What do you do when you want to make a werewolf movie, but you are in a country that does not have wolves? The answer is simple: Change Werewolf to Kangaroo and BAM: you have a shitty, Australian version of the Howling.
The story revolves around this idiot who is from some tribe in the outskirts of Australia, and every time she hears loud music she transforms into a werewolf-kangaroo. Eventually she escapes the tribe and heads into the city only to be chased down by other werewolf-kangaroos. What follows are some of the worst human to werewolf transformations ever recorded on film, and some of the worst fake werewolf suits ever. The kills were actually all right considering how awful every other aspect of the film was. After 90 minutes with no conclusion I was so tired that I just turned it off despite it having 10 minutes left.
Take a cheap, rejected Hellraiser script and tweak the characters to fit in line with the mythology of a Resident Evil wanna-be video game then project that your audience will be a mixture of 16 year old males who jack off too much and desperately nostalgic late-20’s gamers, and you basically have this movie. Throw in some dark, ambient electronica that sounds like loops from Underworld.
A young girl is stalked by leather-clad cenobite-esque demons who seek to trap humans in a perpetual state of ongoing inter-dimensional torture. Her “real” world is broken into sporadically by the monsters who attempt to lure her to a ghost town called Silent Hill where they plan to ritually execute her and steal her secret witchcraft-destruction powers to usher in doomsday. Consequently, the audience is expected to sit through elementary CGI from like three eras ago as she journeys through the caverns of monster-world while this “story” unfolds. John Snow is a dreamy asshole who helps her. Jesus Christ.
The film culminates in what can only be described as a fusion of Soul Caliber and something you’d expect to see on t-shirts at Hot Topic. Sean Bean, Carrie Anne Moss, and Malcolm McDowel all shame themselves during their combined 11 minutes of screen time in this “film.”
Worst piece of garbage I have seen in theaters in a long time. From the genius that brought you Priest and Legion: A middle class family of four is harassed by three invisible aliens who are “studying” them. For an unexplained reason, inducing minor and major terror is a part of alien protocol, so they do everything from playing mysterious pranks to implanting brain transmitters. The family, of course does some “research” and gets wise to what’s happening, so then it’s (anti-climactic) confrontation time.
So many reasons to hate this film.
First of all: no scares! There are not even jump-scares much less anything gruesome or twisted. There are barely any attempts at fright; the few “scary” moments are laughable and saturated with Boogeyman-esque CGI that seriously looks like XBOX-360 graphics. Forget about gore/nudity; this turd is a calculated PG-13.
Secondly: ANYTHING entertaining is in the trailer IN ITS ENTIRETY. You know how there is a 2 second snippet of the kid having a grand mal seizure? Well, he has a 2 second long seizure in the film. Everything from the effeminate dad’s mouth gaping to the alien brooding over the child’s bed, the stuff you see in the trailer is all the “interesting” stuff you can expect to see in the film. J Jonah Jameson (the “wise elder” of the film) never makes a single joke or has a Jameson style outburst. He just sadly front-loads exposition, explaining brain transmitters before walking off-set and collecting a paycheck.
Also, they did something I NEVER thought anyone would have the balls to do in a film. You know the old horror movie cop out where things start to get crazy and then a character wakes up and the audience is like “oh, it was just a dream!”? Well, they did that THREE TIMES. But that’s not the worst part; the third time was A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM! The character woke up, more crazy shit started happening, so they WOKE UP AGAIN! There are more layers here than Inception and In the Mouth of Madness put together. If you played a drinking game where you took a shot for every time a dream sequence was broken, you would have to go to the hospital.
In a climax that would give M Night Shyamalan a seizure, the parents find out that the aliens had been in their lives all along. But by this time, you’ll probably be unconscious from bashing your head into the wall over and over and over and over.
Roger Ebert puts it best when he says the movie ends in a way “as if designed specifically to enrage the hardy viewers who actually make it all the way to the end.”
BLOODCRYPT 