Horror, 93 Minutes, 2010
[Hurricane Sandy is currently causing all kinds of hell for all kinds of people. Here in Scranton, PA we’ve still got power and Internet (at least for now). We’re going to watch movies until either Sandy puts a stop to it or we can actually leave the house.]
You know the old saw about how a thousand monkeys with typewriters will eventually, accidentally, write “Hamlet” if you give them thousands of years? Well, this movie tries the same thing only the monkeys have Adobe After Effects, are very, very drunk and only have four hours.
The movie starts by introducing our main characters. All seven or eight dozen of them. There’s a reporter and her cameraman brother who are working with some group that does something and a group of bloggers that some other thing. There’s also a recently released child rapist that isn’t allowed to do his favorite thing, a doctor who just got a new job doing a whole different thing and assorted policemen, security guys, random strangers and exposition machines that wander in and out of frame seemingly at random.
They all live in a self-contained community that’s completely dependent upon a mysterious “Facility”. Apparently this facility is collecting people with psychic powers who can turn their fantasy’s into physical creatures. Since, for some reason, most of these people are nutter-butter-crazy-pants their constructs do things like melt people, cook them, skin them alive and (posing as some of the ugliest dolls I’ve ever seen) rape them.
We’re told: “Think of it like electric guitars. There are instruments, we call them ‘pushers’, of which there are several through the neighborhood then there are those that serve as a conduit to the pushers. Like an amplifier they help the pushers think louder.” They then wander off into a supremely tortured football metaphor. Don’t worry – it doesn’t make any more sense in context.
The script pinballs between present time, flashbacks, flash-forwards and hallucinations. Special effects (and many that aren’t so special) are used randomly. We get melting, fire, super-saturation, lens flare and smoke and everything else in the box. The acting wavers from ridiculous to really ridiculous. At its absolute best you might think “homemade Twilight Zone episode” and at its worst you’ll think “Monkeys on meth”.
