Nothing Left To Fear: Horror Movie Product Prototype #12

Say what you will about incompetence, sometimes it lends a film character. Oh, sure, well-made film has its own character as well, in all kinds of ways, too. But it’s often (not always, but often) the case that ineptitude has its own vision, its own particular stamp that makes an awful film something that’s still an experience. It may not be good by any metric, but it’s still got personality, even if that personality is shitty. I’m not a huge fan of “so bad it’s good” or ironic enjoyment, but even the cruddiest films I’ve watched still feel like one of a kind, even if I hate them. 

Nothing Left To Fear is not one of those films. It is a completely and totally average horror film. It isn’t bad, but it’s not especially good either. It’s just sort of there, reliant on clichés to the point of being utterly characterless. It just manages to do a good enough job to not be bad, but not good enough to be good, either, and it relies on a lot of devices and imagery whose novelty had already worn off by the time it came out. It’s hard to describe, but the whole thing feels like it was put together by some kind of algorithm intended to design maximum-profit horror film product units.

(As a side note, it’s never really made clear why it’s called Nothing Left To Fear. It doesn’t really have anything to do with anything in the movie. It feels as focus-grouped as everything else about it.)

Dan Bramford and his squeaky-clean family (wife Wendy, oldest daughter Becky, middle child Mary, youngest son Christopher) move to the rural town of Stull, as Dan has taken the job of being the town’s new pastor. They get a little turned around trying to find the town and end up at a farm asking for directions. The farmer is initially hostile until he realizes Dan’s the new pastor, and then he’s much more welcoming. Meanwhile, a figure appears in the foreground, hands covered in blood.

Oh but wait, that’s just hunky farmboy Noah, who gets Becky’s eye immediately...

...even though he’s...slaughtering and bleeding a bunch of sheep?

There’s ample precedent for The Small Town With A Secret in horror films like The Children Of The Corn and Jug Face, all sort of revolving around the idea that there is always a price to be paid for the town’s continued prosperity or even just their existence. Often the price is sacrifice, and it’s usually couched in religion. It’s no different here. The townspeople are all very welcoming - even offering to help move the Bramfords into their new home in lieu of the moving crew. A kindly old lady even bakes them a welcoming cake! It isn’t until Becky (who is sort of telegraphed as a prototypical Final Girl almost from the get-go) has a really disturbing dream that we get the sense that something in this town might not be completely right. Well, that and that we’re watching a horror movie. But the disturbing dream is relatively formulaic, relying mostly on lots of lightning, people appearing and disappearing outside the window, and then one suddenly appearing inside, face hollow-eyed and grotesquely contorted in the early 2010’s go-to shorthand for “ghost.” Had this film been made in the early 00s, it would have been a little girl with long hair covering her face instead, is what I’m saying. 

And sure enough, Becky’s dream is prescient, as it turns out the entire town is keeping some terrible secret, involving the reason Dan’s family was brought to town. As it turns out, the town of Stull has an awful responsibility as the site of some kind of gateway into hell, or at least some dimension of evil. (And apparently, the actual town of Stull, Kansas does suffer from urban legends that repute it to be the site of a gateway to hell.) This responsibility involves regular rituals intended to keep the evil at bay, not just from Stull, but from the world. And so the townspeople are organized, either in commission or omission, in the performance of this responsibility. It’s going to cost lives, but this is the way it has to be. Not because the townspeople are evil or even selfish, but because they have come to realize that sometimes terrible things have to be done in order to keep others safe.

And under other circumstances, this would actually be a pretty good premise. That it’s not just a town full of thoughtless malevolence or mindless drones is definitely a step up where this particular set of clichés is concerned. Life in a small town is already a pretty solid engine for paranoia, where there’s nowhere to run or hide and everyone knows everyone else’s business (or invents business when deprived of the real story), and so the idea that this closeness also implies conspiracy, where every passerby on the street is watching you and knows something, that would be a nice basis for tension, especially when the protagonists are newcomers, unfamiliar with the ways of the town. Dan’s family is largely complacent, happy to be settled into their new home, unquestioning, but that’s as it should be, because people do not live in horror films. Becky seems to be the only one who isn’t comfortable, and this again makes sense because she’s a teenage girl and is probably not thrilled with having to pick up stakes and move to the middle of nowhere after years in the city. Unfortunately, it also kind of marks her out right away - along with putative love interest Noah - as the ones who are going to make it through whatever comes next, and the film doesn’t really subvert that point. 

That it does subvert the idea that what’s being done is evil for evil’s sake is good, but it doesn’t put enough time or effort into articulating what that means. Noah’s all pouty and stompy about it in the first half of the film (for reasons that become apparent but probably also have more to do with his feelings for Becky than much else), before shit pops off, but everyone else just sort of mouths a lot of cryptic fluff about people being “chosen” and how this is the Lord’s will. Kingsman, the pastor whom Dan is supposed to be replacing, does show some flashes of sadness and resolve - he’s aware that this is not what was intended, but the experience of shepherding this town seems to have reshaped his faith. As he says at one point, there aren’t any angels coming. It’s just us. But that’s all it gets is a little bit of talk - it doesn’t really show up in the other townspeople’s behavior toward the Bramfords or in any other little background ways that might have contributed to an air of mystery. 

And mystery - or really any kind of mood or atmosphere - is notably absent here. The people in this film aren’t caricatures, but they also don’t have much opportunity to be people outside of their specific scenes either, if that makes sense. The family is just sort of a generic family, without a lot of sense of relationship dynamics or quirks, and the townspeople are largely just extras, just sort of people filling space in the scene without giving it any personality. The lighting and camerawork is perfectly serviceable, but not much else (with the exception of one reasonably well-realized dream sequence involving Becky that could have replaced the really ham-handed one earlier in the film that I mentioned above), and the dialogue feels just enough like dialogue instead of conversation to make it harder to close the distance between the characters and the audience. None of it is egregiously bad or inept, but that just ends up making it feel bland.

And then when everything does go off, it’s just as formulaic as everything else. Evil enters our world in the form of a possessed person, all contortions and black eye and mouth makeup, preceded by tendrils of computer-generated darkness and corruption that evoked in me only the feeling that that must have been where most of their effects budget went, and by gum they were going to make sure we saw as much of it as they could manage. The evil walks free in Stull, as it must (for reasons that are never quite made clear - apparently the only way to keep the gate shut is to...open it? And then shut it? Like so much else about their responsibility, it’s just kind of hand-waved), and the residents are prepared, all the blood Noah collected used to paint their doors (in a nice Biblical nod), and what must happen happens, and so the film comes to a close in a manner much like the rest of it - not at all surprising. Not bad, it is not a bad ending, just as it isn’t a bad film. Just one so predictable and expected as to rob it of any impact or opportunity to evoke any sort of emotion in the viewer apart from “well, that happened.”

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Starry Eyes: The Sacrifices We Make

After my last post, I ended up having a conversation with some friends about the importance of tragedy in horror film, and it’s definitely something I think is important. Good horror films don’t have unambiguously happy endings. If there’s a victory of any sort, it should come with tremendous physical and/or psychological cost. As the tagline to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre said, “who will survive, and what will be left of them?” Good horror ends badly, with loss and regret and things forever changed. Good horror is at heart tragedy, and one of the most time-honored tragic stories is that of the person whose ambition costs them everything, whose drive to the top alienates them from everyone and everything, sometimes even their own humanity. 

Starry Eyes, then, is a sharply observed story of what it can mean to do whatever it takes to achieve your dream, to a terrible degree. It’s not an especially original premise, or an especially novel approach to it, but it’s handled with tremendous skill and confidence and works wonderfully as a result.

Sarah Walker is an aspiring actress who is, like a lot of actresses, struggling. She has a shitty job at a PG-rated Hooters type restaurant, she goes on auditions and gets nowhere. She has a reasonably sympathetic roommate and a small circle of fairly unsympathetic friends who really can’t or don’t look past their own selfish needs. One guy is an aspiring filmmaker who lives in his van and hasn’t actually produced anything but talk, another guy is a shallow, thoughtless twerp who thinks taking photographs of everything makes him an artist, and there are two women who undermine Sarah constantly in pitch-perfect displays of relational aggression and do whatever it takes in a situation to keep themselves at the center of attention, even to the point of pretending to slip and fall the instant the others stop noticing them. Her roommate’s largely harmless, but nobody in this film is really on Sarah’s side. 

Nobody’s on Sarah’s side, and her life is basically a series of small, repeated concessions - she concedes her dignity at her terrible job, she concedes her value and self-worth to her insensitive friends, she concedes her sense of herself every time an audition goes badly. It becomes clear pretty quickly that Sarah is maybe not as stable as she should be for this career path, as failed auditions are inevitably followed by fits of rage and compulsive self-harm. So here she is, stuck in a dead-end job, no acting prospects, her only social support network a bunch of self-involved nitwits who are all talk and no resolve, and her ambition to transcend all of this (and her anxiety at failing to do so) is eating her from the inside out.

And then comes the call to audition for a horror film called “The Silver Scream.” It’s a weird audition - the two production company representatives are oddly reserved past the point of professionalism into near hostility, and a decent line reading gets her no closer to the job. So she goes into the bathroom, screams, curses, and tears her hair out, as she always does.

And there, waiting outside the stall, is one of the representatives, who wants to her to reproduce her fit of rage and self-punishment for their cold, appraising eyes. How far are you willing to go?

And then a second audition, where she is asked to disrobe under a spotlight, where discomfort gives way to release, to brief, half-glimpsed visions of blood and bared, feral teeth and hooded figures.

How far are you willing to go?

A woman trying to become a successful actress in Los Angeles is probably the most obvious vector for a story like this, but it’s handled with a lot of skill. Lots of things happen in little moments - interruptions in conversation, quick glances, fleeting expressions, sudden, swift changes in mood. You can see the life sap out of Sarah as she begs her blandly paternal boss at the restaurant for another chance. You can see the moment, played out entirely in small changes in facial expression, where she lets go of some of her dignity as she sheds her clothes for the audition. The little moments with her friends where their dynamic is sketched out economically and clearly and a tossed-off mispronunciation of a movie studio’s name communicates so much. A meeting with a producer who seems avuncular if slightly unhinged curdles into something worse in the blink of an eye. It’s finely tuned in a way that’s rare for horror films (and manages to be blackly funny in places without tipping over into comedy), and it makes all of what happens eventually so much worse. The editing is crisp and relies (at least initially) a lot on quick cuts and sudden transitions. The effect is slightly disorienting, but not overly so, just enough to maintain a constant low-level hum of tension and deep unease. And then, when the inevitable happens, and Sarah decides how far she is willing to go, that crisp economy gives way to extended sequences of very human-scale suffering, as the cost of Sarah’s decision and the scope of the bargain she has made begins to make itself evident in horrifying ways (her ambition really is eating her alive). 

(As a side note, it’s interesting to me the number of ways in which this film resembles Contracted, another story about a troubled young woman in Los Angeles who is surrounded by people who do not have her best interests in mind. The parallels don’t stop there - rape or at the very least sexual coercion in both cases drive a traumatic internal transformation which results in violence against the people who should have kept the protagonist safe. I think Starry Eyes is probably the better film of the two insofar as it is inhabited by people who are less cartoonish than those in Contracted, but I felt weird enough about one film taking this tack, that there are two makes me feel even more uncomfortable.)

A terrible price must be paid for Sarah’s “gateway part,” and we’ve had the whole film to recognize that not only is Sarah primed to pay it, but nobody around her has treated her in a way that would give her pause to reconsider. She is asked to do something bloody and horrible and she does so willingly because everyone has made it easy, The violence that follows is genuinely uncomfortable, her suffering is raw and hard to watch, and so is that of the people who pay a price for her ambition. All of the snappy glibness of the film’s beginning falls away into something excruciating. A price must be paid, and Sarah is born anew into a Los Angeles sunrise, ready for her close-up.

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Baskin: Between Two Worlds

It’s a tricky thing, to try and mash up two different styles of film into one. When it’s done well, you get something fresh and interesting that elevates both styles, and when you don’t you get an incoherent mess. And I just got done watching a whole lot of incoherent messes, so I really, really don’t want to write about another one.

Luckily, Baskin (Raid) is not an incoherent mess. It’s a striking effort that really straddles two worlds, not just cinematically, but thematically as well.

It’s late at night, and a young boy is asleep in his bedroom. There are toys everywhere and drawings he’s done, and dim light streams in through the windows. The boy is awoken by some sounds from outside his room - what sounds like moaning coming from the bedroom across the hall. It’s the sounds of two people having sex, and the boy almost knocks on the door, but then thinks better of it. He wanders out into the living room, where the TV is on, tuned to static. He heads back to his room, but when he turns, there is red light streaming out of his room. It upsets him, and he doesn’t want to go near it, but suddenly there is a hand - bloody and outstretched - reaching toward him. He tries to run into the other bedroom but the door is locked. He calls for his mother, but there is no answer.

The hand reaches out, and the door slams, blinding us to his fate. Smash cut to title.

It’s not immediately clear who the boy is or what happened - although it will be made clear in time - but after the title, we’re introduced to the actual protagonists of this story. It’s a group of cops - paternal Remzi, burly Apo, young Arda, belligerent Yevuz, and nervous Sabo. They’re sitting in a restaurant, having a few drinks, having some food, and swapping crude stories as men do. Sabo’s stomach is bothering him, though it isn’t clear why, but the others are just hanging out and enjoying some camaraderie. Something’s off, though. There’s something in the air. Sabo gets sick and cries out in terror. Their waiter makes the mistake of laughing at one of Yevuz’s stories, and Yevuz takes offense to this. You get the feeling that Yevuz was waiting for an opportunity to take offense to something. Things get ugly for the waiter.

Basically, our protagonists are a pack of bros with badges and guns. They’re not bad in the sense of being evil or corrupt, but they’re comfortable throwing their weight around. They leave the restaurant, crank up some tunes and rock out for a bit like bros do before they get a radio call - it’s another unit asking for backup. It’s in a bad neighborhood. Not bad like, crime-ridden. Bad like...cursed. 

And this is how our five cops find themselves entering a very old building. A very old building where an even older ritual is taking place.

Baskin is in many ways a film about duality. The film itself alternates between two tones - dreamlike and visceral. This shows up in how it’s shot - the first half of the film is dominated by saturated primary colors, with a lot of haze and bloom in the lighting, giving the whole thing sort of a slightly fantastic feeling, like a fairytale. The second half, when the cops enter the building and things start going super-wrong, is dominated by stark lighting with lots of shadows, half-glimpsed figures, vision constrained by the beam of a flashlight, and everything is murky and grimy. Long shots and slow, sensual detail are replaced with quick cuts and frenetic movement. The protagonists enter another world, and the nature of the world around them changes as well.

It also shows up in the juxtaposition of two very different types of story. On the one hand, one narrative thread feels very much like a sort of ghost story, focusing on Arda and his surrogate-son relationship with Remzi. Arda has been plagued, ever since he was young and lost a close friend in an accident, with recurring dreams where that friend is trying to contact him but he doesn’t want to see his friend. He tells Remzi that sometimes it feels like he’s still dreaming, and this story provides surreal punctuation throughout, and it isn’t really clear how much of what we’re seeing is actually just in Arda’s head. The other narrative thread concerns what happens when the cops enter the building and stumble on a cult engaging in a sacrificial ritual. They can only find one of the cops who made the original call for backup, and he’s hopelessly unhinged. This story is focused, sharp, immediate and deals strongly with concrete, material things like flesh and bone and how they can be joined and separated. The cops are taken prisoner and become horrible witness to the cult’s unholy exercises. This is very much in the tradition of newer violence-heavy films in the New French Extremity mold. 

And this to me is interesting, because it’s tough to find two styles of narrative that are more different. The opening sequence serves as a thesis of sorts, integrating both styles - The opening dream turns menacing , as the young boy wanders through the long shadows of a house late at night, only to be confronted by a hooded figure with a bloody outstretched hand., and the initial sequence of the cops at the restaurant is filled with dread - the sense that something very bad is either happening or going to happen is strong. It’s definitely a slow burn, only picking up about halfway into the run time. 

And when the action shifts to the abandoned building in the middle of the forest to which the police have been summoned, the implied awful stuff is made explicit. This is where the film takes a turn for the gory, but it does a lot of its heavy lifting with economical suggestion - quick glimpses of bodies, smeared with blood and filth, writhing and contorting, wet, meaty smacks as someone does something to someone else behind a plastic curtain, quick shots of hooded, blinded, or masked figures baring filthy teeth in a feral snarl. The camera doesn’t linger in these instances, and it’s all the more effective as a result. Some of it is sort of bog-standard gore stuff, but a lot of it is striking and in some cases almost perversely poetic. Most importantly, it doesn’t go over-explained. We don’t know what’s going on exactly, and nobody is inclined to explain it to us, only that really really bad shit is going down. Where most films would stick to one style or the other, having either Arda experience events unsure of their reality or having him and his colleagues be trapped and tortured by a cult, the decision to jump between these two (and in the conclusion, bring both together in a way that dislocates our perception of what’s come before) feels audacious and makes the entire experience slightly hallucinatory. There’s a persistent internal logic to it, with imagery repeated and recontextualized and iterated upon throughout, bridging the two stories and the two styles, and so it feels like there’s a larger meaning to all of this, some important thing we’re just on the edge of grasping, but aren’t quite able to. A lot of stuff is left suggested or unanswered, but it feels less like they are loose ends and more like everything we need to know is there, but we need to look closely.

All that said, it’s not without flaws. It slows down a little too much in the third act as the officers are taken captive and the action is halted for the cult’s leader to engage in a lot of talk about passengers and doorways and opening your heart, and a lot of the intensity initially built up is sort of burned off as a result. The conclusion meanders a little when it needs to be tense or to really punch the revelation. But it’s still effective, even if not entirely unexpected, because it makes us look at everything that’s gone before, including the very opening scene, in a new light. This makes it even harder to pin down what kind of story we’ve just been told. It’s not a slam-dunk, but it’s definitely a fresh and interesting approach to telling what could have been one of two really formulaic stories, and that elusive sense that I almost know what’s just happened continues to linger several days after I watched it. I’d call that a win.

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Retrospective: The Hellraiser Series, Part 3

I have got to be honest, I didn’t have very high hopes for these last three films at all going into them, especially considering that the last one was made expressly as a stopgap effort to prevent Dimension Film’s option for the rights to the brand from expiring. I can’t think of anything more insulting that a film made purely for legal or business purposes. It’s fucking gross and, given that we’re now firmly in the territory of direct-to-video budgets, direction, and writing, the outcome looked grim. But, once I finished watching them, I realized that all of my low expectations were completely justified. None of these three films are good at all. Largely, they recapitulate problems with earlier films in the (ugh) franchise - two of them are repurposed from scripts that were not originally intended to be Hellraiser films and boy, does it show, and the third, though expressly intended as a Hellraiser story, manages to hit a bunch of the thematic signifiers from the first film without really understanding what they mean or why they’re important. The squandering of the original’s power and vision is made complete. So, one last time, let's do this.

Retrospective: The Hellraiser Series, Part 2

So this...is where things are gonna start getting icky.

Frankly, I was surprised at how poorly 2 held up in retrospect, and 3 has never been a good film by any metric (except maybe putting butts in seats, but given how much the (ugh) franchise vanished off the radar after 3, I wonder if it even performed well there), and the nature of sequels is such that invariably, at least where horror is concerned, there are going to be increasingly diminishing returns. So films 4, 5, and 6 are by all rights pretty much guaranteed to be disappointments.

That said, the experience wasn’t...as bad as I thought it was going to be. A couple of these films are actually not bad. I wouldn’t call them great, but much better than I expected. Unfortunately, what does start to show through at this point are the nakedly mercenary considerations that went into their production, which sort of cast a pall on whatever strengths they have, and one of them is just, by any measure, ass. Only 4 was even originally intended as a Hellraiser film, and the director felt enough pressure to make it more commercial that he ended up disavowing it. The other two are from (fairly similar) repurposed scripts that have the mythology of the first films inserted to wildly varying degrees of fit and effectiveness. So at this point, it’s really just about product now, and that’s a pretty dispiriting thing to realize when you’re trying to take these films seriously as creative works. A lot of things have been conspiring to keep me from working on this thing of mine for awhile now, but I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of having to grapple with such obvious cash grabs wasn’t part of it.

But here we are, with three more films out of nine to consider, so once more into the breach...

Life Exceeds Art: The Horror Of The Abandoned Hospital

I've mentioned the idea of Abandoned Hospital Syndrome in passing before. This is the tendency to take a specific setting - like, well, an abandoned hospital - and hang some formulaic set pieces off of it and trying to pass it off as horror. When done well, a setting like this can be really powerful. Buildings left to decay are spooky to begin with, making the building larger gives it a monolithic quality, and I think when the building was one intended for the treatment and care of illness, there's something almost profane in its dilapidation. Hospitals are supposed to be safe and clean, so it's almost a desecration. Session 9 is an excellent example - a huge mental hospital left to rot, long shadowy corridors, bygone apparatus, a legacy of misery and death. In the hands of its skilled director, you don't even need special effects, really. Just some lingering shots, barely-glimpsed movement, and understated sound effects. On the other, you have lazier attempts like The Sick House, which is basically a slasher film with some vague nods to the idea of disease, set in an abandoned hospital without any real rationale other than "this ghost was a doctor," in the hopes that the setting will somehow confer a feeling of dread that the hackneyed story and clumsy direction don't earn. And those are only two examples. Hospitals - especially, though not exclusively, mental hospitals - are a staple setting. If you couldn't tell, I think they're a little overdone.

This point, then, is thrown into sharp relief when I read something like this photo essay about Charity Hospital in New Orleans...

https://abandonedsoutheast.com/2016/05/24/charity-hospital/

Charity was a huge - look at the size of the building - teaching hospital. Over 2500 beds. It served New Orleans' poorest citizens. And then when Katrina hit, and the levees failed, Charity lost power, and its lower levels flooded. Evacuation was not forthcoming. No power, no air conditioning (in Louisiana, in August), scarce supplies, and a building full of the sick, the injured, the dying, the dead. I mean, forget glib zombie movies, if you want to see what post-apocalypse would look like, just watch any documentary about the effects of Katrina and the failure of the levees on New Orleans. No souped-up cars, no goofy-looking bands of raiders. Just lots of people scared, starving, dying in the dark. 

And now, because of business interests, a corrupt and inefficient city government, and bureaucracy, the rotting hulk of Charity hospital sits in New Orleans. Going on eleven years now, it sits there, rotting, abandoned. A mute testament to the worst week ever in the hospital's history 

See, you don't need the ghosts of serial killer plague doctors. You don't even need the ghosts of former mental patients. The real world is sometimes worse. Is often worse. The problems of people, struggling against the forces of nature, or poverty, carry a raw desperation that no masked murderer can match. One of the most frightening things I've ever watched was a dramatic reenactment of the accident at Chernobyl, the fear on the faces of the engineers, the people who went into the basement of the reactor, condemning themselves to death within seconds. The people who swam into lethally radioactive water, blind, with limited oxygen, to fix broken coolant valves. They were real.

When Charity Hospital flooded, so did their basement morgue, and all the bodies came floating to the surface. They had to be collected and stacked in the stairwells, in the damp and the August heat.

Just imagine that - wading through chest-deep or deeper water in the dark, gathering the corpses. That's not fiction. That's not make-believe. Someone in the world we inhabit, right here in the middle of the United States, in the 21st century, had to do that.

What ghost can compare, then, to the ones with which these people will always live?

Oh, Hey There...

...I know, I know, I come back long enough to say "I'm still here!" and then vanish again.

Basically, a few things are slowing down my work on this thing at the moment.

1) My job. It's not as nuts as it was in the fall (literally the busiest I have ever been), but I tend to stay late at the office to write my posts on a desktop computer because my laptop's uncomfortable for long stretches of typing, and there are seasonal things going on right now that keep me working well into the time I usually have set aside for writing this thing. There are basically three days during the week I can stay late, and they've all been occupied the last couple of weeks.

2) The length of my retrospective. Basically, I can write up a single movie pretty quickly, but doing three movies in one block means three times as long writing. So there's sort of a bottleneck effect. And yeah, I kind of want to keep doing the Hellraiser movies in blocks of three, because I think it's important to sort of see how they relate (or don't) to each other, and that's easier for me to examine in a single piece than doing separate ones that have to link back to each other over and over. Once I'm done tackling these films, I can go back to single posts.

3) Gotta be honest, the middle three Hellraiser films are kind of a bummer. The fourth is actually - well, "good" might be stretching it a little, but there's promise, there's a good idea there largely betrayed by a low budget and (according to the director, at least) attempts to make it more commercial. But both the fifth and sixth films are repurposed scripts that had the Hellraiser "mythology" inserted into them after the fact. The fifth is awful, easily as bad as the third, and the sixth (while also largely having the same conceit as the fifth, suggesting that there was a minute there where everyone was trying to write the next Jacob's Ladder), while being a much better movie - hell, probably better than even the second - is also sort of dispiriting in that although it's a good movie, knowing that it was a retooled script still sort of bares the lie. It makes it obvious how little it mattered by this point that the film be a creative work. It was something not to be made, but to be assembled from whatever parts were lying around. That the results were actually not bad at all is almost secondary, and it's sort of hard to write about something so nakedly and callously mercenary. I can only hope that the final three are so bad that I can just rant at length and abandon.

So yeah, I'm still here. Again. Just wrestling with the process.