Man, it's a slow month of DVD releases. Once you've watched the big ones: The Avengers, Cabin In The Woods, etc., you are really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. And so it was that I ended up with two movies in my hands. Chernobyl Diaries (one I was at least mildly interested in thanks to Oren Peli's name on the cover) and Friends With Kids (one I had no interest in but my housemate wanted some thing else to watch). Since neither of these films are worth a full, detailed review, I'm going to hit them both on the head. Let's start with the better of the two: Chernobyl Diaries.
I gotta admit, I was pretty pumped for this. Not only was this the first film Oren Peli has written since the first Paranormal Activity (one of my favourite horror films of the last ten years) but nowhere near enough creative media has used Chernobyl as a location. STALKER proved that Chernobyl can be a scary fucking place and I was looking forward to what Oren could do with the location. We've got the pretty typical set-up, young hot kids on euro trip decide to up the ante with an "extreme" tourism trip to Chernobyl. You've got the assertive one, the cautious one (who happen to be brothers), the hot, tough heroine, the dumb, bland blonde, the mysterious tour guide and two foreigners (an Aussie and his Russian girlfriend). Doesn't really sound that exciting, but Oren's deceit is turning horror conventions on their head, so I was still pretty pumped to see where this was going. The first thing Chernobyl Diaries gets right is the location and atmosphere. From the first moment you see Chernobyl and Pripyat you can feel the horror of what happened here. The oppressive death and decay of the fallout ridden wasteland, the silence, the decaying husks of abandoned buildings left to what little of nature survived. I got a little excited seeing the theme park and ferris wheel where you hold out for extraction in Modern Warfare, or the big plaza that you battle through on the way to your final destination in STALKER. And for about 70% of the movie, that atmosphere remains. The first few scares are powerful, and the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation works well. Outside of some of the mutated animals, who or what is stalking the tourists is not revealed right until the very end, as it should be. We can some fantastic 'something moving or standing in the distance' shots, as well as an incredibly tense kitchen scene. The deaths all occur off-screen as well, which is a nice change. There's very little gore in the entire film. Mixed with some fantastic cinematography, I was ready to give this a big thumbs up. And then came the last act, and everything fell apart. The few remaining heroes are chased into this creepy fallout shelter, deep underground and everything looks set up for a cool reveal of the creatures as these people driven mad by having to survive deep underground. There's also one fantastic scare here, too. And then the creatures start to come out into the light and I'm not going to spoil it, but they are not scary. Anyone whose played STALKER knows how terrifying the scuttling, gas-mask wearing snorks, or the invisible, vampiric bloodsuckers were, but there's no such creativity shown here. From the initial trailers, I thought this was actually a good, old-fashioned ghost flick, but I really was left bewildered and disappointed by the final act. The story just ends. No real answers, just bam, done. Finished. This feels especially disappointing because the first two thirds of the film were fantastic. I can only imagine what happened to Oren's script. Perhaps the butchering's is why he decided not to direct it himself. I don't know. While not an awful film, the final act stops me from truly being able to recommend this film. Mix in some questionable acting and you've got two-thirds of a good horror movie. Really only recommendable to die-hard horror fans.
Alright, let's make this quick. Friends With Kids is written, directed, produced by and starring Jennifer Westfeldt and boy, can you tell it. Let me some up this movie in one sentence: she never, ever shuts up. This film is just an endless dialogue dump. And not even interesting dialogue. Alright, so Jen and Adam Scott's character are friends who share a kind of platonic relationship. Both their friends are in couples. We have Chris O'Dowd (of IT Crowd fame and one of the only funny people in this movie) and Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm (only in this film because he's with Jennifer in real life, but thankfully doesn't phone it in). We start the film with them all getting together, happy as Larry. They talk. We jump forward four years. It seems both couples now have kids and neither take it well. To buck the trend, Adam and Jen decide to have a kid together, share the parenting role, but continue to date other people. I wonder where this is going. God, this movie is just fucking predictable from end to end. Damn near nothing happens. I'm not kidding, the film takes place over six fucking years, but almost nothing dramatic or interesting happens. There's this weird dramatic tension towards the end, but it disappears as fast as it appears. Jen seems to forget there's anyone else in this film but her and her vision. The friends only turn up four times, for a total screen time of about 20 minutes. I'm serious. There nothing but a convenient plot device, completely neglecting the acting potential of the four. Thankfully, Adam Scott delivers a great performance almost convincingly selling this bullshit. Jennifer herself is ok, but criminally unfunny. She's got this "oh I'm so awkward" stumbling thing always going on, but unlike someone like Zooey Deschanel there's no subtlety or variation to it. Thankfully, both Adam Scott and Chris O'Dowd have some generally funny lines, but they're not enough to elevate this film about self-indulgent shit. This could have been a 30 minute play, and it would have been decent. But film is a visual medium and endless dialogue with nothing to watch is just boring. People talk, then they talk some more somewhere else, then they talk some more somewhere else, then someone else talks. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. This is one woman forcing her frankly confused and completely cliche message all over us. Avoid this shit unless you enjoy endlessly screaming at the screen "Oh my God, would you just shut the fuck up and do something!?"
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