BUG, 28 WEEKS LATER, WRONG TURN 2, PLANET TERROR, DEATH PROOF, ELEPHANT

This is day three of a superb chest cold, very likely bronchitis, which has laid me up good. This has happened before but to be honest, not in quite some time. My curative pattern hasn’t changed though. I stay in bed, drink lots of fluids, take all the drugs my doctor prescribes and then I rent every other splatter film from Movies On Demand. And so, dear reader, as it’s been awhile since I’ve bothered reviewing anything, I will review the following all at once: Bug, Death Proof, Planet Terror, 28 Weeks Later, Wrong Turn 2 and Elephant.

BUG (2006, dir: William Friedkin) is one of the best small scale character driven horror films I’ve seen in sometime. Ashley Judd proves to be one of the strongest female actors on the scene and delivers a harrowing and skillfully paced transformation from lonely and grieving bartender to full-blown delusional schizophrenic. By the end of the movie I couldn’t believe the difference between where the characters began and where they ended. And so as not to be purely a study of psychosis, it cleverly leaves all explanations to the apparently demented characters themselves. Which begs the obvious question, Are they delusional or simply the very few who know the truth?

I followed BUG with 28 WEEKS LATER (2007, dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo), the ingeniously titled sequel to the surprise zombie-style British hit 28 Days Later. I was happy to see one of my favorite UK actors Robert Carlyle starring as a husband and father with a very troubling secret about the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife. The premise of the film is skillfully set up and the characters are well developed before any of the grisly and nasty stuff begins. The only purely forced moment comes toward the end with the final meeting between father and children. With all the incredible action preceding including the firebombing of London, that they would ever meet again, let alone be alive, seems quite unlikely.

In a real effort to not stray too far from the game plan into the purely dreadful, I actually Googled the question: Wrong Turn 2 or Hills Have Eyes 2? Sadly, it did not give me an answer but a quick scan of the pubescent punters on IMDB led me to believe that of the two, Wrong Turn 2 was the right way to go. I’ll make this both short and brief. WRONG TURN 2 (2007, dir: Joe Lynch) is a fine comic-splatter film filled with bad actors, great blood-letting, thick-lipped hillbilly mutants (for some reason mutants, while hunched over and eyes pointing in all directions, are very strong and agile in these films). It borrows scenes freely from all the inbred hillbilly slaughterhouse atomic testing films of yore. Movies like this typically set up one character to be the last person standing by the end of the film. They stand apart from the others, show more compassion, humility, and have a stronger sense of the ironic. Wrong Turn 2 bravely sets up this character only to bury a hatchet in her head. Now that's class!

The best thing is Henry Rollins doing his best to out-Rambo Rambo. He’s not very good, but I kept thinking, Wasn’t he in Black Flag? Wasn’t he a California punk once? Anyway, it’s not nearly as nail-biting as the first Wrong Turn which I frankly admit to liking much more than Michael Bay’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise or anything Eli Roth sinks his depraved teeth into. Besides that, I’m a fan of special effects artist Stan Winston who directed the underrated 1989 non-hit Pumpkinhead as well as producing the first Wrong Turn movie. With credentials like that, no wonder I’m a fan.

Today began with renting PLANET TERROR (2007, dir: Robert Rodriguez), another zombie gusher, followed by DEATH PROOF (2007, dir: Quentin Tarantino). Originally packaged as GRINDHOUSE, the two films were cleverly separated pre-MOD so that suckers like me would pay the full 3.99 per flick. The best thing about PT was the preview at the beginning for MACHETE, a fictitious film that actually looks like a 1970s grindhouse hit. Every detail, down to the title font, brought me back to my preteens when all I would have to fire my imagination, being too young and too scared to actually see anything like that, was the trailers, most often aired on Saturdays in between Creature Features and Monster Movie Matinee.

PLANET TERROR is a loopy, mostly comical, take on zombie films with the now-cliched subplot of government hi-jinx and biological weaponry. The whole movie seems to exist only to have Rose Mcgowan waste zombies and the infected military with an assault rifle-as-prosthetic limb. The only thing that really makes this film feel like a 1970s grindhouse flick is that its treated, digitally I assume, to look like very grainy scratched film stock. It even has the prerequisite “missing reel” cleverly appearing half way through the obligatory sex scene.

DEATH PROOF (caution: may contain spoilers, for those who care) is closer in feel and pace to '70s exploitation films and even pays lip service to films such as Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and White Line Fever, the muscle car driven action films of the early to mid ‘70s. Problem 1 is director Quentin Tarantino’s at-this-point way overused technique of non-stop banter-while-the-camera-tracks-around-the-table. Effective and original in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, it now feels like it's all of DEATHPROOF. Girls talk in the car, girls talk in the taquería, girls talk in the bar, girls talk in the car, girls stop talking when psycho stuntman killer Kurt Russell smashes into them at 200 miles per hour. And all the talk in the world doesn't add up to character development. And when all four characters are dispatched at once, development of any kind is moot.

Second half starts with a new group of girls. Then: girls talk in the car, girls talk in the 7-11, girls talk in the luncheonette, girls talk outside as they try to finagle Jason the Hick into letting them test drive his cherry 1970s muscle car. Finally, the film gets interesting. The girls are all Hollywood players to one degree or another and one of them, Kiwi-native Zoe Bell, a stunt person herself, is played by non-other than Kiwi-native Zoe Bell, a stunt person herself. The point being when Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike begins to rear-end the girls after they have embarked on their test-drive, Zoe is on the hood of the car playing something called “ship’s mast”. It’s all very white knuckle as you realize the cars are driving very fast and she is literally hanging on for dear life. And while in the past, scene's like will tend to make the more jaded movie goer think "Oh, that's just a stunt person", the stunt person here IS the character. You see her, you see her face, it's all her on the hood of a car moving very quickly. Mind you, this is a good 10.5 hours into this film. But now the film is delivering. The film ends with Stuntman Mike getting his comeuppance at the hands of the girls and even freeze frames and flashes THE END in very wonderful crappy ‘70s movie fashion.

Finally, having put an end to my viewing madness to begin writing, my wife casually turned the channel over to IFC where ELEPHANT was playing. I’d seen parts of it before and dutifully began watching it again, putting my laptop aside. ELEPHANT (2003, dir: Gus Van Zant) is without a doubt one of the most horrifying pictures I’ve seen to date. It calmly goes about it’s business introducing its characters, mostly kids at a high school, and slowly reveals a Columbine-like scenario where two psychotic teens bring down students and teachers with a frightening calm and an impressive arsenal of Internet-purchased weaponry. The horror and sadness come from the matter-of-factness in it’s portrayal of normal kids living their day with their not fully developed sensibilities. In fact, most, if not all, the characters are played by non-actors using their real first names.

It’s a troubling, harrowing and painful indictment of a country that believes its troubles are somehow fixable. That no matter what goes on here, we don’t live with suicide bombings on our soil. Never mind that we could just as easily call the perpetrators of Columbine and Virginia Tech suicide shooters, every bit as delusional as the bombers in the middle east. Every bit convinced of their own heroism and rightness as the martyrs in Iraq.

ELEPHANT was a reminder after a good 10 hours of “horror” films what true horror is. With ELEPHANT comes the painfully sad truth that this is the horror we live with here and now.