Red Dawn (2012)

I love action movie cheese, whether it's "Top Gun" or "Point Break" or anything starring Dolph Lundgren. But there do exist a few films deemed classics in the "badly awesome" category that I am not a fan of. One of those is the original "Red Dawn." I know it occupies a special place in many hearts, but for some reason I could never get behind it.

There's a lot of reasons to like it to be sure, be it the amazing cast or the stunningly absurd plot that screams out for high-octane action movie shenanigans, but I honestly slept through most of "Red Dawn." I have a hard time pointing to exactly the reason why, but there's something about that movie that just makes me drift off into a stupor worthy of post-Thanksgiving dinner. Considering that there's a calculated 2.23 acts of violence every minute of the film (seriously, at the time it made the Guinness Book of World Records), it's quite an accomplishment to make something that action-packed boring, but hey there it is.

I always found "Red Dawn" inexplicably dull, and because of that I didn't like it. Well, that and it was really creepy watching it knowing that there are people in America who look at it like it's a precognitive documentary. Honestly it made me feel a little queasy because it was like looking at the world through the lenses of their paranoid, gun-nut, conspiracy theory laden crazy goggles. It's an unsettling feeling.

That's a thing I want to watch: Alex Jones' spank material.

So sure. Remake it. Whatever. At this point I'm not even going to rant about them remaking everything. At least it's a remake of a movie I don't care about. It could be much worse. And when a movie has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years after being completed (true story, it was shot in 2009), you know you're dealing with some quality material, am I right?

This is going to suck, isn't it?

Well, the answer is unfortunately "Yes, it did suck." This is not a good movie. Not even by the standards of unnecessary remakes is it a decent film. It's barely coherent in its narrative, the plot does the impossible and is even dumber than the original, all but one of the characters are essentially walking cardboard cutouts spouting dialogue equivalent to a dog gnawing on a squeaky toy, and the admittedly plentiful action is squandered by the watered-down PG-13 rating. I would ask how something this easy is messed up so much, but honestly there wasn't much to work with to begin with, so I can't even be that mad about it. It's not like I'm surprised it sucked. I'm just tired.

All that being said, I still liked it better than the original. At least I stayed awake this time.

You know what the deal is at this point with the story, and little has changed from the original in that respect. Very early on, a foreign army invades America, and with a pillaging that would make the beginning of any fantasy movie proud, the townsfolk of Spokane, Washington are promptly slaughtered and interned. Escaping from the invader's clutches is a group of high schoolers who decide to flee into the woods and fight the good fight, calling themselves The Wolverines and eventually throwing a big enough wrench into the enemy's plan as to suggest eventual victory in the near future. Since "Red Dawn" doesn't feel the need to have an actual ending.

Cower in fear, North Korea. She's going to make duck-lips at you.

In the original film the invaders were the Russians. And in 1984, I'm sure that made some sense. In the remake, it's North Korea. It was supposed to be China, but when MGM decided they didn't want to make them mad, since it might eat into the box office sales in...well, China I guess, they changed it to North Korea, a place where barely anyone has electricity let alone a movie theater to go to. It's not even worth it to mention how stupid the idea that they could successfully invade us is. But I'll still say it. That's stupid.

The whole invasion is explained to be possible because of "a new weapon" that destroys all communication or something, kind of like an EMP, except North Korea's stuff is immune due to a MacGuffin they needed for a third act plot device. Of course, the film never explains how all the radios and TVs and communication that was not protected is still working after the invasion, but there I go nitpicking "stuff that doesn't matter" like the buzz-kill I am.

Our main heroes de jour are played by Chris Hemsworth (pre-"Thor"), Josh Hutcherson (pre-"Hunger Games"), and Josh Peck (post-proving he's a terrible actor). There's also Jeffery Dean Morgan and Brett Cullen who show up to throw some acting chutzpah at us, but they are extremely underused. So overall the cast is alright, but then again, among The Wolverines we've also got Adrianne Palicki, who played Wonder Woman on the failed TV reboot, and Isabel Lucas, who was the Decepticon in "Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen" who could turn into a human (since Decepticons can do that now), so I guess we've got to pick our battles here.

"I'm the only reason you're watching this, aren't I?"

When the cast is good, it's pretty darn good. Morgan and Cullen are of course great, but Hemsworth is carrying the movie nearly the entire time, being the best actor of the main cast by as far as Thor could chuck Mjolnir. It also helps that he is given the most interesting character, being a soldier recently back from the war who has some issues, but obviously becomes indispensable when North Korea attacks. Hutcherson is okay, but he has the same problem most of the cast has, being that his character is so anonymous that he kind of fades into the background, and it's a struggle to even remember his name. Even Will Yun Lee, playing the essentially nameless Big Bad doesn't really do much besides get killed via impossible convenience, although he is fairly intimidating.

But when the cast is bad, it becomes borderline unwatchable. The worst offender of this is Josh Peck as Hemsworth's younger brother. I knew I was going to hate this character the instant he showed up as a hotdogging quarterback who ends up costing his team the game because he felt he could win it single-handedly. He was mistaken. And true to that character trait of selfish impulsiveness (which is about the only one he has), he ends up getting one of his friends killed at a later point in the film. I thought that perhaps that may have proven to be a learning experience for him, but nope. Not happening. He doesn't learn anything and ends the movie the same character he started as despite suffering horrendous loss. What a character arc.

And Josh Peck is such an unlikable actor that it really is nails on a chalkboard for me to even look at the damn guy. And it took me the longest time to place where I'd seen him before. At first I thought he was that mattress selling prick from "Devil," but then I finally realized where I'd seen him before.

IT'S THAT LITTLE TURD SMUGGLER FROM "ATM."

Of course it is. Why wouldn't that be the actor they got for "Red Dawn?" He's only the most soul-punchingly obnoxious and irritating actor I've seen since Ryan Reynolds or Dane Cook. Sounds like a great time. Make him one of the heroes. In fact, make him essentially the main character, as he's one of the few who survives till the end. Fantastic. I'm glad I'm watching him in this movie.

Aside from the shortfalls of the cast, the rest of the movie does tend to make itself not boring by having a good amount of bombs, bullets and guys screaming "AAAAAARRGH!" as they shoot the enemy troops, all of whom seem to have the survival instinct of a duck with a sexual attraction to spinning helicopter blades. The problem with all of that is that pretty soon scenes start feeling less like a cohesive narrative and more like a slideshow of explosions that happened in no particular order. "Red Dawn" will jump from scene to scene with no lead-in or establishment of when or even where we are in relation to the thing we just saw, making the story quite hard to follow. And it's not too long before it starts getting really hard to care one way or another.

 It's the amazing Wolverine Brothers, Douche, Square-face and Talent!

By the way, isn't it nice when we don't have to see blood during our sequences of horrific violence? Much like "Alex Cross," there's a shocking moment in "Red Dawn" featuring a sniper rifle. But in this movie, instead of the chest, the person gets shot in the head. But don't worry! Just because the dude would have gotten his head half removed with that large-caliber bullet doesn't mean we have to see blood. Because just like real life, that's a very tidy affair. They wouldn't have even had to wash the carpet he fell on. Man, why can't every violent action movie be PG-13? It makes it so much better!

"Red Dawn" feels to me like a 5 hour long TV mini-series that was trimmed down to an hour and a half and released in theaters. And that compression does make it go by at a very brisk clip, but at the cost of knowing what in the world is happening. I'd prefer it as a mini-series. And maybe if it had been a series we could have actually gotten to know the characters instead of just knowing them as "The annoying one," "The one with the weird face," "The black one," "The one Josh Peck got killed," and Chris Hemsworth. 

I don't know what else to say, honestly. "Red Dawn" isn't the worst remake I've ever seen, but some of that probably has to due with the fact that I never liked the original. So even if it did suck, hey it's no skin off my back. I just don't care.

Check out the trailer for "Red Dawn." BTW Chris Hemsworth is not nearly as prominent in the actual film. Of course.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Red Dawn" is relatively harmless, and the action is admittedly plentiful, but it's ultimately not worth the time or effort it takes to get the disc, put it in the player, go back to the couch, hit play, chapter skip through the previews and commercials, play the movie, and then sit there for an hour and a half. There are better things you could be doing.

The Possession (2012)

Scene not appearing in this film.

Oh man, you guys. I'm scared. Petrified, even. Can you blame me? Just look at today's movie. How can you now look at that and just be chilled to your soul? I like a good scary movie as much as the next red-blooded guy with an appreciation for dark things, but even I have my limits. I mean, do I even want to put myself through this terror?

A PG-13 horror movie. Is there a more terrifying concept known to man?

With that, "The Possession" came to this race with three quarters of its fuel tank emptied before the starting gun even went off. It's impossible to look at a horror movie not rated R and not assume right from the beginning that it's going to suck. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, which is that 98% of the time, they do. And when they suck they suck hard. I'm not really looking forward to another.

So where does "The Possession" stand after making its case? Surprisingly its place is not at the bottom of a rock quarry filled with rat carcasses, which is where "The Apparition" or "House at the End of the Street" landed. Instead its place was more akin to standing in a ditch filled with a few inches of water. And some of the water got up over the top of its shoes and made its socks a bit wet. And it's a little chilly out. But the water is nice and clean as opposed to muddy. Maybe a few leaves in it.

What I'm attempting to say using that very forced analogy is that "The Possession" actually wasn't that bad. It wasn't that great, in fact it wasn't very good, but after seeing the duo of pig vomit that was "The Apparition" and "House at the End of the Street" I'm just so happy to be watching some likeable characters in a horror movie that I'm willing to let a lot slide for this one.

"Ah, bubala, such a mensch is this goy!"

"The Possession" follows the zany adventures of a box. Inside this box is a dybbuk, an evil spirit contained by a Jewish ritual. Once the box is opened it takes control of whoever opened it and does whatever it does that evil spirits that possess people do. It's a given that there will be creepy young girls acting spooky and parents who don't want to believe there is something wrong with their kid. You know the drill.

When Clyde (Jeffery Dean Morgan) buys the box at a yard sale for his youngest daughter, Em (Natasha Calis) it's not too long before she starts acting creepy by saying and doing weird things, freaking out at people who threaten to take away the box, speaking in different voices, and looking not unlike a Nine Inch Nails groupie after a week locked in a small crate. On the other hand, even after all that she's still the more likable of the two daughters. But in her defense, the older daughter Hannah (Madison Davenport) has hit that "Whatever, Dad, you loser" phase of her life. She can't help that she sucks.

After a long, slightly irritating stretch where the characters are all playing catch-up with the audience who figured everything out half an hour ago, Clyde finally enlists the help of a Hasidic Jew named Tzadok (Matisyahu) to get the dybbuk out of Em. This all culminates in an exorcism in the basement of the hospital Em is staying in after collapsing after making her mom's boyfriend's teeth fall out of his skull using only the power of her rage. I feel I should bring up that at that point, Em had shown a drastic personality shift, had been found sitting in the dark in a room overflowing with gigantic moths, was seen talking to an invisible person, had stabbed her dad in the hand with a fork, had performed acts of impossible clairvoyance, had performed acts of telekinesis, and had also tried killing her mom with broken glass. And it's only now they decide to get her some help. So we're a little lite on the parental competence here.

Clearly, she's just stressed.

Most of (well, actually all of that) has to do with the mother, Stephanie. She's played by Kyra Sedgwick and is a horrible person. And I hated her character. But the odd thing is that I'm not sure if that's a point in Sedgwick's favor or against it. The reason for that is that I'm of the opinion that it's totally possible that she's meant to be something of a villain in this film. And if we're supposed to despise this person as a bad guy, Sedgwick nailed it. If not, hoo boy. If not, that's one of the worst portrayals of a sympathetic character I've ever seen.

Stephanie and Clyde are recently divorced, although we never actually learn why. No mention of infidelity is ever mentioned or even hinted at. They obviously have their issues with each other, but they still seem to be halfway amicable, or at least politely respectful. Well, at least Clyde is. Stephanie on the other hand is constantly getting on Clyde's case for literally nothing, disrespecting and condescending to him, getting right in his face and calling him a son-of-a-bitch and a rotten bastard for horrendous crimes like getting an amazing job offer and letting his daughters eat pizza, even when he's the only person who's trying to help his daughter when there's something clearly wrong with her.

Clyde actually seems like a pretty chill dude. He's friendly, he's funny, he's good with his kids, even the one who gives him flak because she's a teenager, and he's a successful college basketball coach. Dude's seemingly got it going on, and Jeffery Dean Morgan plays him with a lot of charisma and ingrained likeability that it's very easy to like this guy. Far more so than the cold ice-queen Kyra Sedgwick puts forward. The worst thing he does is miss his daughter's dance recital, which sucks and he's totally a douche for doing so, but as far as son-of-a-bitch status goes is pretty unconvincing.

And how dare you look like Javier Bardem!

Maybe something happened we don't know about, but from what "The Possession" shows us, Stephanie is an over-reactive harpy who drinks too much, treats her ex-husband like a child while not being nearly as good with the kids as he is, and in fact scoffs at the notion of getting her daughter professional help when she's looking like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" and trying to stab people. She's also shacked up with this guy who's a total stuffy jerkwad, seemingly immediately after the divorce. So that's Stephanie. Obviously, Clyde is the one totally at fault here in this situation.

And the wild part is that when they get back together at the end, I think we're supposed to be happy. I wasn't. Clyde's too good for her. I honestly found the ending which alludes to them patching it up to be quite sad, because I hated to think of Clyde being stuck with that woman.

"After your father gets done saving us by offering himself up as a sacrifice to a demon I am SO going to yell at him for messing up my hair."

I mention the Stephanie thing a lot because it really was about the most notable thing about "The Possession." While Natasha Calis did an admittedly bang-up job as the possessed girl, and the scenes with her and Jeffery Dean Morgen are very, very good from an acting dynamic perspective, overall there's not too much left to hang the rest of the movie on. The plot is nothing more than what you'd see in a random so-so episode of "The X-Files," and the scares are basically non-existent as the movie doesn't even seem to try, as if it knows it's not going to do anything with that PG-13 so they didn't bother. That's somewhat commendable in a strange way, but still, it's irritating when it's called a horror movie.

Honestly, the creepiest part of the movie is the whispering coming from the box. That's pretty sad.

There are some pretty effective things going on here, though. Whenever Em is freaking out as the dybbuk is surfacing, the odd soundtrack and effectively gross effects done to make her eyes roll into the back of her head is creepy and unsettling enough to drag out some much needed tension to the scenes. The soundtrack in particular is pretty gutsy in terms of being a bit unconventional and off-kilter. And for a movie with a generic story like this, trust me, anything composer Anton Sanko and director Ole Bornedal can do to make "The Possession" stand out in any way is a very good thing. And generally, they do a pretty good job of this. For the source material they were given I'd say they performed admirably. The fact that it doesn't outright suck is honestly a miracle.

This might have actually been scary if the trailer hadn't given it away. Now instead of creeped out, we're just saying "Oh, look. It's that scene that was all over the trailer." Good job.

But if there was a reason to see "The Possession" it would end up being almost entirely for Jeffery Dean Morgan and Natasha Calis. Morgan's already proven himself as a phenomenal actor on a number of occasions, most notably in "Watchmen," but Calis reminds me a bit of Jodelle Ferland. And if she's anywhere close to Jodelle, she's an up-and-comer to keep an eye on.

So I guess the best thing about this one was the fact that it avoided being crap. Huzzah?

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Possession" is a PG-13 horror movie. That should tell you it's crap as a horror movie. However, it's well made enough to function as something closer to a drama with some creepy stuff going down. Don't except it to scare you, and at least you'll get some good performances out of it. It's still not great. But it's not nearly as bad as it could have been. Watch "The Unborn" to see how bad this story could have gotten.