My Five Year Plan

Let’s make this intro short and sweet: as I predicted last week, boring David is gone, and this week we get ‘horror for America,’ featuring fauxteur Eli Roth as guest judge. Six movies by six contestants. We’ve got surprises (the two worst contestants in the competition do surprisingly well, two of the best do pretty horribly), so without further ado:

“The Malibu Myth” by Kenny Luby - Regular readers of my On the Lot summaries know that I absolutely hate this guy. His movies are the worst sort of aimless fuckery, and it shocks me that he’s allowed to put his wretched faux-artistic nonsense on television (that Luby represents for the show some sort of weird only-in-Hollywood mockery of formal experimentation shows how perverse this show’s understanding of the medium is).

So it pains me to say this, but: this is the best film I’ve seen from Kenny Luby. It’s got a narrative(!) and a few cool makeup effects. That said, it’s still crap. The most bludgeoning, insultingly plotted type of crap, where two people are talking about mysterious deaths in the area, and then as they find a body in the road, they’re attacked. This is a plot? Whatever happened to reversals, characters, or even the most remote hint of subtext?

Of course, Eli Roth loves Luby’s incompetent brutalist hackery, comparing it to films by fellow Splat Pack (sigh) directors Rob Zombie and Alexandre Aja. He seems to willfully misinterpret Luby’s inability to write dialogue here (”Let’s get naked out here.”) as some sort of homage to schlock cinema or as some sort of deconstruction of genre convention. Let’s be honest here - Luby and Roth deserve each other. D.

“Ankle Biters” by Sam Friedlander - So in this one, Sam, our other viral-video director, tells the ’story’ of a puppet thing that bites a boy’s ankles, and then chases him. The lack of scares in this film is only topped by the lack of imagination - can’t you at least competently produce a chase/action sequence that has at least one reversal in the entire thing?

But really, that’s the least of Sam’s crimes this week. Eli Roth is remarkably on-point when he criticizes the stultifying opening narration that basically ruins the plot of his own film, as well as the needless and stakes-lowering coda featuring some doofy cop character we haven’t seen before. I’m all for puppets in film (Sam’s chief concern as a director was whether or not people would buy his antagonist, rather than whether or not he earned an ounce of emotional investment from his audience), but this is just mediocre. C-.

“Midnight Snack” by Andrew - Andrew’s been one of the few potentially good filmmakers here, but he lost any hope for me here. Instead of turning out another shrugworthy bit of antiseptic comedy like his last few, he bakes a huge loaf of comedy-horror that, as Eli Roth (again, on point - but that doesn’t excuse how big of an asshole he looks like when he says it) explains, “is neither fish nor fowl.” He then delivers a humiliating blow, telling Andrew that his film would’ve made for a good ‘Got Milk’ ad. The audience chuckles. The real problem here is that Andrew’s editing and shot construction is basically meaningless. He so slavishly latches onto setting up the not-very-good ‘jokes’ that the framing and timing ends up being completely wrong for all of his scare moments. Our big climatic fright moment is some Asian chick with bad skin turning her head slowly. D is for dumb.

“Eternal Waters” by Jason Epperson - Okay, now I don’t like Epperson as a filmmaker, but I’m going to step out on a limb here and say that this was, within the sort of lowered standards and narrow criteria that I have to qualify any statement with regards to this show, pretty good. Epperson falls back a bit in the beginning on The Cinema of Speed Ramping/Filters/Jump Cuts, but it’s in service of a nightmarish dream sequence, so I’ll grant him that. From hereon in, he takes a remarkably mature approach, with some rather elegant chiaroscuro lighting, some decent acting (save one shot of a serial killer having fallen on his own sword, as it were) and an almost kinda touching ending. Good show, Epperson. You could have a career in direct-to-video Christian genre movies yet! B.

Something Stupid by Shira-Lee. - (Let’s be honest - I don’t remember the name of this film, and neither will anyone within a few hours). Evidently the racist ‘mystical negro’ archetype plays a role in the South African conscious too, but here Shira-Lee is, basing her film around a Whiter-than-White couple who go into a house, and then an older mammyish black woman tells the woman about how her son died in the house. Get out! GET OUT!

Sigh.

Carrie’s still useless, but Garry makes his first useful comment of the season, saying that there’s no conflict in the film, no tension, and thus it’s not even really a film. And Roth, again (I’m shocked here), offers up something useful: the elegant, gliding camera moves totally don’t work in this context, distracting from the stately, creepy art direction (that Roth cites The Grudge as an example of a film that did this sort of thing well just blows my mind). D.

“Profile” by Mateen - Here we go. This is what I’ve been waiting for the entire show. Something to really hate. Mateen’s film is rank exploitation on the level of United 93 or The Passion of the Christ. A young black man is beaten brutally by cops while a rookie cop - a brother! - does nothing. Mateen explains this is his own brand of horror, the horror of the real, as the film cuts away to the young man being pulled over. Oh. Shewww! Thank God he wasn’t really hurt - it was all a dream. And the officer that pulled him over is the same black guy, so he’s not going to do anything.

And then, for some reason unbeknownst to anyone with an understanding of cinema as a medium, Mateen pulls back to a comically long shot - the entire western seaboard! Followed by a shot of the earth! What?

The judges, rightfully, tear him apart, though ever since Carrie chided Jason that first week about making fun of retarded people, none of the judges seem willing to challenge the morality of the filmmakers. Eli Roth informs Mateen just how meaningless his film is by elegantly dissecting the question of narrative point-of-view and then telling Mateen that his film shifts point of view too rapidly to produce any emotional connection on a level other than ‘Stop hitting him.’ Strangely, many have leveled this same charge on Roth’s latest installment in the Hostel series.

I hate this.

Oh yeah, a rating? F.

So who goes? Given that the audience was audibly moved by Mateen’s film, and that Andrew probably built up some good will from the voters, I’ll say Shira-Lee.