THE NO-THRILL ZONE
'Hide and Seek' and 'Alone in the Dark' are scarily awful, but 'Fascination' makes bad feel good
Transcending badness into sheer deranged genius isn't easy, especially since it's never possible to do it deliberately. To excel in that manner, a film must be made with the best of intentions, and with significant numbers of the participants genuinely believing they've got something good on their hands. Even then, not every contender can be Plan 9 from Outer Space or On Deadly Ground. This week, we have some prime examples: three alleged thrillers, none scary, all laughable, but only one consistently entertaining.
Hide and Seek arrives with the highest pedigree, as it stars Robert De Niro, whom you may remember as having been in some good movies once upon a time, and Dakota Fanning, who's in every movie that requires a blonde little girl. In a massive stretch, she plays a dark-haired girl here, which is a tip-off that she may be evil. She's also perfected a Zombiefied Stare of Evil, which is frightening the first few times but gets progressively funnier as it becomes clear that director John Polson (of Swimfan infamy) never considered asking her to add another expression to her repertoire.
Fanning's motivation is that her mother (Amy Irving) was the type of depressed housewife who washed down pills with booze, and wound up dead in a bathtub. This makes her all angsty, so Dad (De Niro), who happens to be a psychiatrist, decides they should move from New York City to the countryside, taking along a collection of creepy antique dolls, a music box that plays "Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word," a cat that you just know is going to run screeching out of a closet at some future juncture, and a tea kettle that makes loud, startling whistles. The country house is in the woods near a dark, forbidding cave, and the weirdly dysfunctional neighbors like to pop around at all hours, unannounced.
If these things don't clue you in that Hide and Seek is supposed to be scary, the opening credits rip off both Rosemary's Baby and The Shining. Fox even put out a press release stating that, in order to preserve the suspense of the "terrifying" ending, the final reel would be shipped to theaters separately from the rest of the print, accompanied by armed guards.
Well, what's so scary? Li'l Dakota has an imaginary friend named Charlie, who probably isn't imaginary. Problem is, everyone assumes Charlie is imaginary, and she doesn't like to talk about it. If anyone in this film actually communicated, the story would be over in 15 minutes. Clearly, Charlie's identity won't be revealed until the climax, but before that there are plenty of sudden loud noises, and not much else. De Niro's character hits on a cute divorcée (Elisabeth Shue), using the
godawful opening line "I have a daughter the same age. She's in the car." Cut to Dakota's Evil Gaze of Death. Cue audience laughter.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough laughs to justify Hide and Seek even on cheeseball grounds. Alone in the Dark hits a lot closer to the mark, beginning with an opening text crawl that's read aloud and goes on for some nine paragraphs. It's like the verbal equivalent of the mothership at the beginning of Spaceballs, and it's total nonsense to boot, all about some fictional Indian tribe called the Abkani, who somehow opened a portal to a realm of monsters, which have something to do with a scientific experiment to turn people into zombies. Director Uwe Boll holds the dubious distinction of having helmed the worst videogame-to-movie translation ever (no small feat, that) in House of the Dead. But he makes things on the cheap and under budget, so people keep giving him money, even though he doesn't seem to know how to point a camera at his actors, let alone operate it.
Christian Slater stars as paranormal investigator Edward Carnby, delivering every line as if he's hung over; Stephen Dorff plays his former coworker in a top-secret combat force, at one point stating, "This is maddening - it doesn't make any sense at all!" Indeed.
No doubt you've seen the TV ads, which make Alone in the Dark look like Aliens underground. Whoever cut those spots is a genius: Not only did he/she isolate the film's few good moments, but this miracle worker actually managed to make the image quality look better than it does on the big screen.
Boll has been compared to Ed Wood on several genre-related websites, and the analogy is surprisingly apt: His demon-possessed zombies are not unlike Tor Johnson in Plan 9; his technobabble, including such gems as monster-repelling bullets coated with "photon-accelerated luminescent resin," recalls some of Wood's notions; and the costumes worn by the paranormal-hunting troopers of "Section 713" look like Lazer Tag outfits. Boll is also the kind of director who thinks tying back Tara Reid's hair and putting her in glasses makes her seem intellectual. There's a lot here to laugh at - and, in fairness, it is a marginally better flick than House of the Dead - but I still lost interest after about an hour.
Compared to the above two, almost any movie might seem like a masterpiece, so maybe a case of extremely lowered expectations induced me to have such a good time at Fascination, a German-produced film picked up by MGM. A B-movie that transcends mere cheese into 7-Eleven nacho sauce, it doesn't aspire to be more, instead reveling in absurd soap-opera-like plot contrivances and gratuitous sex. The hell of it is that Fascination actually features more legitimate character development than Polson or Boll could handle.
Director Klaus Menzel takes an easy hook - what if your new stepdad is actually a murderer? - in gleefully preposterous directions, with the dubious help of lead Adam Garcia, who doesn't seem capable of good acting but at least looks like he's trying really hard as he strains to exercise those imaginary thespian muscles. He plays Scott Doherty, son of Jacqueline Bisset and a father who dies in a swimming accident. Shortly thereafter, Scott falls for English temptress Kelly Vance (Alice Evans), and mom marries Oliver (Stuart Wilson), a British gent she apparently met on a cruise. Kelly turns out to be Oliver's daughter, and that's just the start - you simply cannot imagine where the climax goes.
Along the way, everyone gets laid, and Scott nearly dies from sex twice. The first time, he's doing it on a roof, and his orgasm is so intense he rolls over and almost falls off. The second time, he's performing oral sex underwater and damn near drowns. If you're still reading this, you must know by now whether Fascination is for you. However, if you decide to see it, I suggest waiting for the DVD, which will probably be out in a week or two.Published: 02/03/2005
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