“My friend, you have seen this incident, based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen?” And then with startling dramatic gleam, our babbling narrator Criswell declares, “Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it… for they will be from outer space!” Only this sort of sheer nonsense could come from the one and only “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” one of the absolute best films ever made. It’s a film that is so bad you can barely look away throughout its run time. Films of this ilk like “Reefer Madness” and “Robot Monster” must be appreciated in the same vein.
You could reasonably make the assertion that I’ve rooted for “Holliston” to stink. And you wouldn’t be that far off. I didn’t root for it to stink, but I was never an ardent supporter of it from out the gates because I simply had nothing to gain from it. “Holliston” is still a vanity project and is still a bit odd, but thankfully the show has gotten better.
Like the first “V/H/S,” the sequel to the acclaimed anthology surely won’t re-invent the wheel, but it still manages to be a very good horror film with a killer series of stories. Meshing the found footage sub-genre with the anthology film. “V/H/S 2” learns from the mistakes of the first film by reducing the number of stories and lengthening them for more exposition. There are still inherent flaws and plot holes injected in to this sequel, but for this outing there’s a better sense of coherency, and a lot less filler. Rather than the more confusing premises from the first film, this time around the four stories are much easier to follow. To wit, they’re much more entertaining.
Director James Watkins survival thriller is one part mediocre social commentary, two parts solid thriller, and one part moronic drama. “Eden Lake” seems to want to be it all, offering characters that simply can’t let their confrontation with rowdy teens go, all the while hinting at the complexities of dysfunctional violent home and how they breed violence within their confines. But much of that is destroyed when Watkins seeks to turn his juvenile villains in to scowling black and white monsters motivated on violence and violence only. There aren’t any shades of grey to them until the very end, and by then the movie has become so ludicrous it’s hard to soak in the thoughts on the vicious cycle of violence.