The Next Day: The Boy (2015) Edition

That's right, it's another episode of The Next Day! And this time, it's also a movie called 'The Boy', which I agree is a little weird!

Enjoy!

Next time, a movie not called The Boy!

New Video Project! The Next Day: The Boy (2016)

That's right, 'The Next Day' is back - in video form! The stars of TheAvod bring the aftermath of prominent horror films to life, or at least audio!

The first installment is 2016's 'The Boy'!

The Next Day - Creep Edition

The film Creep ends with the villain, one Mark Duplass, revealing that he's been killing videographers and other random people for ages.

He's even on the phone as the credits roll, planning his next murder.

The Next Day: Intruders Edition

Welcome to 'The Next Day', a recurring feature which explains what happens immediately after the end of films with ambiguous finales!

This time we're talking about Intruders, the film about (spoiler alert) a home invasion which goes awry when the house's inhabitant, a shut-in, turns out to be a crazed serial killer!

At the climax of the film, after she's murdered all of the Intruders (hey, I just got the title!), and the house she hasn't left in a decade is set on fire, the serial killer wanders off into the woods as the credits roll and police sirens approach.

Yeah, turns out that I'm really fond of auto-balancing.

So, what happened next?

She was immediately arrested. Like five seconds later. This is a 23-year-old woman who hasn't left her house in a decade. She can't drive, has no social skills, resources, or idea how to avoid the police. Also she was pretty badly beaten during her fights with each of the three home invaders.

Honestly, it would have made more sense for the character, and been a better ending for the movie, had she stood at the front door and looked out into the world, then walked back into her burning house, going down with the ship. Whether it was because she honestly couldn't leave or because burning to death was preferable to life in jail could have been up to the audience, who would have left with a more logical, character-based resolution.

How To Ruin Your Own Movie: The Intruders Edition

The Intruders is the story of a father and daughter who move into a spooky new house, and the events which follow after. Spooky events! Doll heads appear and disappear seemingly at will, there are eerie noises in the night - fairly standard stuff.

So the audience is placed in a position of uncertainty - is the house haunted? Is there someone hiding in the walls? Is the main character an unreliable narrator due to mental instability? This would all be a great foundation for mystery and drama, except for one thing-

The movie tells us that it is, in all likelihood, the second option. Right up front. Here's the first thing that happens in the movie:

Sorry about the low quality - the image was super-dark, so I just used the auto-balance.

A beaten woman is tied up in a dingy basement.

Another Fun Thing About Chainsaw Killer

Chainsaw Killer is low budget in the best possible way - by which I mean it doesn't care for a second that its budget is showing, it's going to get its point across with whatever tools it has at its disposal. In this case, those tools are:

A - Footage of the Chainsaw Killer chasing people through the woods in the late autumn.
B - Footage of those victims being chased in the early spring.

Now, you might think that having only those two things would in some way baffle or foil Chainsaw Killer's editors, but no - it doesn't even slow them down. Allow me to present my proof!

Chainsaw Killer - Bad Filmcraft or Unintended Plot Revelation?

Allow me to reintroduce baffling film 'Chainsaw Killer'.

Seemingly an attempt to use existing footage from an abandoned project, Chainsaw Killer tells the story of a horror geek with a vodcast who is obsessed with tracking down a copy of the obscure horror film 'The Force Beneath'.

Also, there's a guy with a chainsaw, wearing a catcher's mask, who spends his time cutting people up with said chainsaw. Not in such a way that it would require any gore to be shown on film, however. This is not a film with an extravagant budget. The kills tend to be along the lines of-

Chainsaw goes offscreen.

Blood thrown on face.

Then cut away to the next scene. It's never super-clear what the Chainsaw Killer's connection to the obscure videotape is, almost as if they're appearing in two separate movies right up until he turns up and kills the main character.

So, keeping that extremely low budget in mind, allow me to show you pictures. First is the face of the chainsaw killer-

The Weirdest Prop I've Seen In A While

I recently watched The Pact 2, and while I normally write articles like this to criticize half-assed props, this time I wanted to call out a strangely, almost unnaturally accurate prop. The main character is working on a graphic novel based on the psychic visions she's having of recent murders. Not that she knows that's what she's doing - the point it, she's got a comic book.

At the end of the movie, she pops some samples of that comic book into an envelope and mails it off to real comic book publisher Fantagraphics.



The super-readable address is rare enough to see in movies that I got curious and looked it up - and yes, that was Fantagraphics' current address at the time this article was published. I don't know why they went so all-in with accuracy in this scene - maybe Fantagraphics is publishing some kind of a movie tie-in, I didn't care enough to look it up. Still, it's nice to see this level of attention to detail.

Even in Great Movies, Weird Mistakes Were Made

So there's a scene in wonderful film Double Indemnity which doesn't make a lick of sense. Barbara Stanwyck is coming to meet Fred MacMurray to discuss the latest phase of their nefarious scheme, only to hear through the door that Fred MacMurray already has company - Edward G. Robinson, better known to some as the original Chief Wiggum! They're discussing the insurance settlement that Barbara has cheated the company out of!

So she's put in something of an awkward position. Edward could be leaving at any moment, so she really should run - but then again, it's vitally important that she hear what's going on inside the room! Finally she waits too long, and the door opens-

But she's able to hide behind it? Yes, unlike every other apartment building in the history of America, the door to the private apartment opens out into the communal hallway. In an amazing coincidence, this gives her an opportunity to hide while Fred is seeing Edward off.

So why this bizarre bit of staging? Couldn't they have just built the hallway with alcoves for her to duck into, and Fred to stand in front of? Probably just a function of limited time and budget, like most other errors of this type. Wilder wrote it into the script, then when he saw it in action, he was smart enough to realize how false it looked, but understood that it would cost more to fix than it was worth, since most people would never even notice what was off about the scene.

Well, I noticed, Billy Wilder. Me, a guy watching the movie 72 years after you made it and then spent decades being universally praised for its quality.

Exists Has Maybe the Fastest Check-Out Point Ever

I think people are generally familiar with the 'Check-Out-Point' in horror movies, the moment in the film where the characters' actions diverge so completely from any human behaviour or experience that relating to them becomes impossible. Exists, the found-footage Bigfoot movie from Eduardo Sanchez (but not Daniel Myrick) has one of the earliest check-out points I've ever encountered, a mere 4 minutes into the film.

Here's some context - a group of twentysomethings are driving to a cabin in the woods. While one of them is screwing around and distracting the driver, they hit something in the road. Then, as they inspect the car for damage, they hear plaintive wails and crying from the woods. Loud, inhuman sounds that are, at the same time, not from any recognizable animal.

When they go back and check the footage of the accident, they discover this-

In the moment before they hit something, Bigfoot was walking on the side of the road next to the car.

So, at this point, they both A: have the best legitimate footage of Bigfoot anyone has ever gotten on film, and B: most likely ran over Bigfoot's child.

The only possible human reaction in that situation is to back the car up until there's room to turn around, and then to drive to civilization as quickly as possible, to do anything else would be suicidally stupid.

Naturally, they head for the Cabin in the Woods, and I check the H out of the film.

How did you forget such basic storytelling lessons, Eduardo? In the Blair Witch Project, the main characters don't know they're screwed until they're so far into the woods that there's nothing they can do about it.

I seriously can't believe this movie is from the same team that brought us Altered.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Magic Man

The film Magic Man concerns a woman's half-hearted investigation into the mysterious death of her mother some twenty years earlier. At one point we get a look at an article concerning that crime - and here it is!

Now, for the text!

Production Can Be a Struggle, Folks

So I'm watching Scream Park, and we get to the part where one of the killbillies has to chop his way into a gift shop. Then this happens.

If you're wondering why that looks so strange, not unlike an FMV game from the mid-90s, it's because that's some truly iffy bluescreen you're looking at. Its seems that a condition placed on the filmmakers was that they not damage the amusement park's property at all, so this scene proved something of a challenge.

Also, here's a free tip - if you're framing straight at a set of glass doors like this, if you'd just open the door you want out of the way 90 degrees it would be effectively invisible. By pushing it as far as it would go, you've made it abundantly clear that there's an open door right there on the left of frame, right next to the fake one you've added in post.

The Next Day: Scream Park Edition

The film Scream Park concerns an attempt by the owner of a theme park to arrange the murder of his staff in the hopes that the publicity surrounding the massacre will turn the park into a major tourist attraction. Setting aside whether or not this would work (the film seems to think it would), it's one of the most inept examples in recent memory of a film struggling to obtain a 'the killer wins' ending that I've ever seen.

These are the film's two survivors. Woman and her Boss. After a terrible struggle against some killbillies, Woman manages to save the day, while Boss hides in a closet the whole night. Then, right at the end of the movie, it's revealed that Boss was in on it all along, and murdered Woman's would-be boyfriend because he was romantically fixated on her.

Filmmaking errors and their effects on narrative.

So imagine a movie that opens with a child being kidnapped. That kidnapping sets the plot in motion, and the search for the child is the main action of the film, with the identity of the kidnappers being a central mystery. Now imagine, two minutes later, a scene in which the mother, before the police come to tell her about her missing child, is talking on the phone in her living room, and in a mirror on the wall, the child is plainly visible getting a drink of water in the kitchen.

If you saw that, wouldn't you spend the rest of the film wondering what the mother's connection to the kidnapping was, and how the child was back at home after we saw them being abducted? Wouldn't it be a little infuriating if the film never addressed it?

Of course, from the filmmakers' point of view, none of this screwing with the audience was ever intended - during the editing process, they moved the kidnapping up to the start of the film, but they needed the content of the phone call to set something up in a later scene. Feeling that a flashback might be confusing, they just edited all of the shots of the child from the phone call scene, and then pretended that the phone call scene was taking place after the kidnapping, but before the mother finds out about it. Unfortunately, they missed the reflection in a couple of the shots, and they wound up leaving a deeply confusing image in the film.

Can an observant viewer be blamed for letting the awareness of that reflection colour their impressions and expectations of the rest of the film? This isn't like seeing wires attached to monster heads, or a boom mike drifting into the top of frame. This is an error that doesn't look like a mistake, and has the potential to drastically change the meaning of the film - possibly the most severe kind of mistake.

Which brings me to Curse of Chucky.

The Hidden Hand: Alien Contact and Government Coverups "Review"

I watched this documentary the other day, and found it to be lacking in any sort of clear narrative whatsoever. It's nothing more than a series of often-contradictory testimonials from a series of interviewees of vastly differing credibility levels. I mention it here because I noticed two interesting things while watching it.

Thing Number 1-

If you took the audio of a group of people talking about the PTSD effects of being abducted by aliens, then removed all of the mentions of aliens, and just left in about how it's impacted their lives, it would be indistinguishable from the audio of a group of child molestation survivors.

Thing Number 2-

The photo that the filmmakers used to represent 'Men in Black'

Is pretty clearly two guys cosplaying as the Blues Brothers.

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.

Race with the Devil's Amazing Moon

So I'm watching Race with the Devil for theAvod, and there's a plot point requires part of the action take place during the apex of a full moon. Then something amazing happens. We get a look up into the sky, and what should appear, but-

The noon-day sun, processed with the least-convincing day-for-night treatment this side of the mod squad. Even accepting that this is supposed to be an unusually bright full moon-

That's still unacceptable. I know that there were any number of reasons that might have kept the production from getting their own footage of the full moon (short schedule, rain, lost footage...), but this was the 1970s, and I refuse to believe that stock footage libraries didn't exist yet. How much could a single shot of the full moon have possibly cost?

This is a movie where trucks explode and fly off of bridges. Come on, people.

It's possible that you're wrong about The Dark Knight Rises

I've been very hard on terrible movie Skyfall here on the website, and as a consequence, a question has been asked of me: how is it that I'm so critical of terrible movie Skyfall, while I'm happy ignoring the many plot holes and stupid contrivances of wonderful movie The Dark Knight Rises? A fair question, one which I'll answer in the form of a picto-illustratory article.

The short version - The Dark Knight Rises doesn't actually have many plot holes or stupid character decisions. What people have incorrectly regarded as such are largely examples of them not paying close enough attention to the film, or misinterpreting things (willfully or not) out of a biased intent to claim that the film isn't actually any good. I'm not going to attempt to engage their motivations for doing this, but rather just explain where their reasoning is flawed.

So, let's start at the beginning, shall we?

I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 72

Indiana Jones and the Accidental Trailblazer

It’s no surprise that half of the fun of this type of high adventure movie is watching the characters discovering lost civilizations and ancient cities. In world that’s essentially been mapped (save for the Oceans. And Thule) it’s a romantic idea to imagine that there still are mystical peaks and valleys that haven’t yet been seen by modern humanity. It's kind of hard to believe these conceits in modern-age fiction, our world of satellite topography and long-range helicopters has long since killed any notion that there could be a Shangri-la hiding in a mountain range somewhere, even something as basic as Man-Who-Would-Be-Kingistan has been debunked as pure fantasy.

This is why we love adventure films sent in the recent past. The technology and culture is familiar enough that we can easily imagine ourselves there, but the characters’ overall knowledge of the world is less depressingly complete than our own, so their willingness to chase the fantastic can seem admirable, rather than naïvely quixotic. It’s not like this is a recent trend in fiction, either. Even Alan Quatermain was adventuring half a century before his stories were penned.

One of the key elements that make this ‘lost civilization’ storyline so compelling is the way it sidesteps our own history. Always worried about plausibility, the storyteller has to go to extreme lengths to offer an explanation for how these people have gone undiscovered by humanity and untouched by progress. There’s a certain curiosity that the horizon generates in the human mind. Who’s to say what’s just over that next ridge, deeper into the woods, or just behind that mountain range? Why couldn’t it be an ancient city built entirely out of gold?

Intellectually we know that there aren’t any mysteries left, and that, within out own experiences, we’ll never uncover something ancient and mysterious. That’s why it’s so vitally important that this discovery, when presented in adventure fiction, come at some price. If the struggle that the characters must go through in order to find the underground empire isn’t extreme, then where’s the satisfaction in the discovery?

Consider the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy has to go to Nepal to track down the key to its discovery, then carefully sneak right under the Nazis’ noses in order to confirm its location. Or the final resting place of the Grail in Last Crusade – it’s established that Sean Connery spent his entire adult life looking for information about its location, and then Indy has to struggle through a setpiece in the Venice sewers to obtain the final clue.

Compare that to Indy and company’s journey to the Valley of the Plastic Prop in this film. First off, just to reiterate, he’s not discovering anything lost to history. John Hurt already did that, but he’s not a whole lot of help just now, what with him being crazy and all. So what does Indy have to do to retrace John Hurt’s steps? Does he have to decode bizarre things the man says? Not really. Find a key to decoding a map that John Hurt makes? Nope.

All he accomplishes is getting kidnapped by the Russians who place him in a convoy, which quickly turns into a chase sequence, as Indy and company find themselves racing through a suspiciously paved jungle. During this chase sequence no one is consulting any maps, or paying any particular attention to the direction they're headed in. One group wants to escape with the skull, and the other wants to stop them. Yet somehow this chase sequence terminates with the characters all arriving at a river approximately five hundred yards from the mysterious city lost to the mists of time.

How did it stay an undiscovered legend for so long? Apparently no one had bothered to walk in a straight line through the jungle before. Fancy that.

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!