Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Two reviews: Percy Jackson and Cabin Fever 2

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

I’d wanted to catch this film a little earlier, but circumstances conspired to continually throw different obstacles in my path. Lack of time, a screaming child, and the events just sort of piled up until my wife and son decided to just see the film without me. They were enthusiastic about it and both insisted that I needed to see it with them again, so we once again set out to see the film and FINALLY managed to catch a Sunday matinee that was neither too full nor too empty. I sat back, dipped my fingers into some popcorn, guzzled back some fruit juice, and let Chris Columbus transport me into another world where the Greek Gods walked and their children struggled to rise as heroes.

Percy Jackson is a young teenager struggling with a restless nature and growing dyslexia issues. Raised by a single mom and her abusive husband, Percy has an obvious affinity for the water and is accompanied by a best friend we later learn has a stronger connection to Jackson than we originally understand. Not knowing of his true birthright, Jackson is blamed for the theft of Zeus’ lightning bolt and chased by mythic creatures as he attempts to find the gate to Hades and rescue his mother. Along his path he must overcome various challenges accompanied by friends both new and old. Jacksons’ trials are based on the classic mythologies, as are the solutions.

I had a blast with this movie. It wasn’t too violent, wasn’t too childish, it was just some classic storytelling in a modern setting and it worked. There’s a place for CGI-rendered effects when they aren’t used to beat the audience over the head, and Columbus manages to use the technology as an accent to what is already a great story. Jackson is a great hero, rising to the defense of his mother in the face of an abusive of father or stepping into the depths of Hades without the usual sense of bravado. This is a hero who acts because he has to, not because he’s some sort of “chosen one” picked out of a hat to serve the forces of good.

4.5 out of 5.

Cabin Fever 2

Wow. Okay, some spoiler alerts are on but you’ll note how little they actually matter, much like the rest of this unbelievably terrible follow up to the original Cabin Fever.

This rancid piece of dog meat fell in my mailbox through some random trick of fate. With a running time of one hour and roughly twenty minutes, director Ty West manages to drag the film through a meandering pace that makes the viewer feel more like he just went through some sick four hour epic and never seems to actually take you anywhere. The opening moments of the film give us a taste of things to come as the disease ridden survivor of the last films’ infectious flesh eating virus manages to drag himself up out of the river creek, wander through the woods with his flesh getting raked off his body and blood splattering everywhere and this goes on for several long moments with the kid gasping for breath as he stumbles and trips his way to the main road where he’s unceremoniously plowed down by a high school bus. This sounds so unbelievably cool, but the staggering, running, tripping, and ripping gets so unbelievably tiresome that we simply stop caring by the time he hits the road that we’ve already become desensitized to anything that could happen and the rest of the film plays out in the same way. Considering that this same character was pretty much dead by the end of the first film anyway further illustrates the utter pointlessness of having him pop up again, but this whole movie is a series of pointless blundering and incoherently terrible decision making.

The rough plot has the infectious water get delivered to the local High School on the night of the prom while our erstwhile deputy from the first film kind of plays out his own sub-plot on the sidelines. The film would have been better of if they had developed an entire story around the deputy’s investigation and irresponsible antics, but they seemed more like a tag on in order to establish familiarity with the original film than anything else. We’re kind of expected to start caring about the stereotypical teenage crowd, but there isn’t a single truly likeable character in the bunch as they all come off as whining little brats who make a fairly big show out of drinking the water and then sharing deep soul kisses as a matter of setting up for the big bloody vomit finish that isn’t so much foreshadowed as it is dragged in front of your eyes with a big “ain’t I the coolest???” sign propped up next to it. Ty West manages to wring out any sense of shock or horror that comes with the fantastic visual effects through pointless dialogue, pointless wandering, and a staggering ability to stack scenes that never have any real pay off or contribute in any way to the story as a whole. Even as the story winds down to a climax, we’re treated to an additional ten minutes or so of sophomoric bathroom humor as a dangling plot thread is wrapped up in yet another meandering and ultimately pointless close to a film.

Director Eli Roth put enough distance between himself and this travesty that he seems rather free of the responsibility for this unbelievably terrible sequel. Cabin Fever 2 manages to unseat the gadawful wretchedness that was House of the Dead with this crap fest of a film, proving that there’s always some way to scrape beneath the bottom of the barrel to discover brand new levels of suck and awfulness if you just try hard enough. Ty West should be ashamed of himself, because it takes an unbelievable amount of wretchedness to craft a scene that requires one of its main characters to squeeze excess pus and blood from his nether regions in graphic detail and still make it a boring moment in this bag of snot. After having watched this movie, I feel as though I might actually be willing to endure the two hour epic of suck that is Transformers 2… I might even buy tickets to an early screening of the next Michael Bay-directed travesty to cinema, possibly even grant a viewing for one of Uwe Bolls’ more recent debacles just to build myself back up to watching something halfway decent. Movies like this are more likely to push me into a bottle than all the economic misery in the whole world.

2 out of 5, because the special effects were amazing and I’d feel guilty for not pointing out this one small thing that was actually done right even if the direction, story, and build up around each gag were miserable failures of epic suckage.

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