akuma634

I just got done watching Red State via On Demand for $9.99. I just heard about this movie today and it did sound very interesting, enough so that I did spend 10 bucks on a HD PPV to see it. Right off the bat, I gotta say that it really wasn't what I was expecting and it could have been so much more. Instead it felt very flat. I was also expecting much more from something written by Kevin Smith. For a Hollywood production that cost around 4 million dollars, I have to ask where the money went. I know by Hollywood standards 4 million is pocket change but I've seen plenty of amazing indie horror movies over the years that were made on hardly anything and managed to not only tread new ground in the horror genre but surpass anything on the big screen.

My issue is that as a life long horror fan, this wasn't much of a horror movie, let alone a very good one. It suffers a lot of genre problems, the most common would be not writing decent characters, the entire point of making a good horror movie is to have at least one character for the viewer to like because if you don't care about anyone in the movie then all you're doing is spending 90 minutes just waiting for random people to get killed off. This movie really didn't bother much with characters. It starts with three guys obviously in their early 20's playing teenagers who's entire motivation is having sex with a loose woman. As you'd expect from this kind of movie, it's all a trap set up by the villains of the movie. The villains are religious cult very much based around Fred Phelps and his church of hate, only these people are gun nuts who hoard military grade firearms and take it upon themselves to execute people who they feel God hates. There is one person in the compound that isn't evil but everyone else is evil. The direction of the movie shifts into the local police for a little bit and then the ATF is on the case and they become the focus of the movie. It becomes what you'd expect, they try and do the whole Waco Texas event with the cult standoff. There's a moral gray area in this portion of the movie and it's about the ATF guys being ordered to go in and kill everyone, well they know there are hostages as well as children of the cult inside. The moral gray area just doesn't really hold up as well, again no good characters and no real reason to care if the entire cult gets slaughtered or not.

That's a summary of the whole plot right there without spoiling anything major. There are a lot of things to take issue with in the writing, especially considering how it's Kevin Smith, this guy is normally good at writing entertaining characters. As far as being a horror movie goes, it's barely passable, it's more of a thriller type movie but with weak tension and not enough real drama. The violence was very tame, it's all gunshots and most of them aren't actually shown. That is all you ever see, just a few squibs and one somewhat gruesome gunshot wound. What I was expecting was something closer to the 1965 cult classic Two Thousand Maniacs where these people were totally nuts but they took the killings and made them into their entertainment, really having fun with it. Here it's just wrap them in plastic and shoot them in the head ritualistically. With the ATF element, I think they were going more for the George Romero film The Crazies but it just wasn't working, plus with The Craziest it was more about fearing the trigger men of the government and here it's cold g-men with guns vs a cult with no redeeming qualities. Another better direction this could have taken would be something more humor driven like Machete which actually told a much stronger political message than Red State did. Speaking of the obvious political aspect to the movie, it really doesn't show until very late into the movie and it doesn't even attempt to be subtle, it's just right out in the open. A very flat message that doesn't really mean much in 2011, why not say this when George W. Bush was president? Another point I want to make is that it really could have been much worse. I mean at least they didn't totally beat you over the head with the political message, well they did that but it was just one scene. But I have to say I was relived that it wasn't another one of these torture movies like the first two Saw movies, Hostel, Grotesque, and Martyrs where it's nothing but horribly written one dimensional "characters" getting tortured off camera for the entire movie. That's a trend I was sick of from day one, I mean if a movie made to shock people isn't as gory as 1963's Blood Feast (the original gore movie) then I think they aren't even trying. So maybe the whole gunshot thing isn't so lame because they could have easily went for lots of torture scenes that are 95% off camera. In the end it was a well made Hollywood production that does look good and sound good in HD. It didn't really work as a horror movie, it lacked the emotional spark to be a drama, and it lacked the tension to be a thriller. It's just a well made but very bland movie overall. I'm not saying avoid it at all costs but don't go in expecting too much.

I decided to give in and watch The Human Centipede bluray this morning. I've been watching plenty of bad movies for fun lately, the last ones I've seen were The Worst Horror Movie Ever Made, Troll 2, and The Room. All very fun and entertaining bad movies but The Human Centipede was the opposite of fun and entertaining.

I went in with no expectations and ended up just screaming at my TV for an hour and a half. I haven't seen so much stupidity in a horror movie since Hostel, Rob Zombie's Halloween, Martyrs, Gutterballs, and Return To Sleepaway Camp. It's rare for me to hate a movie only minutes into it but this gave me no choice. It starts with an old German man who looks like Butt-Head with a little Beavis bone structure, he's sitting in his car early in the morning and looking at pictures of what appears to be dogs sniffing each other butts. Then a truck stops behind his parked car, the truck driver walks to a chain link fence (in a very public area with several dozen cars passing by the second) so he can go number 2. The German man takes a rifle out of his car, tries to conceal it under his coat, and nonchalantly walks behind the truck driver, shoots him, and we see the opening title. I'm not sure how there were no witness or anyone who heard the shot.

The main plot is about two obnoxious American girls on vacation in Germany who want to attend a party. They leave their room and drive through the woods in the middle of nowhere when they suddenly get a flat tire. They have no idea how to change a tire so they start bickering and crying for minutes while an old pervert who speaks no English pulls up to harass them. Eventually they wander through the woods while screaming at each other and saying their names in every sentence, because I guess that's how people talk. They do find a house so they knock and Butt-Head answers the door and invites them in. He then gives them drugged water, freaks out when one girl spills her glass, demands she drinks more water, and eventually he gets suspicious enough for the girls to worry but by then they're already drugged. They wake up in restraints only to find out that the doctor is going to kill the trucker because he isn't a tissue match. He leaves and comes back with a Japanese guy, that is the very depth of this character. The only thing he ever does in the entire movie is screams in Japanese at the top of his lungs. When he has the three people he needs, he shows a slide show of his evil mad scientist plan to create The Human Centipede. A medical experiment that makes absolutely no sense and has no practical application.

For a while not much is really going on aside from Dr. Butt-Head ranting and acting like an idiot and the three victims crying like babies that need a diaper change. On the day of surgery one girl tries to escape and it's one of the most pathetic escapes I have ever seen, it's logic hurdle over logic hurdle like refusing to leave through the front door and steal the doctor's car, eventually the doctor catches the girl and makes her the middle of he centipede. The surgery scene is incredibly boring. You see some teeth pulled off screen and there's a circular incision that is barely shown, that is as gory as this movie ever gets. 1963's Blood Feast had a ton of gore and while looking laughably bad almost 50 years later, it is much more gruesome than The Human Centipede. 46 minutes into the movie you see the actual Human Centipede, which is three people with stitch effects on their faces and tons of bandages. The doctor parades them around the house, tries to teach them tricks, makes the front guy eat out of a dog dish, screams at them a lot, and the three of them do the usual routine of crying and the Japanese guy screaming in Japanese.

There isn't any more plot I can reveal without spoiling the movie but it only gets stupider. By the end it just creates a void where any sense of logic or humanity should be. The movie is just very boring, nothing much happens, there is just barely enough violence for an R rating, little nudity, no real plot, no characters or development, and just a very dull movie. I think what could have saved this movie is just taking the idea and making it into more of a comedy like replace the German doctor with Tommy Wiseau or The Iron Sheik and replace one of the girls with someone like Paris Hilton. Just outright spoof your own movie and it could have some watchable content. There is just nothing in this movie that I can possibly recommend. It isn't the worst movie, Manos: The Hands Of Fate and Birdemic: Shock and Terror were much worse and a lot more boring. The Human Centipede just goes nowhere and doesn't even make any attempt at being an interesting or original movie.