Movie Review The Hitcher

The Hitcher (2007) 

Directed by Dave Meyers 

Written by Eric Bernt, Eric Red, Jake Wade Wall 

Starring Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton, Neal McDonough, 

Release Date January 19th, 2007 

Published January 19th, 2007 

Just referring to a film as a remake causes the eyes to  roll up. Especially horror remakes. The remake of 1986's The Hitcher I'm sure made many an eye roll as mine did. Seeing the name of Michael Bay as producer gives little reassurance. Bay was responsible for both of the awful Texas Chainsaw Massacre reimaginings as well as the forgettable Amityville Horror remake in 2005. By some miracle however, this remake of The Hitcher works. Director Dave Meyers delivers a tightly focused edge of your seat, horror thriller that features a star making performance from Sophia Bush.

On a trip to spring break Grace (Sophia Bush) and her boyfriend Jim (Jim Knighton) pass a man on a rainy stretch of New Mexico highway. He was standing almost in the middle of the road and was nearly hit but did not move. They chose to leave him there but unfortunately, the hitcher, John Ryder (Sean Bean) caught up with them at a gas station down the road.

Feeling guilty, Jim offers John Ryder a ride to a hotel just down the road. Thus begins a tale of terror that the young couple could never have imagined. Ryder is a psychopath who has killed up and down the highways of America. Grace and Jim are lucky to escape him the first time. However, like a classic horror movie villain, John Ryder is not easy to get rid of.

The Hitcher is a remake of a 1986 horror flick that starred then teen sensation C. Thomas Howell as a good samaritan and Rutger Hauer as his menacing passenger. Hauer's hitcher seemed untouchable as one of the genre's great villains. In the remake, the role falls to character actor and Lord of the Rings star Sean Bean. As John Ryder Bean definitely embodies menacing determination but he's no match for Hauer's Walken-esque killer.

Sophia Bush and John Knighton; on the other hand; more than surpass Howell's whiny teenager. Whily and brave, their Grace and Jim are surprisingly smart, self aware, characters who make rash but correct decisions. One of the reasons this remake works so well is because Bush and Knighton are allowed intelligence. The decisions they make are decisions anyone would make given such outlandish conditions.

What director Dave Meyers, a music video veteran making his feature debut, does so very well in The Hitcher is establish his own logic and stick to it. The situations in The Hitcher are not unlike most horror movies, the difference is that The Hitcher establishes its own level of reality and remains existing within the rules of that reality. That allows us in the audience to suspend disbelief and get into the nervy, exciting tension of this story.

If I have an issue with The Hitcher it is with the slim, almost non-existent motivation of the title character. John Ryder is simply a killer who would have killed Grace and Jim whether they stopped the first time they saw him or after they finally did decide to help him. His motivation is simple bloodlust which I found unsatisfying. The Hitcher seems like it could make this killer more complicated and interesting. As it is, he is menacing but thin.

Sophia Bush is best known for the teen drama One Tree Hill on the CW network; but she is soon to be a very big star. The sexy star of The Hitcher is said to be the lead candidate to take over the coveted role of Wonder Woman when that film series starts up. Based on her tough minded work in The Hitcher, they could not make a better choice. Bush is sexy and vulnerable with a strong backbone and determination. Her work near the end of The Hitcher evokes a touch of Jamie Lee Curtis and a dash of Sigourney Weaver.

The Hitcher gets extra points for featuring actor Neal McDonough in a supporting role. McDonough is one of the more underappreciated character actors in the business. He broke out in the short lived series Boomtown on NBC and from there has been stellar in small roles in Flags of Our Fathers and Minority Report. As a tough as nails sheriff in The Hitcher, McDonough is the perfect measure of small town hard ass and pragmatism. He doesn't believe the horror being unleashed but he is one of the few with the toughness to deal with it.

Director Dave Meyers got his start in music videos but unlike most video directors who make the move to features, Meyers is not tied to that video style of quick edits, bright colors and shaky cameras. Meyers' direction of The Hitcher is smart and stylish in the classic thriller fashion. Using tight close ups, Meyers closes the frame around his actors and creates tension with his camera.

Best of all, he makes sparing use of the typical horror movie jump scene, that scene where things pop up out of nowhere as the music spikes. It's the cheapest kind of scare and Meyers is smart to avoid it, for the most part.

Director Dave Meyers shows terrific chops in turning a horror retread into a surprisingly suspenseful horror experience. The Hitcher should have been just another January programmer; but because of Meyers and the tough sexy performance of rising star Sophia Bush, The Hitcher is a stunner of edge of your seat excitement. Not a perfect horror film; but damn sure an entertaining one.

Movie Review John Tucker Must Die

John Tucker Must Die (2006) 

Directed by Betty Thomas

Written by Jeff Lowell

Starring Jesse Metcalf, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, Sophia Bush, Arielle Kebbel, Penn Badgley, Jenny McCarthy, Taylor Kitsch 

Release Date July 28th, 2006 

Published July 29th, 2006 

The most striking thing about the new teen comedy John Tucker Must Die is its impressive online ad campaign. Taking full advantage of the zeitgeist grabbing MySpace.com, the producers of John Tucker Must Die created the films official website on MySpace. They recruited teens in the films target demo to spread word about the film on their blogs and on MySpace message boards and they plastered every inch of the site with pictures of star Jesse Metcalf whose hunky visage was the selling point for the films target audience of teenage girls.

By the time the film actually arrived in theaters it really didn't matter if the film was any good, the marketing had worked like gangbusters in turning out the exact audience demo the studio had been trying to attract.

Now that that is out of the way the question remains; is the film any good? It's not a simple answer. On the one hand I as a 30 year old male film critic felt the picture was derivative, lazy and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. On the other hand, watching the film in a theater crowded with teen girls cackling at the films every turn of plot, I can't deny the film is effective in many ways.

Jesse Metcalf is the titular star of John Tucker Must Die but the lead role actually belongs to Brittany Snow as Kate. Always the new girl, thanks to her mom (Jenny McCarthy) and her misadventures with men, Kate arrives at yet another new school once again as an outcast. Being her usual anonymous self, Kate flies below the radar observing the goings on at her new school and particularly the goings on surrounding the school super-stud John Tucker.

Tucker is captain of the basketball team and is currently dating the head cheerleader Heather (Ashanti), the valedictorian Carrie (Arielle Kebbel) and the schools top causehead Beth (Sophia Bush). Because the girls run in different circles they know nothing of each other and John Tucker. Kate knows because John has taken each of them to the restaurant where she works.

One day John's girls are fatefully thrown together and one just happens to mention John. All hell breaks loose between the three girls and eventually engulfs poor Kate. Asking the logical question why they are beating on each other when it's John they should be mad at, Kate sets in motion a plot to get revenge on the cheating, lying John Tucker.

The plot and poster might give one the impression of a dark comedy about a high school murder plot. Unfortunately, John Tucker Must Die is not nearly as ambitious as its title. The girl's revenge plot is more mean spirited than it is vengeful. The early plotting involves turning John into the poster boy for STD's, spiking his water with estrogen and tricking him into wearing a thong in front of all of his buddies.

When none of these plots is able to derail the surprisingly resilient John Tucker, the girls hatch one final plot. After John finally breaks up with each of the three plotters, they decide to turn Kate into John's ultimate fantasy girl. Using their inside knowledge of his likes and dislikes, they will get John to fall for Kate and then have her dump him like he dumped them.

My plot description is a little more straightforward than the film itself which is often distracted ogling its supermodel cast. There is no one in the cast of high school age and rarely do you see a face that does not belong on a magazine cover. Seriously, what planet is this movie from planet Maxim in the FHM universe. It's difficult to take anything in the film seriously when you are distracted by more than fifty of Maxim magazine's future and even former cover girls (star Arielle Krebbel is one of Maxim's top 100 hotties).

Like so many broad teen comedies, John Tucker Must Die wants it both ways. It wants to be broadly comic but also have honest pathos and characters we care about. Well, you can't have it both ways. Director Betty Thomas and writer Jeff Lowell needed to make up their minds at some point and decide if John Tucker Must Die was going to be a dark teen comedy a la Mean Girls or a more sensitive but broad film like those awful Freddie Prinze Jr movies from the late 90's early 2000's.

Is this American Pie or a movie Hillary Duff turned down. John Tucker Must Die doesn't know what it wants to be. Thus it winds up a beaten mutt of a movie with elements of any number of different movies with no real center of its own.  

With all of the obvious problems of this film I certainly cannot and will not recommend it. However, I can't completely write the film off either. Watching the film with a nearly sold out audience filled with girls from 12-16 who roared with laughter throughout, I could not help but be struck by the effect the film had on its target demographic.

I'm not actually sure if I am impressed or a little frightened by how well John Tucker Must Die hits with teen girls. It tests so well that it must have been tested to death upon its initial completion so that each scene would hit the target audience just right. A scientific approach to filmmaking that I find terribly disturbing. I'm honestly conflicted. On the one hand, who am I to deny people a calculated good time? On the other hand this is not art in any way shape or form.

There likely was little to no artistic effort put into crafting John Tucker Must Die. It is a product tested and sold to a market of consumers pre-destined to want to consume and enjoy it. A filmic symbol of our mechanistic society that meets the exact needs of consumers no matter what needs they may be. This mechanism however robs us of humanity and experience.

Watching a film should be an experience that reaches out to the audience and leaves them with a sense of having been a part of something, like all great art. Movies like John Tucker Must Die are merely mass consumed quantities like popcorn or chocolate bars. Easily digested and disposed of. They contain minor pleasures and empty calories but leave no trace of themselves later.

An example of what I hate about modern Hollywood, John Tucker Must Die is the ultimate in product placement. The product just happens to be the film itself rather than a McDonalds or Coca Cola. John Tucker Must Die is itself a mass consumer product of disposable value and forgettable minor pleasures. The ad campaign and MySpace site may have a place in marketing history, but the film is more forgettable than that bag of fritos you finished off sometime ago and cast into the abyss of an empty garbage can destined for a landfill.

Movie Review Stay Alive

Stay Alive (2006) 

Directed by William Brent Bell 

Written by Matthew Peterman 

Starring Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Muniz, Adam Goldberg, Sophia Bush

Release Date March 24th, 2006 

Published March 24th, 2006

The horror genre has always been cheap and exploitative. To expect anymore from it is to be constantly disappointed. Sure, you occasionally get something like Dawn of The Dead that sneak past the guards of genre expectations and surprise you with incisive wit and social commentary but those experiences are few and far between.

More often you get cheap forgettable trash like Stay Alive, a serviceable, not too irritating exercise in teenage bloodletting that while you may not remember it long after you see it you at the very least won't wretch when it comes to Cinemax or Showtime in two or three months from now.

Little known actor Jon Foster stars in Stay Alive as Hutch, a twenty something slacker whose all consuming love of videogames is tested by the death of a close friend. A death that is eerily reminiscent of that friend's virtual death in an underground video game called Stay Alive.

The game is an historic gorefest based on the legend of a woman named Elizabeth Bathory aka The Blood Countess. She is said to have murdered hundreds of servant girls in the late 1800's and bathed in their virgin blood in order to keep herself youthful. If Ms. Bathory sounds far more interesting than anything else in Stay Alive you can understand why this film is  disappointing.

Hutch comes into possession of Stay Alive at his buddies funeral where he also meets a strange girl named Abigail (Samaire Armstrong) who also knew Hutch's late friend but is vague about the connection. She joins Hutch for a tribute to their late friend. With fellow gamers from a local internet café, Swink (Frankie Muniz), October (Sophia Bush), Phin (Jimmie Simpson) and Miller (Adam Goldberg), Hutch will play Stay Alive until they can't play anymore.

Little does anyone realize that you don't just play this video game you literally have to survive it. Like the video in The Ring or the website in Fear Dot Com, anyone that comes in contact with this video game has sealed their fate and will be picked off in the order of their passing inside the game.

The concept is unoriginal and not very inspired but that is the genre we are dealing with. Modern horror has little more on its mind than the kill and often that is enough to make these films passably entertaining. What dooms Stay Alive however is another scourge of the genre, the PG 13 rating.

With movies like The Grudge and When A Stranger Calls proving there is a viable moneymaking market in PG 13 horror we are now subject to bloodless horror cliches stripped of what makes us want to watch a horror movie in the first place, blood and sex.

Stay Alive is the latest example of the neutered horror genre. With plenty of dead bodies but little gore Stay Alive becomes a dull exercise in horror sanitized for the protection of children. The appeal of the genre has always been in the dark recesses of our minds where our id hides that part of ourselves that cannot resist the animalistic urge for blood.

The horror film appeals to base instinct, to titillation, and only the most skilled of the genre, people like George Romero or David Cronenberg can combine it with subtext and smarts. Most horror films have to settle for that base appeal to the darkness and allow us to wallow in that caveman enjoyment of blood, guts and beautiful naked woman.

Stripped of that, a film like Stay Alive is simply boring. Like watching someone else play a video game and never giving you a turn. There is very little to hold your interest, especially with a concept that is so derivative and unoriginal as a killer video game.

A question for Frankie Muniz. Why are you in this movie? Muniz is not exactly a big star. His TV show Malcolm In The Middle is limping to the finish line and his Cody Banks film series is not likely to continue. However on name recognition alone he is the biggest star in this movie and yet he plays a supporting role to a guy who's biggest role to date was the gas station attendant in Terminator 3? Okay, Jon Foster has had bigger roles but he is nowhere near as well known as Muniz whose career takes a big step backward in Stay Alive.

Of all the disappointments in Stay Alive however, maybe the biggest is writer-director William Brent Bell who shows off far more talent behind the camera than the film deserves. Bell's occasional directorial flourishes make you wonder why he put so much talent in service of such a forgettable little film. Bell's writing could use a great deal of work but as a director he seems to have a good deal of talent.

Someday William Brent Bell may make a serious name for himself as a director for hire on big budget features where a strong producer like Joel Silver can help him focus on simply making the film and forget about trying to be a writer slash director. As the script for Stay Alive, co-written with fellow first timer Matthew Peterman, shows, Bell simply doesn't have the writing chops.

Stay Alive is yet another forgettable teenage slasher flick designed more as a studio ATM than as an entertaining horror film. I'm not recommending it, hell I can barely remember having seen it myself.