Film Review - Harbinger Down (2015) - Spoilers

Anyone who makes a movie has my admiration. In fact, this extends to anyone who is engaged in some creative pursuit and puts it into the public eye. For me, it's my writing and drawing. It's never an easy thing to do, because it exposes some piece of yourself to public scrutiny. This applies to even a collective act like filmmaking. I approach reviewing films - or any creative product - with a little trepidation. This is someone's vision and labor that I'm critiquing and, in the case of movies, in a field that I've never done much practical work in.

That said, Harbinger Down is not a good movie.

It is set on a crabbing boat, the Harbinger, captained by Graff (Lance Henriksen) and crewed by one-dimensional characters. Also on board is his granddaughter Ronelle (Giovonnie Samuels), a grad school student and a couple of her colleagues who are tracking whales in the Bering Sea. They find a Soviet space ship from the eighties which contains the corpse of a cosmonaut. It also contains a virus that was meant to create people invulnerable to the rigors of space travel. What it does is infect humans and turn them into monsters with a lot of tentacles and teeth. All the cookie cutter characters are killed except for Ronelle, who manages to freeze the monster, while being left marooned on the ice to an uncertain future.

The film has an interesting history. StudioADI, a special effects house, was hired to provide practical effects for the remake of The Thing (2011). StudioADI has a long history in the film industry, having worked on films like Starship Troopers and the Alien films, starting with Alien 3. Their work for The Thing was replaced in post by CG effects. The studio went to Kickstarter to raise funds to make a film, featuring their effects work. They were successful and the result is Harbinger Down.

This story is far more interesting than the actual film.

The characters are threadbare, functional for a body-count but nothing more. The story is minimal, a bare-bones excuse for having a gooey, shape-shifting monster kill people in a dark, confined space, but brings nothing new to the genre. These weaknesses would have been acceptable, if the film delivered on what was promised; a show-case for old school practical effects like the 1982 version of The Thing and 1986's Aliens (The films cited by writer/director Alec Gillis as inspiration). Instead, what we get are mostly poorly lit, poorly edited scenes in which it is often hard to determine what is going on. The few times that the effects can be clearly seen, while they are competently executed, are neither imaginatively designed nor presented in an engaging or flattering manner. Watching Harbinger Down makes me want to watch The Thing again to see how practical effects should be done, in design, execution and presentation, as well as how to tell a gripping story.

Not Recommended.

Film Review - Kristy (2014) - Spoilers

The recipe for Kristy. Take a decent premise; a network of killers target young women for ritual slaughter, calling each Kristy as a reference to Christ. Put a decent actress in the lead; Haley Bennett plays the Final Girl (well, only girl) Justine and is competent in an uninteresting role. Add some decent cinematography.

And then completely ruin any chance of making a watchable movie with a plot that is so implausible and a story so cliche ridden that I think screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski wanted to insult the intelligence of anyone watching the movie.

Justine is a college student staying alone on the campus of a university for Thanksgiving. She is the only student there, something that already stretches the bounds of credulity. While out on a provision run, she encounters Violet (Ashely Green), a member of a nation-wide cult that murders girls and posts the killings on-line. Justine is picked at random; but the killers seem to have a perfect knowledge of the campus, how to disable power and communications and her exact location. Jump scares, near misses and the inability to hide from four people on a large campus drag out the runtime until we get some Final Girl butt-kicking and the Justine's stalkers are killed. As credits roll, we learn that police are taking apart the cult. Justine gets the last word saying, "Justine is dead, I am now Kristy." An after credit sequence, however, indicates that Justine is killed by a cell of the cult. So, not so Final of a Girl after all.

It would be pointless to go through every flaw in the story, since there are so many of them. The most annoying are the inhuman competence of the killers and their ability to appear out of nowhere whenever it is dramatically convenient or it's time for a jump scare. However, those are just things that annoyed me the most; the script is full of hackneyed ideas and well-worn cliches. The story offers nothing original, has no engaging characters and thematically is hollow. The film is a waste of time.

Not Recommended.