Pocahauntus (2006)
Directed by Veronica Craven
Written by Veronica Craven, Barry J. Ratcliffe
Starring Lisa Allen, Chris Angelo, Stephanie Basco, Julia Bindi
Unrated

This is why I’ve been dissatisfied with the gushy and overly ecstatic reviews of cheap, DTV movies on horror sites. It isn’t because they’re stupid or have poor taste or are just cronies to the genre, hoisting the “SUPPORT HORROR!” flag until they’re dead to the last man. It’s because the nuts and bolts of horror, the actual structural exoskeleton, is so easy that ANYBODY thinks they can do it. And that’s the problem. “ANYBODY” does.

I mean, think about it. Making a GOOD horror movie is hard to do, perhaps harder than any other genre of film. But just conceiving a horror movie is easy as pie. The rhythms and patterns can be picked up by a pre-schooler. “We kill that person”¦ and we wait”¦ We kill THIS person”¦ and then we wait”¦ And then THIS OTHER PERSON dies”¦ and then we wait.” The best of the best horror filmmakers try to wring a symphony out of those two notes, but most of them are content to let it congeal into a barely sold mush. No structure is needed, so even seventy-seven minute movies can last forever. The slasher movie is the catch-all for horror fans, suffering from the delusion that they can walk that aisle and make a movie without being burdened by that whole “talent” nonsense.

I say all this, to say that I would have shot Pocahauntus in the face a year ago, but I can feel the lowering standards trying to swallow me alive after suffering through crap like Delivery, The Blood Shed, and Home Made. Pocahauntus is not as terrible as any of those films (Hell, it’s already infinitely better than Hostel Part II), but it’s still really bad, distinctive only in the fact that I wasn’t in pain while I was watching it. In fact, the most generous statement I can level towards the film is that it’s a waste of a damn fine cameraman.

Atonement
Directed by Joe Wright
Screenplay by Christopher Hampton
Based on the novel by Ian McEwan
Starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan
Rated R
Release date: Dec. 7, 2007 (limited)

Every fifteen years or so, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in an act of populist penance, gives Best Picture to a film that everyone likes and is just flat-out entertaining, and has no room for the mugging for Oscars they eventually got. These films include nifty little genre pieces like Casablanca, The French Connection, and The Silence of the Lambs. The last time a movie that everyone got behind for Best Picture that didn’t have lavish costumes or fake English accents was”¦ Actually it was last year. The Departed won, and I’m still in shock. That movie’s fucking GREAT!

But more often than not, the Little Gold Man goes to movies that Academy voters don’t lose sleep over. “Look at me,” these votes say, “I have displayed my impeccable and uncontestable taste to the world. I have kept the populace safe from entertainment that actually deserves accolade. I have gotten behind the movie that looks nice and takes itself deadly seriously. My job is done. I think I’ll go to bed, and then wake up and make sure all those writers will never have food to put on their tables ever, ever again.”

This kind of thinking leads to Best Picture wins for Crash, Titanic, Shakespeare In Love, The English Patient, and Braveheart which, to be quite frank, they really don’t deserve. Not when Munich, L.A. Confidential, The Thin Red Line, Fargo, and Apollo 13 are also nominated in those same years. It leads to Oscar wins for movies like Atonement, and it will win, make no mistake. It will win and all No Country For Old Men fans will be shocked and dumbfounded. And you will continue to be until next year when they pass up something great for something “important” again.

This was the attitude I took when I walked into Atonement, populist rabble-rouser that I am. I hate movies like this, and I was more than willing to crack jokes at the expense of Keira Knightley‘s scrawniness and James McAvoy‘s lack of testicles. I loves my cheap shots, and I wouldn’t be the Roddy Piper of film criticism that I am if I didn’t go after them like Britney Spears after a ham-hock. I know which side my bread is buttered on.

It’s over! Oh, dear sweet Jesus, it’s finally over! And not surprisingly, it’s a clean sweep. I’d feel better about there not being another Hellraiser movie to watch, if I didn’t have to watch Hellraiser: Hellworld to be able to say that. This is the worst of the lot. I know I say that with all of them, but that’s only because they each have gotten progressively worse since the fifth one. This just goes to show that when you’re in prison, the burly inmates fuck you the hardest the night before you’re paroled.

The only thing I hate more than garbage is SELF-AWARE garbage. It seems that Pinhead and his Cenobite Peanut Gallery have been turned into an online role-playing game. There are references to the Lament Configuration, and at one point one of the main characters is even wearing a Pinhead t-shirt. I imagine the screenwriter making inappropriate grunting and cooing noises while he was at his computer, typing out this little masterpiece”¦

“Yeeeahhhhhh”¦You JUMP that shark”¦”

Our movie opens on a group of interchangeable teenagers at a funeral for one of their friends, who killed himself. It is after one of these kids delivers the dumbest and most infantile line of dialogue ever uttered in a Hellraiser movie (and think of the ground that covers) that I girded my loins for the ever-elusive two-footer in a franchise of pure shit. Says one of them about the deceased”¦

“I don’t even think he has a dad. I bet he was making it all up.”

Yes. He didn’t have a father. He either appeared on Earth by spontaneous combustion, or he is in fact the second coming of Jesus. Wouldn’t that suck if it were the case though? The long-awaited Savior appears and he gets bumped off at the beginning of the EIGHTH HELLRAISER MOVIE? They’d have to rewrite all the sermons. And somehow, “He cameoed in shitty movies for our sins” doesn’t have all that great a ring to it.

Romance & Cigarettes
Directed by John Turturro
Starring James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Mandy Moore, and Steve Buscemi
Rated R

Romance & Cigarettes boasts a cast that anyone in their right mind would drool over. James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Mandy Moore, Aida Turturro, Mary-Louise Parker, Christopher Walken, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Eddie Izzard, Bobby Cannavale, and Elaine Stritch. I would pay to see any one of these fine actors just read out of the phone book.

In fact, let’s see if we can’t make that happen, huh? All eleven of them taking turns reading the East Orange, New Jersey White Pages? Because Romance & Cigarettes just doesn’t work. It’s a sprawling mess that gets labeled with the term “personal” because the only person who gets what the hell the film was trying to accomplish is probably writer-director John Turturro. It’s a bizarre hybridization of Moulin Rouge and Moonstruck, and every bit as loud and unsubtle as either of them. This is the kind of movie that, were the director ever to deign to come to our humble little site and read this negative review of mine, he would probably think to himself “Bah! He just doesn’t understand my ARTISTRY!”

And he’d be right. I don’t. I think I understand where he was going, but I’m just not sure how he thought it was going to work. From all outward appearances, it seems that Turturro has morphed into Barton Fink. HE CREATES FOR A LIVING!

Braveheart
2-Disc Collector’s Edition
Directed by Mel Gibson
Starring Mel Gibson, Patrick MacGoohan
Paramount Home Video
Available Dec. 18, 2007

Twelve years. That’s how long it takes a Best Picture-winning, fiercely revered classic to descend into camp and cheese. Not even Titanic got there that fast (it was never that highly revered by anyone male and over the age of 13 at the time of its release). It’s almost quaint by now, isn’t it? This was the movie that made BEN-HURian epics fashionable again and if it weren’t for Braveheart‘s success, Lord of the Rings wouldn’t have been greenlit in its current incarnation. And it was made in a time that seems so long ago, when we didn’t think of Mel Gibson as”¦ y’know”¦ Mel Gibson.

And believe it or not, I’m actually NOT cracking cheap jokes (for a change). Mr. Gibson certainly is”¦ outspoken about some things, and some folks just plain can’t stand him anymore. It’s a valid issue, depending on who you ask. Like it or not, BELIEVE it or not, the new 2-disc reissue of Braveheart is now a niche item. There are two camps for this item: those who are die hard fans of the movie, and those who are curious after not having seen it since it came out in 1995 and think “Why the Hell not?” Any of those who haven’t seen it by now, probably won’t be interested.

I fall in that latter category, just for reference. And I accepted this assignment out of sheer curiosity. Would what I’ve seen out of Gibson in the past few years detract from a movie I loved twelve years ago that I haven’t seen since?

The answer to that is actually “No.” But the bad news here is the glaring flaws I failed to pick up on in the meantime that I was either too young, too ignorant, or too much of both to pick up the first time. Needless to say, in a year that gave us The Usual Suspects, Apollo 13, Leaving Las Vegas, Dead Man Walking, and Se7en, Braveheart really didn’t deserve Best Picture.