by Daniel Erenberg
3-D technology can make anything cheesy. So a film that is meant solely to scare the shit out of you might not be the best choice for it. I can sort of see what they were going for though. The first killing in the movie pops an eyeball out at you, and later in the film a human heart goes flying out into the audience. But these shots should elicit more shock and less giggles. The only time I jumped in the entire film was when an ugly dog went running towards the camera, followed by a dwarf woman chasing after it. That freaked the shit out of me. Moments later, when the killer (a dude in a miner’s uniform) cut a naked lady’s chest open with a pickaxe? Didn’t react at all.
The flick’s premise centers around a group of teens, who escape from this miner’s massacre and then reunite ten years later, the same day another massacre begins. Two of them (Jaimie King and Dawson’s Creek’s Kerr Smith) have gotten married and become a grocery store manager and the town sheriff, respectively. Another of them, played by the shockingly bad actor Jensen Ackles, from TV’s Supernatural, has just come back to town after being gone for the past decade. And the fourth is that naked lady who gets killed really early on after an exceedingly unsexy sex scene and some reasonably hot full frontal. The best acting of the bunch comes from King, who manages to save her scenes simply by not being awful in them.
The film spends its first half trying to convince us that the killer is a supposedly dead mine worker named Harry, but turns the tables in the second half, completely forgetting that character and trying to set up a mystery as to whether Ackles or Smith could possibly be the killer. By this point, we don’t really care because they’re pretty much the same character, and even though there’s a love triangle between them and King’s character, we can’t muster up a single shit as to who she ends up with, because the two guys are just so, so boring. So the second half of the film just ends up being a bad acting contest between Gay Jack from the Creek and the guy from Supernatural who didn’t used to be on Gilmore Girls.
Note about 3-D: It’s really hard to wear 3-D glasses over prescription glasses but it was the only way I could see this film. Let’s do something about this, 3-D Scientists. And please try to do it before the February 2nd 3-D episode of Chuck, because that’s sure to be better than My Bloody Valentine 3-D.
D
Tags:
January 24, 2009 at 1:59am ∞
