megan fox

poster

I don’t pay super close attention to what new movies are coming out and when. I follow enough movie critics on social media that I hear some of the buzz, but I really don’t give it much heed. I don’t spend a lot of time watching new movie trailers or reading reviews, etc. But I have a general idea of what movies people are talking about.

The Substance is a new horror movie starring Demi Moore. It is getting a lot of good buzz and is definitely on my radar. Subservience is a new horror movie starring Megan Fox. It is not getting good buzz, but rather a lot of panning when anyone is talking about it at all.

Because I don’t pay close attention to these things I got these two movies mixed up. I put on Subservience thinking it was getting a good buzz. Within twenty minutes of watching it, I was confused.

People are really liking this movie? Maybe it gets better towards the end.

My friends, it did not get better towards the end, or at the end, or after the credits rolled. It is a stupid, stupid movie. It takes a old, dumb trope, and does nothing new with it. I should have realized something was up the moment I saw it was directed by S.K. Dale who also helmed Til Death which was just as dumb.

But it is also kind of fun? It reminded me a little of those dumb erotic thrillers I used to watch in the 1990s.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a decent dude. He has a good job, a loving wife, a precocious daughter, and a baby boy. He’s living the American Dream. Except for that loving wife, she’s dying. She desperately needs a heart transplant.

Working that good job while taking care of those two kids and trying to be there for his wife is a little more than he can handle. So he does what anyone in that situation would do. He buys a super hot robot to handle the domestic chores.

Her name is Alice (Megan Fox) and she’s programmed to take care of his every need and desire (wink, wink, nudge nudge.) He doesn’t bother to tell his wife, Maggie (Madeline Zima) who is basically a permanent resident at the hospital that the robot he bought looks like Megan Fox. The look on her face when she first sees Alice is precious.

Alice is good with the kids, she’s great at cleaning up, and she’s a pretty good cook (though her lasagna is nothing like mom’s.) She can tell Nick is stressed out and would do anything to help relieve it for him.

You can see where this is going. Alice’s programming gets mucked up causing her to go haywire. If Nick is stressed then she’ll take off her robe and give him a release. If some guy at work is causing problems then she’ll go to his house and shoot him in the face. If Maggie’s health problems are causing trouble then she has to go to.

It is the kind of film where you have to just enjoy the ride. Because if you start thinking about it you’ll start to wonder things like: How can a guy with a relatively low-level construction job afford a big house, what must be enormous medical bills, and what can only be an incredibly expensive robot? Or why is the robot anatomically correct in every way? Are they all programmed to seduce? Or how can a person who just had a heart transplant do all that running and sexing and fighting?

Those aren’t questions the film is prepared to answer. It is better to just enjoy the not-particularly talented Megan Fox give a robotic performance that actually works in her favor for once. Or dig into the nostalgic vibe this thing is giving off. They don’t really make erotic thrillers like this anymore (even if the erotic aspects are fairly tame and it never quite thrills like you want it to.)

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.