Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
Asylum (2008)
Call me easy, but I like director David R. Ellis’ movies. Yes, even Snakes on a Plane, and especially Final Destination 2. Sophisticated cineastes-about-town like me can’t live by Eric Rohmer alone, you know. We need a little Sarah Roemer to liven things up.
And with that back-scratching out of the way, I can say that the Ellis/Roemer collaboration Asylum is awful — dreck so powerful, it would take a barrel of soft soap to wash it away. Roemer plays a college freshman assigned to a new dorm. Well, not so much new as the renovated wing of an asylum for troubled teens that hasn’t been used since the youth revolted in the mid 1930s and killed the doctor who had been torturing them by shoving lobotomy needles into his eyes.
Now, the doctor’s ghost is roaming the halls and continuing to prey on young people with troubled pasts. The un-renovated wing in ruins — which, after 75 years, still has file cabinets containing patients’ histories — is attached to the dorm, so all it takes is about two minutes worth of computer hacking for the six kids who seem to be the dorm’s only inhabitants to gain access to the old section of the building.
Ellis is known for his wicked sense of humor, but it is entirely lacking in this hodgepodge of supernatural slasher clichés and clueless jump moments. You won’t believe a word of it, although “The” and “End” will be mighty welcome. —Doug Bentin
Five Days (2007)
Even the most die-hard of armchair sleuths would be intimidated by a 300-minute mystery. While your schedule and your ass may be unable to take Five Days all in one sitting, your mind and your curiosity will want to. A production of the great BBC, the Gwyneth Hughes-penned miniseries is comprised of five one-hour episodes, each depicting a single day in the aftermath of a crime.
That crime is the sudden, shocking disappearance and presumed murder of Leanne Wellings (Christine Tremarco), a twice-married mother of three who vanishes while buying flowers from a roadside vendor, leaving her two youngest children waiting in the car. The kids make their way toward home, but they, too, are soon missing.
Hot-tempered husband/father Matt (David Oyelowo) is torn up at the prospect of losing his entire immediate family, while also considered a possible suspect by the authorities leading the investigation (Hugh Bonneville and Janet McTeer). Their widening net weaves in encounters with journalists, a potential pedophile, a nursing home resident (Edward Woodward) and one horny young woman (Sarah Smart) with a secret.
While full of twists and revelations, Hughes’ screenplay doesn’t ignore characterization, and there are plenty of people you get to know in that amount of time. The day-an-episode structure could be a gimmick, but she smartly avoids that, mostly in making those days not consecutive, which heightens the drama and asks viewers to fill in part of what happened in the time that elapsed. A second season, with a new story and characters, has yet to play the States. —Rod Lott
Derailed (2005)
Based upon James Siegel’s 2003 bestselling thriller — and believe me, we’ll get to that in a sec — Derailed stars Clive Owen as a happily married ad exec who nonetheless gives in to urges with a mysterious, seductive woman he meets one morning on the train to work. That woman is played by a severely miscast Aniston — not a person one to whom would readily affix the adjectives “mysterious” or “seductive.” “Cloying” and “overrated,” perhaps, but she’s way in over her head here.
Before she and Clive can do the deed, their hotel room is intruded upon by a robber-cum-rapist, who adds insult to injury by then proceeding to engage in an ever-escalating game of blackmail. This thorn in their side is played by Vincent Cassel, the wiry little laser-dancing Frenchman from Ocean’s Twelve, and thus marks the first glaring diversion from the source material. In the book, Aniston’s character is raped repeatedly over an afternoon by a black man. For whatever reason — I’ll take political correctness for $500, Alex — the race has undergone a literal whitewashing.
Otherwise, the first two-thirds stick pretty close to the book, even lifting entire scenes of dialogue. Unfortunately, what was punchy on the page drags in the hands of director Mikael Håfström, which does the abrupt, condensed ending no favors. In Siegel’s book, there were several endings, but each with a purpose, adding layer upon layer to an already suspenseful story. Here, it’s your standard revenge climax, and by cutting so much out of it, it’s bereft of the logic the author brought to it.
You may be enticed to rent Derailed by the cover tease of its “unrated” version, but all this amounts to are some quick shots of Cassel dry-humping Aniston, which is more nauseating than anything. The tagline is “They never saw it coming,” but you don’t have to see it at all. Even the less-seasoned viewers among us can guess the film’s “big twist.” –Rod Lott
Saturday the 14th Strikes Back (1988)
Recently I watched the Australian superhero satire The Return of Captain Invincible. I mention this because it happened to be an unfunny comedy that suddenly and inexplicably turned into a terrible musical 20 minutes into its running time, so when I was 15 minutes into Saturday the 14th Strikes Back and the peroxide blonde vampiress who looked just like an ’80s New Wave porn star started singing about how much she misses vegetables, I was hit by a profound case of the what-the-fucks.
Luckily, this scene turned out to be an aberration, and none of the other characters felt compelled to burst out into song over the hour that remained until the movie limped along to its merciful conclusion, but the constant threat that they might at least managed to inspire the kind of tension the rest of Strikes Back sorely lacked.
Written and directed by Howard R. Cohen, the auteur also responsible for the original Saturday the 14th, Strikes Back was clearly made for a young audience, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it is neither funny nor scary. The cast is game and there are some potentially amusing surreal touches (such as the mother’s strange aversion to serving healthy foods), but they are all so poorly timed and executed that none of them stick.
It doesn’t help that the film includes several shots from Allan Arkush’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School during its inexplicable climax, painfully reminding you of a much better way you could have spent the previous 80 minutes of your life. —Allan Mott