A new werewolf movie opened this weekend in the US.
Skinwalkers, a low-budget, crappy one that was kept from the critics and universally-loathed by the few who did see it. (Only
17 reviews on RT, and only 1 positive.) I didn't see it and didn't want to, but I skimmed a couple of reviews and thought
this one summed things up pretty well.
No subset of the horror genre has created a higher percentage of dogs than the werewolf movie. Since The Wolf Man reached screens in 1941, it has become possible to count the number of good films about lycanthropy on the fingers of one hand. The problem with most werewolf movies isn't that they're derivative - that's pretty much a given when one considers the inherent limitations - but that they're badly written, badly acted, or just plain silly. Skinwalkers hits the trifecta: all three apply.
...
The impact of the PG-13 rating is evident everywhere. The bad guys inflict PG-13 torture on their victims then have PG-13 sex. There's PG-13 cursing and PG-13 gore. Everything is carefully sanitized so that teenage boys can see this movie without having to worry about adult supervision. Never mind that it's pretty much impossible to tell a werewolf story with anything less aggressive than an R. I don't claim that the rating is the reason why Skinwalkers fails, but it certainly doesn't help. Shots of horrific wolf attacks and an unobscured view of Malthe's body would at least have made the film seem less juvenile, if no more intelligent.
So it's poorly written, has bad actors, bad special effects, poor direction, and the back story/mythology isn't any good. Not much left, is there?
The tragic thing is that there's a perpetual audience appetite for horror movies, and monster movies, and worse, that almost all of them suck. Reading about
Skinwalkers, I was reminded of my initial reaction to
Underworld. That wasn't a good movie either, but it had the clever marketing angle of a hot chick in latex as the hero, and the (relatively) interesting world fiction of vampires warring against werewolves. And it made money.
Skinwalkers isn't like to do so, (opening weekend half a million is a disaster), but it cost nothing to make and they'll do decent business on rentals and DVDs, as all horror movies do, so I'm sure it'll be profitable, in a minor sort of way.
Skinwalkers looks like a B-movie that's about as good (bad) as anyone involved could have hoped.
Underworld, on the other hand, had a decent budget and some actual acting/directing talent, but it undermined itself with a horrible script in which every opportunity was missed and most things made no sense. I belabor those points in
my rather overlong review.
I concluded my
Underworld review by remarking that crap like this makes me want to write my own monster movies. I still plan to, but honestly, why do most action/horror movies suck so hard? What prevents the vast collection of theoretically-talented screen writers in Hollywood from putting together a decent 90 minutes of action? It wouldn't seem that difficult, but judging by the results on screen, it must be. Maybe it's interference from studio executives and bad directorial choices, but so often the errors in the film and script are glaringly evident to virtually everyone who sees the film. Some character is painfully stupid or annoying, there's no continuity in the action sequences, there's an excessive focus on some unimportant element that distracts from the main focus of the film, etc. (
Transformers hit that trifecta.) The problems seem correctable, but they so seldom are that I'm left puzzled.
Why can't movie studios even get the basic stuff right? They sometimes do on big budget films, or at least come close enough that viewers are willing to overlook the misses, but the medium and low budget action movies seem quite incompetent. Action fans aren't looking for a masterpiece. All we need are the basic elements of story; an interesting protagonist, tolerable sidekick, clearly-defined struggle, a few action sequences, maybe a love interest, and a big finale where the good guys triumph. How hard is that? Polish and shine are just details, and it obviously helps if the action sequences are exciting, the acting is good, the characters are believable and sympathetic, etc. Those help, but they're not required, so long as the film doesn't suck at the key elements.
I think a lot of it is about the writers (or else the sausage assembly line that mutilates their original scripts into what we see on the screen). Good writers don't write formulaic action movies. They want to be Tarentino-esque and reinvent film with time flow trickery, a dozen quirky characters, unconventional stories, original concepts, etc. All of which are great if they work, but most of the time they do not, which is why we end up with neither fish nor fowl pictures like
Domino and
Smokin' Aces, which are meant to appeal to action fans, but are too clever by half with artsy film making techniques and crazy writing, and end up appealing to basically no one. Or overly-intelligent action films like
Firefox which are loved, but only by the sliver of audience that knows about/is interested in them.
It makes you wonder what would happen if the talented writers had quotas to meet. Lots of old time movie critics lament the passing of the "studio system" where directors and actors had to do what the studios told them to do, and as a result they turned out far more quantity, that some think was also of a higher quality. What if we had that today? Instead of Tarentino (trying to) produce a masterpiece every 6 years, what if he had to turn out a movie every 12-14 months? He couldn't make films with as many inventive things as he does now, but if he were on a deadline he wouldn't have time to fool around with all the reinventions of cinema, and while his movies wouldn't be as different and unique, there would be 5x more of them. Apply the same situation to other good writers, like the interchangeably-named/talented JJ Whedon and Josh Abrahams. Take away the pet projects like
Serenity and make them punch up mainstream studio action films!
Looking at their body of work on IMDB I am reminded that one of them wrote Mission Impossible III, which I enjoyed, thus my point is proven. Of course they also wrote the sucktastic Armageddon and Aliens 4, and mostly work on TV shows I've never seen and have no interest in, and it occurs to me that writing a TV show is the ultimate expression of "doing mainstream work on a tight schedule," so I might have to rethink my solution.
Labels: movies, writing
