scientifically altered psycho, played by Brian Libby.

To have Stallone and Norris in their prime taking on the team of Libby and Thompson - man, what a gift that would've been to '80s action buffs. But, as every kid learns on Christmas morning, you can't always get what you want.

Say It Isn't So!

Fans of quality film criticism and of great writing in general suffered a blow yesterday as the mystery man behind Arbogast on Film posted his final blog entry, citing personal reasons for closing shop. Even though AoF's subheading promised "an investigation into the mystery of cinema that can only end with my death," I have to say I'm happy that much less drastic circumstances were responsible for the end of my favorite blog.

While no new entries will be coming (unless Arbo experiences a change of heart down the line), the good news is that AoF's blog archive will remain online as a resource. Personally, I think Arbo ought to compile his many posts and put 'em in a book. I know for damn sure that's a volume of film criticism I'd be happy to own.

The Best Of 2011

This year wasn't exactly a booming one for horror but even if 2011 was somewhat soft for genre fare, it still delivered its share of memorable scares - even if some of the best were found on the small screen. Over at Shock Till You Drop, my top five of 2011 are listed, along with a few honorable mentions. Some might find my top pick questionable (or all of my picks, for that matter) but when I look back on 2011, there's no question what my number one genre addiction was.

All in all, I'd consider 2011 to be a definite improvement over 2010. Hopefully the films of 2012 will be even better.

Happy Holidays

The Christmas crunch has taken its toll on my productivity here but now that the holiday is winding down at last, I expect to be blogging more frequently. Whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year and whoever you celebrate it with, I hope it was a joyous occasion.