Film Review: Extinction (2015)

     Copyright: Vertical Entertainment

The best way to describe the movie Extinction is to perceive it as a weird dream about a script about a time after a zombie apocalypse. The film opens in the present time, where an outbreak of some kind transformed patients into rabid killers, brought the army onto the streets and people were being evacuated to the protected zones.

Two friends, Patrick and Jack, along with a pregnant woman, try to reach safety. A decade later, society has fallen apart and the world has entered a new ice age (for whatever reason), most are dead, but Jack and Patrick are neighbors, living apparently secure lives while one of them is also raising a child, the nine-year-old Lu.

But, here�s the twist � the two men are not communicating with each other in any way, even though only a road separates the two houses.

The twist-based approach isn�t something new in zombie films. Ever since The Walking Dead revived the interest in the genre and started the latest zombie craze, there have been numerous films trying to find a fresh angle from which they can present the same theme. One of the latest ones was Maggie, which relatively successfully went for the father-daughter family drama as the main cornerstone of the plot.

Extinction and its director Miguel �ngel Vivas went for the mystery of a broken relationship between two friends, which obviously had to be something huge if it managed to overshadow the death of the human civilization. Vivas, who previously worked on a home-invasion thriller called Kidnapped, placed a lot of attention to the characters and their state of mind. This is why almost half of the film passes while we see how Jack is a caring father to Lu while Patrick gradually goes insane. Flashbacks examine their relationship and slowly move to the present point.

But, Vivas had to use some horror elements as well, so in one moment, additional survivors and new infected mutants come onto the stage. From then on, the film switches gears into the standard under-siege flick, dispersing almost all potential about the two main characters the director tried to build. Both Matthew Fox and Jeffrey Donovan present solid characters, but their acting stop being important in that point.

As the action unravels, the film goes full bore into the action-survival mode, which doesn�t really leave a lasting impression mainly because the entire film (both houses and the small surrounding area outside) looks like a giant sound stage with plenty of fake snow. In this environment, the panic, fear, and the confusion, in my opinion, just don�t connect that well with the audience.

Like a dream of the zombie movie, Extinction dares to innovate but lacks the cognitive effort needed to make whole the different random parts it tries to encompass.

Film Review: Dark Places (2015)

Copyright: A24

From its onset, the Dark Places movie emits that particular vibe that tells that this film will not be a huge success with the audience. As a dark mystery and a thriller, it begins on a really somber note, showing a mass murder of the Day family in which a brother was accused and sentenced for killing his mother and two sisters.

The remaining sister Libby Day, then a small girl, is two decades later a grown woman, (played by Charlize Theron), who still lives off of the charity coming from random people who learn her cruel fate. Libby, now a jaded and detached individual, learns that in spite of this, the money is drying out, so she is forced to listen to an offer from a shady organization, who desires to reopen her case and find out what really happened that night when the murders took place.

The introduction of this group is one of the most impressive and unexpected elements of the film, which is both out of place (in a good way) and extremely intriguing. It is a shame that later on, the same element loses all relevance to the story.

Naturally, as Libby returns to the backwater part of Kansas where the crime took place, grizzly memories, but also new and worrying events, begin to unravel. Like the The Drop, it slowly build that unnerving tension, even though nothing really threatening happens.

As a thriller, Dark Places is pretty good. It builds two parallel narratives while it examines the young Ben Day, who was convicted of the murders, and his demanding pre-crime life of poverty and family instability. The second narrative deals with the present-day Libby and her quest for answers, until the two plot lines collide into a coherent story. Here, the director Gilles Paquet-Brenner uses a cinematographic approach that is reminiscent of the French horror thrillers from the early 21st century, where bleakness and an overall depressive setup add to the overall horror feel. In this movie as well, the Day family struggles as a collective, but also as individuals � Kansas is a desperate place to be poor, and Ben desperately wants to feel something apart from the sadness and irrelevance, no matter what the cost might be.

But, here the film also makes a turn for a more philosophical domain, where it tries to explore the choices that are made and their consequences as the past time frame moves closer and closer to the family murder, but does this in a very meandering way. At the same time, it gradually loses the tempo of the original setup and the organization that hired Libby doesn�t really matter anymore, even though she falls into active danger from unseen forces who wish for the case to stay closed.

The resolution of the film is, strangely, satisfying in an odd way, mainly because it ties up all the loose ends. Here, the film provides a solid conclusion and sets all the characters to their rightful place, but overall, it lacks any of those heart-racing moments (action one�s or other types) that a grizzly thriller mystery needs to have. This makes Dark Places movie a very good cerebral piece but keeps it emotionally at an arm�s length when it comes to connecting with the audience.

Crowdfunding Push - Abattoir: Waiting Room

Imagining you're an animal in the slaughterhouse sounds like a really bad idea, but this short film being made in Serbia explores the exact same idea. Here's what Abattoir: Waiting Room Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign page states: 

What if we are not the most powerful creatures in the universe? What if "the others" have the power and reason to serve us what we deserve? What if "the others" are here just for that - to show us how wrong we are doing?  Two humans, one �waiting room�, many questions, and two stories. First one: the host (played by famous Serbian actor Radoje Cupic) is a vegan who didn�t do much to save the animals, besides the fact he stopped eating them; his karmic punishment is an existence with never-ending brief residents who are about to end up as a meat products. Second one: newcomer (played by highly regarded Nenad Pecinar) is just one of many with the same questions, behavior, and fears. As a meat-eater, he will end up as a� you can guess.

Abattoir: Waiting Room campaign is entering its final 12 hours and has currently collected over 20% of the funds it is looking for. Check it out here and see if you can help this film out.

Film Review: Knock Knock (2015)

Copyright: Lionsgate Premiere

It�s not good to be bad, and being bad might end with you being killed, is what Knock Knock movie is trying to tell us. Temptation can be interesting and fun, and it can even dance around in your living room in a shower robe, but at the very end of temptation, something horrible and sharp might lurk in the dark.

Essentially, this is all well and nice, but the cog in the mechanism of this revenge horror film is its main actor � Keanu Reeves. This man has plenty of, shall we say, unorthodox talent and a strong screen presence, but here, the actor transforms into a devastating miscast right during the opening scenes.

Let�s take the first few moments of the film. Here, we see Reeves� character, a man by the name of Evan Webber, being woken up by his loving wife and family. Webber is an architect in his 40�s and he has a gorgeous spouse and kids straight from a cereal commercial. At this point in time, all is splendid in the Webber household, but still Reeves acts as an alien who suddenly appeared in a human body. This alien studied human culture for a long time and prepared for this situation in simulators, but through an error, he arrived there way ahead of schedule.

Now, the same alien is trying to improvise human emotion and mostly ends up looking weird or as overacting close to the Nick Cage potential. As the family leaves, the strangeness of Evan Webber kind of dies down a bit, but not completely. When Evan�s beautiful future tormentors arrive, the film makes it hard to root for anyone and it also seems pointless to wait for any particular moment, apart from seeing if the ending would be an outright win for either side or with some kind of a poetic tie match. Each of these scenarios was completely fine by me and no option bothered me in any way.

I get that Eli Roth is a smart movie guy in every sense of the word. He produced several very effective horrors by being innovative, on budget and a bit edgy, but not too much. Now, as a director, he does show off his cinematic talent and Knock Knock movie has frames that are pleasant to look at, especially when it comes to the way Roth uses the exquisitely decorated Webber home. On the other hand, he obviously couldn�t find a solution to the Reeves rampant emotional emptiness he infuses into his character. Even worse, maybe this wasn�t even a problem in Roth�s eyes. Ironically, in the last moments of the film, there is something like a mini-catharsis when spit starts to fly from the mouth of a desperate Evan, but it comes too late to make any difference.

I understand that Knock Knock movie was designed as something similar to an inverted revenge fantasy, but the thing that it brought to the table are a bit of nudity and a distant, weird Reeves. There were plenty of places where the film could have introduced some lame twist, for example, like the one that Haunter pulled off (minus the supernatural element) but Roth didn�t even make an effort to do that. Sloppiness, lack of direction and miscasting all made Knock Knock movie a below-average revenge thriller.