31 Days of Horror – October 10th – “The Wizard of Gore”

Next up in our 31 Days of Horror countdown is “The Wizard of Gore“, a “kind of” remake of a 1970′s Herschell Gordon Lewis movie of the same name.

From a writing perspective, I think “The Wizard of Gore” could have been good- probably even great, and maybe could have cracked my top 5 horror movies, given my penchant for film noir. It’s got the mystery, the shape shifters, and to top it off, a creepy magician. Unfortunately, the directing and production are such collosal failures, the movie assumes the shape of a giant terd.

Montag the Magnificent is not your garden variety magician. When he chooses a female audience member to be part of his show, instead of making a purse disappear or pulling a scarf out of an ear, he slices them open and pulls out their innards or stuffs them inside a giant barbeque and lights it up. But at the end of the show, just as everyone’s about to flee from the theatre in horror, he says his magic words and the girls appear alive and well before the audience’s eyes. But while the girls may leave the stage unharmed (except for being hypnotized into getting naked, no biggie!), one by one they show up corpsified. Journalist Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue) becomes obsessed with the show and the disappearing girls.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 95 minutes

Directed by: Jeremy Kasten

Written by: Zach Chassler

Starring: Kip Pardue, Crispin Glover, Bijou Phillips

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 08/18/08

“The Wizard of Gore” looks cheap and amateur across the board. The colored lighting and craaaaaazy camera angles are reminscent of mid 90′s MTV, and I don’t mean that as a compliment, in case it wasn’t obvious. There are odd visual flashes throughout the movie that I found confusing since they tip off the already obvious twist. If they were going to be there at all, they should have been a lot more subtle a la Fight Club. Perhaps director Kasten should focus a bit more on communicating the plot to the audience and a little less on the camera tricks.

Dourif (as a crooked herbalist) and Glover (as the aforementioned creepy magician) give good, if not over-the-top, performances. I get the sense that both actors are desperately trying to save a movie they know is destined for the crapper. Kip Pardue struggles as the lead. His lines are delivered so stiffly, it’s almost as if he’s never seen a noir film.

When I noticed the credit for the Suicide Girls in the opening, I thought, “Send in the boobs.” There should be a Countdown to Titties clock in this movie. Anytime you see a chick with tattoos, put 60 seconds on the clock. And it’s not that I’m opposed to breasts in movies, but pointless mam-shots have become so predictable for horror movies that I find it a bit annoying. Make a decent movie and then you’ve earned your tatas.

31 Days of Horror – October 9th – “Cube”

From the opening scene “Cube” thrusts the audience, along with 6 characters, directly into a booby-trapped maze of cubed rooms.  No one, neither characters nor audience, knows quite why they’re there.  But the film never lets up by leaving those claustrophobic cube chambers for a flashback or an easy explanation.  It maintains an intense focus, and the suspense just builds and builds.

This is a pretty cold open:  Six people in jumpsuits awake in a strange arrangement of connected cubes.  Each cube has a door on each of its 6 walls (including up and down.)  They quickly discover that some of the rooms are booby trapped with a variety of motion detecting traps such as poison gas, tons of slicing mechanisms, flame throwers or a face melting acid spray.  Yikes.  An early, and disturbingly painful, death shows just how high the stakes are.  Without food and water, they’ve got maybe 3 days to find their way out.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 90 minutes

Directed by: Vincenzo Natali

Written by: André Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, Graeme Manson

Starring: David Hewlett, Nicky Guadagni, Nicole de Boer

Theatrical Release: 09/09/97

DVD Release: 01/26/99

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $501,000

Metacritic Score: 61/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 58%

Tension builds as a viewer, but it builds even more for the characters.  They’re pushed to their limits, and when one snaps, it changes the group dynamic completely over the second half.

Released in Canada in 1992, “Cube” has slowly but surely found an audience on DVD.  Borrowing some from John Carpenter’s “The Thing“, the basic premise of confined characters searching for both meaning and salvation in their actions makes this more or less a blueprint for the “Saw” series without the lame Jigsaw the master puppeteer angle.  I’ll just say that “Cube” is many many times better.

Beyond being without some of the unrealistic behavior that you see in movies like “Saw“, “Cube” isn’t all contrivances and manipulations.  It’s more than just setting up twists.  It gives the audience plenty to really think about with a clear philosophical theme of chaos vs. order.  The question of why they’re here is an obvious one, and one that they can’t know without getting out, if ever.  Did someone meticulously plan this cube and specifically target them to bring them here for some grand purpose?  Or was it all a lot more random – the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, more or less – based on the little information we have on the cube’s construction, the latter at least seems plausible.  The characters discuss it at length.  Both sides of the debate seem reasonable enough.

“Cube” engages the audience in the best way a movie can. It asks big questions. It leaves a lot to the imagination, but it makes you think. It doesn’t just present easy, digestible answers that are more about convenience than meaning. The movie does not fit into a neat little “Cube“.

31 Days of Horror – October 8th – “Giallo”

Famed Italian horror director Dario Argento has been in the news a lot lately.  His most popular film, 1977′s Suspiria, is getting the big budget Hollywood remake treatment courtesy of Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green.  That’s slated for a 2010 release.  Perhaps even more exciting to Argento fans, his newest movie, Giallo, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody, came out this year as well.

So I watched Giallo.  Let’s nobody get their hopes way up about that second part.

It turns out Giallo is little more than a very cliché cop vs. serial killer story.  This plot line is so tired, I was nodding off just a few minutes in.  We’re told through exposition that Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Brody) understands the bad guys and gets all the serial killer type cases.  (He doesn’t demonstrate this skill much in his actions, though it’s apparently important enough that the themes and the final scenes hinge on the notion.)  He hunts a killer credited simply as Yellow (played by Adrien Brody with heaps of makeup) that likes to smash beautiful girls’ faces with tools.  Linda (Emmanuele Seigner) is the sister of the girl currently on the receiving end of Yellow’s torture tools.  She meets up with Enzo and tries to help him crack the case before her sister’s head gets cracked like an egg.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 92 minutes

Directed by: Dario Argento

Written by: Dario Argento, Jim Agnew

Starring: Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner

There is no atmosphere here, no sense of a real world populated by real people dealing with the dread this kind of scenario would produce – in fact, there are literally almost no characters at all aside from the cop, killer, victim and sister.  Huge chunks of back story are explained through awkwardly inserted flashbacks of both the cop and killer’s childhood traumas.  Sounds more like Dr. Phil than Dario Argento.  All telling and no showing makes TV Casualties sleepy.

Further on the lack of atmosphere – every word of dialogue is about the murders.  There is virtually no characterization.  There is nothing said with style.  No signs of anything these characters care about or think about, and thus, no real reason to care about them.

Fine.  So it’s a shitty plot with shitty dialogue.  Can Oscar caliber acting salvage that somewhat?  Brody hams it up in the double role.  He overacts with twitches and funny faces as the murderer and tries to pull off a constantly smoking, gravelly voiced noir detective that comes off as silly part of the time.  Emmanuele Seigner plays her role with the charisma of a dead dog.

As I alluded to somewhat earlier, the final scenes go through the motions as though the filmmakers are saying something important about Inspector Enzo.  As though this piece of shit could deliver something meaningful.

31 Days of Horror – October 1st – “The Thaw”

Hell yeah, October is finally here! First up in our 31 Days of Horror, a slighting chilling Val Kilmer picture…

Straight outta Canada, “The Thaw” is – weirdly enough – a politically conscious rip-off of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (which happens to be my favorite horror movie.) Global warming is the theme here, and we’re not talking underlying. It’s pretty overt, maybe even heavy handed. The film doesn’t try to tap into fears about global warming so much as actually use a loosely connected monster movie to try to get a cautionary message across. All told, it isn’t too annoying in this regard, which it easily could’ve been, but I do think something about the preachiness made it less scary.

A group of science students travel to the arctic research facility of Dr. David Kruipen (Val Kilmer) to learn from his work regarding the melting ice caps. The Dr. has just made a grave discovery, though, as hatching parasites found on a well preserved wooly mammoth carcass prove to be devastating to his team of scientists. The students arrive to find the empty facility, and it’s not long before bugs are scuttling over tiled floors and stainless steel counter tops, picking off college kids one by one in classic horror fashion.

Truth be told, the storyline of “The Thaw” even more closely resembles that of a Season 1 “The X-Files” episode, “Ice,” which was also heavily influenced by “The Thing,” even going so far as to hire the same set designer as the John Carpenter movie.

It’s not the recycled story that lets this movie down, though, or even the cast, all of whom do a pretty a respectable job. (Kilmer is only in the movie for about 10 minutes, but the younger leads – “Superbad‘s” Martha MacIsaac and “Veronica Mars” alum Aaron Ashmore, in particular, bring a lot of life to their roles, considering the material.)

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 94 minutes

Directed by: Mark A. Lewis

Written by: Mark A. Lewis and Michael Lewis

Starring: Val Kilmer, Aaron Ashmore, Martha MacIsaac

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 10/06/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

The production quality fails the movie. Clumsy directing syphoned suspense away multiple times. Those long, quiet scenes that lead up to a startlingly loud noise would cut to a new angle just before the bang, totally undermining that lingering anticipation and moment of surprise. It’s like they were going through the motions of a horror movie cliché without having any idea what made it work in the first place. The opening sequence also looked very cheap and amateurish. It aimed for a fast paced, semi-disturbing montage juxtaposing graphic footage of wounds and flame with news clips about global warming – sort of like a crappy version of the weird videos in “The Ring” – but the way it was edited seemed dated and trite.

The biggest failure, especially when holding this up to “The Thing“, was the utter lack of a paranoid and desolate atmosphere. It didn’t capture the claustrophobia of being isolated with characters pushed to the edge, unsure of any of the people around them; those slow shots creeping over the blustery tundra that stretches on as far as they can see in every direction. “The Thaw” didn’t deliver on those almost intangible style elements that make a great horror movie “feel” creepy and interesting. And when it comes down to it, a horror movie lacking style, lacking a particular atmosphere to capture our imaginations, is almost not a horror movie at all.

The Acolytes: Underground Horror from Down Under

Part serial killer thriller, part good teens gone bad, Australian indie “Acolytes” is the kind of horror movie they should be making more of. I’m pretty hard to please when it comes to this genre, and I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Mark (Seb Gregory) wanders into the woods one day and spies a man burying something. He and his friends James (Josh Payne) and Chasely (Hannah Morgan Lawrence) decide to unearth the buried treasure, but instead of money, they discover the body of a young woman.

Here’s where the movie takes a turn for the “Kids do the darndest things when they find a body”, and I start wondering if I ever really want to procreate. Instead of reporting the body to the police, Mark and James cook up a scheme to find the murderer and blackmail him into killing an evil scumbag kiddie rapist (Michael Dorman) who has recently been released from prison. Schemes like this in thrillers never play out as planned, so things go from bad to worse pretty quickly for Mark, James, and Hannah.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 91 minutes

Directed by: Jon Hewitt

Written by: Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause

Starring: Sebastian Gregory, Joshua Payne, Hannah Mangan Lawrence

Theatrical Release: 05/15/08

DVD Release: 07/28/09

Production Budget: $4 million

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 83%

With a small budget of only four million dollars, “Acolytes” has a great visual style and excellent performances by the cast, especially considering their age. Unlike most teen horror flicks, the characters in “Acolytes” are handled as real people instead of hash marks on a killer’s bed post.

You’ve probably seen movies that have one twist too many. The theatrical release of this movie has four or five too many- so many twists piled on top of one another is overkill and takes away from the overall impact. The ending is a bit of a cliché for a thriller, which is the biggest let down of all. (The DVD features two alternate endings.)

Overall, “Acolytes” is a movie I would certainly recommend to fans of the horror/thriller genre. It’s dark and disturbing and has just the right kind of jump-out-of-your-seat tension. The DVD became available in the U.S. today.

Horsemen: Ponyloaf.

Here’s a recipe for braised bullshit movie: one 12 oz. can of David Fincher’s “Se7en” (Up), one leg of “Silence of the Lambs“, and two squirts of pure Quaid sweat. (This recipe calls for Dennis. Randy is an acquired taste. Little gamey.)

Yep. “Horsemen” is a blatant “Se7en“/”The Silence of the Lambs” copycat. Their strategy was to not merely recycle that material… but to kick it up a notch by totally sucking. Quaid (Dennis. Randy wouldn’t touch this script with Gary Sinise’s sac.) stars as Aidan Breslin, a work-obsessed homicide detective slash crappy dad. We know he’s a crappy dad because his eldest son, Alex (Lou Taylor Pucci), harps on the subject every time he’s on screen. A 16 year old boy that insists on giving his dad lectures on parenting? Science fucking fiction. It’s so heavy handed it makes Queen Latifah’s meathooks look downright dainty.

In one scene, young Alex suggests the family go to a hockey game. Daddy Breslin responds as if he’s either never heard of the sport or the notion of spending time with his offspring has never occurred to him before. Immediately cut to the family decked out in matching Red Wings gear. Huh?

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 110 minutes

Directed by: Jonas Åkerlund

Written by: Dave Callaham

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Lou Taylor Pucci, Ziyi Zhang

Theatrical Release: 03/06/09

DVD Release: 07/14/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

Similar crappisms abound in “Horsemen“. I sense severe editing going on here. Several transitions left me feeling as if a whole chunk of movie had gone missing, which is often the case with straight to DVD turds.

Even Ziyi Zhang, who I’m a fan of, struggles. She is not nearly sinister enough to pull off the gloating female temptress the movie wants her to be. Her performance comes off as silly and a little embarrassing.

Plotwise, the movie is just as blah. Detective Breslin hunts a gruesome murderer. Eventually he realizes that this is not the work of one killer, but a kill group! Four, to be exact, each one representing a horseman of the apocalypse (rather than each murder representing one of the 7 deadly sins). Spooky, no? The actual murders lack believability and the quick discovery scenes don’t seem to give them the reverence such brutality would require – even the filmmakers aren’t buying it. We’ve seen it all before in “Se7en” and the dozens of movies that have already ripped it off. The biblical details are meaningless – a catchy name and an excuse for cryptic bible passages are all it really adds up to. Which is kind of how the whole movie feels. No substance and not even much style.

“Horsemen” fails on the very basic level of establishing a connection between the audience and the characters, rendering itself suspenseless. The movie could have almost saved itself (by a pussy hair) by following through with the final twist. Instead, it limps off with the cheesy, stupidly optimistic ending. Why? Movies like “The Descent” and “Se7en” resonate because they don’t go for the “things are finally starting to look up!” Hollywood ending. In the end, “Horsemen” failed to even successfully rip off its predecessors.

5 Movies From the Underground, 6/11/09

Our objective at TV Casualties is actually pretty simple – it’s our duty to uncover the gems, what the British would call the “best bits.”  This becomes especially crucial when dealing with TV series or movies that have been overlooked.  The following movies will throttle you.  Hard.  (We actually suggest you sit as you watch them.)  And not one of them has more than 2000 votes on IMDB. So give these films the love they deserve – buy them, sign up for a free trial at Blockbuster and rent them, etc. Find a way.

1. “Shotgun Stories” (2008) 1,284 votes on IMDB – Michael Shannon earned an Oscar nom last year for his role in “Revolutionary Road.”  He also starred in the much lesser known “Shotgun Stories,” which was my favorite movie of 2008.  A blood feud erupts between two families in a rural Arkansas town, and it’s not long before both sides go too far.  The movie has funny parts but is dark and very subtle, with a needlessly tragic streak that doesn’t feel at all manipulative or contrived.  It’s the best I’ve watched in a long time.

2. “Chop Shop” (2008)  1,240 votes on IMDB – Ramin Bahrani wrote and directed “Chop Shop,” a movie about a street kid scavenging in the slums of New York.  Alejandro works in a chop shop and the owner lets him live in a cluttered room above it.  Eventually he takes in his sister, whom looks headed toward prostitution, and the two of them save up to try to buy an ice cream truck to start a food truck business.  The story somehow balances the naivete of a child with the grit and grim of urban life in an honest, believable way.  Roger Ebert declared Bahrani the “new great American director” a few months ago.

3. “Diggers” (2007) 1,090 votes on IMDB – Written by our Emmy pick for Outstanding Performance in a Comeday, Ken Marino, “Diggers” tells the story of clam diggers in a depressed New England town in the 70′s. Hunt (Paul Rudd) deals with the loss of his father while a corporation threatens to put him, and all other local diggers, out of business. Rudd plays the reserved main character well, but Marino steals the laughs as a frantic father of many. While subtle, this is probably the funniest movie on the list. You can own it for under $10.

4. “Look Both Ways” (2005) 1,865 votes on IMDB – “Look Both Ways” is the first full length feature from writer/director/animator Sarah Watt. Set in New Zealand, the movie follows Meryl, an artist who illustrates sympathy cards for a living, and whose father recently died. After witnessing a deadly train crash, Meryl meets Nick, a photojournalist who is sent to cover the crash and has recently been diagnosed with cancer. Sounds uplifting, no? It actually works out to be subtly optomistic by the end, I promise. Animated scenes of Meryl’s obsessively morbid thoughts mix with the live action, which is where the movie really shines.

5. “Ten Tiny Love Stories” (2001) 232 votes on IMDB – If I were a teacher, Rodrigo García would be teacher’s pet. On top of having written and directed three movies we like a lot (“Nine Lives” and “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her” are the other two), he’s directed a number of the best episodes of our favorite shows (“Carnivale” and “Six Feet Under“). That led to him landing his own HBO series, “In Treatment,” which is also excellent.  As a cherry on top of all of that, he’s also the spawn of author Gabriel García Márquez (another personal fave). “Ten Tiny Love Stories” is ten women sharing one intimate story from their past in almost-mockumentary fashion. Some of the stories are sad, some are funny, and almost all of them are so well crafted that you’ll feel a slight voyeuristic discomfort, as if you’ve come across someone’s secret video diary and can’t help but keep watching.

The Burrowers: Digging Up Another Straight to DVD Gem

Add yet another movie to the long list of recent feature films inexplicably reduced to straight to DVD affairs.  J.T. Petty’s “The Burrowers” really saw no theatrical release outside of playing at a handful of film festivals last fall.

The movie combines an old West adventure with horror, drawing pretty equally from both genres.  The opening scene features a family being attacked by some unseen entity.  When Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary) arrives on the scene to find his fiancée among those missing, he quickly launches a search party.  Just like that, the movie takes to the road on horseback – cowboys riding through the prairie in search of missing folks and mysterious monsters.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 96 minutes

Directed by: J.T. Petty

Written by: J.T. Petty

Starring: Clancy Brown, Karl Geary, William Mapother

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 04/21/09

Production Budget: $7 million

Domestic Gross: $0

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 67%

The lush green atmosphere and Western sensibility really separate this from your average teen horror fare straight away.  Your run-of-the-mall horror movie rarely even pretends to care about its characters, and horror teens, in particular, are always disposable.  Often annoying already, their deaths are so meaningless that they may as well be bags of meat for a maniac to hack away at with an ax.  In this semi-proper Western universe populated more by adults than teens, though, the characters are treated with a little more reverence.  Consequently, the deaths still pack some surprise, still carry some weight with the audience.  Like “The Descent,” (though not quite as good) this is horror made for adults.

Fans of ABC’s “Lost” will recognize several faces here:  actors William Mapother, Doug Hutchison and Clancy Brown (our famously despised pick for Sandor Clegane) all play major roles in “The Burrowers” and had significant parts on the island as well.  (Fun fact:  Hutchison, AKA Horace the Dharma leader on “Lost,” got one of his big acting breaks as the super creepy Eugene Victor Tooms on “The X-Files.”)  The entire cast does a nice job pulling off the critical juxtaposition of the old West -  stuffy, formal, almost Victorian aspects of speech and mannerisms mixing with the rough and grimey demeanor of hardened men that work ranches all day.  As always, this combo is good for several laughs.

The movie does have its flaws, though – from the opening scene on, the audience stays one step (or more) ahead of the characters.  That certainly doesn’t help build suspense or an aura of mystery.  I also thought a fight scene toward the end went on way too long.  Even if we do sort of feel like we know what’s ultimately coming, though, some of the particulars of the details still make the end satisfying, and there are a few twists along the way as well.

Perhaps its biggest strength – “The Burrowers” shows some restraint in not letting us see the actual creatures too much, which I think usually works better than the alternative.  (This isn’t Freddy or Chuckie making wise cracks as they kill.  What might lurk in the shadows is always scariest.)  All told, it’s an effective and entertaining movie, especially considering its modest budget.  Just 900 and some odd votes on IMDB? Horror fans should seek this out on DVD.

The Education of Charlie Banks: Fred Durst directs?

At one point, Fred Durst did it all for the nookie. Those were simpler times. Now he, apparently, directs. In the quest to discover bodacious movies, it’s best to leave no stone unturned.  It was with a smirk and a heavy heart that I turned the Durst stone, but there was a pleasant, perhaps even bodacious, surprise underneath.

“The Education of Charlie Banks” introduces friends Charlie (Jesse Eisenberg,) Danny (Chris Marquette) and Mick (Jason Ritter) through a few scenes as kids in New York City in the 1970′s.  Charlie and Danny are fairly well off and headed for Ivy League schools.  Mick?  Not so much. He serves as the baddest guy in the neighborhood.  Nailing college girls is as close as he’ll get to a degree.  Here comes the central dramatic conflict:  Mick beats a couple of kids nearly to death, and Charlie rats him out before quickly recanting his statement.  The movie picks up in the 80′s at Brown University where Danny and Charlie are roommates.  Mick arrives unexpectedly to stay for a while, and, with his blue collar background, there’s a bit of “culture shock.” Perhaps more importantly – does Mick know that Charlie was the one that ratted him out?

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 100 minutes

Directed by: Fred Durst

Written by: Peter Elkoff

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Ritter, Eva Amurri, Chris Marquette

Theatrical Release: 03/27/09

DVD Release: 06/30/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $15,078

Metacritic Score: 50/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 52%

Part coming of age story, part fish out of water story, the plot keeps it pretty simple.  The focus here is on characters, fully formed ones that grow and change.  A movie can get a long way by actually caring about its cast of players, by making them more than plot devices, and this one does. The core group of 6 or so actors often look like they’re having a lot of fun together, and the roles they play are fairly colorful without going completely over the top.  Conflicts arise and there are a few twists, some more predictable than others, but the script shines by being consistently generous with each and every character without seeming cheesy.   The movie remains thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.

The story, however, falls apart somewhat toward the end.  Thematically, there are many direct mentions of the class disparities and rich and poor, and the characters reference “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald quite a bit.  That considered, I felt like the writer lost his focus in terms of what he was really saying about Mick, being that he was the only poor character.  As a myth, or a hero’s journey, this was slightly less than satisfying, though I can respect that it doesn’t give easy answers, at least, or wrap things up with a neat, happy ending.  The pacing seems to sense this weakness in the final section, as the film wraps up really quickly.

Despite that flaw, “The Education of Charlie Banks” was well worth watching and deserves to find a bigger audience on DVD.  Durst seems like a natural behind the camera, as odd as that may seem.  Everything about the movie gives off a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and there are many playful, amusing shots and details throughout.  Most importantly, he gets great performances, cohesion and chemistry from the young cast.

One Week: Joshua Jackson’s Best Work Since D2

Regardless of the content of the movie itself, “One Week” may always be best known as the movie that used youtube comment quotes in its advertising campaign rather than quotes of legitimate critics. The blogosphere went apeshit, calling it, “A new low for the movie industry.” Now, as for the movie:

What would you do if you had one week to live? That’s the launching point of the Canadian movie “One Week.” The rhetorical question becomes a literal one in the opening scene when Ben Tyler (Joshua Jackson) is informed that he has stage four cancer. He’s young, but the disease is particularly aggressive – they’ve found cancerous cells in his bloodstream and spreading. Essentially, he could go at any time.

Cue the identity crisis punctuated with quirk. Ben’s first thought? This will be a good excuse to call off his upcoming wedding, an affair he seems lukewarm about. He’s also relieved that he basically won’t need to go to work anymore. On the way home he purchases a motorcycle on a whim, and it’s not long before he sets out on an open-ended journey with the vague destination of “West.”

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 93 minutes

Directed by: Michael McGowan

Written by: Michael McGowan

Starring: Joshua Jackson, Liane Balaban

Theatrical Release: 03/06/09

DVD Release: 06/16/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

From that point, this becomes a roadtrip movie. Ben meets a series of characters on his criss-crossing path toward the Pacific. He gets more involved with some than others, but they each help him shape his thoughts on what’s left of his life. As episodic and formulaic as that may sound, most of it works well enough. Ben’s impending death gives him a crystal clear perspective, and the internal conflict that emerges pits passion vs. responsibility. The movie went places with this element of the story that I didn’t expect, and I’m not sure I agree with, personally, but it was messy and complicated and honest. It gave me something to think about.

The subdued voice of the narrator (Campbell Scott) tells much of the story here, which helps give a clear delivery to the deadpan humor throughout the movie. Jackson is fine as the lead, but Liane Balaban sort of steals the show as his fiance, Samantha, by being funnier than him in her handful or so of scenes. Her character won me over to the point that it really changed my interpretation of the end of the movie.

From the style of humor all the way to the story’s end, “One Week” is a mature film. Despite the focus on cancer and death, it avoids the pitfall of melodrama. In fact, it may be a little too clean considering the grave subject matter – it would be believable, maybe even normal, to see characters behaving irrationally in a scenario like this. Still, it was somewhat refreshing to see a movie show some emotional restraint and basically do the opposite of the “go too big with every scene” soap opera crap. To break this down in youtube comment terms, I wouldn’t say, “Best. Movie. Ever.” But I lol’d a few times.

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