Editorials
00’s Retrospect: Dead on Arrival — Ten Horror Duds of the Last Decade
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this has been a great decade for horror films. Anyone who doesn’t think so simply hasn’t been paying attention. Of course, those successes likely wouldn’t have felt as sweet had there not been about four or five times as many bad ones, and following from that observation I’ve sifted through the cinematic garbage bin to put together this list of the worst. We’re not talking direct-to-DVD bargain-bin burners here; we normally expect those to be bad. We’re talking studio-released, mostly moderate-to-big-budget disasters with a lot of marketing and moolah behind them. These aren’t the hand grenades; these are the atom bombs whose explosions of craptastic-ness were too big to ignore. They’re listed in order of release rather than badness, since there’s just no way to rank these suckers in any meaningful order. They’re all terrible in their own unique and special way.
Poor Aaliyah. Not only did the R&B superstar have to die in a tragic plane crash, but her legacy suffered the final insult of being tarnished by this painful dud that came out the following year (worse yet, they actually dedicated the film to her memory). Hadn’t her family already been through enough? It’s not nice. Anyway, to be fair Queen of the Damned had a tough act to follow. It’s forebear, the beautifully conceived, well-acted, artful Interview with the Vampire, helmed by Crying Game director Neil Jordan, was one of the best horror films of the `90s. So we couldn’t have reasonably expected Damned to be better. Fine. But let’s just tell it like it is: this was a movie so bad that it helped kill both director Michael Rymer and lead actor Stuart Townsend’s film careers. Anne Rice famously reverted back to Christianity in 2004, and I can’t really blame her – if something I’d written was adapted into big-studio diarrhea like this, I’d probably turn to Jesus too.
You forgot about this lil’ gem from early in the decade, did you? Well, allow me to give you a refresher. Stephen Dorff plays a detective investigating the deaths of several people who all died 48 hours after logging onto a website called…wait for it…FeardotCom!!! Ok, so the actual domain name is FeardotCom.com. I know, it sounds absolutely terrifying right? I’m shaking uncontrollably just thinking about it. What follows this mind-blowing revelation is a treasure trove of bad acting, editing likely to cause seizure, lame scenes of torture, and pathetic attempts at making a website called FeardotCom scary. I say double-bill this bad boy with the heinous American remake of Pulse and call it a night.
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator has everything you’d expect in an action/horror film based on those two beloved franchises: Aliens, Predators, slo-mo shots of Sanaa Lathan running from explosions, actors, sets, costumes, props. The list goes on and on, really. Just don’t expect any frills. You know, things like a believable plot, cool action scenes, well-drawn characters, a talented director, narrative coherence, fun. Wait, you actually were expecting all that stuff? Wow, look at Mr. High Maintenance over here. I don’t know what to tell you, diva. Go watch a James Cameron movie or something.
Like most everybody else, I really loved The Ring. I thought it was scary, and fresh, and stylishly crafted by director Gore Verbinski. So when The Ring Two was released, I paid $14 opening night to watch it at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. That’s right, $14. Two miserable, sleep-inducing hours and 14 bones down the drain later, I limped from the Dome and suddenly felt a strange, sharp pain in my ass. And that’s when I realized: I’d just been gang-raped by Hideo Nakata and those sick bastards over at Dreamworks.
Anyone who has seen the Nicolas Cage Wicker Man montage on YouTube (you can also just scroll down) – or worse yet, the film itself – knows that this remake of the `70s horror film is an unmitigated disaster featuring a painfully over-the-top performance by its star. Neil LaBute has made some good films, including the awesome In the Company of Men, but it seems the bigger his budgets have grown the worse the results have been. Of course, perhaps we should be thanking Cage and LaBute for The Wicker Man, as it’s one of the most unintentionally hilarious horror films ever released by a major studio. Nicolas Cage in a bear suit. Nicolas Cage punching and kicking women in said bear suit. Nicolas Cage punching and kicking women in general. Nicolas Cage screaming the following line at the top of his lungs: “Oh no, not the bees!! Not the bees!! AAAHHH!!” If it had all been on purpose, this would have gone down in history as one of the greatest comedies of all time.
Jim Carrey was awesome in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That film, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a sublime meditation on the nature of love and memory. Carrey, in rare form, was subtle and moving in his portrayal of a man broken by the loss of his girlfriend, played excellently by Kate Winslet. In a word, the movie was incredible. If for whatever reason you haven’t seen it, watch it. Oh yeah, Carrey was in another movie a couple years later called The Number 23, directed by professional hack Joel Schumacher. It tried to make numerology scary. It failed, big time. To be fair, the movie was up against a doozy of an obstacle from the start: IT TRIED TO MAKE NUMEROLOGY SCARY. Sorry, but the scariest thing here is Virginia Madsen’s visible addiction to Botox.
Boy, director Stephen Hopkins sure has had a lot of second chances. His first mainstream feature was the lackluster fifth movie in the Elm Street franchise, The Dream Child. Strike one. Next up: Predator 2. Ouch. Strike two. Ok, well at least his next film was the fondly-remembered classic Judgment Night starring Emilio Estevez. No? Strike three. He’s out, right? Back to the dugout? Um, not exactly. He was subsequently hired to direct Blown Away (flop), The Ghost and the Darkness (flop), and Lost in Space (flop). Ok, I don’t mean to be crass, but who the hell is this guy banging that allowed him to direct another big-budget, major studio movie, this time the Hilary Swank CGI suckfest also known as The Reaping? The movie is so bad, that bitch should be required to give up at least one of her Oscars. Preferably the one for Million Dollar Baby.
I know this movie has its fans, to which all I can say is: are you fucking kidding me? I loved The Devil’s Rejects just as much as the next horror freak, but this updating of the 1978 John Carpenter classic is balls. Sure, I was excited, really excited to see what Rob Zombie would do with the franchise, and I certainly give him points for ambition. But by giving Michael Myers a clichéd redneck-upbringing back-story he succeeded in milking all the suspense and mystery out of the thing. Aw see, he just had a bad family life! It’s not his fault! Give me a fucking break. It doesn’t help that the script is crap, the actors are lackluster (Scout Taylor-Compton is no Jamie Lee) and that the kills lack any buildup whatsoever. What a shame.
In the odious PG-13 “horror” movie Prom Night, Lauren Conrad – oh I’m sorry, Brittany Snow – plays Donna, a blonde, vaguely human organism being stalked at her senior prom by some dude wearing a baseball cap who looks like he just stepped off an episode of To Catch a Predator. For some reason he’s obsessed with Donna even though she doesn’t seem to possess a modicum of either sex appeal or personality, and to take out his frustrations he starts killing a bunch of folks. Of course, if I were one of the cops on the scene I’d be less worried about the stalker than the fact that the victims don’t appear to have an ounce of blood in their bodies. This isn’t a horror film; it’s a 1
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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