You Better Watch Out: KRAMPUS

A dreary lump of coal, Krampus is a horror movie with the just-in-time-for-the-holidays message that if you have a bad attitude about being trapped in a house with objectively awful relatives on Christmas, demonic creatures will drag your entire family to a snowy doom. Loosely inspired by the Germanic legend of Krampus, a devilish horned anti-Santa who punishes bad children, writer-director Michael Dougherty has a broad, overlit Christmas comedy darkened and invaded by malevolent critters and supernatural beasties who pick off an extended family one by one. His previous film was 2009’s Halloween-set horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat, so he knows his way around bending holiday iconography to horror ends. Of course Christmas imagery is more incongruous when put to that purpose, with sleigh bells and hoof-steps up on the housetop creating an ominous foreboding instead of the delight of reindeer paws. I’m all for a Christmas horror movie, but this one’s chintzy and half-baked, not nice, and not naughty enough either.

It starts with thin stereotypes stretched to mildly routine satire about commercialism and losing the spirit of the season. After a slow-motion brawl in a big box store over the opening credits – set to a cheery carol, an obvious juxtaposition, but worth a smile – we meet a harried family busy preparing for holiday guests. A workaholic father (Adam Scott), perfectionist mother (Toni Collette), and cynical teenage sister (Stefania LaVie Owen), have little time to indulge young Max (Emjay Anthony) and his childlike whimsy, namely his lingering belief in Santa. It gets worse when boorish overnight guests descend, an uncle (David Koechner), aunt (Allison Tolman), great aunt (Conchata Ferrell), and cousins (a pack of funny young newcomers), each one rude, uncouth, loud, and mean. Not even a sweet German grandmother (Krista Stadler) can keep belief in pure Christmas magic alive when these branches of the family tree collide.

The formulation of these characters is so scattershot and obvious no one is worth caring about, let alone believing. The guests are rough-and-tumble, gun-toting, bullying dopes. Their hosts are not much better: distracted, snobby, bitter, elitist, and judgmental. Unfair extremes painted in ugly colors, everyone acts more like political cartoons than real people. And why do they put up with each other? “Because we’re family,” dopey dad tells little Max, who later secretly, tearfully rips up his letter to Santa and throws it out the window. There, the cold winds convert his negative energy, a wish to be rid of annoying relatives (totally understandable), into a massive blizzard that knocks out the power and snows everyone in. The better to be attacked by Krampus and his evil elves, naturally. It can’t come fast enough.

But the film proceeds in fits and starts. Characters wander away and disappear. Everyone is worried for a moment, formulating rescue plans, troubleshooting how best to escape. Then we’re on to the next attack, token worry for the missing (mostly kids!) immediately followed with batten-down-the-hatches, load-the-weapons strategizing and monster smashing. The problem is that these crass bad-sitcom types react like they know they’re suddenly in a horror movie, and not even in a jokey meta or savvy genre way. The instant the action starts – snowmen mysteriously appear in the front yard, a girl disappears, a snowdrift gets bitey, etcetera – they’re hammering wood over the windows and ready to fight off invaders. And don’t even get me started on the grandma, who knows exactly what’s happening from the jump and waits way too long before she clues the rest in on the details. The tension is largely non-existent, mostly because their troubles never seem all that serious.

Dougherty clearly has a lot of fun tweaking Christmas movie tropes with monster movie jolts. The creative creature effects – largely convincing and tactile things – are the clear star here. There are impish gingerbread men, a pack of creepy elves with unmoving mask-faces, malicious toys, and a drooling, fanged tree-topper angel. Krampus himself is merely suggested, before revealing his massive part-goat, part-devil, part-Santa design. My favorite, though, was a jack-in-the-box that starts small, but balloons to the size of an overstuffed anaconda with a clown face dripping an elongated alien jaw, all teeth and fleshy gullet. These monsters are so effectively visualized and imaginatively designed I wish Dougherty, with co-writers Todd Casey and Zach Shields, designed more compellingly staged sequences around them, or at least made me care about who they were attacking and why.

Besides, for its nasty streak and creature feature jabs, it’s too sugary sweet to commit to anything but an ending of family togetherness wrapped in false comfort. In other words, the movie simultaneously embraces and rejects holiday cynicism, thoroughly undoing any potential points of satiric interest and muddying its point of view. It ends up literally about nothing: a phony Christmas platitude wrapped in a weak B-movie twist. This would be an easier movie to recommend if the jokes were funny and the scares were scary. As is, it’s a great idea done half as well as I hoped. Imagine someone took the greatest holiday horror comedy, Joe Dante’s Gremlins, drained it of energy, then thoroughly defanged its filmmaking and perspective and you’re onto the sense of emptiness I felt in every scene of Krampus.

Double Dare: CHEAP THRILLS

Cheap Thrills is an efficient but hollow bleak comic thriller built out of what passes for social commentary these days. That is to say it has topicality and point of view that isn’t subtext so much as text and blasts its intent with all the finesse of blunt force trauma and without having much to say. The plot concerns two old buddies unexpectedly catching up after running into each other at a bar. One (Pat Healy) is a failed writer who just lost his low-paying mechanic job and is due to be evicted at the end of the week. The other (Ethan Embry) never finished high school and is now a dirt-poor debt collector for the local criminal element. They haven’t seen each other since high school, followed different paths, and yet find their financial problems mean they still have a lot in common. The middle class sure is eroding, the movie says, pointing out the grim reality so many of us are facing.

It gets worse.  A rich man (David Koechner) and his much-younger wife (Sara Paxton) call the men over, offering to buy them a round of drinks. The guys appreciatively accept. Then the man leers at them, points out a clearly troubled woman sitting across the bar, and offers $50 to the guy who can get her to slap him. Hey, money is money. They accept the challenge and get the bills. The rich man leans closer, waves his cash around, and offers them a chance to play out their own private “reality game show.” They just have to play along, do his dares, and collect $250,000 at the end of the night. These guys are in such a painful squeeze, cash-strapped, teetering on the precipice of crushing poverty. They barely have time to process their doubts before they’re on their way to the wealthy couple’s mansion in the hills, ready to take part in the evening’s challenge and reap the rewards. It almost goes without saying that the dares start relatively simple – punch a guy, take a swig of liquor – and escalate in depravity until they are pooping on a stranger’s carpets and worse.

At every step of the way the poor men wriggle and squirm, torn up about each new perverse twist while the rich couple looks on, practically licking their lips as they pull out stacks of greenbacks. They know how little the money means to them, how life changing it could be to their victims. All four characters are complicit in continuing the game. The rich people set the rules. The others just have to play by them to have any hope of getting by. The pain on Pat Healy’s face is unmistakable, as is the money-lust dripping off of Embry’s. The characters are pawns in the plot’s schematic thematic construction, but the actors manage to make even the most strained plot developments halfway believable. Koechner rubs his hands, snorts his coke, and grins manically while Paxton gazes on when she’s not fussing with her phone. She can barely be bothered to plug into the human misery being enacted for her entertainment.

That’s part of what makes the movie so effective. It asks us to sit back and watch the corrosive brand of free market jockeying played out before us, watching rich people squeezing every last drop of torment out of people who desperately need the money offered, doing so for no other reason than because they can. Money is a powerful motivating force here as it is in reality. The movie is certainly an ugly glimpse of our recessionary ids, a story of rich getting richer as they make others suffer, make all the rest of us work harder and harder for less and less. By the time the two poor guys at the center of the movie’s cheap thrills are manipulated to turn on each other, undercutting to get the most out of this bad situation, negotiating down then amount of money it’d take for one of them to, say, chop off a pinkie, it’s clear the one-crazy-night lark is going to bottom out somewhere truly depraved. And, sure enough, it’ll get there.

Director E.L. Katz shoots the film as a claustrophobic chamber piece, a small cast rattling about in a limited number of rooms. The images are dark and dim, the actors looming large in the frame, circling each other in blocking that reinforces the tightening maze of disgust and eager greed the night becomes. But the screenplay by David Chirchirillo and Trent Haaga never complicates the scenario, letting it fall down its obvious and unpleasant trajectory without much difficulty. It’s one thing to point out the economic microcosm represented in the central conceit – bad rich guys exploit the rest of us who will do anything to get a piece of the pie – but the movie doesn’t do anything constructive with that. It sits harshly, cynically, corrosively on the surface, eating through characterization and plot alike, leaving a thin, sour aftertaste. The movie has all of the jolts and splatters meant to provoke nervous laughter and surprised gasping guffaws out of an audience ready to be amazed the filmmakers went there. But it’s all weakly provoking with nothing more to say beyond the obvious.

Loud Noises: ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES

There’s a lot of random silliness all over Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, a long-awaited follow up to the original cult hit. That’s in keeping with 2004’s Anchorman, a film that accommodates a somewhat sharp puncturing of sexual harassment, a scene in which an angry biker punts a dog off of a bridge, and a psychedelic animated sequence that stands in for a sex scene. This time around, writer-director Adam McKay and co-writer/star Will Ferrell step back easily into the anything goes world of Ron Burgundy, the mustachioed, egotistical, 1970’s chauvinist who strides through the films with extreme confidence, like he’s trying out poses for his own taxidermied afterlife. The first time, McKay and Ferrell created a gleefully giggly movie, broad, thin, and full of unashamed shtick, wall-to-wall quotable non sequiturs. They double down here, indulging in arbitrary asides, consequence-free slapstick, splashes of mild surrealism, and loud noises. (I don’t know what they’re yelling about!) The result is a jumbled grab bag of nonsense, creaking dead air, and patches of inspired insanity.

The first film found Burgundy and his newsroom buddies – Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, and David Koechner – howling in anguished sleaziness over their station manager (Fred Willard) bringing on a woman (Christina Applegate) co-anchor. It was a period piece goof about sexism in the workplace. This time, McKay has his eye on skewering the 24-hour news channels, so he traces the idea back to the late-70’s/early-80’s source, the time between the suicide smash cut to black and the darkly funny little typeface reading simply “80s” in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Burgundy, having fallen on hard times, is approached by a producer putting together programming for a new network. The once-proud newsman decides to get the team back together and do what he was put on Earth to do: read the news. The early moments of the movie contain a certain amount of affection and interest for those of us who simply like seeing Ferrell, back in character after all these years, drive around picking up Rudd, Carell, and Koechner. It’s been nine years, but these guys do still good impressions of themselves.

Eventually, a plot emerges. Or rather, several plots emerge, some more important than others, none going much of anywhere, all tossed overboard at a moment’s notice if something more immediately funny (theoretically) comes along. Burgundy feels competition with a handsome hotshot anchor (James Marsden), who swoops in with the primetime slot locked down. Burgundy is also intimidated by his new boss – a black woman (Meagan Good), facts that rarely goes unmentioned, even when the guys are on their best behavior, which isn’t often. He’s unsure how to relate to his seven year old son (Judah Nelson), asking the mother “Are you sure he’s not a mentally challenged midget?” Still elsewhere, the channel’s owner (Josh Lawson) wants to meddle in news coverage for synergistic reasons and a harried producer (Dylan Baker, performing as if he told Ed Helms he’d fill in and no one would know the difference) tries to keep Burgundy and crew from failing too spectacularly, as they try to introduce vapid gossip, bullying patriotism, and endless on-screen graphics to TV news. Sound familiar?

It all plays like a brainstorming session ever so slowly galumphing its way towards something like a story. There’s lots of fine satirical intent going on here, sometimes sharp and pointed. After all, how better to say the very idea of 24-hour news channels is inherently flawed than to say these dummies invented it for self-serving career reasons. When Burgundy decides to cover a car chase live, or spend some time repeatedly, simply saying, “America is great,” McKay cuts to people all over the country staring slack jawed in awe. “Hey, guys!” one man says. “The news got awesome!” This is definitely the work of a director with a funny rage funneled into sociopolitical points. It’s almost expected. He’s the guy who made big banks a villain in his 2010 cop comedy The Other Guys and then ran graphs about the financial crisis under the end credits. That’s funny and sharp. But Anchorman 2 drifts indulgently, though, watching characters stand around acting out self-consciously funny moments. It’s as if the movie is throwing out lines and hoping some stick as catchphrases on novelty merchandise.

I think the problem is the thrust of the film trying to make us care about Ron Burgundy as a character. He was a sketch character, a buffoon whose rise and fall and rise in Anchorman was played broadly for laughs. During the course of Anchorman 2, Burgundy cycles through a half-dozen highs and lows, competing interests, and vacillating levels of self-awareness. Instead of being the butt of the joke – the first film’s thrust was puncturing his backwards ways, having us root for Applegate – he’s front and center. It’s distracting and borderline unlikable to root for a character who stumbles around obliviously, at one point casually spitting out racist remarks at a sweet family dinner, and then telling his black boss he’s blameless since it’s her fault for inviting him in the first place. The movie wants him to succeed on his own terms, even if the movie keeps forgetting about some of his motivations for long periods of time, rarely able to hold two ideas in its head at any given point.

At worst, it’s not funny. At best, the movie bubbles up into a kind of frenzied nonsense. But the bulk of its truly nutzoid moments happen in the last twenty minutes or so. Anchorman’s 94 minute runtime has here ballooned to 119 minutes, which for a while in the middle feels like three or four hours. Subplots muscle each other out for screen time. Carell’s dumb weather guy meets and falls in love with an equally dumb secretary (Kristen Wiig) for what seems like forever, but is in actuality only a handful of scenes. Throughout there are funny little one-or-two-scene performances from unexpected faces that I won’t mention here. They’re good for an unexpected smile the first time around. But then, things get pleasantly insane, erupting in events so unexpected and cheerfully nonsensical that I couldn’t help but devolve into laughter.

I won’t try to describe the final stretch of the film here. But I will say it pivots into a long period that seems to be parodying a very different kind of movie altogether and then culminates in a cavalcade of cameos I found pleasantly surprising in its hilarious escalation up, up, and away from what little reality the movie ever had. So a long, uneven comedy sends me out with a smile anyway, after a seemingly endless stretch during which the big, dumb, likable caricatures are put to use on a few distinct satirical points in between indistinct nonsense. I can’t say I want to wave off the laughter entirely, and yet I can’t recommend the picture wholeheartedly. Sometimes you just have to describe your reactions and hope it gives the wink and nod to those who are predisposed to liking this and warns off those who aren’t.

Fish Food: PIRANHA 3DD

I looked up what I wrote about Piranha, Alexandre Aja’s 2010 3D remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 creature feature, and found that I called it “gratuitous in every possible way.” It served up attractive spring-breakers in and out of swimsuits while tension built to the bloody end, which chummed the water with enough gore to fill a half-dozen horror flicks with lower body counts. I wrote, “I liked just enough of it to wish it were better.” It didn’t win me over like it did its small collection of defenders, but I could see that it was self-aware of its own genre status and enjoyed wallowing in it. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone’s enjoyment of this particular film’s trashy interests. I know I did from time to time, even if I ultimately left the theater feeling, on balance, more negative than positive towards it all.

Now we have Piranha 3DD.  Its predecessor’s central question was “What if we made a bad movie, but were so aware of what we were doing, and so energetic about our exploitative elements, that we ended up with a good movie?” This lifeless sequel that stinks of desperation at every turn seems to proceed from the question “What if we made a bad movie?” Now, I don’t mind partaking in some deliberately trashy filmmaking. I’ve already admitted to enjoying some of Piranha’s low charms and found David R. Ellis’s immortal Snakes on a Plane to be some level of fun. Here are films that know what simple-minded premises they have, are reasonably well made from a technical standpoint, and have just enough winking bemusement that some can be convinced to give them a pass. (I feel no shame admitting to a weakness for Snakes on a Plane. Of course I haven’t seen it in years. It might not hold up to a repeat viewing.)

Anyways, Piranha 3DD has been handed off to director John Gulager, winner of one of the seasons of the Project Greenlight reality show. He ended up making the low-budget horror movie Feast, one of the most noxious and slapdash films of its ilk in recent memory, and then followed it up with not one, but two direct-to-DVD sequels, the viewing of which I have not made a priority. This new movie, written by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, and Joel Soisson, relocates the titular piranhas from the inland lake spring break of the first movie to a waterpark run by a slimeball (David Koechner) with a sleazy idea for how to boost profits. See, he hired “water-certified strippers” to lifeguard a walled-off section of the park he calls an “adults only” pool. His stepdaughter (Danielle Panabaker), home from college where she’s studying to be a marine biologist, isn’t happy about this. She’s all the more worried when she and some friends are nearly eaten by, what else, a piranha in the nearby lake.

The plot, such as it is, is a dull drag to the park’s opening day, where the splashing park patrons will get set upon by a pack of piranhas that find their way through a drain pipe out of the lake and into the pools. But because the pool isn’t as packed with partying jerks as the first movie’s lake and the debauchery is mostly low-key and cordoned off, the kick of seeing anonymous extras taken down isn’t satisfying in the slightest. The bloodbath of the first film may have been too much for me to take, but it’s certainly far more enjoyable than seeing families, kids, and elderly people splashing about in terror in the shallow end of a pool. Besides, why don’t they just get out of the pool? And why don’t the waterpark’s employees think to drain the pool sooner? And when they decide to, why is it so difficult?

There’s very little of narrative interest here. The characters are incredibly thin, even by bad creature feature standards. There’s a little romance for the stepdaughter, a wimpy guy (Matt Bush) who can’t swim (think that’ll be important later?) and a crooked deputy (Chris Zylka). There’s also a dumb blonde (Katrina Bowden) who, early on, gets a baby piranha stuck in a very uncomfortable place without even really noticing it. Later, when it emerges and bites off her boyfriend’s privates, she runs bloody and shocked down the hall, finds her friends and informs them of this elaborate body horror in a tone of voice that one might use when asking to borrow a cup of sugar. Basically, these characters are here to state the obvious, go completely unprepared for the climactic buffet, and pad the runtime to feature length.

It’s advertised as an 83-minute movie but, by my count, the credits rolled a little bit past the 70-minute mark, which means that the endless bloopers and outtakes under the end credits take up about 15% of the movie. And keep in mind that this is a movie that finds time for Gary Busey to accidentally blow up a flatulent cow, for David Hasselhoff to lamely cameo as himself, and to shoehorn in supporting characters from the first movie, like Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames and Paul Scheer, the latter seemingly there only to collect stories for How Did This Get Made?, his podcast celebrating bad movies. This is one of those movies where seemingly nothing could go right, not even a little bit, not even by accident.

Beyond the mindless plotting, essentially nonexistent characters, and padding, the biggest problem here has to be Gulager himself. I don’t want to be too mean here, but he’s a remarkably untalented director. With his clumsy blocking, awkward pacing, and half-hazard effects, his anti-style manages to dismantle even the slightest hints of tension or energy that creeps up into the performances and the script. His direction of the setpieces, such as they are, manages to turn them into lifeless lumps of movement devoid of flow or excitement of any kind. It’s like he set out to deliberately make a bad movie, which he may very well have. But it takes a lot of work to make even a bad movie. It might take even more work to make a good bad movie. And this one feels so dashed off and lazily made that it can’t even flop over the painfully low bar it sets for itself.

More Finals: FINAL DESTINATION 5

The biggest problem with the last couple Final Destination movies is that the audience starts the film way ahead of the characters. Since rare is the survivor in one of these cinematic death traps, we know all the rules and are forced to wait around for the new batch of characters to catch up to where we are. Each film starts with gathering a group of characters and then killing them all off in an over-the-top calamity. Then it circles back to reveal that the accident has yet to occur. What we’ve seen is merely a premonition that was just experienced by our main character. Said main character then saves some of the group seconds before the disaster occurs, but rather than saving their lives he’s brought them into a new kind of prolonged torture. Since they were all marked to die, Death itself, the ever-present invisible menace, is out to hunt down all of these escapees one by one.

I have a tremendous affection for this series. The first three are especially efficient and are probably the very best examples of the premise that could possibly be made, imbued with a gutsy B-movie sensibility paired with a devilish delight in methodically setting up the variables that, when triggered in just the wrong, or right, order will lead to a freak accident. They’re slasher movies without the villain. When you get right down to it, it’s far more unsettling for me to contemplate death by weird, complicated, unforeseeable circumstances than it is to simply ponder meeting a masked machete-man in the woods. The former is simply much more likely than the latter. These films succeed through their total commitment to the innovation and imagination (not to mention the incineration, impalement, and other sudden bloody frights) inherent in the concept.

By the time we arrived at the fourth feature in the series it was all starting to seem a little tired but here we are yet again, this time with Final Destination 5. It dials back some of the flippancy that began to settle in last time, occasionally summoning up the dread and propulsion that made the first three so much creepy fun. The recipient of the premonition this time is Nicholas D’Agasto, who wears the responsibility well. As for a group of his co-workers headed to a retreat that are saved by his early warning of a bridge collapse, they’re less memorable than they should be. The boss (David Koechner), the I.T. guy (P.J. Byrne), the intern (Emma Bell) and various office workers (Miles Fisher, Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, and Arlen Escarpeta) are just plain less interesting than other ensembles and that makes the time spent waiting for the characters to learn why they survived, only to start mysteriously dying, a bit on the tedious side. (I do like how, as in all these movies, several character names are winks to horror icons of the past, this time including Friedkin, Hooper, and Castle).

As the characters line up to meet their grisly ends, the film, directed by Steven Quale from a script by Eric Heisserer, makes good use of its 3D technology, finding great ways to accent depth and heights but then still getting a kick out of thrusting bloody entrails and goop right at you. The way the plot unfolds feels a bit more belabored than usual. “You know how many things had to go wrong for this to happen?” a detective asks after a laser-eye surgery patient suffers through several steps of equipment malfunctions. It’s unsettling to a certain extent, and certainly gross, but lacks a real visceral impact like even an earlier sequence in this very movie that finds cringing suspense from the threat of unnatural bodily harm from gymnastics gone wrong. (I knew there was a good reason I find it difficult to watch uneven bars routines).

Learning about the franchise’s rules comes courtesy of the series’ one major semi-recurring supporting actor, Tony Todd as an eerie coroner. Asked how he knows so much, he responds “I’ve seen it all before.” And so we have. This one has a handful of good moments and ends on a terrific nod to the franchise’s past on top of a well-executed climax. The film goes through the events you’d expect, hits all the beats the other films have conditioned us to foresee.

THE GOODS. Not so much.

I had never realized how much I liked Will Ferrell until he showed up for one scene in the middle of The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard dressed as Abraham Lincoln while falling to his death in a tragic skydiving accident. As he plummets, he provides a running commentary that provoked the only smile to cross my face during the entire movie. That’s not to say it’s a particularly funny scene, but rather that Ferrell’s good-natured loopiness was a welcome respite to the mean, suffocatingly noxious humor provided by Jeremy Piven, dominating nearly every scene in the movie as Don “The Goods” Ready, a mercenary salesman who is hired to save a failing car dealership. Piven gives such a convincingly slimy performance as this cocky jerk that it coats the movie with unpleasantness and smarminess that would be less of a problem if the movie itself weren’t so persistently mean-spirited in its comedy and downright ugly in its visuals. It strands such likable actors as Ving Rhames, David Koechner, Kathryn Hahn, Ed Helms, Tony Hale, and James Brolin with embarrassingly unfunny things to do. This is a comedy that wields profanity and inanity as bludgeons in an attempt to beat laughter out of the audience. It’s just plain off-putting, ultimately giving cause for nothing more than 89 minutes of near constant, headache-inducing, brow-furrowing.