This is an interesting snap shot of what life could be like for the survivors of the killer virus that finally wipes out most of mankind. While the movie kind of bills itself as a road trip to the promised land (basically, 28 Days Later without the speedy zombies), it is really more of a character study of the survivors and how they interact while living a nightmare. Kind of...
Oddly, the movie chooses to focus on brothers Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci, Horsemen) and Brian (Chris Pine, Startrek), which is ok, but I was much more intrigued by the relationships that the film doesn't explore fully. There is the unexplained love story between Brian and Bobby (Piper Perabo, Coyote Ugly); the unexplained non-love story relationship between Danny and Kate (Emily VanCamp, Everwood); and the absolute emotional minefield left unexplored between father and daugher Frank (Christopher Meloni, Law & Order - SVU) and Jodie Halloway (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men). Hell, that last one could have been an absolute tear jerker! I kind of felt as though this movie just left a LOT of unexplored emotion on the table, and I wanted it to go deeper into these other relationships rather than focusing on the one relationship I cared the least about. The acting talent was there, the production value tells me the budget was there, and even the writing quality was good; the only mistake this movie made was keeping too narrow a focus -- which is not a common problem. I've only given this movie three stars, but it could easily have been a four and half star movie if it had gone a little deeper.
A lot of this movie is predictable, and it's hard to tell whether your watching a horror movie or a drama/thriller most of the way through it. But despite all of that, it was still an interesting movie to watch. I recommend it with the caveat that if you do watch it, you should know going into it that it won't give you everything it should have.
Movie to Skip: Stash
When I first saw The Blair Witch Project, I realized that super low budget horror films could be creepy and scary. I had always written them off as a waste of time, but that release really changed my mind. Unfortunately, Stash isn't anywhere close to the originality or quality of that other film. Perhaps Blair is a high standard for an independent flick, but I think that's really more of an excuse. Good quality can come from these things, but these guys failed to deliver. Here's why:
First, if you're going to put a hilljack in a movie as the foil, then make him a scary hilljack. Give him a chip on his shoulder when dealing with 'outsiders,' and for goodness sakes, make him sinister and menacing. A hilljack in a horror movie should be little more than an animal with a shotgun and full of spite for those he thinks are looking down on him. He should not be a jolly fat guy with poor hygiene.
Second, cinematography and camera work is very important -- real film makers understand that. Had this film been framed correctly, this would have been an extremely brutal movie. Seriously, there is no way that this would have been anything short of an NC-17 if the camera work had been better. The close-ups were just... wrong, and none of the scenes were shown in a way that made any real sense. Sadly, I think The Room did a better job with its cinematography, and that is a truly shameful fact.
And finally, a word on the brutal nature of the film. Violence is a pretty common element in horror flicks. Naked aggression and animalistic violence scares us, which is why it is the omnipresent theme in a fair number of horror movies; if it isn't present in most horror movies, it is at least threatened. But the brutal elements in this film were just carelessly thrown in. Ok, so the hilljack is a rapist. But do we really need to actually experience half a dozen rapes in the movie? What 'benefit' does that particular kind of repeated violence add to the story? Yes, it is one of the most vile acts that one human being can inflict upon another, but does seeing it again and again make it scarier? (No, you don't actually see anything other than the fat hilljack's stained boxers, but you have to see that shot more than once and there is no question as to what is going on.) What is even worse than repeating the act over and over again, the villain is almost comical as he goes about it! In short, rape is a dirty violent act. That the act occurred once, and could have been insinuated several times in the movie would have gotten the message across. But instead, this movie chooses to give us the bobbing boxer shot half a dozen times as our bad guy 'hoots and hollers' in an apparent effort to 'lighten' the mood. Instead of an act of horror, this repeated scene becomes nothing more than a poorly delivered punch line to a misogynistic joke. And quite frankly, it is pretty hard to salvage the movie beyond a misogynistic joke from that point forward in the film. The choices made in the creation of those scenes demonstrates monumentally poor judgment on behalf of the writers and the film makers in general, and probably says far more about the morons that made the movie than it does the fictional characters they were trying to portray. Major. Epic. Fail.
This was not a good movie, and the more that I think about it, the worse it becomes. You can freely skip and feel satisfied that you've done the right thing.
