BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Gym TV and Bad Horror
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Gym TV and Bad Horror
I've been to my new gym every day this week, after making it down there two or three days a week for the previous several weeks. I'm enjoying the workout, I can already feel/see the difference in muscle development from hitting the weights again after a year of mostly bike riding with some desultory dumbbell exertions, and I'm growing fascinated by the television offerings in the cardio machine section of the gym. There are five or six flatscreen TVs mounted overhead, and they always have the same channels on them, at least when I'm there at night.
Two always show ESPN, one always shows CNN, another one is usually on TNT or TBS or one of those movie-intensive cable networks, and another seems be on ESPN News. The ESPN ones are pretty self-explanatory; it's a gym after all, with more men than women working out. The one that interests me more is the TNT set, or the programming on that channel. They show about a dozen episodes a day of the various crime dramas, generally Law and Order or one of its pedophile-intensive spinoffs. They also show a lot of mediocre, semi-recent films, and seem to run a cheesy horror movie every night around midnight, when I'm doing my elliptical calorie burn. I saw part of the laughably bad (but not funny) Arachnophobia a few days ago, and yesterday I saw the first hour of the remake of the Amityville Horror.
I would have guessed it was 6 or 8 years old, since I remembered seeing trailers for it, and sneering at yet another unnecessary remake of a "classic" horror film. I promptly forgot it after that, and did quite a job forgetting it, since IMdB tells me the film was released less then 3 years ago. It also clears up one of my main complaints about the film, that the mom looked way too young to have 14 y/o son. She looks about 24 in the movie, and her oldest son looks about ten years younger. The actress, the instantly-forgettable Melissa George, was born in 1976, so she was 29ish in the film. That helps the math, until you note that the absurdly-named actor playing her son... was 16. The fact that the mom in the movie apparently had the first of three children when she was about 13, and looks like this 16 years later is a bit off-putting. Worse (from a believability standpoint) is Ryan Reynolds, who spends quite a bit of time running around shirtless, looking like this. Because every average guy in the late 1970s (the 2005 remake is set in the same time as the original) was ripped like that. And freshly-waxed.
Casting and styling issues aside, the movie was okay. I watched about the first hour it with one eye, while sweating away on the cardio machine and thinking about some enjoyably-amusing activities the iG and I had engaged in Friday afternoon, reading the dialogue since the TVs are on mute in the gym, and enduring 5-minute blocks of commercials every 15 minutes. Haunted house, scene of past murders, ghosts only the kids can see and the dog smell, a useless exorcist priest, dad's slowing going crazy while dreaming about murdering his family, etc. It's basically a poor man's The Shining, minus the isolated mountain hotel claustrophobia, and if you're wondering about the dramatic drop off between Jack Nicholson/Shelley Duvall and Ryan Reynolds/Melissa George, um... yeah. Going from Stanley Kubrick to Anthony Douglas might have been a factor as well. Or maybe it got better at the end; I didn't see the whole film, after all.
I did see enough to grasp the elements of visual horror, and recognize them from every other horror movie in the past decade. When did solemn, dead-makeup looking children become the height of horror? Most of the "gotcha" scare scenes in The Amityville Horror were based on the zombie-looking little girl, and it reminded me of all those Japanese horror films, the original or US remade versions, most of which prominently feature white-skinned, zombie-like girls. The movies are making money, so someone must like it. Horror fans got burnt out on Freddie and Jason and Michael Myers, so now we're being terrified by eight year old girls? Let's hope the pendulum hasn't any further to swing, since how much further can it go at this point? Deadly kittens? Beware their lethal purr?
Here's a trailer; don't watch it with the lights off!
