Movies We'd Rather Be Watching

True story: someone stole my VHS copy of Bowfinger.

There are movies, and then there are movies. Terrible movies. Movies so bad they make you wish you were watching something, anything else. With these god-awful films in mind, I present Movies We'd Rather Be Watching, a list of films-within-films that look to be much, much better than the movies in which they appear.

Dynamite Jones, as seen in Boo!

Boo! is your run-of-the-mill haunted asylum movie. You know the story: kids get trapped in old mental hospital and ghosts happen. What you probably don't know is that Boo! features a character named Arlo whose backstory is that he starred in a movie called Dynamite Jones, which is about a vampire killer. The film plays on a TV in a bar where Arlo is either drinking or working--possibly both. While I can criticize Boo! for being just another haunted asylum flick, I'm keen to watch Dynamite Jones, which, by all accounts, looks like just another blacksploitation vampire hunter movie.

Face Punch, as seen in Twilight

Like it or not, Twilight is shite. Utter, utter crap. Buried under this steaming pile is something called Face Punch. Face Punch is an action film--that's all the movie (or the book) has to offer. It could be about an underground, invite-only face punching competition,or it could be about something else. Like about a guy who has to enter a face punching competition in order to win custody of his son. Whatever the case, Face Punch, by virtue of its name alone, is infinitely better than Twilight.

Mant!, as seen in Matinee

Truth be told, I kinda liked Matinee. But then again, I don't remember much about it, other than Mant!. Mant!, which looks like a rip-off of The Fly, is the movie that screens at the cinema in which Matinee is set. Meant to be a tribute to William Castle, Mant!'s legacy is that it's better known and more well liked than Matinee itself.

Alex's student film, as seen in Grave Encounters 2

Grave Encounters 2 has a very strong beginning and end, but is terrible throughout the middle. A real shit sandwich. The film rehashes the same scares from the first movie, and is largely one-note for most of its running time. But before the plot enters the asylum and takes a powder for forty minutes, we spend some time on-set with Alex. A film student, Alex is in the middle of making a movie, which he abandons in favour of pursuing a documentary about Grave Encounters (which, in the world of GE2, is a real movie). By all accounts, Alex appears to be a competent filmmaker (he's a crap documentarian, though) and his unfinished student film looks to be a satire of modern horror tropes. If only Grave Encounters 2 was as inspired. And short.

Stab!, as seen in the Scream franchise

In Scream, Sidney voices concern over who would play her in a movie based on what's happening in Scream. She jokes that'd she get stuck with Tori Spelling. Sure enough, when Stab! is shown at the beginning of Scream 2, Tori Spelling appears as Sidney. It's a wonderful callback to a great film, made even better by the fact that Stab! was directed by Robert Rodriguez. Within the world of Scream, the Stab! franchise grows larger and larger, until the irony can't be contained in one film alone. The postmodern joke finds its punchline in Scream 4, which opens with not one, but two Stab! films. And, as if that weren't enough, there is a fan site dedicated to making Stab! movies. For real.

Muckman, as seen in Chainsaw Killer

Chainsaw Killer is a terrible movie. And not in the good way. It's just straight-up bad. At the centre of the story is a mysterious film called The Force Beneath. A characters gets his hands on a copy and plays the tape, and the screening includes a handful of movie trailers. Most notable is the trailer for a movie about a bog monster called Muckman. Not only does it have better production values than Chainsaw Killer, it turns out Muckman is an actual movie that you can actually watch.

Honourable mention:

Kickpuncher, as seen in Community

Community is not a movie (sixseasonsandamovie) but it gets a mention here because Kickpuncher might just be the greatest fake movie series ever made up: a low-rent, low-budget series of films about a cyborg whose punches have the power of kicks. A cop living in the "future" world of 2006, Kickpuncher is a Robocop 2 of sorts, fighting to rid the streets of Mega Dope. Other films in the Kickpuncher franchise are Kickpunder II: Codename Punchkicker, Kickpuncher III: The Final Kickening, Kickpuncher Detroit, Kickpuncher Miami, and Kicksplasher.

Machete Joe

Or, why you're not smart enough for postmodern horror.

The late '90s were a big time for horror.  The genre underwent a huge paradigm shift, ushering in a new breed of film: the hip, postmodern horror movie.  Now, nearly twenty years later we're at the risk of drowning in a quagmire of mediocre pomo--the result of an unchecked growth in independent, do-it-yourself horror.  Easy access to increasingly easy-to-use video production equipment created an opportunity for all would-be filmmakers.  Once the floodgates opened, out poured a torrent of cheap and cheerful horror movies, films that payed hommage to, referenced, and mimicked the favourite films of years past.  And one of those favourites was Scream.

Scream was not the first postmodern horror movie, but it was certainly the first to draw a lot of attention from critics and mainstream audiences.  Success breeds imitators, and Scream's legacy is a glut of self-referential horror films.  Some are better than others but few if any have been able to recreate or recpture the cleverness of Scream.  And Machete Joe is definitely not one of those better imitators.

The easiest way for a horror movie to be postmodern is for it to be a film-within-a-film, a movie about people making a movie; you get all the recursiveness of a self-referential film without even trying.  Machete Joe does this.  It's about low-budget horror filmmakers making a low-budget horror film.  And it's got all the low-budget horror stereotypes you'd expect: bitchy cast members, an uncompromising director, and a creepy location with a hidden threat.  To give credit where credit's due, Machete Joe does feature Ernie Hudson in 1.5 scenes, and the film-within-a-film has a castmember who's sole purpose is to class up the film--a talented and respected actor who is inexplicably slumming it.  But that's about as clever as it gets.  The rest of the film is a pedestrian slog through a swamp of horror cliches.
The film under construction in Machete Joe is "Machete Man", a based-on-true-events tale about a machete-wielding killer who witnessed a rape and then murdered the rapists.  The filmmakers have secured the location where the rape took place, hoping the place will inspire an ending for their unfinished script.  Unbeknownst to all, the killer is still skulking about, and it's only a matter of time before he starts offing the cast and crew.

What made Scream so great, apart from its witty dialogue bantered about by pop culture savvy teens, was its complete and total lack of self-consciousness.  It's hard to be self-referential without also being painfully aware of the dramatic irony you've created in your film, but Scream pulled it off.  Machete Joe, by contrast, is too caught up in the conceit of postmodernism to create an interesting subtext on the subject of horror movie realities.  Moreover, once the characters realize they're living out a horror movie, they fail to extricate themselves from the scenario they've created.

To make matters worse, one character is filming a behind-the-scenes documentary for Machete Man, but the possibility of layering realities through the use of both cameras--movie and documentary--is never explored.  Rather, the documentarian just films a lot of boobs.  Nor does Machete Joe entertain the notion of distancing its subjects from its subject matter.  Multiple in-film cameras that carry out different functions can be used to remove or distance characters from events they witness in the movie.  But Machete Joe doesn't do that.  Scream briefly uses film-within-a-film to recreate the audience/movie character dynamic within the film itself.   All Machete Joe is able to do is have a guy film his own death.

Truth be told, nearly everyone is smart enough to piece together a postmodern horror movie, but few have the talent to make that a satisfying film.  Machete Joe takes everything that's great about postmodern horror, all of its potential for insight and commentary, and squanders it.  Instead of layered subtext it gives us tired cliches, instead of cleverness, fart jokes. 

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

I have complained at length, here and on TheAvod, about self-reflexive cinema. In the post-Scream era, a lot of people jumped on the postmodern bandwagon, but it seemed they forgot why that movie was such a success. It wasn't because it folded in on itself, but how it did so. Scream was self-aware without being self-conscious about it, but it's just the opposite for a lot of horror films today. If a movie takes itself seriously, then it shouldn't draw attention to itself with ironic, and often poorly written, insight.

Now, that's not to say that I don't enjoy postmodern horror, I just find that most of it is terribly done. So you can understand that I was a bit anxious when I sat down to watch Behind the Mask. The movie blends mocumentary with narrative film to tell the story of Leslie Vernon's attempt to become a legendary serial killer in the same vein as Jason, Freddy, and Michael.

Many years ago, Leslie Vernon was taken from his home by an angry mob after he brutally murdered his abusive parents. Leslie was thrown from the top of a waterfall and was never seen or heard from again. Some say that if you till the soil in the Vernon apple orchard under a havest moon, the dirt will become thick with blood, and if you listen close, you can still hear the creaks and groans of his mother's body as it hangs from a tree, swaying in the wind. Now, years later, Leslie has returned to his ancestral home to murder a group of kids partying in his house. And grad students, Taylor, Doug, and Todd are there to document it.

Taking a page from Man Bites Dog, Behind the Mask is about a group of documentary filmmakers who follow Leslie around as he plans is killing spree, and they even help out once or twice. In the world of the film, Jason Voorhees and the like are real people, and Leslie hopes to become like them--iconic. So he plans and works hard to ready himself for his big night. And while we follow him as he stalks his "survivor girl" and tours us around his property, he tells us about what it means to be a killer, how it all works.

Most people don't know that it takes months of planning and preparation to select the right group of kids, and choose the right final girl. A killer has to make sure he can accurately predict what people will do, where they will run to. And a killer has to work hard to train his body and his mind to withstand the endurance trail that is the horrific killing spree. Leslie walks us through these revelations with good cheer and introduces us to his mentor, Eugene, who terrorized nubile teens back in the 60s.

To counter Leslie's moral ambiguity and general cheerfulness is Taylor, the documentary's director and host. She's clearly opposed to what Leslie plans to do, but has committed herself to documenting his story, and tempers her outrage with the false hope that Leslie might not actually follow through. Only when Leslie claims his first victims, does Taylor fully understand the kids are in a horror movie.

Behind the Mask uses all the stereotypes and archetypes we've come to expect from horror to pit the genre against itself in what might be the most successfully recursive horror movie I've ever seen. Not only does the movie provide a humorous discourse on genre expectations, it also breaks down genre analysis by explaining how imagery is used to communicate ideas about characters and story.

If I had to complain about something (and let's face it, I usually do) it would have to be Taylor. Once she figures out Leslie's endgame, she fails to use her insider knowledge to her advantage and continues to operate within the confines of Leslie's horror movie. This would suggest a kind of inevitability, that horror movies generally work off the same standard script. I don't really have a problem with this, but I would have preferred if Taylor at least tried to break free from convention only to find that she can't.

The rest of the movie, however, is wonderfully done. The documentary sequences are delightfully crummy, and Leslie himself is very engaging and his enthusiasm is infectious. The film also features Robert Englund, and that's always a plus. I really enjoyed Behind the Mask, and it's given me a new appreciation for all the hard work that Jason, Freddy, and Michael do.

A Perfect Getaway

Unsure of my feelings about this film, I decided to interview myself in an effort to come to a final decision.

Q Hello, me. How am I today?
A A little stiff in the shoulders, actually.

Q Did I enjoy watching A Perfect Getaway?
A Yes.

Q Did I like the movie?
A Uh, pass.

Q But David Twohy made other movies I really love.
A Yes, that's true.

Q Like Pitch Black and Riddick.
A I know.

Q And Warlock.
A [menacing silence]

Q Why don't I tell me a little about the film?
A Steve Zhan and Milla Jojovitch--

Q Both of whom I like.
A Don't interrupt. Steve Zhan and Milla Jojovitch are a married couple on their honeymoon in Hawaii when they learn about a double murder on a neighbouring island. They begin to suspect their new friends Timothy Olyphant and his girlfriend are the killers.

Q That's it?
A No, but that's the main thing.

Q So what's the problem?
A Well...Steve Zhan is a screenwriter and Timothy Olyphant keeps telling him how to write a movie, like he's Robert McKee. He's talking all this crap about red herrings and twists.

Q And we all know how I feel about postmodernism in film.
A No, that's not it. I mean yeah, but no. The film pretty much tells you in the simplest of terms how the movie's going to play out. You'd have to be stupid not to know what's coming. I mean you don't know all the details, but there are few surprises.

Q I still don't really understand why I'm confused.
A Well, in spite of the expositionary dialogue, the story does some strange things that aren't accounted for. I don't know if it's David Twohy fucking with McKee or what, but at the end the focus shifts from Steve Zhan and Milla Jojovitch to Timothy Olyphant and his girlfriend. It kinda makes no sense, because the story has been told solely from Steve and Milla's point of view and you're meant to identify and sympathize with them. Also, there are some questionable characterizations that I don't really agree with.

Q With which I don't really agree.
A Seriously?

Q Anyway, it seems that I liked it overall but was a little put off by the end.
A Yeah. Yes. That's it exactly. I mean, it's kind of funny at times, how the movie points out how movies work, how stories are told. I liked that. But the end is just so...I don't know. Unexpected, I guess. In a bad way. I think if you were going to mess with your audience like this film tries to do, you'd maybe set up things a bit differently. I don't want to say the film tries and fails to defy expectations, but I think it cheats a bit at creating mystery and intrigue. Whether that's intentional or not, I don't know. But there is one fantastically edited chase scene. So on the whole, I'd say it was pretty good.

Q Better than Warlock?
A You're going to regret that.

Q Me. I mean, I'm going to regret that.
A Yes, I am.

CSI 805

CSI is one of my all time favourite shows. Not every episode is a gem, but still. So how excited was I when they finally had a mystery that took place on a horror movie set? And how awesome was it to learn that David is a huge horror movie fan? Gotta love David.

A scream queen is found dead in the studio and the team investigates. They have to investigate two red herrings before they catch the real killer. Pretty much your standard fare. What I have yet to decide is whether the story is better or worse than average.

What I'd like to believe is the writers purposefully came up with the standard horror story elements--the rainy night, the bad phone reception, etc--and the dizzying series of twists at the end as a statement about the, uh, state of mainstream horror movies today. Props to the guy who wrote the director character's "death" scene in which he waxes philosophical about being killed on a horror movie set. It is ironic. Now if only the director wasn't such a stereotypical twat. But wait, maybe that's part of the critique...

Alternatively, this episode may be viewed as an attempt to cram a 90 minute PG-13 "horror" movie into 42 minutes of network TV.

Whatever I decide, the point is that my roommate heard me laughing through the wall. And it looks like Sarah might finally leave the show.