Castle Vardulon

Verisimilitude

2010-03-16T17:57:00.001-04:00

The word means, quite simply, the quality of appearing real – which is why it sppears so often in reviews of films, especially those based on true events.

Take, for example, ‘To Catch A Killer’, the 1992 television miniseries about the arrest of John Wayne Gacy, as played by Brian Dennehy in a virtuoso performance. A title card at the film’s outset establishes the rules-

And the film does a pretty accurate job of covering the last two weeks of Gacy’s freedom, from the killing a drug store stock boy to his arrest for the murders of 33 young men.

The producers even do their best to make it period-appropriate, since the film is set in the year 1978. The cars are all the correct vintage, as are the clothes, hell, someone even makes a comment about the minimum wage being 2.50 an hour. So it’s obvious that the production cared about verisimilitude.

And then this happens –

Gacy is hanging out with a potential victim in his rec room. Nothing weird about that, right?

Um… yeah. In 1978, Michael Jordan was 15 years old. I mean, I’m sure he was already a great basketball player, but he wasn’t actually being merchandised yet.

This is such a weird mistake, too – it’s not like an extra who forgot to take his digital watch off while putting on a tunic – this is a cast member with actual dialogue, who was being paid real money to be there, wearing clothes picked out by a wardrobe supervisor and then approved by someone who makes more money than she does.

Not to mention every single person on the set that day – every single one of them looked at that shirt, saw the Michael Jordan logo, and didn’t do or say anything about it.

Ah, moviemaking.

Brian Pulido is the Real Garth Marenghi

2010-03-15T05:37:00.002-04:00

So I’m watching terrible film (and future entry in my semi-recurring series: Tony Todd is Too Good For This) The Graves, and something odd happens. The main characters are first introduced in a scene set, for no good reason, inside a comic book shop.

(I received no remuneration for including this product placement. I can’t say about the filmmakers.)

Here’s the scene in question:

That certainly seemed like an odd interlude that served no purpose, didn’t it? So then I get to the end of the film, and notice, for the first time, who wrote and directed the movie.

The name sounded oddly familiar, so I decided to look it up on the old webternet, and it turns out that Brian Pulido is the creator of both Lady Death and the writer of ‘Mischief Night’, the other comic mentioned. (Fun Fact – Mischief Night’s artist was Juan Jose Ryp, the poor man’s Geoff Darrow. Or, more charitably, the Geoff Darrow who gets off his ass and actually draws a comic more than once every five years.)

For those of you not familiar, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is a Channel 4 show about an egotistical writer who’s obsessed with the brilliance of his own creations. Here’s the relevance sequence from episode 3: “Skipper, The Eyechild”

So, other than the fact that Pulido did not cast himself as a brilliant doctor who the pretty girls convince of the genius of one ‘Brian Pulido’, how is that different?

Criminal Minds 210: Lessons Learned

2010-03-12T02:37:00.002-05:00

It’s finally time for Criminal Minds to tacky the thorny issue of Islamic-themed terrorism! A DEA SWAT team breaks into a suspected drug lab, and finds instead a bomb-making hideout! The terrorists escape, but the bomb is scary enough to force Greg to get out of bed at 6AM – and he’s going to have to miss his new son’s portrait being taken the next day, too!

It’s rough being Greg.

Back at HQ, it seems that Emily’s now officially on the team. Good for her! And it turns out she can read Arabic, and translates their message into English and breaks their relatively simple code: There’s going to be an attack in two days. Then it’s time for some PC ass-covering – when someone announces that the terrorist mastermind calls himself ‘Soldier of God’, and it’s commented that Al Qaeda believes that they’re engaged in a holy war, Reid points out that the words ‘Holy’ and ‘War’ never appear together in the Koran.

As if that means something.

You know, the word ‘Crusade’ isn’t in the bible either. So?

Luckily the terrorist mastermind is already in Gitmo, so they’re going to have to profile some answers to him if they want to save the day!

Then, right before the credits, Mandy mentions something odd – he says that if they don’t stop it, this could be the first terrorist attack in America since 9/11.

Uh… the Anthrax attacks? The Beltway Snipers? That guy who was blowing up army recruiting centers without killing anyone? Has he not been paying attention?

Watching the credits, I just noticed that Greg’s wife is played by Gay Jack’s sister from Dawson’s Creek. Doesn’t mean anything, but huh.

Mandy takes Emily and Reid with him down to Cuba, hoping they can serve as an effective investigating trio. Emily’s supposed to be important because she speaks fluent Arabic, but somehow I doubt the show’s going to make its audience watch people speaking a foreign language for long, and quickly move into having the terrorist mastermind speaking English.

When the team arrives in Cuba the Terrorist has already been beaten and humiliated by the interrogators-

Be thankful that this is a CBS show. On cable (and in real life), he’d be naked. An FBI interrogator briefs them on just how badass this terrorist is – not only has he not cracked, but two weeks earlier he’d heard that another prisoner was talking to the FBI, so the terrorist managed to talk to him for three minutes in the shower line, and the guy wound up killing himself that night!

Which makes him, I guess, the Hannibal Lecter of terrorists? Because that’s what they were ripping off?

More importantly, though, how did he get near another prisoner, or find out that someone was giving info? They specifically referred to him as being a ‘Ghost Prisoner’ at Gitmo, meaning that his presence there is top secret, and won’t appear on official prisoner manifests. Wouldn’t that necessitate him also being kept in complete isolation?

Mandy instructs the FBI supervisor to have the CIA rough up the terrorist a little, so that he can rush in and save the day, and also provide the terrorist with clothes. Not sure how he’ll put them on while wearing shackles, though. Mandy’s plan is simple – demonstrate that he’s a completely different kind of interrogator, hoping that it will lead to him opening up.

Yeah, remember how I guessed they wouldn’t wait long before having him speak English? I was overly optimistic. He didn’t speak anything but English from the moment he opened his mouth.

The other half of the team searches the bomb house thoroughly, and finds documentation suggesting that they were planning to weaponize Anthrax! This leads Reid to point out that the amount of Anthrax sent to Tom Daschle’s office could have killed millions had it been properly distributed.

Wait, Reid, if you remembered the Anthrax attack, why didn’t you correct Mandy back at the end of the teaser?

Emily proves her worth, kind of, by recognizing Terrorist’s accent as being from Egypt. You’d think one of the military or CIA translators would have known that already, but let’s move on. Jason tries to play the sympathy card by telling the Terrorist that the sun’s about to set, and allowing him to pray.

Meanwhile JJ and Garcia are illegally eavesdropping on all audio communications, and catch some chatter about a bomb being hidden at a construction site in Virgina. The message of this scene? That private communications are passe. What we need is a government who will listen to everything we say all the time so that they can decide what’s good or bad for us, and shoot people accordingly.

Then it’s back to Cuba, where Mandy finally gets around to the red-hot theological debate that we’ve been waiting for! The terrorist proves to be a kind of a simplistic straw man – he seriously seems to want people to convert to Islam all over the word. As if Al Qaeda didn’t have actual, realistic goals that it wanted to achieve.

Then he mentions that he was radicalized by a bombing attack on a bazaar when he was young. Which I’d imagine would piss someone off. I can’t say for sure – I’m from a country where there are extremely few bombings. Maybe you get used to it after a while?

Back in the USA the DEA team raids the construction yard. Hold on, why is the DEA still involved in this? They now know that it has nothing to do with drugs. Shouldn’t this be an FBI SWAT team? Or did they just not want to hire any more actors? If that’s the case, why were they a DEA SWAT team in the first place?

Anyhoo, the place is empty, so Mandy knows he has no cards to play, and he gives the terrorist the information to see how he reacts. When the information relaxes the Terrorist, Mandy realizes it must be a trap, and tells Greg and the rest to get out of there as quickly as possible before this happens:

Only one person ends up being killed by the blast, and no one whose name we knew – lucky it was one of those booby traps set to go off a full six minutes after people broke into the building, huh.

Wait, that doesn’t make any sense…

Since the chatter was a trap, that means they don’t have any actual clues, and profiling the terrorist has proven more important than ever! Mandy appeals to his humanity, using the family of the dead agent as pawns. The Terrorist responds that no Americans wept for his son’s death. Which is a good point, actually…

With the admission that his son was killed, they now know that his son was killed by a bomb, they’re able to reveal the terrorist’s true identity – he’s an Egyptian cleric who moved to America to recruit terrorists from prisons! Wait… so they knew this guy both as a trouble-making cleric, and as an anonymous terrorist, but they never put the two together, even with two months of having him in custody and not knowing his name? Don’t they have facial recognition software for that kind of thing at the CIA? Especially when you consider that he was a famous enough preacher that the two CIA goons immediately knew who they were talking about the second his real name came up.

The new CIA/FBI partnership pulls up some useful information – they discover some Anthrax was stolen from a Dutch lab earlier that week, and a watchlisted Muslim flew from there just four days earlier! They rush to the guy’s house and discover that five guys have been shot to death in one of the rooms, and that the anthrax bombs have already been completed!

Wait, why did they kill half their cell? Five dollars says we’ll never find out.

More importantly, this gives them the ticking clock the story needs – it’s only nine hours until moon rise! Why is that significant? The coded message said to do the attack at the next ‘Crescent’, which of course means that they’d actually wait until nightfall to carry out their attacks, and not just to attack on the day when that moon happens, right?

Because it makes total sense for them to hold the attack after dark, when most people are safe at home, and not in the middle of the day, when they’re milling about in public areas.

Mandy brings Reid in for a last-ditch attempt to get some information about the coming attack. It’s after sunset, and they’re basically begging for him to help. But then it’s too late! Mandy gets a call on his earphone, saying the attack has happened! They open the door, and a news story in the background plays a generic news story, while Mandy accuses the terrorist of being evil while giving no specifics about the attack!

God, I can’t believe they’re actually doing this. Are we really supposed to buy that the Terrorist is this stupid? That he’d immediately start gloating without any proof that his attack was successful?

Yeah, he is. The terrorist gloats about his plan to send a bomb to the grand opening of a shopping center. Which is apparently happening after sunset?

Making things worse? That’s the mall that Greg’s wife is taking their son to in order to get the pictures taken! Hold on, who goes with their newborn to get their picture taken at the grand opening of a mall? Wouldn’t the crowds be absolutely ridiculous?

Anyhoo the FBI gets there in time and shoots all the remaining terrorists, leaving us forever wondering why they killed five members of their gang. Also, in a cute bit of ‘Big Brotherism’ we discover in the next scene that they covered up the attack and told people that it was just an attempted robbery.

There are no more scenes with the Terrorist to wrap up his story, just a bit with Mandy explaining that the Terrorist had wanted the FBI down in Gitmo to confirm that the plan had worked, and that’s why he’d let them track his cell phone. But wait, the cell phone was only tracked because the DEA randomly raided what they thought was a drug house, which turned out to be a bomb lab. If they hadn’t done that, the plan would have gone on without a hitch!

Are we supposed to believe the Terrorists called the cops on themselves, just so their leader could have a chance to gloat? They couldn’t be that stupid, could they?

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Sort of – Mandy’s guessing that the Terrorist wanted him down there is what led him to pull the con game that saved the day, which kind of counts as profiling… Of course, he utterly failed at Crackering the suspect, so it’s a pretty much a wash.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Actually, maybe yes – it seems like no one took that whole ‘loose anthrax’ very seriously, and a watchlist guy flying from the country where it had happened the next day? I’ve got to think someone, somewhere would have been on top of that.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

3/10 – I’d have scored this higher, had Mandy’s plan not been entirely dependant on the incredibly dedicated and patient Terrorist revealing himself to be a vain idiot.

You know, I just realized that Emily did absolutely nothing in Cuba. She recognized his accent (which, again, anyone familiar with accents should have been able to do, just like people fluent in English can tell a Texan from a Scot from a Newfie), and then offered no other aid. Not a great first couple of days on the job for her, actually.

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Jennifer Lopez Edition

2010-03-10T02:59:00.000-05:00

J. Lo.’s triumphant return to the stage at SNL proved to be one of the cleanest episodes of the year – not only were there no rape jokes of any kind, but even the two gay jokes were largely harmless!

This relative cleanliness gives me a golden opportunity to mention one of the other recurring sketches I have a problem with: ESPN Classic. If you haven’t seen the specific sketch I’m talking about it doesn’t matter, because they’re all exactly the same. Two guys fail at describing women’s sports, and make crude jokes about women’s hygiene.

I find these sketches so unpleasant that I’ve been tempted to add a ‘MisogynyWatch’ to the regular posting – but I haven’t yet because of the overt misogyny of the show is so far restricted to just this one recurring sketch. Like how I wouldn’t have started the RapeWatch if the only time rape came up was the despicable endlessly returning ‘Scared Straight’ sketches.

I am weirdly fascinated by this sketch, though, because of its similarity to a great moment from Alan Partridge, which, thanks to the magic of Youtube, you can see embedded below.

In addition to being generally hilarious, the first minute of the clip is an indictment of the kind of homophobic, misogynist attitudes that could be found all over the airwaves at the time. It ought to be something that we look back on and think ‘man, television used to be disgusting’. Yet here SNL is, offering us a real-life example of the exact thing Alan Partridge was parodying fifteen years ago. It’s so off-putting to imagine that, as the lesbian character said, there really is a bunch of guys sitting around in an office, trying to judge how crude they can be in describing vagisil without being shot down by the censors.

And I do mean ‘guys’ – the list of writers at the end of the show features twenty-six names (Jesus Christ, it takes 26 people to write this show? How is that even possible?), and only six of them are female.

Also notable this week was a startling example of the show’s shoddy production values. At this point I’m so used to the show taking up to fifteen seconds of black space to come back from commercials that I just assume it’s part of sketch. These problems, on the other hand, are just weird.

Here’s a shot from the opening of the digital video ‘Flags’.

That seems like a bit of an odd thing to drop in there, right? But hey, that Andy Samberg’s just weird, and that strange subtitle was one of the few laughs I eked out of the uncharacteristically lame video.

Next up was that boring sketch where Wiig and Hader make strange faces while doing celebrity interviews so that they can edit the star freaking out into a promo. This time they kept pushing Jennifer L. to speak Spanish so that they could show a clip of her-

And suddenly the subtitle makes sense. So how did it end up at the beginning of one sketch rather than the end of another? Obviously because the chyron people are not great at their jobs.

Also not great at their jobs? Whoever’s keeping the time backstage. Because after Jen-Lope finished her thank-yous…

There was still a hundred seconds left in the show. Which led to lots and lots of footage of people milling around on stage. Or as it’s known in the trades, ‘dead air’.

The Final Count this week was:

Rape - 0
Homophobia - 2

The Twelfth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2010-03-09T01:40:00.002-05:00

It's another dispatch from the Golden Age - in this one we learn that there's nothing funnier than suicide!

Again, children's comic.

Lake Mungo Is Almost Too Good

2010-03-09T01:20:00.003-05:00

Time for a bit of a departure here at the Castle – instead of only being motivated by hatred and contempt, I’m going to make an effort to write about a subject that I actually enjoy. Weird, right? So, without any further ado, let’s take a dip in Lake Mungo!

Okay, one more bit of ado – I just wanted to point out that I seriously opened this post with a bad pun, and then apologize for that.

Sorry. Now let’s move on…

To the sunny shores of Lake Mungo!

Christ, what is wrong with me? Does actual quality make me this nervous? I suppose there’s a safety net available when I’m writing about bad movies – with the calibre of films I tend to write about it would be almost impossible to do them a disservice through bad reviewing.

Take ‘Alive or Dead’ for instance. Had I drunkenly mashed my keyboard with a spatula for half an hour and then posted the result I still would have come up with a better review than that film deserved.

But Lake Mungo… not only is this a film I personally enjoyed, it’s one whose quality I respect, a movie that manages to take the fake documentary, a genre that’s so easy to abuse, and do something novel with it – namely, to make one that was completely believable as a documentary.

Watching it I couldn’t help but think of all the mockumentaries I’ve enjoyed in the past, and how, without exception, they’re filled with things that strip away the façade of verisimilitude. Hell, even the mighty Ghostwatch has that guy doing the terrible American accent, ruining the illusion whenever he’s onscreen.

One could make the argument that this is simple Eurocentrism speaking, and that were I an Australian native who was familiar with all the actors in the film it would play much differently, and I couldn’t argue with that. I’m not familiar with Australian television and cinema, though, and I can only speak as an average North American viewer of the film – and as such, the appearance of reality fundamentally works. The central actors are flawless at presenting themselves as a family reeling after a tragedy, and all the supporting actors perfectly express everything they need to get across.

I’m so used to being not scared while watching these movies that actually experiencing the growing dread that the film engenders was an almost entirely alien experience. Hell, as the film marched on I began to grow suspicious of it: Could this movie possibly earn the tone it was creating? My natural inclination is to guess where a film is going, so how does someone who’s never surprised deal with a movie whose developments are completely unpredictable while never violating the rules of its own world?

Stare blankly at its brilliance? By a key moment a third of the way into the film that’s all I was capable of doing.

And what about that moment? How do you talk about the scene that the entire film is leading up to without flat-out spoiling it? A moment that’s all the more brilliant because the film doesn’t telegraph it at all… which means I could be ruining the film just by alluding to it.

It happens about 8 seconds after this – god, I hope that doesn’t give too much away.

These aren’t pressures one is faced with when complaining about the terrible design of the Praelien.

Fundamentally, before I’m able to describe the wonder that is Lake Mungo, I need to understand how to talk about something that works, as opposed to something that doesn’t. How the hell am I going to review this thing without anything to mock or deride?

Oh, like that. Right. I get it now.

The disturbing moral lessons of Numb(three)rs and Medium

2010-03-08T03:10:00.004-05:00

My fandom for actor Peter MacNicol ensured that I would tune in to Numb(three)rs when it premiered some six years back. I found the show to be a passable procedural, barely worth mentioning, let alone remembering. Still, the inertia of storytelling kept me watching for the next few seasons, even as I began to grow unsettled by the show’s lacklustre storytelling, terribly-used science, and its habit of borrowing its plots rather shamelessly from other shows and popular films.

This came to a head at the beginning of season five, when an episode so closely remade the plot of a film that the writers’ arrogance triggered a kind of reflexive disgust in me, and I haven’t watched an episode since (save for the time Gregg Henry was on, because hey, Gregg Henry).

Thinking back I can’t imagine the episode was as bad as I remember, but its obviousness was just too much to bear. If you don’t believe me, just check out ‘Blowback’, or as I call it: “The Numb(three)rs theatre players present: LA Confidential - The TV Show!”.

So I’m a little out of touch with the recent storylines, such as why MacNicol looks like a caveman and lives in Judd Hirsch’s garage, but familiar enough with the show that when I discovered that there was a new episode that both ripped off the plot of a movie (Sleepers this time) and had a terrible moral lesson to offer, I was eager to tune in.

Man, does this show not disappoint with the awfulness. The plot, rather quickly, is that a group of boys were molested as children, and then one of them killed himself. The other two were being interviewed by a reporter (the sister of the dead one) on a rooftop parking garage when a shot rings out, executing one of them.

At this point you may wonder why they were meeting on a parking garage rooftop, with the wind that interferes with sound and the terrible lighting and all. The answer? Because only if the meeting was on a rooftop could a sniper shoot at them. This suggests that the reporter who set up the interview must be behind the sniping, but that turns out to not be the case. Due to bad writing.

Now it’s time to play the game that must be played with every episode of Numb(three)rs: Why is the FBI working on this case? (Spoiler alert – there’s basically never a good reason)

This time they actually try to come up with an explanation – White Agent (of the interchangeable White Agent/Black Agent team that Joel Morrow works with) was present at the interview/shooting. Why was he there? Because the agent on the original molestation case from ’85 had died, and the press needed a quote!

Of course that doesn’t give them jurisdiction on the case – it’s still just a murder that FBI agents witnessed – but hey, at least they were trying, right?

So let’s zip through the plot, shall we? The fourth molestation victim was the sniper, who killed victim number 2 because he was going to testify to the police. Why was he going to do that? It seems that the molester had disappeared some twenty years earlier after serving just six years-

Okay, hold on a second… if he’d been charged with child molestation, the six years would make sense – states are kind of stupid about those sentences – but the show explains that the FBI is involved because the molester (Alan Ruck!) was charged with kidnapping three children and brutally raping them.

Crimes which tend to carry a much harsher punishment.

But let’s move on. After Ruck was sprung the four boys beat him to within an inch of his life and raped him with a baseball bat. I know what you’re thinking: Good for them. The problem is that one of the kids kept a videotape of the crime, and that kid (the suicide one) felt guilty about the vicious beating, guilty enough to let Ruck know about the tape, which Ruck wanted to use to blackmail the four kids, threatening them with a scandal and rape prosecution.

This is what the second molestation victim was going to confess to the cops about, which victim four killed him to prevent. Which raises the question: What were they afraid of? One of the victims grew up to be a high-powered lawyer, which means that he must have at least some passing familiarity with the criminal code – they beat a man very badly 19 years earlier. 19. He didn’t go to the hospital and never told anyone about the beating, meaning that the only way to prove it even happened was the tape, on which no one’s face appears. Krumholtz offers some pseudoscientific folderol suggesting that he can tell who was involved in the beating based on the length of shadows, but that’s so far into the depths of junk reasoning that it would be taken seriously in a courtroom.

More importantly, though, this whole threat is predicated on the idea of a being DA willing to charge four men for a non-fatal crime they committed against a child molester twenty years earlier. On what planet would that ever happen?

Right at the end of the episode, after all the victims are dead or in jail (victim three killed himself rather than being taken in) and the molester gets away scot free, the reporter questions Morrow about the moral of the story. He explains that it’s a hopeful story because suicide victim had saved Ruck’s life after the beating all those years ago, and “Every time you save a life you save the whole world.”

Except for the three people who are now dead because a child molester lived. Think about that for a second – a guy brutally molesters four children. When they’re a little older they decide they’re disgusted by the fact that their upcoming lifetime of nightmares and post-traumatic stress was only worth six years of Ruck’s life, and attempt to try to beat him to death. An act, I would argue, that few people could argue with the motives of, and few would suggest punishment for. One of them chickens out and saves the guy’s life, which sets forth a chain of events that leads to nearly all of those victims dying.

And this is supposed to be a good result. When compared to the other idea – kill a child molester, and four people go on to live long and happy lives.

What the hell is wrong with you, Numb(three)rs?

Hey, and speaking of murdering child molesters, let’s take a look at this week’s Medium, which has the most sickening message I think I’ve ever seen on the show – and this is a show that argued that it’s better to let a mass murderer kill 10-50 innocent people before the law stops them than to kill them first, saving all those lives.

Because it’s not our place to interfere with the natural order of things.

Except that’s what the Medium does every GD week.

Okay, I’m not here to complain about last year’s terrible Kurtwood Smith episode, that’s been taken care of already.

I’m here to talk about this week’s terrible Laura Prepon episode.

So Allison gets mugged, and it leads her to Laura’s female-empowerment-themed self defense class. Laura explains that after she was brutally beaten, raped, and left for dead three years ago it was only by become an ass-kicking machine that she was able to resume living her life.

Allison begins having dreams about Laura being attacked, naturally she misinterprets them because she’s not a very bright person. This episode’s cheating with the misleading dream sequences is more egregious than usual, however, with Laura’s attacker making nebulous statements about her not struggling, when all he should be saying is ‘I’m an undercover cop, and you’re under arrest!’

That’s right, Laura’s been going to the sex offender registry and beating rapists and child molesters to death. I know what you’re thinking – good for her. Except this time she made a boo-boo, and accidentally killed a cop who’d been put on the list to help his cover as he tried to get a paroled rapist (David Cubitt’s evil brother) to admit to a brutal rape he recently committed.

This really ought to be a thorny moral situation – no, she was trying to do a good thing, but wound up not doing enough research and it led to tragedy! Should she turn herself in, or continue helping the world by killing rapists and child molesters?

The show doesn’t take that tack, though – no, instead Allison climbs back onto her moral high horse and claims that all of Prepon’s murders were immoral and deserve punishment. Worse yet, she’s so disgusted by the whole idea of women taking revenge on men that she quits the women’s self defense course. Okay, to be fair, that’s subtext, but it’s pretty close to the surface.

Allison does quit the course, and doesn’t show any other signs of wanting to learn self-defense, which makes it seem as if the show is ending with a pro-rapist, anti-women’s self defense message.

How else can we read the ending, where Allison has a vision of Prepon murdering Cubitt’s evil brother, and quickly calls Cubit, hoping that he can rescue this evil rapist (who drugged and raped a 15-year-old in one of Allison’s in-no-way-misleadingest visions) from a heroic vigilante.

Luckily Cubitt has a little more sense than Allison, and lets Prepon murder the evil brother before taking her in, reinforcing Cubitt’s role as the most interesting and morally centered character on the show.

So Medium was especially despicable this week, and you know what’s worse? It wasn’t even coherently written from a plot standpoint.

Let’s think about Prepon’s accidental murder of a cop for a second. This requires her to be a vigilante who does no research whatsoever – taking the website as canon without checking newspapers or police records of the original crime – which doesn’t really mesh with her well-thought-out plans for kidnapping, murdering, and disposing of rapists’ corpses. And then there’s the bigger question of how she found the undercover cop at all. Yes, the website would have listed his ‘current address’, but there’s no way that would be A: The cop’s real address, or B: a rented apartment where the cop was living for the case.

We’re not talking about a five-year operation to take down the Jersey mob here. The extent of the cop’s undercover assignment was to go to weekly group therapy with the evil brother and try to get him to talk afterwards. It’s not like he wasn’t doing his day-job policing at the same time. So, what, did Prepon just run into him at the grocery store after having memorized every rapist’s face in the entire registry?

Damn you, Medium – why can’t you get anything right?

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Galfinakis Edition

2010-03-07T02:05:00.002-05:00

It’s time for the glorious return of the Saturday Night Live RapeWatch, which has been on a hiatus due to my depression with the overall terribility of the show, save for the Jon Hamm edition, which featured all of the brilliant comedy we’ve come to expect of him, and not enough objectionable material to warrant me getting angry enough to write about.

We’re back now, though, so let’s take a look at Zach Galfinakis’ first outing as a host of SNL!

A largely terrible episode, the few bright spots did nothing to rescue the show from the overwhelmingly unfunny mediocrity that’s become its trademark. Seriously, people, when ‘What Up With That’ is your episode’s high point, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

But we’re not here for general SNL criticism, that’s what the rest of the Internet is for. So let’s go over the objectionable content!

Things were off to a questionable start when Zach made a rape joke during the monologue – it may be borderline, since it was a statutory rape joke, but I thought it worth bringing up because it’s part of a confusing trend that suggests male children can’t be victims of molestation. Everyone accepts that a female high school student molested by a teacher is the victim of a crime, but put a male high school student in the same situation and you’ve got at best a joke, and at worst something that’s considered admirable.

The second rape joke was just nonsensical, and the perfect example of the writers using rape for the shock value to cover their inability to actually come up with a joke. The premise was that a new kind of underwear was being made partially from banana plant fibres, which raises the risk of ‘Monkey Rape’. Because monkeys are known for using bananas as masturbatory aids. Seriously, is the joke any less funny had Smuggy Smuggerson said ‘increases the risk of your penis being eaten by a monkey’? I don’t think so – but that wouldn’t have accomplished what the show seems to often be designed to do these days: desensitize people to the horror of rape.

Things were also pretty robust over in our control category. In addition to two sketches with random homophobia-themed humour, there were two sketches whose entire premise was built around the idea that men being (or acting) gay was, in and of itself, something that needs to be pointed and laughed at.

The final count:

Rape – 2
Homophobia - 4

And for the record – no, I don’t know if that’s how his name is spelled, and no, I’m not checking. I’m also not checking if he actually shaved his beard off for that last sketch.

Criminal Minds 209: The Last Word

2010-03-05T03:11:00.002-05:00

If the beginning of this episode of Criminal Minds is to be believed, some people are just too stupid to live. A family is out picnicking in the park, and while the wife is alone at the table for a moment a mysterious man runs out of the words and announces that his daughter has disappeared. So what does the woman do? Does she yell and run to the crowd of people fifty feet away, hoping to gather a large group of people that can quickly locate this missing child?

Nope, she follows a stranger into the woods.

I’m not saying she deserved to get murdered and then have her corpse raped by the fake Green River Killer, but come on. There’s a bare minimum of personal safety that you have to maintain to deserve being taken seriously as a sentient human being, and she just performed the serial killer equivalent of walking blindfolded out into traffic.

Later that night a prostitute is woken up by her son – once she realizes what time it is she races out the door to get to work. Only to wind up gunned down my a mysterious toque-wearing figure!

Are the two killers the same man? Probably not, but I guess we’ll find out after the opening credits!

There’s some drama going on back at the base, as Andy’s friend from Andy Richter Controls the Universe walks into Greg’s office, announcing that she’s joining the team. Her name is Emily, BTW. Greg’s having none of it, though, because no one consulted him or Mandy about replacing Elle on the team.

Of course, given that she’s a recognizable actress, she’s a new cast member.

Yup, here’s the new opening credits group shot.

I’m not saying that someone felt that Elle was utterly replaceable, but take a look at the opening credits group shot from the previous two episodes.

And now one episode before ose

So yeah, it wasn’t exactly a struggle to segue her out or anything. I wonder why JJ was the only one who took the opportunity of the rejiggered opening credits to get a new cut-out in there?

Then they start the discussion of the two serial killer cases – it seems that the ‘Mill Creek Killer’ has been getting a lot of attention because he kills middle class white women in a stagey fashion, while the ‘Hollow Man’ has been getting almost none because he shoots prostitutes in alleys and doesn’t care what race they are. This lack of attention seems to be annoying the Hollow Man, and he’s started sending letters to the press, hoping to start the clock on his fifteen minutes.

That’s right, it’s about two competing serial killers. Preposterous? Yes. But it worked in Kiss the Girls, right? Okay, so not that well…

One serial killer shoots hookers, the other bludgeons professional women – can it be a coincidence that they’re working at the same time in the same city? The answer, of course, is yes. It’s not a multiple personality thing at all, because Fake Green River is played by known actor Jason O’Mara, from the terrible Life on Mars remake, and though we didn’t see toque-guy’s face that well, it clearly wasn’t him.

After a brief visit with the latest victim’s husband, the show cuts to a scene of FGR visiting his latest victim’s corpse, though they mercifully cut away before the molesting starts. Then it’s time to visit the hooker’s family, so as to better make the episode’s heavy-handed theme about the two classes of people living in the same city. The point is made again at the police station, where the FGR case has six boxes of files, while the Hollow Man has just a slim folder.

Then JJ has a conversation with the reporter who’s been receiving the letters, and encourages him to not write about Hollow Man, hoping that this will enrage him into coming forward. And enrage him it does – leading to him gunning down two whores in broad daylight. He manages to get away with it, though, because there was no one else in his alley. We learn a vital fact about him, though – that he’s a cab driver!

Oh, and also they find FGR’s latest victim, and figure out that he returns to molest the corpse. Hilariously Mandy solemnly announces that ‘next time, we’ll be waiting for him’. Which is a nice theory and all, but what are the odds that they’ll find the another victim, deep in the woods, before he comes back for it?

Now it’s time for the ubiquitous profiling scene, in which the characters outline various personality traits they think the killers will have. The Hollow Man will have a menial job, FGR will be handsome because he gets women to follow him – despite a fun detour into graphology, there’s no real value to the scene, so let’s move on to-

Yet another victim! Because, like all Criminal Minds serial killers, FGR does not have a day job, and kills 3-4 people per week.

Out in the woods FGR is stopped by a sheriff, but he’s already disposed of the body, so no evidence is discovered. For some reason the sheriffs aren’t taking down the license plate of everyone they stop on the mountain roads that day, so an easy clue is lost forever.

The team guesses that FGR must know the schedule of the park rangers, to better ensure that no one will find the body before he returns to it – they search that area and, miraculously, come across the corpse. Mandy’s plan goes into effect, and they hide in the woods and wait. But when someone arrives to find the corpse, it’s not FGR, but rather the reporter!

Naturally we know he’s not the killer, because we’ve seen FGR already, but he’s got a big clue to offer – Hollow Man sent a letter telling where the body was! The press has blown their stakeout, and they’re left with a puzzle - how could one killer know where the other killer had dumped a body!

Well, they’re obviously in contact. I mean duh.

Out on the street FGR tries to abduct a woman in broad daylight on a well-traveled street in broad daylight. She fights him off and yells for help, and he goes running away. The theory is that he’s breaking down because he wasn’t able to molest that last corpse, and now they’ve got a sketch of what he looks like!

Based on the assumption that the paper that the Hollow Man left when he shot the two women was significant, other than the headline promoting another killer’s work over his own, of course, Reid digs through the papers until he finds mysterious lines in the classified section. He knows that they’re from serial killers to serial killers because the pseudonyms used are from Catcher in the Rye, a book that only crazed sociopaths enjoy. That’s their take, not mine. Although I’m not a fan of the novel.

In the messages back and forth they find a reference to the body dump that Hollow Man tipped off the press to – but there’s a problem, as it’s too oblique to have been useful. He named an area of park and the name of a trail, but there’s no way the killer would have left the body actually on the trail, lest it be discovered by random hikers. Logic dictates that he must have dragged the body to a point easily accessible from the trail – but if that’s the case, how could the reporter have found it? Hollow Man didn’t know where it was.

They come up with a daring plan: make a fake letter to the FGR, claiming that the Hollow Man has left a body for him. This leads to a ridiculous scene of them painting up a policewoman and burying her under some leaves.

Couldn’t they just get a corpse from the morgue? Perhaps the corpse of the last victim? Or even a dummy? Hell, a pile of pillows under the leaves would be as useful as anything as a real person.

We cut immediately to FGR arriving at the scene of the body dump…

Wait, hold on for a second. They put the ad in the paper to make into the next day’s morning edition, and are assuming that FGR is going to read it and immediately go looking for the body. Let’s set aside the fact that they can’t know that he doesn’t have a job or a place to be that day, and move on to the question of how he could possibly find the body.

While FGR’s message to Hollow mentioned a specific area and trail name, the team’s message to FGR contained only an oblique reference to ‘Harm’s Way’, which they’re hoping he’ll interpret as a direction to go to the “Harms Wood” area of the nearby national park.

Now here’s the problem. This is Harms Wood:

Look, I’m well aware that there’s no scale on the map, but any way you slice it that’s a really big area of land – there’s at least six different trails running through it. And all that FGR knows is that somewhere in that expanse there’s a corpse.

How on earth could he ever manage to find the thing? And within a reasonable amount of time for that woman to be lying there?

Of course, he does, and the team immediately pounces on the guy as he’s starting to strip. Naturally he claims he’s not the killer, but the fact that he was taking out a tube of lipstick to apply to the corpse when he was tackled means he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Also he molests the corpses, so there’s got to be some DNA.

Wait, what’s that? Greg said they don’t have any evidence? Right – everyone’s incompetent. So it’s up to Mandy to Cracker him into a confession.

Which Mandy has failed to do every time he’s attempted it. So I’m sure this is going to go well.

They also don’t know who he is – despite the fact that his van must have been somewhere nearby.

During the conversation FGR proves not to require any cracking at all – he’s all too happy to talk about the crimes and the Hollow Man in hypothetical terms. And then when confronted with the threat of being identified as a necrophiliac he immediately confesses.

Wait, what? You know, if there character had been identified at all, given even a rudimentary personality, maybe I’d believe he had a public image to protect – Ted Bundy freely admitted to molesting corpses, after all. Next to being a serial killer necrophilia isn’t such a big deal.

Now it’s time to wrap things up by drawing out Hollow Man. JJ gives a press conference announcing that the police now believe that the shootings were all isolated incidents, and that the last two were probably a copycat.

Huh? How can you copycat an isolated incident – and the fact that it was two victims at once, in a good part of town, in broad daylight, means that it wasn’t similar to the other shootings at all.

Let’s pause for a moment and give the writers of that line a hand.

Still, the press conference makes its point, and Hollow Man walks into police headquarters and tries to shoot FGR. You may be wondering how he managed to get a gun into the building. Well, it turns out that all you have to do is wait for a guard to start wanding you after setting off a metal detector, and you can just knee him in the face, gaining ample time to pull a gun and cow the rest of the agents, who seemingly weren’t even aware that the alarm had gone off.

Then it’s time for the happy ending, in which the reporter has put together a cover story about all the dead whores. Heartwarming, right?

Oh, and Emily is still hanging out at the office, waiting to join the team. It seems she really loves profiling, and already started on a new case! Greg’s nervous about the idea, but no matter how resolute he may be, even he can’t fight the opening credits.

The Fake Green River Killer

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Dear lord, no. He was caught because he gave another serial killer (largely an untrustworthy group of people) the information necessary to catch him.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

There is no police technique more conventional than getting one criminal to rat another one out, so I’m going with this was a completely run-of-the-mill solve.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 – This is yet another case where, had the team not shown up, things would have shaken out largely the same way.

The Hollow Man

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Actually, yes! For the first time this season the team actually accomplished something. Sweet, right? Based on an analysis of the letter that the Hollow Man mailed they were able to determine that he was so desperate for attention that depriving it of him would draw him out. It didn’t just draw him out, rather preposterously it actually made him turn himself in to the cops! Which is kind of a stretch, come to think of it…

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

There was a pretty good shot, actually. He’d started shooting people in broad daylight, and it was just good luck keeping him out there at that point. Eventually someone would have notcied a cabby shooting a whore, and that would have been it.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

5/10 – It was certainly a psychology-intensive solve, but based on just how far-fetched the idea of a serial killer turning himself in is, I’ve got to chop some points off. Because, let’s face it, if he hadn’t turned himself in, they’d have had no idea how to find the guy.

Criminal Minds FactCheck!

As I mentioned in the review the ‘Mill Creek Killer’ was a stand-in for the real Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway. In fact, the killer seems to have been split into two characters for the purposes of this episode, one with Ridgeway’s methods, and another with his targets.

The whole ‘lying in wait’ thing is based on a famous conversation that Ted Bundy had with investigators while he was assisting on the case. He announced that the killer would likely return to the bodies to molest them later on, and a good way to catch him would be, if they found a fresh body, to set up surveilance on it until he returned. This proved to be a no-go, since A: they never found a body that fresh, and B: it was kind of a crazy idea.

So, was profiling useful in catching the real Green River Killer? Sadly, no. But it’s one of my favorite stories of serial killer catching, so let’s quickly go over it.

Gary’s MO was to have a prostitute get into his car, where they’d be put at ease by a picture of his son and the small toys left lying around. Then he would drive them somewhere isolated and strangle them.

One of the prostitutes he picked up had a boyfriend/pimp watching out for her, and when he saw her struggling in the front seat of the car as they pulled away, he’d tried to follow the truck, but couldn’t manage it. While the boyfriend didn’t get the truck’s license plate, he was relatively certain that he’d be able to identify it if he saw it again.

So the boyfriend/pimp enlisted the help of his girlfriend’s father, and together they drove around the suburbs until they found it. Then they called the police, putting Ridgeway on the authorities’ radar.

Sadly there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him (a pimp’s word isn’t worth much in court, apparently), and when he passed a polygraph Gary went to the bottom of the list of suspects. He wasn’t so low that they didn’t take DNA samples in the late 80s, just so low that they didn’t get around to testing them until 2001. When the police found a match Gary was arrested days later, and he quickly confessed to all the murders.

Ridgeway was one of the most heavily-profiled killers in history, and the investigators’ conversations with Ted Bundy about catching him were groundbreaking examples of employing the examining the mind of one serial killer to better understand another (they would also inspire the plot of ‘Silence of the Lambs’) – and yet despite all of this, Ridgeway was caught in the simplest manner possible – someone saw him do it. It just took the cops 18 years before they were able to prove it.

One final note on the case – Ridgeway actually did kill with a nearly fiction-level frequency, murdering up to four women a month during his busy periods, occasionally killing two women in the same week.

Criminal Minds 208: Empty Planet

2010-02-26T03:05:00.001-05:00

This episode opens with a ‘bang’… by which I mean a montage of a dude making some pipe bombs, calling in a warning to the news, and then doing this with them-

So who is this crazed bomber, and what is he trying to stop with his explosions?

Let’s find out after the credits!

The team rushes to Seattle, where the terrorist has announced that he won’t stop bombing until they ‘get it under control’. He’s needlessly vague about just what ‘it’ is. In a bit of good news, just a couple of people were killed by the explosion, and the rest just got suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation.

They also find the detonator, and start a search for anyone who might have seen the guy pressing it. Next they hold a press conference announcing they don’t know who detonated the bomb, hoping that this will convince the bomber to call them.

Over at Seattle FBI HQ they’ve finished putting the pieces of the bomb together, and find two interesting clues – 1: the shrapnel in the bomb was dried peas, meaning that he was hoping to kill a single person, and not a large group, and 2: that there was a symbol etched into the end of one of the pipe bombs, which they identify as…

Actually, you know what? Take a look at the symbol before you read what they say it looks like.

Okay, see that marking? What could it possibly be? Reid glances at it for just a second, and then makes an announcement, which turns out to be exactly right.

Take a moment, get your guesses ready, because the answer is…

A robot with an arrow through it.

Yeah. I don’t see it either. When I saw it I thought ‘poorly-drawn key’. What did you think?

Based on the etching they assume the bomber is a crazed anti-technology nut. They find a few other instances of people destroying computers, and peg the bomber as a member of the FFT(Freedom From Technology) Brigade, a hot new domestic terrorist group. They know it’s the same guy because in one of his notes at another crime scene he left this far clearer picture:

Now that’s what a robot with an arrow in it looks like!

The ream offers their profile, which boils down to ‘he’s a lot like the unabomber’. Then the bomber calls, and identifies himself as Allegro. Then he blows up a gas station!

But it’s not as impressive as the gas station explosion from Robocop.

But then again, what could be? (Photo courtesy of Randy Fife’s website)

Where was I? Oh, right. Criminal Minds. Sorry, I get carried away with Robocop sometimes. The team heads out to the newest explosion site and look for the manifesto that he announced that he was going to leave there. Flipping through it reveals that the bomber wants them to get rid of all technology immediately, or he’ll keep going up. So obviously he’s completely nuts.

Reid remembers a helpful piece of information at this point (you’ll notice he does that a lot…), namely that ‘Allegro’ was the main character of a dystopian sci-fi novel from the 80s about a young boy who fights against the robots who have taken over the world! Which means that the bomber thinks he’s living out the book!

A more concrete lead comes when they notice that one of the people on the bus was a cutting edge computer scientist. After bringing him in they discover that not only is he the exact kind of person that the bomber wants to kill, but that he’s also a friend of the person who wrote the inspirational book! The writer’s name is Ursula Kent, and she also teaches in Seattle! What a happy coincidence… or is it?

It’s not. Obviously the bomber is obsessed with the book, and has come to Seattle to stalk the author. For some reason the scientist refuses to accept the idea that he’s clearly the target of the bombing, and refuses FBI protection. He’s blown up something like six seconds later, getting out of his car on campus.

We’ll later discover that the bomb worked by arming when you sat down on the seat, and detonating when you stood up again. But he blew up after driving back to the university from the FBI building – doesn’t that mean that the bomb would have had to have been planted inside the FBI’s parking garage? How on earth would the bomber have managed that?

Somehow I doubt we’ll ever get an answer to that one. Other than bad writing, I mean.

While decoy bombs start turning up all over the city Mandy and Reid head over to the university to interview the author. She doesn’t understand how her work could have inspired a killer, but she’s got a necklace in the shape of the robot with an arrow through it! She announces that she always wore it in class, meaning that the bomber must be one of her students, or at least someone who audited a class! She starts reading the manifesto, hoping to recognize the writing as belonging to one of her students.

She doesn’t come up with a name right away, but she does let the team know about another pro-technology lecturer who lectures at her class every year. They’re able to get to the woman before she’s blown up, but not before sitting down in her car. This leads to one of those tense bomb-disarming sequences as the FBI tries to save her life. Rather ridiculously Derek elects to stay with the lecturer while she’s getting out of the car.

Look, I know it’s heroic and all, but you staying by the car doesn’t change whether the bomb disposal was successful at all. Either they get it out safely, or they don’t. The only thing you accomplish by sticking around is to make it possible for the bomber to kill three people rather than two.

Not really seeing the heroism there.

Back at the uni the author claims she doesn’t recognize anything about the manifesto’s writing. Of course she’s lying, but it’s not immediately clear why. What is immediately clear is that the team is unbelievably stupid for leaving her alone at the office – the bomber has killed her two friends, and is basically stalking her. Just hang around the woman and eventually he’s going to turn up.

Somehow this doesn’t occur to them until Reid goes over the plot of the book, which ends with the main character killing his mother.

Gee, you don’t think that’s something you could have mentioned earlier?

We’re rushing to the end now, so let’s move along. Bomber thinks that he’s author’s long-lost child that she gave up for adoption, and the book was a message to him. Author drops the bombshell that the child she gave up was a daughter. Whoops.

The team tries to shoot him, but the author jumps into the bullet, feeling guilty about inspiring the whole killing spree. The episode ends without us discovering whether she dies from her injuries or not.

Also unrevealed – just how Allegro managed to plant a carbomb inside the FBI parking garage. They mentioned that they were going to check the surveillance tapes, and then hoped we’d forget about it.

Just like that god-damned sniper.

I’m gradually reaching the conclusion that in many fundamental ways this is not a well-written television show.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Not particularly. The clue that cracked the case was Reid’s ability to remember the plot of a sci-fi novel he read as a child. None of their profiling of the suspect turned out to be accurate, nor did it help them catch the bomber.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

If one of the cops had read the novel, yes.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 – It was yet another Criminal Minds special this week – showing them catching a serial bomber by having him not be a serial bomber at all. By now I’m used to the show copping out whenever they attempt to address a complex, difficult to solve crime – that’s kind of a given. What’s more puzzling to me is that this is the second time they’ve copped out in this specific way, by which I mean making it seem like they’ll have to track down a crazed bomber, only to have it turn out to be a guy with a specific, easy-to-quantify motive who just happens to use bombs as his weapon.

Does this mean we can look forward to more not-snipers in the future?

Criminal Minds FACT CHECK:

From the bombs to the anti-technology falderal, this was pretty clearly intended as CM’s Unabomber riff. And since the first episode of this show bragged about how the BSU profiled the Unabomber, let’s take a look at the real case, shall we?

Ted Kaczynski was an incredibly intelligent man who attended Harvard at age 16, obtaining a degree in mathematics. During his time there he participated in a CIA-funded study that involved attempts to break him down psychologically, and he was so unhinged by these experiments that he would eventually toss aside his career, become a survivalist, and wage war against the technology that he believed was going to be used to completely control mankind.

I wonder what he’d say about that new iPhone ap that lets everyone know where your phone is at all times…

Anyhoo, the point is that he started trying to attack university officials and airlines by planting and mailing bombs, hence the name University and Airline BOMBER. You know, I had no idea where the name came from until I looked it up just now.

The Mindhunter (John Douglas) profile correctly judged that the UNABOMBER would likely be a university graduate in science who had turned against technology. While this was fairly accurate, it was utterly useless in catching the guy for the 16 years after it was made.

So how was he finally caught? Well it seems that Ted had a little brother named David, and David had a wife who always thought that Ted was really, really creepy. Seeing stories about the Unabomber in the news she’d told David that Ted was probably the guy, but he refused to believe her. It was only after the Unabomber manifesto was published and David recognized the writing as being suspiciously similar to some of Ted’s anti-technology screeds from the 70s that he finally came to agree with his wife’s instincts.

So that’s how they caught the Unabomber. On Monday they had absolutely no idea who he was. On Tuesday a guy phoned up and told them who he was. On Wednesday he was arrested.

Profiling, as usual, did not play a role.

The Eleventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2010-02-23T01:32:00.005-05:00

This is what was wrong with Inglorious Bastards. At no point in the movie did someone fly a plane low enough that its propeller decapitated a German Officer.

Just putting that out there.

Although, technically, that's Commando Yank's 'GyroSub', and not actually an airplane.

Criminal Minds 207: North Mammon

2010-02-19T03:02:00.000-05:00

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Criminal minds tried to get in on the whole torture porn thing. I mean, they’re kind of a horror-themed show, right?

In this case, it’s a situation where three girls are kidnapped on the night of a sleepover, which happens to be on the exact same night as a pep rally! But who’s done it? And why did they live in a town with the preposterous name of North Mammon? Why not just move down the road to Greed City, TN?

Okay, girls grabbed from a sleepover – not exactly Saw territory, I know, but believe me, it’s going somewhere. And that somewhere is in a small underground concrete chamber with adequate ventilation. The killer opens a vent to talk to them – and he wants to play a game! The rules are simple: If they do nothing, then they’ll all die of dehydration. But if one of them is murdered by the other two, those two get to leave!

Yeah, it’s one of those moral quandry deals. And one of them has a bad cold that’s going to turn into pneumonia what with her being buried alive and all, so it’s just a question of who’s go the guts to kill who?

I’m obviously not going to cover their bickering and scheming in detail – what would be the point? So look forward to not hearing about the girls until the ironic twist part of the proceedings.

Back at home base we discover that JJ has some connection to the missing girls. Her aunt knows one of their mothers, and called in a favor. It seems that no one knows they’re missing, because they were forced to leave suspiciously identical messages on their parents’ answering machines, claiming that they were leaving on a road trip.

They’ve been missing for five days, and the phone message said they’d be back on Friday, meaning that whatever’s going to happen, it’s going to happen over the next two days. When they get to town they find the local authorities are a little skeptical about the missing children – we also learn the importance of that coming Friday – it’s the big state championship football game, which the pep rally the previous Saturday was for!

The team checks the crime scene and goes to talk to the parents, one of whom is mysteriously missing and no one can find. The show them moves into generic ‘secrets of a small town’ mode, where Mayberry turns out to have a dark underbelly. All the girls play soccer, and were therefore ignored by their families because it’s primarily a football town. In a note that’s sufficiently pointless to necessitate it being vitally important later on, they mention that the sheriff was a football star back in the day.

Two more important clues turn up almost immediately – a bunch of cigarette butts are found across the street from the kidnap house, and the girls’ car turns up abandoned in a lot. During the briefing of the cops and parents the missing father finally turns up, and beligerently demands to know what’s going on. JJ takes him aside, and the briefing continues. They point out that twisted abductors who set aside areas to contian their victims are incredibly good at concealing their hiding places. They mention John Jamelske, a Syracuse man who built a rape dungeon, which is all well and good, but did they have to accompany the explanation with this image?

Seriously, we know that’s not what’s happening to the girls, so how is it illustrative of the sitation or helpful at all?

Okay, moving right along, we learn two important things – one, the missing dad has run off, and two, the cigarette butts belonged to a soccer coach. The disperate threads dovetail together nicely when the missing dad bludgeons the soccer coach with a tire iron.

It seems that the coach had statutorily raped a 17-year-old some years back, and the missing dad, a lawyer, had gotten the charges dropped. So naturally he assumes the soccer coach must be the killer. The cigarettes are pretty good evidence, especially because they’re popular fake cigarette brand ‘Morelys’, like the ones that the Cigarette Smoking Man and dozens of other characters have smoked over the years.

Meanwhile a garbage man turns up one of the soccer uniforms in a motel dumpster just outside of town.

The team collects it and immediately lets the garbage man go. Despite the fact that they just got finished telling the police that the killer would likely insinuate himself into the investigation somehow. And what could be a bigger insinuation than coming forward with the miraculous discovery of a key piece of evidence?

Yeah, garbage man’s pretty much got to be the killer at this point.

But since we’re not going to skip ahead twenty minutes, let’s look at the evidence that was just handed to them on a silver platter. It seems that staying at that very motel until just recently was missing dad, who hides out there for a few weeks each year being a secret gay guy. In another key note, both he and the soccer coach also played high school football with the sheriff.

So now, in addition to kidnapping the girls, the killer is planting evidence designed to implicate missing gay dad and soccer coach in the crimes. But what could they have in common that leads to them being targeted?

Oh, right, they all played high school football together. Right. So, how long will it take the team to figure that one out?

They get all three families into a room, and none of them have anything useful to offer. Instead they just snipe at each other about their various personal problems. Meanwhile the killer is letting two girls out of the bombs shelter he’d kept them in. But which two?

I’ll give you a hint – one was nice, one was dying of pneumonia, and one was a total bitch, who was trying to convince the nice one to help her kill the dying one, since she had the least chance of surviving, anyways.

Ready with your guesses?

Yup, the bitch wanted to kill sicky, and while she was trying to convince nice girl to go along with her plan, sicky gathered just enough strength to murder bitch first.

So that’s all wrapped up, and all we’re left with is the identity of the killer. I mean, obviously we all know it’s the garbage man, but how are they going to figure it out?

After one of the parents clues in to the football connection the girls are able to pick the garbage man out of an old team photo. It seems that the garbage man had been on the championship team twenty years earlier, and an injury had ruined his career and destroyed his life. He blamed the other members of the team for his problems, feeling that they’d turned their backs on him.

When they arrest the garbage man he pulls the old ‘I never touched them, so I didn’t commit murder’ sophistry that’s so popular in the Saw franchise. Of course from a legal standpoint he did, in fact commit murder by putting them down there and telling them to kill each other, and since kidnapping is punishable by the death penalty, it really doesn’t matter whether he swung the hammer at all.

According to the garbage man he was just trying to show everyone how secretly vicious people are, going through lives just pretending to be decent. I’m not sure how this was supposed to be a controversial message – it’s pretty much common knowledge that if someone has the choice between killing another person or dying that they’re going to kill that person, isn’t it?

The episode ends with some more character stuff, this time about JJ’s background. The gist is that she’s happy to manage the team, and has no interest in becoming a profiler.

Yeah, I don’t care either.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

They in no way solved the crime. So no.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Again, the crime was not solved in this episode. The killer won, then let the girls go, and they just said who did it.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

0/10 – Yup. I’m going there. By dint of them not actually solving the case, I’m calling the profiling team’s involvement a total failure.

Hell, by not adhering to rule god-damn 1 of criminal profiling “Investigate anyone who helps out with the case”, they basically got that girl killed. After all, if the garbage man had been in an interview room he never could have given the girls the hammer that was used in the murder, and a simple search of his house would have turned them up.

God, these people are awful at their jobs, aren’t they? I can’t decide whether it’s daring or terrible that Criminal Minds is basically a show about cops who aren’t any good at catching murderers.

If this was a little more overwrought I could almost buy it as a CSI:Miami-style ‘secret comedy’.

Final Destination 4: The Final Destination

2010-02-15T01:46:00.012-05:00

You know, when I was working on the reviews of the last three movies I gradually developed a theory that the premonitions that led people to escape their imminent deaths were being by the Ghost of Murder, solely for the purpose of his own amusement – he’s got infinite chances to kill them after all, and as only the sickest of hunters will tell you, hunting is far more pleasurable when your prey knows that they’re going to die.

It was intended as nothing more than a joke about the series’ baffling lack of an identifiable antagonist, or really any drama of any kind. Ever since the first movie it’s been a foregone conclusion that every character would die in the end – even 2’s happy ending was apparently undone in the supplemental material on part 3’s DVD, although I haven’t actually watched it to check. Tony Todd’s lines about death having a plan, and the crackpot with a book at the beginning of 2 were as close as the series ever came to giving ‘death’ a personality – the rather thin idea that ‘Death’ has a specific plan for when all living creatures were going to die, and that if you see that plan you can avoid it, at least until Death circles back around. This explanation seemed a little on the idiotic side, especially when you consider that it in no way explains the premonitions people received.

So I thought it would be funny to refer to ‘The Ghost of Murder’, a malicious spirit who arranges tragedies, then warns people about them through signs and premonitions – explaining that he was like a cat that lets a mouse go over and over just so he can catch him again and again.

Little did I know that FD4 would, whether it was intentional or not, go on to confirm my suspicions about the Ghost of Murder in their entirety. So, without any further ado, let’s take a look at Final Destination 4: The Final Destination!

I wonder, if the Final Destination series continues (and I can’t see why it wouldn’t – absurdly, FD4 was the highest-grossing entry), will this be remembered as the entry where they formally declared they were doing away with things like ‘character’ and ‘plot’, and just devoted themselves entirely to gore setpieces.

The film’s opening certainly makes a persuasive argument that they’re going in this direction. Absolutely no time is wasted getting to know anyone – the main characters are introduced as they sit down to watch the NASCAR event that will quickly lead to disaster, and we barely even get a chance to learn their names before the bloodshed begins in earnest.

Hell, I’m not even going to bother listing their names here, since I’ve already forgotten them, but for the sake of clarity I’ll put their pictures up so you’ll know who I’m talking about:

(From right to left – Guy, Gal, Friend, Douche)

The carnage starts just seven minutes in, and I’m happy to announce that, this time, they didn’t cheat with the accident. As in the first movie it occurs without input from the main cast, and exactly the same whether they’re present for it at all.

I’ll give the movie this – they know how to use digital gore to great effect. From the opening tire-beheading-

(you may be wondering why that tire isn’t slamming into Gal and Friend right now, despite them being directly in its path. Good question.)

To the sundering of the racist couple by… um, the giant buzzsaws they keep in cars, I guess-

All the way to the hilarious 3D chest stabbing, the sequence is hilariously violent.

Which makes this a good time to point out that this film series has basically converted into comedy at this point. It’s a gradual process that begin with the final sequence of Final Destination 2, in which the scene of a mother being confronted with the severed, burning arm of her dead son is played for laughs-

The series has been dedicated to showing the lighter side of horrible human tragedy. Although that’s not technically what they’re doing, I suppose – actually they’re dehumanizing people to the point that we can laugh at their disgusting demises, rather than being horrified or saddened by their pain and suffering.

Which is why the characters’ reactions to being the few survivors of a tragedy have gone from providing the emotional core of the first film, to being given a slight nod in the second and third films, to not even coming up this time around.

Seriously, everyone in this movie goes right on with their lives as if nothing at all has happened to them – and this film doesn’t even take place over a long period of time the way the first and third films did – as far as I can tell, other than the ending, the whole thing takes place within the confines of a single week.

Anyhow, Guy gets the message from the Ghost of Murder and leads a variety of people outside – in addition his three friends there’s the Mechanic and his woulda-been-beheaded girlfriend, racist guy, and black security guard. They’re shocked and don’t believe Guy’s claims that he had a vision, right up until his yells are interrupted by the crashed car’s other front wheel, which flies down out of the heavens and beheads the same woman that its brother would have in the original timeline.

There, with the twitching body on the ground signalling our first obvious comedy edit of the night, the film finally cuts to its opening credits, 11 minutes into the proceedings.

Oy. Thank god there’s only an hour left in this thing.

No, you’re not reading that wrong. FD4 clocks in at a just-under-feature-length 76 minutes when the ending credits roll, and that’s only if I give them the ridiculously self-congratulatory opening credits sequence, which offers up X-Ray recreations of some of the series’ most memorable kills during its 90 second runtime.

You know what’s great about this sequence? Just how many times it gets the fatal injuries from the earlier films wrong. Here they are, in the the order they appeared-

That’s Yuppie from part 2 getting a jagged PVC pipe in the head. But take a look at her actual death-

And you can clearly see that it was coming from a completely different angle – the sequence also shows it flying through a window and impaling her, but part 2 took a more circuitous, and far stupider, route to that impalement.

Then, after a few choice kills from part 3, a power drill shows up-

Even though, insanely, a power drill has never been featured in any of the series’ kills. Which, even as I type it out, seems crazy.

Then we take a trip back to the first film, with Stifler’s half-beheading-

Which is depicted as being above the mouth, when it actually cut his head off at exactly mid-mouth level-

You know, it’s quite possible that this is the nit-pickiest thing I’ve ever done. Huh. But again, I’d just like to put it out there that there were people being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate 3D CGI animated versions of these character deaths, and they failed to do so.

Hell, at one point they realized that building a 3D model of a van and barbed wire and then having them explode and fly (respectively) would be too difficult, so they just used footage from the actual film-

With a ‘X-Ray’ filter put on top of it to make it match the rest of the footage. It doesn’t, though.

Then things get even weirder when, instead of just filtering footage from the actual movie’s kill-

Or creating a full-body skeleton and showing the barbed-wire hit it, they shot new footage of a different guy wearing different clothes, having a different (not arm and hand-severing) injury happening to him-

Now that’s just weird. Did they not want to use footage of the previous film because they didn’t want to have to pay that actor again? Could anyone be that cheap?

Also, take a look at those posts behind the new dead guy-

I’m getting so hard-core into this pointing-out of flaws that I can’t help but notice that in the actual footage the Druggie was standing perpendicular to the line of fenceposts, rather than directly in front of them.

Wow, I just totally topped my greatest nit-picking excess ever. Hell, this incoherent, poorly-designed image is only onscreen for like half a second.

Oh, and when they do get around to shows a closeup of that severed arm, it’s the wrong one-

Yeah, that’s his right arm being cut off, where the left one was severed in the movie.

Damn, this is too hardcore. Let’s move on to the actual movie.

Like the filmmakers before me, I’m going to forgo all of the character stuff, and just let you know that the friends meet up at their local coffee shop, and while Guy and Gal want to go to the memorial at the track, Friend and Douche do not.

Also of note in this scene? The following has been gouged into Guy’s regular table-

At this point you may wonder ‘Is the Ghost of Murder now resorting to defacing tables in order to leave his cruel clues?’ The answer, as we will learn a little later in the film, is yes.

Anyhoo, over at the memorial the film’s ‘plot’ gets rolling, as we discover that the racist guy blames the guard for his wife’s death, because the guard wouldn’t let him run back to certain death while attempting to save her. The racist decides that he’s going to get back at the guard the only way he knows how – by burning a cross on the guard’s lawn.

Seriously.

You know, I’ve always wondered how someone can carry a cross on their back to one of these things without pausing to wonder ‘Hey – what do you think Jesus might think of the thing I’m doing right now?’ I’m guessing he’d be against it.

Oh, and did I mention that the guard was black earlier? If not, he is. I guess the cross might seem confusing if that wasn’t clear.

The Ghost of Murder doesn’t truck with racists, of course, so he sets the racist’s tow truck rolling along, spilling gasoline, dragging a hook behind. Racist gets caught in the hook and set on fire, then killed in the explosion. It’s kind of a ‘phone-in’ death, as far as the Ghost is concerned, actually. Not a lot of cleverness there.

The next morning Guy and Gal hear about the racist’s death on the news. Note that the guy is fully dressed, while gal is – entirely gratuitously – in her underwear.

Ah, movies.

Guy and gal are creeped out by the news – mostly because guy had a dream the night before about elements suggesting the death. And then he has another vision right away, giving him clues about how the mom is going to die!

Right – I didn’t mention the Mom before, did I? Well, she was saved from the car accident as well. I didn’t bring it up because she dies in another one of the series’ patented ‘Screw You, Audience’ kills. You know, the ones where the Ghost of Murder goes to ridiculous lengths to almost kill someone, and then they’re murdered after that near-death by a completely unrelated set of circumstances.

This one’s even more preposterous than the dentist’s office from part 2 – A woman is getting her hear done and the Ghost of murder sabotages a chair, loosens a ceiling fan, and slides a can of hairspray into a flat iron so that it will explode, dropping a surprisingly sharp fan-

Absolutely nowhere near the mom. You can see the picture for yourself – the mom and hairdresser are exactly where they were while cutting hair. And even if mom hadn’t spun in the chair, that ceiling fan wasn’t going to land anywhere near her. So why did the Ghost of Murder pull all of that random crap? To frustrate the audience while waiting for the ‘screw you’ death of having a rock thrown through her eye by a lawnmower.

It’s supposed to be extra-funny because the scene begun with some kids throwing the rocks into the field that would later kill their mother. Funny because of the lifetime of therapy that results from seeing your parent brutally killed in front of you.

With a second person dead Guy and Gal see the pattern, and decide to bring Friend and Douche in on their theory. They even have a sheaf of papers that they printed off after doing a google search for the term ‘Final Destination’.

It seems that, as the second and third films suggested, this is a pretty well-known phenomenon in the world of Final Destination. It’s a nice bit of continuity that gets stomped all over when Guy follows up the death sentence with ‘Some say the chain can be broken.’

Um… who says that? Considering that in every documented case of this thing happening, every single person involved died? The only possible explanation is that the Ghost of Murder is putting some alternate theories out there because he knows full well that it’s more entertaining when people die desperately clinging to life rather than accepting mortality’s stark inevitability.

So who’s next on the hit list? Guy and Gal head out to the race track in hopes of helping him remember the order of death. There they run into the security guard, who’s surprisingly willing to go along with their crazy plan to thwart death. We, the audience, on the other hand, are treating all of this ‘thwarting death’ stuff with barely-contained contempt, since we know that they can’t possibly get out of this alive.

Guy figures out that the Mechanic is next, and they head over to his place of work. It’s at this point that the film proudly displays that, along with its other shortcomings, it doesn’t have the slightest familiarity with how physics work.

We’ll give films a lot of credit in their presentation of science we don’t understand. Especially where explosions are concerned. Take, for example, the sundering moment I screencapped above – now, logically I know that there’s no way a car can explode that would send its hood spinning, completely intact, at a nearly flat trajectory. But we saw an explosion, and when explosions happen, bad-ass things follow close behind, plausibility be damned.

But there’s acceptable suspension of disbelief – say, the kind that allows you to believe that an exploding van could perfectly detach two fenceposts and throw them (once again at a completely flat trajectory) while keeping two lengths of barbed wire between them so that they can cut a man to pieces, rather than wrapping around him and tearing his flesh apart – and then there’s preposterous contrivance on the part of the writers.

I’m watching a Final Destination movie, the fourth one, in point of fact, so obviously I’m fine with the idea of the Ghost of Murder manipulating small details of the environment in order to elaborately kill people in the cruellest, bloodiest way possible. What the Ghost of Murder can’t do, on the other hand, is completely alter the way the entire world works in order to allow his hilarious murders to take place.

Only the writers can do that, and even then, only the terrible writers.

First off, there’s the fact that, instead of a chain-link fence outside, the garage has the kind of real thing that totally exists in real life-

A criss-cross of razor sharp metal slats. Gee. Wonder how the mechanic’s going to buy it, huh?

Before we move on to the murder, though, I will offer that this is the one scene where the film attempts to create ‘character’, as the guard explains that his wife and daughter were killed because he crashed their care while driving drunk. It puts him and his character completely out of place among all of the mannequins that populate the film, which is largely about watching people getting diced into cubes (IN 3D!).

But back to the death – the Ghost of Murder makes a cable spool release, which sends a van rolling down a ramp towards mechanic – but the line goes taut just in time!

The Mechanic is saved! At least until the film decides that it’s forgotten the basics of reality. You see, just as the mechanic steps out from behind the van the spool breaks off, flies through the air-

And smacks into a compressed-gas tank, which-

Hold on a second… how did the spool wind up flying through the air? What force was being placed on it that caused it to rocket like that? The van is rolling down the ramp, and then stopped suddenly as the cable ran out – that moment, when the van’s momentum was suddenly halted by the spool, was the absolute high point of force being exerted on the cable. Had it broken just then, the spool would doubtless have been sent flying.

It didn’t, though – it broke off ten seconds later, when basically no force was being exerted on the spool. The van was at a dead stop, sitting on relatively flat ground, and the cable – being steel – doesn’t stretch and therefore stores no potential energy that it could use to whip the spool around were it a bungee.

This is science so basic that even I know it: take a piece of wire and give one end to a friend, then both pull on it. If you let go, the friend’s hand will jerk back, and the wire will whip towards it. Tie that same piece of wire to a nail on a wall, and you can pull as hard as you like, when you let go of that piece of wire, it’s just going to fall. That’s the situation we’re presented with in the film, and yet we’re asked to believe that a hundred-pound steel spool will be tossed around a room by no energy at all.

God-damn, is this a stupid movie.

Oh, right, the death. Let’s get a look at that.

As anyone could predict, they were just so excited to be ripping off Cube that they didn’t really care about the details leading up to the death.

Do you think that in the script it said that he was pushed through a chain-link fence, and then later someone noticed how stupid it was, but instead of rethinking the scene they just said ‘Ah, screw it, it’s a razor-slat fence – those happen, don’t they?’

Even more contemptuous of reality is the next scene, which is part of a first for the series: simultaneous deaths planned by the Ghost of Murder to kill two people at the same time in different locations. Even wondered how the Ghost of Murder works the timing when a giant slab of concrete falls on two people at once in the original timeline? Wonder no further – friend gets attacked in a car wash, while douche is trapped at the bottom of a pool.

Let’s look at the Friend’s preposterous brush with death, being trapped in her car as it goes through a car wash. First off, I can accept that the Ghost of Murder can screw with her car’s electronics, locking her inside it as it fills with water from a pipe that he also tampers with. That’s just how the ghost of murder rolls.

What I can’t accept is how the whole scene kicks off, with a roller knocking the antenna off of Friend’s SUV into the circuit breaker, causing the car wash’s machinery to malfunciton. Here’s a picture of that happening:

An explosion launching a flag so that it will act as a spear? Sure, why not? A regular not-at-all-waterproofed-even-if-it-was-closed circuit box set on the wall in a room designed specifically to splash water everywhere? The Ghost of Murder has a lot of powers – forcing an architect and contractor to do god-awful work five years earlier is not one of them.

Again, only the writer has that power.

You know, the filmmakers can put these characters into any situations that the budget will allow. It’s not like plausibility is an issue for them. We, the Final Destination-watching audience, expect them to come up with weird and interesting ways for these murders to happen. If you can’t come up with an interesting, way for someone to get killed in a garage or car wash without preposterously rewriting reality to arrange it, then just don’t set a scene there.

You’re obviously not able to write hard enough, so next time around maybe have the characters work at places that will be a little easier to arrange creative deaths in. Like a chainsaw factory. Or an acid storage warehouse.

Then again, I’m not even sure if the imminent death that was planned for Friend was even possible – she got her head trapped out the top of a sun roof, and was moving towards a roller:

Yeah, there’s a metal bar in there somewhere, but is it really low enough that it would hit her face?

Friend is actually saved from finding out how plausible her death was by gal and guard (guy went to the pool to look for Douche) pushing her SUV back with their pickup. This causes the Ghost of Murder to temporarily skip her, so let’s move on to the far more plausible, but stupid-for-other-reasons death of the Douche. After having sex with a random woman (the film series had been notoriously low on breasts up until this point, just the tanning twins in 3 and this gratuitous sex scene keeping fans of nudity happy) he accidentally turns a pool’s drainage pump on and then dives in, looking for the lucky coin he dropped.

The Ghost of Murder then supercharges the drain so that it’s capable of tearing the cover away-

So when Douche swims over it, he’s sucked down and stuck to the drain, which proceeds to suck his guts out through his anus. This is the standard FD kill – a normal situation has, with a little help from the Ghost of Murder, been transformed into a deathtrap.

And what were the reasons for me calling it ‘stupid’ earlier? Ah, well it seems that Douche dives into the water at 47:25 and gets stuck almost immediately – but then he’s struggling and fully awake right up until the suction kills him at 49:50. So yeah, I don’t believe he could hold his breath that long, especially not on a casual dive into a pool.

Okay, let’s give the film the benefit of the doubt, and assume that whenever the film cut over to the car wash time was standing still for the douche. Even discounting that minute and a half, Douche spends an entire minute onscreen and under water, all the time thrashing about and spewing bubbles.

How on earth was he still conscious?

With half of their friends dead it’s time for more soul-searching. The guard, again being the only character to have one, announces that either the chain has been broken, or he’s going to die next. In either event, he’s prepared for it, and heads home to kill himself.

Guy and Gal head home to go the Alex route and death-proof their apartment, just in case the plot of the film continues.

You know what’s great about that picture? They’re not throwing the knives out, they’re just taping them together and covering them with cardboard. Because, you know, if it turns out the Ghost of Murder is done with them they don’t want to have to go to the all the trouble of buying new knives.

It’s at this point in the film that, once and for all, the movie announces that the Ghost of Murder is the one sending these signs to the main characters, expressly for the purpose of making them run around frantically and get killed off in entertaining ways. How can I be absolutely sure of this fact? While they’re sitting on the couch, relaxing and hoping to dodge the whole ‘being killed’ thing, the Ghost of Murder knocks over a cup of coffee, which stains all but five words on a newspaper:

“Through…Action…they were saved”. This is the sign that motivates them to run over to Guard’s house and check on him, believing that they’ve saved everyone’s life by rescuing friend, and hoping to catch him before he kills himself.

But before we get to the results of their quest, let’s analyze this key moment in the film, since it defines both the Ghost of Murder’s character, and proves that he’s the one sending the messages to Guy, and all the previous clairvoyant main characters.

Q1 - How can we be sure that the Ghost of Murder knocked over the coffee cup?

A1 – The coffee cup is knocked over by a sudden mysterious gust of wind, which also picks up Gal’s hair and clothes-

Despite the fact that the windows are behind her, and closed. This ‘mysterious gust of wind’ is the most common way that the ghost of murder operates, followed closely by ‘unscrewing something inside a machine’. Across the entire length of the series that ‘mysterious gust of wind’ has always acted as short form for – the Ghost of Murder is at work.

Q2 – Is the message intended to help the characters?

A2 – Clearly it isn’t, because the message is a lie. The entire point of the last three films has been that nothing can save you once the Ghost of Murder sets his sights on taking you down.

Q3 – So why does the Ghost of Murder send the message?

A3 – Because the absolute last the the Ghost of Murder wants is to have two people on his hit list sitting on a couch in a stab-proof apartment. The Ghost of Murder loves to cause obscenely brutal deaths, and nothing incredibly gross is going to happen to them in that apartment. So what does the Ghost of Murder do? Whatever it takes to get them out of the apartment, running around and trying to save themselves – it’s obviously more fun to kill them in this state, and he has access to so many toys to do it with!

Think of the Ghost of Murder like a duck hunter – Ducks are simple, docile creatures. If all you wanted to do was kill a few ducks it would be easy enough to point a gun at them as they swim slowly across a pond and pull the trigger. But the duck hunter sees no sport in that – they know that the only way to find fun in murdering a duck is if the duck is terrfied and trying to escape its fate. So the hunter sends a message (by dog or rock) to startle the ducks and gets them flying for safety, then murders them as they flee.

Because that’s more entertaining.

Likewise, the Ghost of Murder sees no sport in killing a pair of immobile stupes. He wants them frantically running about in all directions like chickens. And then he cuts their heads off.

With all that in mind, what could this scene possibly mean other than that the ghost of murder is a dick who’s impatiently awaiting the gore scenes to come in the last half hour of the film?

Which, come to think of it, is something he and the audience have in common.

So they rush over to the guard’s house and discover that, in a callback to part 2, he’s completely incapable of killing himself. Pills won’t work, his car won’t start, and they arrive in time to pull him out of his noose. Weirdly the characters interpret this as proof that the chain has been broken, and that they’re from the Ghost of Murder’s plans. I’m not sure why they do this (how does being off an evil ghost’s hit list make you immune to suicide?), but we in the audience naturally know better, since we’re intimately familiar with the rule that you absolutely cannot kill yourself out of order when the Ghost of Murder’s got you on his list. Which must mean that, despite their best guesses, there’s someone else on the list before the guard.

They don’t think the situation through, though, so the film jumps a couple of days forwards, giving guy and gal time to impulsively decide to head off on a trip to Europe. Gal and Friend go to a movie at the mall while Guy handles some last-minute planning. Which means it’s time for another clue about who’s going to die next, and how. The vision is kicked off by a fake European guidebook (the cleverly-named ‘Europe by the Book’) falling open to a telling image:

Hold on a second, why is there a picture of a person drowning in a travel guide? That picture doesn’t even have a title explaining what it is. The vision shows dripping water, blood splattering, and a caduceus (or snake-staff, if you prefer). Since those clues are far too vague to be useful the Ghost of Murder also flips on the television, letting guy know the identity of the person who’s about to die – another survivor from the disaster who’s just been identified now that he’s come out of his coma!

Wait, it was common knowledge that there was another survivor from the disaster? How come we haven’t heard about this before? Their exhaustive googling didn’t turn this up?

Guy and guard rush over to the hospital, hoping to save this mysterious survivor. It goes exactly as well as you’d think.

The idea was that a hydrotherapy tub upstairs had overflown, which caused it to weaken the floor and fall through. Because it’s entirely plausible that a hospital’s floor (especially in the hydrotherapy room) would be made of things that water would weaken, like wood and plaster, and not, you know, concrete.

Amazingly, though, that idiotically contrived death isn’t the stupidest thing about this death. You see, the mystery victim notices that water is leaking onto him in his bed, so he strenuously crawls out of it, hoping to escape, and winds up moving to the very spot the tub was going to land on! Hilarious, right?

Except for one profoundly stupid thing – where was he crawling to? Here’s the guy in his bed as water drips from above-

Now he’s climbing off the left side of his bed.

And here he is crawling across the floor.

Please note the conveniently-placed door just to the right of the bed. You’d think someone trying to reach safety might be headed for that door, wouldn’t you? Especially one who only knows that water is leaking down, and not that a giant metal tub is going to come crashing through the ceiling, which, again, is made entirely out of paper-mache.

But he’s not headed for the door. He must be crawling for something important, though, right? Like maybe there’s an open door over there, and he was worrying about being able to reach the much-closer-door’s handle?

Nope. It’s a flat wall.

So why was he crawling in that direction? Ah, right – terrible writing. For a moment there I guess I forgot what movie I was watching. Sorry.

The film reaches new depths of stupidy just moments later when, despite the fact that they know Guard is the next to die, they take no effort to protect him or look out for possible ways the Ghost of Murder might be out to get him. Which leads to outright theft-

I know the filmmakers might claim that this is a reference or homage to an earlier film, but that’s just not accurate – the 3D X-Ray callbacks that played under the credits serve that purpose. This is just theft.

More to the point, though, what’s an ambulance doing going thirty miles an hour in a hospital parking lot? With no siren?

Now that we’re down to three remaining cast members it’s time to enter… endgame.

Guy rushes to the mall, hoping to rescue Friend and Gal from an as-yet-unknown fate. The two women are attending a 3D action movie, which gives the filmmakers a chance to show off some of the joke posters that people love to print up for sets-

The other one is really obvious, but is ‘Death Fist’ a parody of something? A Van Damme movie, maybe? It reminds me of the Lionheart poster a little, but I’m guessing that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So what could possibly happen in a theatre that would get people killed? It seems that they’re building some new screens, and when the guys break for lunch one working with coke-bottle glasses leaves his specs on a table. This allows the Ghost of Murder to use a gust of wind to move the tarp covering some closed windows – the sun shines in and focuses through the lenses, setting a pile of sawdust on fire. The fire quickly spreads along a path of paint thinner over to the, uh…

Barrels of rocket fuel that malls keep stacked in all construction areas.

Confession time – I’ve never worked any kind of construction site (shocking, right?), but seriously, what the hell are those barrels for?

Hell, at this point in the construction process they’re still cutting lumber and building walls and supports – why would there even be cans of paint and paint thinner there?

It’s benefit of the doubt time, I guess – let’s just assume the construction guys were also domestic terrorists planning to build a bomb, and all the jet fuel (and paint) was somehow an integral part of their scheme.

While Gal and Friend sit in the movie theatre, watching a fake action film (which features a bridge explosion that I think is from ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’), Guy runs from screen to screen, looking for them. In the film’s only slightly clever sequence Gal intuits that something is wrong when she notices that the people all around her are analogs to the victims at the NASCAR crash! Just then Guy runs in and warns her about his vision – there’s going to be an explosion! Gal’s happy to leave, but Friend is having none of it – her life has been saved once, and she’s sure that the whole thing is over.

And then, something completely impossible happens. As Guy and Gal flee the theatre, Friend is killed-

Only she couldn’t have been.

What’s the one god-damn rule this franchise has followed? It’s that you can’t get killed unless it’s your turn on the Ghost of Murder’s hit list. So whose turn was it?

Since Friend’s life has been saved once, that means the list currently stands at: Gal, Guy, Friend. So even if pulling Gal out of the theatre counted as her skip, it doesn’t matter, the Friend still can’t die, because it’s Guy’s turn next, not Friend’s. You might think that Guy fleeing the theatre counts as him being skipped, but no – the rule has clearly been that if you put yourself in harm’s way to save someone else and then narrowly avoid being killed, it does not count as your turn. This was covered in the first god-damn film, people. Alex nearly got killed saving Clear, but because it wasn’t his turn, the near-miss didn’t count.

Which means that it can’t possibly be Friend’s turn. Which means the filmmakers didn’t even care the slightest bit about the rules of their own franchise. Wow.

Out in the main stretch of the mall everything is falling apart because of the explosion. As Guy and Gal struggle to make it down an escalator it collapses on them, causing Gal to be dragged into the gears-

It’s at this moment that we discover that, like the end of Final Destination 3 before it, this whole theatre explosion sequence has been a new premonition that Guy was having as he walked out of the hospital. Which means he’s got time to save everyone!

Well, except for the guard – the Ghost of Murder is such a dick that he only sends the vision once they’re already crossing the street, meaning that Guy gest to watch his friend die twice. Although, thankfully, we’re spared the ordeal.

Now it’s up to Guy to save the day! But how? Simple: instead of running into the theater, he goes back into the construction area where the paint cans are, sadly, already ablaze.

Guy goes through a ridiculous ordeal that involves getting his arm nail-gunned to a wall and then manually setting off the sprinkler system with a burning stick. It’s the only sequence in the entire film that actually manages to create any drama – mostly because it’s not being edited for maximum comedic effect, but also due to the fact that we’re not sure how Guy is going to going to get out of the situation.

There’s never any danger of him dying, mind you – he’s the main character, and they either die off camera (1 and 2), or in the end-of-movie kill. Still, though, the sequence works because they actually manage to get the character into an incredibly dire situation, and then have him noodle his way out of it.

Just one brief, shining moment this film that doesn’t serve as a practical demonstration of filmmaking incompetence. Startling, right? Kind of like finding a brand new, totally unscratched CD at the bottom of a pile of garbage.

So, with the fire stopped and the disaster prevented, it’s time for the end-of-film wrapup, which is set just two weeks later – a record in briefness from the franchise, I think.

The sequence begins with Guy on the way to his local coffee shop (from the beginning of the movie, remember?) and seeing a construction scaffold that’s about to collapse.

He points out the flaw to the workers in a surprisingly genial manner, then continues into the coffee shop.

Um… why? Why isn’t he taking this as an important sign about his upcoming murder? Guy acts like his survival at the mall has moved him off the Ghost of Murder’s hit list – but how could he possibly think this?

The two possibilities, as he explained it earlier, are that the chain can be broken, saving everyone’s lives, or that the Ghost of Murder just keeps coming back over and over again until he succeeds. Well they’ve done nothing that could constitute ‘breaking the chain’, so why is he so blasé about the rickety scaffold?

He can’t possibly think that the Ghost of Murder would only take two shots at a person, because in his second premonition he saw the Ghost of Murder make a third (successful, if completely illogical) attempt on Friend’s life. Since he saved everybody at the mall, that means either he or Friend is next on the hit list, depending on how the Ghost of Murder scores his ordeal in the construction area.

Despite these obvious reasons to be nervous Guy meets up with Gal and Friend at the coffee shop and sits at their usual table, where he makes a shocking discovery.

That’s right – the Ghost of Murder scratched out the ‘It’s Coming…’ and replaced it with an ‘IT’s HERE’ – not coincidentally that exact message has been showing up in all of his premonitions. Which means that the Ghost of Murder planned for him to save all those people so that he could kill them all at this moment. And how’s he going to do that? By collapsing the scaffolding, which causes a truck to swerve-

Killing all three of them in one fell swoop, presumably in the order they were meant to die in the original timeline.

THE END

Except for a couple of things.

First off, it’s nice that the guy’s last line is him realizing that running him through the deadly rat’s maze that is his life has been the Ghost of Murder’s game all along, and that was who sent him all of the premonitions. Of course he’s stupid enough to try and explain this to Gal and Friend rather than just fleeing in terror, but that’s not a surprise, he’s never been demonstrated any particular intellect or cleverness, he’s just a guy who was, for a brief window, given the cheat codes to life, but now they’re not working any more.

The other huge question left at the end of the movie is just why the Ghost of Murder offered such an elaborate series of clues to help Guy along. Even for the notoriously dickish Ghost of Murder, two separate premonitions sent to one person is a bit of a stretch.

Unless you consider the movie theatre, and all the people who would have died in the mall had Guy not intervened. Now, the Ghost of Murder has been established as loving one thing and one thing only – sparing people’s lives just so he can make them suffer a far crueller death a little later on. In order to do this, he needs people to save those lives.

Which is exactly what guy does twice in the film. Which means that, according to the rules of this movie the Ghost of Murder is going to be coming for every single person who would have died in the mall that day.

Yeah, the next few months are going to be pretty gruesome in that unnamed American town.

Hey, do you think the filmmakers realized just how dark their ending was, or were they satisfied with killing off the main characters and never even paused to consider the five hundred other people who’d die cruel, protracted deaths soon after?

I didn’t think so either.

Oh, and what's with the absence of Tony Todd? I mean, he obviously had better things to do. But still, didn't you make an effort?

Criminal Minds 206: The Boogeyman

2010-02-12T02:57:00.000-05:00

As of the beginning of this episode Elle is still, technically, a member of the FBI. But given that everyone knows she’s a nutjob, that’s not going to last. Of course, the FBI cleared her of any culpability in the shooting, despite the fact that she was acting against orders in going to the rapist’s apartment, and no one has any idea where his gun came from.

More importantly, when Greg is ordering her into therapy and she tries to say she doesn’t need it, he doesn’t pull out the big gun – that she, whether the shooting was justified or not, created a situation where a shooting was likely to occur, and she did it for no defensible reason at all.

Elle’s headed for therapy, and off the show by the end of the hour, I’m guessing.

So, on to the plot of the episode. A bunch of kids are hanging out, listening to an older child tell a scary story about how an old man who lives in the woods killed a little boy recently. They believe the old man watches them from a haunted house atop a hill. There seems to be some truth to the story though, because while it’s being told another child is beaten to death in the woods!

My guess about Elle seems to be right on track – once we’re back from the opening credits we discover that Elle, instead of going to therapy, is on the run! Yup, we’re going to have divergent storylines this week, with Greg hunting Elle while Mandy and the team track down the killer.

He’s something of an unusual killer, it seems. Not only were the children not molested, but now the killer has murdered both boys and girls! So who could it possibly be?

There’s kind of an elephant in this room for the whole conversation, where an obvious solution is just sitting there, but no one mentions it. Which is kind of funny, since it’s generally the first place they go in any other situation: serial killers generally kill within their own general demographic group. It’s by no means a hard and fast rule, but the show has mentioned, time and again, that if you’ve got white victims, look for a white killer, black victims, a black killer. It’s not a magic solution, but it’s definitely a useful avenue of investigation.

Yet no one even considers the possibility that a child could be the killer – despite the fact that the only link between the victims is their young age, they weren’t raped so it wasn’t a child molester who didn’t want to get caught, and it’s easy for children to get close to other children without drawing attention to themselves.

So why wouldn’t this completely valid line of reasoning come up in the conversation? I can only assume that they want it to be a surprise later on when a kid turns out to be the killer.

Of course, in order to generate this surprise twist, the show must make the characters look incompetant. Luckily that’s not something the producers have a problem doing.

The teams visit the crime scenes, and then give lectures to the parents and children of the town. They warn the kids to stay in groups of at least 2, and the mother of one of the dead kids mentions that a hat was stolen from the corpse – a potential clue for later, perhaps?

A little later on the kids from the beginning are daring one of their number to ring the old man’s doorbell and then run away. But lurking in the window is…

Well, obviously not the killer, because he’s tall, and not a child. But it’s still meant to be creepy. Because we’re supposed to seriously think that a show like this would actually have the killer turn out to be a mysterious old man who lives in a haunted house. He almost gets up to the door to rung it, but then someone grabs him from behind… could it be the killer? We don’t know, because we then cut to commercial.

Back at the sheriff’s office, the school guidance counsellor warns his son not to go wandering off on alone, then goes to talk to Mandy. I’m guessing this kid has to be the killer, since he serves no purpose to the plot, yet has a line.

Also, the media seems to hate red-headed children for some reason:

I could be wrong, but you’ve got to admit that’s a pretty compelling set of arguments.

A woman shows up, announcing that her son has disappeared – could he be the one that was being dared to run up to the house? Maybe, I’m not sure what that kid’s name was. The little brother confirms that he was the kid we’d seen, and the team rushes up to the haunted house to check if a boogeyman lives there.

We cut away to a scene of Elle visiting her father’s grave, which leads to some awkwardly dialogue where she tries to explain her justification, without ever actually confessing to anything. This is one of the most awkward character exits I’ve ever seen.

The team doesn’t arrive at the haunted house until well after dark, and while they turn up no boogeymen, they do manage to find the kid they’re looking for, hiding in a shed. He claims that he wasn’t grabbed from behind, but rather touched by a swinging tree branch. They do manage to find the missing childrens’ possessions in the house, confirming their belief that the old man must be the killer. But then the old man’s long-dead corpse shows up, which means someone else must have been squatting in the house and using it as a base of murder operations!

They search the house for evidence of who the killer might be, but don’t actually bother fingerprinting it or anything. The big clue they discover is a wealth of meals-on-wheels trays, which have been consumed entirely, save for the creamed spinach, which was sealed in its container with duct tape.

Before the investigation can continue, it’s time for some character stuff! Remember how I was criticizing their inability to notice Elle’s declining mental state, and their stupidity for putting her in a stressful quasi-undercover position? Well it turns out that Reid didn’t mention the fact that she was getting drunk one night in Ohio while everyone else was working – either to the team at the time or the FBI internal investigation of the shooting.

So he’s just flat-out terrible at all parts of his job.

Also, there’s a jerking us around story where JJ claims that she was afraid of the woods because she’d lived through a Friday the 13th type of situation. Of course it’s a lie, and designed to waste our time.

Finally some evidence turns up – there’s two sets of fingerprints on the food trays, the guidance counsellor, and a mysterious child.

Yup, the red-head did it.

Christ, this is a questionable show most of the time.

Also they don’t find it particularly strange that one child’s fingerprints were found on all the trays, and assume that they belong to one of the victims. Except there’s no reason that one of the victims’ fingerprints would be on all of the food, since the killings largely happened before the food arrived.

For a moment they seem to have all the evidence they need against the guidance counsellor, between his fingerprints and the murder victim’s hat they find in his backpack. They’re so certain that he’s the killer that even after they discover the fingerprints on the trays belong to another child they just assume it’s a fourth victim. Of course, there’s no physical evidence that any of the other victims were in the house, so why he would have broken his pattern is a good question.

Searching the guidance counsellor’s home turns up more dairy products that have been sealed with duct tape. Mandy decides to put the guidance counsellor to the test by asking him if he wants cream in his milk! He does! Which means that the son was the one who couldn’t eat the creamed spinach. This leads Mandy to assume that the kid must be the killer, which the dad confirms right away.

With the plot wrapping up it’s time to add a ticking clock to the proceedings, in the form of a little girl that the red-headed kid abducts from a bus stop and tries to kill with a bat.

Of course, they’re not going to show us a girl getting killed, let alone popular child actor Elle Fanning, so naturally the team gets there in the nick of time. The mechanics of the rescue aren’t interesting, so let’s skip over them, right after taking a look at the ‘let’s wrap up the plot in a single line’ cheat that Derek busts out just before the rescue.

As everyone’s getting out of the car, Derek says “You know, after his mom left Jeffrey probably resented the fact that his dad spends more time at work with other kids than with his own.” Mandy follows up with a “Took out that rage on any kid who he viewed as having what he didn’t.”

That’s all the motivation we’ll get. The wild guesses of people who have been completely wrong about everything right up until now. They overlook the fact that the mother only left six months ago, which isn’t a lot of time for psychopathic rage to build up. More importantly they don’t explain away the child’s complete lack of empathy, which doesn’t just go away once you decide to start murdering people. No, the only way to get a child who loves murder as much as the red-headed kid is early childhood abuse or neglect, and you’ll need to continue the violent abuse through formative years if you want to produce the kind of brutal rage this kid evidences.

Oh, and Elle quits her job, and leaves the show without confessing. Will she return as a vigilante murderer in a later episode? I’m guessing no.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Profiling in no way entered into the solving of this crime. All of their theories were completely wrong, and they never even suggested the most obvious ‘demographic profiling’ solution.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Yeah, it was.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?
1/10 - Well god-damn but this was a terribly-written episode, wasn’t it? Let’s take a moment to look at just how stupid almost everything about it was.

The mystery of the episode revolved around the possibility that a creepy old man was the killer, only to have it turn out to be a creepy kid instead. But let’s look at what brought them to the house in the first place – children’s stories about the cannibal hermit who lives there. That’s it. No evidence, no suspicions, just children’s stories, and the fact that a kid had disappeared there while knocking on the door and running away. Obviously all of that turns out to be meaningless, and it should have been a dead end.

But it isn’t. Why? Because, in an amazing coincidence the killer has been using that house as a hideout!

Wait, what?

An 8-year-old has been using it as a hideout? Why and how?

Now, let’s give them the fact that the dad figured out the old man was dead because he’s the one who delivers meals-on-wheels up to the house. And for some reason he didn’t inform the authorities, but did tell his son about it. Why was the son going up there? Why was the father letting him, and not just permitting it, but encouraging it, by continuing to bring his son the old man’s meals on wheels?

Let’s not forget, the son wasn’t just grabbing the meals on wheels and eating them unbeknownst to his father-

The dad was wrapping the spinach in duct tape so that the son wouldn’t accidentally eat any. Just like he did with his dairy products at home:

Speaking of, for a house of two people, one of whom is deathly allergic to dairy products, those are an awful lot of dairy products to keep around. Does he really need yogurt, cream, milk, and cream cheese?

Overlooking the fact that, since he was the one bringing the food he could have just tossed the spinach on the way, rather than leaving it in the package, I’ve got to ask, why was the dad bringing his son food at all? And when was the son eating it?

So the son leaves for school in the morning, goes to school for six hours, then, what? He goes up to a creepy house in the middle of nowhere and hangs out until his dad brings him some dinner, and then they come home?

Why was his dad allowing this? It’s not like they don’t have a home of their own that they can go to.

Honestly, it seems like the only reason for them to be squatting in the house was so that they could leave clues pointing to them as the guilty parties – clues that would only be found if the cops completely randomly decided to search a house that had no connection to the case…

You know, this might be the worst-written episode of Criminal Minds yet.

Except for that time a guy was hiding in a car trunk in an empty parking lot and the team didn’t bother searching for him at all. I guess that was a little worse. But only a little.

Also, who was looming in the window in this shot?

There was no car in the driveway, so it couldn’t have been the guidance counsellor, could it? Especially when, in the very next scene-

He’s in the police station with his son?

Wow, I hate this episode.

The Tenth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

2010-02-09T01:29:00.001-05:00

So, what's wrong with the following picture?

Yes, that's right. If that's what the frog's statement translates to, why isn't it a question?

Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder on Ice!

2010-02-08T04:23:00.003-05:00

Ah, FD3 – the movie in the series that I have the most contempt for (to date). Now while it’s true that most of this contempt is due to the relative lack of Tony Toddity in the film (he appears in two brief vocal cameos), it also has to do with the film’s utter failure to make any kind of sense at all. As proof, I give you – the disaster that kicks off the plot:

Wendy and friends climb aboard a devil-themed rollercoaster whose voice is provided by Tony Todd. While they’re being strapped in the hydraulic system that keeps the seat arms in place springs a bit of a leak-

Letting us know that it’s not the best-maintained ride in the state. Then an a-hole further back on the ride asks the hot girls in front of them to flash him while they’re going through the loop – although I’m not entirely clear how he thinks this could possibly happen, both because he’s an ass, and the small issue of the girls having restraints on that both limit their movement and cover their breasts.

Perhaps the line is leftover from when the script imagined they would be in a more old-fashioned rollercoaster? Anyhow, here’s what the a-hole gets up to when the ride is actually happening:

That’s him tyring to film the girls. They slap the camera away, and its strap causes it to wrap around the tracks like so-

Where it’s hit by the wheels of the roller-coaster-

This impact causes hydraulic system to fail, releasing everyone’s restraints, and the wheels come flying off, which makes the front car of the roller-coaster wobble dangerously, detach, and fly off on the next turn. Things get worse when the grinding of the front car shakes a piece of fiberglass loose from the body, which flies through the air and knocks part of the track loose, which then sends the last survivors plummeting off to their deaths.

Okay, let’s take a moment and run that down – train hits camera, causes a cascading failure that leads to everyone dying. Simple enough, right?

So Wendy, the main character, freaks out about her premonition, getting the whole second car kicked off the ride. Despite the fact that a few people also want to get off the first car the operators won’t allow them to, which will no doubt lead to some serious lawsuits when everyone dies in a horrific accident. As they immediately do.

But how does this accident happen, exactly? The camera, right? Well guess what-

That’s the A-hole getting off the ride, and taking his camera with him. The camera that caused the accident. Is not on the ride when it leaves the station.

Yes, the hydraulic system was a little wonky, but it wasn’t just a bad hydraulic system that caused the accident. It was the way the wheels came flying off when they hit an obstruction on the line. An obstruction that could not have been there when the train left the station.

Yet the accident still happens, despite the fact that it could not have.

God, this was an awful movie.

The rest of part 3’s plot isn’t really worth talking about because the filmmakers don’t bother trying to do anything new with the premise. It’s basically the exact same movie again, with only the specific ways that the Ghost of Murder kills people having changed.

In fact there are only two other really notable items in the entire film, and each one is notably stupid. First off is the pictures. Ah, the pictures.

You see Wendy, the main character, is constantly taking pictures of everyone at the carnival for the ‘yearbook’. Except the film is set two weeks before the end of the school year. Which means the yearbook would have had to have been locked down months ago.

Seriously, why did the filmmakers think the main character would need a reason to be taking pictures? Isn’t taking pictures at social gatherings just something people normally do? They all have digital cameras – it’s not like taking photos costs something.

But let’s overlook the stupid overexplanation of the pictures and take a look at the pictures themselves. It seems that, in a plot development stolen wholesale from ‘The Omen’, pictures taken of people at the carnival reveal the manner in which they’re going to die.

At this point you might be saying ‘but wait, if that’s true, shouldn’t all the pictures provide hints that everyone was going to die in a rollercoaster disaster?’ That’s a really good point – but no, the pictures don’t show a rollercoaster over and over again. Instead they show pictures of the way that the Ghost of Murder is going to kill them later on in the story after a premonition saves them from the disaster.

That’s right – despite the fact that the Ghost of Murder planned to kill them on the roller coaster, he’d already developed his backup plan for how to kill them if they received a premonition. Which raises an important question – would pictures taken of other people that night hint at the ways they would have died if they’d gotten a premonition as well?

The other option is far more preposterous, but actually fits nicely with the evidence that the film provides – that option? That the Ghost of Murder is the one sending people these premonitions, specifically so that he’ll have a chance to murder them in a more hilariously elaborate way then he otherwise would have.

What proof is there for this theory? Check out the bad-taste photos that the film offers for proof of the ‘there’s clues in photos’ idea.

That’s supposedly the last photo taken before Lincoln was shot, and an error in the plate signalled where the bullet was going to hit. That’s a little icky, sure, but here’s the second photo, supposedly taken weeks before 9/11.

Yeah. That happened.

But here’s my point – there’s no suggestion made that Abraham Lincoln, or the Twin Towers, for that matter, had previously screwed up the Ghost of Murder’s plan to kill them (although there was that ’92 bombing…). No, the only suggestion is that once the Ghost of Murder has developed a plan to kill you, if you have a photo taken a clue about that plan will appear in it.

Not only does this mean that the Ghost of Murder planned both the 9/11 attacks and the Lincoln assassination, but also that Wendy and friends getting off the roller-coaster and getting brutally murdered later on was always his plan. The only logical conclusion to draw from this is that the Ghost of Murder is the one sending the premonitions – because if he didn’t, how could the murder he’d planned ever come to pass?

I just realized that I’ve now officially put more thought into this movie than the people who made it did.

Okay, so that’s the pictures taken care of – and damn, do I wish the movie had sped through the photos as quickly as I did. Nearly a third of the film is devoted to Wendy looking over photos and trying to figure out what their meanings could possibly be – when they’re painfully obvious to even the slightest glimpse.

Here’s one that proves to be a real puzzler for the characters.

Wow, it’s like I’m watching Medium here.

Hey, geniuses – she’s going to get shot in the head, he’s going to have spikes dropped on him. Let’s move on, shall we?

This scene actually brings me to the one other interesting part about this movie – a conversation which suggests that the people who made this movie never actually saw Final Destination 2.

Gothy Guy (from the photo, remember? The one right up there!) theorizes that Death’s Plan could be thwarted by someone further down the list killing themselves, thereby saving all the other survivors. Of course no one actually tests the theory – which there’s no point in doing, since black teacher already tried it last movie, and found that Death makes it completely impossible for people to die before it’s their turn.

That’s him pulling the trigger over and over again-

And here are the six live bullets that the cop keeps in his gun.

It’s an interesting idea that the Ghost of Murder won’t let anyone else steal his kills, and one that the movie might have done well to explore. But doing new, interesting things isn’t what this franchise is about, damn it! It’s about brutally murdering people in disgusting ways! Sometimes in 3D!

Well, that’s it for the film Final Destination 3 – it looks like they’ve saved the day, but then everyone dies in a subway accident. In a hilariously twist the Ghost of Murder sends Wendy another premonition about his accident, but this time he’s kind of tired to waiting to kill her, so he does it after it’s already too late to change anything.

Because, like Jigsaw after him, the Ghost of Murder is a dick.

That’s it for Final Destination 3. All that’s left is to finally get around to watching FD4 – which is good, because as of the time of writing this this DVD is already a day late. Whoops.

I wonder what I have to look forward to in the fourth film? Seeing how regressive part 3 was has me wondering just where they’ll go in part 4 – will another stab be made at expanding the mythology, or will we just get another redo of the exact same premise?

Most importantly, will Tony Todd be included somehow?

Criminal Minds 205: Aftermath

2010-02-05T02:54:00.003-05:00

The story begins, as I’m beginning to understand that most stories do, at home base in Quantico, where the team is being briefed about a nefarious serial rapist. His twisted MO? He phones them and leaves a voicemail announcing that he’s standing right behind them, and then, because he’d broken into their house, he is! The already-puzzling aspect? For the first group of victims he attacked young women from a bible college, and now he’s gone after single women in their 30s… but why?

I suppose we’re going to find out after the credits, aren’t we?

Before they arrive there’s yet another victim – like all of their serial offenders, this one works really, really fast. So that there can be a ticking clock later in the episode. Spoiler alert.

Demonstrating some intelligence, they decide that the change in targets is the most important element to focus on. They split up and speak to both sets of victims – a bible college woman brings up an interesting question: after the first two rapes they massively tightened security, but still the rapist managed to get into the school. He also knew a suspiciously large amount of information of the victim’s lives, as if he’d been extensively stalking them. Hell, he even knew the name of one girl’s family dog!

During all this the team drops some real science about the types of rapists out there, and that this one specifically is a power-reassurance rapist. I’m not going to go into a long series of details about it now, because I’m not in a ‘getting myself depressed’ mood, but basically these are timid, pathetic stalkers who imagine themselves in relationships with their victims, and see the attacks as ‘dates’. Of course that’s an incredibly simplistic description, but the important point you should single out is that they’re the least violent kind of rapist, and almost never kill their prey.

In a useless scene that then becomes a character beat, Elle is weird and squirrely when they all head back to the hotel for the night, forgetting stuff in her car and being generally off. Reid tries to talk to get about it, but she’s more interested in getting drunk than having a heart-to-heart about her recent shooting. Will that be important later? I can only assume so.

While hanging out at the hotel the local detective and Mandy go over the details of the case, and unleash a few more facts, most importantly that only an estimated 20 percent of all rapes are reported… meaning that there could be as many as 40 more victims out there! Of course, there aren’t going to be a large number, because women are more likely to report an attack if there’s a famous serial rapist going around that the police are desperate to catch – that way they know that their attacks are going to be taken with at least a modicum of seriousness.

It still works to generate a lead, though, when the team uncovers a bible college girl who comitted suicide right when the MO changed! They have a hard time getting the parents to admit it, but then the dad finally cracks when his wife leaves the room. Because they weren’t smart enough to use interrogation 101 and interview them seperately. Turns out the daughter killed herself because she’d become pregnant from the rape, and her devout religious status made abortion an impossibility.

Hey, wait a minute, didn’t she kill the baby anyway by killing herself? Didn’t she commit the sin of abortion after all?

Oh, you know what? This is a topic I probably shouldn’t be addressing in this particular venue…

The rapist’s motive comes into focus – he was going after religious girls because he thought they wouldn’t want to have abortions, and when one comitted suicide he’s moving on to single women who’d gone to fertility clinics, based on the assumption that since they wanted a child anyway, they wouldn’t get rid of it!

They have a bit of a hard time at the fertility clinic, which has only one man working there, and he has no connection to the bible college. Actually the bible college thing is my question – they never bother to ask if he knows anyone who also works around the college. They do find their answer, however: he sells a ‘getting to know you’ questionaire to a direct mailing company, the same one that the college uses!

With a lead in their possession they head over to the direct mailing company, and discover that everyone who works there has access to the questionaires. They struggle through the mountain of files, looking for a clue about who the rapist is going to attack next. They come across a woman who checked off all the same boxes on her form as the three existing victims, but they’re too late – when the police arrive at her house they knock and then leave. The woman didn’t answer because the rapist already had her tied up!

Wait, is that the same actor playing the rapist? Because we saw him in profile in an earlier scene, and he some facial hair, which I’m not really seing outlined in the mask…

Also, don’t the cops find it suspicious that a woman’s car is in the driveway, but she’s not home when they knock at like 9PM? Didn’t anyone tell them that they’re dealing with a rapist who hides in homes, and then ties up the women when they get inside? Elle gives the cops a hard time about that, but no one really answers the question. And the scene is designed to make Elle look like she’s even more on edge.

Which makes it more puzzling that they elect to ask Elle to go undercover as a potential victim – wait, they know she’s emotionally unstable, and just two nights earlier she was drinking heavily while everyone else was working. Why do they think she can be trusted with this duty? Couldn’t they just have the lady cop or a local FBI agent do it?

Also, and this is just a ridiculous contrivance to increase drama, they tell her to hide her gun somewhere in the house she’ll be staying at, because he won’t enter a house until she’s left it, and there’s no way he’ll try to enter the house if he sees she’s carrying a gun. Because, you know, it’s not like she’s got somewhere she can keep it totally out of sight while walking around and not look suspicious at all. Like, oh, I don’t know, some kind of a leather bag with straps or something…

Purse. That’s the word I’m looking for.

You know what the hilarious thing about this scene? At the exact moment that Mandy is telling her she can’t risk being seen with the gun, so she’s got to hide it in the house, you know what image is playing onscreen?

Yes. It’s an image of her hiding the gun in her purse.

Oy.

Moving on and cutting to the chase simultaneously, it turns out Elle was so profoundly not ready for the undercover gig. When she leaves the house that night instead of going to her car and driving away she runs across the street, grabs a guy out of a car, and puts him under arrest.

The good news? He was, in fact, the rapist. The bad news? They didn’t have probable cause to arrest him, so they can’t get his DNA. The team wants to try to talk him into a confession, but as the show has so amply demonstrated, they’re terrible at that, so nothing comes of it.

Oh, and for the record, here’s what he looks like:

See what I mean about all that moustache and goatee not fitting under the mask so cleanly?

So Elle completely destroys their case, which I find fairly believable from her character – she was never good at her job, and in the four episodes since her shooting she’s been even worse. The big question is: Why did they put her undercover at all? Let’s face it – the character has been well past the edge since she got shot. Of course, since they’re all professional psychologists it kind of seems like they should have noticed the problem.

With the rapist identified, but currently uncatchable, it’s time for the team to leave. But not before Elle swings by the rapist’s apartment and murders him.

Note the terrible stance she’s using. One hand, straight arm… that’s how you can tell a moral murder on a TV show from an immoral one, you know – good guys use two hands, bad guys one.

So I guess that’s it for Elle, right? I guess someone could make an argument that she was justified or something, but given that she went alone to the guy’s apartment she’s going to have a hell of a time explaining how she didn’t go to murder him.

She plants a gun on the body and all, but I don’t see her lasting another episode.

Because this one’s over, rather anti-climactically.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Dear lord, no. Their insight into the traditional behaviours of a power-reassurance rapits offers them absolutely no useful information. If that wasn’t bad enough, they failed to notice that one of the members of their own team was hanging by her last thread, or bother to do anything about it if they did notice.

Really awful showing this week, guys.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

It was. They solved it through the most basic system of all, looking for concrete connections between the victims. Hell, I’m not sure why it took them this long or why the cops had to bring the FBI in – once they had two victims who’d gone to a fertility clinic within three days of getting raped didn’t they think it was worth following up on? Apparently not.

Again, it’s only when you’ve got REALLY stupid cops on the case that you have to call the FBI in, apparently.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 – As stated above, not only did profiling not solve the case, but it actually failed to keep one of their own members from straight-up murdering a guy.

Um, also, where did Elle get an extra gun to plant on the rapist? Does she carry one around with her at all times? It seems like she probably didn’t know Ohio well enough that she could have grabbed an untraceable weapon within the maybe hour between the guy being sprung by his attorney and her gunning him down in a parking lot.

That’s some sloppy writing right there.

Oh, and hey – let’s talk for a minute about some writing that moves into truly awful territory: Remember earlier when I wondered if they were going to explain how he got through the tight security at the bible college, even going so far as to rape these women in their own dorm rooms? Well guess what – they didn’t even try to explain any of it.

Nope. When he’s brought in someone even mentions that they ‘still don’t know how he managed to break into homes without a trace’. Here’s a guess – really good at lockpicking. What I want to know is How did he get past guarded campus gates and into and out of dormitories during the hunt for a serial rapist on the college grounds?

Apparently the show felt it wasn’t worth addressing.

Hacks.

FACT CHECK – There’s no real case like this out there – in fact, when Reid is asked to mention any similar cases, all he can come up with is Gary Heidnik, the creepy guy who kept prostitutes in a hole in his basement.

This episode is significant for another reason, though – it’s another one of Criminal Minds’ patented cop-outs, pretending to be an episode about a kind of criminal who’s incredibly hard to catch (bomber, sniper, arsonist, and now serial rapist), and then turning around and giving them a preposterous or contrived motive that leads to an easy-to-follow paper trail.

It’s disappointing writing, although instructive in its failure, because it sheds some light on just how hard it is to write a show about psychologists helping out with crime solving.

How would a profiler catch a serial rapist? He wouldn’t. Because you can’t.

John Douglas (The Mindhunter!) wrote a whole book about how serial rapists and stalkers are almost impossible to catch (or stop, in the second case), and the only thing he, the world’s most famous profiler, had to really offer on the subject was a guide to help women understand which type of rapist was attacking them, and what to do in each situation.

Yeah. It was a rough book. Fun fact, though – the writing staff clearly read it for research while working on this episode. Not only is their description of the types of rapists fairly clearly cribbed from the text, but the only reason to bring the relatively obscure Heidnik up at all was that he’s featured in the photo section in the middle of the book.

The book is 'Obsession’ by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, if you’re looking for a copy after my description.

Final Destination 2: The Ghost of Murder Returns

2010-02-01T03:58:00.007-05:00

And we’re back! It’s time to take a look at Final Destination 2, which, according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer™, has been critically consensed to be the high point in the series, with a Freshness rating of 47%.

So you just know it’s going to be good, right?

Except no, it’s not. In fact, it sets up a disturbing trend which will continue into Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder On Ice!

The film opens with an acknowledgement that, yes, in the world of Final Destination, people are aware of the events of the first film, and find them strange.

They don’t, however, find it strange enough – the only sign we get about it being a thing people are creeped out by are a visit to a themed website and seeing an interview with a crackpot who wrote a book about the ‘Flight 180 Curse’ to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the crash.

Frankly, it seems like this should be a bigger deal. The odds of being on a plane crash are long enough, but each survivor dying within the next six months, all in separate, preposterous, accidents? That’s got to be roughly equivalent to being hit by a bolt of lightning that causes you to win the lottery. And then having it happen again.

For literally decades after King Tut was unearthed people talked about the curse that killed anyone involved in opening the tomb. Well this is a far-better-documented example in the present day. The press would be all over this MFer.

Anyhoo, let’s get into the story proper. JJ from Criminal Minds is heading off on Spring Break with some friends, and has one of the series’ patented premonitions while waiting to merge onto a highway.

I’m going to pause here for a moment to point out something I neglected to mention in my review of Final Destination – Alex, the main character, was not involved in causing the disaster. He, like the rest of his class, just happened to be on a plane with a bad electrical system. His freak-out delayed the take-off, which meant the plane explosion happened five to ten minutes later than it would have, but since the problem was in the plane itself, there’s no reason that would have prevented the disaster.

Okay, now back to JJ. While waiting, she hears a knock on her windshield.

This is an old lady banging a set of cans on the window of the van. I point it out because this is the moment that JJ will fixate on as validating her déjà vu. It occurs at 4:53. So let’s gave the film the benefit of the doubt and assume that everything after this point occurs in real time, or something like it.

The SUV full off teens zooms off down the highway, pulling into traffic at 5:15. They see the various other characters in the film driving in other vehicles, including Black Teacher, Druggy, Lady Yuppie, Mom and Son, and Cop. and then have a terrifying near-collision with a lumber truck driving so dangerously fast that it actually passes them illegally on the right.

This occurs at 6:40 into the movie. Assuming the cars are driving a conservative highway speed of 100 kilometers an hour, that puts them 2.4 kilometers past the intersection. Now let’s go further and assume that the truck was speeding along at 110 miles per hour the entire time, right up until it passed the SUV and settled its speed to that of traffic. This would mean that the truck, in that same 85 seconds, would have travelled 2.6 kilometers. So at the time of JJ’s SUV merging into traffic, the truck would have been 400 meters before the intersection, passing that intersection thirteen seconds after she drove into traffic.

I know this is a lot of math, but trust me, it will all come into play soon.

Alright, so after JJ is passed by the lumber truck there’s another couple of minutes of ominous foreshadowing as we, the audience, get to judge characters by the cars they drive. Then, at 9:45, a chain snaps and this happens:

(my greatest fear, preserved forever on film)

Followed quickly by this-

(No, wait – that’s my greatest fear)

Yeah, it’s possible that I shouldn’t have included the gore shot. Sorry about that.

Anyhoo, the point is that we know that the chain broke at 9:45, which is exactly 270 seconds after JJ merged into traffic, and therefore 8.3 kilometers away from the intersection.

So, just to be absolutely clear, the fatal accident happens nearly ten kilometers (and exactly five miles) away from the intersection where JJ’s Déjà vu began.

Now let’s get back to JJ, as she snaps back from witnessing a vision her own fiery death. The old lady bangs her cans on the windshield again at 11:50, meaning that had the original timeline been allowed to continue, at 12:12 she would have pulled into traffic – this means that the lumber truck should zoom by at exactly 12:25, with the accident occurring at 16:42.

This should be true, because the film continues on in apparent real-time.

And yet, at the appointed time, the truck refuses to show. Not at 12:25, not at a full minute afterwards. In fact, the lumber truck, which was notable primarily for the ridiculous speed it was moving at, is nowhere to be seen until 14:44, two and a half minutes after it should have been there.

Making things worse, the accident happens almost immediately afterwards-

So here’s my question – what happened to the truck? In the original timeline JJ was able to drive for nearly five minutes before the accident occurred, and now the only thing that has changed is that JJ kept the rest of the cast off the highway – meaning that there were less cars to slow things down.

What kept the lumber truck? Why did the chain break early? A simple answer might be – ‘Well, the Ghost of Murder did it’, and that’s reasonable enough… except the entire series is predicated on the Ghost of Murder only stepping in to alter things after one of his plans has gone awry. After all, he didn’t try to crash the plane into the terminal to ensure everyone died, did he? No, he only picked things up a month later.

I know it’s mostly a matter of the filmmakers wanting to make sure they got more of the crash onscreen, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of logic, and it violates logic to ask us to believe that JJ’s change of mind about going onto the highway could have both slowed the logging truck down a huge amount and moved the accident eight kilometers closer to the intersection.

And you know what the crazy part is? That’s not even the last continuity problem that scene has. Here’s JJ, defiantly stopping her SUV on the on-ramp to keep the rest of the cast from driving out onto the highway.

It’s important to note that for the rest of the scene she does not move the car. In fact, in a few moments she’ll get out of it to try to explain herself to the cop who would have had his head taken off by the log.

The important thing to note in that shot? That her SUV is well behind the highway, and parked next to a metal pole and a low concrete wall.

So now that she’s cheated death, the Ghost of Murder immediately tries to take JJ down by sending a truck to kill her. The cop saves her, but her friends, sadly, aren’t so lucky-

The truck appears out of nowhere to kill all her friends, somehow not smashing through the concrete dividers or knocking over the steel pole in the process.

Huh.

So anyway, the plot continues apace, with the cast gradually figuring out that what’s happening to them is eerily similar to what happened in the first Final Destination movie. Yup, they too are being targeted by the Ghost of Murder. Which means it’s time to stop by and visit with Clear, the sole survivor of the last movie!

You heard me. Turns out Alex got killed off-camera.

But before that happens the Ghost of Murder bumps off another of the survivors in a suitably preposterous series of misadventures, with the punchline being that the punk is the only person in the world so stupid that when something comes rushing at his face he doesn’t put his hands up to protect himself.

The gore happens five seconds later. I’m not showing it this time.

Clear, who’s voluntarily living in a padded cell, has surprisingly little advice to offer, although the scene allows the writers to get into the logic of her predicament a little. She’s so paranoid about the Ghost of Murder coming after her that she won’t come near anything even slightly sharp or heavy.

Also, for some reason, she’s got a Polaroid of Alex’s corpse on her wall.

It seems that, after three months of locking themselves away, the two had gone for a walk, and a brick had fallen from a building and killed Alex. And then, I guess, Clear took a picture of the body?

Seriously, why does she have this? Even if the cops were willing to give her a crime scene photo (which I suppose it must be), she’s in an asylum, and whether it’s voluntary or not, there’s got to be a doctor there trying to treat her. One that must think that keeping a picture of her dead boyfriend’s bloody corpse lying around might not be the best thing for her continued mental health.

In the end she agrees to leave the asylum and try to help JJ solve this conundrum. Their first stop? Tony Todd’s funeral home, of course! Because this movie is taking place really close to where the first movie was set. For reasons that will soon become apparent.

Anyhoo Tony doesn’t have a lot of hints to offer this time around, just letting them know that if the Ghost of Murder is to be stopped, it will be by having new life that wasn’t part of Death’s plan come into existence.

They jump to the conclusion that, since there was a pregnant woman involved in the pileup, their quest must be to make sure she has the child – new life invalidating the Ghost of Murder’s scheme and all. So now they have to round her up and make sure she survives long enough to have the kid! And there’s even a ticking clock, because JJ is now having visions of a white van (like the kind the pregnant lady drove) ditching into a lake!

But first it’s time for some more gruesome murders, which call into question both how the Ghost of Murder’s rules work, as well as what we, the audience, are supposed to accept as reasonable human behaviour.

First, the Ghost of Murder stuff. The teen is brought to the dentist by his mother, and while there, a preposterous series of events happen – preposterous, Rube Goldbergian deaths being the Ghost of Murder’s trademark, we can only assume he’s involved – almost killing him. A fish gets trapped atop one of the tank’s vacuum pumps, which causes a leak, that drips onto an outlet which makes the power in the office go wonky, cutting off the oxygen supply to his Nitrous/Oxygen mix, almost knocking the kid out, so that when a plastic blowfish from a mobile falls – with no outside force acting on it – right into his mouth, the teen’s breathing is cut off. It looks like he’s a goner until a nurse rushes in and plucks the toy from out of his windpipe, saving the day!

Except then he walks outside and chases some pigeons away, which force a worker into some controls, which then drops a pane of glass from the sky, crushing him-

Wait, what? What happened to the rules, Ghost of Murder? There was a preposterous series of wacky coincidences, partially caused by a supernatural force, that would have led to his death, had someone not intervened. Isn’t that the criteria? Shouldn’t the Ghost of Murder skip him now?

And then his death, with the pigeons and the lever, has nothing at all to do with the near-death experience in the dentist’s chair, such as, oh, I don’t know, him spitting out the blowfish doll and having it land outside where then he trips on it, falling into the pigeons.

No, as it stands they’re supposed to be two wholly unrelated incidents, which means his first ordeal wasn’t caused at all by the Ghost of Murder – which flat-out makes no sense at all, given how ridiculous the whole thing was.

But let’s move on to the just flat-out stupid one. After a surprisingly non-fatal car accident the yuppie is trapped in the front seat of the car.

Want to guess what happens to her?

The kicker of this scene is how they want it to be shocking – a guy goes to pry open the door with the jaws of life, and that impact somehow sets off the airbag, pushing her head into the pipe. As if someone stuck in a car like that – but in no immediate danger - wouldn’t say “You know what? Before you worry about getting the door open, how about we move that jagged bit of PVC away from my neck, huh?”. But they don’t, and it somehow ends up through her forehead. Even though she could have just leaned to the side in the seat before they tried to pull her out.

Wow. That scene’s been bugging me for like seven years. No wonder I never watched this movie a second time before now.

You know what? Now’s as good a time as any to explain the big twist this movie brings to the mythology, since it comes up in the drive leading up to the car accident. What’s the new wrinkle? That instead of killing people in the order they would have died, the Ghost of Murder is now killing people in reverse order. Why is he doing this?

Well, it seems that each member of the cast has previously been touched by the hand of death – every one of them avoided getting killed at some point in the past year because they were somehow affected by the survivors of the first film. The cop didn’t get shot because he was called to the scene of a train accident, junkie wasn’t in a theatre that collapsed because he saw Gay Jack get hit by a sign, and, in a much less dramatic incident, JJ wasn’t carjacked to death because she was delayed from following her mom out of a mall by a news broadcast about Tod’s suicide.

So what the Ghost of Murder is now doing is cleaning up the loose ends he created with his last killing spree.

But wait, why does that mean he has to do the murders backwards?

What’s that? For no reason? Oh, okay. As long as there’s no reason, I’ll just keep going, I guess.

Two things about this late-film twist, though. 1: It’s nice to see that, like the missing trap rooms from Saw II, the writers didn’t come up with any story they didn’t have to, and don’t bother to explain why the already-dead characters needed to go. Hell, they don’t even suggest whether JJ’s three friends needed to die in the accident, or if they just suffered for making the poor decision to get into a car with her.

The bigger problem with this twist is B: Two of the stories flat-out don’t make sense. First there’s the yuppie, whose story is that she was going to spend the night at a bed and breakfast that had a gas leak, and was saved when the bus she was taking to get there splattered the Blonde all over its grill. Two problems with this- First off, there’s no way the yuppie character would ever take a bus for any reason, and then there’s the fact that it was a magical teleporting city bus that splattered the blonde-

And why would you take that to get to a rural B&B?

Eben more preposterous is the Black Teacher’s story, who explains that he was transferred to the school from the first film after dead teacher was killed by hilarious contrivances, and then two days later someone stabbed his substitute at the old school.

Here’s the problem with his story, though – and it’s twofold (man, this is like the eighth multipart problem in a row for me. Weird.) based on just when the transfer happened. If the transfer was A: Supposed to be right after her death, the story is just nuts, because school is clearly out when the first film takes place. The characters’ two-week-long France trip must be taking place either at the very end of the school year, or in the summer (the real one was in July), and then the main action of the film takes place a month later, and none of the characters are going to school at that point. So when she got killed the teacher was absolutely not currently teaching a class that would need someone to cover it when she died – hell, she was a few days away from leaving town when the Ghost of Murder came calling, and she no doubt would have put in her notice.

But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant B: he was transferred at the beginning of the next school year, and that’s when the stabbing happened. Even then it doesn’t make sense, because think about what the teacher’s death changed – if she’d died on a plane, they would have had a substitute come in for the last week of school, then transferred (or hired a new) teacher for the fall. If she’d died in a house explosion after being stabbed by bad luck, the board would have had to… hire or transfer a teacher for the beginning of school.

Meaning that in either case, Black Teacher would have wound up teaching that class at approximately the same time, and her death didn’t effect him at all.

So either the writers didn’t think this one through too well, or the Ghost of Death is getting sloppy. Of course, given the fact that he deals with a few people he doesn’t like with large-casualty tragedies rather than, you know, brain aneurysms, suggests that he’s not the most careful artisan anyhow.

So, with that out of the way, the rest of the survivors convene at the hospital in time for the baby to be born. But that doesn’t change anything, and the Ghost of Murder bumps off Black Teacher and Clear in a single explosion.

Why didn’t the baby help things? JJ has a quick flashback to the accident, and realizes that the pregnant woman wasn’t killed in the original accident, and has no involvement in the Ghost of Murder’s plan!

So what could Tony Todd have meant by ‘New Life’ breaking the plan?

Well JJ takes the comment, along with her visions of drowning in a lake, to mean that she should drown herself in a lake, thereby ‘dying’ since it’s her turn, and then have someone resuscitate her so that ‘New Life’ is created.

Um, is that technically new life? Of course, a 9-month-old fetus is already alive by any definition, so it’s hard to imagine how it being born would count as ‘new life’ either.

Yeah, the film basically falls apart right at the end. The Ghost of Murder is foiled by JJ coming back to life (even though it’s not really her turn because no one ever got around to saving, and therefore making him skip, the cop), and we’ve got a happy ending. Perhaps the only one in the entire series, although I can’t speak to that because, at the time of writing, I have yet to see part 4.

Next up is part 3, the one that takes my biggest problem with part 2 (the accident changing the way it happened for no reason), and turns it up past 11.

Self-Promotion!

2010-01-31T01:21:00.003-05:00

Well, not exactly self-promotion, technically speaking. While it's an honor to be nominated for one of bloody-disgusting's Horror Blog Awards, alongside such luminaries as CyberSchizoid, Moving Pictures Haiku Reviews, and William Malmborg, I'm not posting this following link/picture for my own benefit-

If you've got a second, would you mind heading over there, get an account (not as much of a chore as it sounds) and vote for Zombots? It's about time that TheDivemistress was recognized as the bold new voice in the horror blogosphere that she is, and this is a chance for that to happen!

Just make sure you actually vote for 'Zombots'. There's like eight blogs there that start with 'Zom'. Just warning you.

Thanks in advance!

Criminal Minds 204: Psychodrama

2010-01-29T02:46:00.001-05:00

And you thought regular bank robbers were bad? This one likes to strip people down and then force certain selected pairs to simulate sex with one another! The team is on to him, though – they know he’s a serial killer just waiting to happen!

Before they can fly out to California to help catch the guy it’s time for some interpersonal drama, as Greg’s wife drops by to remind him that their child has medical problems. What’s that? A child with a mysterious, unnamed ‘condition’? It seems to me that this will be a well that they’ll be able to mine for years of angst for their main character! Score!

But on to the actual plot of the episode. One the way to LA the team tries to figure out the killer’s specific motivation is, so as to better predict what he’ll do next. He escapes on a bike, which makes him difficult to catch, and wears a mask, so no one can recognize him! They use a little ‘geographic profiling’ to figure out where the robber likely lives, then head down to the crime scene to suss it out. From this they glean an important piece of information – he only attacked a guard at one bank robbery… but why?

They make the intuitive leap that he beat this particular bank had a guard in uniform, while all the others were plainclothes. Which means he has a problem with authority – they assume this means he was in the jail or army, and had a bad experience of it. Another logical leap leads them to assume it wasn’t the army, because army people know how to work together, and this robber worked alone.

Unless, you know, he was so bad at working with other people that he was washed out by people in uniforms. Which would fit their profile exactly, come to think of it…

A key piece of evidence is missing from the last robber. The robber had forced a 60-year-old woman to get it on with a 30-year-old man, and then had the bank manager and his wife simulate sex in front of their teenage children, who happened to be in the bank at the time. For some reason, though, the tape has been erased! It seems that after the robbery the bank manager was so flustered that he ‘accidentally’ erased the key tape. Which raises the question of just how stupid are these cops?

There’s been a robbery. Anyone could have been in on it. Especially the bank manager, what with something like 80% of bank robberies being inside jobs. Yet they let him handle key evidence? Because what, cops can’t be bothered to push the eject button on a recorder?

Oh, and the profilers spend far too much time trying to figure out what his choice of victims could have possibly meant. Um, I’m not a trained psychologist, but maybe that he was molested as a child by his mother? And that, since he picked an old lady and a 30-year-old white guy, she’s still alive and he’s still got a problem with her?

Also, I’m going to save everybody a lot of time and reveal what turned out to be on the erased tapes: Nebulousness!

Yeah, the father admits that he wanted to delete the tapes because he didn’t want anyone to see his family’s humiliation, but the team doesn’t actually ask him what happened until much later in the show, even though they already stated that they’re sure it’s vitally important to identifying him.

They’re oddly cagey about admitting what happened – it’s implied that he forced the parents to sexually abuse their own children, but they refuse to come out and say it, so I can’t be sure. I wonder if this was a censorship issue…

You know, they could have just asked anyone else who was there what happened. What with the robber forcing everyone to watch the entire thing. Just a thought.

There’s a quick red herring about changing heights of the robber, but they figure he’s wearing lifts, and mercifully move right along. But why they’re pulling all of this nonsense the robber hits another bank. In this one someone manages to call 911, though, spoiling his game. He still escapes, but a meter-maid sees his face before he knocks her out with a single punch.

Then there’s a sweet car chase, but you’re not watching the show, you’re reading about it, so that’s not especially important now, is it? The whole sequence is notable only for the fact that he evades them by driving across a culvert, and despite the fact that he’s only fifty feet away, none of the cops elect to, you know, just shoot him.

Sure, he’s on a motorcycle, but why not take a shot? Isn’t that why it’s called ‘taking a shot’?

Back at the new crime scene the team discovers that the robber has finally started killing people – in this case he beat a man to death for not taking his clothes off. Also he’s not stealing money any more. So let’s just call him the ‘killer’ from now on.

The characters take a break for more character stuff, as Greg announces that he missed his son’s first steps. Yawn. More importantly they finally get around to looking at ex-cons who live in the area, but there are 300 of them, so it’s going to be a while. JJ suggests narrowing down their search by looking at sex offenders, which leads them to a pimp. Um, yeah… weren’t you operating under the theory that he didn’t know that he was sexually motivated until he started stripping down people at his bank robberies?

Which makes the pimp they track down yet another red herring. Oy.

While time is being wasted the killer heads into a diner and shoots up the ceiling.

This is noteworthy because when they go to a closeup of the gun, the image has been reversed for some reason.

I’m fairly sure this is a reversal, not just the insert guy firing with the wrong hand – the prop gun has a standard ejection system, meaning that the shells fire off to the right when you shoot it. This gun is clearly ejecting to the left.

Anyhoo, the killer tries to get a child to punch his own mother, and when he won’t, the killer murders the kid.

This finally leads them back to the psychology portion of the evening, as Greg freaks out about the idea of being children being harmed because of his problems with his own absentee fatherism. After the aforementioned interview with the bank manager, they finally get that the robber was always focused on children because of his own abusive childhood. Seems like this should have been obvious, but whatever. They also make the connection that he’s forcing people to act out his own past abuses, as a kind of therapy. It’s also a therapy that was used in a California prison at a certain time, allowing the team to figure out which of their potentials must be the killer.

This doesn’t prove to be the most helpful information, though, since even a trip to see the killer’s mother and then the hotel he lives at can’t help them figure out where he might be.

Since he loves abusing families the team assumes he’s headed to the nearest park, which proves to be a dead end. He’s actually at a large nearby birthday party! A quick confrontation leaves the killer injured and no one else hurt.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Not really. The key clue to tracking him down is identifying him was being able to recognize a type of therapy he was acting out – basic knowledge of psychology is necessary for that, rather than insight into human personality. The other key element ‘geographic profiling’ is actually one of those painfully obvious things that they try to sell as a science – basically it boils down to the idea that any criminal will commit crimes close enough to his home that he’ll feel comfortable, but far enough away that people won’t recognize him.

It can be precis’d as “Well, duh”.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Oh yes. When caught he was wandering around a neighbourhood in broad daylight, carrying an SMG. The only reason no one called the cops on him is that it would have harmed the show’s denoument.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

2/10 – The funny part is that psychology could have actually helped them narrow the case down, it just didn’t. If they’d made the leap that his love of beating up moms had something to do with an abusive childhood they could have done a background search on that and maybe found him sooner. But somehow the ‘he’s an abuse victim’ didn’t occur to them until they were actually face-to-face with the mother.

Half-wits.

The Ninth-Greatest Panel in Comic Book History

2010-01-26T01:28:00.001-05:00

Okay, this is more of a promotional image than an ad, but I couldn't resist.

I must track down that issue of Master Comics. I need to know why a balloon led that gloved man to shoot that child in the face.

The Final Destination series is not especially good at continuity.

2010-01-25T03:42:00.006-05:00

Or coherent rules.

With a rented DVD of ‘Final Destination 4: The Final Destination’ sitting here by my computer, ready to be watched, I got to thinking about something that’s puzzled me for a while – no, not the way everyone but the Saw franchise seem obsessed with dropping the numbers from their titles – that’s a conversation for another time.

What I want to discuss today is just what a loose relationship the entire franchise has made with ‘making sense’. It seems like a simple enough premise to execute: There’s a visually compelling disaster in which teens are killed, which turns out to be a dream of one of the teens, which motives him/her to avoid that fate. Everyone else dies, and then the Ghost of Murder – who is pissed off at having been thwarted (And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling dream!) hunts down the survivors and kills them in an even more brutal fashion than they would have died the first time around.

Yet each film has managed to, in one way or another, botch this simple formula. Huh.

But hey, why am I talking about this in the abstract for, when I could be exhaustively detailing examples of what I mean – which is kind of the entire point of this blog, come to think of it.

So let’s start with Final Destination.

Alex (Devon Sawa, who’s famous for… uh… having been in this film, I suppose) is headed, with a large portion of his high-school senior class, to France for a field trip. He’s understandably nervous about flying, especially after seeing the remains of dead birds all over the front of the plane-

It was clearer on the big screen, trust me. He’s also set on edge when he hears ‘Rocky Mountain High’ playing on the speakers in the Airport bathroom – which, in case you were wondering, is the absolute high point of humour that the series reaches.

When he gets onto the plane Alex sits in his seat and has a vision in which he changes seats to be next to his creepy buddy, and then gets a sense of how soddy the plane is when the knob falls off his tray.

Also clueing us in to the plane’s shoddiness? The fact that it explodes moments after takeoff.

Alright, here are the key things you needed to notice about that sequence – Alex and Tod are sitting next to each other – as are blonde girl and Gay Jack from Dawson’s Creek. And the teacher (reaching for the falling girl) is alive when the explosion comes – from the front.

Okay, so all of those people, and Stifler, get off the plane, which then proves to be fueled by some kind of an antimatter reaction, so that when it explodes half a kilometer away, this happens:

The sound of the explosion is oddly muted for something that was strong enough to break windows. I know I’m drifting off-point here, but this bugged me the first time I saw the movie nearly a decade ago.

So, moving right along, The Ghost of Murder gets pissed about Alex’s vision, and comes back to kill Tod in a surprisingly tame fashion. It’s in this scene that the Ghost of Murder reveals himself not just to love Rube Goldbergian murder scenarios, but also to possess specific weird powers to undo natural forces when it will help a murder along, or make it especially brutal, either physically or emotionally.

In Tod’s case, The Ghost of Murder pulls an especially dick move – first he breaks the valve on the back of a toilet so that water will spill out, causing Tod to slip and get strangled by a laundry line that his mother had left in the shower.

Why is it such a dick move? Check this out-

Yeah, you saw that. The Ghost of Murder sucked the water up just so that everyone would think that Tod killed himself. What a dick.

The next murder is the most important, which is odd, because it happens to the least important character, but it’s vital for understanding the past decade of film and television.

Alex and Clear – who for the entire film I thought was named ‘Claire’, because Clear isn’t a name, and they’re homonyms (confusing me further – she would go on to play Claire Redfield in RE3) – are having lunch at a café and discussing his theory that you can see clues all around you whenever the Ghost of Murder is going to work. Then Gay Jack and his girlfriend show up, because Gay Jack wants to pick yet another fight with Alex over… um… Alex having saved his life, I guess. And then this happens.

Where have you seen that before, right? Every television show and movie since. It’s like all of Hollywood saw Final Destination and, in unison, slapped their foreheads and went ‘seriously? We can have people hit by cars mid-sentence without needing cutaways or stuntmen? Sweet!’

So if you’re as sick of thinking that someone’s going to get hit by a car every time they step out into the street in a movie as I am, you have Final Destination to thank.

There’s another notable bit in that sequence, though – and it has to do with laziness on the part of the filmmakers, and their aforementioned (in the title of this article!) problems with continuity. You see, not to spoil the effect or anything, but there was no bus at the shoot that day. It was put in later. Which actually allows us to raise a pretty big question – where did the bus come from? It was tearing along at something like 30, blasting through that intersection straight, in no way turning.

But in this shot from just before Blonde gets splattered we can see that the street that the bus must have driven down is entirely blocked by a piece of heavy machinery-

Continuity error, or the Ghost of Murder, hard at work? Obviously the answer is continuity error.

After having a conversation with Tony Todd, who, being an undertaker, knows more about the Ghost of Murder than normal people, Alex comes up with a theory, one that will become the key rule of the series, and lead to all sorts of problems down the line.

Viewing this graphic-

Leads Alex to sketch out where everyone was sitting, to try and figure the order they would have died in when the plane’s electrical system went nuts.

His revelation? That the Ghost of Murder is killing people in the order they would have died in originally!

Except Alex was sitting next to Tod – and we didn’t see anything killing Tod – and the original graphic even shows the hypothetical explosion happening under Alex’s seat, not Tod's. Also Gay Jack was sitting next to blonde, but somehow he’s not next on the death list, rather the teacher must die.

And die she does, in a sequence that’s famous for being closer to a Three Stooges short than a segment from an actual horror movie. Seriously – she lying on the ground, bleeding, and tries to grab a towel to staunch the flow. Which causes a butcher’s block full of knives to plummet into her chest. And then they’re knocked deeper by a falling chair.

It’s hilarious.

Anyhoo, with her out of the way, it’s time to introduce the other key element of the Ghost of Murder’s rules – if you see the signs and save someone’s life (or your own), the Ghost of Murder has to skip you and go to the next person on the list. Gay Jack, in a fit on ennui, parks his car on a set of train tracks, and then, in a confusingly-edited scene, Alex pulls him out of it just in time to keep him from being splattered along with the classic car.

Going back to his list, Alex figures that he must be next, since he remembers the fireball burning his face off, and since Claire was sitting behind him, she would be last.

Alex hides out in a cabin and tries to death-proof it, but then realizes that he’s not next at all, but rather Clear is on the chopping block. What’s his justification for this?

Terrible writing.

Okay, remember how I said that Alex switched seats? It was so that two hot girls could sit together at the back of the plane. Looking at their pictures in the paper he gets a Eureka! moment, and announces that since he never got around to switching places with the two of them, that means he would have been in back of the plane, and the last to die!

Um… no. No, that’s not how it works, Alex. And by ‘Alex’, I mean ‘film’. The entire premise of your ‘order of death’ has been based on not on what Alex did or didn’t do, but what Alex WOULD HAVE DONE in the original timeline. His freakout doesn’t affect the order of death, it just draws the ire of the Ghost of Murder.

So the fact that he didn’t offically trade seats before his freak-out doesn’t change the fact that he would have, and his place on the Ghost of Murder’s hit list should remain unchanged.

But it’s not.

Which leads to the denoument, with Clear almost being electrocuted, and Alex saving her by grabbing a power cable and then being thrown away from it by an explosion. Alex mistakenly believes that this is the Ghost of Murder’s attempt to kill him, meaning that the whole thing is over!

Unless, of course, the Ghost of Murder just starts again at the top of list. And why wouldn’t he, really? I mean, do they really imagine there’s some rule where if you cheat death two times the Ghost of Murder will just give up? I mean, I know he’s a busy guy, what with 60% of the world’s major industries being propped up by murder and all, but he’s not so busy that he can’t finally get around to taking his shot at Alex, because, no, the electrical cable didn’t count.

Alex is saved by Gay Jack at the last moment before a swinging sign hits him, a heroic act that turns bad very quickly-

Oh, Gay Jack, we hardly knew ye.

You know, the look of realization on his face at that moment is pretty much my favorite thing about the entire film. It’s just too bad his last line is so unbelievably stupid. Oh well.

That brings Final Destination to a close. Please join us next time when I look at how these rules were expanded on in the sequel, the unpredictably-titled ‘Final Destination 2’.

Fun fact about Final Destination: The script began development as an episode of X-Files, which writers Glen Morgan and James Wong were running at the time. This explains the appearance in the film of two curious FBI agents who have so little impact on the plot that I managed to leave them entirely out of this exhaustively-detailed review.

Morbid fact about Final Destination: The idea of a high school French class being killed in a plane crash was inspired by the actual 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, in which an actual high school French class, along with hundreds of others, were killed by a surface-to-air missile.

So yeah, they didn’t change anything but the cause of the crash in their morbid exploitation of the tragedy. Thanks, Morgan and Wong.

Criminal Minds 203: The Perfect Storm

2010-01-22T02:31:00.004-05:00

Cruelty’s afoot in Jacksonville, Fla, as a husband and wife receive a mysterious DVD in the mail – one depicting their college-age daughter being tortured to death, all to the tune of ‘Only the Good Die Young’! There’s not just one murder, though, as the father has a heart attack while watching the video and dies!

Who could possibly be so vile as to taunt the parents of the victim? I’m guessing we’ll find out soon, since, with the exception of a two-parter, none of the episodes have ended without someone being caught for the crimes.

Mandy immediately makes the leap that there must be two killers because one of the killers seems to be performing for someone, and not just the family watching it. This would be a useful insight, if the camera, which should be on a tripod, hadn’t moved while the killer is torturing his victim, proving the existence of a cameraman.

On the plane to Florida they discuss the psychology of team killers, and how they reinforce each others’ crazed obsessions, escalating them faster than they would on their own. The old saw about ‘would they have killed if they’d never met’ gets brought up, which is the mostly hilariously useless hypothetical question imaginable, especially when your job is to catch these people.

A trip to visit the grieving (twice-over!) mother proves fruitless except for the mention of a ring, which proves missing from the body, and will no doubt show up as a trophy later on. Meanwhile Mandy heads to the scene of the body dump which, despite the fact that they already had pictures of the dead body on the plane, still contains the unmoved body. How long does it take to get a few snapshots?

While talking with the local detective in charge of the case Mandy mentions the fact that there are two killers, and when questioned about the basis for this guess, they mention the psychological mumbo-jumbo, rather than the more concrete “because someone was holding the camera”. In addition to the five known victims the team manages to pick out another two bodies that seem to fit the M.O., except for some different DNA in the victim. In another interesting piece of information it seems that the DVDs were always sent specifically to the mothers, because the victims are just that dickish.

There are still a few unanswered questions, such as why the killers leave the bodies lying around, while hiding the victims’ cars, but the team feels ready to offer a profile. It proves to be some general and unhelpful blather about how their personalities interlock, creating a ‘perfect storm’ like the DC snipers or Colombine kids. The whole thing is so profoundly unhelpful that the show actually has the blonde girl interrupt it with knowledge of a new abducted victim.

Over in the world of real policework they’ve finally tracked down pieces of the various cars at a single used car dealership in Georgia, all sold by a guy named Joey. His background of petty crime suggests to them that he must be the lesser of the two killers, and they head out to bust him immediately. In a burst of profound stupidity Joey has his crippled father run interference for him, then convinces the cops to shoot him so that he won’t have to go back to prison.

Um, you know, if you give up your partner (or partners, since it’s too early in the episode for him to be one of the actual killers) they’ll probably let the auto theft and complicity charges slide. The crippled claims to have no idea what his son was up to, even after a lock of hair turns up in his son’s room. Their next step – hunting down his cellmate (and natural first suspect for being a murder partner) Anthony Paul Canardo. Their first stop? Joey’s last place of work, where they’re complete dicks to the garage owner when he’s more than happy to give them information about Joey’s cellmate Tony.

Putting the final nail in the coffin of Tony being the killer when it turns out that he’s got a cute blonde wife.

If you don’t know why this is the most important clue, then you weren’t living in Ontario during the early-mid 90s. Good for you.

She professes ignorance to what her husband’s been up to, then heads to a friend’s house while waiting for Tony to get home to work. They neither send cops to pick Tony up at work, nor search Tony’s house. Why? Because they’re terrible at their jobs. This allows Tony’s wife to show up at the police station with a split lip and black eye, ‘admitting’ that her husband’s crazily abusive.

Wow, she seems to be turning him in pretty hard core, doesn’t she? Yet her story doesn’t add up, because Tony heads home moments later and gets into a fight with Derek, who was apparently waiting to catch the serial killer all by himself. Huh. So, despite the fact that his wife supposedly warned him that the FBI was after him, he still drove home from work.

Again, no one finds this suspicious. They finally get around to searching his house, though, which turns up all the serial killer videos, which were sitting in plain view.

Now they just need one more thing – the location of their last, still-living, victim. Paul isn’t giving that information up easily, though. Wait, not Paul. Tony. Sorry about that.

Their have a plan for how to get the information out, though – send the wife in to talk to him. She grudgingly agrees after Mandy uses the power of psychology to convince her that she’s the last victim’s only hope of survival. There’s a tense scene of the husband and wife talking, and the husband is clearly annoyed that he’s being accused of seven murders, rather than just five. Somehow the fact that he keeps looking puzzledly at the first two victims, and the fact that he keeps hitting the number ‘seven’ really loudly doesn’t tip the team off that he wasn’t involved in the first couple of deaths. So he tells them about a storage unit that the crippled father owns, and they believe it.

Because they’re idiots.

The storage unit proves to be empty, which finally clues Mandy in on the true scenario, that the wife is in charge of the murdering. Of course, the psychological insight proves moot, because the tech girl had already took apart the sound on the tape enough to reveal the wife’s voice on it. But they’re too late, she’s already escaped the police station!

A little glimpse into the wife’s background reveals her backstory/motive – she was regularly brutalized and raped by her father and brother, and her mother covered it up. Ick. This revelation leads to an hilarious exchange between Reid and the Tech Girl:

Reid – “Strange. In this case, the abused actually became the abuser.”
Techie – “That doesn’t happen a lot?”
Reid – “One in eight.”
Techie – “We found the one.”

Yeah. Let’s take a moment to let that sink in. Reid just announced, with no citation, the statistic that 1 out of every 8 victims of child abuse goes on to become an abuser themselves. This is a fact he knows well. Yet he considers it ‘strange’ to hear that, in this case, the abused became the abuser? No, 1 in 8 isn’t 1 in 4, or even half. But it’s a lot. And when you consider the fact that 1.5 million children are abused annually, that means there are something in the neighbourhood of two hundred thousand new abusers being made every single year*.

That’s got to be pretty close to the definition of commonplace, doesn’t it?

(* All statistics on child abuse come from the US Department of Health and Human Services' annual report on Child Maltreatment - 2007 Edition)

Let’s set the math aside for a second, though, lest we overlook the rank stupidity of Reid’s initial statement. ‘Strange. In this case, the abused actually became the abuser.’ Um, you’re a criminal psychologist, Reid. Where exactly did you think abusers were coming from, if not by being abused themselves?

‘Strange’? If this truism – ‘abused becomes abuser’ – didn’t exist, then you wouldn’t have a job.

But hey, so it’s a profoundly stupid line that makes everybody involved in this show look like a complete moron, what’s the big deal? Let’s move on, right? There’s a victim to rescue in the nick of time!

How is this accomplished? By Mandy hitting Tony’s feelings of betrayal about his wife killing before she met him? Yup. He lets them know about a cabin in the woods where all the killing was done, and they get there just in time to rescue the girl and beat the wife up, who hilariously announces that ‘they’ve got nothing on her’. Um, other than the fact that you were in the process of trying to murder one of the victims in the place where the rest were killed. But other than that yeah, you’re good.

Also on the grounds of the cabin was the body of her old partner, which ties off that plot thread rather nicely.

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Marginally, yes. After an episode full of them getting it wrong over and over again, finally Mandy pulled a Hail Mary in the closing seconds, and actually accomplished something useful – he convinced Paul to tell them where the girls were killed. Of course, this really wasn’t ‘solving the crime’, they were only able to leverage his insecurity because the crime had already been solved, but I’ll still give them half-points for the rescue.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Again, it was conventional police techniques that did, in fact, solve the case. The clue that broke the whole thing – the scrapped car parts – was crime solving at its most basic. And a perfect example of them trying to make the main characters look smart by having regular cops look stupid. There’d been three years of women and their cars disappearing, then having the women turn up but the cars stay gone, and it didn’t occur to anyone to just keep calling every single used car and parts dealership in the state until they found a lead? Would it have taken a while? Sure. But not three years.

Likewise it wouldn’t have been that hard to rescue the final victim using conventional police techniques either – if the cops had been doing their job the wife wouldn’t have been able to wander off to put the last victim in danger, and they would have had all the time in the world to perform a title search and discover that the couple had a hunting shack in the middle of nowhere.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

4/10 – Like I said, I can only give them half marks this time. Psychology didn’t solve anything, but it did kind of help them rescue the last victim. So that’s certainly a win for profiling. Ish.

FactCheck!

Any Canadian reading this will no doubt recognize this episode as being based on the Paul Bernardo/Karla Homolka killings of the early 90s. having grown up in Ontario at the time, I personally have clear memories of the case, and the terror that the entire province felt, knowing that there was a crazed team of serial killers out there, murdering high school girls. Yeah, the real life girls were younger, all three of them.

The writers of the episode didn’t bother hiding their influences at all – their male killer’s name is A. Paul Canardo, which, considering the real killer’s name, is only slightly more subtle than ‘Shmaul Shmernardo.

They veered off of the facts of the case in a pretty major fashion, though – there was no twist in real life, the husband was the dominant, monstrous personality. Although if fiction was stranger than truth, then reality was far more unpleasant. While the episode flirted with the story’s hook by giving the wife a backstory involving incestuous rape, it was nowhere near as harrowing as the true events, which had Karla drug her own 15-year-old sister with animal tranquilizers so that her husband (a famous rapist) could rape her unconscious body as a Christmas present.

I feel dirty just typing that.

Anyhoo, the sister died from a bad reaction to the tranquilizers, and it was this death that convinced the husband and wife team that murdering girls was more entertaining than just raping them.

This led to the famous kidnappings, extended torture, and murders of Leslie Mahaffee and (who’s the other one), the stories of which held the public’s attention for weeks. In addition to the plea from the families that showed up in the episode, profiling also came into play in the real-life case. This was actually my first experience with profiling outside of a movie, and I clearly remember newspaper articles explaining that the killers would be a team of two men, one of them in charge, and the other submissively carrying out orders.

In a real-life example of the uselessness of profiling, this theory actually led the police to focus on pairs of male offenders for a brief period, wasting valuable time that could have been spent elsewhere.

Another interesting point about this case is that it has a fairly definitive answer to the old sophist saw ‘if these two had never met, would those girls still be dead?’ Unlike the stooge in the episode, Paul Bernardo was, as I mentioned above, a famous rapist long before meeting and marrying Karla Homolka. Known as the ‘Scarborough Rapist’, he’d attacked at least 20 of victims before moving on to murder with his wife’s help. It’s interesting to note that it was an actual idiotic police department that led to his being allowed to kill in the first place – there was a dragnet where the police were taking DNA samples from basically suspicious man in the area, and Paul had turned up on their list because he liked to brag about being the Scarborough Rapist to his friends, and one of their wives found that suspicious enough to warrant going to the cops.

During Paul’s interview everyone noticed that he looked almost exactly like the description of the rapist that a few of the victims had given. The cops hadn’t investigated further, though, because Paul seemed like a nice enough guy, and they assumed that a serial rapist would have to be ‘creepy’. They didn’t even move his DNA to the top of the testing list, just to be safe.

So even though Bernardo’s DNA was always going to be tested, and he eventually would have been caught for all of his rapes, lazy policework left him free to murder for a full 30 months after that police interview.

The cops finally got around to testing Paul’s DNA, but he was captured before the results came in, when, after a significantly brutal beating, Karla went to the police and turned him in. She testified against him in court in exchange for a lesser charge of manslaughter being pursued against her.

In a final, unbelievably unpleasant point of correlation between the real-life murders and the show, there actually were videotapes of the victims’ torture. They weren’t sent to anyone – in point of fact, no one knew they existed for quite some time. It wasn’t going to do Paul any good to let people know they existed, and Karla, who testified against Paul in exchange for a deal, had a vested interest in keeping them secret. You see, much like the gradually-stripped audio from the episode’s tape, the Bernado/Homolka tapes revealed that the wife had been much more involved in the killings than she’d let on. Not so much that you’d call her the ‘dominant’, as in the episode, but enough so that an entire country wanted to explore the possibility of retrying her for the murders when they found out she hadn’t been the passive victim of Bernardo’s madness the way she’d claimed.

There was no second trial, however, and the worst the courts could do to her was to prevent her from changing her name. To avoid public scrutiny after having a child in 2007, she moved to the West Indies, where she presumably lives in relative anonymity. Paul Bernardo is currently serving his 25-year sentence in Kingston Penetentiary.

Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffee, and Kristen French, as of the time of this writing, remain dead.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Shocker Edition

2010-01-21T03:49:00.007-05:00

A recent conversation with The Divemistress about the movie Shocker got me to thinking about just how puzzling a film it is. Never has there been a movie whose purpose for existing was so unbelievably clear, yet which has done done such an abhorrent job of fulfilling that purpose.

Simply put, the film Shocker exists for one reason: To create a franchise horror villain that Wes Craven would own the rights to, so that he could make back some of the sweet cash he lost by signing away Freddy to New Line.

That character? Horace Pinker, the “Freddy Kruger of Television”. He would have the ability to travel through circuitry, move around as an electrical man, and, most importantly, both exist within the reality of television shows, and drag other people within the shows to be killed there.

It’s an ambitious idea, finding yourself trapped, in fact murdered, within the realm of your favorite television show. While it’s not quite the equal of ‘guy kills you in/with your dreams’, it’s certainly a decent premise, and more than capable of supporting a franchise of films.

Which brings me to the question I’d ask Wes Craven if I ever had the opportunity – why does it take this movie so damn long to get to the point?

Let’s compare it to some other films that it shares qualities with, shall we?

Wes Craven’s breakout hit, Nightmare on Elm Street, whose iconic, extremely profitable, main villain he hoped to emulate in Shocker. When does Freddy first appear in Tina’s dream?

Okay, now let’s take a look at an unrelated film who shared similar horror themes with Shocker, and its most effective sequence outright from Wes Craven’s movie. That movie? ‘Fallen’. It featured a body-jumping-themed villain. So how long before he demonstrated this ability?

Okay. So there’s your baseline. So now let’s take a look at Shocker, a film about the Freddy Krueger that can jump through televisions and pull you into the realities of fictional programs.

Horace Pinker, aptly played by Mitch Pileggi, is already a mass murderer as the film begins. He commits his first onscreen murder at the 8-minute mark.

This murder is witnessed by Peter Berg because of his poorly-explained ability to astral project while dreaming.

Of course, this isn’t a movie about a human killer, it’s about a human killer who because a supernatural one. Why does that sound so familiar? Anyhoo, the first thing a killer needs to do in order to get supernatural powers is to die – but that doesn’t happen until a full 45 minutes into the movie.

So now he starts with the TV-grabbing, right? Nope. First he becomes a body-jumping themed villain, capable of moving instantaneously from person to person.

Then we learn he can be weakened by a magic necklace.

Wait, hold on a second – this movie has a magic necklace in it? And astral projection? Huh?

Horace finally jumps out of a television at the ninety-minute mark.

And only gets around to dragging Peter Berg into the TV until some time later - not before first attacking him with a chair.

That’s right. Among other things, Horace Pinker can possess chairs. Speaking of which, have you ever wondered what Mitch Pileggi would look like if he were half-man, half-chair?

Wonder no longer!

Anyhoo, after a tussle around the apartment Peter forces Mitch to flee by using, what else, the magic necklace, then jumps into the television set after him.

At this point the film finally reveals its reason for existing, as Peter and Mitch engage in an epic fist-fight that takes them through every copyright-cleared piece of footage that Wes Craven could obtain. The effects supporting this sequence are widely inconsistent, going from decent blending-

To atrocious.

But whatever the quality of effects, it’s clear from this scene’s energy and audacity that it was what Craven had been going for all along – this is the reason for Horace’s existence, and by extension, the movie’s. Had there been the sequel that Craven so desperately desired, it would have been about the TV-jumping serial killer.

So why did Craven wait until the movie only had 15 minutes remaining to get to that point? That would be like making an entire movie about Freddy Krueger, child molester, having him get burned alive by the parents at the halfway point, and only have him show up in someone’s dreams as an end-of-movie stinger.

People enjoy horror movies, and they like themed villains. You know what they don’t like, though? Villain origin stories. I don’t have a lot of evidence to back that theory up, because almost no one’s ever been stupid enough to spend an entire film giving a villain’s origin story, but between the financial disasters that met the releases of Shocker and Hannibal Rising, I think there’s an argument to be made against ever trying this again.

Your killer can be as ludicrous as you want, with powers as outlandish as your imagination can produce – but don’t spend an entire film trying to justify them. You’re robbing the audience of an impressive villain by showing him finding his way in the world. We didn’t want to watch a story about Michael Myers’ tragic abusive upbringing, no one wanted to watch a movie about Hannibal learning to be a cannibal, and we certainly didn’t want to see the moment that a trio of Dream Demons offered Freddy his powers. Although, come to think of it, that sequence was almost certainly ripped off from this movie-

So, to wrap up – save origin stories for superhero movies. Horror fans will cut you a lot of slack as long as the killer is interesting enough. Overexplaining is the death of drama, and an entire film of nothing but explanations is death itself.

Also, if it’s not too much trouble, maybe you don’t want to have your villain defeated by a remote control. Just FYI.

Criminal Minds 202: P911

2010-01-15T02:23:00.005-05:00

It’s time for Criminal Minds to go back to the well. The Child Molester well. Which, if you’re making a list of all the wells out there, it belongs near the bottom. Or the top, if it’s a list of ‘worst wells’.

A group of people in one of those FBI operations where they hang out on paedophile chatrooms hoping to identify sickos is sent an image of a young boy being held in a tiny, soundproof container. The boy is ‘Peter’, an unknown sex slave who was abducted at least a year earlier, and has shown up in a few videos since then. Now he’s aged out of his captor’s attraction range, and the villain is looking to sell! But instead of just cutting a cheque (which would require a more efficient bureaucracy, one imagines, they call the profilers, because if there’s one thing profilers know how to do, it’s look at a live video feed of a kidnapped child and figure out where that child is being held.

Wait, no, I’m thinking of psychics. I’m not sure why she’s calling Mandy’s team.

Pointlessly creepy note – Peter is filmed through a camera set into the mouth of a severed mannequin’s head:

According to the random ‘creepy statistics’ section of the episode, there are 40K new pieces of child pornography uploaded to the internet every week. Which seems crazy, but I’m very naïve about the awfulness of the world.

It seems that the camera’s feed is impossible to trace within the 18 hours they have before the auction ends, so the head of the child protection task force at the FBI, who is a former profiler herself, decides that she needs Mandy’s help to find the kid. I’m still not sure just how, but it’ll come up soon, right?

Despite the fact that they have no idea what the child’s real name is, the children’s advocate announces that they know the child was kidnapped somewhere on the east coast. Not sure how, when you don’t know who it is, but let’s move on.

During the flight there’s some generic speech about how easy the internet makes it for paedophiles to find their targets. Of course, it’s not like paedophiles have had any trouble finding victims in the ‘all of history’ before the internet was invented, but whatever, the point is that this is another episode going out of its way to show the terrifying danger you suffer from creepy strangers kidnapping your children. It’s an odd message, considering that most child molestations and murders are committed by relatives, friends of the family, or acquaintances who have a good reason to be around the child. For a show that actually did one of its ‘depressing facts’ segments about how ‘Stranger Danger’ was the most useless child safety programs ever conceived of, this is two episodes about child molestation in a row where the guy responsible was the creepy stranger in the dark van.

Meanwhile, they track down what they assume is the molester’s credit card information from the company that handles his internet account – wait, wasn’t that unfindable? It seems no. While the stream of video is coming through Belarus, the guy also has some hosting space of his own, which he paid for by credit card. Since one of those sites features a teen boy being tied up in real-time, they figure it’s time for an old-fashioned raid!

But it was all for naught! The tied-up teen boy is actually a camwhore, who makes a little extra cash tying himself up for live video broadcasts, hoping to make a little extra money off twisted sickos. The camwhore explains that he hosted to the video as a favor for one of his clients. He doesn’t want to give Mandy any information about that client list, but then Mandy tries to empathize with him, telling him that while he can’t get back at his father, at least he can get back at the sicko who’s grabbed Peter. This gets through to him, and he gives them the screen name and some tracking info for Mehtevas, the sicko in question.

Over at the FBI childcatcher headquarters the rest of the team are trying to figure out just where Peter is hidden, based on visual cues in the feed. One problem? The cell doesn’t have a door. This puzzles them, leading to some speculation about just how Peter got inside. Then Elle (back from her ‘getting shot’ leave) theorizes that the molester built the cell around Peter, “Like a ship in a bottle”.

Maybe I’m all backwards on this, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how ships in bottles are built. If they were, the world’s long tweezer market would completely collapse. While I’m sure it’s possible to saw the bottom off a bottle, slide a complete model ship inside, and then glue the base back on, I’m equally as sure that it’s cheating to do so, and cheating doesn’t constitute how you build a ship in a bottle. Because it’s cheating.

It’s like describing something’s success as ‘hitting a home run’, but what you mean is smashing a softball with a corked bat.

None of this is useful information, of course, so it’s back to the camwhore, who they decide to use as bait for the molester. This gives us our first look at the molester, who, in no way ironically, turns out to be an elementary school principal!

We’re just halfway through the episode, so while he’s a molester, he’s obviously not the molester. A search of the principal’s office doesn’t turn up much but his pornography-enabled laptop, which is more than enough to get a confession out of him. One might think they’d have trouble getting into the laptop, but no, he’s another one of those guys with a really easy password to figure out. Confronted with his library of child porno, he admits that he’s been bidding on the kid, which they’ll be able to use to track the real molester down.

Again, why wasn’t the FBI bidding on the kid as well?

Then the FBI prove themselves to be completely incompetent. Instead of keeping the arrest under wraps until Peter has been rescued they perp-walk him out the front door where the press have gathered. In an amazing coincidence, the molester just happens to be watching the news when this is happening, and since he knows who the principal really is, he shuts the auction down, and leaves it there until a fake story goes out that the FBI are looking in the wrong state.

A fake story that wouldn’t have had to be put out if they’d just done their jobs right the first time.

Back at HQ tech girl and blonde woman try to figure out who Peter is by running down the unit number on his cub scout shirt. They act like figuring the number out is harder than it actually is. Here’s the picture they’re looking at.

Is it just me, or does that clearly read 3446? Let’s not forget, the characters in the show aren’t looking at a blurry screencap the way we are. And still they can’t figure it out - they even act like it’s impossible to just go through a list, because there’s 999 possible combinations. That’s right, the two of them can’t even make out the ‘3’, they’re just working on the fact that it ends in 6. They turn up a word on another part of the shirt, though, which narrows it down to just one unit.

The team goes to check out the town where Peter’s scout troop was located. It turns out his name is actually Charlie Sparks, and the school believed that he transferred out – it’s a pseudonym, and it seems that the kid was living with the paedophile while in school and the cub scouts!

This leaves them with a pretty big question – why did the molester shut down Peter’s life and lock him in a room? Mandy thinks that it’s because the FBI was closing in on him! They look through a list of everyone who was interviewed on the case. Only one of them is alive, in state, and out of jail, so they guess that it must be him!

The team rushes over to his house and arrests him without incident, rescuing Peter from the trunk of his minivan at the same time. It turns out that Peter was kidnapped at age 1, and has been molested continuously for his entire life.

So yeah, that guy’s done for. The show tries to end things on a happy note with Peter’s mom coming to meet her son for the first time in half a decade, but this kind of story is basically impossible to put a positive spin on. Even if the kid miraculously doesn’t have a complete inability to empathize from his utter lack of healthy attention, he’s almost certain to wind up with paedophillic tendencies himself.

That’s right, kid. Look forward to a life of only being able to be aroused while imagining naked children. The happiest ending possible is that he lives the rest of his years in a profoundly unhappy state, never hurting anyone else.

But that’s not the most likely outcome.

So what’s worse – that they’re doing a popular network show about such awful subject matter, or that they’re misrepresenting the awfulness so completely?

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

A little – after all, if Mandy didn’t have the skills necessary to figure out that the camwhore was abused by his father, he couldn’t have gotten under the kid’s skin to get him to co-operate. Then again, that came from a place that’s less of psychological insight and more of common sense. When the camwhore first meets the FBI they ask where his father is, and the camwhore responds that the guy is a bastard that he hopes he never sees again. Also, his chest is covered with cigarette burns. Gee, I wonder if parental abuse might have been involved?

Here’s another clue – he’s a 14-year-old boy who’s working as an illegal camwhore for paedophiles all over the globe.

Of course, since the camwhore led them to the principal and the principal was a dead end, it didn’t actually help them solve the case, did it?

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

Actually, it almost completely was. The case was solved by looking at a video feed and finding out where the victim lived by reading something written on it (Ah, Skinwalkers. I hated you.), then making the totally normal law-enforcement assumption that a criminal went to ground because he thought the cops were onto him.

Completely run-of-the-mill policework, with little-to-no psychology involved.

Also, why weren’t they bidding on the kid?

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

2/10 – Yes, they showed off a decent bit of psychology this week, but since none of it actually helped solve the case, they can’t be well rewarded for it.

In a final note, I was pretty hard on the show for misrepresenting the bleak monstrousness of Peter’s future, but it’s possible they didn’t quite mean it – the episode ends with a strangely incompatible mix of image and music. The soundtrack is cautiously upbeat, headed in the direction of triumphalism because of the reunion, but the last image is of Mandy’s profoundly unhappy face:

Of course, since the show is generally not the best-written thing around, I don’t know if I can attribute that look to Mandy knowing that, in twenty years time, he or somebody like him is probably going to be arresting that kid while other mothers comfort his victims.

Also, why was this episode called P911?