Christmas Capsules: Alone for Christmas (2013)

Director: Joseph J. Lawson
Writers: Nancy Leopardi, from a story by Naomi L. Selfman
Starring: David DeLuise, Kim Little, Davis Cleveland, and Gerald Webb

We must be in much better moods than usual this holiday season; although some of the movies we’ve seen have really sucked, there weren’t many (if any at all) that we truly hated. I mean, our relationship with these cheesy holiday flicks are pretty fickle: all it takes is one bad character, one forced plot twist, one obligatory argument started for a stupid reason, to take an otherwise enjoyable movie into “frustrating” territory.

I will freely admit that I picked this movie for one reason, and one reason only: I knew it would bomb. (Well, that, and to get a little break from the romance movies that permeate the atmosphere this time of year.) I mean, an homage (read: rip-off) of Home Alone, only with Macauley Culkin’s character replaced by a dog? There’s just no way possible that can’t be atrocious. Add to it the dad from “Wizards of Waverly Place” (a show my wife and I actually enjoyed, mostly without irony, during its run years ago), as well as the fact that this is a production of The Asylum, and that leaves you a recipe for catastrophic failure. 

It is, but most of it is enjoyably so: it’s not until the actual “defending the house” plotline starts that it veers off into “irredeemably bad” territory, with Bones the dog using everything at his disposal to rid his family’s large house of three bumbling would-be burglars. This is a combination of awkwardly bad special effects, a serious lack of comedic timing, and a rather startling level of violence (I wasn’t expecting a character to land face first onto a grill).

David DeLuise, the aforementioned dad from Waverly Place, plays a character known only as “Dad”, which really goes to show you the level of detail the writers paid to the story. He and his perfect family—which consists of the ideal combination of wife, husband, son, and daughter—are going on a trip to their grandparents’ house for the holidays. However, they are only able to take one of their two dogs with them on the trip, a notion that’s actually ass backwards (I feel like most families would either take both or none); so poor old Bone gets stuck going to the kennel.

In a scene that goes on for way too long, Dad has some reservations about the place, but the weird owner reassures him that he’s been doing this for a long time and will take good care of the dog while they are away. Reluctantly, Dad agrees—but before you know it, Bone breaks free and returns home after catching wind that some robbers might be targeting their house. Christ, whatever. The usual hijinx ensue, including lots of cartoon violence and overly inept criminals that frequently cross the line into unfunny territory.

It’s not without its plusses, though: Jonathan Nation as Anthony, the kennel owner, is genuinely hilarious in the role; so too is--and I’m not making this up--Kevin Sorbo, who clearly was in this just for the check (his character just up and leaves midway through for no reason), but still delivers a performance that’s way better than the material deserves. Once he leaves, the movie’s all pretty much downhill from there.

The end results are about what you’d expect, but despite a decent beginning, the knocks against it quickly start to accumulate: the effects are some of the worst I’ve ever seen (see: the scene where the family SUV backs into something, complete with computer-generated broken glass…despite the car not even touching what it was supposed to crash into), the writing is beyond inept, and the “twist” ending is so illogical that you’ll probably be screaming at the television set. I also hated the voice of the family’s other dog, Cleveland (cute name, though), who frantically tries getting home in time to give Bone a hand. He’s got a couple funny lines, but ultimately he’s an unnecessary side character that distracts from the overall story.

And the scenes of Bone defending the house are so poorly done that they defy logic. I'm even setting aside the idea that he's a dog that somehow manages to not only remember where a bunch of household items are, but also manages to grab them using just his paws (and without making a single bit of mess). I mean, I guess you kind of have to give it that pass, or else you wouldn't have much of a movie. My problem with all of it is that, like most of the jokes, there's no setup to the "punchline"...it just happens.

In Home Alone, you had a kid who slowly realized what was happening, and then sprung into action to defend his home. It isn't believable in the slightest, but of course it isn't really meant to be. Yet, it almost feels believable because of the way Kevin uses random everyday items to destroy the bumbling crooks; the traps feel like they were set up in a way a child of his age would think. In Alone for Christmas, there's no set-up to the defending of the home whatsoever: Bone finally makes it home shortly before the thieves make it there, and then just starts setting up random traps, which of course, the thieves all manage to hit, often with little to no coersion.

But beyond this instantaneous, ungratifying setup is yet another layer to why it doesn't work: the traps aren't really set up in a way befitting a dog. It would have been much..."cooler" (for lack of a better term) if the traps felt like they were actually conceived from the mind of a dog; instead, many of them are ripped off right from Home Alone. It's terrible, and the movie loses all of its remaining grip once these scenes start.

The leader of the thieves is actually pretty decent, and deserves to be in a better movie; the others, not so much. They're just your standard moronic young burglars who overact at everything and get their laughs out of saying stupid things and acting as dumb as possible. Yeah yeah, it's a low-budget movie marketed toward kids, so it's not all that surprising, but that fact doesn't make me hate it any less.

If you were planning on streaming this (and, let's be frank here: you weren't), then I'll make it easy for you: don't. There's nothing here for you. Even if you have kids, I'm sure you can find something that will hold their attention for longer, and that won't give you an intense headache from the stupidity of it all.

OVERALL: 3.5/10

STRAY OBSERVATIONS

• In an odd marketing decision, the dog on the front cover isn't even the one who defends the home from invaders.
• This is the reason Asylum movies have such a bad rep.
• The "mouth moving" effects on the dogs are actually pretty good for a trash movie.

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ASININE ASYLUM: 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012)

Director: Martin Wichmann Andersen
Writer(s): Nancy Leopardi
Starring: Hayley Derryberry, Tony Besson, Mike Holley, and Adam LaFramboise

Now it's time to take a slight reprieve from the onslaught of MarVista movies we've been reviewing, to check out an offering from The Asylum, essentially the “MarVista of horror” (I hope I get that quote on one of their movie posters!). Actually, they’re probably a grade or two lower: whereas MarVista tends to retread over their own tropes (or the tired clichés set forth by Hallmark and Lifetime, two channels for which they produce), The Asylum tends to directly rip off existing horror films (and the occasional non-horror hit), reworking them into super low-budget carbon copies in an attempt to swindle unsuspecting folk into watching their films. Don’t believe me? How about Snakes on a Train? Paranormal Entity? Atlantic Rim? The only mainstream “success”—term used very loosely—on their resume is Sharknado, the type of off-the-wall mashup they’d been doing for years, but that just happened to hit pop culture at just the right time.

Well here we have 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck, a found-footage film that is actually the fourth in their Paranormal Entity franchise, something I did not know until now since there’s no indication of that anywhere on the packaging. Don’t let the lame title fool you, however, because 100 Ghost Street is every bit as lame as you were expecting.

Now, I have to be completely honest: Any supernatural movie makes me a little nervous going in, because there’s no reason for any of them not to be scary. I mean, if you think about it, stalkers and killers and murderous animals and mummies and zombies…while they can all be creepy or scary in the right hands, they are all visible beings that can be seen and heard; most of them also have to get in close to attack. Ghosts, on the other hand, follow no such rules of physics, and can make their presence known whenever they want, or however they want.

How is it, then, that ghosts are oftentimes so dull? Here we have a subgenre with almost limitless scare potential, and you still end up with movies like this, in which the stupidity of its characters somehow becomes the main attraction.

The style of 100 Ghost Street is a direct ripoff of any number of other found footage flicks, with opening title cards informing us in advance that everyone you are about to see has died. I’ve never really understood why this is so prevalent in these movies: sure, Blair Witch made it work because it was “the original”, and everyone believed it was real. When you know it’s a work of fiction, all that forehand knowledge does is prevent some tension for the viewer. For example, when the final character makes it out of the house alive, we know that she doesn’t, because the intro already told us that. Word of note to wannabe filmmakers: The less information you give from the outset, the better.

Anyway, the plot is very simple: Six paranormal investigators, give or take a few, go into a house that’s supposedly haunted by an angry ghost. It is. They die.

But movies aren’t necessarily about what happens, but how they happen, and 100 Ghost Street is—like most bad horror movies—a textbook example of what not to do in this situation. Characters wander off on their own, leaving the safety net of the entire group; the dickish “leader”—who looks like a fifty-year-old emo singer—refuses to let a woman, who just got attacked by a ghost(?) leave; a character is forced to go into a known danger zone (complete with freshly-ripped body) alone just to recover some keys that may or may not matter; the list really goes on and on. My initial hesitation melted away after the first thirty minutes, when I realized just how little this movie cared about entertaining its own audience, and was replaced with a kind of indifferent boredom.

It’s not completely without merit, though it’s certainly without the kind that makes it worthy of a watch: some of the ghost effects are actually pretty well done. Unfortunately, most of the good effects are wasted on a scene in which a woman (the one who was attacked by a ghost earlier, then is—surprise!—left entirely alone less than an hour later) is raped by an entity. Now, actually, having a character raped by a “ghost” isn't a new idea; after all, there was a movie based entirely around that idea (1981's The Entity, starring Barbara Hershey as the victim). But in the hands of The Asylum, the whole scene just puts the “icky” in “gimmicky”.

Of course, Asylum movies literally do exist solely as a cash grab to leech off the success of already-existing movies, so any attacks you make on the film’s quality or similarities to other works, are only part of their draw. It also, in a way, puts them above critique: they don’t care what you think about anything in their library, because they already have your money and wasted your time; that, in the end, is clearly all that matters.

So with that in mind, I’ll just say 100 Ghost Street is exactly what you think it is going into it: a lifeless supernatural found-footage “thriller” with very little in the way of thrills, and absolutely nothing in the way of intelligence.

RATING: 2.5/10

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MARVEL-LESS MARVISTA: Nanny Cam (2014)

Director: Nancy Leopardi
Writer(s): Brian McAuley
Starring: India Eisley, Laura Allen, Cam Gigandet, and Farrah McKenzie

It's been said, I'm sure somewhere, that the opening shot is the one chance you have to suck in your audience, and to give them an enticing taste of what's to come. The opening scene of Nanny Cam does a perfect job of that, by essentially showing you all the film's flaws right from the outset: Linda and Mark, the main couple of this mess, leave their 8-year-old daughter Chloe—who's a terrible actress, by the way-- with an elderly woman—also a terrible actress-- while they plan to have a romantic evening out together. As it turns out, the old biddy has dementia (c'mon Linda, you should have done a little more research!), and ends up dropping a pot of burning water on Chloe. At least, I think that's what happens...she never shows any signs of actual injury and never gets taken to a hospital, but it's made out to be a big deal, with Linda informing the old woman she can't watch Chloe anymore.

Well now what can the upper-middle-class couple do when they want to go somewhere, as apparently no one in these movies have any friends or family? The search for a replacement is about to begin when lo and behold, an option falls right into their laps! Enter Heather (India Eisley), a creepy teenager who happens to wander onto the property in time to prevent disaster; Chloe has found Mark's nailgun, which was conveniently placed out in the open and within reach of a curious 8-year-old. Just based on this random encounter, Mark thinks she'd be perfect for the job, but Linda is reluctant—after all, they did just get burned (pun intended) by not properly researching the last babysitter—so she goes the extra mile to really make sure Heather is who she says she is: by calling the one reference on her resume. When the reference checks out (and it should, since it's Heather herself, not even disguising her voice), the two stop the search immediately, having found the perfect replacement! (Now we're starting to see how they ended up with a dementia-addled oldie).

But things aren't right with the new nanny, something Linda discovers not from all the red flags we've seen up to this point, but after watching video footage in which Heather talks to Chloe for three straight hours. “What could an 18-year-old and an 8-year-old possibly have to talk about for three hours?” she wonders aloud, and becomes obsessed with finding out, hitting up the local electronics store clerk and asking him about in-depth set-ups, an area he's creepily adept at.

Soon, Chloe starts acting strangely toward her mother, as if she wants Heather to be her new mommy, and Heather really starts clamping down on Mark. Will boring ol' Linda pull her family back away from the bizarre clutches of evil? Or will Heather get rid of her competition so that she can have the family she so desperately craves?

This one is worse than most MarVista productions, with terrible acting, consistently awful dialogue, and infuriatingly-illogical plot twists. I know, I know, those are the qualities you're actually looking for in a Lifetime movie, but there's a fine line between a “bad-good” movie, and a “bad-bad” movie, and this one typically entrenches itself in the latter category, with an almost exhausting number of inconsistencies and stupid moments that it would be virtually impossible to remember them all.

Its one “saving grace”- in this case meant as the sole thing that saves it from an even lower score—is Heather's backstory, which is legitimately devastating. Usually Lifetime movies seem to skirt away from truly disturbing material, but her origins add a slight layer of complexity, and empathy, missing from many Lifetime villains. And while her motives still end up being hilariously basic and laughable, it still helps to understand why she acts the way she does, rather than just having her be some one-dimensional caricature. On the downside, the sudden burst of seriousness does underscore some of the (unintentional) goofy fun, by injecting a real underscore of sadness, though it's still so bad that the laughs resume shortly after the shock wears off.

If you're a purveyor of trashy made-for-TV movies, Nanny Cam might have what you're looking for, but for me, I learned the hard way that too much of a bad thing can be...well, just bad.

RATING: 3/10

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