Willow Creek

Willow Creek (2013)

Dir. and written by Bobcat Goldthwait

Starring Alexie Gilmore, Bryce Johnson

On thing about this movie: the poster art is fly as fuck.

One day I woke up to discover four things about the world which would obviously change my life forever.

1. Bobcat Goldthwait made a horror movie?
2. It’s a bigfoot horror movie?
3. I guess I’ll have to see that.
4. Oh, it’s found footage? Crap. Well, still though.

Obviously I was not going to be dissuaded by the fact that there’s no such thing as a good bigfoot movie, and even less a good found footage movie, let alone one about bigfoot. Why let a little thing like logic get in the way of optimism? Besides, I don’t need to be a believer, because apparently director Goldthwait is. That’s the hook to this particular exemplar of the found footage bigfoot film subgenre: it’s a fictional faux-documentary movie made by a real bigfoot true believer about a fictional bigfoot true believer making his own non-fictional documentary about bigfoot.

Or, supposedly, anyway. As you probably know, Goldthwait (POLICE ACADEMY 2-4) is better known as a standup comedian than a horror film director, and so I have to admit to a bit of healthy skepticism about how genuine he is about all this, especially in light of the way the movie plays out. But if he’s trolling the bigfoot faithful, you gotta be impressed by his commitment to the bit; he’s been on-record since at least 2009 as a confirmed Sasquatch hunter, and he even appeared in the Animal Planet “Documentary” (there are not enough quotation marks in the world to adequately convey how loosely I use that term) series Finding Bigfoot. So I’ll take him at his word that he’s not just some opportunistic bully dropping by to derisively jeer at the poor bigfoot true believers, he’s one of them. Or at least has an open mind about the subject.

Nevertheless, there’s a reason I used words like “true believers” and “bigfoot faithful” in that previous paragraph. This is obviously to some extent a film about belief and skepticism, as embodied by its two central characters, Bro-y Bigfoot believer Jim (Bryce “Dallas Howard” Johnson, Goldthwait’s previous films SLEEPING DOGS LIE and GOD BLESS AMERICA) and his incredibly tolerant, much-too-good-for-him-in-my-opinion girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore, Goldthwait’s WORLD’S GREATEST DAD, some TV) who is very much making this trip as a favor to him and is trying to keep her complete bafflement that anyone takes any of this seriously to herself as much as is humanly possible, which means they still argue about it a lot. They spend some time interviewing people and getting interminable shaky footage of golden hour Northwestern woodland landscapes, but mostly they just inexplicably film themselves driving around, arguing about bigfoot in exactly the same pointless and circular way that you do with your friend who insists on arguing about religion. Meanwhile, Goldthwait muddies the waters a little by having the couple drive around the real-life Bigfoot hunters mecca Willow Creek and interview people who may or may not be actual occupants of the town. What is real, and what is fiction, what is fact and what is belief, man?

Obviously these are questions somewhat outside the scope of this horror blog, but there’s no getting around them here, this is definitely the direction Goldthwait is trying to push the movie. Fortunately, he’s still a comedian, and this part at least turns out sporadically pretty amusing. I’m not sure how much is scripted and how much is just the kind of spontaneous comedy gold you’d expect from interviewing people who live and work in the Bigfoot Mecca of America, but some of it is pretty funny. They interview the “Bob Dylan of the Bigfoot community,” which I assumed meant he was respected and prolific until the eighth or so verse of his folk song about beloved hairy biped. In a pretty amusing twist on the usual horror movie foreshadowing, one guy warns them about the “curse of bigfoot,” which you assume will be something sinister and supernatural but turns out to be that you quit your job and your wife leaves you and you spend the rest of your penniless days furtively hiking through the woods without ever catching a glimpse of the elusive cryptid.

Unfortunately, while there’s some chuckles in there and Gilmore, in particular, is utterly charming and entrancing and to be perfectly honest I think I have a little bit of a crush on her, this is still a found footage movie, meaning that it rarely if ever rises to the level of watchable, and even then only for sequences which would work much, much better if they were shot like a real film. Way, waaaay too much of even a slim 79 minute runtime is pure filler, things which would be useless outtakes in even the shittiest Animal Planet bigfoot faux-documentary, let alone a real movie which people could be expected to watch. On paper, it sounds like a fun idea to take a found footage bigfoot film and use it as a secret examination of faith and skepticism, but in practice it doesn’t turn out to be any more interesting or enlightening than that time your atheist sister came back from her second semester at college the same year Uncle Fred and Aunt Betsy from Kentucky came to Thanksgiving dinner. And it’s further muddled, because there’s really no good argument in favor of bigfoot-belief presented in the movie. The best that meathead Jim can come up with is the standard squishy “well, what if…” mumbo jumbo which is quickly and correctly shut down by Kelly, who points out that the same argument works for leprechauns. But, uh, we also know this is a bigfoot horror film, which means we implicitly already understand that there will be a bigfoot attack by the end of this movie, making all of these points completely moot. By virtue of this being a genre movie, the reality of this situation is a foregone conclusion and we know to ignore whatever point the skeptics may make. So what’s the point of having this discussion while we’re killing time waiting for bigfoot to eat someone?

The magic of cinema.

Speaking of which, it does eventually turn into a horror movie. It’s well over 45 minutes into the movie before this even starts to hint at being horror, but eventually our two protagonists do end up camping in the woods, where they’re doomed to basically exactly reenact a condensed and less eventful version of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, but less so. The standard found footage shaky-cam running-from-something-unseen rigamarole is exactly as dire here as it always was and has been ever since it barely even worked as an acceptable novelty gimmick in 1999 with BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (and even then, only because they managed to convince some people there was some sort of reality behind it) but Goldthwait does try one semi-bold maneuver; right as the movie starts to switch gears to a mostly-horror format, he has our two protagonists wake up in the middle of the night to strange noises outside their tent and for some reason turn on their camera. Yes, this is fucking identical to the BWP, but Goldthwait somewhat boldly lets it play out longer than you’d expect. In fact, a lot longer than you’d expect; the scene plays out, with just a single held shot in the dark, of the two protagonists listening, mostly in total silence, for almost a full 20 minutes. This sequence seems to be the most-cited thing in the spate of bafflingly positive reviews this movie got, and in theory I can see why this sequence is interesting, utilizing the claustrophobic power of the found-footage gimmick to trap you in a single limited perspective and offer you only the terrified faces of our heroes and the mysterious, off-screen presence which is tormenting them, to hold onto. It’s an exercise in horror via a stark limiting of perspective, giving you only the slightest hints of what you should be afraid of, with the expectation that if you’re on the movie’s wavelength, your mind will fill in the gaps with things infinitely more terrifying than even cinema’s greatest bigfoot suit could provide.

Unfortunately, it also means that if you’re not already on the movie’s wavelength, it also gives you nothing whatsoever, nothing whatsoever, to hold onto. Goldthwait is gambling that because of the film’s style, you’ll be automatically more likely to empathize with these people and get invested in the intensity of their situation. And by that, I mostly mean that he’s counting on the found footage gimmick to convince you that what you’re seeing is “real.” Goldthwait is hardly the first person to have made this dire mistake; it seems like a lot of folks erroneously think that just because found footage dispenses with a lot of the tools of cinema, it inherently feels more “real.” Of course, if this situation was real, it would be fucking terrifying. But for me, anyway, there’s simply too much artifice built into the essential premise here to treat this footage as if it has anything to do with reality, and --beyond that-- it’s just too dull to make it worth the effort.

Even with better-than-usual found-footage acting, the attempt at “realism” just highlights to me how phony all of this is, and then all that’s left is a shoddily made aping (ha!) of standard horror beats, but with all the good parts taken out. Characters can’t do or say anything interesting or enlightening or articulate, because that’s not what would happen in real life. Cameras can’t show you the good stuff, because they wouldn’t in real life. But does removing those things really get you closer to presenting actual real life? Movies are fundamentally artificial, but they have an internal reality; they use the tools of cinema to communicate the movie’s specific internal reality to us, and we understand and accept that internal reality reflexively.* We know we’re watching a flat screen, but we also understand and accept the illusion of three dimensions; we know we’re seeing disconnected segments of time, but accept the illusion of a contiguous story; we know we’re watching actors in an elaborate fiction, but accept the illusion that this is simply happening. The cinematic tools that allow us to do this are the most obviously artificial part of the process, but they’re also exactly the thing which allows us to establish and convey the internal truth. I don’t accept that removing or severely restricting them necessarily makes things any more truthful or real. Even stripped down to the barest elements of cinematic grammar (one long shot of two silent faces, mostly in the dark) WILLOW CREEK can’t escape the fact that it, too, is just a horror movie. And that no matter how much they hold back, it’s not the least bit more legitimately authentic than KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE.

I suppose to some people the attempt at replicating some kind of cinema vérité might make the experience of watching these actors feel a little more relatable (though I can’t help but notice, as I inevitably do in these found-footage debacles, that real documentaries inevitably look a lot nicer and frame things better). But honestly, if you’re looking for relatable, what the fuck are you doing watching this movie in the first place? Bigfoot ain’t real either, brutha. Why apply so much draggy naturalism to something which is completely fictional in the first place? I get the feeling that a lot of the positive reviews of this film simply came from people who don’t like or respect horror cinema much in the first place, along with a patronizing sense of “well, here’s a horror film which mostly isn’t a horror film anyway, and at least it feels more realistic than, say, EVIL DEAD.” What you like or don’t like is anyone’s prerogative, but to me the very point of horror cinema it’s that it’s one of the most inherently cinematic genres; relying completely on the medium itself to make you relate to the internal reality of things which are fundamentally outlandish. That, to me, is the whole point of cinema; not to convey reality itself, but to create an artistic, subjective reality for you to immerse yourself in. If you don’t want that, well, you’ve got real life out there to enjoy. But I don’t see the point of this found footage trend clumsily trying to hide those cinematic tools in an effort to seem more realistic. It never will be, and in the process you also lose so much of what makes the whole medium worthwhile and interesting in the first place.

But hey, we could argue about this all day, just as we might argue about the reality of God or the reality of Bigfoot. And I’d still be right about all three, but would you really want to watch minutes on end of unedited footage of me driving a car and doing it? I rest my case.

*Or at any rate, we’re now so familiar with these tools that we accept them reflexively; it’s worth noting that it took quite a while to establish these tools and to understand just how open an audience would be to montage, to music, to rapid cuts in time and space, and other cinematic shorthand which would certainly seem counterintuitive to audience understanding.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	EXISTING SOON (a subtle jab at fellow bigfoot-found-footage debacle EXISTS?)
TITLE ACCURACY	Willow Creek is a place where much of the action takes place
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Found Footage Clusterfuck, Bigfoot
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Bigfoot?
NUDITY?	A quick flash at the very end
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	OK, here we’ve gotta get into SPOILER SPOILER territory and talk about the end of the movie. Bigfoot himself never appears on camera, but in the last minute of the movie, the scared camera running through the woods suddenly glimpses something. But it’s not a bigfoot, it’s a fat naked woman standing in the woods for about a second. Now, this was obviously the subject of some confusion for me. Wait, are there no bigfoots after all, and instead they’re being tormented by some kind of naked woods-dwelling mutant troglodyte people? Or is bigfoot, like, a were-bigfoot and this is his wife in human form or something? I guess that would sort of explain the otherwise completely puzzling bit earlier on where a shifty redneck threatens them for trying to enter Bigfoot’s territory. But apparently none of those theories is correct; wikipedia claims this naked woman, glimpsed for a quick shaky-cam second, is recognizable as “bearing strong resemblance to the missing woman on the [milk] carton [seen earlier for another quick beat in the movie] and an unseen creature attacks them, killing Jim and moving on to Kelly, whose cries for help are heard in the distance. Her fate is ultimately unknown but implied she is taken as a "forest bride" like the other missing woman used by Sasquatch to procreate.” Which, eew. Apparently our spunky skeptic gets punished for her doubt by being kidnapped and raped by bigfoot until the sweet release of death. Classy, and it also makes no sense because why would bigfoot do this? We know for a fact there are available female bigfeet, because they spend the entire fucking movie talking about the famed Patterson-Gimlin footage --which is what brings our two antiheroes to this isolated location in the first place-- and that footage clearly shows a female creature with prominent breasts. So what the hell? Aside from not being set up in any meaningful way, this is just a deeply unpleasant and unearned way to end the movie.  END SPOILERS
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Arguably, although of course we never see one.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No, unless you want to count the madness of blind belief.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No, although I am fond of my were-bigfoot theory
VOYEURISM?	I mean, any found footage premise has an inherently voyeuristic vibe, and if memory serves Jim does creepily try to leave the camera on while they have sex, which, again, ick.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don’t ever date people who are into bigfoot.

Seriously though Hollywood, if you could put this chick in everything, I would be pretty happy with that, thanks guys.

Spiders 3D

Spiders 3D (2013)

Dir. by Tibor Takács

Written by Joseph Farrugia, Tibor Takács, Boaz Davidson, Dustin Warburton

Starring Patrick Muldoon, Christa Campbell, William Hope

That this no-budget bargain-basement-CG Bulgarian-shot giant-spiders-vs-tanks opus is chintzy and idiotic should come as a surprise to no one. This is not a film which you can reasonably watch and then complain to your friends that it was unrealistic and that the stilted acting and inconsistent character motivation really made it hard to connect with the drama. Those things may be true, of course, but the problem is not the product, the problem was your expectations. It’s like complaining that Taco Bell’s flavor-basted doritos locos lack a sense of authentic Mexican regional cuisine. You did not choose to watch THE VVITCH. You chose to watch SPIDERS 3D. You knew what you were doing.

Fortunately, SPIDERS 3D also more or less knows what it’s doing, or at least it gets the job done by accident within acceptable parameters. This is a goofy, blessedly stupid b-movie creature feature which flits from one ridiculous plot turn to the next with the consistency of a game of drunken telephone in a loud bar among fifteen or so people who don’t speak the same language. But at least it does so in the service of stringing together as many scenes as possible which feature cartoony CG spiders eating people. If that’s what you would like to see, SPIDERS 3D will deliver that function with at least a minimal competency (in 3D where available!). If not, how in the hell did you end up watching a movie called SPIDERS 3D in the first place? I mean, it’s not like Hollywood rammed this one down your throat with 18 months of grueling advertising and inescapable commercial tie-ins. No, you had to find this one yourself. And it tells you exactly what it offers right there in the title. It offers exactly that, and nothing more.

I can’t really imagine there will be a lot of people who are ultimately glad they made the effort, but as far as brainless, unimaginative creature features go --and I label it such mostly affectionately-- this is probably in the middle of the pack. In most ways it’s noticeably more watchable than the majority of SyFy channel efforts in a similar vein, though unmissably inferior to even nominally real movies like EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS (though at least those SyFy ones got the idea of sweetening the pot by crafting their own melange of boutique CG monsters, like SHARKTOPUS and probably LEOPARDILLO by now. Say, has anyone ever done a NIGHT OF THE LEPUS-style creature feature about killer armadillos called ARMADILLO ARMAGEDDON? They should).

Anyway, that’s what’s being offered here; just a breezy hour 29 minutes of goofy nonsense and corny-looking CG spiders eating people. That’s what you get, take it or leave it. If you would enjoy that sort of horseshit, SPIDERS 3D has it, though not always in a high enough dose or in a creative enough combination to distinguish itself amongst a rather crowded menagerie of similar efforts which offers significantly better options (though few indeed that would rise to the level of “good” when compared to a real movie)

Still, there’s some ironic enjoyment to be had here, which is a rare enough thing in the mostly-grimly-serious modern horror scene that it offers some slight charm. Hilariously daffy lines readings abound (“but, dad, it’s, my, birthday,” says our on-screen daughter, clearly the niece of a producer) in a world which perpetually threatens to plunge headfirst into open camp without ever quite ruining things by doing so. Most of the cast is too bland to really take this opportunity as an excuse for some hammy overacting, but at least you’ve got Pete Lee-Wilson (BLADE 2!) as an eccentric spider-obsessed Russian scientist. In a better world he’d be played by Peter Stormare, of course, but we do not live in that world.

Speaking of which, as you probably already imagined, this is exactly the kind of movie which would have an eccentric Russian scientist character, and also certainly a “Col. Jenkins,” plus the obligatory regular-guy blue collar hero and his powerfully dull family who are going to be brought together by this crisis (Patrick Muldoon, STARSHIP TROOPERS, Christa Campbell, DRIVE ANGRY, Sydney Sweeney, THE WARD). It’s not a script which is much interested in tweaking with conventions. In fact, it’s such a natural extension of 1950’s nuclear monster/ giant bug movies that one can’t help but wonder if the script (credited to an unbelievable four writers, including director Takács and longtime Hollywood hustler/Golan-Globus co-conspirator Boaz Davidson) was just found behind some old boxes in a warehouse and brushed up to include the word DNA and delete any stray references to Communism or Beatniks. Hell, they even waited long enough that the Russians can be the bad guys again!

Incidentally, this is the second movie in a row I've watched where Soviet-era space experiments falling to earth have created giant people-eating mutant monster hybrids. Is this something I ought to worry about?

Allow me to explain: because it would be impossible to come up with a movie where killer spiders eat people and not use four movies’ worth of plots to explain it, it seems that 20 years ago... Russians found an alien spaceship “under the ice” and decided the best course of action would be to reconstitute alien DNA in the form of modern animals, why not? And for some reason reconstituting alien DNA apparently worked best in spider bodies, which they then shot into space so they could harvest their harder-than-steel webbing for the kind of fearsome game-changing military advantages that only very tough spider webs could provide (this supposedly impervious webbing later proves surprisingly easy for a child to tear apart, but nevermind that). Then nothing happened for 20 years. But now, the Russian spider-space-alien-web experiment has fallen back to Earth, and the spiders are going to take over (where else?) a part of New York City which looks somewhat like Bulgaria. Granted, all that makes perfect sense. But there’s also a US military conspiracy of, I guess, spider collaborators, to cover up the killer spiders by claiming there’s actually a deadly plague on the loose and murdering everyone who knows the truth! Damn their oily Spider-collaborating hides! But you do have to admire their optimism that a swarming army of rampaging murderous giant alien spiders could be mistaken for a viral outbreak, by anyone, anywhere. I mean, I’m no trained scientist, but I’m convinced I could pick out the difference. Anyway eventually our hero Patrick Muldoon has to kill a giant alien queen spider with a train, obviously, and that seems to solve it, whatever was going on.

OK, not the most elegant plot for a movie whose only purpose is to deliver killer spiders (wait, did you catch that? Killer alien spiders! Talk about burying the lead!) and honestly that still leaves out most of the main characters and huge chunks of plot. The wikipedia plot description is well in excess of 1000 words, making it longer than Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Orwell’s widely-read Shooting An Elephant, and of, course, Hemingway’s beloved The Snows of Kilimanjaro. You can look at that as a tiresome failure of storytelling, or you can just have fun with its freewheeling kookiness. Your choice; obviously I made mine long ago. If you’re inclined to have fun with it, something ridiculous is almost constantly happening, and goofy-looking CG spiders are almost never far from the screen, so while I acknowledge that this is fundamentally indefensible from any imaginable artistic standpoint, I also can’t quite find it in my heart to complain. If anything, it ought to have pushed just a little further into full-on dada. We were so close!

The “spiders” themselves have an agreeably funny not-really-very-spider-like design, but they move badly, it’s immediately obvious they don’t walk like real spiders (which is 90% of spiders’ real-life creep factor and completely absent here). How is it possible that in 2015 we haven’t figured out how to make insects consistently look like they’re walking naturally? I mean, footage of real spiders exists, guys. Look at that, and then look at what you’ve done, and try and tell me this is even a reasonable approximation. These spiders look like they really don’t know what to do with all those legs and are constantly trying to figure out which one needs to move next. I guess maybe the fact that they’re alien spiders explains it? This is awkward for them, too. Anyway it’s pretty funny-looking, and fortunately the movie compensates for its dodgy CG and uncoordinated walking by offering plenty of the title character, even if near the end it unforgivably cuts away from a military-vs-huge-spider city-street dustup to halfheartedly pretend we care if these bland morons are going to find their daughter somewhere underground (we don’t, and incidentally all she had to do to avoid this situation was nothing, apparently a task which was too difficult for her). It’s not really imaginative enough to think of any really outrageous hijinks --either cool or hilarious--, but it moves along at a decent pace and you can’t fault its consistency as a generic spider-delivery system.

This is not a good movie, obviously, and in fact I think it’s a distinct possibility that it’s not even as good as the director’s other giant spider movie, 2007’s ICE SPIDERS (which now that I look, also stars Patrick Muldoon. Wait, is this a sequel? I can find no evidence that it is). But SPIDERS 3D was never going to be good, the best it was ever conceivably going to be was fun, which I guess it sort of is in a dumb time-wasting lazy hungover Sunday afternoon kind of way. The only thing that makes it kind of a bummer is the director -- Tibor Takács was at one point in his career actually capable of directing horror movies which were both fun and good, like I, MADMAN and THE GATE. OK, he never had the most distinguished career (good lord, he directed two episodes of Police Academy: The Series! That has to be the saddest sentence I’ll type all day) but seeing him reduced to this kind of adorably incompetent non-movie is a little disheartening. Even as recently as 2005, his SyFy Channel MANSQUITO kind of resembled a real movie while still being ludicrous fun. Not so here; you’d never guess the guy who made SPIDERS 3D ever had the slightest actual artistic inclination. He doesn’t even get cute with the 3D or anything; this is generic hack work through and through, but with 3D spiders. But oh well, if brisk, silly creature features are your thing, this one is mostly eventful and enthusiastic enough to get the job done.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

TAGLINE	Eight Legs. Three Dimensions. One Disaster.
LITERARY ADAPTATION	None
SEQUEL	None, unless it actually is a sequel to ICE SPIDERS. Patrick Muldoon has a different name, though, so I’m thinking not.
REMAKE	None
DEADLY IMPORT FROM:	Shot in Bulgaria, but it looks like an American crew.
FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK	None.
SLUMMING A-LISTER	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON	Tibor Takács?
NUDITY?	Nah.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
GORE?	PG-13
HAUNTED HOUSE?	No
MONSTER?	Spiders, some very large
UNDEAD?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
SLASHER/GIALLO?	No.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Dessicated corpses? Alien-Spider DNA hybribs!?
VOYEURISM?	Nah

OBSCURITY LEVEL	Rightly obscure.
MORAL OF THE STORY	There’s seriously got to be an easier way to get really strong threads.
TITLE ACCURACY	Well, by the time I saw it the 3D was gone, but “SPIDERS” by itself doesn’t have the same cache. Also, shouldn’t the title mention they’re aliens?
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE?	N/A

A somewhat affectionate 2, but I can't in good conscience go any higher.