It’s In The Blood

It’s In The Blood (2012)

Dir by Scooter Downey

Written by Scooter Downey and Sean Elliott

Starring Sean Elliott, Lance Henriksen

I know what you're thinking: "Great, this poster is lying to me already by pretending Lance Henriksen in the main character here when you and I both know that's certainly not the case." Well friend, you skepticism is not unfounded, but he's actually in more than a handful of scenes this time, at least. He's not the main character, and there's probably no artistic reason why his face should be this big when the actual star appears (maybe) only as a blurry shadow at the top. But he's definitely the co-lead.

             Well, after the refreshing novelty of reviewing an actual good movie in DON’T GO INTHE HOUSE, I guess it’s time to get back to my bread and butter: writing lengthy reviews to warn you off of watching ridiculously obscure direct-to-video crap you never heard of and were definitely never going to watch in the first place. Which means, it’s that magical time of the year where I give a modern Lance Henriksen movie a shot, on the assumption that, come on, a guy makes 500 movies a year, at least one of ‘em’s gotta be halfway decent just through sheer statistical probability, right?

            Maybe, but surprise surprise, if there is a good one out there somewhere, IT’S IN THE BLOOD ain’t it. In fact, it’s a bunch of hot garbage. How hot is this garbage? The main character’s name is “October.” I don’t think they ever mention his last name, so I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s “Blood,” which would at least help the title make more sense. Now, I admit, some extensive Google searching does reveal a handful of real live humans who somehow live life with the absurd name of “October.” But the most prominent one seems to be the daughter of the bassist from Slipknot, which is about the level of taste we’re dealing with here. I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Look at this guy, I mean, Jesus.

October T. Blood is played by Sean Elliott (“Frat Guy” in THE LIBRARIAN III: CURSE OF THE JUDAS CHALICE) who also co-wrote the screenplay. I never saw him play the Frat Guy, but I can safely say that as a screenwriter, he probably doomed himself as an actor from the get-go, because October has about four characters’ worth of gimmicks stuffed into one: he’s apparently supposed to be 1) some kind of brooding hunk (he’s got a cut-off sleeve, like Ash? But he looks kind of like Adam Scott) who is 2) hitchhiking his way back to his podunk hometown after being away for some time (just a year, according to the Netflix blurb, but it surely seems like it must have been more?) and it’s clear that he left after 3) his beloved girlfriend Iris (Rose Sirna, a minor part in a zero-reviews-on-IMDB movie called LAMB OF GOD* [follow me to the footnote for the plot description, because you need to hear this]) died under circumstances that are not initially clear to us and 4) also, she was his adopted sister, so what in the hell, is this fucking Wuthering Heights up in here? There’s nine billion people on Earth dude, can we try not to fuck someone in our immediate family, October, Jesus Christ? And this whole incident caused him to be 5) estranged from his redneck sheriff father (Lance Henriksen, HARBINGER DOWN, various Pumpkinheads, 56,000 other movies). Also, 6) he’s some kind of genius savant with a photographic memory and perfect recall, who can instantly summon to mind every page of every book he’s ever so much as glanced at during his entire life. Which 7) is why he is a expert field medic and survivalist, because he read how to do it in books and remembers every detail perfectly. (Also, incidentally, it’s the only reason for this bizarre and specific character detail. Apparently this is the only way they could think of to establish that he’d eventually be able to bandage a wound and sharpen some sticks.)

Bear in mind, that’s not the plot of the movie; all that is established in the first five minutes or so. If there is any actor alive who could play a role that overloaded, Sean Elliott is certainly not him. Lance Henriksen might be, actually, but unfortunately he’s stuck with the dad role, and wouldn’t you know it, the screenwriters were so busy adding things to October’s character that they forgot to give him any clear characteristics of any kind.

This is made clear before we even see his face, because the first thing that happens when October gets back to his family farm is he finds his beloved childhood dog stuck in a bear trap. He crouches down and comforts the whimpering animal while he flashes back to sunnier, idyllic childhood days when the adorable pup first came into his life. Then, offscreen, someone blasts the dog to bloody pieces with what is presumably a full-sized howitzer, dousing the reminiscing prodigal son with blood. And then his dad walks up behind him and mumbles that he had to put the unfortunate pooch out of his misery. He later explains that he set up bear traps everywhere for some reason (coyotes? I can’t remember) and just figured the dog wouldn’t be dumb enough to step in one.

Now, this would be a perfectly reasonable introduction to this character if they were trying to establish that he was some kind of unhinged backwoods psychopath. But instead, they act like blowing up this dude’s childhood dog with a shotgun without warning while he’s leaning right over it was a completely reasonable, if unfortunate, response to the situation. The movie posits this incident as a perfect encapsulation of the failure to communicate between the two men. As in, one of them thinks it’s necessary to blast a giant hole in his kid’s dog with his shotgun without warning while he’s kneeling over it, spraying him with viscera, and the other thinks maybe don’t do that, or, maybe, acknowledges that its completely reasonable but is still sulky about it because he’s a big bitchy baby. But then, aren’t they both a little bit right? Apparently so, because rest of the movie is entirely about them getting lost in the woods and then bonding and resolving their differences, all while we gradually flash back to the tragedy that initially pushed them apart.

Oh, one thing about that bonding: while they do it, they are occasionally attacked by this weird crawling thing that I interpreted as an alien mummy dog (the credits just call it “monster”). When Daddy Blood first gets a look at it, it’s got some kind of PREDATOR-style camo mode on, which seems to me makes it an alien, but who knows? He’s so shocked at the sight that he falls backwards off a cliff, breaking his leg and trapping them in the woods. Subsequently, the malignant critter’s MO will be to suddenly create an eerie and inexplicable mist, and then crawl out of it and briefly menace them while remaining mostly off-screen, and then fuck off back into the darkness so they can get back to elliptically talking about the tragic events which cost the life of October’s sister/ fuck buddy.

Here’s the weird thing: they spend a lot of time talking around this incident without ever talking directly about it. The movie bafflingly posits the backstory as this big mystery it has to slowly dole out to the audience in flashback form over the course of the entire movie, even though it’s clear from like, flashback #2 that a creepy sheriff's deputy (Jimmy Gonzalez, a lengthy career of minor roles playing cops in big movies including LOGAN, MACHETE KILLS, and TAKEN 3, clearly relishing his rare chance to play a cop who’s also a raving psychopath) is murderously obsessed with Iris and there’s literally only one way this can turn out. Which is exactly how it does turn out, and yet the movie acts like it’s some kind of huge game-changing revelation which suddenly explains everything (the only new information we learn is how unpleasant her death was, and having a pretty extended, sadistic rape scene is way, way too much for a movie this dumb and bad, making it seedy and repellent as well as boring.)**

Anyway, this irritating and borderline insulting flashback structure effectively prevents the only two characters in the movie from ever substantively discussing the only relevant conflict until the very end, which makes for some very strained, unnatural conversations (and the movie is almost all conversations). But naturalism was pretty much already ruled out by one other noteworthy factor: while they happily jabber away about their shared past while awkwardly avoiding all specific detail, they somehow manage to entirely avoid the topic of the goddam alien mummy dog that’s trying to kill them! They seem to agree that there’s some kind of danger, but unless I missed it neither of them ever specifically addresses the fact that every once in awhile, without warning, some kind of weird mist will appear and a bitey critter from another dimension or Hell or whatever will ineffectually try to get at them. Nobody asks what in God’s name is going on, or wonders if this is a metaphor or if this is an alien or whatever, or seems surprised at all that this is happening. Not once. It’s so completely bizarre that it would almost be interesting if the movie had literally anything else going on.

            Henriksen is giving 110%, as he always does, and he’s so good that you might almost be fooled into caring about their stupid non-drama, but his sole co-star is only operating at about -56%, so it averages out to around 27% acting overall. Which isn’t nearly enough to make the drama worth it, not even close. And yet, that’s definitely the ONLY thing the movie is interested in. The alien attacks are so random and unrelated to any of the dialogue that it’s almost like they shot all the drama and then later decided that the only human beings indiscriminate enough to watch this movie would be horror fans, and so they went back and shot some b-roll of a couple of badly staged creature attacks to edit in. In the big climax, our hero gets attacked by some kind of unexplained distorted zombie ghouls  --including, for some reason, his girlfriend’s killer?-- but the alien mummy or whatever is nowhere to be seen, so I couldn’t tell you what the fuck is going on here. October is just such an excruciating opaque character and so wildly underacted that it honestly seems like maybe he’s supposed to be autistic or developmentally disabled or something (he does have the whole “photographic memory” thing, is that a hint?) but I don’t think so. It’s implied he’s suffering from hallucinations, but his Dad sees the monster first, so… huh, I dunno, maybe that’s not important? Or maybe he hallucinated the whole thing and just murdered his dad? But if so I don’t know what that would mean.

I dunno man, you tell me what this is. This is about the best look we ever get at it.

 Anyway, the possibility of ever understanding this twerp, let alone caring about him, is completely nonexistent. The entire movie is about the reconciliation between son and father, but since the son’s a sulky blank and the father seems like a nice guy and is also played by Lance Henriksen, there’s just no narrative drama there at all, it just seems like this guy’s being a petulant dick to his poor old dad for no reason. The flashbacks don’t really reveal anything which deepens our understanding of their estrangement, and since the flashback structure means they can’t really discuss anything substantive about their relationship without spoiling the “mystery” anyway, their ultimate “reconciliation” is completely unmotivated. And the alien attacks, which are the only reason anyone on Earth would suffer through this garbage, are completely extraneous, not only to the dramatic conflict, but the plot itself. Literally the movie would not be affected one tiny iota by removing them (is it possible that the same writers who had to add a subplot about perfect recall to explain how a character knows how to bandage wounds couldn't think of any reason two people would be stuck in the woods together, except that one of them broke his leg after seeing an alien mummy?). Oh also, as you probably guessed, they suck. 

Not that it would really matter at this point, but it also has terrible, hyperactive editing and grotesquely unappealing color-correct photography, too. I mean, it takes genuine ingenuity to make location photography in the picturesque woods look this visually dull and ugly. What I’m trying to say I think is that this is a pretty bad movie, sorry if that wasn’t clear, before.

Lance gets to do a WHEN HARRY MET SALLY fake orgasm scene, though. You gotta like that. But I don’t think I’ll have what he’s having.

* IMDB plot description: “What if Jesus came to earth as a college student? Who would follow Him? who would be healed by Him? Who would crucify Him? A modern day version of a timeless story, this film follows Desiree, a young journalism major in desperate need of healing, as she investigates a student who rumor claims as the Messiah. Named Immanuel, this student has reported healed sickness, brought happiness, and inspired hope in the student body. After spending just a few days with him, Desiree begins to realize that sometimes rumors aren't just rumors.”

** OK, fair’s fair, we also find out that the evil deputy decided to locate his murder room in Papa Blood’s old shed, like 20 feet from the house (?), meaning Henriksen eventually hears the commotion and comes to investigate but is drunk and gets shot before he can do anything. But this only serves to make October seem like even more of a sullen little bitch, because come on, what the fuck was he supposed to do? Not be drunk on a weekend in his own house? Be prepared to walk into his shed and see an armed psychopath with two bound victims chained up?

Now THIS poster IS a blatant lie, but I think I'd much rather watch the imaginary movie it's advertising than the real one that exists.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	You Can’t Escape The Wilderness Within. I’m sure that means something to someone, somewhere.
TITLE ACCURACY	The only possible interpretation is that it refers to the familial link between father and son, but genetics play no role in the plot.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature-feature, also some kind of zombie ghouls show up at the end, and it briefly gets kinda torture-porny for a while during one flashback.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lance Henriksen!
NUDITY?	Don’t think so.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah, and a pretty nasty, unpleasant one at that.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	I guess some zombies? Or maybe they’re just a metaphor?
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Crazy stalker/killer
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	The killer watched October and Iris bone naked outside.
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re going to blast somebody’s beloved dog to pieces with a shotgun, maybe at least open with “hey you might want to stand back.”

Dream House

Dream House (2011)

Dir. Jim Sheridan

Written by David Loucka

Starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts

I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you DREAM HOUSE is a good movie. You and I both know that’s a lie. But I’ll give it this: it’s not the bad movie I thought it was going to be. It is, if not an interesting bad movie, at least something of a rare variant on the usual crapola. It actually managed to surprise me, which is something I would never have thought possible when, in something of a masochistic mood, I decided to throw it on and see what happened. Is surprising the same thing as being worth your time? Well, not your time, certainly. But possibly mine, just barely.

I suppose before we go any further I should try and justify the kind of blatantly self-destructive behavior that would motivate a person to watch DREAM HOUSE in the first place. It is, of course, in part yet another recurrence of the dread “How could that not be great?” syndrome. As in, Woah, Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Naomi Watts made a horror movie with Academy-Award winning MY LEFT FOOT director Jim Sheridan? How could that not be great? This condition is a sadly temporary state of mental confusion nearly always immediately followed by a rueful Ah, OK, that’s how. I’ve suffered from this unfortunate malady before, actually, several times, and although I get over it every time I seem uniquely immune to full remission.

This time, however, my borderline-suicidal optimism was not the sole motivating factor; the truth is, dear reader, that in my deepest, secret heart, I’m something of a formalist by nature. It’s not something I’m proud of, but there it is, and I’m too old to deny it. While I can and do happily wallow in some absolutely indefensible dreck, I do deeply care about and love the craft of cinema, and sometimes, just sometimes, I need to cleanse the palate by watching something which was actually made by competent professionals who know how to make things look slick and pretty, and know how to work with fancy pants real Hollywood actor types.

Admittedly, while this kind of technique is necessary to give us everything from a James Bond movie to a STILL ALICE, it is rarely something which meaningfully benefits a horror movie, and often comes at the detriment of the actual important mechanics of the horror genre. As we’ve discussed before, the particular nuances of cinematic fear mostly come from places other than technical proficiency in acting and slickness in craftsmanship, as many a high-falutin’ mainstream director has disastrously discovered while crashing and burning on what they assumed would be a low-effort genre flick. The skillset it takes to movingly depict Daniel Day Lewis crying is not necessarily the same skillset that can evoke a sense of unease as Daniel Craig believes his house to be haunted. Succinctly put, there was almost never any chance this movie was going to be any damn good at all; these are talented people, but there was no reason to think they had the right kinds of talents to breath life into the threadbare haunted house subgenre.

But just because something is almost certainly going to be a trainwreck is no reason not to waste an hour and a half of precious, finite life on it! He said, a hint of wild desperation twining its way into his voice. Look, I just want to watch a movie that looks like a real movie every now and then, is that such a crime? I never said I was a role model. Leave me alone!

How could anyone resist this kind of exciting advertising?

NOTE: This will be a spoiler review, if you consider a movie you never wanted to see and I now emphatically recommend that you never see capable of being spoiled. But yes, this is a movie which is utterly dependent on holding onto a few secrets --some pretty intelligence-insulting but a few sort of surprising-- and if you think you might be as foolish as I am and give it a try, don’t read any further because the spoilers start, like, in the very next sentence after this warning (or the third sentence, depending on how you want to grammatically categorize the two sentence fragments which immediately follow).

So! DREAM HOUSE. DREAM HOUSE is called DREAM HOUSE, so it pretty much tells you right in the title that it’s going to be one of those tiresome twist-a-rooney movies that dignified mainstream Hollywood directors think are going to totally blow people’s minds because all they watch are weepy menopausal dramas about middle-age ennui, and they don’t realize these twists have been hacky since the middle 19th century. It begins with William (Daniel Craig, A KID IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT) a vaguely defined high-powered editor (of what it’s not clear; I’ve noticed that lots of people in movies are high-powered editors, because I think it’s the only middle-class sounding job Hollywood can dimly imagine outside itself) who is celebrating his final day at the office before embarking to his newly-purchased quaint small-town America suburban home to spend time with his cherubic family and write the Great American Novel. On the train ride home, he’s standing next to a silent Elias Koteas (TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 1990) so obviously that’s gonna be a thing at some point.

First though, we gotta pretend we think this isn’t going to turn out to be a dream or he’s really a ghost or something. That becomes increasingly difficult, as we meet his almost comically idyllic family -- Movie Wife #1 (Rachel Weisz, THE MUMMY RETURNS… holy shit, she’s in Stephen Norrington’s DEATH MACHINE? Just one more reason I’ve got to watch that) and indistinguishable adorable daughters #1 and #2 (Claire and Taylor Geare, real life sisters who also both appeared in INCEPTION), as they hug and sing songs and practically tie us down and garrotte us with the fact that they’re a perfect vision of suburban bliss, and not at all in any way a dream or a ghost or what have you.

But what’s this? His daughters keep seeing mysterious ghostly happenings, and he learns that the house was, get this, the site of the brutal murder of a family exactly like this one a scant five year ago! The victims were all shot by a mysterious perpetrator who has his face conveniently obscured in all the old newspaper photos, and also whenever William asks people around town about this stuff they act really weirded out and awkward around him. Sympathetic neighbor #1 (Naomi Watts, TANK GIRL), especially, keeps putting every known emotion on her face and looking conflicted and commiserative every time he shows up. Needless to say, the rest of the family never goes outside the house or has any interactions whatsoever with anyone besides William so we’ll never know how the town would react to the fact that whatever they are, they’re definitely not the ghosts of the family he murdered before being confined to a mental institution and is now imagining while squatting in his old, abandoned home to try and deal with the grief and guilt, no siree-bob.

Well, it’s not exactly a mystery what’s going on here, but the movie bravely pretends it is for a disastrously long time. That much, though, I expected. The surprise here is not that Craig is actually a mentally ill man named Peter, squatting in the ruins of his former home where his family was killed and creating an elaborate fantasy life where they’re still alive (and have different names?). The surprise is that Sheridan and writer David Louka (RINGS, HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET, so we’re not exactly talking a flawless A-list pedigree here) don’t save their big reveal for the end, but actually drop it (in a painfully clumsy bit of end-of-PSYCHO exposition) right smack dab in the middle. And honestly... that’s kind of a ballsy move because, uh, what else is there to this story except Peter’s journey of self-discovery? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining that it didn’t go full SHUTTER ISLAND and force me to go back to murdering prostitutes again, but what other plot could there possibly be lurking in this premise?

Alas, having managed, against all odds, to actually surprise me, DREAM HOUSE is totally exhausted and just settles on suddenly and arbitrarily introducing a totally new plot, that maybe Peter wasn’t the actual killer and he needs to figure out who it really was. So he quickly gets over being crazy and turns detective for the remainder of the runtime, because, why not. Not that the mystery here exactly requires the world’s most cunning detective. Considering they wouldn’t dare end on an attempted double secret reverse twist (where it turns out that no, he actually really did do it*), and considering it definitely wasn’t long-dead wife #1, that leaves only three other characters in the movie:

1: Sympathetic Naomi Watts,

2: Her asshole ex-husband (Marton Csokas, the beloved role of Lamech in Darron Aronofsky’s NOAH) who the movie spends a suspicious amount of time and effort establishing for no immediately extant purpose, and

3: the apparently unimportant Elias Koteas who appeared right at the beginning but sure hasn’t done anything since.

Hmmm, I wonder who the culprit(s) are?

The good news, though, is that even if the two halves of the movie are both bad and are barely related to each other, there are two fun wrinkles. For one, when the big twist comes, the movie’s entire production subtly shifts from the golden-hued, idealized fantasy look where Peter was the perfect dad with beautifully coiffed hair (and killer abs the movie makes sure to show us), to a grimier realism with a greasy-haired Peter crouched in a mouldering, graffiti-covered house under slate gray skies (he still has great abs though, I noticed. Guess that part was real). Because it’s a uptight multi-million-dollar Hollywood production, you never question how phony and gorgeous the first half of the movie is until the other shoe drops, and consequently the descent into realism is subtle, but feels seismic. That’s a pretty smart filmmaking trick I can’t recall ever seeing before, although I’m sure it’s been used somewhere or other. Of course, the movie then shoots itself in the foot by being even more patently ridiculous in the back half than the front (completely negating its newfound sense of realism), but oh well, it was a good idea.

What? A lot of high-powered editors/psychotic homeless men look like this!

The second idea is equally pointless in execution, but I like it even more. By the film’s climax, we know that there is no “William” and there are no ghosts -- Peter’s just a nut who was living in a completely convincing idyllic fantasy of his own past with a different name because that is a totally real thing people do wink wink. This, of course, makes the first half of the film totally meaningless arbitrary nonsense, because none of that happened, and it’s not even like it helped us learn about his character or anything because it’s just boilerplate movie ghost stuff and hugs, and doesn’t even hint that there might be some further mystery about who the killer was. Fair enough, but when the inevitable showdown with the real killer inevitably goes down in his ruined old house, we get one final twist: he’s not nuts, or at least not totally nuts, because the ghost are real! While Peter is fighting for his life with a gun-toting murderer, Ghost Wife shows up to help out!

Of course, she’s a ghost, so she can only do movie ghost things like gently rustle wind chimes or knock over empty cans, but it does create the amiably weird situation where the killer, unaware that he’s in a ghost movie, gets really confused and irritated that things keep falling over and distracting him from his murder. I find it charming that the movie, having established no rules whatsoever for this phenomenon and, in fact, giving itself the easy out that the “ghosts” were all in Peter’s head, instead doubles down on this dumb idea and just decides to play by standard ghost movie rules as to how the disembodied spirits can actually assist the living (his lazy daughters sit the fight out, though. Thanks, girls, #feminism). It goes without saying that this twist is goofy and needless, and it doesn’t even really seem to affect the outcome of the fight very much, but I appreciate the weirdness of it. If I’ve ever seen another movie where the ghost of Rachel Weisz tag-teams in on a fistfight, it’s sure not coming to mind right now.

Needless to say, this is not a movie which deserves or makes any use whatsoever of the talents of these A-list actors. Weisz, who I would seriously consider one of the best actors alive today --period, any gender, any genre-- is capable of sewing silk purses out of pretty much whatever you want to give her, even in a completely boring non-role like this one, where the totality of her character could be summed up in the phrase “fantasy loving wife.**” That ain’t even being given sow’s ears, that’s like sewing silk purses out of scraps of dead leaves and grease-stained carpet swatches. But she’s Rachel Weisz, dammit, and she’s incapable of not making an impression. Poor Naomi Watts fares worse as a plot point halfheartedly disguised as a character. She’s working hard, but there’s just absolutely nothing interesting about this role, and she barely registers in a stock character which could have been just as successfully played by a mop stapled to a paper plate with a smiley face crudely drawn on it. Craig is… well, Craig actually seems to understand how silly a movie this is, and seems to be barely suppressing a smirk the whole time.**** He’s a pro and isn’t exactly coasting, but he also seems to have figured out that aching psychological realism is out of the question here, and he’s better off just powering through on charisma (and killer abs). Good choice.

Apparently the final product here is at least in part a mess due to friction between director Sheridan and producer James G. Robinson, who reportedly clashed so severely during the production that Sheridan tried to have his name taken off the finished film. A number of reports claim that Sheridan wanted to deviate from the script and pursue a more improvisational method, which the article claims is typical of his work (never saw GET RICH OR DIE TRYING, can anyone confirm?). Loucka’s other scripts don’t exactly scream ‘mastery of the written word’ so that approach might have helped a little, but frankly the movie’s got much more severe problems than the dialogue, starting and ending with the high-gloss approach to such pulpy genre hokum. You might be able to improvise something which was a little less stilted than the final result here, but come on, this whole premise is ludicrous from front to back, there’s not a shred of realism in it to bring forward, so tweaking the dialogue was only ever going to do so much.

And that just brings us around to our original point: Sheridan, Weisz, Watts…they have a particular skill at getting at emotional truths. But this is not a movie about emotional truths -- this is a bunch of silly genre bullshit, and their enormous combined talents are completely wasted here on parts where they don’t make a damn bit of difference. There’s not a single frame of this film which wouldn’t work just as well and maybe better with Patrick Lussier directing Jeff Fahey, Tara Reid and Paris Hilton. In fact, having all that talent just serves as temptation to try and steer the whole enterprise towards a tone of ponderous seriousness which it is constitutionally incapable of earning, totally deflating the few schlocky genre thrills it does offer. And having to spend all that money (a reported 55 million, a ridiculously unwise gamble on a ghost movie even if it had turned out good) just makes it more likely that some overbearing producer like Robinson here is going to get nervous and wrestle for control and totally dilute whatever bit of actual focus and intent might have originally been present in large enough quantities to at least give it a little bit of impact.

Not that I think anyone could have made this moldy old chestnut of a script into a genre classic or anything. But it certainly could have been better than this, if someone had just seriously asked themselves how to crank some juice out of this lemon, instead of how to make it more emotionally resonant. It was never going to be rich and truthful, but it could have at least been entertaining. With this level of talent on board, though, your priorities get all mixed up and you want to focus on acting instead of performing. The result is a film which is great at absolutely everything that doesn’t matter, and frustratingly bad at everything which is actually important, completely negating every bit of potential fun it could ever have hoped to provide

Well, almost everything. It did get Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz together, which bodes well for mankind’s overall gene pool.***** As Craig himself said of DREAM HOUSE, “The movie didn’t turn out great, but I met my wife. Fair trade.” So I can confidently say that the only thing standing between me and enjoying DREAM HOUSE is my current inability to marry Rachel Weisz. So Rachel, if you wanna give me a call, we can discuss our future together and possibly also adding an extra star to my rating here.******   

*Although if they had actually gone for it I would be forced by the honor of a gentleman to track the filmmakers down and give them a long, increasingly uncomfortable hug.

**Not to be confused with “fantasy-loving wife,” where the lady digs on Tad Williams*** and David Eddings and Robert Jordan and shit. That would be way more interesting.

***Side note: have you ever googled a picture of Tad Williams? I just did, and man does he not look how I expected. I mean, I guess it’s unfair of me to picture him as a bespectacled beanpole nerd, but I sure didn’t expect him to look like Domenick Lombardozzi cosplaying as Anton LaVey. Never meet your heroes, kids.

****It’s also possible he was banging Rachel Weisz -- who he met and later married while filming the movie-- on the sly, which would be more than enough to get anyone grinning. Heck, if he was doing that and could make it through these lines without spontaneously bursting into ‘zippidy-do-dah,’ this performance deserves a fuckin’ Oscar.

*****She was previously married to Darren Aronofsky, who subsequently went on to marry… Jennifer Lawrence?! Man, she jumped off that ship in the nick of time.

******Since I feel a little weird ending on this joke the same day literally every woman I’ve ever known is posting “Me Too,” I’d just like to clarify: I hope if Rachel Weisz is reading this she’s very happy with Daniel Craig’s killer abs and knows that this comment is made in total jest, and she should not feel in any way pressured to run away with me in exchange for a B- rating on my review of her 2011 movie DREAM HOUSE.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Truth Can’t Stay Hidden Forever
TITLE ACCURACY	As long as you don’t mind spoiling the movie’s halfway-through twist in the fucking title, it’s perfect
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghosts, Psychological horseshit
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	All
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None. Elias Koteas? He’s been in plenty of genre movies over the years, but I never think of him as a horror guy, per se.
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	No, mercifully, it’s pretty much the only cliche which remains untouched here.
CREEPY DOLLS?	None, which is odd since this seems like exactly the kind of horror cliche low-hanging fruit this film might be tempted by
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Oh, Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Clean Craig to Dirty Craig. His abs stay the same, though.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, someone is watching them from the woods, and it turns out to be real!
MORAL OF THE STORY	(spoilers) Sometimes when you murder your family you create a vivid, all-encompassing alternate reality where you imagine your dead family still being alive but also you have a different name and also they’re really ghosts I guess and you’re not actually imagining things because it’s magic, and also someone else killed them and framed you in a crazy mix-up, it turns out. You know, the sort of thing a lot of folks can relate to.