Botched

 There's a certain temerity in calling your movie "Botched", as if you were looking out at the audience and calling them out, daring them to make the obvious joke. Especially if it's an extremely low-budget horror/comedy with pantomime leanings, which is what I'd call a high-risk proposition.

 The title is explained away in the first few minutes: Richie (Stephen Dorff) successfully pulls off a heist at an auction house, only to be foiled by two accidents which leave him limping away and his loot scattered on the street. His irate boss (Sean Pertwee) sends him on another job to make amends: To steal a bejewelled crucifix from a huge building in Moscow.

 First impressions aren't bad; The plain cinematography and lackluster credit titles make it look like a TV Movie, but the gliding camerawork does a good job of first presenting the location of the heist, then the crime itself and the crew's exit from the premises. Sure, there's some very crappy slow motion and inexplicable speed ramps (always a warning sign), but director Kit Ryan is at least putting in an effort.

 Things quickly go to shit when Richie gets to  Russia. And I mean that both within and without the film itself. First off, Richie is partnered with a pair of obviously incompetent local thugs - Peter (Jamie Foreman) and Yuri (Russell Smith). Peter, in particular, is a psycho who murders someone during the robbery, but worse than that, Foreman plays him with manic relish and a deeply suspect stereotypical Russian accent that would make the Russian agents in Rocky and Bullwinkle die of embarrassment.

 His every line delivery is so forced it drains any situation he's in of any possible humour, even when the jokes seem like they would work on paper - it's a deeply embarrassing performance that I can't see working unless you're very young, extremely forgiving, or, ahem, chemically predisposed to liking it.

 The first example of this is when he tries to keep the lift the criminals are using to escape clear of other people, and they just ignore him. There's a kernel of a funny idea there, but Foreman's mugging and exaggerated frustration make it more cringeworthy than anything else.
 The lift breaks down, leaving Richie, his accomplices and a bunch of bystanders in an empty, derelict floor. At first they think security discovered the murder/robbery, but then they start getting killed in colourful ways by a deranged serial killer who uses the floor as his own personal hunting ground. A killing floor, if you will.

 And that's where it becomes clear that Peter is not the only vaudeville reject in the cast: most of the survivors are one-joke idiots whose main method of joke delivery is mugging shamelessly for the cameras.
 This also applies to the slasher (Zak Maguire), who's introduced twirling like a blood-spattered Dee Dee from Dexter's Lab, and overacts like a motherfucker. At least he's having fun, I guess?

 The film follows suit with its stylistic choices and the places it goes. There's what I can only describe as wacky hijinks galore. I think it's going for a live-action cartoon feel, but the thing it most consistently reminded me of is the tacky TV comedy of the 70s and early 80s; Mostly Benny Hill, thanks to all the sped-up sequences. Or, to be much less charitable, the Star Wars Holiday Special due to the pantomime acting and jokes.

 OK, that's (slightly) unfair - mainly because there really are a couple of decent jokes in the script (by Raymond and Eamon Friel and Derek Boyle). Not many, and most are ruined by the delivery, but it does buy the film some goodwill.

 And some of the so-bad-it's-good stuff actually works; I'm partial to an extremely poorly made, Caddyshack-like rat muppet that gets a surprising amount of plot relevance and stars in one of the best gags.

 There's a lot of gore, too, and the special effects are outstanding compared to everything else. There's severed limbs and heads, impalements, lots of corpses, a good fire stunt - good stuff, even when they pair one of the impalements with disco music because... well, maybe it'll be funny? (It isn't.)
 No matter; Soon the cheesy Casiotone soundtrack (by Tom Green) will kick in again, and we're back to amateur hour.

 The acting is atrocious. even for the people who play it straight; The requisite love interest (Bronagh Gallagher) runs all her lines through a truly atrocious accent. It's all so bad it actually makes Dorff's committed performance look pretty good - and let's face it, he's never been the best actor out there (and I say this with a lot of affection).

 It pains me to say it, because it could have worked, maybe - but it's just a deeply shitty movie with many inexplicable, terrible-looking choices. It happens, I guess. They went full ham hoping for cult immortality... and fucked it up. If only there were a word I could use to encapsulate that.

(The film is a joint production between Germany, UK, Ireland and the US, with most countries represented in the cast - I went with UK for its nationality as that's where the director is from.)

The Price We Pay

 If there's a pawn shot in a movie, odds are something violent is going to happen in it. In Ryûhei Kitamura's The Price We Pay, it's a botched robbery.

 Three robbers go in: Cody (Stephen Dorff), the professional, principled one, Alex (Emile Hirsch), the hotheaded psycho, and John (Jesse Kinser), the fuck-up who gets shot in the leg and brought in a getaway driver that leaves them all in a lurch as soon as guns are fired.

 Alex unnecessarily kills an innocent man, and is about to kill another person, Grace (Gigi Zumbado) until Cody steps in and points out they may need a hostage and alternate means of egress.

 The trio and their captive make it far into the New Mexico back roads before their car breaks down, and then they take shelter in a nearby farm where a fidgety teen (Tyler Sanders, who died a few months after production wrapped - the film is dedicated to him) nervously lets them take over one of the farmhand bungalows.

 It's clear that there's something iffy even before a curious Alex discovers a huge underground facility under the barn. Our heroes have stumbled into an organ harvesting operation, and soon they're all strapped into gurneys under the tender care of the Doctor (Vernon Wells) and his gigantic underling.

 Yes, this movie can accurately be summarized as what if From Dusk Till Dawn but if it left-turned into Hostel instead.

 Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of Hostel-style "hey, all the characters are now helpless captives, let's torture them for a bit until they manage to find a way out!" plots. There's some pretty impressive carnage (and a really fun use of a gas canister) once the tables are turned, but it's too little, too late. The script, by Christopher Jolley, fails to give any of the characters any depth, and completely lacks the intelligence needed for any of the verbal sparring - be it between Cody and Alex, Grace and the kid, or anyone and The Doctor - to be halfway entertaining or even tense. And the monologue that gives the movie its title is just painful.

 There's also the fact that... well, nothing much happens throughout. And that, coupled with a dour, joyless tone kind of robs the film the chance to devolve into the sort of b-movie fun it could have gone for.

 Dorff and Hirsch are both credited as producers, and they both give themselves fairly showy roles. They do well, as does Zumbado, but none of them can do much to prevent their characters from simultaneously feeling both poorly defined and like walking clichés.

 I'm not a huge fan of Kitamura as a director, though I do respect that he's kept some of that deranged excess and energy from Versus. That excess unfortunately carries over to the style here (jittery zooms, whip pans, choppy editing). It's a shame, especially when the first half showed better filmmaking. It didn't bother me  too much, but I didn't enjoy it either. Which, come to think of it, is basically how I'd describe the movie as a whole.

The Gate

With Imaginary we saw what modern kid's horror looks like - I hope it was aimed at kids, anyhow. It must have put me in the mood for an actual, non-pusillanimous attempt at kid-friendly scares, because here I am, revisiting The Gate for the first time in more (depressingly more) than twenty years.

 It's definitely from a different era. Where Imaginary desperately avoids showing any sort of injury, and spends considerable effort trying to convince us a bear moving in tiny increments is scary, The Gate gives us an eye gouging, some deliciously gooey shots of disintegrating flesh, a truly grotesque use of an animal carcass, and a sprinkling of very imaginative (and disturbing) surrealism. Instead of following a grown-ass woman going through hoary, overtly clichéd family drama, the eighties version features actual kids dealing with their own sibling issues in a comparatively subtle way.

 And this is not a case of comparing a bad movie with an older classic, because I'm not entirely convinced The Gate is... well, good. I find it incredibly hard to be objective about it because it's a well-loved movie I saw as a teen. I still love it, but it's impossible to deny that it's got issues.

The kids ain't one of them. Our protagonist, Glenn (a teeny tiny Stephen Dorff, in his first role) is a remarkably good child actor, and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) and sister Al (Christa Denton)... well, they're enthusiastic, and perfectly acceptable for the sort of film this is. Denton's got the distinction of being the one older kid at the movie who actually looks like a teen, and that's because she was fifteen when this was shot! Definitely a rarity at the time.

 Glenn and Al are latchkey kids, left to fend alone for three days while their parents go off somewhere; Terry is Glenn's misfit friend, who spends most of his time at their house and whose acting out is handled surprisingly empathetically by the film's script (by Michael Nankin).

 The thing is, the parents (unwittingly) left open a mysterious but clearly evil gaping hole in the backyard. Parenting styles were different in the eighties, but come on folks, leaving your kids alone with a gateway to hell was probably frowned upon even back then. Things start going wrong almost immediately, starting with a fairly cheesy/upsetting nightmare and the subsequent death of a beloved family member - but Al won't let Glenn call their parents back because it's her responsibility as a teen to throw non-stop parties with her airhead friends (which include a very young, but still 22, Kelly Rowan).

 There are some mysterious events surrounding the satanic hole which Terry, being a Troubled Kid (tm) manages to spot because he of course listens to weird European metal records with liner notes that include instructions on how to open and close them. Yeah, it's very much a kid's horror film script. There are clever touches, like geodes leaving satanic imprints on a tracing pad... but the cheesy ideas have them vastly outnumbered. It's knowingly campy.

  A more serious problem is that it takes rather a long time for thing to get going - there's some rising weirdness, but it's not until the halfway mark that the pit disgorges troops of tiny demons and other monsters to terrify the household. Once it does, though, it really gets going. The visual and practical effects are an absolute delight, and in House or Poltergeist fashion, the supernatural threat changes form and tactics continuously.

 All this allows director Tibor Takács and his crew throw horror concepts around with abandon, rendering the already creaking plot almost nonsensical, but... I mean, why would I complain about a kid getting an eye implanted on the palm of his hand when I could instead be savouring a very weird slice of tween-friendly body horror? I'd even argue that all the craziness gives the film a welcome fever-dream edge.

 I'd say it's got enough going for it to compensate for its pacing issues and some iffy acting and plotting, but... of course I would. And you know what? Objectivity is overrated.