The Apparition

written and directed by Todd Lincoln (2012)

Horror films have a fairly low threshold to reach in terms of being entertaining.  All they need a premise that puts people in danger and this premise doesn't even have to make much sense as long as the characters are threatened somehow. This flick has that basic apparatus in place and provides serviceable scares, but it's not great by any means.  Spoilers follow...

It starts off with grainy 70's film stock of a seance, then whoosh,  you're in modern times watching some college kids, while they set up an experiment recreating the seance of the 70's.  The leader of the ill advised paranormal ghost hunt is Patrick, played by Tom Felton, aka Draco Malfoy, so you know he's not going to be able to handle what happens eh?  Anyhow, they're trying to contact the same 70's seance entity to PROVE that ghosts are really real.  He's a super spooky looking dude who isn't give a backstory, so I don't even remember his name.   I dunno why they'd want to contact such an evil looking bastard.  I know you can't judge a book by it's cover, but c'mon dude looks straight up EVIL.  Of course, it goes off the rails wrong, and one of them, not Draco, gets sucked into blackness.

Next you're getting acquainted with a couple in some desert city, Arizona or Nevada, maybe it's California, but it doesn't really matter where.  All that matters it's a big ole suburb that Kelly and Ben have just moved into, and it's basically full of empty houses - they have ONE neighbour.  Aside from the product placement purpose of the Costco shopping scenes,  why are all these shots of the Kristen Stewartish girl, (Ashley Greene), and her boyfriend, (Sebastian Stan), doing their just moved in, need to do some nesting chores, taking up so much screen time?  In a good film, stuff like this is character development.  Scenes that show them doing everyday people things, establish the protagonists and clue you into caring about them.  This is an important step, because you need to care about the film folk, otherwise seeing them getting threatened isn't nearly as spooky.  Make connection with audience.  Check...barely.  Now on to the spooks!

The progression of the haunting was slooow and the entity has random abilities.  First it's moving stuff around, opening doors and then it manifests as mold.  Ooooo gross! Mold!  That stuff really is deadly, ya know.  Also the entity manages to kill the neighbour's  dog.  The dog just keels over so it wasn't gross, just sad.  I thought it was mean to kill off a dog, but I guess it made the ghostie seem more threatening.

Actually the worst part of the movie is that the boyfriend Ben KNOWS something bad is happening, but he hides this from his girlfriend.  I was confused actually, because I didn't realize that the boyfriend was the camera guy from the experiment.  I thought it just switched to a random couple with no connection to the opening scenes, because you NEVER saw the boyfriend/camera man's face in the video footage of the seance recreation experiment.

Kinda cheap, but horror is rife with the cheap tricks.  Whatever works eh?  In any case, Ben is a shitty fucking boyfriend.  He saw that girl get sucked into blackness, and you know what?  That was his girlfriend!  OMG what a douchey guy.  He eventually gets found out and tries to explain his douchey behaviour, saying he thought if she didn't know about the experiment, she'd be safe.  Whatever guy, and what a load of paternalistic crap too.

Actually none of the haunting stuff makes any sense, nor the ghostbustery stuff that is supposed to create the monster, or let the entity come through or whatever the bullshit story was.  There was no logic to it.  I think it was likely written backwards -  dude thought of some spooky scenes he could shoot and strung them together with the story attached awkwardly with lots of metaphorical duct tape.

The movie is gonna appeal to teenagers and they probably won't even mind that it's a dumb flick that makes no sense, because they likely haven't experienced many good horror films.  Unfortunately this one does nothing to change that situation either.

Underworld Awakening

directed by Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein (2012)

About the only thing I really was engaged by in this movie was picking out the Vancouver backdrops.  The evil lab?  That's SFU.

If only the rest of the movie was near as interesting as puzzling out where it could have been shot.  I didn't give a fuck about anyone in this.  The lead vampire? hunter?  I haven't seen the preceding 3 flicks, so I didn't know what was all led up to this one.  They explained the back story in the beginning, something about vampires battling werewolves until one guy became both, a hybrid vamp-lycan, and the lady vampire (Kate Beckinsale), who kills werewolves, fell in love with him and started killing bad traitorous vampires instead of just sticking it to the wolfman.  blah blah blah.  It still didn't make a whole lotta sense.  All I got was that somewhere in there was supposed justification for her to hunt down a bunch of folk she needs to kill: wolf people, regular people, vampire people.  She kills 'em all.  And really grossly, explicitly too.  Like hardcore head shots and dropping people out of windows after they've begged for their lives too.  NO MERCY! I know I'm supposed to be rooting for her badassery, but I didn't like her and if she'd died I wouldn't have cared.  I would have felt good actually, like yeah you deserved that you mercenary bitch.  What makes you think you have the right to kill all these folk?  They are trying to kill you? An eye for an eye?  More like pop allll their eyeballs for trying to pop yours.

That's what's really fucked about this movie.  It's stupid to kill people. Whatever, this is magic silliness. right? There are no vampires, or werewolves, but there are video games and it's fun killing mindless others in video games, smashing sprites to oblivion, but does this inhumanity towards humanesque monstrosities translate into a lack of respect for humanity generally?  Intuitively, I'd say yes.  Yeah killing is the prime directive in many video games and action movies, and sure you aren't seeing "real" people being brutalized and murdered.  But you are seeing violence and you're supposed to be enjoying it, and isn't there something fucked up about that?  Why am I supposed to think it's okay for one class of people to be destroyed?  Why do you want me to root for their complete annihilation?  Why does feeding bloodthirsty instincts feel so dirty and backward?  I dunno that these questions are reasonable to ask of a cash grab action horror smackdown, but so what, they are still good questions.  Bottom line is I felt bored and often disgusted by the excess of violence and pandering to baser instincts that ran rampant all throughout this flick.