The Friday Night Horror Movie: Forbidden World (1982)

forbidden world

We are edging ever so close to Totally Awesome ’80s in April, so I thought I’d let my Friday Night Horror be an ’80s flick. I will have at least one more Western In March review up before the end of the month to make it not a total loss, but as I’ve mentioned before there aren’t a lot of Western horror flicks.

Roger Corman remade Alien and it’s pretty good, actually.

Corman was a prolific producer (who also directed some pretty great Edgar Alan Poe adaptations). He famously gave Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme their starts and mandated the films he produced have at least one scene of violence and/or sex every fifteen minutes.

Forbidden World has ample amounts of both. But it also has a bit of style, a pretty good story (even if it is mostly ripped off from other, better science fiction films), and it is rather entertaining.

Military fixer Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) is called to an isolated planet to investigate some troubling messages from an experimental research station there.

Upon landing, he learns that the scientists have been experimenting with a synthetic strain of DNA that when combined with another creature has turned into something strange and dangerous. Something alien you might say.

There are a couple of sexy scientists (Dawn Dunlap & June Chadwick), a disheveled, chain-smoking genius (Linden Chiles), and other miscellaneous (and thus disposable) crew members. The monster thing continues to change and grow and kill all the while the survivors try and…well…survive.

It is very much a low-rent Alien knock-off with bits of The Blob, Star Wars, and other science fiction/horror flicks from the time period thrown in for good measure. Oh, and at least a couple of naked shower scenes, because why not?

But it is well made for what it is, the effects are surprisingly good all things considered, and I found it to be quite a bit of fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Spasmo (1974)

spasmo

I’ve come to realize the line between the horror genre and the crime genre is often a thin one. Sometimes horror films involve monsters or space aliens or the supernatural, but sometimes the villains are more pedestrian. Many horror films involve human killers – often of the psychopathic and serial variety – but human all the same. Many of these films follow a police detective private detective or some other normal citizen as they investigate the murders. This is, of course, what countless crime dramas do.

In these cases, it isn’t entirely clear as to what differentiates a horror movie from a crime one. Sometimes it might be a matter of the violence and gore, but I’ve seen plenty of detective movies/series that revel in the gruesome details. Maybe horror movies have more jump scares. Or maybe sometimes the genres rather blend together and you get to decide which one you are watching.

The Italian Giallo was pretty much always crime stories with a (usually leather-gloved, knife-wielding) killer on the loose and someone out to discover who he (or she) is. But they did so with a particular brand of style and a pension for graphic, sexualized violence.

Spasmo is a Giallo that works more like a standard crime mystery with a bit of (not very graphic at all) sexual psychology thrown in for good measure.

Christian (Robert Hoffman) and his girl go frolicking on some beach. They come across a woman face down in the sand. At first, they think she’s dead, but upon further inspection, they find she has just passed out. When she awakens she says her name is Barbara (Suzy Kendall) but she gets pretty cagey when asked any other questions. As soon as Christian’s back is turned she runs for her car and jets away.

But she leaves behind a bottle with the name “Tucania” written on it. Somehow they figure out the name is also the name of a boat and they jump aboard and attend a party going on there. As it happens Barbara is also aboard and before you know it Christian has dumped his girlfriend and run off with Barbara.

Strangely, Barbara is all about a little hanky panky but she forces Christian to shave his beard first. While he’s in the bathroom getting a face trim some dude busts in the window brandishing a gun and threatening to kill him. A Tussel ensues and Christian accidentally shoots the man dead (or is he?).

Barbara is weirdly chill about this fact, doesn’t even bother to look at the guy but does suggest that the two of them (her and this man she’s just met) go on the run together. But before they can leave Barbara’s boyfriend shows up and forces her to go with him. Christian takes off separately, then realizes he left a necklace at the house and returns to the scene. There he finds the dead man has vanished.

He regroups with Barbara at a chateau on the sea where they meet a couple of oddballs who tell them a story about a weird crime they just came across. Turns out someone is planting very lifelike dummies, dressed in lingerie and with knives sticking out of them all around the countryside. The film is littered with people discovering these strange creations.

Someone else attacks Christian and nearly kills him. His brother is somehow involved. Barbara seems to come and go. Christian begins to think he’s going crazy. At its heart this is a murder mystery, but also a psychological horror. We’re never quite sure what is real and what is being imagined by Christian.

The ending ties it all together with a twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s one of those things where once you see the conclusion the rest of the film makes more sense. I found myself thinking about the beginning and what was confusing got tied together. But that didn’t really make watching it the first time all that satisfying, and I’m not sure this film really merits a second viewing.

ScreeningNotes over at Letterboxd has a really interesting essay on the film. He ties it into the larger Italian cinema from the time frame. I’m not sure I buy into everything he’s spouting, but it is an interesting read anyway.

For my money, if you are a fan of the genre then this is worth watching, but you’ve really got to be a fan.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

bone tomahawk

There aren’t a lot of Western/Horror hybrids for some reason. I don’t know why as it would seem like the barren landscapes of the West and the isolated communities filled with all sorts of outlaws would lend itself to horror, but I guess not. Maybe the audiences for those two genres are considered too far apart to make bringing them together worth it.

Controversial director S. Craig Zahler gave it a pretty good shot with his debut film Bone Tomahawk. Storywise it is primarily a Western but its graphic use of violence and impending sense of doom give it a good dose of horror.

In discussing the Western Genre I’ve not spoken much about its depictions of Native Americans (though we did have a good discussion in the comments section a while back). Generally speaking, the Western’s depiction of Native Americans has not been good. They were usually depicted as nameless, faceless savages attacking, raping, and murdering the pure and righteous white people who had come to the new land to save them from their savage ways.

Zahler (who also wrote the script) tries to work his way around this problem within the genre by having an Indian character (Zahn McClarnon) state that the film’s villains aren’t real Indians, but Troglodytes, cannibalistic savages that belong to no tribe. And thus hand waiving the whole problem away. But this is a Western set in the American West and the villains sure do look a lot like Indians, and they sure are savage. If you can get past that (and the really, truly, gruesome violence) then you are in for a bit of a treat.

A stranger (David Arquette) stumbles into the small town of Bright Hope. He buries his ill-gotten treasure before wandering into a bar. The town’s Back-Up Deputy Chickory (Richard Jenkins) spies the bag burial and tells Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) about the suspicious nature of it all. They question the man who pushes Chickory down and tries to escape, getting shot in the leg by Hunt for his trouble.

They call in the doctor’s daughter Samantha (Lili Simmons) to take the bullet out of the stranger’s leg. Somewhere in the night our villains sneak into town and kidnap the stranger, a deputy, and Samantha.

In the light of day Sheriff Hunt, Chickory, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who has a broken leg, and a dandyish gunslinger named John Brooder (Matthew Fox) all head for the valley where the enemy camps.

All of this is fairly standard Western stuff. Zahler gives it a lazy energy in the first half which is punctuated by some wonderful dialog and terrific performances by all involved. As they finally come to the enemy camp things turn horrific as the bad guys are truly abhorrent. I won’t go into details but let’s just say cannibalism isn’t their worst trait.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my day so I’m fairly immune to graphic violence, but this gets pretty intense. I do appreciate a film that doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence. Westerns have a tendency to have bloodless gunfights where the worst that happens to a man when he gets shot is that he falls off a building. Real violence is full of blood and gore and is horrible in every way. There is something to be said for a film to show that.

If you can stomach the violence and the hand-waiving away of the genre’s casual racism, Bone Tomahawk is a rather terrific bit of genre filmmaking.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Faculty (1998)

the faculty

The Faculty is so of its time, so late 1990s that I spontaneously turned into a 22-year-old college senior again while watching it. It was produced by Miramax, the hippest studio at the time. It was directed by Robert Rodrigues at the very apex of his coolness factor. It was written by Kevin Williamson hot off his hit-making turns with Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. It stars a veritable who’s who of late ’90s hip young actors including Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Clea Duvall, and Jordana Brewster. The soundtrack features Stabbing Westward, The Offspring, Soul Asylum, Creed, Garbage and Layne Staley with Tom Morello covering Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” If it was any more late 1990s I think it would create a black hole time warp.

It was part of the late-90s horror boom that began with Scream in 1996 and catered to a more younger, cooler, and mainstream crowd that horror was used to. I was very much into that whole scene. I freaking loved Scream and was so excited that horror had become popular.

I hated The Faculty when I saw it in theaters. Hate is probably too strong of a word, but I was very disappointed with it. I dug Rodrigues and Williamson, I loved this new wave of horror, but something about The Faculty just didn’t sit right with me. Looking back on it now, I think it was that it is more of a throwback to older films. It clearly has influences in all those schlocky 1950s sci-fi/horror films, and it outright references Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing (both films I wouldn’t see for several more years). I wasn’t hip to that vibe just yet so it all felt off to my brain.

I didn’t watch it again until tonight. I now am quite familiar with the film’s reference points and I think twenty years of distance has given me perspective on that particular wave of horror (it was mostly not very good) and so I found myself rather enjoying it. Don’t get me wrong, it is still not a great film, but it’s an enjoyable one.

Plotwise it takes a lot from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but sets it mostly inside a high school where initially the teachers are the aliens and the kids are all that’s left to save humanity. And not just any kids, the outcasts, the freaks, and the nerds.

Wood is the book-smart nerd who everyone picks on. Hartnett is the drug-dealing tough kid. Duvall is the put-upon shy kid who wears all black and might be a lesbian (in 1998!) The teachers (including a goatee-wearing Jon Stewart, Piper Laurie, Famke Jannsen, Salma Hayek, Bebe Neuwirth, and Robert Patrick – geez this cast is stacked) get controlled by these little alien worm things and are out to invade the entire world.

Williamson’s script is smart (but not nearly as smart as he thinks it is, not Scream smart) and Rodriguez’s direction is steady. The cast is mostly great. Overall it is a pretty good little horror film with some nice comedic moments

When I started this review I noted that The Faculty was very much a movie of its time. Unfortunately, that time has not aged very well. The CGI effects look bad. There is a scene that directly references a scene from The Thing. Actually, there are a couple of them, but this particular scene apes some very effective practical effects from that John Carpenter film, but here they are all computer generated and they look terrible.

It is a Miramax film, which of course was run by Harvey Weinstein. Danny Masterson has a small role (his character is simply named F’%# Up #1 which is appropriate, I guess) and freaking Harry Knowles has a cameo so call this a sex pest trifecta.

If you can get past all of that, I think it is worth seeking out, especially if you are a fan of late 1990s horror and somehow missed this one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Shin Godzilla (2016)

My daughter has started to get into Japanese culture, including Anime so I got her a subscription to the Crunchyroll streaming service. I noticed that Shin Godzilla was included in that service so I gave it go. I’d say I am a fan of the Godzilla movies, but I’m not hardcore about it. I’d been meaning to watch this one since it came out, and the reviews for the new one – Godzilla Minus One have been really good, so today seemed like a good day to watch a lizard monster attacking Japan. Godzilla Minus One isn’t a true sequel of Shin Godzilla but I still wanted to watch it before Godzilla Minus One.

Crunchyroll had two audio options. I could watch it in the original Japanese with English subtitles or I could watch an English dub. In general, I prefer to watch movies in their original language and so I chose that option. Unfortunately, the sync was off which meant I got the subtitles appearing on my screen about three seconds before the characters actually said them. This was especially true during the more frantic action sequences in which the dialogue is rapid-fire. It was very confusing so after about an hour I switched to the English dub. It was a very bad dub, but somehow I survived.

Made in 1954 the original Godzilla served as a metaphor for Japan’s post-war fears of another nuclear holocaust. Shin Godzilla is at least partially concerned with the ways in which bureaucracy stalls decisive government action in a time of crisis. Making it a metaphor for the Japanese government’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Just off the coast of Japan, an eruption of some kind occurs in Tokyo Bay. The water begins to boil and an underground tunnel ruptures sending water flooding into traffic. The government meets to discuss the issue, they call in top scientists to figure out what is causing the eruption, but they do nothing.

Soon a tail emerges then a large lizard thing (with hilarious googly eyes. But not to worry, the scientists say, it probably can’t come on land. It’s legs are too small. Then it does come on land and mutates into something more Godzilla-like. More government discussion, but little action. They have to have meetings, you see, and decide what the laws say they can and cannot do during this crisis that no one in the history of the world is prepared for.

Some low-level agents form a secret board of folks willing to actually do something, and they (eventually) save the day. But not before Godzilla destroys most of the city with his super-awesome fire breath and lasers that shoot out of his scales and tail.

It is a curious mix of dudes in offices arguing over the correct procedures, other dudes in other offices actually trying to find a real solution, and some crazy Godzilla action.

Honestly, I was mostly bored during the office scenes. I got what it was trying to do within the first ten minutes or so and after that, it just felt redundant. But the Godzilla attacks stuff is pretty great.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Paganini Horror (1988)

paganini horror

Horror, as a genre, can take some of the dumbest plot points and turn them into something fun, and interesting, and when you’re lucky, even scary. Killer clowns are living in the sewer, hatchet-wielding dudes slice up coeds in isolated campgrounds, killer tomatoes lurk at the grocery store, and just today I watched a short film called Hair Wolf.

Sometimes the movies are in on the gag (that killer tomato movie is full of winks towards the camera), sometimes they find ways to elevate the material, and sometimes they are just dumb.

Paganini Horror has a fairly interesting (if rather silly) idea but doesn’t find a way to do anything interesting with it.

An all-girl rock band is struggling to come up with their next big hit. Their producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) complains that all their new songs sound like their old ones. They need something new, something bold, something that will wow their fans.

Naturally, they buy an unpublished score by the famous Italian violinist and composer Paganini from an unscrupulous dealer (Donald Pleasence who doesn’t get to do much but has one scene in which he throws piles of cash off a tall building while muttering “fly away little demons.” Naturally, they decide to shoot a video of them performing their rock-n-roll version of the Paganini song inside the murder house where he lived. Naturally, this unleashes a gateway to Hell.

See what I mean? That’s not a bad setup. I mean, it’s pretty silly, but a good writer and director could do something with that. Instead, we get some half-thought-out ideas, a couple of decent bouts of gore and violence, and two (count them) two full-on music videos.

Daria Nicolodi who starred in a bunch of great Dario Argento films (and cowrote Suspiria with him) costars as the owner of the creepy mansion. She also co-wrote it with director Luigi Cozzi and Raimondo Del Balzo (who hasn’t done anything else I’ve seen). You can kind of see what they were going for, but without a true master like Argento to help out it all comes out as a big mess.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: House (1977)

house poster

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a massive worldwide hit in 1975. Naturally, studios from all over tried to find ways to replicate that success. The Japanese studio Toho was no exception and they hired Nobuhiko Obayashi to write something Jaws-like. What he came up with was one of the strangest, incomprehensible films I’ve ever seen.

The basic plot, if you want to call it that, is actually pretty simple. A teenaged girl nick-named Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) (most of the characters in this film have goofy names like Kung Fu, Fantasy, and Sweet) invites several of her friends to spend summer vacation at her Aunt’s (Yōko Minamida) house. Strange things begin happening almost immediately once they arrive. It seems the house is haunted.

But any type of plot outline will do nothing to explain just how completely nuts this film is. Criterion describes it by saying that it’s like if an episode of Scooby Doo were directed by Mario Bava. I’d add that it’s a psychedelic cartoon turned into a live-action nightmare.

There is a floating head that bites one girl in the butt checks, a piano that eats people, an evil cat, a murderous futon, and so much more. The sets’ backdrops are gorgeous and intentionally designed to call attention to their fakeness. Obayashi uses fisheye lenses, superimposed images, freeze-frames, matte paintings, periodical animation, and every other cinematic trick at his disposal.

It feels both thrown together and tightly scripted. It is more comedic than horrifying, and more bizarre than thematically satisfying, but it truly is a film worth watching.

It is one of those films I’ve been hearing about for ages. The Criterion Collection got ahold of it a few years back and it’s been talked about ever since. But for one reason or another, I kept putting off watching it. I like weird films but I feel like I need to be in the mood for them, and I rarely feel like I’m really in the mood. But I needed a foreign language horror film and was struggling to find something so I put it on.

I’m so glad I did.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Noroi: The Curse (2005)

noroi the curse

For a very brief period in the early 2000s, Americans became obsessed with a certain type of Japanese horror (or J-Horror as it was known). We’d spent the 1980s watching slasher films, but by the 1990s those had grown stale. We didn’t seem to know what should take its place. So much so that in 1996 Wes Craven directed Scream which was essentially a self-aware slasher with hot TV stars.

Whereas American horror tended to be filled with horrendous violence and jump scares, Japanese horror at the time was more foreboding. The violence was toned down and in its place was psychological horror and a brooding atmosphere.

The Blair Witch Project introduced Americans to the found-footage genre in 1999. That movie, which is about some independent filmmakers making a documentary about a mythological witch that is supposed to haunt rural Maryland. They go missing and the film is supposedly made up of their leftover footage. It is a mix of their professionally made documentary footage and a lot of handheld camera work created by the actual actors living for a few weeks in the woods. It created a craze of found-footage horror.

Noroi: The Curse is a mixture of J-Horror and found footage films. It begins with a voiceover telling us about the life of Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) who was a journalist investigating paranormal activity across Japan. Recently his house burned to the ground, killing his wife, but his body was not recovered and he is presumed missing.

He left behind a series of videotapes full of his research. The film presents those tapes along with a series of newsreels and television footage of various occult specials and the like. It all creates a sort of documentary approach to this fictional story.

At first, his investigative reports seem unrelated. There is a young girl with psychic abilities. An actress (Marika Matsumoto) sees something spooky in a graveyard and collapses. Another woman hears a baby crying next door, but the family’s children are all much older.

Slowly all of these various stories connect and point to a demon that was released from a village that is now buried under water after a dam was built. It seems to have possessed someone and is causing nearly everyone connected to the story to die under mysterious circumstances.

The violence is mostly off-screen and there is essentially zero gore. Tonally it is filled with an eeriness and the creepy soaks right through. I’m not a big fan of hand-held camerawork in movies as it tends to make me dizzy. There is some of that here, but mostly it’s used quite effectively. The camera is framed so that there are often strange little things in the background or on the edges of the screen. It makes you pay attention.

Like a lot of found footage films in which the characters seem to always be carrying a camera, there are times when I wanted to scream at them to put the camera down and run, or fight, or at least help that person getting pummelled by a demon. At least here our hero isn’t the one carrying the camera, he’s actually got a cameraman (working for his documentary) to do that for him.

The film uses the various footage in interesting ways. The way in which it moves between stuff shot by Kobayashi, and various television crews keeps the movie moving in a manner that other found footage films cannot keep up with.

I was a huge fan of J-horror during its initial craze, but I somehow missed this one. I’m glad I found it tonight as it is a good one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Nightmare City (1980)

nightmare city

George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead didn’t exactly invent the zombie movie, but it perfected it and popularized most of the genre’s tropes. Ten years later he made a sequel, Dawn of the Dead. That film was a huge success in Italy, so successful that in 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel entitled Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was renamed Zombi in Italy). It was a big hit and the Italian zombie crazy had begun.

Lots and lots of Italian zombie films were made over the next several years. Some of them are great, some of them are terrible, but they are almost all worth watching. The Italians tended to go big – bigger violence and gore, more nudity and sex. What they miss in nuance and social commentary they more than make up for in over-the-top craziness.

They also allowed themselves to get a little weird, to play with the genre in interesting ways. In Nightmare City the zombies are not the slow-walking, brainless ghouls from Romero’s films, but rather somewhat intelligent, fast-moving monsters capable of using weapons and systematically invading places like hospitals and power stations.

It begins with an airplane flying towards some unnamed European airport. The tower gets no response when it asks the plane to identify itself. When it lands the police surround it, demanding whoever is inside come out with their hands up. When the door does open what comes out is a mass of knife-wielding maniacs whose faces are covered in scabs and scars (more like oatmeal and latex if you ask me). Guns seem to do nothing to these monsters; in an instant, they have killed everyone on sight.

Well, nearly everyone. Our hero, a news reporter named Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) was there to interview a nuclear scientist, manages to escape.

What follows, plot-wise is your fairly typical city under siege storyline. The government orders everyone to stay in their homes and lock their doors. The military comes out in force to kill the zombies. Scientists scramble to figure out just exactly what’s going on (it was radiation, stupid).

Our hero rushes to the hospital to rescue his doctor’s wife and then they try to escape the city.

The script is a mess. There is a lot of speechifying about how mankind is a doomed species and how we’ve used technology to play god, etc. and so forth. It is nothing you haven’t heard in a million other science fiction films, and none of it is delivered confidently. The military and other law enforcement presence seems very small. You’d think they’d bring in tanks and jet planes to secure the area, but we see almost none of that. Presumably, the budget wasn’t big enough to bring in actual military vehicles (the best we get is a helicopter).

The violence is a funny mix of really bad to surprisingly gruesome. There are a lot of zombies with knives and hatches but their stabbing and slicing is often completely bloodless. Sometimes they don’t even break the skin though it seems to drop their victims stone dead. But in other scenes, we’ll see a guy get his eyeball ripped out with a stick, or a woman has her breast completely cut off.

There are a lot of naked breasts in this film. The men tend to get stabbed in the neck, but the women seem to almost always have their shirts ripped off and their boobs stabbed.

It is nothing new to have low-budget horror films throw a lot of gratuitous nudity at their viewers, but it happens so often here that it is both hilarious and tedious (and of course wildly sexist).

Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed myself. You can’t go into a film like this expecting greatness. But director Umberto Lenzi keeps things moving at a steady pace and he has enough skill to not make the ridiculousness too inept. It all comes off as seriously ridiculous fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Till Death (2021)

till death

Last week in my Friday Night Horror column I noted that I’d not done a lot of writing for my Frozen in January theme of the month, but that I hoped I’d get back in the groove soon. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I’ve watched quite a few films that fit the theme, but I just haven’t felt the desire to do much writing. I actually started writing a thing on The Martian (a man stranded on the desolate, frozen planet of Mars fits the bill I think – or at least I was gonna try and make it fit) but then a couple of paragraphs in and I couldn’t find the energy.

That happens sometimes. To everyone I suppose. I just get in a funk and wonder what the heck I’m even doing. Once again I’ll hope that writing this column will get me back in the groove.

Till Death stars Megan Fox as Emma Davenport, a woman who at the beginning of the film is ending the affair she’s been having with Tom (Aml Ameen). It isn’t right, she says. She needs to go back to her husband Mark (Eoin Macken).

God knows why. As we’ll soon realize Mark is a terrible person. It is their anniversary and she meets him at a swanky restaurant. The first words out of his mouth are to complain she isn’t wearing the red dress he likes. She’s wearing a nice little black dress and she’s Megan Fox so she looks good. But it isn’t the dress he was expecting so after the meal he drives her home and forces her to put on the red one.

He’s the kind of guy who orders her dessert even though she says she’s full. He bought her a weird steel necklace for their anniversary and immediately puts it on her, but then frowns at the tickets she bought him to the Super Bowl.

He makes her wear a blindfold while he drives her out to the secluded cabin he owns in the woods. He forces her to keep it on the entire way even though it is at least an hour’s drive and she’s complaining it is making her car sick.

There are twenty minutes of this stuff. Of him being a jerk to her while she sits in sad silence. Twenty agonizing minutes just waiting for her to wake up handcuffed to his corpse.

That’s not really a spoiler because it is in all the promotional material, and any blurb you read about the film is gonna tell you that information. That’s the reason I watched the film. But I nearly turned it off before it got there, the film was so dumb.

So he takes her to this cabin. Makes her sit in the kitchen blindfolded (again) while he lays a bunch of rose petals down and lights a billion candles. Then she wanders around the house looking for him – she puts on the record he leaves a note telling her to play – and then when she finally finds him (in the bedroom of course) his words aren’t something sweet and romantic but a complaint that it took her too long to find him.

He then finally says something nice and they have sex. The next morning she wakes up to find herself handcuffed to him but before she can even really ask him why, he blows his brains out.

The rest of the film involves her trying to get the heck out of there. But the thing is, he’s drained the car of gasoline, broken her phone, and removed any sharp object that might allow herself to get free of him. Eventually, some other folks show up and things get even more difficult for her.

That part – woman handcuffed to a dead man in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter, with no means of escape – should be really good. But the character and the film make so many stupid decisions I just wanted it to be over way before the credits actually rolled.

To wit: after he kills himself, blowing blood and guts all over her face, she doesn’t scream or freak out. She doesn’t check for signs of life. She almost immediately drags his body over to the phone to call for help. When she finds it dead, she grabs the gun and tries to blow the handcuff chain to bits. She doesn’t check for a key in his pockets or anything. It takes her half an hour to clean the blood off her face.

She puts his shirt and pants on (for all she brought was that little red dress and apparently some skimpy pajamas, but not an actual over night bag for some reason) but not his socks and shoes even though she’ll spend lots of time wandering around outside in the snow.

Over and over she (and eventually the other characters) make the stupidest decisions ever. The film does dumb things too. Like skipping over important or interesting things. I mean how does she get his shirt off of him and on to her when they are handcuffed together. That’s the kind of thing we need to see!

Periodically Emma will make some kind of smart-ass comment. After dragging his corpse around the house looking for something that might help out she remarks that she was dragging his dead body around for years, long before he killed himself. Ha! and so forth. But there isn’t enough of that kind of thing to make her interesting.

I’m not a big fan of Megan Fox and while she isn’t bad here, she doesnt’ have the charm this kind of role calls for. The direction is fine, it keeps things fairly taut and moving. There are moments that are more or less thrilling, but all of the ridiculous stuff happening kept me shaking my head in annoyance.