The Year in Horror (2016) – The Most Disappointing Films

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2016, Abattoir, cinema, Don't Breathe, film reviews, Ghostbusters, He Never Died, horror, horror films, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, most disappointing films, Movies, Tank 432, The Conjuring 2, The Good Neighbor, The Last Heist, The Neon Demon, year in review, year-end lists

At long last, we arrive at the beginning of the end: the final breakdown for the year in horror, circa 2016. We’ll be examining the best, the worst and the ones that got away (so far) in later posts but I always like to start with the ones that coulda been contenders first. These are the films that had tons of potential (at least in my eyes), yet managed to drop the ball in some pretty crucial ways.

By this point in the year, I’ve managed to screen 179 of the 259 horror films released/scheduled for this year, meaning that I’ve seen 69% of all horror films released in 2016. Of those 179, I’ve whittled the list down to the ten most disappointing films of the year. Keep in mind that these weren’t the worst (with one exception) but they were the ones that were capable of so much more. With no further ado and in no particular order, I now present the evidence to you humble members of the online jury.

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Ghostbusters

There were a lot of routes that Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot could have taken: it could have been a straight-up nostalgia fest, full of cameos from the original duology…it could have been a sly, feminist commentary on the inanity of modern-day online fanboydom and the expectations of genre fanatics…it could have been a remake, a reboot, a realignment or any other re- that you care to add…it could have been a big, dumb, loud, CGI-heavy popcorn flick…really, the world was its oyster.

In reality, Feig’s Ghostbusters ended up being ALL of these things, which only served to dilute the final product down to the lowest common denominator. With no clear vision, the film whiplashed from snarky meta-commentary to unbelievably dumb CGI spectacle with an ease that did nothing but give me a headache. This wasn’t the worst ghostbusting-related film of 2016, by a long shot (that title belongs to the woeful Ghost Team), but it was the one that had the potential to be a neo-classic and that missed opportunity was a real bummer.

Abattoir

I happen to like writer/director/all-around maniac Darren Lynn Bousman quite a bit, finding his Repo: A Genetic Musical to be an unsung modern cult classic, along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and thoroughly enjoying his batshit crazy art projects like The Devil’s Carnival and Alleluia. Hell, I don’t even particularly mind his Saw films, even if that franchise is a study in diminishing returns.

In other words, I was really looking forward to his ingenious haunted house film, Abattoir, which featured the thoroughly unique concept of an evil man cobbling together the ultimate haunted house by cutting out particular rooms from various crime scenes and stitching them together into one Frankensteinian monstrosity. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a logline worth getting excited for.

The actual film, unfortunately, is a complete and total piece of shit, easily the worst “film” that Bousman has released and one of the very worst films of the entire year. Nothing works, the film manages to completely squander a fantastic cast (poor Lin Shaye!) and the whole concept is completely dropped for a swing into Mouth of Madness territory that’s so inept, it feels like parody. In a year full of surprises, both good and bad, this was easily one of the worst.

He Never Died

This tale of Henry Rollins as an immortal, cannibalistic but, ultimately, very human and flawed “hero” had so much going for it (Rollins is quite good, for one) that it kind of hurts when it devolves into stupid comedy and tedious, indie film “run and guns.” There are moments where the concept is allowed to fully breathe and, for those brief moments, He Never Died is actually kind of special. For the most part, however, this is a classic case of filmmakers coming up with a better idea than they have the ability to actually portray.

The Conjuring 2

I thoroughly enjoyed James Wan’s original The Conjuring, along with the first Insidious. Since that time, however, the Waniverse has started to look suspiciously like the same film, with slightly different clothes, akin to those old RPGs where you could tell an enemy was different because they were blue instead of red.

This has got all the typical Wan trademarks: creepy old house, lots of jump scares, lots of creepy figures popping up in the background and doing creepy things, Patrick Wilson and Vera Fermiga doing their best to add gravity to the silliness…if this was a checklist, it would hit all the appropriate boxes. The problem, of course, is that none of it is actually scary or even particularly interesting, by this point, lending everything a dull sheen of “been there, done that.” Not the worst big-budget horror film released in theaters, this year, but easily one of the most forgettable.

The Neon Demon

I’ve dearly loved every single Nicolas Winding Refn film, so fully expected The Neon Demon, his first official foray into horror, to top my Best Of list for the year. As it turned out, I ended up really disliking the film, finding it to be exceptionally beautiful, visually, but completely empty and thoroughly frustrating. I’ve seen lots of year-end lists that extol the film for everything from its ultra-lush visuals to its tricky, feminist reimagining of the typical “starlet gets lost in L.A.” trope but I can’t help but feel this is another example of lauding a film for its intentions rather than its actual outcome. I can fully appreciate what Refn was trying to do and still think he’s one of the very best cinematic auteurs of our era. This doesn’t stop The Neon Demon from being a stinker, however, and one of my very biggest disappointments of the whole year.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

I love old-fashioned, austere ghost films, the more Gothic, the better. This had all the trappings, from an appropriately gauzy visual aesthetic to a supremely leisurely pace (some might call it slow but that’s easily the film’s smallest issue) but it was missing the most important aspect of any film: a genuine sense of tension, danger or any kind of stakes. More than anything, IATPTTLITH comes across as a style exercise, an attempt by a modern filmmaker to replicate an older style of genre film without really understanding what made those films work in the first place. This is too well-made to be written off as a complete loss and some of the visual effects are genuinely unsettling. For all that, however, I couldn’t help but be disappointed at what could have been, with more focus and a tighter grasp on the mechanics of the story.

Tank 432

Three things I love: British horror films, modern British war films and Michael Smiley. Tank 432 was supposed to feature all of these elements, all but assuring it a place on my favorites list. In reality, Tank 432 is an awful mess, predisposed on a twist that’s so obvious and silly that it thoroughly wrecks any of the preceding atmosphere or creepy elements. You wouldn’t think that a film about an army platoon who must take refuge in a broken-down tank from monstrous, unseen forces would be so dull, confusing and frustrating but you, like me, would be very wrong, indeed.

Don’t Breathe

I actually enjoyed Fede Alvarez’s re-do of Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead, so I was curious to see what the burgeoning, young filmmaker could do with an original concept. This film, about shitty young Detroiters trying to rob a blind war veteran and getting much more than they bargained for, has a lot going for it: the film careens along like a rollercoaster, there are plenty of smart, intense setpieces and Stephen Lang is an instantly iconic “villain.” In other words, a complete classic.

Or it would have been, had the actual film not been so dumb, mean-spirited and predisposed on one eye-rolling deus ex machina after another. This is the kind of film where nothing would happen if any of the characters displayed even a modicum of common sense or desire for self-preservation, the kind of movie where you shout yourself hoarse telling the on-screen idiots to just use their goddamn brains for thirty seconds. In many ways, Don’t Breathe is this year’s It Follows: hailed by everyone and their granny as being the second-coming of horror but so far below the year’s very best as to be laughable. And let’s not even get started on the turkey baster…

The Last Heist

Mike Mendez makes big, loud, dumb and relentlessly fun genre films (his Big Ass Spider! is still one of my very favorite modern cheeseball horror films), the equivalent of PBR tallboys out of an ice-filled cooler. The Last Heist, about hapless bank robbers choosing to rip off the one financial institution that happens to be frequented by a stone-cold serial killer (Henry Rollins, being Henry Rollins), has lots of silly action but there’s never a real spark or sense of unmitigated mayhem and fun. This felt like a made-for-cable movie, with all that implies, and could never quite shake the stigma. While too good-natured and zippy to really dislike, this was also rather dull and found me frequently checking my watch, a first for any Mendez film. Not a strikeout, per se, but a supremely weak bunt to first base.

The Good Neighbor

This had a great cast (Logan Miller and Kier Gilchrist are two of the most interesting young actors currently treading the silver screen and James Caan is James fricking Caan, fer chrissakes!) and a fairly interesting concept but managed to collapse into soggy, Lifetime Channel territory by the time the lame twist reared its ugly head. This is also only marginally a horror film (very marginally), making it one of the films I screened this year that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest. As such, this was a double disappointment: very little horror and a complete squandering of James Caan. Again, not the worst of the year, by a long shot, but so dull, generic and painfully obvious as to be a real chore to sit through.

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The 31 Days of Halloween (2016): 10/15-10/21 (Part One)

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31 Days of Halloween, B.C. Butcher, cinema, Darkweb, Field Freak, film reviews, films, Flight 7500, horror films, Movies, October, Swiss Army Man, The Channel, The Devil's Dolls, The Good Neighbor, The Last Heist, When Black Birds Fly

Since the third week of October viewings featured 21 films, it seems prudent to break the list up into two chunks. This was a pretty varied week, all in all, featuring not only some of my favorite films of the season but also some of my least favorite. In that spirit, then, I present the first ten films screened during the week of October 15th through the 21st: the second half will follow shortly.

Darkweb

Astoundingly bad film that’s sort of a brain-dead take on Eli Roth’s Hostel, albeit one that hews a little closer to the original Most Dangerous Game source material. There’s really nothing to recommend here, unless you happen to be a fan of bad filmmaking (the performances and dialogue almost reach Ed Wood levels of absurdism) or want to see poor Danny Glover completely humiliate himself in one of the worst star-level cameos I’ve ever seen in a cheap-ass genre film: his character spends the entirety of the film yelling, gestulating wildly and shouting “Fuck!” from a TV monitor. I think I can speak for us all when I say that he’s way too old for this shit.

The Last Heist

Thoroughly entertaining, if rather run-of-the-mill, action-thriller about a bunch of crooks who break into a mob-owned bank and run afoul of a dour serial killer (Henry Rollins, in a fantastically realized performance) who’s just trying to get home with his suitcase full of eyeball trophies: can’t we all relate? I was a huge fan of director Mike Mendez’s Big Ass Spider but this one didn’t get me as fired-up, although it’s still the furthest thing possible from a bad film: full of great performances, well-staged action sequences and just enough gore to edge the needle into the “horror” side, you could do a lot worse than this.

The Channel

Simply terrible, zero-budget nonsense that seems designed purely to prove the theory that Christian horror films kind of suck. This tale about a teen who flirts with the dark side (via those terrible “rave dance parties” and Ecstacy pills, of course), gets into a car accident and brings back the spirit of a dead girl is just flat-out awful, no sugar-coating possible. Full of so many cliches, amateur performances and poor filmmaking (the color timing, for one, is just wretched) that it’s impossible to ever become invested in the trite storyline, this bears the distinction of having a distinctly Christian angle but that’s pretty much its only distinctive feature.

Swiss Army Man

An easy candidate for one of my favorite films of the entire year, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man might sound unpleasant on paper (a suicidal castaway comes upon a dead body and uses it in a multitude of ways to survive) but is simply magical, in execution. Rarely have I encountered a film that hits such heady highs between ridiculous slapstick comedy (think Weekend at Bernie’s but much weirder), devastating drama and soaring joy: it’s like riding an emotional rollercoaster, with each new loop and development charging through you at maximum velocity. Essentially a two-person show (for the most part), everything would collapse if the performances weren’t top notch: good thing that Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe bring two of the year’s very best to the table. While Dano is simply superb, able to bring equal measures of awkward sweetness and genuine darkness to Hank, Radcliffe is nothing short of revelatory as Manny, the corpse. Relegated to playing dead for the entire film, Radcliffe still manages to make Manny a completely alive, vibrant character: his gradual awakening to the world is truly beautiful, something that seems a little hard to comprehend in between the non-stop farting and boner-compassing.

Saying too much about this absolutely delightful piece of filmmaking (the craft of which, by the way, is equally stunning) would be to ruin shee delight and I’ll never be a party to that: suffice to say that Swiss Army Man is one of those truly beautiful films that could actually change your life, if you let it, and we’ll leave it at that. The Daniels (as they’re collectively known) have instantly landed on my “future must-sees” list.

Flight 7500

The Grudge director Takashi Shimizu’s latest, Flight 7500, comes with an intriguing premise: a captive audience of travelers on a red-eye flight must figure out what mysterious force is killing them, one by one, as their luxurious tomb hurtles turbulently through dark skies. It’s a pretty interesting, creepy idea, which makes the tedious result even more disappointing: despite being competently made, there’s no spark here, whatsoever, and the film’s numerous plot holes constantly threaten to swallow audience interest whole. The film’s big twist also serves to handily deflate any tension that came before, making the whole thing even more silly, upon closer reflection. Not terrible…just terribly dull.

The Good Neighbor

More drama than horror, in execution, Kasra Farahani’s The Good Neighbor edged its way onto this year’s screenings by virtue of its premise: a pair of pretentious teen shitheads (ably portrayed by Logan Miller and Keir Gilchrist) decide to fuck with a cantakerous, old neighbor (ably portrayed by James Caan) and convince him that his house is haunted, in order to gauge his response. As expected, his response is not what the two guys expect and tragedy ensues. Despite solid performances and execution, this ended up being a bit trite and heavy-handed, by the end, a fact not aided by the film’s frequent courtroom cut-aways. It’s always nice to see Caan in anything, especially at this stage of his career, but this is just okay, no matter how you slice it.

The Devil’s Dolls

A prime example of an indie film’s reach exceeding its abilities, The Devil’s Dolls (nee Worry Dolls) has a fantastic plot but rather unexceptional execution and decidedly iffy acting. A notorious serial killer is gunned down by a heroic cop, who takes the dead guy’s possessions, including a box full of ‘worry dolls,’ as evidence. The cop’s young daughter gets ahold of the dolls and turns them into necklaces, which she sells. Problem is, each of the dolls is actually cursed and causes the owner to commit terrible acts. Our hero cop must now race around the town, desperately trying to stop a vicious killer who’s already long dead and gone, as his innocent daughter becomes more and more possessed. No matter how you look at it, that’s a logline with a tremendous amount of potential, all too little of which makes it to the screen. The kills are graphic and energetic, which will be a plus for the gorehounds, but the performances range from decent to vein-popping. In a hit-or-miss year, The Devil’s Dolls definitely wasn’t one of the worst but it would be a helluva stretch to call it one of the best: file this right in the middle and be done with it.

Field Freak

Much better than I initially feared but still pretty far from my cup of tea, Stephen Folker’s Field Freak is one seriously silly film. This tale about a writer who moves his family to the country only to encounter insane root beer vendors, crazed beaver exterminators and the titular Sasquatian monster is always manic and over-the-top but that seems to be by design. As someone who loathes self-aware dreck like Sharknado, I’m far from an expert on this type of film but Field Freak, at the least, was a fairly painless watch. If campy isn’t your thing, however, this will probably wear out its welcome rather quickly.

B.C. Butcher

As someone who grew up on Troma films, I’ll still freely admit that seeing their logo before a film always gives me pause: will this be one of the outrageously offensive, amazing ones or one of the cheapjack, shitty ones? Without a doubt, B.C. Butcher is Team Shitty, all the way. Painfully amateurish and proud of it, this is nothing more than an opportunity for folks to make a film, pure and simple. When your “movie” features Kato Kaelin as a curiously metro-sexual caveman with an odd obsession with his own ass and I still can’t be bothered to even care, well…what can ya say? The most this warrants is a shrug and a “You got me again, guys…good one.” Extra negative points for the impossibly tedious nightmare sequences, which really hit a new high (low?) in Troma’s search for the most obnoxious film-viewing experiences possible.

When Black Birds Fly

Proof positive that you never, ever judge a book by its cover, When Black Birds Fly might be rough, technically, but it packs more wallop and imagination than most “professional” films. Written, directed and animated solely by mad genius Jimmy Screamerclauz, this is a little difficult to describe but I’ll give it the ol’ college try. Imagine a version of Hellraiser, influenced by The Wizard of Oz, that also doubles as a Biblical allegory for the story of Adam and Eve, animated in the glitchy, occasionally unwatchable style of first-generation computer game cut-scenes. Still confused? Sorry, kids, but that’s the best I got: this howlingly insane film is an experience, in every sense of the word, one of those things that you strap yourself into and just hold on for dear life.

Despite being physically nauseated by the style, at first (absolutely no lie), I actually warmed to the film quite a bit, once I got used to it. Still, this is extremely strong stuff, the kind of material that would be absolutely unthinkable in a live-action film (think extreme Japanese manga, as a reference), full of revolting violence and truly bizarre sex. Perhaps the closest one can get to staring right into the hideous maw of insanity and still emerge, relatively unscathed. Color me thoroughly impressed and more than a little unsettled and freaked out. There really isn’t anything else like this in the entire world, for better or worse.

Keep your eyeballs peeled for Part Two, coming soon!