slimjack

Very bad. Very, very bad. As a fellow who aspires to make, be in or - at least - sniff the catering table at a movie set, I find it hard to criticize independents who actually got a movie of any sort made. However, this movie ... oh dear.

Realizing Frightworld doesn't aspire to anything more than crude exploitation (an honorable thing in itself) and to try to make it conform to more mainstream standards is a mistake. And to be fair, it is more entertaining than - say - Red Zone Cuba ... but not by much. So I won't try to critique, just let me ask throw out some observations.

1) If gore is the point of the movie, shouldn't you be able to see it?

2) If you have hire three sound men make sure at least one knows how to operate the equipment.

3) In a horror movie your lead maniac must be scarier than a smurf doll. Difficult I know but really...

4) There is a lot of talented videographers in the Buffalo/Rochester area, most you can hire really cheap. Get one who knows how to frame a scene.

5) Just because you have someone who knows how to use After Effects and other cool programs doesn't mean he should do so every two seconds.

6) Kudos for getting the girls to take off their tops but next time, get girls who's tops we want to see taken off.

7) Editing should help tell the story or set a mood. At the least in this sort of movie editing should sell the gore gags. A chainsaw suddenly appearing in a characters stomach is not scary, it's sloppy.

Some good things. Not all the acting was bad. Jack was pretty good and I liked Acid once she started fighting back. There was some neat imagery, unfortunately it was thrown up on the screen without rhyme or reason. "Acid Poptart" is a name that deserves a better movie. I like the moxie of Frightworld too. Next time, now that they have a movie of sorts under their belts, I hope all involve aspire to something better than Colman Francis. Upgrade at least Ed Wood.

Ventriloquist dummies and horror movies were made for each other. Think about it. Rare is the dummy that doesn't have a malevolent air about it. In fact, the cuter they try to be, the more wantonly homicidal they seem. Mortimer Snerd resembles Ted Bundy's inner child and Waylon Flower's Madam is a visitation from your darkest nightmare. You would have to be the reincarnation of Ed Wood to make a killer dummy movie that wasn't at least a little creepy. While the makers of Dead Silence aren't that incompetent, they did succeed in making a movie so bland and formulaic you'd get more chills by watching an old Smurfs episode.

Young Jamie Ashen and his family are terrorized by the evil shade of ventriloquist Mary Shaw. Ashen and Mary share only the most tenuous of plot convenient connections but it's enough for the ghoul to unleash her wrath on the poor guy. To make matters worse the police suspect Ashen for Mary's bloody crimes. Ashen returns to his decaying home town to lay Mary's troublesome spirit to rest and, needless to say, she doesn't go quietly. Here you see Dead Silence's problem. The emphasis is not placed on the dummies but on the undead ventriloquist and Mary Shaw is simply not that scary. She's just a moldy old lady in a black dress. The dummies themselves spend most of the movie staring at people, which they do very well as you might expect. Every now and again one might turn its head. This action generates more creaking and groaning than a dozen clipper ships at full sail. Thus the ventriloquist dummy's potential for terror is squandered in a movie that seems hell bent on being as close a clone of Nightmare On Elm Street as possible without violating copy write laws.

Dead Silence's cast does nothing to relieve the movie's stale atmosphere. As Ashen, Ryan Kwanten is competent without being in any way interesting. He is a wispy chinned adolescent who hardly looks old enough to date let alone marry. None the less Laura Regan plays his wife. Regan is spunky and extremely likable and one wishes the movie followed her exploits rather than Kwanten's. Michael Fairman gives an effective and moving portrayal of an old undertaker traumatized by the supernatural weirdness surrounding him. As a result he seems to have walked in from another, better movie. The same can be said of Bob Gunton as Ashen's wheel chair bound father. The only actor to find the right tone is Donnie Wahlberg. He doesn't so much act the cop assigned to Ashen's case as embody all the quirks we've come to expect from cinematic law enforcement. I don't think we are supposed to believe this guy for a second. Instead we are supposed to be amused and that we are. The movie goes dead when Wahlberg isn't around.

Like most movies these days Dead Silence looks beautiful. In set design and cinematography it is everything anyone could want in a killer dummy movie. Weirdly, the only place where the design falters is in the look of Mary's dummies. Billy, the main dummy, looks almost charming. Considering the inherent creepiness of ventriloquist dummies, this took some work. Where was the fellow who carved Mortimer Snerd when they needed him? Dead Silence can't be completely disliked. It does try to inject some good old fashioned atmosphere into a modern horror flick and still keep up the gore factor. Unfortunately it misses both its marks by a wide margin. As it stands Dead Silence is a movie made to be ignored.

There is a new genre infesting our nation's movie theaters. With apologies to Garrison Kellior, let's call it "guy noir". Films aimed directly at the young, hip male audience. Movies that are an unholy combination of old fashioned film noir and the modern action movie, as directed by the class clown. They offer fast paced entertainment, great character actors, twisty plot lines, explosions and more spent ordinance than used in a typical week in Baghdad. Even new genres breed clichés however and the original freshness heralded by Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is beginning to smell the slightest bit stale. This brings us to Smokin' Aces, a movie that isn't so smug as to be intolerable or so brilliant as to be ground breaking. Rather it is good, competent, workmanlike example of its genre, which is bad news for a movie that wants to be hip and edgy.

Smokin' Aces has the requisite twisty plot. Actually it has at least nine plots, all twisty. In fact it has so many plots the movie dissolves into a series of incidences strung together by a smattering of narrative glue. Aces, a card magician and mob nabob, turns federal stoolie and a dying Godfather posts a high dollar contract on him. Naturally every photogenic hit-man with the weekend free descends upon Ace's casino penthouse to do the job and collect the dough. Smokin' Aces tries hard and includes everything needed to qualify as guy noir. It even tries to incorporate the "Tarantino Digression". That is, extended expository flashbacks incorporated for no good reason except that they are fun to watch. Smoking Aces can't quite pull these off as they require a defter touch than the movie is capable of.

There aren't any real people in Smokin' Aces. All the characters are strictly stereotypes played for effect rather than reality. Jeremy Piven as Aces is the self loathing hop head, Alicia Keys and Georgia Sykes are the hot lesbian hit team, Ben Afleck is the hipster bounty hunter and so on. Everything you need to know about these guys you learn in the first split second they are on the screen. There is no star in Smokin' Aces. Afleck, the biggest name, has a relatively small part and is upstaged by his hat. You might remember Chris Pine, Kevin Durand and Maury Sterling as the Tremor brothers if only because they were the loudest, most violent bunch in a loud violent movie. The only actor who rises above caricature is Ray Liotta, who invests his FBI agent with quiet dignity and a touch of pathos and in doing so sticks out like a sore thumb. It takes a strange sort of movie for a review to criticize the one genuinely good performance in it but Liotta just doesn't fit.

Smokin' Aces manages to hold its whirly gig self together for the most part. There are a few problems. It goes on too long after the climatic blood bath wrapping up plot threads you probably didn't notice amongst the explosions. There is a denouement where a hero, brought in from way out in left field, makes an existential choice that is not nearly as agonizing as the movie thinks it is because we have no emotional investment in the fellow making it. Though the final plot twist is prepared for and makes as much sense as anything else in the film, still it feels flat and unsatisfying. Think of Smokin' Aces as a shaggy dog story. It's long, involved and fun to listen to but ultimately goes nowhere.