Prom Night

Prom Night is a remake of, well, Prom Night, a post-Halloween and pre-Halloween 2 Jamie Lee Curtis shocker featuring sundry deaths at the hands of an axe-wielding maniac. During a school prom. You’ve probably seen it; not in reality, but just then, in your mind’s eye. How difficult can it be to imagine?

In the flesh, as you’d expect, it’s a pretty poor film and I was more than a little surprised that it was slated to get the remake treatment. But then, everything is managing the, ahem, ‘re-imagining’ treatment these days.

On the plus side it’s certainly quite polished, and competently filmed. There are no boom shots in frame, for one thing, so it scores over The Happening for that, at least; the actors presumably have remembered all their lines in the right order; and no-one bumps into the scenery unless scripted to. Beyond that it’s really quite difficult to work out why they bothered.

Admittedly, it allows us to view a taste of Brittany Snow’s considerable talent (although that remains sadly corseted at all times):

Snow is the teen scream queen who’s being pursued by the local nut job, who managed to hold it together, despite his obvious psychological disadvantages, long enough to escape from the local high security mental facility. He then eludes police surveillance for three days and cleverly infiltrates the swanky hotel where Brittany and her pals are having their, yes, their prom night. Said loony has been obsessed with the young lass for years (he used to be her science teacher) and really that’s more than enough plot from me. Actually, wait up, that is the plot.

Despite being stonkingly chicken oriental, our killer is remarkably neat and tidy, for the murders are the most bloodless, sanitised offings you could hope for. A bit like that controversial Tracey Beaker episode where Roxy slices up Duke and Elaine the Pain with the artroom spatula; some foot-wobbling muscle spasm, but no claret. You know the thing. Very pre-watershed. This is almost 12 certificate material, to be fair, and other than one extremely mild reference to a bout of teenage jiggy-jiggy, there is nothing here that wouldn’t stop it from becoming the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association’s favourite teenagers in peril cautionary tale.

An ironic buddy act between The Wire’s Stringer Bell and Ziggy Sobotka as two frantic and not really very good cops is the only distraction of note, and just about kept me interested until the predictable finale.

But there is a serious side to all this. Prom Night performed fairly solidly at the US box office and for a couple of weeks pissed all over opposition like Keanu Reeves’s Street Kings and the Jodie Foster vehicle Nim’s Island. While good returns continue, who knows when the remake treadmill will falter. Clearly it has some way to go before it fizzles out. In fact, after Rob Zombie’s pointless Halloween remake last year we’ve still got new versions of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left, The Birds, Near Dark and Hellraiser to look forward to. Well, I say ‘look forward’.

But is it what we want? Is it what we deserve?

, for Snow’s aesthetic appeal and the Wire alumni

The Incredible Hulk

I only saw brief sections of Ang Lee’s mostly-derided Hulk, and although I wouldn’t be able to write most of what I thought about it up into a review of any great length, it seemed…well…slow. I guess you have to take your hat off to someone trying to do something different in the Super Hero market, but hey, bad choice fella. Big green monsters mixed in with feelings and character? It was never going to be loved, was it?

Just a few short years later, and we have a new interpretation of the Stan Lee penned comic book phenomenon, and this time it’s very specifically called The Incredible Hulk, because this movie is taking us back to basics. Heck, it even has Lee in it for a few seconds.

I was trying, believe me, to go into this with an open mind. Having been pleasantly impressed by Nolan’s reworking of the Batman franchise, it seemed possible that something similar might, with a bit of luck, happen here. Think again. This hope is dashed immediately the Marvel Studios ident fades to black. There is no pre-credit sequence, because a mountain of back story is thrown at the audience over the opening titles. Drowning in a laughably portentous orchestral anthem, Bruce Banner’s scientific experiments into gamma radiation, some shadowy militaristic involvement, disaster, poisoning, the taking on of super powers, escape and exile are all crammed into a minute of near-subliminally brief images and crazy pantomime acting that cleverly reduces your expectations for the next two hours to a comforting, fat, spongy, zero. But, OK, so Ang Lee this ain’t. Maybe it’ll just be a rollicking good adventure ride, a rollercoaster of fun and frolics?

Nah. Having set you down in your chair and told you this is going to be mindless fun, it then proceeds to deliver just that. Only, minus the fun part.

We rediscover Banner (Edward Norton, doing earnest and sincere and deep) sitting cross-legged and going ‘Omm’ a lot, doing that mystical self-control thing. Obviously, in realising that he’s hosting a 14ft embodiment of pure rage, that he expands to an anabolically enhanced hypertrophic size when his pulse gets above 200bpm, he’s decided that the most sensible place to pass his time would be one of Brazil’s infamous favelas, working in a sweat shop, and living in crowded, antagonistic conditions. But of course. I mean, let’s eschew some Tibetan mountainside hermit life, for goodness’ sake.

Anyhoo, the US Army find him and attempt to drop a team of mean Special Ops types in there, to open a can of whup-ass or similar, presumably, and bring the creature home. Seconded to this unit is Tim Roth, as lead meanie. Roth has a special place in Hollywood; his character is immediately unsurpassable in the evilness stakes. As he walks purposefully into the army base from which he’s about to lead the mission, we’re told his nationality is Russian/English. Now, come on! How nasty is that, exactly? The Tinsel Town stereotype-shortcut venn diagram of moody bastardness intersects at Russian and English, and Tim Roth stands solely in the middle. Good man! He is, we’re expected to believe, seconded via the Royal Marines, but it seems he’s allowed to wear US Army uniform (not really sure how that works), and, more importantly, and perhaps critically, he has the least amount of military bearing I have ever seen in a major character asked to play a soldier. Private Pyle crossed with Rodney Trotter would have filled the uniform with more menace. Roth just looks like a joke, and it’s at this point that the 12A cert really begins to bite. Perhaps if Roth had been able to really let his invective fly, I might have believed that he was a fighter (not a very principled fighter, obviously, more like one of those weasley little shits who carries a stanley and blames other people, but certainly he’d have come across a bit tougher). Here, he’s a slightly paunchy, drop-shouldered, greasy (long-)haired, pastey nothing. It’s a joke, and you become embarrassed for him. Not as much as you do for William Hurt, though, who has to do the white-haired cigar-chomping US General thing, and not swear. Hurt and Roth have both done really good work, and are two people I’ve always enjoyed watching, but this is a serious low point.

Not as much as it is for Norton, though, who seems determined to nail his once promising career firmly into the dirt. All the excitement and élan that carried him through Fight Club and American History X is gurgling away down the plug of each passing Red Dragon, or Italian Job, or Illusionist. It’s sad, and this may be the saddest point of all. Or, possibly, it’s disappearing up his arse, as it seems that Norton cheerfully rewrote chunks of the script each day on set, and also spent hours discussing his character’s life before the gamma experiments. “I don’t think,” he said, “that in great literature/films explaining the story’s roots means it comes in the beginning. Audiences know the story, so we’re dealing with it artfully.”

Christ.

The problem, though, that the film carries around with it from the start, and which burdens it beyond endurance, has nothing to do with the actors, although it is an issue concerning the main protagonist. The main difficulty is entirely due to the plain and simple unbelievability of the Hulk as an entity. Smartly shot in shadow for the first main stand-off, when the creature finally comes out into the light it’s, well, is rubbish too strong a word? The Hulk is simply too CGI-y; he just looks like a creature made on a PC, or just stepped out of a videogame. I understand that the cinematic Hulk and the franchised multi-platformed game Hulk, are built on the same model, and that would fit, because whereas the physical CGI-d stuff (crashing helicopters and spinning cars and broken buildings) all look solid and perfect, the real living thing may as well have a ripped “I’m a CGI construct” logo down the side of his ludicrously expandable kecks. It looks terrible. Not scary, not angry, not believable.

Sigh. The film lumbers predictably on – via an increasingly tiring series of nods to the old TV series – towards a mundane and too-loud showdown, which the Hulk wins and everyone goes home, trying not to look at all the busted up buildings dotted around New York City, and the remarkable lack of bodies (like the A Team, the body count is absurdly low). It is impossible to care for any of these people, and so we are left in a vacuum of zero development and involvement. At the end, going ‘Omm’ again, this time sensibly snuck away in the Canadian wilderness, Banner looks at the camera, smiles a smile and his eyes go green. Whoop-di-fucking-do. The screen goes black and you expect the credits, but wait…this movie finally has something good up its sleeve. Good on the Planet Cynical, I mean, obviously.

Hurt’s General, drinking himself silly in a bar somewhere, finds himself standing next to Robert Downey Jr, in full Tony Stark from Iron Man character mode. “I’m building a team,” he says. And then the credits. As an advert, it’s exceptional. 112 minutes of preamble, and then the killer punchline. Ladies and Gentlemen, you’ve been franchised.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Happening

My mate Nick has, for a couple of years now, been running a 6-weekly event called the Monster Night. It’s an entertaining, high concept evening where a bunch of pals watch three, mostly horror, movies that we haven’t seen before, or at least not for many years. The remit is simple. The very good need not be considered: here we want 1950s Japanese sci-fi (usually starring one American actor who may have had a speaking part in a film you’ve heard about); 1970s full-on Italian carnivals of gore; 1980s slasher movies that never had a cinematic release; crappy 1990s UK horror films that even Xtro would look down on with justified contempt. This is a celebration of all that’s not even good enough to be mediocre, and we love it. Who can forget the classic moment at the end of Twitch of the Death Nerve when two children we’ve not been told about turn up out of the blue and kill the main actors, and then start laughing uncontrollably? Who doesn’t look back fondly on Rhona Cameron’s cruel demise in the dismal Funny Man? Who can even remember the absurd ending to the soporific Demons of Ludlow? I can’t, I was asleep, along with everyone else.

All we ask is bad acting, a bit of nubile running and screaming from some long-gone Page 3 stunna, a splash of gore and lots of pizza and beer. Quality is not essential, or even desired. And that’s why, in ten years or so, M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening will probably make an appearance somewhere between Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Inseminoid Girl.

The Happening has a lot in common with many of the movies we’ve giggled over recently, not least an on-the-back of a beer mat simple plot, an awful and pretentious script several drafts short of comprehensible, woeful acting, and a dispiriting final sense of Is That It?

What it doesn’t share with these entertaining slices of rubbish is that they don’t make you physically violent with rage and fury as you sit through them.

Shyamalan’s films have relied on twist endings ever since The Sixth Sense turned its audience upside down with ghoulish glee almost ten years ago. Unbreakable has arguably a better and more satisfying switch-around, but nevertheless, it seemed that the director had painted himself into a corner, creating a Twist genre all his own. The Happening, I can only conclude, is his attempt to break away from that concept in the most ironic way possible, by turning the whole idea on its head and having The Best Part in the first three minutes. The rest just ambling away into dull exposition and self-reverential hooey.

The opening sequence is remarkable. It’s 8.33 on a fine New York morning, and we’re in Central Park. The good people of the Big Apple are busying themselves with keep fit regimes, school runs, or getting to work. And then they all stop, a scream is heard in the distance and, inexplicably, they all begin to die by their own hand. It’s terrifically well done and extraordinarily creepy, which may go part way to explaining why the same scene is, shamefully, repeated almost identically not once, but twice, later on.

From that opening moment, and I don’t feel at all mean in saying this, and will explain why later, it is immediately down hill. Immediately. Get that? Immediately. For, following a well-executed creepy and disorienting slice of proper theatre, we are introduced to Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) who will be our hero for the evening. Elliot, and this needs to be hammered home repeatedly, is a Science Teacher (capital ‘T’ there). If Jim Royle were watching this, he’d no doubt opine ‘Science Teacher My Arse’, and I’d be forced to agree with him. Elliot is a Science Teacher in the same sense that Robert Mugabe is a human being. They might look like they’re made of the correct genetic material (Wahlberg even wears a tank top, and at one point says ‘whom’, how teacher-y is that?), but beyond looks they’re nowhere near accomplished enough to convince.

In the second scene, Elliot is holding a Natural History class that is so infuriatingly anti-science, waffly and woolly that it makes you want to thump him very hard between the eyes. The essence of this irritation is a discussion where Elliot suggests that science can only ever provide theories for why things happen, but that ultimately we just have to accept that ’stuff’ occurs because it’s an unknowable act of nature. Really. He says that. Shyamalan then almost does the hitting for you with the lens; there are innumerable super close-ups of Elliot’s inquisitive mush (and who wouldn’t remain baffled when ‘just because’ is your mantra?), his brow furrowed and his little piggy eyes peering inquisitively out of his screwed up potato-y face. His wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), suffers from the same affliction, her first scene being an ultra close examination of her puzzled features. These occur throughout and I guess that Shyamalan is trying to tell us that these people are seriously confused.

And so are we. What exactly is this Happening that we’re all stuck in the movie auditorium to see? Why are people killing themselves? Why is everyone dying in increasingly silly ways? Why does Elliot talk like that? What is the point of John Leguizamo’s character? Didn’t he, surely, have a much bigger part but for some sensible studio exec blue-pencilling it because people simply wouldn’t put up with more than 90 minutes of this shit? Why am I here? Why have I wasted £7.50 on some meandering, preachy, pompous bullshit that’s determined to give me the most self-damaging ecological down-talking lesson I’ve ever heard?

The reason for the Happening is easily gleaned from the briefest of forays into the film. Read a review, and there it is, go to the movie’s official site, and there it is. When the theory (although, hey, right? right?) is posited about 30 minutes in, as people flee the city and head into the countryside, that’s the end of any development plot-wise, and the Happening as it stands becomes a non-event. Wait for a twist and you’ll be sadly disappointed, wait for a moment of clarity and you’ll be seriously disappointed; all that we have here is a rapidly diminishing cast of characters – although how you kill yourself in an open field with no weapons or instruments of any kind is never really shown – and a speedily rising level of patronising guff.

Two jarring gear changes almost provide the promise of salvation, but they are no more than sad set-pieces placed before us to ‘make us think’. In one, Elliot leads his gang into a model Dream Home where everything is made out of plastic, and the billboard shouts “You Deserve This!” Geddit? I’ll be charitable and suggest that clear boomshot is intended as further proof that we’re all living in an artificial world and we’ve brought this on ourselves. In the second, clunky, sequence, the group impose themselves on a paranoid old lady who is convinced they mean to murder her. At this point I almost expected her to be The Answer for all the ills that have befallen these ‘normal’ folk up until now (we are, we’re told, in the very epicentre of the mass disturbances and deaths) but this is not explored at all and is left to fizzle out pointlessly.

No, there is nothing Happening here. As we reach the end, and our small company of hopeless idiots sit pathetically in a basement waiting for the end, we drift into a coda of such breathtaking pointlessness that the only thing that is left for us to do is to stare at the screen and think, “is that really it?” More heartfelt and robust messages of irritation were levelled at the screen than that, however, as I left, I can assure you. As I got up, I thought of that old Buffalo Springfield song, “Something’s Happening Here ….What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear”. Well, it’s clear all right, it’s a man trying to mesmerise us, and falling short.

Poorly acted, poorly executed and incompetent at almost every point, bar that opening sequence, this is Une Grande Idée with nothing extra to add, nothing behind it but a beermat’s worth of thoughts, and no considered follow-up. It just doesn’t work. None of the pieces click. It’s empty and vacuous and all the worse for that, because it thinks it’s important and meaningful.

You know what? Maybe The Happening won’t be on a future Monster Night agenda. I just don’t think it’s up to our usual standard.