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Rings (2017)

25 Friday Aug 2017

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D: F. Javier Gutiérrez / 102m

Cast: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D’Onofrio, Aimee Teegarden, Bonnie Morgan

Inevitability. In the world of franchise horror, the word is a touchstone for movie makers everywhere. Where there is one horror movie that’s been successful (even moderately so), chances are that someone will come along and make another. And another. And another, until the law of diminishing returns – financial, not artistic – brings an end to the whole terrible enterprise. For a while.

The latest franchise entry to be foisted on us without any kind of encouragement from fans, interested third parties, previous investors, or the terminally bewildered, Rings is a redundant exercise in supernatural nonsense that outstays its welcome right from the very start. Set on a plane, the opening scene plays out like a game of tag as first one passenger then another, and then another, reveals that they’ve all watched the dreaded videotape featuring Samara. It’s seven days on for all of them – just what are the odds? – and there’s nowhere for them to go: the plane’s in the air and the video screens are all working. And sure enough, heeeeeere’s Samara! Inevitably (there’s that word again), the plane crashes, killing everyone aboard. But has the cycle been broken?

Fast forward two years and the answer is an obvious, of course not. A college professor called Gabriel (Galecki) buys a battered old VCR at a garage sale and inevitably it contains a copy of the cursed videotape (just how many copies of this videotape were made?). Inevitably, Gabriel watches it. We’re then side-tracked into the lives of generic teen lovebirds, Julia (Lutz) and Holt (Roe) just as Holt is about to go off to college (guess who’s a professor there?). When Holt stops returning her calls and texts, and she receives a mysterious call from a girl called Skye (Teegarden) asking after Holt’s whereabouts, Julia drops everything and heads to Holt’s college. Soon, she’s met Skye and Gabriel, been introduced to “The Sevens”, a group of students involved in an experiment of Gabriel’s devising that involves Samara’s videotape, and been a passive witness to Skye’s demise. She learns that Holt has watched the tape and has twelve hours left before Samara kills him. Julia watches it too, but when she gets the call to tell her she has “seven days”, the phone burns a mark into her palm, and she has a vision of a door.

All this sets up a road trip to the town of Sacrament Valley, and an investigation into the whereabouts of Samara’s remains (Julia and Holt believe that by cremating her remains, Samara’s curse will be lifted). Soon they’re breaking into tombs, visiting a blind man named Burke (D’Onofrio) who knows some of Samara’s history in the town, and discovering hidden rooms below the church. There’s danger, more danger, continued supernatural threat, death, injury, more death, and a sequel-baiting ending that wants to have its Samara-shaped cake and eat it as well. Does it make any sense? On a convoluted, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-simpler level, no, it doesn’t, and mainly because Samara’s influence is allowed to have an effect beyond the videotape and her murderous follow-up courtesy call seven days later. This allows for the deaths of two characters that are at odds with the basic set up, and an ending that makes no sense because it undermines the admittedly skewed logic created from the start, and the greater mythology of the franchise as a whole – as anyone who remembers the end of The Ring Two (2005) should be able to attest.

So what we have here is a belated series’ revival that should be filed under “cash-in”, or “uninspired knock-off”. It tries to reinvent the wheel in terms of Samara’s origins in an attempt to provide viewers with something different from previous outings, but in doing so, becomes laboured and unaccountably dull. Much of the time spent in Sacrament Valley plods along at a pace that defies audience involvement, and with each new plot “development” the sounds of heads being scratched and confused sighs being released act as a measure of just how stale the script has become. Said script has been cobbled together by David Loucka, Jacob Estes, and Akiva Goldsman (what with this and The Dark Tower, Goldsman isn’t exactly having a banner year – and that’s without his story credit for Transformers: The Last Knight). With its bland central duo, reflexive storyline and make-it-up-as-you-go-along plotting, Rings is a horror movie that aims to be as creepy as its forebears, but then forgets that the old trick of having Samara emerging from a TV has lost much of its original impact. The troubled teen spirit is old hat now, a horror icon who no longer possesses the power to frighten audiences, except in relation to how living in a well isn’t too good for the complexion.

At the helm of all this is Gutiérrez, a director whose last stint behind the camera was in 2008. There are certain moments and scenes where it’s clear he’s opted for a generic approach to the material, but what’s unclear is whether this was due to budgetary constraints or creative decision-making. But what it does is to make the movie drag for much of its latter half, which in conjunction with the script’s grinding to a dramatic halt, leaves the viewer stranded waiting for the movie to become interesting again. But neither the script nor Gutiérrez can overcome the lack of original ideas being put forward, and much as he might try, Gutiérrez lacks the wherewithal to inject a much needed spark into proceedings. The performances are perfunctory and lack depth (which is perhaps inevitable given the material), and the cinematography relies too heavily on scenes being lit as if exploring the wider edges of the frame wasn’t required, or important. Even the movie’s few jump scares are tired approximations of previous jump scares. With so much that’s ineffective and mundane, the only thing the viewer can hope for is that, despite its success at the box office, this is one sequel-cum-reboot that puts off anyone revisiting the curse of Samara anytime soon.

Rating: 4/10 – stereotypical even by horror franchise standards, and lacking a perceptible style all its own, Rings adds nothing of value to the series, instead settling for telling the kind of melodramatic detective story that has been done to death dozens of times before; a movie then that serves only to reinforce just how the franchise has deteriorated since the heady days of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 original.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

30 Tuesday May 2017

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aka Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge

D: Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg / 129m

Cast: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Geoffrey Rush, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally, Golshifteh Farahani, David Wenham, Stephen Graham, Angus Barnett, Martin Klebba, Adam Brown, Giles New, Lewis McGowan, Orlando Bloom, Paul McCartney

Six years after Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides appeared to have brought the franchise to an end, Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer have resurrected Captain Jack Sparrow for one more round of hijinks on the high seas. This movie and a potential sixth in the series were being planned even before On Stranger Tides was released, but production delays and script problems kept Dead Men Tell No Tales from our screens until now. It’s debatable that anyone outside of the cast and crew and studio bosses were enthusiastic about the idea of a fifth movie, and it’s doubtful that even die-hard fans were expecting too much from it, but the series has made a lot of money since it began back in 2003 – over $3.7 billion before this installment – so perhaps another entry shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

Dead Men Tell No Tales harks back to the simpler, more effective pleasures found in the series’ first movie, Curse of the Black Pearl, and attempts to forget the bloated excesses of the previous two installments by imitating much of what made that movie so successful. However, this approach hasn’t meant a return to form, but instead has stopped the rot. You can argue that this is a better movie than On Stranger Tides, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but both as a stand-alone entry and the continuation of a series that provides links to its predecessors in an ongoing game of Guess-the-Reference, number five in the series is still found wanting.

For a start, there’s the plot, a mish-mash of ideas that are borne out of the idea that hidden somewhere at sea is the Trident of Poseidon, and that this is the cure for all the curses of the sea. At the start of the movie, a young Henry Turner (McGowan) confronts his father, Will (Bloom), and tells him of his plan to find the Trident and free him from his fate as the Flying Dutchman. Will believes the Trident can’t be found, but Henry is determined. Nine years later, Henry is now a young man (Thwaites), and still searching for the Trident, as is astronomer Carina Smyth (Scodelario). She has a book that gives clues to the Trident’s whereabouts, but has been condemned by the British as a witch. Henry, meanwhile, has encountered the ghost of Captain Salazar (Bardem) who is seeking revenge on Captain Jack Sparrow for his supernatural existence. On the island of St Martin, Henry, Carina and Jack all come together and make sail for the unmarked island that can’t be navigated to, closely followed by Salazar and interested party Barbossa (Rush).

There’s more – much more – and therein lies one of the movie’s biggest problems: it takes what should be a fairly straightforward idea and twists it so far out of shape that every attempt to straighten it out merely serves to make it less and less, and less, straightforward. The plot becomes buried under layer after layer of unnecessary twists and turns and double crosses and “clever” subterfuges. The characters’ individual storylines become convoluted and unwieldy, with one relationship forged out of nothing, and as for any character development, that’s been ignored in favour of getting everyone from point A to point B with a minimum of effort or fuss. For a movie that was delayed partly because of script problems, it makes you wonder just how bad scribe Jeff Nathanson’s original screenplay really was (or if Johnny Depp’s widely credited contributions are to blame instead).

Another problem lies with the character of Jack Sparrow himself. Five movies in and it’s clear that the character has run out of steam both dramatically and comedically. He’s a pale shadow of his former self, no longer as witty as he once was, or retaining the skewed moral compass he once had, and halfway to being a lampoon. And for the most part Depp is going through the motions, offering brief glimpses of the portrayal that made such an impact fourteen years ago, but unable to rekindle the past glories that came with that portrayal. The usual grinning and grimacing are there but that’s the point: it’s exactly the same grinning and grimacing we’ve already seen four times before. When your main character becomes more and more of a caricature with every outing, then it’s time to really shake things up and do something different.

But doing something different – anything different – isn’t part of the movie’s agenda. Instead, newcomers Rønning and Sandberg cleave to the look and feel of the first movie, but are hamstrung by having little in the way of dramatic meat to work with, and a preponderance of comedic moments that are self-referential and which largely fall flat. Yes, there are moments where you’ll smile and maybe chuckle to yourself, but outright laughs are as rare as someone in Salazar’s crew having a complete body. The various action set pieces offer the occasional frisson, but again there’s very little that holds the attention or seems fresh by design or in execution. A bank heist early on plays like a low-budget version of the vault robbery from Fast Five (2011), while the finale steals its set up from the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956).

On the acting front, returnees Rush, McNally, Klebba, Graham, Barnett, New, and Bloom do what they need to do within the confines of the script, while newcomers Bardem, Thwaites, Scodelario, Farahani (as a thinly disguised version of Naomie Harris’s Calypso), and Wenham face exactly the same problem. When an actor of the calibre of Javier Bardem can’t manage to make a character such as Salazar even occasionally memorable then there’s definitely something wrong going on. And just when you thought there wasn’t a rock star who could give a worse performance than Keith Richards in a Pirates movie, up pops Paul McCartney as Jack’s Uncle Jack, an appearance that makes you pray he doesn’t pop up again.

In essence, this is a movie (and a fourth sequel to boot) that atones for the appalling nature of its immediate predecessor, but which in doing so, defaults to being predictable and safe. This makes it a movie that offers few rewards for its fans, and even fewer rewards for anyone coming to the franchise for the first time. A post credits scene sets up a sixth movie which looks set to bring back another character from the series’ past, but if it does, then it will have to be a vast improvement on this entry, and perhaps require a complete rethink of a franchise that has gone astray and which shows no immediate signs of finding its way back.

Rating: 4/10 – impressive CGI and beautiful locations are about the best things in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, but even they aren’t good enough to rescue a movie that opts for mediocre as a first choice, and is only fitfully entertaining; a tiptoe in the right direction for the franchise but still an underwhelming experience for anyone who remembers the glory days of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

The Last Witch Hunter (2015)

02 Monday Nov 2015

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Last Witch Hunter, The

D: Breck Eisner / 106m

Cast: Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Michael Caine, Julie Engelbrecht, Joseph Gilgun, Isaach De Bankolé, Rena Owen

The fantasy-horror movie has been less than entertaining in recent years, what with Van Helsing (2004), the Underworld series (2003-2012), and I, Frankenstein (2014) showing just how it shouldn’t be done. And yet despite these weary efforts we now have The Last Witch Hunter, a movie that remains as jumbled and ineffectual as its genre predecessors. It’s a project that began life as a featured screenplay in the 2010 Blacklist, and was originally set to be directed by Timur Bekmambetov back in 2012. But those plans fell through, and with the project being championed by Vin Diesel (an avid fan of fantasy role playing games), it made it into production once its star was free after the interrupted filming of Furious 7 (2015).

If the movie proves anything, it’s that scripts on the Blacklist aren’t always filmed as written – the original script by Cory Goodman was rewritten by Dante Harper and Melissa Walack before Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless finally ended up with the on-screen credit. Well, gentlemen, don’t be so proud, because if Goodman’s original script was really that good, then let’s make it clear: you guys went and ruined it.

It’s a movie that remains frustratingly remote from its audience throughout, and which fails to make its witchcraft-plunging-the-world-into-darkness storyline and plot even halfway exciting or dramatic. It’s a lot more serious than most, and not as po-faced as some of its competitors, but aside from one terrific joke involving a selfie, this is dour stuff that takes the end of the world as we know it and manages to make it about as threatening as flipping a pancake. And no matter how much Diesel glowers and frets, and no matter how much Ólafsson speaks of the world swallowed up by doom, we all know that whatever happens, Leslie is probably going to be the best bet for helping Kaulder – Diesel’s character – as he fights to discover who tried to kill his mentor and friend Father Dolan (Caine). (Oh, and we can be fairly certain that one character will prove to be less than they appear.)

Last Witch Hunter, The - scene

Fantasy movies have a tough time now, what with the likes of Game of Thrones showing just how it can, and should, be done, and Diesel’s pet project suffers in much the same way as others of its ilk have done: in trying to set their bizarre plots and outlandish characters against the recognisable backdrop of modern times, they then go and wilfully ignore that backdrop in favour of elaborate special effects sequences where anything goes, and where any carefully established grounding in the here and now is catapulted right out of the narrative. If you’re going to have a showdown between good and evil, don’t hide it away in dingy basements or abandoned churches, where the viewer can ogle the impressive art direction or set design, but have it right out in the open: make magic a shocking, but real part of our daily existence (part of the fun of Ghost Busters (1984) is that everyone in New York sees the Stay-Puft Man).

And then there’s the plot itself, which sees Diesel’s barbarian warrior and his pals take on the Witch Queen (Engelbrecht) in pre-medieval times, only for them to fall one by one until it’s left to Kaulder to save the day. But in doing so she curses him to immortality – and provides a handy way for her to be resurrected in the future. And therein lies the movie’s first problem: Kaulder isn’t the last witch hunter, he’s the only witch hunter. But put that aside and then we have another problem: why is it that it always takes so long for the villain of the piece to be able to make a comeback? Here it’s eight hundred years, during which time Kaulder has played policeman in the witch community, and everything is predictably hunky dory (it all has something to do with the Witch Queen’s heart, which apparently, can still beat long after she’s dead – obviously).

Last Witch Hunter, The - scene2

Tasked to “Remember your death” by Father Dolan in the form of a handy clue made while he was being killed, Kaulder can’t just cast his mind back and remember it for himself. Instead he has to enlist the aid of a witch, the conveniently to hand Chloe (Leslie) who has to concoct a potion that will allow him to re-experience that fateful moment. Only that just leads to the next problem: he didn’t die, so why all this rigmarole? Could it be that old screenwriter’s fallback, padding? Or is it just a poorly conceived idea that nobody could fix during shooting (or wanted to)? There’s lots more that doesn’t add up or make sense, and it all goes to reinforce the idea that when it comes to fantasy, as long as the movie looks good – and The Last Witch Hunter does look good – then the story and the dialogue can be as ridiculous as it wants.

With a sequel already in pre-production, and despite a lukewarm reception at the box office, it’s clear that this is an attempt by Diesel to kick-start another franchise he can head up. But while he may be committed to telling further tales as Kaulder, he might just find, based on this “opener”, that not everyone will be as willing to follow him on that particular journey as they are when he gets behind a muscle car and trades macho stares with Dwayne Johnson.

Rating: 5/10 – genre conventions abound in this absurdly watchable yet majorly disappointing piece of fantasy, that at least sees its star smile more in one movie than he’s done in five (and a bit) Fast & Furious outings; derivative and lacking in real purpose, The Last Witch Hunter has neither the style nor the wit to help itself stand out from an already dispiriting crowd.

Pay the Ghost (2015)

19 Saturday Sep 2015

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Pay the Ghost

D: Uli Edel / 94m

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Lyriq Bent, Jack Fulton, Veronica Ferres, Susannah Hoffmann, Lauren Beatty, Stephen McHattie

It’s Halloween, and newly tenured professor Mike Lawford (Cage) arrives home just in time to take his young son Charlie (Fulton) to a nearby Halloween carnival. Charlie is a little nervous as the night before he saw something outside his bedroom window, and at the carnival he sees a large vulture circling overhead, though Mike doesn’t. When they queue up to get ice cream, Charlie asks his dad if they can “pay the ghost”, and in seconds he’s disappeared. Mike searches frantically for him but there’s no trace of Charlie, only the pirate hat he was wearing as part of his Halloween costume. The police are called, and the lead detective, Reynolds (Bent) assures Mike that these things usually resolve themselves within twenty-four hours.

A year later, with three days to go before Halloween, Mike and his wife Kristen (Callies) have separated, and Charlie is still missing. Mike pesters Detective Reynolds, accusing him of not trying hard enough, while also putting up flyers detailing Charlie’s disappearance. When he begins to hear Charlie’s voice, he initially doubts his senses, but when he sees him on a bus and chases after it, it leads him to an abandoned warehouse that’s become home to a group of vagrants. On the outside of the building the phrase “pay the ghost” has been painted. Mike asks if anyone knows what it means, and a blind man (McHattie) shows him a wall covered with the phrase; however he has little more to offer.

Mike tries to convince Kristen that Charlie might be trying to communicate with them from wherever he’s been taken. He discovers that a child who went missing on the Halloween before Charlie’s disappearance also said the same thing to her father. Kristen refuses to believe him until she has her own supernatural encounter. Together, Charlie’s parents begin to look into the number of child disappearances that have occurred on Halloween; a disturbing pattern emerges, one that leads them to believe that this has been happening for a very long time. They dig deeper, and find that the abductions are related to a tragedy that happened over three hundred years before.

Pay the Ghost - scene

For fans of Nicolas Cage, it’s been a rough few years since his lauded turn in Kick-Ass (2010). Since then, only Joe (2013) has shown audiences what Cage can do when he’s fully engaged with a project. Otherwise, the movies he’s chosen to star in have been so lacking in quality they could only have been taken on as a way of paying off his mortgage. Anyone who’s sat through the likes of Seeking Justice (2011), Rage (2014), and/or Left Behind (2014) will have wondered what’s happened to an actor who won an Oscar for one of the most powerful portrayals of an alcoholic ever committed to celluloid. With each new movie, his loyal fans must hope that this will be the one to change his dwindling fortunes and prove he still has what it takes.

Alas, Pay the Ghost isn’t the one. Here Cage doesn’t so much phone in his performance as fax it over an intermittent connection. Trying to maintain a semblance of commitment to the material, Cage goes through the motions with all the intensity of someone who can’t wait to move on to the next project. At one point, after Kristen has made it clear she blames Mike for losing Charlie, Cage is required to fall to the floor and begin crying. It should be an uncomfortable moment of parental grief, but instead it’s uncomfortable because Cage can’t sell the emotion (or any tears). In comparison with Callies, who at least makes an effort to be traumatised by Charlie’s disappearance, Cage sleepwalks through their scenes together, only showing any passion when called upon to share his growing suspicions about Charlie’s abduction.

To be fair to Cage, he isn’t helped by the material, a hodgepodge of supernatural thriller clichés stitched together by screenwriter Dan Gay and adapted from the novella by Tim Lebbon. Fans of the genre will have fun spotting the references to other, similar movies, while the makers of the Insidious franchise will have good cause to wonder if Edel and co. haven’t made an unofficial companion movie to that particular series (Hoffmann’s medium is certainly no match for Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier). You know a movie hasn’t got a clue when the supernatural entity at the heart of everything is able to organise all kinds of mischief at the drop of a hat – including killing someone by spontaneous combustion – but fails to put Cage off his stride at any point (yes, he’s the hero, but really, shouldn’t he be put in danger at least once during the movie?).

Further incongruities occur throughout, with Bent’s credulous detective used to poor effect and removed from the movie once he experiences his own supernatural awakening. Fulton spends most of the movie in a pirate costume, and sporting an eye patch applied with black make up that makes him look like a reject from a KISS audition. The evil entity has evolved from a curse made centuries before but its modern day raison d’être is arbitrary and convenient at the same time, reinforcing the idea that the makers have adopted a kitchen sink approach to its behaviour (just why Charlie has been chosen is one of the many questions the movie fails to even ask let alone explain).

In charge of all this, Edel never shows he has a grip on the material, and several scenes seem under-rehearsed or sloppily staged. Even the de rigeuer scares are heavily signposted and too reminiscent of similar ones from the Insidious series, while the final showdown between Mike and the entity takes place on a gantry that’s surrounded by some of the worst visual effects seen for some time. It’s almost as if everyone concerned just wanted to do enough to get the movie made and then move on.

Rating: 3/10 – Cage has made few worse movies, but Pay the Ghost comes pretty close to being at the top of the list; derivative, uninspired, dull, laughable, ridiculous, awful – it’s all these things and more, and serves as yet another unfortunate nail in the coffin of Cage’s career.

The Curse of Downers Grove (2015)

19 Saturday Sep 2015

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Curse of Downers Grove, The

D: Derick Martini / 89m

Cast: Bella Heathcote, Lucas Till, Kevin Zegers, Penelope Mitchell, Martin Spanjers, Mark L. Young, Zane Holtz, Helen Slater, Tom Arnold

In the small town of Downers Grove, an annual series of deaths involving high school seniors has led to the belief that there is a curse on the town, though no one can explain why it’s happening. Each death has a rational explanation but the fact that it’s always a senior and it always happens in the week before graduation has entrenched the belief even further.

Chrissie Swanson (Heathcote) is a senior who doesn’t believe in the curse, though her best friend Tracy (Mitchell) does. As graduation approaches, Chrissie’s single mother Diane (Slater) goes away on a trip with her new boyfriend, leaving Chrissie and her younger brother, David (Spanjers) to their own devices. Tracy keeps wondering who will be this year’s victim, even suggesting it might be Chrissie. When they get invited to a party by local college quarterback Chuck (Zegers), his obvious attraction to Chrissie leads to his assaulting her, and in her efforts to get away from him she gouges out his right eye.

With his future as a star quarterback in ruins, Chuck begins to harass and intimidate Chrissie, letting her know how much he plans to make her life a misery. Chrissie begins seeing a mechanic called Bobby (Till), while unbeknownst to her, Tracy and David have invited pretty much everyone to the house for a party. As Chuck’s harassment begins to escalate, Chrissie goes to the police but when they learn that Chuck’s father (Arnold) is an ex-cop they close ranks and refuse to help her. David is beaten up and has his right hand badly broken. Bobby confronts Chuck and his cronies but he too is beaten up.

On the day of the party, Chrissie decides that she can no longer try to deal with Chuck on a normal level, and his insistence on their being together (even though she blinded him) isn’t going to be deterred by her obvious dislike of him. And when Chuck and his cronies invade the party, firing guns and scaring off everyone, Chrissie, David, and Bobby all make a stand to end things once and for all.

Curse of Downers Grove, The - scene

With its misleading title, and the involvement of author Bret Easton Ellis as co-screenwriter (with director Martini), The Curse of Downers Grove looks to all intents and purposes to be a small town horror movie with mystery elements. However, it’s really a small town thriller with one of the most ridiculous plots yet devised for the screen. In fact, as each development unfolds it becomes clear that the more absurd the idea, the more determined Ellis and Martini are to forge ahead with it. This is likely to leave the viewer scratching or shaking their head in disbelief for much of its running time.

There are so many things wrong with the plot and basic storyline that it’s hard to know where to start. The curse – introduced at the beginning in a gory black and white flashback – is practically abandoned as soon as we meet Chrissie and Tracy, and as the movie stumbles on, it becomes less and less important, until it’s rudely shoehorned back into the movie at the end in a vain attempt to provide some kind of shocking conclusion (which it isn’t). Occasional references are used to remind the viewer that what’s happening could all be leading up to the curse taking effect, but the focus is clearly on Chuck’s war of attrition and psychotic tendencies, and the script makes no attempt to connect the two.

Worse still is the issue of Chuck’s right eye. He doesn’t go to hospital, he just goes home and tries to patch things up himself. And then his dad comes in and instead of being shocked or concerned or sympathetic, is angry at his son for what happened and for ruining his future career in football, and attempts to beat him. The police aren’t called (remember, Chuck’s dad is an ex-cop), Chrissie isn’t arrested or questioned, and everyone gets on with their lives as if it had happened to somebody else in another town. Until Chuck goes all psycho…

From then on, the movie spirals downhill out of control and appears unconcerned as to how stupid or ridiculous it’s becoming. It’s the kind of movie where characters suddenly announce that their father taught them how to shoot when they were younger, and maybe it’s time they get out his old rifle, just before the inevitable showdown. It’s a movie where Chrissie’s creepy neighbour and childhood friend, Ian (Young), behaves even more alarmingly than Chuck does but somehow manages to avoid any suspicion that he might be up to no good. And it’s a movie where Chuck suddenly starts walking around with a bandage taped over his right eye and no one bats an eyelid (pun very much intended).

The lack of attention in the script leaves the cast high and dry. Heathcote has an alarming lack of facial expressions, making it difficult to work out what she’s feeling unless she says it out loud, and Till adds another showroom dummy role to his resumé. Zegers offers a one-note performance that struggles to be credible on any level, Mitchell pouts a lot to little effect, Spanjers is an unconvincing teenager (he was twenty-six when the movie was made), Slater plays the lovestruck middle-aged mom to surprisingly good effect before being written out for the rest of the movie, and Arnold is completely and totally wasted as Chuck’s dad (whose angry motivation is as nonsensical as his son’s psychopathy).

In all, it’s a disaster of a movie that could have been a lot more effective, and potentially creepy, than it is here. Martini – whose first feature, Lymelife (2008), is a well-polished gem of a movie, and well worth seeing – makes such a bad fist of things you begin to wonder if his heart was really in it. Scenes take place that are so desultory that again, it makes the viewer wonder if the cast were looking at their watches to see if the day’s shoot was almost over. Add to this the fact that the movie was shot nearly two and a half years ago, and is only now getting a release, and you have all the hallmarks of a movie that’s dead in the water but doesn’t know it.

Rating: 3/10 – one step up from being abysmal, but only just, The Curse of Downers Grove is an object lesson in how not to make a scary thriller; tedious, muddled, and disappointing throughout, this should be avoided like a bad case of the runs.