White Trash: When a mother looks like her daughter’s older sister.

Tropes on a Forest Road.

Mother and daughter on road trip. Breakdown on deserted road. Monster attack. That’s about it in THE MONSTER, an average thriller that ambitiously tries to be more than the B-movie it is.

Zoe Kazan is a white trash alcoholic single mom, and Ella Ballentine is disenchanted teen daughter Lizzy. As if sensing the minimal substance here, writer-director Bryan Bertino adds reams of backstory/flashback to create a strained relationship between mom and daughter, but it all amounts to naught when the screaming starts.

One night, taking Lizzy to her father, mom hits a wolf on a deserted stretch of road, careens to a stalled stop, and calls a roadside mechanic. Mom and Lizzy exit the car and examine the wolf, while point-of-view shots tell us there is a monster watching them from the foliage.

Mechanic arrives. Killed by monster. Ambulance arrives. Killed by monster. Rain beats down. Lizzy must get their keys out of mechanic’s van, so walks slowly in the downpour towards the van; it might make for tension, but who behaves like this in pouring rain? The thriller tropes are all here, but not good enough to be compelling, and not cheap enough to be “so bad it’s good.”

Earlier, while examining the wolf, they picked up a tooth that resembled a shark’s tooth – triangular, serrated; later, when we see the monster (a guy in a wet black bodysuit, with a headpiece that looks like Venom), it has pointy knife-like teeth that look nothing like the shark’s tooth. So who do we fire in the prop department?

Acting is exceptional though, both Zoe and Ella called upon to be in constant pain (physical or emotional). We can only imagine how exhausting a shoot like this must be.

THE MONSTER is a streamlined thriller in basically one location with two main actors; a linear story that doesn’t need such a layered character backstory, as the events of the night in the forest are not predicated on anything from the characters’ pasts.

Lizzy ends with a voiceover that sounds as if she’s trying to analogize the real life monster with the “monster” of alcoholism. “My mom tells me there’s no such thing as monsters. But she is wrong. They are out there, waiting for you… watching. Sometimes where you see them… Sometimes where you don’t.” What the–? This monologue is not a payoff, not a callback, not anything – just pointless rhetoric that wants to be in a better movie.

Bertino’s 3^rd writer-producer-director effort (after THE STRANGERS 2008, MOCKINGBORD 2014), he looks to be carving a niche for himself in the straightforward horror-thriller genre. But Berty, are you wading out too deep for your shallow B-movie?

Now that’s scary.

END

Overwrought Underworld.

Guns, Gore and Grrrrrls in growling leather.

The Salad Dealer

UNDERWORLD gives a shot in the arm, so to speak, to the vampire and werewolf iconographies, updating/reimagining both to be in an ongoing millennia-aged war that is escalating, plopping them in modern day Europe (or somewhere with underground rail transport and rain that won’t quit) with automatic weapons and computers. And leather.

Selene (Kate Beckinsale, who would soon marry the director – luckiest man alive, Len Wiseman) is a vampire “Death Dealer,” with guns bigger than her acting abilities and leather so tight and curve-hugging my Carnal Nerve nocturnally emissioned. She’s a lethal stalker and killer of werewolves (“lycans” in sexy new street cred).

Story is interesting twist on the legends, yet if you enjoy werewolf slash vampire movies, this may or may not be your cup of blood. You see, whereas all other werewolf and vampire movies have been correctly slotted into the horror genre, UNDERWORLD is an “action” movie whose characters happen to be vamps and thropes. We’re in their world now, so their intrinsic alienness is the norm, rather than an anomaly. Movie can get on with the shooting and running and blood-fests as common occurrence between the two “races” (just as any two given races on Earth at any given point in history will engage lovingly in shooting and running and blood-fests). Subsequently, dialog is childish, and action is filmed in that style that suddenly slams into slomo to accentuate the flounce of capes and the thrill of tight butt-leather, with no meaning other than for the sake of capes flouncing and butt-leather bouncing.

Latent werewolf, Michael (Scott Speedman) is bitten by a vampire – to breed a hybrid race that will win the war for the lycans, who are jealous that the vampires have such cool leather. Even though he’s a transgender, Selene inexplicably falls for Michael. Because he’s hot, I’m guessing. But vampire-werewolf love cannot be. So it is written in the ancient scrolls of the TV Guide. For advice on her love life, she calls on the Dr. Phil of vampires, their sleeping king, Viktor (Bill Nighy), who in hibernation looks like a zombie husk of a mummy, until he is revived by fresh blood, whereupon he looks like Bill Nighy (i.e. a zombie husk of a mummy).

Casting Kate Beckinsale was not a mistake. Garbing her in such tight leather is. Because I am blinded to anything else when she is onscreen. She is just too breathtakingly beautiful, too achingly sensual– Those pointy incisors; those devil-blue eyes– Look at that cutie go! Two-fisted gun barrels blazing, Hard Guy Overcoat flouncing, rain dripping pruriently from hand-grab spinner waist in leatherbound corset, spike-heeled boots and porcelain-creamy neck–

Uh, what was the question again?–

END