How I Would Have Done It: The Dead Center

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

I haven’t done one of these in quite awhile, and though I have a number of films tagged as potential candidates for this kind of revisit, I think The Dead Center really moved me to do another one because it got so close to being really really good, and the areas that I think held it back were so clearly defined to me that I basically wrote up the notes for this post at the same time I wrote up my original look at the film. It has a lot to recommend it - believable, relatable characters, a sense of dread that doesn’t rely on flashy or expensive effects that would threaten to distance us from the story, and confident, understated cinematography and scoring. In a lot of ways it exemplifies a lot of what I see as virtues in low-budget indie horror. But what this means is that the places where I feel it falls down stick out even more.

I even discussed these shortcomings to a certain degree in the original post, but I don’t like spoiling movies when I write about them, at least when I think they’re really good and I hope that people are going to check them out. If I think they suck, I’m much more likely just to get into it, but I had to be pretty oblique about a couple of things in particular, and so here I can get into more specifics. Because here it really does come down to some very specific choices that I think would improve the movie considerably, without really changing things all that drastically. Needless to say, I’m going to spoil some important stuff, and if you’re at all interested in the movie, I’d recommend watching it before clicking through, also because I’m going to be talking about the movie assuming a basic familiarity with the plot.

How I Would Have Done It: The Banshee Chapter

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

The Banshee Chapter is one of those movies that looks great on paper. It's a story of cosmic horror based on a synthesis of history and real-life phenomena. Weird drugs, ethically bereft government research, mysterious broadcasts, all pointing toward something strange peering back at us from across the veil of reality. It begins with a journalist investigating the strange circumstances around the disappearance of an old college buddy, and the more she discovers, the deeper the rabbit hole goes, until she's immersed in the secret history of one of the darkest periods in American history, and the horrible price we have paid (and continue to pay) for our curiosity.

Or, at least that would be the case if the whole enterprise weren't dragged down by a pervasive narrative incoherence. The Banshee Chapter has a very hard time settling on the story it wants to tell and how it wants to tell it, and the end result is enough of a mess to undo the goodwill engendered by a strong premise. As such, if I were going to make the movie, a lot of things I’d focus on would have to do with streamlining the narrative and giving it a much clearer focus.

How I Would Have Done It: The Final

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

The Final was the first movie I ever considered as the subject of a How I Would Have Done It post, way back almost 3 years ago when I first started writing this little thing of mine. The experience I had watching it could be summed up as "So…this kind of sucks. It kind of sucks, and it doesn't have to." It was the first time I found myself watching a film and thinking of specific ways it could have been improved. There's a good idea for an intense psychological thriller here, but it's buried under some sub-Saw bullshit and baffling pacing choices. The Final is a movie about the fucked-up things that teenagers do to each other, and there's a lot of potential there that the filmmakers eschew for a bunch of torture set pieces.   The real scary thing in this movie isn't all of the gory atrocities visited upon the popular kids, it's the ease with which teenagers are capable of doing terrible things, and how quickly events spiral out of control.

How I Would Have Done It: Silent Hill

(What I try to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

Man, Silent Hill frustrates the hell out of me. I want to like it much more than I do. It's atmospheric, it's got a striking visual palette and an interesting aesthetic, and it's a nice twist on the idea of the cursed or shunned town. But it's messy, incoherent. There's a lot going on, mostly due to the baggage it's carrying as the adaptation of a popular video game franchise. There's too much shit in the movie because everyone has their own ideas about what "needs" to be in a movie about Silent Hill. But I've already gone on and on about that. There's a damn good movie here, it just needs some trimming back, some simplifying, some streamlining.

How I Would Have Done It: Cigarette Burns

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

I am a huge fan of stories that operate on the model of "person hired to search for an elusive object finds himself in a world of weird, weird shit as a result." This basic story encompasses thrillers like 8mm, supernatural horror movies like The Ninth Gate, and to an extent, even Apocalypse Now. For me, it's that sense that some secret world lies just underneath the world we know, that behind the most innocuous doors are things that would make us question our sanity. There is mystery and wonder in our world, if we just pay careful attention.

Cigarette Burns is the story of down-on-his-luck theater owner Kirby Sweetman. Kirby owes a lot of money and if he can't pay it off soon, his arthouse movie theater will be closed down. Enter Mr. Bellinger, a film collector who would like Mr. Sweetman to use his extensive knowledge of obscure film to obtain a very rare artifact - a film called Le Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End of the World). Acquisition of this film is worth 200 grand to Bellinger, because…

…it was only screened once, and everyone at that screening ended up dead or irretrievably insane.

The film itself is practically urban legend at this point - the one known print was thought to be destroyed after the screening, and everyone involved with the creation of the film either vanished or killed themselves. Bellinger seems quite sure that the film did indeed exist, and that there is an intact print somewhere out there.

So what went wrong with the movie?