“I see black people!”

Five minutes into THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT 2: GHOSTS OF GEORGIA, I was exhausted. Every ten seconds director Tom Elkins is blasting us with glitchy special effects. In lieu of horror. Tom thinks that the title card Based On a True Story is enough to scare the bejesus out of us. He’s right: I, for one, am terrified that people actually believe this gaboon.

Upon moving into an isolated house in the Georgia woods with her parents, young Heidi Wyrick (Emily Alyn Lind) sees visions of an old man named Mr. Gordy, and visions of slaves hanging around the property. A visiting black man explains that the Wyrick home used to be a “station” for the “underground railroad” – the movement that freed slaves – and that the white “station master” was brutally killed by hooded Klan for his efforts. But the ghost slaves are trying to tell Heidi something else: maybe that Tom Elkins should dial the effects down to PARANORMAL ACTIVITY.

Nice opening, as a raven-haired spanker with angular features and a ripe B-class chest sits on her bed (Abigail Spencer) wearing one of those long flannel shirts that makes us wonder whether she’s wearing panties. Glitched filmstock and fractured visions start immediately and continue every ten seconds for the duration of the film. So our heroine, Lisa Wyrick (Spencer), is already having visions and visitations, then moves to the Georgia house with her husband and daughter Heidi, where Heidi starts having visions – and Lisa doesn’t believe Heidi is telling the truth. Pot calling the kettle black much? Also, if Lisa and Heidi are constant victims to camera defocuses, stressed filmstock, tinted film, crash-cuts and jumpscares from the very start, where’s the drama? Where’s the arc? It’s not like they moved to a haunted house – the mother is shown as already haunted. For any “ghost story” to work, the protagonists have to experience something alien to their normal existence. All Lisa and Heidi did was move and continue to have visions/camera effects.

Daddy Wyrick is played by Chad Michael Murray, who looks like a country singer that exploits 9/11 with racist songs; constantly baseball-capped and beer-swilling, the perfect redneck. Redhead trailer-trash sister Joyce (Katee Sackhoff) comes to live with them and takes up residence in – whadaya know – the trailer out back!

”Tee hee! Guess where all the men are looking?”

No surprise this story is not true at all, and by that I mean, even from the account of that poor child born of beer sperm and country music. Real life Heidi reported seeing “Mr. Gordy” and some other apparitions, but nowhere are there accounts of the station master being a taxidermist who stuffed runaway slaves! And in the film’s finale, do ghosts really have to walk to their destinations, as the hooded station master does? Why doesn’t he just appear wherever he wants to be? And Joyce gets “stitched up” literally by the station master magically, needles coming out of her mouth. 120 years later, and Houdini’s needle trick still wows ’em. Dramatic license, or dramatic plagiarism?

Are they kidding us with the title? Like OPEN WATER 2, which had no relation to OPEN WATER except a venal cash-grab by executives, HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT 2 blatantly tells us in its subtitle (GHOSTS OF GEORGIA) that it is not about the Connecticut family from the previous film, nor does it feature any “ghosts” from that film, nor does the haunting even take place in Connecticut!

Don’t you love how ghosts appear wearing clothes? Like the clothes have souls too, right? And after the slave ghosts “kill” their tormentor ghost at the end, we see them running, running to freedom lord sweet Jesus. Uh, why? If “ghosts” appear to re-enact their tragic deaths or to simply wander the halls of a mansion, why are these ghosts now “re-enacting” a new ectoplasmic scene? Will they now be seen “running to freedom” all the time by new owners; are they stuck in that new loop now? Where are they running anyway? To heaven? Where that tormentor ghost has obviously gone because they killed him quite maliciously, so lord sweet Jesus must have assumed him unto his bosom like most murder victims. (So do they kill him again in heaven when he tries to torment them, or do they leave that up to the wrathful god of Abraham now?)

After being wrung through every trope in the horror movie handbook (self-opening doors, figures appearing behind her with orchestra stabs, noises in the night, ramped filmstock; i.e. not one original idea), Lisa must “allow” the slave ghosts into her soul to combat the tormenting station master, who feels the need to roar like a monster when he approaches his victims. Like it’s not scary enough that he’s from another dimension wearing a sack hood and about to taxidermy you with sawdust and bugs, he’s gotta roar like Rosie O’Donnell as well.

Heidi wasn’t afraid of the ghosts – she was afraid because she was the child of a redneck who instilled in her a fear of a black planet. But maybe… just maybe, with all those black people singin’ and a-praisin’ lord sweet Jesus, maybe Mr. Gordy was actually Berry Gordy and the station was called Motown!

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Follow the yellow slick road…

An origin tale of how a sideshow charlatan becomes the Wizard of Oz, OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL is as wondrous and exciting as the film that inspired it, which means it is kaleidoscopically trippy and makes no sense.

In 1905 sepia-toned Kansas, James Franco is carnival magician Oscar Diggs, a womanizing narcissist, swept away in a tornado to a bombastic Technicolor land where animals talk, magic exists and women are (still) witches. He uses his duplicity and illusionist sleight of hand to dupe the populace into thinking he is the great Wizard spoken of in legends, and is emplaced in the Emerald Palace just before Judy Garland arrives with all the good drugs.

First there was the vaudeville B-Movie that became a legend in 1939, THE WIZARD OF OZ; the blaxploitation remake THE WIZ in 1978; the dark, largely-overlooked RETURN TO OZ in 1985 (which would be appreciated more readily in these DARK KNIGHT times); and now, adhering to the fad of the age, OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL is a prequel exploring how the Wizard became The Man Behind The Curtain.

An intriguing concept, the visually gluttonous GREAT AND POWERFUL could have been darker, but unfortunately ends up drowning in Disney syrup (except for the fearsome flying baboons, which I suspect caused as much sleep trauma for today’s kids as the now puppet-looking flying monkeys caused for 1939’s kids). Its pedigree will give it more impetus than it deserves, umbilically linked as it is with 1939’s WIZARD. Not to say that WIZARD was a daring film – a product of its times, only achieving classic status for the fact that parents keep administering it to their children as readily as Ritalin, lending it more credibility than the half-baked LSD trip that it really is.

When Oscar lands in Oz, he meets three women (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams), all of whom seem morally ambiguous; no matter how tasty each of them looks, they all have some ulterior agenda and at the slightest prompting are apt to suddenly turn into evil witches – in other words, they’re your average woman.

One of the witches (claiming to be “good”) sends Oscar on a quest to destroy the “evil” witch in order to claim his castle of gold. On his quest along the yellow brick road, Oscar is aided by a monkey called Monkey (Zach Braff) and a cute little china girl that he calls Little China Girl. (She seems like Jena Malone, but she is voiced by Joey King.) They all, in turn, call him Wizard. An endearing moment when Oscar tells the china girl of “a real wizard – Thomas Alva Edison – the Wizard of Menlo Park.” A very cool real world credit in this fantasy film.

Directed by Sam Raimi (of the SPIDER-MAN trilogy, which means that Bruce Campbell will somehow make a cameo – he does, as an Emerald City Guard), GREAT AND POWERFUL looks striking, and will amuse the same demographic that the original film was aimed at (i.e. very young hyperactive kids on Ritalin). And James Franco is the perfect foil for this land where duplicity reigns over naïveté, able to pull off that innocent smile to sell his snake-oil, yet having the braggadocio to counter the witches.

It’s a great angle – that of an illusionist tricking his way into the post of Wizard; that is, after all, what the actual “wizard” turns out to be in WIZARD OF OZ – a charlatan. And strangely, it is through his mendacity that Oscar finds redemption, as the very same trickery he used to charm people into believing he was a Wizard is employed to defeat the evil witches.

But there’s a conceptual problem: when you bring REAL MAGIC into the mix, it skews everything, including good storytelling, because the boundaries of Real Magic are never delineated. For example, when the baboon grabs the good witch, she has her wand with her – a wand that can conjure tornadoes of fire and liquid nitrogen and laser blasts – yet the baboon grabs her anyway. Was the wand battery low or something? And why is china girl so amazed at Edison creating “pictures that move” when she lives in a world where witches can fly in bubbles and shoot lethal energy bolts from their hands? And she’s a porcelain doll that lives and breathes, against all biological laws! Gimme some rules, people!

And the greatest conundrum of all: how could the evil witches possibly be fooled by Oscar’s trickery? Playing devil’s advocate, I guess that in a world of REAL magic, you would not be expecting, nor would you even conceive of, someone bringing ILLUSION into the fray. So when Oscar projects his face onto the town square in a pillar of smoke, these witches would be inclined to believe that he must be using magic, because in their minds there is no other option. Still, I’m sure the 5 – 15 demo is not rationalizing this scenario.

They’re all on Ritalin.

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A shallow ripple in the Force.

Is COWBOYS AND ALIENS a boring western movie, or a clichéd alien invasion movie?

At some point, I wondered whether it was just a tax write-off for Steven Spielberg, who seems to have phoned in his producer’s credit on this one. At least he hired Han Solo.

A cowboy (Daniel Craig) wakes in the desert with no memory and a futuristic bracelet attached to his wrist, which turns out to be a supercool weapon. A classic Eastwood-ian laconic avenger, this Stranger wanders into the nearest town, which is run by a mean-tempered rancher named Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford playing nasty). As the Stranger is run into jail, a strange anorexic woman with catlike eyes, a nice ass and an ironing board chest (Olivia Wilde) skulks around him and makes portentous remarks.

Then aliens attack. Sounds dumb. Plays dumber. At one point, we almost wish that the movie would just remain a good old-fashioned Western, as the production values are top-notch, and fine actors like Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown and Paul Dano are creating memorable, dirt-smeared roles. When mosquito-like extraterrestrial alien ships swoop down and start grabbing people and blowing things up, the tone is meant to shift to fun and action, instead shifting to stupid and eyestrain.

(Note that even though the Stranger has that snappy arm-weapon, Han Solo is the first person to start firing back at the aliens! “Give me a good blaster any day…”)

Dolarhyde (great name, huh?) and the Stranger team up to lead a posse to rescue the snatched townsfolk from the aliens, who have parked their big cigar-like spaceship in the desert and are mining gold.

Poffbacca: a cowboy AND an alien

Like INDEPENDENCE DAY or STAR WARS, the writers’ lack of imagination for the aliens’ battle tactics is astounding: the extraterrestrials have those fancy laser arm-weapons (one of which was stolen by the Stranger), yet when the cowboys attack their ship, what do they do? Run outside naked and start punching everyone.

There are two good aspects to this poorly thought-out art experiment. One is the CGI. Far be it from me to praise CGI as a defining factor of a movie’s quality, but I only mention the Computer Graphics as a comment on the state of the art; the CGI extraterrestrial aliens (which resemble the DISTRICT 9 aliens – no points for originality) are completely IN the movie. There is no doubt at all that we are looking at anything but rampaging extraterrestrial marauders that fully interact with people and horses and the landscape. On the other hand, they are purely used as ‘device’ – no characterization, no depth, just faceless, nameless things that the humans must overcome.

The other powerful aspect of this film is the emotional connection that gradually grows between Dolarhyde and the young Native American Nat (Adam Beach – watch that boy! Oscars in his future!). When Dolarhyde eventually realizes Nat is the surrogate son he wished he had, special effects have already killed him – and through our tears we realize why the great Harrison Ford was chosen as Dolarhyde. Not just for the wealth of Han Solo gags – only Ford could begin as an unsympathetic, cantankerous villain and arc to touching his long-buried heart with such tear-welling effect. Making us weep like Ewoks.

From the comicbook by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and directed by Jon Favreau, with enough screenwriters to guarantee it was going to be a circle jerk, the mashup of genres in COWBOYS AND ALIENS is almost as dissonant as the same mashup involving aliens in INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

Apparently, the overwhelming number of INDIANA JONES fans leaving that movie weeping in outrage was not enough to deter Spielberg from trying to “alien”-ate us again…

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