How to ruin your own movie: The Victim Edition

Michael Biehn made a movie! He wrote it and directed and starred in it, then cast his wife as the female lead, because hey - he's the one making the movie. That alone makes giving it a look, since it's fairly common for a character actor stalwart to produce a film they're passionate about appearing in, they almost never just go ahead and write/direct them as well. The main character is even named Kyle, because Michael obviously wants us all to know that he knows why we're watching the movie, and he's okay with that.

It's not a bad premise for a movie, either. Biehn plays a loner who lives in a cabin in the woods, assiduously keeping to himself, and attempting some personal improvement with the assistance of self-help tapes. His life is turned upside down when a woman in tattered clothes shows up at his door armed with a horrifying story - her best friend has just been brutally murdered by a corrupt, drug-snorting cop, and now that cop and his partner are out to silence her for good! Hell, Michael Biehn's probably in danger just for hearing the story. If that weren't bad enough, when the cops turn up looking for the woman, they have a very different version of events, in which she's a dangerous criminal on the run from the authorities. Also, apropos of nothing, there's a serial killer on the loose in the area.

As anyone can see, this is a potent formula for drama. Who is on whose side? What dangerous secrets are people hiding away? With everyone's life on the line, who can be trusted? Michael Biehn certainly built himself a potent starring vehicle - except for one fatal flaw.

How To Ruin Your Own Movie - The Barrens Edition

The Barrens opens with an important reminder of Count Vardulon's Rule of Vacations - Don't go on one with either of the Ashmore brothers. It's not going to go well for any of you. In this case, Shawn and his girlfriend are out in the Pine Barrens, walking off the official trail when they come across a pile of torn-apart animal corpses.

Things get even more unpleasant when a mortally wounded deer bolts out of the woods and collapses right on the trail - no doubt it was fleeing from whatever left the huge pile of bodies.

Then the teaser ends with a shadow passing over the girlfriend's face as she looks up and sees something enormous flying over her head. The implication is clear - there's a monster in these woods slaughtering animals, and the two of them are next!

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Evil Things Edition

The film opens with the resolution, as is so popular in the found-footage genre-

So everybody dies at the end. Don't bother getting attached to any of them, folks! Not that you could - this is not a story about the world's most likeable college students. Lots of bickering, lots of people telling the main filmmaker to 'stop pointing the camera at me', as if that will somehow make it seem more realistic. Here's a tip for future 'found footage' flimmakers - in real life, people mind being filmed, or they don't. And if they mind, their friends turn off the cameras, because if they don't they seem like complete and utter tools.

So unless you want utter tools and lots of bitching from characters, make it so the people in your movie don't mind being filmed all the time. Trust me, all that people will notice is that the movie is pissing them off less than most 'found footage' films.

Another good thing to avoid is long sequences stolen directly from other 'found footage' movies. In this case, there's an extended (10 minute!) sequence where the characters get lost in the woods. It's not like this is even justified by the plot - they're not looking for anything or seemingly going anywhere. A group of five people apparently just think to themselves 'hey - let's go off wandering into the scraggly woods without compasses, maps, marked trails, or any idea of the geography of the area!'

Meaning that the characters are also too stupid to continue to live.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Tucker and Dale opens with a faux-verite sequence in which a pair of newspeople have gone to the scene of a massacre to do some investigating on their own. For some reason, they've gone in the middle of the night. Anyhoo, they both get murdered by this guy:

And then it cuts to:

Well, first off, it's "Three Days Earlier", since the movie isn't taking place on the day I'm watching it - that wouldn't make sense - more importantly, though, moments later we're introduced to the college kids who are headed out into the wild for the week, and among their number is this guy:

Who's obviously the killer from the opening sequence. Which means that we've had the film's entire narrative arc (college guy goes progressively more nuts, bedeviling the main character, until he's almost killed, but survives at the encounter) spoiled for us.

Thanks for ruining all the surprises the film had to offer, filmmakers.

Still, though, quality movie, you'd just be better off skipping the first minute.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Dead Space: Aftermath Edition

I don't know why I'm surprised that two films in the same series would use the same terrible device, but here we are, ruining things again. At first, I thought the film was going to be clever, and show the actual 'Aftermath' of a Dead Space incident, seeing as things open with characters gathered in the heart of a spaceship, having recently resolved whatever it is their problem was.

At fist it seems like the movie is going to be about what happens next to all of these people - but that quickly gets tossed aside in favor of a structure where an interrogator asks them what happened in the plot of the film, and each one tells their own part of the story (each rendered in a different art style).

Which wouldn't be terrible except for two things:

1: We already know what happened in the story - everyone on the ship except for the four of them were killed, but they managed to destroy a thing that saved the day. This means that everything they do feels a little pointless, and every death a fait accomplit.

2: The 'everyone has a part of the story' thing is completely misused, and has no real value. The main action of the film features all four characters running around as a group, trying to accomplish goals. As a result, all four of them know everything that happened on the ship. They don't have their own 'parts' of the story, and there's no reason each one can't tell the whole thing, yet the movie is parceled out into four sections in chronological order for no good reason. Well, other than to have the framing device eat up running time.

That's the real kicker which makes the whole film so frustrating. The 'after the end' framing device removes all drama and surprise from the film, and replaces it with absolutely nothing. It's not like we need to be told that a 'rescue' from a situation like this isn't going to turn out well - all you have to do is watch Alien 3 - the guys from the corporation are never there to help. What makes the whole thing worse is that at the end of the very first flashback the villains lay it all out on the line - all they need are people who have touched the marker, everyone else is expendable. Since either fate is essentially death, just twenty minutes into the movie the last surprise has been sprung, and we can commence ignoring the thing.

Look, I know Palmiotti and Grey are overly fond of this device. To a fault. To like, seven faults. That doesn't mean that people working on the sequel to something they wrote have to use that same device. It didn't work there, why did you think it was going to work here?

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Chain Letter Edition

As the film Chain Letter opens, a young woman is caught in a terrifying death-trap, each of her legs attached to the rear frame of one of her parents' cars. After a close call in which she's almost saved, the inevitable happens, and she's torn into two pieces. Totally acceptable opening for a slasher film, but unfortunately a few elements of the scene go out of their way to let the audience know that they're not watching the first scene of the movie.

They're watching the last one. How can we tell this?

Note the ridiculous amount of duct tape covering the victim's head. A single piece of tape wrapped around the character's mouth would be sufficient to keep her from alerting her parents to her plight, but the killer has covered her up for no reason other than to cloud her identity from the viewer.

According to Vardulon's first rule of horror filmmaking you don't put a mask on someone unless taking it off will be of some significance to the viewer - but since this is the first film we have no idea who any of the characters are. If this is simply the teaser kill, there's no percentage in hiding her identity, so why are they doing it?

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Jennifer's Body Edition

I've established well and thoroughly just what a plague on the film industry this whole 'start the movie at the end' thing is, and in the process of covering these films I thought I'd seen nearly every way imaginable for a film to spoil its entire plot in the opening seconds. Even I, jaded though I am, was wholly unprepared for how bound and determined Jennifer's Body is to murder any attempts at suspense. If you're at all interested in learning how to ruin your own movie, look no further than Jennifer's Body - it is a master's class on the subject.

So, with no further ado, here's the first shot of the movie:

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Paranormal Entity!

Okay, it’s pretty obvious that a rip-off of Paranormal Activity was going to follow the same basic structure as that film, and ruin it for the audience just as its inspiration did. Despite this truism, I can’t abide just how horribly the film botches any attempt to generate drama.

That’s the 911 call that opens the film. His family’s not dead. His sister is dead. I’m not sure why he describes it this way, and can’t offer any explanation, since, at the end of the movie, we don’t see him make this call.

Here’s the second bit of the call. I can’t stress this enough – his mother is not dead at the time this call was made. In all likelihood the voiceover was recorded at the beginning of the film, back when the mother was supposed to die on camera.

How To Ruin Your Own Movie: 909 Experiment Edition

It’s quite possible that you haven’t heard of ‘909 Experiment’ – I hadn’t heard of it until a few days ago when I was looking for information about ‘Das Experiment’ online. It was made in 1999 as an attempted Blair Witch cash-in, and the plot concerns two young people who head into the woods in order to take part in an ongoing university project about creepy goings-on inside a mountain chalet.

The creepy goings on are that the guy dies and the girl doesn’t. I wish what I’d just done there can be called spoiling the movie, but like all the films I cover here for the ‘How to Ruin Your Own Movie’ feature, 909 Experiment is hell-bent on spoiling itself from the earliest scenes.

That’s Jamie. Just one minute into the movie we see her being interviewed after the main events of the film. So she gets out just fine. And she only refers to the other character “Alex” in the past tense. So obviously he’s not long for the world.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Home Movie Edition

What follows is the first image that comes onscreen in the film ‘Home Movie’.

An arresting image, to be sure, for anyone who doesn’t want to look too closely, it’s flies buzzing around inside rotting roadkill.

The movie then fast-forwards a little, an obnoxious habit that will crop up from time to time-

That is either a really big fly, or a really small dead animal.

It turns out to be the second – a squirrel, which the cameraman then picks up, places in a garbage bag, and sticks in a little red wagon.

So, from these three (okay, really only the first and third images were relevant) key visuals, what have we learned? That this is a movie about a killer child.

So, exactly one minute into the movie and all suspense has been stripped away, and all that’s left to wonder is how long before the child murders his/her parents.

HOW TO RUIN YOUR OWN MOVIE: Red Sands Edition

I don’t know if Red Sands sets a record for ruining the film’s ending, after all, the Strangers did one hell of a great job with the title cards, but it’s possibly unique in the way the film throws away not just the twist ending, but every main plot point in its opening seconds.

The first scene of the film involves Doctor Ray from ER sitting in an Afghani military installation, being questioned by his superior officer, prominent genre actor and professional J. Jonah Jameson impersonator, J.K. Simmons.

Ray’s staring at the camera intensely while JK explains that everyone else in the squad was killed, and no one knows how.

HOW TO RUIN YOUR OWN MOVIE: Twilight Edition

Normally I restrict the ‘How to ruin your own movie’ posts to films that feature obscene levels of anticlimacism, that seem determined to give away all of their secrets as early as possible, ruining any drama that might be created. Not this time – although the film does open with one of those voice-overs alluding to an event later in the movie, it’s not specific enough that it ruins anything.

No, the ruining is done by the rest of the film, which makes a concerted effort to suck every bit of drama out of every possible situation, until all we’re left with is a film whose emotional journey flatlines.

First, the romance plot. A strange, pale girl from Arizona moves to a small town in Washington and starts dating a local vampire. The myriad possibilities for drama are obvious. None are exploited.

HOW TO RUIN YOUR OWN MOVIE: The Strangers Edition

It may come as no surprise to longtime readers of the site (Hi, Phillipa!) that there's nothing that irritates me more than modern fiction's attempts to kneecap any ability it might have to create tension or anxiousness or yes, even fear, in their audience by flat-out telling that audience exactly how the film is going to end in the opening minutes. As I mentioned in my Swamp Thing Natsukashi Podcast, the one thing that horror films have going for them is that they're the only genre whose endings, even in big studio pictures, can't be easily predicted. In a horror movie, you don't know the good guy's going to win, you don't know the bad guy's going to lose, really, you don't know that they're not going to kill the dog and the kid and end the film in the most upsettingly abrupt manner possible.

This is how audience are kept on edge - if they don't know what's going to happen next, they become invested in the story. If they think the fate of each character is up in the air, they invest more emotion in those characters' struggles. In no other theatre will you find as rapt or attentive an audience as in one playing a good horror movie.

So why on earth would a movie, especially a horror movie, ever give away its most powerful weapon, the uncertainty of its resolution? If you're going to tell me how your story ends, why should I bother watching it? This is why Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was one of the biggest disasters in recent memory - how on earth am I supposed to care about characters that have to die for the events of the first film to have even occurred?

HOW TO RUIN YOUR OWN MOVIE: Diary of the Dead Edition

You know what's great? When a movie takes the time to sit down and explain the message behind every event in the film, in real time, as those events are happening.

I'm not going to go into the unbelievably stupid things that every character does for the entire length of the movie, because I'd have to watch the film a second time to document them, and there's no way I'm going to be doing that, but why on earth would you make a film that flat out told you not just how it was going to end and who was going to survive, but also had the narrator pop in every five minutes to explain how heartbreaking and philosophically interesting she finds everything that's going on.

How to ruin your own film: The P2 Edition

Ah, my first entry in the list of films that open with out-of-context scary stuff from later in the film, then tell the rest of the story in flashback. How I hate this convention. Why does anyone ever do this? Two things – one, do they not realize that this spoils any chance that the film has at building suspense? Whatever the image you put in the beginning, the audience is just going to spend the rest of the film waiting for that image to show up, which keeps them from getting involved in the story. And B: I know that most filmmakers possess a pointed contempt for their audiences, but do they really think so little of the people paying to see their movie that they imagine they'll leave if something scary doesn't happen within the first three minutes?

CLOVERFIELD ADDENDUM (SPOILERY)

So yeah, it turns out they did a few stupid things. But not so many that it ruined the film for me.

On the whole, not a bad movie, just a shockingly short one. Turns out I was off by a full ten minutes, and the credits rolled round about the 70 minute mark, making it well under 'feature length'. I know 'feature length' is a bit of a fuzzy line, but my own personal rule is that if you're not a good bit longer than one of those original Columbo movies that were aired in a 90 minute timeslot, then you're not as long as a real movie.

HOW TO RUIN YOUR OWN MOVIE: THE CLOVERFIELD EDITION

(The following was written paused 21 minutes into the movie “Cloverfield”)

I haven't seen the movie Cloverfield yet, but I already know how it's going to end. How do I know this? The filmmakers were nice enough to inform me in advance. As the film begins, two title cards come up. The first reads:

DOCUMENT #USGX-8810-B467
DIGITAL SD CARD
MULTIPLE SIGHTINGS OF CASE DESIGNATE
“CLOVERFIELD”

Then there's a second page, informing us that:

CAMERA RETRIEVED AT INCIDENT SITE “US-447”
AREA FORMERLY KNOWN AS “CENTRAL PARK”