Cobweb: Played

Goddamnit, I got suckered again. I just went through this a month or two ago with Pond, whose trailer looked eerie and unsettling, but as a whole movie was mostly a pompous, nonsensical slog. Sometimes trailers do take the absolute best bits in a movie and string them together, giving you the impression that yes, it’s all going to be like this. Sometimes trailers lie.

But at least with Pond, I was going in blind. Where Cobweb is concerned, I only have myself to blame. Well, myself and the filmmakers. People whose opinions I trust and respect found it disappointing, and under normal circumstances, that’d be enough for me to take that film off the list. But damned if the trailer for it didn’t make it seem spooky and menacing enough that it piqued my curiosity. As much as I heard it wasn’t very good, that trailer kept pulling me back, making me wonder if there wasn’t something to it. Well, the trailer got me again, because it managed to find the good parts of a film that isn’t even really the sum of its parts. It looks good, it has a reasonably good twist, but the execution’s all over the shop.

It's almost Halloween in an appropriately autumnal small town, and Peter is a little boy with a lot of worries. He’s quiet and shy, and thus a natural target for the class bully. But it’s more than that - he lives with his parents in an old, semi-spooky house, full of bumps and creaks as it settles on its foundations, as wood expands and contracts with the weather. It’s hard for him to sleep some nights, and he has nightmares sometimes. One sleepless night, he’d swear he heard knocking behind the wall, even though his mother says he just has a very active imagination. So he gets out of bed, and knocks on the wall himself. Something knocks back.

Something knocks back, and a small voice says “help me.”

The beginning of the film isn’t bad at all. There’s a chilliness to it, and Peter seems like a kid who is genuinely haunted by the shit he’s dealing with. But the problems start early. It seems like what was intended was for the story to start off being about this mysterious presence in the house, but as the film goes on, it will pivot to Peter’s parents maybe hiding some kind of terrible secret. You’ve got the concerned teacher who sees his behavior and when all of the kids in class draw Halloween-themed pictures, Peter draws something that any responsible adult is going to interpret as a cry for help. Is it the thing in the walls? Is it his parents? Is it both? And that’d be fine, but the first big problem here is that for something like that to work, you need for his parents to seem reasonable and loving and normal, right up to the point that the madness makes itself known. That way, the juxtaposition of their apparent normalcy and whatever comes through is upsetting, shocking, an “oh shit” moment. And from the very beginning, Peter’s family doesn’t seem normal at all. Right off the bat, there’s something really odd and off about them. It’s the same problem as how in The Shining, Jack Torrance seems dangerously unstable almost from the first moment he’s on screen, so his descent into homicidal madness really isn’t all that surprising. As a result, there’s no tension or contrast, and instead of an upsetting reversal of expectations, we’re left with a foregone conclusion, and so a lot of the movie feels like an exercise in waiting instead of something shocking and revelatory.

There are also problems with the flow of the narrative. The first two acts are oddly…not perfunctory, but there is the feeling of a bunch of sequences robbed of the connective tissue that would make it feel like a story. It’s one of those cases where it feels like the filmmakers had a bunch of spooky moments, rather than a fleshed-out narrative. The performances are generally stilted (except for Peter, whose actor does a pretty good job with what he’s given) because in part the actors have to deliver dialogue that’s clunky and artificial. Kids do not talk like the kids in this movie talk. Choices are made in the story that I don’t think hold up to real-world scrutiny, and seem made to position all of the pieces in place. There’s an air of contrivance to the story. It looks like things are going to improve in the third act with a pretty shocking act, but what should be a natural gut-punch of an ending ends up being just the beginning of a drawn-out, largely unnecessary confrontation. The climax consists of some pretty stock slasher-movie moments alongside a lot of unnecessary exposition that belabors a point that would have been better served by flashbacks instead of a bunch of stuff being said over and over and over again before the whole thing just sort of…stops. I get the sense that it was supposed to feel ambiguous, but it doesn’t, it just feels like they couldn’t think of a way to bring the story to a close, so they just ended it there. And it’s really frustrating because I see the pieces of what could have been a much better movie peeking out here and there. It’s got the courage to go to some pretty dark places, but once it gets there, it wastes the opportunity on the least interesting choices it could make.

I think this is why the trailer was so persuasive to me – trailers are basically isolated moments intended to sell the film, and this is a film that definitely has some really good isolated moments and imagery – the sheer, baffling strangeness of a backyard overrun with pumpkins, quick asides that communicate important details without being overdone, an impressively creepy nightmare sequence – but that’s all it is, a bunch of moments that never really come together, and what would have been a nice reversal of expectations squandered by letting it play out entirely too long until all of the implied horror is exhausted through over-explanation. Scares aren’t enough. It’s not enough to play the notes, you have to know why they’re being played in the first place.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

The Devil’s Rain: (It’s) Hail(ing), Satan

One of my more vivid memories of childhood is looking through the movie ads in the daily newspaper, because they were always designed to be as eye-catching and, in the case of horror films at least, as lurid as possible. Promising all kinds of truly horrific sights, my still-developing brain hadn’t yet learned to take things with a grain of salt, and the visuals in the ads would send my imagination into overdrive. A few of those films stuck in my brain and since I’ve become an amateur horror film enjoyer, every now and then I’ve taken it on myself to check them out, to see if the reality could come anywhere near living up to my childhood expectations. I mean, the answer is no. It’s always going to be no, because the imagination conjures far worse things than film does most of the time and I had a really vivid imagination as a kid. Maybe one of them has come close, but that’s it.

The Devil’s Rain, then, is another instance of me indulging a curiosity from childhood and this one’s probably the least frightening of the bunch. It’s not really a good movie by any metric - it’s borderline comic in places, featuring a cast that makes it even harder for viewers of a certain age to take it seriously, but it does have its moments.

It opens, without music, on credits laid over selections from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, pretty well-established shorthand for “this is going to be about hell” at this point. That leads into, well, a dark and stormy night. No, really. It’s pitch-black and the rain is absolutely pelting down. Inside her house, Emma Preston stares fretfully out the window, worried about her husband Steve, who’s out there somewhere. Her son Mark tries to reassure her, but she says something about how all of this is happening just as she saw it. So that’s odd. And soon enough, Steve’s truck pulls up in front of the house, and he gets out. But he doesn’t come inside, he just stands out there. He tells Emma that someone named Corbis wants a book that she has in her possession, and to come to Redstone - a deserted mining town nearby - with it.

And then the thing that was her husband dissolves into a puddle of slime.

With this, Mark resolves to head to Redstone to confront Corbis, insisting that the book - a large, dusty, old-looking tome that they keep safe under the floorboards of their home - is not theirs to bargain with. It’s actually a better start to the film than I might be making it sound. There’s a sense of isolation and threat to the sequence with the rain and the dark, and there isn’t too much exposition so we’re left knowing that something bad (and unnatural) is happening, something the Preston family has been anticipating for a long time, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, it’s sort of downhill from there for the most part. The general pace of the film is “people go one place, and then they go another place,” so then the action jumps away from Mark’s confrontation with the mysterious Jonathan Corbis to introduce us to Mark’s brother Tom and his wife Julie, who…just happens to be a psychic.

Why is she a psychic? As it turns out, it’s mostly a narrative device to explain Corbis’ whole history with the Preston family and to drive the characters from one location to another. Mark goes to Redstone, and then Tom and Julie follow when she gets a horrible vision about what’s happening to Mark, so really it’s sort of a movie about the members of a single family taking a trip from their homestead to an abandoned mining town and discovering that whoops, there’s an evil cult there. That sounds kind of reductive, but at least until the end of the film, that’s really kind of it. The acting’s mostly melodramatic, and the dialogue (especially in the confrontation between Mark and Corbis) is pretty purple and overblown. It’s not an easy film to take seriously.

And this isn’t helped by what are obvious budgetary limitations. The whole thing takes place in a couple of locations, one of which is an abandoned mining town, which is where the film spends most of its time. The stunt work is not the most convincing I’ve ever seen (a car plows into a tree at maybe 0.5 miles per hour, a tumble down some stairs might be the gentlest I’ve ever seen on film), and the practical effects work ranges from the surprisingly effective to the downright laughable. And the cast is full of people who were, as another review put it, either on their way up in their career or on their way down. If you were a kid in the 1970s or 80s, the majority of this cast is going to be very, very familiar to you from various films and television shows of the era. And it’s not their fault, but their familiarity does detract from any atmosphere this film might have at any point. At least two or three of them are so well-identified with other characters or shows that it’s difficult in the modern day to see them as any other character. You should be going “oh shit,” but instead you’re going “hey, it’s that guy!”

It's not all bad – the opening is pretty strong, the character of Corbis is surprisingly sinister, there are some genuinely creepy moments sprinkled throughout, and the climax makes up for the lack of action beforehand by being as deliriously gooey as Lucio Fulci at his best. There’s some potential camp value to the film having had Anton LaVey as a technical consultant, but the film itself isn’t really that campy. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I’d love to basically see the satanic cult version of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, and this ain’t it.

It might seem unfair, like I’m holding this film to modern standards that it has no chance of meeting. But this came out after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and before Halloween, so in context it really does seem like an example of the sort of thing that horror was beginning to outgrow. And it doesn’t help that it doesn’t have the relentless eeriness of another low-budget film about cult goings-on from around the same time, Messiah of Evil. Between its overall clumsiness and its cast, I think this one hasn’t aged so well. Not in the cultural sense, there’s nothing objectionable about it, really, it’s just difficult to take seriously. This is one for watching with some friends and some beers.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon (this is available on Blu Ray? WTF?) 

Nocebo: Worlds Collide

Usually when you think about two worlds overlapping or colliding or coming together in a horror film, it’s our world and the spirit world, or our world and some alien hell dimension, or maybe the present and the past. But every now and then you’ll get one about two different cultures or socioeconomic strata, though those are usually the province of drama, which is what cultured people watch instead of horror. Yes, that is a chip on my shoulder.

And Nocebo (and maybe The Feast, now that I think about it) fits neatly into this last category while still being very much a horror movie. It’s a nuanced, unsettling story about the convergence of two very different worlds, that unfortunately tips its hand a little too early.

Christine is a hard-working, go-getting designer of high-end children’s clothing, and we meet her as she’s trying to get her daughter Roberta off to school,  and negotiating who’ll be picking her up with her husband Felix before heading to a runway show for her newest line. Things are going smoothly, the presentation appears to be impressing all the right people, and then from backstage she gets a phone call relaying some vague, unspecified bad news. Her response is “I can’t process this right now,” and then she appears to hallucinate a sick, mangy dog, encrusted with ticks. Or maybe it isn’t a hallucination, because when we rejoin her and her family some months later, she seems to be very ill. Respiratory problems, fatigue, memory lapses, joint pain. She’s trying to get back up on the horse, shop around a new line, but she’s in rough shape. Whatever happened to her, it’s clearly taking a toll, and then there’s a knock at the door. It’s a petite Filipina woman named Diana. She says that she’s here as Christine’s home health aide.

Christine doesn’t remember hiring a home health aide.

Nevertheless, Christine hand-waves it as problems with her memory, treating it like someone might treat receiving something from Amazon that they’d forgotten they ordered. And that’s the basic backbone of the film - there’s a definite class element here. Felix and Christine and Roberta are a prosperous (and not especially sympathetic) English family with a lovely house and thoroughly first-world lives. Felix is a marketing strategist, Christine designs high-end children’s clothing, and Roberta’s on the abrasive side of precocious. By contrast, Diana is from a very small village in the south end of the Philippines. And as Diana settles into their home, Christine and her family treat Diana with exactly the sort of dismissiveness and condescension that you’d expect from prosperous Westerners. When Diana cooks dinner for them, Felix calls it “surprisingly good.” So yeah, they see Diana as a curiosity and a servant, nothing more. And when Diana offers to help Christine with her ailment, using traditional shamanic healing practices, Christine thinks it an amusing diversion…until it starts to work. Christine starts to feel better and Felix immediately assumes that either Diana is a charlatan taking advantage of them, or that his wife is mentally unstable, or maybe both.

All of this is punctuated with flashbacks to Diana’s life back home, which sets up a nice rhythm of narrative contrasts between the cloudy damp of England, all modern architecture and design, and the humid, make-work housing of the rural Philippines. The modern and the primitive, a contrast that is extended to the differences between Christine’s medicine, bottles and bottles of pills and a CPAP, and Diana’s practices. These are not just people from two different worlds, they’re people who also see the world in two entirely different ways, and the film neatly avoids pigeonholing what Diana is doing as mumbo-jumbo, whatever Felix’s reaction is to the contrary. The same Christine who is initially resistant to Diana’s treatments and who puts her faith in modern medicine also has a pair of “lucky” shoes and a little mantra she recites to bring herself success in pitch meetings, so there’s the suggestion that maybe Christine and her family aren’t super self-aware, but that’s definitely part and parcel of the characterization. Why would they need to be? Everything’s here for them.

That said, it’s not really cartoonish (for the most part). There’s a shifting dynamic between Felix, Christine, Roberta and Diana that adds some nuance to it, and at no point do any of them seem wholly bad or wholly good. Diana is obviously sharper and more perceptive than Christine and Felix give her credit for, Christine’s chronic illness has left her hanging by a thread, Roberta just wants kids at school to stop picking on her, and Felix isn’t so much a villainous caricature as yet another wealthy white man who can’t imagine a world where he isn’t right about everything. All of this works to the film’s benefit.

But none of that would necessarily point to horror. The horror is really more in how the story is told. It's a slightly cold, distant film, with a faint but pervasive strangeness that makes even (or especially) scenes of children walking the runway or dancing for a commercial feel sinister, and mundane moments are punctuated by startling juxtapositions where worlds overlap or one intrudes upon the other, their impact heightened by the underpinning of constant unease. As the film progresses and we start to put together the reason Diana is there and who she is in relation to Christine, it becomes clear that there is going to be some kind of reckoning, and the film’s denouement stitches them together in sacrifice. Unfortunately, I also think attentive viewers will end up seeing the whole thing coming from pretty early on, as the first act calls our attention to some details that point directly at what was probably meant to be a revelation for much later. And then, when we do get the revelation, it’s played with less nuance than the rest of the film, turning one character into something a little more two-dimensional, or at least pandering to a particular stereotype in a way that rings a bit false when the way they’ve been depicted up to that point would have been just as effective and just as condemnatory. Unfortunately, knowing where it’s going robs the film of a lot of the mystery and ambiguity that would have been central to its effectiveness up to the moment all the pieces get put together.  

Which is a shame, because it’s a well-considered, thoughtful film apart from that. In some ways, it’s a movie about what makes us sick, and what can heal us in turn. The term “nocebo” is related to the term “placebo,” but instead of positive effects being attributed to an inert substance, it’s negative effects instead. Whether it’s medicine or poison, it’s not the substance, it’s not the technology, it’s not the ritual, it’s you. It was in you all along.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon 

Consecration: But Now I See

It just occurred to me as I started to write this how many movies I’ve seen that take place in monasteries or convents. Something about the somber surroundings, the isolation, the presumed holiness or sanctity…it’s fertile ground for creepiness to be sure, but also has the problem of any well-worn location - the more a location lends itself to a particular type of story, the easier it is to just tell that particular type of story, and the easier it is to tell that type of story, the less likely it is any other type of story will ever get told. It’s why we have so many movies telling the same stories about old Nazi bunkers from World War II, or the same stories about abandoned mental hospitals. So yeah, stories in monasteries and convents will probably feature an unusually secretive or zealous religious order who are hiding some terrible secret, and someone coming in from the outside to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. I’ve seen that done well, and I’ve seen it done really badly.

Consecration - a brooding, careful, deliberate story that’s equal parts mystery and supernatural horror - doesn’t really break the mold much but it largely does what it does well, save a narrative choice toward the end that brings all of the momentum to a screeching halt for the sake of overexplaining something that you’ve pretty much already figured out.

We meet Grace Farlo as she’s walking down the street, with a voiceover monologue telling us that her brother always believed she had a guardian angel, while she believed in nothing. But now, she says as a white-habited nun approaches her, she’s not so sure. Flash back to some indeterminate amount of time before, and Grace is receiving the news that her brother Michael - who became a priest - has been found dead at convent in a remote corner of Scotland. Initial findings suggest that he murdered another visiting priest before taking his own life. Needless to say, Grace has a difficult time believing any of it went down like that, and travels to the convent in question to find out what actually happened. The convent is home to an especially - some would say fanatically - devout order of nuns, an order dedicated to the protection of a very important holy relic. As Grace approaches the convent, the Mother Superior recites their litany: “There is only one God…

…and his shadow.”

So on one level it’s your basic “person investigates unwholesome goings-on at a convent that hides a mysterious secret” story, as is almost inevitable with the location. And Grace is very much a woman of reason and science among the especially devout, so you have that element of attempting to explain the inexplicable through reason versus faith. The bones of the story are nothing new in that respect, but for the most part, it’s the execution that saves it. Sight is a consistent through-line - Grace is an ophthalmologist, one of the nuns has gouged out her eye because believes she saw the devil, and visions of the past and future play an important narrative role. And it’s a movie, so what we see is important to how we experience and understand the story. It’s assembled with care, and it keeps us guessing for about the first half of the film with a mixture of flashbacks, hallucinatory visions, and what might (or might not) be nightmare sequences, in a process that gradually reveals more and more about what actually happened here and why. It makes good use of disparate images and moments that hint at connections without making them obvious right off the bat, all set in an atmosphere of gloom, overcast rural Scotland, old convents and older ruins, all drab and gray with the white-habited nuns standing out almost like ghosts. The expected story beats are punctuated by a number of arresting visuals and striking moments throughout, and the cumulative effect is one that keeps us guessing as the film gradually builds to a revelation.

Which, unfortunately, is probably connected to the film’s biggest weakness. It’s not a bad revelation, and it’s all set up well by the creepily devout nuns, the pleasant, affable representative from the Vatican who, along with the sisters, has another agenda (because of course), and there are visual touches here and there, and small asides that broadly hint at nefarious goings-on without ever really giving things away ahead of time. Now, attentive viewers will probably figure out the twist sooner than it’s revealed, and that’s down to familiarity with the genre and the setting as much as anything. It’s a solid execution of a formula, but…it’s still a formula. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. The problem is what ends up serving as sort of a false ending on the heels of the big revelation. Once the truth has been revealed, the film stops its momentum dead to show us exactly how everything happened start to finish, and we don’t need all of it to get the point across. The problem is not revisiting key scenes with new information or context, that’s a perfectly respectable narrative device, and a big part of playing fair in any film with a twist (still looking at you, High Tension). The problem is that it pretty much revisits all of them, well after we get the point. It’s just gilding and regilding and regilding the lily and it brings everything to a halt in doing so. Any surprise evoked by the big reveal just evaporates, right when you want to bring the whole thing to a crescendo. Maybe a brisker montage would have worked, maybe intercutting all of it with the revelation itself, but as it stands it just kills the mood dead and does the actual end - a nice bit of circularity that pays off an early startling moment - a disservice by making it feel like an afterthought, something appended as an “oh yeah” after somebody finishes telling you what it was you just watched.

I don’t know that it would have been a transcendent bit of film, it’s still pretty beholden to narrative convention, the performances are good and it’s very well-shot, but it could have still packed a punch. In a film with the amount of subtext this one had about sight and belief, I guess I just wish they hadn’t been so literal about showing us everything.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Underwater: As Above, So Below

Two of the most forbidding environments you can make movies about are deep space and the depths of the ocean. They have a few things in common - they’re both dark, they’re both cold, and they’re both extremely hostile to human life. We know for a fact there’s life in the deep ocean (and boy is some of it fucking weird-looking), and life in deep space is a source of constant speculation, explored in films both horror and not. But I don’t think it’s any accident that H.P. Lovecraft drew most of his inspiration for his best known work from both outer space and the deep sea. Places we were not meant to go, containing things we were never meant to meet.

One of the best films about the terrors of space has to be Alien, and I have to say, watching Underwater - a film about the terrors of the deepest ocean - I couldn’t help but be reminded of that film. Which isn’t to say it’s plagiarism, it really isn’t. but it has enough similarities that it’s difficult for it to escape Alien’s shadow. It never quite rises to greatness, but it’s helped along by generally strong performances and direction that doesn’t make any real missteps.

The opening credits set the scene in compact, efficient fashion, using a mix of time-honored news article headlines, architectural specifications, and topographical maps. A mining company has managed to plant a drill at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which plunges over 36,000 feet down from the sea floor at its deepest points. Pitch-black, crushing levels of pressure. The drill is down there, as well as Kepler Base, a facility of 316 crew whose job it is to control and maintain the drill. The opening credits also tell us that the project has been dogged by controversy - accidents and “mysterious sightings.” But accidents happen, and arguably anything at that depth is going to be mysterious.

Cut to the interior of the base. Long, utilitarian hallways, fluorescent lights, work suits hung up on hooks. Night-shift mechanic Norah Price is brushing her teeth when there’s a rumble. Could be nothing, but then again, that far down with only the base’s structure between you and a nasty death by either drowning or implosion, you want to pay attention. It happens again. It feels like an earthquake.

And then it happens again, and Kepler Base begins to come apart at the seams.

From here on out, there’s just one objective - escape to the surface. Along the way, Norah encounters other survivors - including Lucien, the base’s captain - and not a lot of hope. About 70% of the base is compromised, and most of their escape vehicles are either nonfunctional or inaccessible. Lucien proposes that they suit up and walk across the ocean floor to the drill itself, using pipelines as guides, and using the equipment there to head for the surface. Are the suits rated for exposure to those depths for that long? Nope. Will breathable air supplies be an issue? Yep. Do they even know what the hell is going on out there that caused the base to collapse? Nope. Is this their only option apart from dying a horrible death from drowning, oxygen deprivation, or being crushed to death? Yep. Everything and everywhere is blocked by collapsed structure, water’s pouring in, and, well…they don’t appear to be alone in the base.

One of the biggest strengths to this film is that it’s very well paced. It hits the ground running and doesn’t really stop. With maybe one or two exceptions, this is a film about constant forward momentum, and the urgency works very much in its favor. In that sense (among others), it’s less like Alien than it is something like The Descent - a group of people faced with an increasingly hostile environment and only one way out. Alien was a slow burn, and this is about as far from a slow burn as you can get. The first half of the film or so is effectively a disaster movie, one that maintains the tension without sacrificing much in the way of believability or giving into histrionics. These are people who make their livelihood in a base hundreds and hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, and they’re generally competent and good at keeping their heads straight. In an environment like that, panic could easily be fatal, and it’s kind of a breath of fresh air to have protagonists who generally know their shit. This sense of actual people in an actually difficult situation, responding like people actually would is helped quite a bit by a strong cast who manage to infuse their characters with definable personality under conditions that don’t really lend themselves to character studies. There is the one obligatory wisecracker who manages to keep the quips coming no matter how dire their situation and okay, that one felt a little contrived, but he wasn’t actively grating. Interactions aren’t the tetchy naturalism of Alien - these are people who generally support and trust each other and are able to keep their eye on the ball. The setting does stumble a tiny bit (why on earth would emergency airlock releases use a swipe card and touchscreen keyboard?) but not enough to really distract, especially since it’s also when the film’s at its most relentless.

So we begin with a tight, focused disaster story that shifts focus in the second half to something potentially more sinister, and what’s frustrating is that I think it’s here…right at the moment when it has a chance to become something bigger and stranger…this is the moment when it suffers most from its inability to rise above its inspirations. It’s not bad by any means, just…workmanlike. The effects are solid, but not especially striking. The action doesn’t really slow down, but it sort of needs to, a little, so the implications of what we’re seeing can sink in. It’s not bad, and it doesn’t feel calculated, but it also doesn’t really do anything that I haven’t seen before. Barring the quality of the effects work and the performances, it kind of turns into any number of other Alien-but-underwater creature features you might see pop up on TV on any given Saturday afternoon. It hits all its marks, but doesn’t really do anything different or interesting with them.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There are some blink-and-you-miss-it allusions late in the film to something bigger and darker and the ending nicely inverts some things, but the sort of constraints that give the first half of the film so much urgency really limit what can happen in the second half, and when it really needs to open up and get weird, it rushes past that to head for the ending. It sounds like I’m damning this film with faint praise, and maybe I am, but that’s the frustrating thing - it’s not a bad film, really, but it’s most easily compared to a great one, and the contrast, along with an inability to commit to some ideas that would really set it apart, does it no favors.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon