Bargain Bin Blu-Rays: The Good, the Bad, the WTF

It’s… it’s so organized… no words, should have sent a poet…

“What about this one?”

My husband held aloft a horror triple feature, retrieved from the depths of the Blu-Ray bin at Wal-Mart.  A weekend tradition held over from his post-college cheap entertainment quest, we often peruse the $7.88 bins in search of the germs and gems of cinema.  There’s a plethora of decent older releases to be found, but I wanted something off the beaten path to determine if there was any merit in these value-buys.  I looked over the jacket briefly, featuring three older films with a range of actors, everyone from Dennis Hopper to the guy who played Andy Warhol in the opening sequence of The Watchmen.

“Oh, that looks terrible.  I’m in.”

Mortuary (2005)

I started off with Mortuary, the first option on the title menu.  Seeing director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre) attached gave me so much hope; seeing “people who liked this also liked Gothika and Final Destination 3” dashed most of it.

We open with a family moving cross-country to an abandoned funeral home following the death of the husband/father.  The dialogue is painfully staggered and the sets are an awful jumble of a historical run-down home and some Styrofoam headstones, strange neighbors with a shipping container yard.  I felt mildly optimistic when Cindy Lou Who went skipping around the cemetery, putting what I thought were pieces of dynamite on all the tombstones.  I was disappointed when I found out they were, in fact, strands of Twizzlers.  Damn.

Have fun with the crumbling monuments and large rusty equipment, honey!

Mother Leslie (Denise Crosby, Star Trek) remains awkwardly upbeat despite the cackling crippled caretaker (Greg Travis, the aforementioned Warhol impersonator) and a decrepit mansion harboring a serious case of black mold and bubbling front yard sewage.  Son Jonathan (Dan Byrd, The Hills Have Eyes), when not getting into fisticuffs at the local diner, refers to her as the happy mortician.  Young daughter Jamie fills the role of zombie bait/precocious “I see dead people” kid.

 

No, Denise Crosby, that’s not where we hid your career…

Apparently one can become a mortician by reading “Embalming for Dummies”, as Leslie does while attempting to embalm her first cadaver.  A bumbling, stuttering Sheriff (Michael Shamus Wiles, Breaking Bad) rings the doorbell and all we’re missing is “Yakkity Sax” – Leslie freaks out and spurts factually inaccurate green embalming fluid across the room in true Benny Hill fashion.  Upstairs, Jonathan and his friends fall over themselves hilariously trying to mask the smell of pot.  Their superficial characters are about as believable as a gay teenager with a barbed wire tattoo around half of his neck.  Wait…

 

I got it out of a quarter machine at the Dollar Tree.

My suspension of disbelief was dragged through the next hour as the happy mortician invites her son’s friends down to the lab to see what’s on the slab.  Liz (Alexandra Adi), although eager to see a dead body, is horrified to see her piano teacher, who was only about 374 when he died. Once the ghoulish action starts crackin’, the continuity falls apart.  Take one part Courtney Love lookalike obviously laughing while she’s being attacked plus young girl’s shifting snot bubble, noticeably reused shots, a dash of mournful, inappropriate background music and really awful CGI, and there you have Tobe Hooper’s Mortuary.

Well not with THAT attitude!

Oh yeah, and that guy, the custodian of cemetery copulating.  Despite my devotion to the original Evil Dead trilogy, it always takes me a hot minute with these types of films, because I grew up expecting horror to be, you know, scary, with the occasional dash of humor.  Once I accepted that this was a campy, humorous horror flick, I was able to enjoy it, in spite of a computer-generated Saarlac in a well as the climax.  Trust me, it’s awful – almost as bad as one of the kids being swallowed into the ground by what appeared to be a non-sentient version of Armus, the creature that dispatched one of Trek-dom’s most beloved blonde characters.

Final Grade:  C. Tolerable, cheesy horror fun.  Grab some friends and make it a drinking game.  Take a sip every time the sheriff says “No more graveyard babies!”  Down a shot every time someone vomits black sludge!  Chug your beer and mourn Tasha Yar’s acting career!

 

Salvage (2006)

On occasion, a movie that looks terrible will manage to surprise me.  A low-budget film from the 2006 Sundance festival, which at first I thought was a very special episode of Hoarders: Duck Dynasty Intervention, turned out to be quite enjoyable.  This grainy, audio-challenged thriller proved me wrong thanks to decent acting and a solid plot.

As IF!

Claire Parker (Lauren Currie Lewis, dead ringer for Alicia Silverstone) is a college student ending her graveyard shift at a convenience store.  She’s expecting a ride home from beau Jimmy (Cody Darbe), but instead is greeted by Duke (Chris Ferry), a toothpick-chomping creeper driving her boyfriend’s truck.  Because accepting rides from strangers is always a promising sign that things will go well.

I also have a panel van with “free candy” on the side…

Claire’s nightmare begins… and begins, and begins again.  Reliving the ordeal over and over, with slight variations, Claire descends into madness as she tries to figure out what happened to her missing boyfriend, and herself, at the hands of a madman.  There are subtle clues to tell you what’s really going on, but it took me until the end to figure out the big Shaymalanian twist – I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say hope is definitely abandoned by those who enter.

Are… are you here to lay the linoleum?

The reason this film works is because it’s not trying to be over-the-top.  There are subtle, nearly unnoticeable background actions – a face in a doorway, a reflection in a mirror – things that are often creepier than bold-faced scares and buckets of blood.  Not to say there’s not gore; I had to look away during a super visceral torture scene (think Face Off), so kudos to this team of filmmakers for pulling it off using zero computer-generated effects.  While the storyline tended to repeat itself, as was the point, it seemed a bit stretched for a full-length feature, and would have been better served as an episode of Night Gallery or Twilight Zone.

Dude, there’s your car, dude…

Despite the extraordinarily low budget (Clerks was shot with a higher budget over 10 years prior) Salvage compensates for the poor audio and visual quality with a first-rate storyline.  I wish they had a higher budget only for minor things – better audio (at one point you can’t hear the ringing phone that’s answered), actual costumes for the police force instead of t-shirts that say “sheriff”, and a little more lighting in some of the basement scenes.  I wouldn’t have bothered putting it on Blu-Ray, however; the quality simply wasn’t there, and any attempt to sharpen it would, in my opinion, have detracted from the grittiness of the tale.

Final grade:   B for story, C for technical issues.  It’s definitely not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and has redeeming qualities that make it a true horror flick, one that puts you on the edge of your seat.

 

Memory (2006)

I thought I saved the best for last.  After suffering through Mortuary and being pleasantly surprised by Salvage, I was expecting great, or at least mediocre, things from the final installment with the most star-power.  Billy Zane! Dennis Hopper! Ann-Margaret! Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica!  Surely this is my reward for wading through the cesspool of B-horror movies.

Ahhh… that’s where the script went…

I obviously haven’t learned a thing.  This one opens Blair Witch-style and once the shaky-cam stopped, switched to television movie quality.  After Dr. Taylor Briggs (remember this name, you’ll hear it frequently) is exposed to a hallucinogenic red powder, he returns to his hotel, uses his Sonicare toothbrush and is swept away by a flood of minty-freshness.  While running through the “forest” (a.k.a. Al’s Tree Lot, free tie-downs and hot cocoa) in his dream, he encounters a mysterious masked figure in a Burberry coat.  The entire sequence was so ridiculous my husband came running upstairs thinking I was hyperventilating because I was laughing so hard.

I present my fish, Elvis.

Here’s just a few of the completely unrealistic/unbelievable plot holes that plagued this “psychological thriller”:

• Billy Zane is a renowned Alzheimer’s researcher… who has never heard of the pineal gland but takes one look at an MRI of the brain and says “cancer.”
• Billy Zane is an experienced scuba diver… who panics when he finds exactly what he expects to find at the bottom of a lake, and despite zooming for the surface, doesn’t get the bends.
• Billy Zane is a rich doctor with a generic flip phone clearly featuring a plastic sticker when someone calls him, instead of a real cell phone and someone actually calling him.  (If your budget can’t incorporate a working cell phone, perhaps you should restructure.)
• Billy Zane Googles everything and is (of course) able to solve 30-year-old murders as a doctor since he’s now also a private investigator because plot device.

Look, it’s not Billy Zane’s fault he got dropped into this terrible film (maybe it is); his acting is good, considering the horrible script.  But what’s with every freaking character referring to him by his first and last name like he’s Harry Potter – seriously, I wanted to follow up every occurrence with “the boy who lived.”  And reading everything out loud – even when we, the audience, are looking at what they’re reading, we still get a follow-the-bouncing-ball read-a-long.   After a while, I was half expecting to hear stage directions thrown in there.

I wish I hadn’t taken the red pill…

The strained dialogue took place between rapid cut scenes and awkward face-front stationary shots reminiscent of Sears family portraits.  Pointless scenes like “let’s go ice-skating – oh, wait, it’s closed…” followed overly predictable twists, making the entire thing feel like a bad Lifetime movie.  I cringed at Hopper’s brief scenes, wondering why the Blue Velvet star was so under-utilized.  The one saving grace is that he’s not the predictable bad guy – but Ann-Margaret having a creepy cellar tea-party wasn’t much better.

American Girl Goes to Hell.

Probably the funniest (unintentional) moment is when the good doctor and Number Six escape from the burning art gallery.  This clearly wasn’t a closed set, as a random guy in the background observes the action quizzically; not as an extra acting surprised at the sudden fire, but as a passerby watching a movie being filmed, raising an eyebrow as if to say “Damn, white people are crazy.”  Yes, sir, yes they are, because they get in their Jeep to drive away, only to be standing outside the burning building again in the next scene.  I know a script supervisor who’d be out of a job on my watch.

Final Grade: C-/D.  Despite A-list celebs, I found myself groaning through most of this “thriller”.  It’s not even enjoyably bad, it’s just plain awful.