cornflakeboy20

I don't know why they can't get a Hellraiser movie right since part 3. There is plenty of good material to work with, in comic book and short story adaptations. And yet most of the sequels have been a Hellraiser story grafted onto an average mystery or horror plot. This one is visually interesting for the most part. The acting is alright. And the Pinhead is really not bad. But the plot and visual style owe an incredible debt to Se7en, from the opening credits, to the Commandments killer, to the visual style, to the cop who looks vaguely like Brad Pitt. And yet it has none of that film's compelling story and characters. The opening scenes are a bit more reminiscent of Saw, at least in terms of being ugly, graphic and frenetically edited. But the movie doesn't achieve any element of its own and really just has no good story or original characters to suck you in. The real mystery here is why no one since the 90s has figured out that Hellraiser needs gore and visuals and surprises and mythos, but also character and story.

In this endeavor, a perfectly attractive and ordinary teenage girl is menaced by the stunt doubles of the cast of "Mean Girls" until she finds a magical Asian music box/wish machine that looks like a slide projector and... not much changes. See as how she's already cute and not really an outcast, and the popular boy has already asked her on a date, the whole wishing thing kind of seems like a joke. After the first wish for the ersatz Mean Girl to "just, like, totally rot or something," the wishes don't really seem to do much. She wishes to be popular and this manifests itself as her getting invited to a party and somebody mentioning she looks cute. She wishes for her father not to be embarrassing, and lo and behold, her father is Ryan Phillippe (which he has been all along), only one of her friends notices that he's hot all of a sudden. They don't even do us the courtesy of giving the characters glasses and then removing them to reveal themselves as babes or studs. For each wish, the magical Asian slide projector takes a life in a very Final Destination fashion. Two deaths are outright Final Destination ripoffs. I must mention that our heroine is totally useless. Two suicides happen directly in front of her, and she doesn't even try to approach the person. She just stands there sobbing and yelling, unconvincingly at that. The final death is meant to be shocking, and it might have been, were it not totally laughable. Some of the above 10/10 reviews seem to have been professionally written. The filmmakers ought to have saved their money on fake critics and put it onto screen. Or spent it better, as I believe this thing cost 12 mil.

In the beginning of "Wilson," Woody Harrelson's loser character laments the rise of people on social media and zoning out listening to earbuds, mourning the death of human interaction. Then, he shows us the reason why people listen to headphones in public: so they don't get in inane conversations with people like him. As with Ghost World (and Art School Confidential, less successfully) Daniel Clowes adapts his basically plot less comic into a feature length film, shoehorning a plot into what was just a character piece. Really, this is just the misadventures of a socially awkward, overly truthful, but extroverted person. But the pinned on plot concerns Wilson reuniting with his troubled ex, finding their bullied daughter who'd been adopted away, getting in trouble for contacting said daughter, and forming a new relationship with a yoga instructor. When his reunion with his daughter goes south, this previously lighthearted movie becomes too serious. The audience, who was all chuckles before, suddenly didn't know how to react to violent situations and dangerous people. I can't say the movie would have been successful without this situation. IT still concerns a man who it is hard to like. But adding dark elements to a comedy and then returning to the comedy does not seem to work. The seemingly upbeat ending, too, seems fastened on. The filmmakers wanted to end on a note of hope, so they stuck in a rather cliché sentiment that does not add much to either the story or the overall theme. I have enjoyed many movies about oddballs and social outcasts, but this one just does not manage to reconcile its story elements and its themes. I wasn't crazy about the source material either.

PS: Who came up with the advertising image of two men at a urinal? What are people making of it?