Paranormal Activity 4 Review (Kirk Haviland)

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

Starring Kathryn Newton, Matt Shively, Brady Allen, Aiden Lovekamp and Katie Featherston

Written by Chad Feehan, Zack Estrin and Christopher Landon

Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

New this weekend in theaters from Paramount Pictures comes the latest installment in the Paranormal Activity series: Paranormal Activity 4. Starting with superbly crafted tiny indie film that became a sensation that was the first PA, the series has gone on to generate millions in revenue for little cost for Paramount and has managed to supplant the Saw films as the recurring new film each year for Halloween in theaters. But has the film series exhausted itself creatively, and perhaps more importantly has it outstayed its welcome with its audience?

Paranormal Activity 4 takes place five years after Paranormal Activity 2, which ended with Katie’s (Featherston) dispatching of her sister’s family and the abducting of their baby, Hunter. The 4th film follows the life of teen Alex (Newton), along with her boyfriend Ben (Shively), her parents and her little brother Wyatt (Lovekamp). Alex’s mom takes Robbie (Allen) into their home after his mother has an accident which puts her in the hospital. But things are not as they seem and Robbie is far from an ordinary young boy and his presence leads to strange phenomena occurring inside the house. Alex seems to be the only one who is noticing the strange occurrences all around her, and the change of Wyatt’s attitude under the influence of Robbie.

The biggest issue I had with the 4th film in the Paranormal Activity series is the fact that it’s really boring. The new family here is really an unengaging group, with the script really painting mom and dad as stereotypical shells and leaving the entire story centering on the kids. Fortunately Newton’s performance as Alex, the daughter, is the strongest acted performance of the film. She really delivers a solid performance and Lovekamp’s portrayal of Wyatt is some decent work as well. The comedic relief is left on Shively’s shoulders as the boyfriend and he manages to provide a few laughs.

However, our returning character of Katie is barley involved this time around. The film trudges along with very few high spots until we hit he final act. We see some interesting developments before the final “stare down”, including one character’s inventive demise, but then it all goes horribly wrong. The ending is terrible. I mean Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers awful here. It incorporates aspects and graphics that have never been involved in any way in the previous films and does it spectacularly wrong. Also the contention/ leap of faith we are required to believe with regards to the recording of the events throughout the film is preposterous. Setting all the webcams on all the laptops in the house to record non-stop would require all the laptops to be open ALL THE TIME, never mind the batteries running out. And this is done without the family’s knowledge! This never comes off at believable for a minute.

Ultimately Paranormal Activity 4 fails at delivering the tense, unnerving experience that the first film did so well. As with the case with the Saw films, Paranormal Activity 4 is a victim of the law of diminishing returns for horror sequels, as the story lacks any of the bite that the first one did. Paranormal Activity 4 is a non-recommend.

Till Next Time,

Movie Junkie TO

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Smashed Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

Smashed (2012)

Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Octavia Spencer and Mary Kay Place

Directed by James Ponsoldt

We the audience watch Kate (Winstead) and Charlie Hannah (Paul) hurriedly waking up to a frazzled version of a morning routine. She already knows that she’ll be arriving at work late, but there’s a spry spirit within these characters and their environment, that indie folk musical score by Andy Cabic and Eric D. Johnson guiding our perspective of a loving married couple still making each other breakfast.

I love these jerks. She is our favourite elementary school teacher, pretending that her marker is Bob Barker’s microphone, turning an inner-city classroom into The Price is Right. Her youth makes her able to pull off duster dresses, looking ‘vintage’ instead of dowdy and poor, living as if the fashion-conscious Angeleno didn’t exist. They’re the kind of annoyingly hilarious people who slowly pedal their hipster bikes through the avenues of Highland Park, indifferent to the shiny black cars behind them. They represent a new demographic within greater Los Angeles that’s more Greenberg and less The Hills. Captured within Tobias Datum’s cinematography, it shows an overcast city instead of the sun-baked one of contemporary mythology. That they are just like the youth in any North American city, surviving the ineffable middle ground between obtuseness and subversiveness, comfort and stasis.

Since I love the movie, I’ll now tear it to pieces for objectivity’s sake. The event that gets the movie rolling happens early enough in the movie, as she pukes in front of her class. She can’t necessarily reveal her drunkenness to these innocent children. Conveniently, one of them asks if she’s pregnant because the child has seen women throw up under the same state of health. Pressed for an answer, she says yes, she’s pregnant. Which leads to my main criticism of the movie that depicts or assumes that Kate’s decision-making comes from well, because she’s an alcoholic! But then, I suppose, what would we have done?

There are also the undeveloped supporting characters. I saw this movie back at TIFF, the movie’s producer Jennifer Cochis revealing that the original script told both Kate and Charlie’s story. At first, I wished that movie would have been made – there’s probably  a small market for two and half hour American neorealism out there. Spencer, who, during this movie’s shooting, had a simmering Oscar buzz, plays Kate’s AA sponsor, seems slightly close to BBF territory if not for her first subdued monologue about her new food addiction. There are less well-drawn characters like Dave (Offerman), the vice-principal in Kate’s school, and the principal herself (Mullally). There are also details that I already forgot about, even whole characters like Kate’s mother (Place) who is unapologetic about her own alcoholism. The biggest victim of this kind of script slashing seems to be Charlie. We’re assuming that he’s just hanging out in pool halls with his brother, but how does his addiction and rich parents affect his supposedly stalled career as a writer? Indies like this negotiate between looking like multi-dimensional character studies and having a snappy, succinct flow. This close the latter and is the better for it, and we get a movie with strong female character in a cinematic landscape that lacks equal gender representation.

Then there’s the frankness that I assume other audiences of critics can receive as vulgarity. But It doesn’t matter that Dave has a crude way of revealing his attraction to Kate. The audiences will laugh at this awkward scene and at Offerman’s careful delivery, probably more than jaded critics will too. Here is where I take the stand that performances and cadences can overcome any distasteful subject or series of events that it portrays. Besides, the characters’ alcoholism is central to the story but unlike other dreary addiction movies, we’re shown other glimpses of the characters’ lives. We’re not watching 85 minutes of a face and a bottle. It’s that razor-thin tightrope walk where Kate and Charlie’s benders can be both backyard stories and alarm bells of certain self-destruction, and Winstead’s performance captures both extremes.

One last thing is that this movie is gif-able, tumblrable and quotable, its script containing funny one-liners said both by Kate and the addicts she meets. Charlie’s last words to Kate, reaching out to a woman he may have totally lost, doesn’t seem tacked on. His sense of longing during this last scene is as poignant as the movie’s bigger emotions.

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Drool and Vomit: The Cast of A Little Bit Zombie Speak Out! (Kirk Haviland)

Hello All, Kirk here, aka Movie Junkie TO, with another interview. This time I got to sit down with the cast of the Canadian horror comedy A Little Bit Zombie. The following is my chat with cast members Kristopher Turner, Shawn Roberts and Crystal Lowe. I was also able to sit down with director Casey Walker which should show up on the site soon enough.

Enjoy!

Movie Junkie (MJ) – Thanks for sitting down with me today guys. I really enjoyed the film when I saw it earlier this year. I wanted to ask a few questions about how you made the film. First off, one of my favorite parts of the film is the use of practical effects over CGI in most situations, I can think of one particular scene involving vomit, Crystal. I wondered if you guys could talk about how it helped your performances and the decision to go with the practical effects to begin with.

Kristopher Turner (KT) – For me, having dealt with a lot of the fluids that come out of my mouth or splash on my face or whatever, it’s a movie that deals a lot with the sensory world.  We’re putting a human through the zombie experience, yet leaving him with the conscious brain to take it all in. So to be able to work in that sensory world of having gross things is way better having something that’s real and an actual effect.  It’s a movie that’s got a lot of heart and to have things that are real just speaks to that so much better.

Shawn Roberts (SR) …and budget constraints had something to do with why we had to go with real effects. I mean it’s a low budget independent film that we shot here in Canada and Casey’s got an eye for effects.  He knows what he can work with and what we need the computer for, and basically he wanted to use as much on the day real sort of props and liquids as we could.

Crystal Lowe (CL) – That vomit scene you mention was the second shot that I ever did for the movie so that really broke it in, once you get puked on in front of everyone they pretty much love you going forward because there’s nothing else I can do that’s worse. Casey thought it would be hilarious to keep the puke coming in the third take, so it did. I was like “c’mon Casey you’ve got the shot “and his response was repeatedly “just wait, hold on one more second” and from that moment I realized what kind of set it was going to be. It was the most fun I’ve had on a movie set ever.

MJ – Sounds like you guys had a lot of fun filming this, could you talk a bit about what appears to be a tight knit cast and crew.

CL – Close is an understatement, that’s the thing when you find a script that you love and when you find a crew that is invested because they read the script and they know what it can be. Nobody was bitching, nobody was complaining, we were there for 14 hours days and it didn’t matter because we were all happy to be there. We knew what the outcome was so it really made us tight as a cast and crew. And as a cast we were all in Sudbury with only each other, so we barbecued together every weekend and that became our life for a month, it was really cool.

MJ – Sounds like what any independent director would die for to have on set. I know for Casey this was long process to get to screen, up to 6 years. What stage of the process did you guys become involved?

SR – I think I was about 5 months out before we went to camera that I originally heard about the script and the countdown happened. I had a conversation with Casey on the phone after which I was like “alright you sound like an awesome dude, I wanna hang out with you let’s shoot a movie”.  So we’ve been now 2 ½ half years into it.

KT– Ahh one and a half.

SR – Whatever, seems like a long time.

CL – I had actually been given the script by my agent almost a year before production I think. My agent gave it to me to read and told me “this production wants to offer this to you, I think you should take a look at it” so I did. After I read it I told him “you gotta get me on this movie, this is such a great script”. I love the script and I loved Tina because she was so crazy. It took a while, about 8 months, then all of the sudden my agent called me back and told me my flight was booked and I was leaving for set, it was so long I had forgotten about the project! That said I was very excited that it came through.

MJ – I wanted to ask about this fantastic vehicle behind us here, the converted ambulance to zombie killing machine: Painkiller. How was it to have this fantastic prop on set?

KT – It’s great when you are making a movie with real props, it feels more like you’re in a movie, you’re not in a studio, you’re actually in it.  I mean we were getting eaten alive by real black flies and mosquitoes. We had a real giant zombie killing machine named Painkiller behind us in the shot, the real effects allow you to feel connected to the process that way.

SR –  And now being out  in the public I think having a giant zombie mobile brings over everybody cause they want the check out the truck “oh there’s a movie here too cool we’ll check that out”.  You know it’s good marketing.

CL – Exactly, it changes things, makes it real. You know it’s funny because I have been quoting this movie a lot lately, but Labyrinth is one of my favorite all time films and I went to see it again just recently. As I watched the puppeteering in that I thought if we had made that now it would have been all CGI, and I don’t know if it would have had the same magic as it held then. That’s why I love the mosquito in our film, because it’s a puppet. I prefer to work with that cause Jim Henson and those puppets look real, I mean they don’t look like CGI creations, they look like real little beings and I kinda wish that we would go back to that a little bit.

MJ – Now we must talk a bit about the man himself, Stephen McHattie. It must be a little intimidating to know this man is going to walk on and attempt to steal every scene right out from under you?

CL – Here’s the thing with Stephen McHattie, he doesn’t try to steal every scene, he just walks on set and steals it. It’s not an effort on his part, he just walks on and does what he does. That man is an old school cowboy, I’d never met an old school cowboy until I met him, he’s like the Marlboro Man. And he was really amazing and very generous with me, so I’d ask him questions about his process as an actor and about how he’s feeling in the movie. He was very open and very willing to answer any question I had, all while he had a smoke with his boots on. I mean this is as old school cowboy as it gets as on his spare time he digs dirt and plants, I mean this is what he does, and it’s cool.

KT – Well this was my first time working with him, I know Shawn had worked with him before. He’s a legend, you do these indie movies and you hope that you can learn something from people like that. You try to watch their acting process and see what they bring to the table and how they do it. You see the behind the scenes prep so it was great. And it’s almost like having a living prop because you have a real zombie hunter, essentially he embodies that, and he stares at you and looks like he wants to kill me literally all the time. So it makes it much easier as an actor to work off something like that

SR – And yeah working with someone of that calibre certainly brings everybody’s game up a little bit. And intimidating, nah I know the old bastard so I’m not that intimidated.

MJ – And I must add, everything you guys have said has backed up all of the fine things I have heard about the class act that is Stephen McHattie. Thanks again for sitting down with me today guys, but let me leave you with one last question. What’s with director Casey Walker’s obsession with Bacon?

KT – Bacon?

Kristopher and Shawn in unison – not just regular bacon, Tactical Bacon!

KT – A REAL product you couldn’t write that you couldn’t make that up, that has to exist somehow, I don’t know.

SR  – Yeah I don’t know, I think he found it online or something and was like wow this is real, we need this in the movie, then they sent up a box or something so he was like “alright Tactical Bacon it is”. What else do zombie hunters eat.

CL – I also don’t know where it comes from but I really appreciate his love of bacon in general because I like bacon in everything! Who doesn’t like bacon? I’m a Canadian so it kinda just makes sense.

MJ – LOL! I guess I’ll have to follow up with Casey on that one. Thanks again guys.

Till Next Time,

Movie Junkie TO

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Top 5 Must See Movies at Toronto After Dark 2012 (Matt Hodgson)

TAD Poster and T-shirt art by Gary Pullin

The 2012 version of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TAD) is almost upon us. Over the years TAD has brought audiences a wonderfully varied selection of horror, sci-fi, action, and cult films from Canada and around the world. Also of interest to cinephiles is the nightly pub night at Pauper’s Pub on Bloor in which ticketholders can mix it up with filmmakers, actors, and members of the press – an opportunity that few festivals provide. I’ll be at Toronto After Dark and so will many other members of the Entertainment Maven team, but I thought I would take this opportunity to talk about five movies that I have seen on the festival circuit which are MUST SEES this year at TAD.

5. Grabbers

Channeling everything that was great about 80s horror, Grabbers is a deliciously funny horror movie based in a small town in Ireland in which the locals must ward off an invasion of tentacled critters. And since it’s Ireland, booze is involved and it becomes a key factor in staving off this monstrous attack.

4. Dead Sushi

It seems like a lot of people have been writing off J-splatter (gratuitously bloody Japanese horror) movies lately, and maybe for good reason, but Noboru Iguchi has crafted an incredibly fun and oddly intelligent horror movie involving killer pieces of sushi. This will surely be the most interactive audience experience to be had at TAD and will even educate the audience about sushi etiquette and preparation. What a contrast!

3. Game of Werewolves

An absolute hit at Fantasia in Montreal, Game of Werewolves, much like Grabbers, is a love letter to 80s horror cinema. Moreno, the director, is dedicated to suspense, practical effects, and most of all, beautifully crafted comedic moments. Game of Werewolves is a great time at the cinema and a very fun way to end this year’s festival.

2. Wrong

A missing dog, a clock that ticks over from 7:59 to 7:60, a zany cast of characters in a story where everything just feels…well…wrong. This movie was one of the best things I saw earlier this year and instantly became one of my favourite movies of the last few years. The type of weirdness on display in Wrong is similar to that found in the works of Douglas Adams, specifically Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I cannot recommend Wrong strongly enough, you have never seen anything like this, and nearly every moment is hilarious.

1. Crave

Crave is a very special movie. It takes often overused narrative devices like voice narration and fantasies and either completely reinvents them or executes them to perfection. This is the first feature film from director Charles de Lauzirika, but you would never know it. Crave is inventive, intriguing, thrilling, funny, and could very well be the best movie at Toronto After Dark this year. Do…not…miss it!

See you at the festival!

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The Barrens Blu-Ray Review (Kirk Haviland)

The Barrens Blu-Ray

Starring Stephen Moyer, Mia Kirshner, Allie MacDonald, Peter DaCunha, Erik Knudson, Chantelle Chung, David Keeley and Shawn Ashmore

Written and Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

New this week to DVD and Blu-Ray from Anchor Bay Entertainment comes The Barrens. This take on the classic campfire stories that have dominated family camping outings for decades comes from the enigmatic Darren Lynn Bousman, more known for his inconsistency than any one film in particular. So what does the director of Saw 2-4, the divisive Repo, The Genetic Opera and the outright abysmal 11-11-11 have in store for us this time?

It’s known as the Jersey Devil, the long rumoured winged beast spawned 400 years ago, supposedly by Satan himself. The stories claim it came about after a woman known as Mother Leeds had 13 children, but she offered up the 13th child to the Devil as a sacrifice. Some say this creature still inhabits the dense pine forests of southern New Jersey, where Richard Vineyard (Moyer) takes his family for a rustic weekend camping trip so he can spread his father’s ashes where he camped as a child. As the Vineyard family ventures further into the woods in search of the perfect campsite, at Richard’s behest, we see that Richard may have a hidden agenda, as his grip on reality starts to slip away. It would appear The Jersey Devil may not just be a story for Richard. With his paranoia growing he manages to put everyone he loves, wife Cynthia (Kirshner), daughter Sadie (MacDonald) and son Danny (DaCunha) in real danger. But when Sadie’s friend Ryan (Knudsen) goes missing, Richard is convinced it’s the work of the Jersey Devil. But is the legend of the Jersey Devil real, or is it just another of Richard’s growing delusions?

The Barrens is a low budget indie horror that wears this fact proudly on its sleeve. Using cost effective locations like the forest and a minimal amount of Computer Generated Images (CGI), using the practical effect of a man in a rubber suit for the Devil, you can see how the production was able to come in at a reasonable cost. Getting Moyer, straight off of HBO’s True Blood, is probably one of the most costly expenditures the production had. And Moyer was definitely wise choice, for the 85% of the film where he is allowed to show some range and depth he does well, but it really falls apart for Moyer towards the end. The beginning is actually quite slow, so thankfully we have Moyer there, but as the films ramps up the writing for Richard gets more tedious and ridiculous. The rest of the cast are decent enough, Kirshner may have been coasting a bit in parts and the kids aren’t going to win any awards in the near future, but their work is solid enough. The script is hardly original, the cursed creature in the woods attacking people, is it real or just the paranoid guy’s mind, we’ve seen this before. This time around it works, for periods at a time, but not the whole way through. When the Devil attacks come (when the CGI creeps in) it looks like a Scy-Fi network film. And the suit looks great on angular shots, but very underwhelming in up front shots.

For Blu-Ray extras we get barely anything here, an audio commentary with director Darren Lynn Bousman and director of photography Joseph White and a trailer.

Overall The Barrens is much like eating at a buffet, not all the offerings look appetizing and others leave a bad taste in the mouth, and you usually leave full but not 100% satisfied. While I cannot endorse a buy, a late night cheapie rental may be in order. The Barrens gets a very mild recommend.

Till Next Time,

Movie Junkie TO

Make sure to keep up with what’s going on at Entertainment Maven by liking our Facebook page and having updates delivered right to your Facebook News Feed. It’s the only way to stay on top of all of our articles with the newest blockbusters and all the upcoming films, festivals and film related events in Toronto.

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