Who Greenlit This Shit? Edition II - "Final Destination 5"

by XdarksparkX
Originally Written: August 7th, 2011

Normally I don’t completely rip into a movie and call it a complete waste of time before it’s released unless drastic measures call for it. However, I’ve been having these thoughts about the Final Destination series as a whole for a few years now, and after watching the trailer for Final Destination 5 for the third time, I think I’m finally able to construct my thoughts into more than just nonsensical expressions and gestures of rage:

Without seeing a single frame of the final cut, I know for a fact that this film will be complete crap.

The Final Destination series has been on the down and out since the first sequel was released back in 2003. FD2 was okay for a sequel, but the filmmakers completely missed the essence of what made the original FD an awesome film. The fact that through logic, Alex was able to figure out a pattern of the order the people who got off the plane could die in, and that when he inevitably failed to save most of them from the grim fates that befell them, there was very little in the way of supernatural instigation—most of the deaths were a freak one-off deal that was sometimes over emphasized (Ms. Lewton’s death) to show that no one, Alex or other, had any actual control over the events. No one ever stated that Alex’s pattern was definite fact, it was merely his own cockamamie theory that just happened to come true at every turn—it only became accepted because it continually turned out to be right.

With the subsequent sequels, something changed. Gone was the creative drive that powered the first film, instead it became a part of the infamous Hollywood cash cow. Everything taken in the first suddenly became the considered “rules” for the series, making it terribly trite and predictable. Just look at the grandiose opening “accidents”, which became a staple of the series. In the original, Alex had a dream about a horrible accident taking place where the plane he was on took off and suddenly exploded. Not only does this work because he falls asleep when he gets on the plane (an arguable point of how he fell asleep that quickly, but still it’s a much more valid setup that what succeeded it), but they had previously established that he has a terrible fear of flying. This is why the “premonition” made perfect sense in FD1—it could’ve been real, it could’ve been his overactive phobia tainting his imagination, but the second that plane bursts into flames after Alex and friends get kicked off the plane, it becomes invaluable knowledge to the survivors that cannot be argued.

With the subsequent films that followed, the filmmakers literally just pick a random point where they can switch to the “premonition state” under the table without the audience knowing. Then, after the overdone gruesome “accident” (which starts to become laughable when you realize that they need to have to visionary die last in the premonition, in order to be able to tell the other survivors the “predetermined order” that they will die in), they do that “super zoom out of the eye” shot back to the aforementioned random point just before the “accident.” No dream, no nothing… these people are literally touched by a random bout of psychic powers for absolutely no reason what-so-ever. It begs the question, if Death is just going to get pissy when it‘s over-elaborate plans are thwarted, why doesn’t it just flip the script and kill the person who HAD the premonition first? Good luck finding out if anything’s amiss now!

You may have noticed that when referring to the opening deaths, I refer to them as ‘accidents’ with intentional quotes around the word. This is because the events that begin the first act in the subsequent sequels aren’t so much believable accidents as much as they are nonsensical apparatuses with as much over-complication as a classic Rube Goldberg device. These aren’t accidents, these are the events that unfold when some vague metaphysical force plays a game of goddamn Mouse Trap. I let FD2 off the hook slightly in this, as the human control of a motor vehicle allows a margin of error in judgment and reaction time to make that accident an actual… well, accident. However, from 3 onward, the opening scenes are so unbelievably convoluted, all while attempting to achieve the simplest means—death.

I don’t even know if I should really get into the logical fallacies of the latter opening sequences; I could easily write a 20 page diatribe about how the Roller Coaster accident in FD3 was complete bullshit that goes against every single law of basic coaster design mechanics, but I won’t. Just for shits and giggles though, here’s a list off the top of my head of logical and mechanical failures from that sequence:

• The Devil’s Flight’s shoulder restraints bounce up and down when released. Any coaster that EVER did this would not pass State Certification for Amusement Ride Operation.
  
• There is no backup restraint for the shoulder harnesses. No seatbelt, no belt that attaches to the harnesses, nothing. When that one valve fails, everything goes to hell. On every modern coaster there is always a failsafe on the restraints, even if that means doubling up the exact same mechanism so that if one fails, the other is the backup. The odds of both of them failing is astronomical. Not to mention, that one valve apparently held the restraints for the ENTIRE train. Nope. The trains are locked usually by car, but sometimes in sections depending on the maker. Either way, one failure like what was shown would not cause the entire train’s restraints to unlock.
  
• We are to believe that a camera, dropped by a foolish rider, wrapped around the track and was the leading cause for wrecking the train’s wheel assembly. HA! Are you kidding? That camera would’ve been absolutely wrecked—the worst thing that would happen is the train would lose momentum and valley (stall) at a low point where it lacks the inertia to climb the hill in front of it. Those wheels are attached to a train that weighs a probable ton without inertia or riders—fully operating, it would chew that camera up with barely the bat of an eyelash.
  
• Speaking of the wheels, there are three wheels on a coaster car’s wheel assemblies: the road wheel (rides on top of the track), guide wheel (rides on the side of the track), and up-stock wheel (rides underneath the track). In the film, these wheels and their specific states fluctuate randomly depending on what the scene called for. For instance, the remains of the coaster train goes into the loop and stalls at the top; flipped upside down. This means that the up-stock wheels are still intact, if they weren’t the train would’ve fallen once it lost enough momentum and crashed into the track below. However, the train instead rolls back and hits a piece of track that had been completely jarred out of place (don’t get me started on how this happened), before the suddenly halted momentum causes the front end of the train to fly completely off the rails and spiral towards the ground.
  
• As more of a side note, the Ride Operators are possibly the most idiotic people to ever walk the face of the Earth. After Wendy flips out they let her and the rest of her section get off, however both her boyfriend (my boy Jesse Moss) and Ryan Merriman’s girlfriend (Carrie) are in the front row and therefore still locked in their seats. (Wait, so they unlock sections of the train at the loading platform, but that one valve controls the entire train’s locking mechanism!? WHAT THE FUCK!?) Then, when Jesse’s character and Carrie are looking the Attendant dead in the eye asking to be let out, they get completely ignored and the guy says to the operator “you’re all clear! Start the ride!” NO. NO, NO, NO! If someone asks to get off, and are legitimately serious and not messing around, YOU HAVE TO LET THEM OUT. All of those Ops should have never been anywhere near an operator’s panel or ride attendant job position.
  

There are MANY more points that I could dissect if I actually took the time to look the scene up and wasn’t going from purely from memory of the big points that stuck out, but the point is made just the same. To sum up, they might as well have had someone get thrown in front of the car, and then attempt to avoid being hit by doing a Scooby-Doo esque “spinning of the wheels” startup before running in front of it within the same vein as a Looney Tunes cartoon. THAT would’ve been within the realm of reality they were working in.

…Does it show that I was a Ride Operator at Six Flags for three years?

Now, I’ve heard fan boys of the series attempt to proclaim “it’s only a movie” when I’ve brought these points up, but to argue that point is to completely whiff on the purpose of the series and it’s brand of horror/suspense. If I as a viewer am fully and completely conscious of the fact that I’m just watching bland characters die in ridiculous ways, then the entire existence of the movie within the guise of being apart of the Horror genre is pointless. I don’t think about how dangerous the objects we use every day without a second thought are, but rather I spend my time laughing at the fact that they expect me to buy into this with any legitimate emotional investment.

And the openings only got worse from there.

FD4’s tries to make us believe that stock car raceways only have rusted chain-link fencing between the track and the spectators, along with serious cracks and fractures in the seating area at a point of primary structural support. FD5 then attempts to make us believe a suspension bridge has COMPLETELY failed and caused the roadway it holds up to crumble like a soggy Oreo cookie. The openings became more about Michael Bay inspired “insipid flashiness” than about logistical and psychological horror.

At least in the FD5 trailer, it seems like they don’t just randomly come across the information of a similarly crazy incident where people survived because someone predicted it minutes beforehand on the internet or something like previous films (who thinks to Google that anyway?) Instead, the cryptic coroner of the series named “Bludworth” (Tony Todd) is at the site of the mass funeral for those who died on the bridge and says to the protagonist and co. that he’s seen this before: the freak accident, the random survivors… and death hunting them down one-by-one. It’s better, but that’s like saying it’s better to get hit by bird poop than step in dog shit.

The worst part is, the Mouse Trap shenanigans that the openings contain don’t just happen in the opening scene in the later films. Oh no, these unbelievably improbable chain reactions actually start to bleed into the subsequent “accidents” that Death uses to correct the wrongs and right the fates of those who avoided his cold embrace in the opening. It gets to the point where they are willing to throw anything—including basic logic and every single one of the laws of physics known to man—out the goddamn window just to get a “cool” death scene. It gets even worse when they start knowing that people expect it to the point where they use chain reactions just to have them result in a near-miss / “close call” moment. Great, yeah that’s it, pander to the absurdity that you so proudly flaunt as a “series staple”. I should punch each and every one of you bastards in the soul.

Since this is supposed to be about 5 (and has turned into a much broader reaching rant), I’m going to try and keep this rant about these within the realm of what I saw in the trailer.

• Floor to ceiling windows that are in high rises and multi-story office buildings are NOT shatterproof nor massively thick. This is a common misconception. Having them posses those traits in the name of safety would just be laughable, because there’s zero chance that someone would EVER slip and fall into them. Besides, if a window washer sees something going wrong, they need to be able to make an immediate breach and entry. Window Washers: Saving the day, one window at a time.
• “I see that it’s been quite a while since your consultation for this laser eye treatment…what made you decide to take the leap today?”
  “A lot is going on in my life, I don’t want to miss anything.” *starts violently shivering after sitting in the chair* Jesus, then get fucking CONTACTS! My God, if you’re flipping out like this why are you doing it in the first place!? Oh wait, because then we can’t have an incompetent doctor leave you alone with your eyelids pried open and a high powered laser aimed directly at your retina!
• Death by falling on Acupuncture needles? 1000 Ways To Die already did it.
• A sheet metal screw can come loose from a ceiling bound air-conditioning unit in a gymnasium and fall with the most ridiculous precision onto a balance beam, landing flawlessly on it’s head without reacting to the fact that it’s momentum was suddenly and forcefully halted. Physics: “screwing” Netwon and his supposed laws whenever the hell it feels like it.

And just as a bonus lesson courtesy of FD3, remember children, an engine does not need to be hooked up to your truck for you to be able to actually drive it. It can simply rest under the hood as if it was conveniently placed in a trunk, which allows it to fly completely out from under the hood when a runaway van rear-ends you, sending the engine fan right into the unsuspecting head of the douchebag in the convertible in front of you in the drive thru line at McDonalds. Oh, and the douchebag’s car won’t move either, because as we previously established… physics isn’t an absolute or anything. It takes more plays off than Randy Moss when Death is the QB.

As if all of this wasn’t fail-tastic enough, in the 5th film Bludworth informs the survivors that because they aren’t supposed to be here, the only way to appease death is to kill someone else in their place. Wait, why didn’t you tell the kids in the first one that? What, is this a new development in the way Death operates? Did you read about revisions to the “How To Handle Those Who Escape Plans of A Horrific Fate” section of the Grim Reaper Rulebook in the newest edition of Afterlife Quarterly? What happened to the “only new life can defeat death” crap you spun to AJ Cook and her cohorts in FD2? Jesus man, are you ever consistent? Stop acting like the information you present is an absolute rule when it changes every five seconds! Your “rules” are more sporadic than the presence of physics in these movies!

[Sigh] … You know, for a film series called “Final Destination”—where the main subject of interest in the plot is death—they sure seem to have a hard time actually getting to that very destination and letting this series just fucking die in a ditch already. I wish Hollywood’s obsession with formulaic crap would reach it’s Final Destination. [Cue rimshot; subsequent tomato throwing] Thank you, I’ll be here all week!

Altitude

by XdarksparkX
Originally written: April 17th, 2011
[Images courtesy of Dread Central]

God damn it Jessica Lowndes, we have got to stop meeting like this! Here we are again—you’re starring in a suspect indie-horror film, and I’m stupidly intrigued to see it simply because you’re in it. This will never last if we keep this up…

Thankfully, this movie not only prominently displays the reasoning for why I’m so enamored with Jessica, but it is also leagues better than Autopsy (a praise that seems feeble after my drubbing of it, but still accurate and valid). In fact, I could go as far as saying that I enjoyed the majority of Altitude for what it was. However, the bookends of the film grind my gears to no end, especially the ending, which is so putridity Hollywood I had to forcibly restrain myself from vomiting all over my keyboard when the end-credits hit.

Before we get there, there are some good points I can actually bring up about the film. The first of course being Jessica’s performance. Once again, my girl came to play. While I have seen better from her, this was no where near the train wreck performance she put out in Autopsy—this is definitely on the upper echelon of her career’s performance hierarchy. I think director Kaare Andrews’ ability to recognize her potential and talent helped that, so kudos to him. Apparently Jessica also went out of her way to do extensive research to make sure that her aviation jargon and such was believable, even going as far as taking flying lessons. I’m no aviation expert, but she damn sure sold me on it.

See girls? You can still be pretty and not suck at your craft!

As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, everyone in this film was solid as far as performances go for a movie of this quality, and that’s huge when the script calls for your main cast to be isolated with each other in a small confined space for a majority of the runtime. I mean, could you imagine what The Breakfast Club would’ve been like as a character piece had the actors just sucked complete ass? I shudder at the thought.

Impressive... most impressive.

The only person who’s performance I had a problem with was Landon Liboiron, or as I call him when knocking the crap-fest that Degrassi: The Next Generation has become, “Eyebrows”. I don’t know, I just never feel like he is actually emoting at any point in the entire film. I get that his character is supposed to be emotionally distant, but I mean when everyone else around you is actually turning in semi-decent performances and you’ve got an air of “I don’t give a shit” / “uhhh what?” about you, it stands out like an NBA player at a jockey convention.

I also must say that the visual effects are phenomenally well done throughout 99% of the film (there’s one really obvious scene at the end that looks bleh), and when you consider the paltry budget they had to work with, its a pretty astounding feat to accomplish. Most of the visual effects shots are so well done, you wouldn’t even think they were VFX shots, and that’s more than some mega-budget films can say...

Now comes the bad. First off, the way the movie kicks off is a great framing point with a mid-air plane collision, but in that short 5 minutes it becomes painfully obvious that the child on the plane will play an extremely significant role, and the second Landon shuffles into frame it hits you like a Captain Obvious freight train.

Also of note in the character-establishing scene, Julianna Guill’s character Mel randomly states that she’s a film student in the opening. Yet not two minutes before that we saw the first shot of her using her the camera, and we can clearly see that the damn thing isn’t on—there’s no picture in the LCD viewfinder. Not to mention, every so often during the first half-hour or so they cut to her camera’s perspective, yet the digital quality they show the camera to capture is so atrociously bad it’s almost laughable. It honestly looks like it was recorded on a cell phone from five years ago, not an actual DV camera as portrayed. Film major my ass! No self-respecting film student would bother owning such a blatant piece of trash, no matter how cheap they got it. This information never comes back in any substantial way either, so it’s basically a piece of pointless character exposition.

Once the plane gets off the ground, the film actually becomes a pretty damn decent thriller film. It all looks like smooth sailing, until they are swallowed by a supernatural storm cloud and Jess isn’t instrument rated, which means she has to visually maintain separation from the ground at all times. A loose screw channels the Final Destination series and conveniently lodges itself into the elevator controller, making it impossible for Jess to taper off after she realizes that she can’t pull up over the storm, and shit has officially hit the fan. Is it perfect? Not on your life, but it’s damn sure entertaining, and the dialog is pretty damn solid as well. Jessica frequently calls Jake Weary’s macho-jock character Sal out on just about every stupid idea he comes up with when he’s in his three sheets to the wind haze (seriously, drinking is one thing, but this dude is a chronic alcoholic—he continually washes beer down with more beer for the first 40 minutes of the film).

The scene that really had me applauding Paul A. Birkett’s writing was when Sal starts flipping out and saying they should draw straws to see who gets the lone parachute on board. Jess proceeds to go into a highly logical rant about not knowing who packed the chute, if it’s packed properly, or how high they actually are. “You think we’re 10,000 feet up, but if we’re only a thousand, you’ll hit the ground before you can even deploy the chute!” My god, was that just a smart, logical argumentative point in a low-grade thriller / horror film? Did the devil by any chance happen to ice skate to work today?

This is not to say the writing is without its faults though. The aforementioned useless character exposition that takes place in the beginning aside, most of Sal’s asshole-ery comes out of far left field from Parking Lot J with little to no actual provocation. This would work, if he actually gave off the vibe of a true asshole the rest of the time instead of just a cocky jerk. It’s almost like at intermittent points during the writing process Birkett said to himself “I need to remind the audience that Sal’s a dick.” Yeah, we got that. You don’t need these stupid, random things that can only really be backed up by the terribly flimsily argument that he’s tipsy to happen for us to get that.

Then comes the ending… dear god, what in the hell of all that is went wrong here!? My frustration with it was actually compounded by the fact that I watched the behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD after the film, and found out that the original script ending was leagues better conceptually. After Jessie kisses Eyebrows and he says “you didn’t mean it, did you?” The clouds would’ve parted and they would’ve slammed right into a mountain, abruptly ending the film. I would’ve taken that and ran with it, when put into comparison with what ultimately ended up on film!

The major problem is that for the first 75-80 minutes of the movie, they have set their ground rules as far as feasible possibilities go. Yes, you can introduce something new in the guise of a major twist, but you can really only do it once. After that, you start pulling serious Hand of God / Deus Ex Machina bullshit out, and the audience you’ve manage to captivate is so violently thrown by the turn of events that they get ripped out of the film.

So they find out that Eyebrows is the one causing Cthulhu to come after them (the creature doesn’t have a name, so I will refer to it as that from here on out), simply through his imagination and fears. Okay, so there is your twist, it’s become a psychological thriller type of deal. Right, you’ve used up your big twist—Cthulhu’s existence is purely the power of imagination, and can be stopped if Eyebrows would just stop being such a “goddamn pussy” (Jessie’s words in the film, not mine!) and just think of happier times. Of course, he can’t… because the dumb shit was probably under the covers reading the Necronomicon before going to bed every night when he was eight years old.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie...”

So, this should be it—your story’s resolution should to come within the context of this twist. Nope, not the case with Altitude. Instead they attempt to add another twist, using—of all things—time travel.

No. No, no, no, no… NO! Damn it, Andrews! You have officially thrown the carcass to the wolves; you have disengaged your audience with this overcomplicated nonsense. Why in the Lovecraftien hell would you do this!?

Now, surely some people are going to say, “well, you can buy the fact that Eyebrows can manifest Cthulhu’s disembodied head from the depth of the sunken city of R’lyeh, but you can’t buy that he can take them back in time?” To answer that: yes, I cannot buy that for a second. Aside from the fact that their earth-shattering twist was already well done with the teasers and eventual appearance of Cthulhu, at the same time it’s fantastical within the depths of imagination—like a schizophrenic’s psychotic episode, who are we to tell them what they are seeing isn’t real? I actually thought that would’ve been a great commentary as a whole for this film; but alas, by throwing the time-travel twist into the finale purely to achieve that ham-fisted bullshit Hollywood ending, they’ve created a climax that I simply can’t support. That is because it feels like the biggest crutch job in the world. Kaare tries to justify this in the BTS doc by saying that “by [the characters] allowing themselves to die in the present, they’ve saved a better version of themselves in the past, where their families are not killed and there’s no emotional baggage that keeps them from being together.” That’s all well and good, except for the fact that it makes no logistical sense!

“OH, COME ON!!!”

When you deal with time-travel Kaare, you need to be VERY careful if you want to make it legitimate. My rant on the Cameron’s Terminator films illustrates that—you have to think in terms of linear time progression in order for your time-travel plot point to work. What you’re saying Kaare is that they somehow saved themselves from the fate of the movie by going back to the day the crash happened, SOMEHOW REPLACING THE PLANE THAT CLIPPED THE ORIGINAL WITH THEIR OWN, and making a ‘better life’ for themselves? I hate to break it to you, but the other plane would still be there! They didn’t make Jessica’s mom (who was in fact the pilot of the plane little Eyebrows and parents were on at the beginning of the film) alter course—in fact, they didn’t make the original plane do anything except say “holy shit, where did he come from?” GAH! What is it with people trying to make time a loop; it is a continuous linear progression of events! Why is it that the only film that managed to get this right is Back To The Future? Look, there is an initial progression of events. If you jump back to one of those events, your presence can alter said events and potentially erase coming ones from that point on, but those initial events will still unfold exactly as they did when you weren’t there until you intervene!

Here’s the best way I can put it—I’ll partially regurgitate what I said in my Terminator rant. Think of time in the sense of a piece of string. Now, as pivotal / memorable events happen, you tie a knot at a certain point in that string. So eventually you’d have this piece of string with knots at various points. Now suppose you added a time-travel variant to this idea, and decided that at the tenth knot you wanted to go back to the fifth. Whether or not you alter it from then on, the fifth knot will still exist as it did when it was originally formed when you go back to it. It only changes when you mess with it after revisiting it.

Now, imagine that you took the current end of your string, and you looped it back to that fifth knot. Congratulations, you have just created a paradox! Because think about it, if now the plane that was supposed to hit them at the beginning was really Jessie and Eyebrows from the future, how can they get to the point where they get caught in the storm if they now live “happily ever after?” Exactly, they wouldn’t—at some point they would have to have the events of the movie happen because it’s the only way to get to that false hope of happiness. You haven’t rewritten a happier life for yourself; you’ve actually DOOMED yourself to constantly end your life at 21 on that plane so you can have a ‘better childhood’. Because technically, you will now be forced to exist in an infinite circle, because the only way the past can happen is if you go back to the end of the circle you’ve created. And where does a circle end? Wherever it begins—it always comes back around.

Who Greelit This Shit? Edition I - "Autopsy"

by XdarksparkX
Originally written: June 17th, 2009

WARNING: Due to the writer's inability to find alternative words that can accurately describe his emotions while viewing this movie, and the flat out Grade-A shit quality of said movie, strong coarse language is present throughout this review. Reader should venture in at their own risk of mental scarring after hearing a recount of such a terrible waste of film.

I like Jessica Lowndes. No, strike that—I effing love Jessica Lowndes. Ever since I saw her 4 years ago in Tobe Hooper’s abysmal contribution to the Showtime series Masters of Horror known as “Dance of The Dead”, I fell ass-over-teakettle for her potential as an actress. It’s sad, but its so rare these days to see a young woman who’s not only easy on the eyes but can actually emote believably. Seems like today everyone’s pining for the pretty, with talent just being a bonus. Talent is supposed to be the premium; the beauty is the bonus, but with a visual medium, our society naturally figures eye candy over substance. Oh, the state of this world… Anyway, Jessica doesn’t exactly set the world on fire with her performances, but if she continues to learn and grow and actually tries to hone and sharpen her range and consistency, I guaran-damn-tee you she’ll be accepting a certain golden statue for Best Leading or Supporting Actress somewhere down the road.

That being said, I’ve slowly began to realize that my fandom for young up-and-coming actors and actresses can lead me down a road full of shitty movies that have me saying “why the hell are you in this, [insert actors name], you’re so much better than this piece of shit.” As is the case with Autopsy. A member of the third After-Dark Horrorfest collection, I rented an HD copy of Autopsy roughly two months ago when I found it on the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, and I still wish I had those 480 Microsoft points back.

"Oh Jessica, why are you in this? You're so much better than this..."

Apparently someone forgot to mention to writers Adam Gierasch (who also directed), Jace Anderson, and EL Katz that you have to make your victim characters sympathetic. There has to be a trait or flaw within the character that makes the viewer want to root them on and see them survive the end. Throughout the opening credits we get a lot of home movie shot footage and candid digital pictures of the four principle characters out and about partying in good old “Nawlin’s” Louisiana. Only we find out that Emily (Jessica Lowndes) got behind the wheel totally hammered (proceeding to down more beer in the drivers seat before departing no less) and subsequently starts the movie by wrapping their car around a tree. Wow, within the first five minutes you’ve lost me, I don’t give a shit what happens to these characters. They were dumb enough to drink and drive, they’re fitting of whatever happens to them in the next 75 minutes.

The plot that plays out pulls a classic Hand-of-God tactic. The ‘Hand-of-God’ tactic is what I like to call it when a scenario is presented in a movie (usually horror movies) where it’s blatantly obvious that the writer wants the characters to get into a certain predicament. So rather that spend time finding a logical way to get them there, he or she makes up the biggest bullshit excuse that wouldn’t logically fly with anyone just to get them into said predicament. Case in point: the idiots find out that they’ve hit someone in addition to wrapping the car around the tree, and an ambulance arrives (how does it know where they are when we’ve established early in this post-crash scene that none of them have a working cell phone? It doesn't just pull up and see the accident, it has its sirens and shit on! The fuck man, the fuck!?) to take the human hood-ornament and the ass-clowns to the nearest hospital, Mercy Hospital (oh ha-ha, very nice, doctors killing patients in “Mercy Hospital”, yeah that little pun has never been done before). They arrive at the hospital, and the nurse in not being legit at all, refusing to let the guy who got some of the hood ornament's blood in his mouth get immediate examination opposed to the guy with a bump on the forehead due to the skeleton crew the hospital’s been running on since Katrina. Nice, way to bring up that BS excuse, by referencing a natural disaster! I’m not sure when this was filmed, but I believe it was filmed in 2007 and completed in 2008. If that’s so, Katrina happened like 2-3 years ago guys, almost everyone who wanted to go back had already. Jesus, what a fail. If I’m one of these characters I’m calling bullshit and getting the fuck out. I’ll walk, in the rain if I have to, I don’t give a damn. Then again, I wouldn’t drink and drive, get in a car with someone who’s obviously shit-faced, or let someone I know drink and drive period, so what I would do has really no merit on this movie anyway.

Anyway, Jessie’s boyfriend discovers he has a piece of glass stuck in his sternum. Against everyone's protests the dumb-ass says “oh it’s just a little piece” and starts to pull it out. He pulls… and pulls... and pulls, and its at this point we realize that the entire fucking windshield must be inside this guy, yet he keeps pulling! I’m sorry, but if I think it’s a small little piece and try to pull it out (which I wouldn’t do anyway, but again… drinking and driving…) only to find it’s really a shard, I’m stopping immediately and not touching it with a ten foot pole. Hell I’m not even moving for fear of raping my internal organs. He gets the entire thing out, and then proceeds to spas out in the most comical way. I didn’t know having glass shards in you made you twitch like you were having a seizure.

"No, please... no more! I'll leave a note next time, I promise! Just please for the love of God don't make me watch any more of this movie!"

Of course, due to the “skeletal crew” we’ve got to separate the group slowly as each one is admitted into their checkups, and only when people aren’t coming back do we realize that shit has hit the proverbial fan and that the best idea would be to get the hell out of here.

Gierasch, for some reason, feels the need to show us Jessica and Co. descending and ascending the stairs between floors multiple times after he establishes that the elevator is 10-7 (out of service). He shows this, even though there are floor numbers at the ends of the hall on EVERY GODDAMN FLOOR! Now, when it comes to editing I don’t like to put the full blame on the director unless I know for a fact that he was the editor himself. That being said, I assume (and I hate to, but I really have little choice) that he did at least have a say in whether or not the final cut was acceptable. Showing Jess run up and down the stairs is a pathetic way to stretch this paper thin movie out to an 80 minute runtime. What I do know though is that Gierasch shot enough varied cuts of various groups of the victims all going up and down stairs to actually allow the editor to not repeat the same shot twice. And when you see that there are about 10 - 15 of these stairway shots, that’s a pretty damn scary thought.

I’ll admit, I like smart horror. Like really smart horror. I feel it’s the only way the genre can be called such anymore. Everyone’s a dumb-ass in these movies now-a-days, and this seems to be because the writing is so weak that if someone were to do something even remotely rational or logical, the whole movie would have no place to go but to the end credits. That being said, while it’s frustrating in Autopsy to watch the characters be so compliant with splitting up, it seems somewhat justified in a hospital. What isn’t justified is that Jessica’s character Emily had supposedly gone to med school (dropped out after her first year) and yet when the police officer she called from one of the lackey’s cell phone arrives and isn’t sure if she’s a patent in the mental ward or not due to one of the hooligans BS cover stories, she doesn’t bring up the perfectly logical question of “if I’m a patient, then why the fuck am I not in a hospital gown? So the patient who’s supposedly crazy thinks to wander around and find clothes before trying to escape the hospital?” (Holy run-on sentence Batman!) Again though, it would actually take a while to figure out a legit way out of this, because naturally the cop would look at this like something really is up and possibly call for backup. Now what? Oh, logical plot point? My bad…fail! It’s not like you can’t half-ass your way out of this by having another lackey come up from behind the cop and smack him in the head with the brick of failure that was shit out when this movie was conceived , but at least the victim was smart enough to bring up the point.

"Oh God, not logic! Please anything but basic LOGIC!"

One thing I will say is that the cinematography and art direction is fairly good. The art direction is dark, dank and gritty, just how it should be in a horror film. I also love the color tone that was chosen, its right in between Saw’s “so high it’s sometimes retina burning” saturation and Hostel’s “so dim you wonder what the fuck is going on half the time” saturation, and it compliments the old / unused / rundown looking sets nicely. That being said there’s nothing else I can applaud this on, not even Jessica’s performance, which was mediocre to say the least. While she emoted well for the most part, I think the Gierasch may have screwed her up on some scenes. For instance, when she finds her boyfriend with his organs pulled out and hanging in pans all over the room (all of this done so he can remotely support the doctors corpse bride of a wife… yeah you heard me, I couldn't make that shit up) she goes to what I call “cry face” (you know, the look when your about to cry, when the tears are a-building, but you don’t break down due to say circumstance or self-image) only to abruptly pull back and go into a look of complete unemotional curiosity. It was as if someone said “you’re sad and now your like what the fuck is this.” No, you keep the cry face, you embrace the cry face, you go full out with the cry face in this scene. Then you slowly overlay the WTF curiosity onto the cry face, but you don't just drop it completely. You’re still emotionally distraught at the image of your boyfriend being the unlucky bastard who got the red light slapped on his nose for the real life version of Operation! She then breaks down out of NOWHERE when she unplugs her beau. Umm, where was the emotional fear and hesitation of actually KILLING the person you love? Just because you KNOW you have to do something doesn’t make it any easier, especially when it comes to killing a loved one. Jesus Oli Herbert Christ…

Oh, and to top it all off, Robert Patrick is the crazy doctor who’s behind all the shenanigans. That’s right, Robert. Fucking. Patrick. I know you less hardcore movie fans are like “who?” Let me ask you, have you seen Terminator 2? If you have, you remember that bad ass motherfucker who was made out of liquid and could form knives from his arms and shit? Yeah, that was Robert Patrick. Dear God man, I would’ve given you money if I had known you needed it this badly!

There’s a scene where Ashley Schneider (Clare) runs away from a naked animated corpse that inexplicably unloaded all of its organs on to her, (which, during said scene doesn’t get her to scream ONCE. Uh…epic fail, sound department?) only to bump into one of the T-1000’s henchmen. She freezes for a second, and then proceeds to get punched squarely in the face. It was at this point, as I was rolling on the floor with tears of laughter streaming down my face, that I start to wonder if this was supposed to be a parody movie. There’s another scene where Ross McCall (Jude; who’s been drugged with halogens) walks through a door in the background, past the nurse and Robert Patrick who’re holding Jessica still so they can inject her with “teh serumz”, and acts completely non-chalant and worry free, even though previous scenes have led us to believe that the halogens were wearing off and he knows they’re after him too. And I can’t forget the scene where Jude decides to blow up one of the rooms since the doc’s got his face pressed all up against the door trying to get in. Yet when Jude blasts the room to hell and back, the door on the other side in the hallway where Jessica is doesn’t flinch, smoke, or do much of anything other than let out a meek muffled boom when the shot transitions to her immediately after the blast (the other door to the room however, gets blown clean off its hinges and smacks the Doc and Lackey #2 square in the face). You cannot put scenes as hilariously bad as these into the movie and tell me with a straight face that it was supposed to be serious.

"Hmm... yup, this movie has officially killed its potential to be taken seriously."

The film ends as everyone expects it to, on a freeze frame (which NEVER work dramatically except in like… The Breakfast Club) of Jessica beating the shit out of the Doc screaming “DIIIIEEE!!” followed by a half-assed scene of the Doc opening his eye to say “ZOMG, SEQUELZZZZZ!!!” This whole “killer isn’t dead” thing is so goddamn old, seriously. Either have the villain win or have him die, this whole ‘look I’m not really dead so bring on the sequel’ thing grinds my goddamn gears, because everyone knows if you move in on the villains dead body that he will make some sort of movement saying “I’m not dead, see? I hear franchizzzeee!” You know what I want, I want the classic pan over the dead body, hold the shot for a few seconds and then smash cut to black and have the protagonist say “what? he’s dead, this ain’t a fucking horror movie” (bad grammar and all) and bam, cue end credits. Now that would be a bad ass ending!

In the end, Autopsy is really nothing more than the same formulaic crap we’ve come to expect from the horror genre. If you somehow still enjoy the tired horror movie cliché’s or would like to watch a hot Canadian chick run up and down the same flight of stairs, then by all means give Autopsy a whirl. But for those looking for something a little more interesting from the “indie” horror film scene, this one’s better off left in the 99 cent bin at Blockbuster.

1/5