Movie Review Quarantine

Quarantine (2008) 

Directed by John Erick Dowdle

Written by John Erick Dowdle, Drew Dowdle 

Starring Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez, Columbus Short, Steve Harris, Dania Ramirez 

Release Date October 10th, 2008

Published October 10th, 2008 

Yawn! Another horror remake. Ah, but there is a twist this time. Quarantine isn't a Japanese or Chinese ripoff but rather a trashing of a Spanish horror movie. At least the film has one innovation.

Jennifer Carpenter stars in Quarantine as a reality TV host whose assignment this week is to follow the Los Angeles fire department on a 911 call. First though we are introduced to her assigned fire fighters. Jay Hernandez and Jonathan Schaech are the firefighters and they are a couple of likable sorts. Hernandez is knowledgeable and respectful. Schaech is boorish and flirty. Carpenter takes to them both quickly and in another movie this would be quite a love triangle. In Quarantine however, these attractive actors are merely bait.

Finally getting a call, Jennifer jumps aboard a fire engine with her fighters and soon arrives at the scene of a medical emergency in an old apartment building. Inside one of the apartments an old woman has been screaming in pain and not responding to the knocks and calls of neighbors and super. The firefighters arrive with the police and eventually break down the door. Inside the old woman has a crazed look on her face and soon she has attacked and bitten a cop so badly that he bleeds to death. As Hernandez and a cop played by Columbus Short tend to the injured cop, they and the rest of the building's tenants find themselves locked inside the building by the CDC.

Someone or something is infecting the residents and the CDC is not about to let anyone carry it to the outside. This sets up a cat and mouse game between the infected, flesh eating zombie types and the trapped tenants, cop, firefighters, our intrepid reporter and her loyal cameraman (Steve Harris). The film is shot entirely from the cameraman's perspective, as if we are watching the documentary in progress. Yes, for those who suffer from shaky cam-itis aka motion sickness, Quarantine is one of those movies. Like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, Quarantine operates on the guise that these events took place and we are watching after the fact.

If only being unoriginal and a cause of mass projectile vomiting and dizziness were Quarantine's only issue. Sadly, star Jennifer Carpenter's performance rivals the remake and motion sickness issues by being the least believable TV personality since Angelina Jolie's dopey reporter in Life of Something Like It. Acting more like a spoiled teenager than a TV reporter, Carpenter giggles and flirts and exploits her access to the firemen for no other purpose than she thinks they're cute. She tells the camera that she has always wanted to be a fireman but I find it hard to believe she wanted to be anything other than a magnet for cute boys.

Things devolve further as we get into crisis mode in the apartment building. Now, no one would ever assume when they are responding to an emergency that you might end up dealing with cannibalistic, rabies ridden zombies. However, after the old woman has killed the cop and a firefighter someone should become a little more suspicious and cautious. But no. Instead characters still wander into dark areas throughout the building, fail to stick together and are picked off one by one as they remain heavily in denial about their situation.

I didn't buy a second of it. Carpenter breaks the believability with her ditz reporter and everyone else puts off because the plot requires them to be tools. As one after another is picked off our involvement with the story and the characters becomes less and less until we get to the inevitable end that we absolutely know is coming.

The style gives away the ending, not that there was much suspense involved anyway. The point and purpose to a movie like Quarantine is to try and frighten with atmosphere and camera tricks. That it fails is a function of poor craftsmanship and a lack of deeper ideas than a scary noise off camera that suddenly becomes something on camera.

Movie Review Hostel 2

Hostel 2 (2007) 

Directed by Eli Roth 

Written by Eli Roth

Starring Lauren German, Roger Bart, Heather Matarazzo, Bijou Phillips, Richard Burgi, Jay Hernandez

Release Date June 8th, 2007 

Published June 8th 2007

In the last three weeks I have seen the movie Waitress 3 times. In that time, I have been reading a terrific book about the movie The Big Lebowski that is soon to hit store shelves. I mention these activities on my part as examples of good things you could be doing rather than watching Hostel Part 2 a sad perverts fantasy of a horror film.

From the twisted mysoginist mind of Eli Roth comes another woman hating fantasy about torture and death. Was Mr. Roth simply was not hugged enough by his mother as a child? Did some woman break his heart in some unimaginably cruel way? Whatever the reasons for his misogyny, these are issues that would be better dealt with in therapy and not on the movie screen.

Poor misguided Lauren German is the alleged star of Hostel Part 2. I would call her a victim of Hostel 2 but I should save my criticisms for later in this review. German plays Beth, a rich American tourist traveling Europe with her friends, sexpot Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and introvert Lorna (Heather Mattarazzo, a long way from The Princess Diaries).

Together the three seek drinks and companionship and when the opportunity for some pretty scenery and cute guys on the cheap comes their way they can't resist. Enticed by their new friend Axelle (Vera Jordanova), they travel to an exclusive little European getaway that happens to be the site where tourists are captured and sold over the internet to rich guys for the purpose of torture and death.

What a bummer.

I am being flippant because writer Director Roth makes clear with his dull dialogue and sloppy takes that he doesn't care about these characters, he is merely setting them up for slaughter. Surprisingly, it takes a little while before the gore sets in but once it does, Roth's ugly misogynist side comes out in every way you would imagine.

I can't say I was surprised by any of the awful things that Eli Roth puts his actresses through in Hostel Part 2. The first film made quite clear his feelings about women, why would having females lead the cast of Part 2 change anything. If anything, as evidenced by Heather Mattarazzo's brutal death scene, hanging upside down nude and having her throat cut as a naked woman basks in the viscera, his hatred of women has only deepened since the last film.

I told a friend after the first Hostel, and left it out of the initial review, that I honestly felt that Eli Roth makes movies in order to keep himself from piling the bodies of real women in his basement. Again, I'm being flippant, I don't wish to be. I honestly believe Eli Roth is a very troubled soul. What other impressions are we to take away from Hostel Part 2. The awful things he does to his female characters, the callous treatment of life and death, the casual context free nudity. These seem to be the actions of a sociopath rather than a filmmaker.

Aside from the Hostel films, look at his work on Quentin Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse. Roth contributed a fake trailer to Grindhouse called Thanksgiving which features a scene in which a half naked female teen is jumping on a trampoline and is impaled through her vagina with a giant knife. Some might call that humorous since it is admittedly such a ludicrous death scene. But to have even conceived such a scene is a sign of a desperately twisted and perverted soul.

Roth does, I must admit, provide a few rather big laughs. Oh, not in his abysmal film. Rather, in the film's promotional tour during which he has claimed some sort of political perspective. Interestingly, I chastised Roth in my review of the original for skirting the edge of a political perspective before retreating to more nudity and gore.

Now, as he has further strayed from any point beyond his gore and shock, he claims that he has a humorous political point about how the rest of the world see Americans. Roth now claims that Hostel Part 2 is a metaphor for the attitude Europe has taken toward Americans in the wake of the war in Iraq. I would buy that argument if the point were made in a more satisfying way in the film itself, but to have Mr. Roth merely tell us this was his point, I'm not buying it. I watched the movie, I didn't find any point, political, metaphoric or otherwise.

Hostel Part 2 exists solely as Mr. Roth's masturbatory fantasy of torture. He has a twisted grudge against women and chooses to display that on film. I wish he would simply seek therapy, and save the rest of us from being subjected to the dark corners of his perversion.

Like the recent 28 Weeks Later, another mindless example of bloodlust for profit, Hostel Part 2 deadens the soul and steals a little of your humanity as you watch it. The excesses of the horror genre are reaching a critical mass and with filmmakers like Eli Roth being feted as innovators by true artists like Quentin Tarentino and being indulged for profit by movie studios like Lionsgate, there seems to be no end to this.

The MPAA is supposed to be the arbiter of such things but bestowing a mere R-rating on something so clearly in need of the NC-17 rebuke, they have tacitly endorsed the increasingly shallow depths of character left in this genre. Hostel Part 2 is sadly not the last but merely the latest in this increasingly degrading form of filmmaking so perfectly dubbed 'horror porn'.

Movie Review: Torque

Torque (2004) 

Directed by Joseph Kahn 

Written by Matt Johnson

Starring Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Monet Mazur, Adam Scott, Jay Hernandez

Release Date January 16th, 2004

Published January 16th, 2004

The trailer for Torque is so eye-rollingly derivative as to bring about a physically painful reaction. The trailer inspired in me a groan of such depth it's almost indescribable. The trailer is as big, dumb and loud as any full-length action movie of the last ten years. Ear splitting metal music, dopey, mock tough guy dialogue and stunts so hokey they are beyond laughable. But it would be unfair to review the film based solely on the trailer so I actually went to see Torque and found exactly what the trailer promised it would be and worse.

Martin Henderson stars as motorcycle tough guy/ underwear model (okay not really an underwear model but you know what I mean), Cary Ford. Cary has just returned from Thailand where he was hiding from the Feds after being sought on drug charges. Cary has returned to California to set things right with the cops and get back the girl he left behind, Shane played by Monet Mazur.

With a pair of his old motorcycle buddies, Dalton (Jay Hernandez) and Val (Will Yun Lee), Cary makes his way back to LA but not without starting trouble with the motorcycle gang The Reapers, headed up by Trey (Ice Cube). Cary is able to reconnect with Shane though she fights it for a few minutes. Cary also reconnects with the guy who set him up on the drug charge, a fellow biker named Henry James (Matt Schulze). Cary still has Henry's drugs stashed somewhere and Henry wants them back. Rather than just kick Cary's ass and get the drugs back that way, Henry sets up Cary for the murder of Trey's brother (Rapper Fredro Starr). Henry will help Cary get away from Trey if Cary gives him his drugs back.

Why Henry can't just directly intimidate Cary into giving him his drugs back instead of setting up this byzantine murder plot that also involves a pair of FBI agents played by Dane Cook and Justina Machado, is one of the film’s innumerable plot issues. Then again, why do you need a plot when you have cool looking motorcycles?

Herein lies the problem with Torque. I was willing to give 2 Fast 2 Furious a pass because that film was laughably bad but had the coolest cars. Paul Walker is a terrifically bad actor, so bad that it's enjoyable to have him onscreen just to make fun of him. Torque on the other hand wants to be a better film than 2 Fast 2 Furious and it wants you to know it with lame little jokes about motorcycles being cooler and faster than cars. Unfortunately the motorcycles aren't cooler than the cars and the superior attitude of the film is badly misplaced.

Martin Henderson is a better actor than Paul Walker, which presents a different problem because there isn't much to make fun of. None of the material in the script for Torque is very good yet as delivered by Henderson it's not so terrifically bad that we can make fun of it. It's all just sort of there…it's not good, it's not bad, it's just a dull and derivative.

The action in Torque isn't all that shabby. First-time director Joseph Kahn is a pretty good technician behind the camera and he shoots some okay action stuff. None of it however rises to the memorably ridiculous levels of the worst of Bruckheimer and Bay or even it's cousins, The Fast and The Furious, and it's sequel. Sure Torque is big, it's dumb and it's loud, but in a more mediocre and far less interesting way than in a memorably good or awful way.

It's odd, I'm almost disappointed at how good Torque is. Let me correct that, I meant to say how bad it is but not as bad as it should have been to be good. It's a bad movie, but it's not bad in the way that 2 Fast 2 Furious or The Rock or Gone In 60 Seconds is bad. Torque isn't bad in that campy, fun unintentional way. It's just a bad movie and that's it.

Movie Review Hostel

Hostel (2006) 

Directed by Eli Roth 

Written by Eli Roth 

Starring Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Rick Hoffman

Release Date January 6th, 2006 

Published January 6th, 2006 

Filmmakers have a very interesting mental link between sex and violence. Because both are really the last societal taboos, certain forms of each are in violation of all social graces, they can be exploited in order to shock and titillate audiences. Movies as varied as the brilliant A History Violence and the abysmal Devil's Rejects have drawn sex and violence together as if the two things were inextricably linked.

Eli Roth, the director of the horror flick Hostel, is a true believer in the link between sex and violence. Hostel puts the two subjects in direct relation as college-aged protagonists seek cheap, meaningless sex on a trip through Europe and end up paying dearly for it in the typically mindless, blood-soaked fashion of modern exploitation flicks.

Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) are fresh out of college and ready to party. They have traveled to the modern day Sodom that is Amsterdam in search of the holy grail of twenty-something morons: loose woman and legal hash. Paxton is the more indulgent and headstrong of the two, partaking in both the willing bar girls and the pay-for-play gals lining the streets in lighted window displays. Josh, on the other hand, is slightly more reserved and even a little put off by the sex on sale.

Once Paxton and a fellow traveler, Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), who the guys hook up with along the way, have exhausted the local talent, they come across a German teen who has the inside scoop on the best looking and loosest women in all of Europe. There is, the teen claims, a youth hostel that is on no map, and where the local women are dying to sleep with any foreigners. All the boys have to do is hop a train to scenic Bratislava.

A lengthy train trip later; the three friends have found the mythic hostel. The story is true: naked flesh is easy to come by and the naked women are easier than ever imagined. The fun, however, does not last long. After an epic night of debauchery, that even Josh partakes in, Oli disappears with a young Japanese girl. Soon Josh too has disappeared, and Paxton seeks out their new female companions to find out what happened to his pals.

He is told that both guys are at an art show, and, in standard Eastern European fashion, the supposed "art show" is housed in a slaughterhouse. Of course, by now we in the audience are well aware that the art show is actually a brutal torture chamber where hostel stayers are kidnapped and killed in the most horrifying ways imaginable.

Director Eli Roth showed an interesting level of originality in his first feature, 2003's Cabin Fever. That film was a skin-crawling genre exercise that twisted expectations by not focusing on a human killer but a timely viral killer. That film was not all that visually accomplished, partly because of its low budget, and neither is Hostel. The films share a low budget aesthetic, but Hostel, with a slightly higher budget and the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino, makes it fair to wonder when Roth will finally show a talent for crafting visuals that don't rely on special effects splatter.

Of the many attempts at scary visuals, only a scene where a character has his kneecaps drilled and his Achilles heel sliced comes across as shocking. A later, gorier scene in which a woman's eyeball dangles precariously from its socket is truly underwhelming as both an effect and makeup. Poorly executed special effects aside, Roth lacks the necessary skill to negate his low budget with story tension.

Jay Hernandez, so impressive in the 2001 teen romance Crazy/Beautiful, fails to make a compelling lead in Hostel. His boorish American tourist bit is believable but not all that enjoyable or relatable. Co-star Derek Richardson's own wet blanket character is even less impressive, and thus no help to Hernandez. Only Icelandic actor Gudjonsson manages to be entertaining, but he is quickly dispatched. His charming comic presence is missed once he's gone.

Hostel has the hallmarks of the exploitation genre down cold. Buckets of blood are spilled, copious amounts of naked female flesh are displayed; all of the basic horror elements that had once held the genre in the movie ghetto of late night pay cable and direct to video land are featured in Hostel. Something about all that nudity in Hostel, combined with the lack of even one strong female character in Hostel, leads me to wonder whether Eli Roth has a problem with women. 

Hostel is not merely misogynist, the film demonstrates a direct loathing and objectification of women. The women of Hostel  exist to remove their clothing and die horribly. Whether this is a symptom of Roth's inability to write for women, a similar lack of compelling female characters plagued Cabin Fever, or he really does dislike women is up for debate.

Roth apparently enjoys the company of Quentin Tarantino and yet he seems to have never seen Kill Bill, which provided more than a few examples of how to write convincing, compelling female characters. Then again, writing is not Roth's strong suit anyway. On more than one occasion Roth comes within a few lines of something interesting and walks away to throw more blood and gore at the screen.

Hostel comes close to a clever parody of the current anti-American attitudes so pervasive in Europe where American travelers are encouraged to claim Canadian citizenship to avoid a hassle. Sadly Hostel comes to the precipice of joking about this timely subject but then travels the easier path to exploitation success, more naked flesh and piles of human remains.

There is also, I believe, an unintentional undercurrent of puritanical feelings bubbling beneath the surface of Hostel. The way in which sin and vice lead almost directly to death in Hostel is rather Old Testament. Hostel shares this sex-death link with classic horror movies like A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th, but oddly no horror film director has had the nerve to explore this vengeful god scenario in an intellectually satisfying way.

Eli Roth may have earned the appreciation of a true genius in Quentin Tarantino, but there is no evidence in Hostel that Roth actually learned anything from his new mentor. Where Tarantino crafts artful visuals from the lowest of genres, Roth can barely craft a solid scare. That is not to say that Roth won't develop into a good director someday, but for now his work is merely terribly overrated.

For lovers of the exploitation genre, (what writer David Poland has cleverly dubbed the "horror porn" genre, including recent films like Devil's Rejects, High Tension and Wolf Creek) Hostel will be a huge hit. But for fans of well made movies, Hostel is yet another waste of screen space. 

Movie Review: The Rookie

The Rookie (2002) 

Directed by John Lee Hancock 

Written by Mike Rich 

Starring Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, Jay Hernandez, Brian Cox 

Release Date March 29th, 2002

Published March 28th, 2002

Is there any more tired genre than the sports movie?

Many films are bogged down by the conventions of genre but the sports movie is so constricted it's almost pointless. Every sports film ends up a clone of every other sports film. 2001's Hardball was essentially an urban Bad News Bears with a hint of The Mighty Ducks. The 2000 football movie The Replacements was the same movie that was made in 1993 under the name Necessary Roughness, and so on and so on. Examples of this tired genre stretch out for miles and now comes yet another tired sports movie The Rookie starring Dennis Quaid.

In this mostly true story, Dennis Quaid stars as Jim Morris, a small-town science teacher and baseball coach. With his team playing poorly and desperately needing motivation, Morris cuts them a deal. Morris agrees to try out for a major league baseball team if his team makes it to the States. You see, Morris was on the fast track to the majors in his youth but blew out his arm. Now his arm is healthy and throwing harder than ever. Well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you what happens next; after all it is a true story. Even if it weren't a true story do you honestly think the team would lose and the coach not tryout for the majors?

The Rookie is not a bad film. Technically it is well shot and the acting is first rate. I especially loved Rachel Griffith who, while having very little to do in the picture, still manages to create a strong character. In the end though, no matter how proficient the project is it cannot escape the demons of the sports genre, which is more than ripe for parody. Those genre conventions and the film’s corn-pone, family values, Disneyfied universe make for a film that while efficiently made was doomed to failure even before it began because it is so by the numbers. 

Jim Morris's triumph is intended to be inspiring but because it feels like EVERY other sports movie, every other baseball movie, The Rookie is rendered inert. The drama drags along through scenes that feel as if we've seen them in every other movie. The Rookie has a true life story but director John Lee Hancock makes that story feel so like every other sports movie that even this TRUE story feel like just another sports genre movie. Each beat of the story, every character development, and the ultimate triumph all feel unimpressive and forgettable.