Hellbenders

Hellbenders (2012)

Dir. and Written by J.T. Petty

Starring Clancy Brown, Clifton Collins Jr, Andre Royo, Robyn Rikoon, Macon Blair, Dan Fogler, Larry Fessenden

HELLBENDERS is a high-concept horror-comedy about an elite team of ex-religious officials who live in a funky hipster commune and fight demonic possession. Kind of like GHOSTBUSTERS if instead of blue-collar schmos, they were all barely functional indie hipster assholes who cannot for the life of them stop bantering for even a single second, otherwise all will be lost.

That sounds somewhere between homicidally irritating and annoyingly charming (and it usually shakes out somewhere between those two), but, you ask, where is the high concept in that? Well, the twist is that in order to do their demon-exorcising job properly, they have to be prepared to kill themselves and drag the demon to hell with them, as a last resort. This is a problem, though, due to the fact that hunting demons kinda automatically puts you on God’s good side, and makes it hard to talk your way past the bouncers into hell. To remedy this awkward situation, our heroes have to make sure they’re constantly sinning all the time, so their souls are so fundamentally tainted that not even some emergency deathbed last rites will bail them out. This means they have to spend most of their off-time smoking weed, fucking each other, lying, stealing, masturbating, getting wasted, and living a generally debaucherous lifestyle like it’s their job. At first it seems like pretty good work if you can get it, but apparently Heaven’s standards are somewhat laxer than I seem to recall from my tenure in Catholic school, and sinning enough to guarantee an eternity of torment ends up being kind of an exhausting full-time job.

This is all very cute, and for awhile it’s pretty amusing, thanks mostly to the great comic cast assembled by director J.T. Petty (the surprisingly good MIMIC 3, S&MAN, THE BURROWERS):Clancy Brown (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE LITTLE MERMAID 2: RETURN TO THE SEA) is aces as the grizzled straight man and the group’s leader, Clifton Collins Jr, (TRAFFIC, CAPOTE) has some dry one-liners as the disillusioned leading man, and Andre Royo (Bubs from The Wire!), Macon Blair (BLUE RUIN and GREEN ROOM), Dan Fogler (FANBOYS, EUROPA REPORT) and Robyn Rikoon (COLD WEATHER) all have fun as the schlubby, filthy-mouthed backup. The setup has an agreeably 90’s indie movie hangout vibe (something of a rarity in a 2012 release), which really means one thing: an ensemble of hungry young actors trying to deliver as many hip, self-consciously filthy quips as they can manage, as fast as they can manage, complimented by today’s edgiest, most affordable indie hits and some powerfully indifferent camerawork. You know, like early Tarantino, or (once upon a time) Kevin Smith! Except not as good! Like all the movies of that ilk (everything from SUICIDE KINGS to TAINTED to BLOOD AND DONUTS) it’s nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is (or as filthy as it thinks it is, incidentally; these guys talk a big game about sinning, but they never seem to actually get around to doing it on camera), but it’s still probably just barely clever enough to get by, most of the time.

Trouble starts to set in as the plot does, which is fortunately a good way into the movie. There’s some horseshit about a prophecy, one of our guys becomes a vessel for a demon apocalypse, and everyone else has to reluctantly rally to save the world. And I do mean reluctantly; the movie itself only seems grudgingly able to get off its ass and pretend it cares about this boring nothing of a screenwriting cliche, and even then only when it has exhausted every other possible option. In fact, it seriously toys with getting completely sidetracked by this movie’s version of William Atherton from GHOSTBUSTERS (Steven Gevedon, SESSION 9), who steps in to shut our boys down with his bureaucracy and rules, because fuck the man. You can tell how little investment Petty has in the whole end-of-the-world thing by juxtaposing it with the nearly equivalent amount of effort that goes into this competing subplot, though, frankly, both are so so rote that it's a bit of a toss up which is more lively. But at least our boys get to yell and curse more for the snobby bureaucrat business, which is really more of the movie’s speed.

Eventually, everything has to escalate to a big set piece, by which time most of the film’s initial charm has dissipated, and so have all its good ideas, and so --from the look of the astonishingly chintzy CG-- has the budget. That’s the problem with these high-concept horror films; sometimes the people making them forget that beyond a concept, you actually have to make a film. Silly as it is, there was real potential here, either as a dirty-minded comedy or a darkly comic horror film. But neither option really pans out in the end. It's not imaginative enough to wring much juice from its stock apocalyptic climax, and --even more damning-- for a movie which mostly gets by on the charm of its characters, it also can't think of much for most of them to do as things drag on. It wants to be an outrageous cult movie, but alas (as we have so often observed here), that’s not really the kind of thing you can manufacture; you’ve got to be genuinely demented to create something genuinely offensive. You can't fake it. Petty’s come up with a workable premise here, but he needed someone a little less responsible to run with it, someone who had some actual subversive ideas beyond having Clancy Brown yell “Cocksucker” a lot.

Still, the film has its moments, especially in the first half. And I did note a couple coming-atcha’ moments which were probably a hoot in the original 3D, including a ridiculous sub-Sega-Saturn-level CG hell-vagina, (which is definitely trying too hard, but still, at least it’s trying). And hey, they got Larry Fessenden in there in a small role, so they know what Papa likes. Petty remains a director with enough clever tricks to get me excited about his next movie, but so far he’s mostly been too clever for his own good, sacrificing solid meat and potatoes genre filmmaking for meta (and potatoes?) tomfoolerly. A good side dish, but not much of a main course. HELLBENDERS is the perfect embodiment of a high-concept genre film which is all dressed up, but forgot to think of a place to go.

Somebody really thought we'd fall in love with these characters and their questionable catchphrases so much that they all got individual posters, like a Marvel movie. Don't think that ended up happening, but maybe it's because the movie's idea of a clever catchphrase is "Fuck Satan" and "We keep records." 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Deliver Us To Evil and the much better They’re Going To Hell So We Don’t Have To
TITLE ACCURACY	Unfortunately not a movie about those awesome Hellbender salamanders; I think they explain the concept somewhere in there but it’s a pretty iffy explanation anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	It’s supposedly based on a graphic novel also written by Petty?
SEQUEL?	None, although I must confess I’d probably watch it, especially if someone with a little more interest in whammy directed it.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA, mostly shot in Brooklyn
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Horror-Comedy, Exorcism/Possession
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None of these guys quite hit the A-list, but Brown and Collins have both been in big prestigious Hollywood productions in smaller roles.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Clancy Brown, Larry Fessenden, and I’d say Macon Blair is starting to get there after this, GREEN ROOM, and MURDER PARTY.
NUDITY?	Seems like there would be some in something like this, but IMDB keywords does not return any results for “female nudity” and they’re usually very thorough about these things. Then again, one review claims it’s rated R for “full nudity,” so who knows? I don’t even notice anymore.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Nah
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	Yes, demonic
CREEPY DOLLS?	Some creepy basement dolls
EVIL CULT?	Yeah, I mean, there aren’t any robes or anything but there’s definitely a prophecy and stuff, so I think that counts.
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	People get all demon-looking when possessed
VOYEURISM?	None that stood out
MORAL OF THE STORY	I guess that old gypsy lady that dragged Alison Lohman to Hell really had to put in a much longer ground game than it looked like in the movie if she wanted to pull that maneuver off.

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.