The Hunt (2006)

Thanks for spoiling the movie. Assholes. See the alien face on the box? There's the movie; it's aliens. I hate when movies spoil themselves. Like Yor: The Hunter from the Future. Spoiler in the fucking title of the movie and on the box art too.

He's not really a caveman , he's... Blast Hardcheese!

This movie wasn't quite sure what it wanted to be. It claims to be "an alarmingly frightening film that combines horrific elements of The Blair Witch Project and Predator." What "horrific elements?" The part where people bitch and screw around in the woods for hours and the fact that there are aliens? This movie could have benefited from some "GET TO DA CHOPPAH!" There are multiple first-person POV cameras, which end up being a bit stupid and confusing. Then, in addition to the first-person POV's, there's also a third-person POV for the audience. So, we get to see the cameraman filming his Blair Witch-ian POV as well seeing him doing in third person. Well, that's okay if this was supposed to be a sort of The Fourth Kind reenactment set side-by-side to real footage. Except, it's not a reenactment of any kind; it's the director's POV. "We can't have all first person footage," he probably said. "That's a rip-off of The Blair Witch Project. But, we can't have it just like a regular movie either. That's boring!" So, he combined the two. All these POV's STILL don't make the movie interesting.


The audience, or at least the observant members of it, already know the ending. So, the film has to interest or provide a bit of suspense to keep us watching. It doesn't do this either. Hunter Dad is going to make an educational (?) hunting video to distribute at Wal-Mart. I'm not sure if he has some sort of contract with Wal-Mart or he's just hoping they are in need of some more crap to add to their bargain bin. He gets his wife's ex-husband to invest in his project after showing him his super-duper amazingly fantastic new invention: a bicycle helmet with a camera attached. Add a flashlight on it and he could hunt in caves! Amazing! Hunter Dad and Wife hire Surly Cameraman to film their expedition, but Wife is a bitch and immediately has a problem with him even though he hasn't shown his Surly side yet. They talk shit about him while he eavesdrops with his camera audio equipment. Later, he gets drunk and breaks the fourth wall while bad-mouthing everyone alone in his basement. There's also son of Wife, Wimpy Kid. He's wimpy because he wears glasses. He doesn't really want to go hunting with his step-dad, but, unfortunately for Wimpy Kid, Hunter Dad only had enough funds to make a bike helmet camera to fit kids. Oh, and he can't afford a pack mule either, so Wimpy Kid gets to carry all their shit.


They take off to the woods, but on the way stop at a diner to order PANCAKES! from a mentally challenged guy. Guy talks ominously about the local hunting grounds, but I kind of lost consciousness at this point from humming dueling banjos so furiously. When I woke up they were being menaced by another "special" local at the hunting grounds. Did I mention the third first-person POV yet? Well, this movie just likes to spoil itself so much that all these hunting scenes are inter-cut with scenes of Wife's ex-husband and his wife searching for the group. These two handle the third first-person camera, saying things like "We are making this tape so when we find you, you can watch this later and see how we did it." Hey, after you get over your frightening experience of being lost in the woods let's watch the tape I made about rescuing you. Later, in these scenes but before anything interesting has happened in the hunting scenes, the kid and the other POV tapes are found and the search is called off. The couple then goes around filming people  who may have been involved in the disappearance (the two locals) in some sort of amateur investigation because they think there is some sort of conspiracy. However, WE don't know there is supposed to be some sort of conspiracy because the hunting scenes haven't gotten there yet.


In the hunting scenes, Hunter Dad and Surly Cameraman follow John Cusack's example of what to do when you are with your kids and see an ominous fence that screams "No trespassing." They trespass under (a hole has been dug) the fence with BARBED WIRE FACING IN (to keep something inside! Oh no!) to see if there are more deer to shoot for their video. They screw around in the woods, trying to shoot a deer and failing. At one point the pack mule Wimpy Kid tumbles down a hill with exposed tree roots sticking out and no one seems to really give a shit apart from "Hey, don't fuck up our stuff!" Now, the film is trying to make Surly Cameraman out to be an asshole, but Hunter Dad is supposed to be a good guy. I'm not saying he should coddle the little snot, but he's already carrying all your shit on a hunting trip he didn't care to be a part of where you dragged him into an area that just screamed danger. You can at least help him back up the hill. Hunter Dad makes up for his inadequacies by giving the kid a nuclear-powered compass. Maybe the dad thought he was being cute or something, but I'm pretty sure compasses are magnets and have no reason to be nuclear-powered. It's obviously not nuclear-powered, but a regular magnetic compass, when then find themselves in a false North that causes the needle to go all wonky. The area looks like a baby Stonehenge with bidets instead of stones and piles of fire ant killer.


The group decides they should get out of there because maybe that "No trespassing" sign did have a point. They find a campground and a prison issue slipper and really start to get freaked that maybe there is an escaped prisoner or something, but decide to stay overnight instead of getting the fuck out of there. They have flashlights, why not just keep going? Surly Cameraman is surly and drinks from a small flask for over two hours. I forgot to mention that this movie really likes timestamps. Every ten minutes we get a tap-tap-tap timestamp telling us the date (including the day) and the time. The movie takes place mostly during one day so it gets a little redundant to see: OCTOBER 16, SATURDAY 10:22 AM … OCTOBER 16, SATURDAY 10:34 AM typed out.


Then Surly Cameraman takes off with his camera for a little Blair Witch running through the woods shaky cam. I don't know why he ran off though. Maybe he heard the vehicles coming for Hunter Dad and kid, though that happens some time later. Everyone runs off, but meets up again at bidet Stonehenge where Menacing Local # 2 tells them he's sorry but he has to do this but he's glad they have cameras blah blah. It's obvious the government is in on it. Menacing Local # 2 dumps deer piss on Wimpy Kid and tells him to run off with the tapes. He falls down and his camera helmet comes off and somehow gets turned around so we can see the kid's face in a snotty nose "I'm so scared right now" scene. FINALLY the aliens show up and kill the adults, but I guess they don't like deer and just sniff the kid with their fingers. The aliens are actually kind of cool, but it was completely unnecessary to show them in as much detail as the movie did. I think it's scarier not to show them.


Wife's ex-husband has the tapes and has been studying them. In a non sequitur conversation with his wife about how the maid Conchita must have stopped being lazy and started really cleaning he realizes that there's no way a woman with a Hispanic sounding name would really do her job! The government has broken in and cleaned his house and bugged him! If the government broke in and trashed his house to get the tapes, I would think they would just make it look like a robbery rather than wasting time cleaning. So, Wife's ex-husband GOES TO THE GOVERNMENT with a file o' proof complete with a perfect picture of one of the aliens. I think the picture would have been enough, and more effective than the other scene where everyone gets killed. The government agent at the UFO Bureau says he'll help, but shreds that shit as soon as the dude walks out. Then, he and his wife die due to complications from a car accident.


Overall, it's a fairly inoffensive movie and a mediocre fake documentary. It's thankfully not as over the top with its "THIS SHIT IS SO REAL AND BASED ON A TRUE STORY!" like The Fourth Kind was. It's poorly thought out and can't quite decide if it wants to be a first-person POV movie or a regular third-person POV movie. The two POV's don't mesh well and hinder the story telling. The hunt scenes and the search scenes with Wife's ex don't mesh either. The search scenes end up being pretty pointless. They could have told the story linearly, had the kid and tapes found, and then had Wife's ex-husband go to the government with his proof. Instead we get this cutting back and forth that ends up spoiling any surprises the hunt scenes had to offer. Not that the whole fucking movie wasn't spoiled already by the box art.

Haunted Boat

With such a generic title, you'd think this movie could at least deliver what the title suggests? A boat that's haunted can't be so hard, can it? Ghost Ship did it fairly well, after all. So, with a movie called Haunted Boat, all I ask is for a boat (check) and some sort of haunting. And, this is where the movie fails spectacularly.
 

The plot seems straight forward at first. Six party-loving teenage twits board a boat that was gifted to one of them as a birthday present and head to Catalina to party some more. The party loving teens get stalked/killed/haunted/sick/stupid is a pretty standard starting point in horror movie plots, albeit one beaten so thin that I can't imagine a good movie with that plot coming out any time soon. Our Haunted Boat teens either have great fake ID's, or they know the right people, because they are clubbing in the first scene and getting completely hammered. Or, they actually supposed to be over 21, as they look, and the writers can't even get their characters straight.

As for the characters, these are as paper-thin as the plot (another failure of modern horror). There's the insipid brunette lovelorn naive girl. There's the inane sexy, take charge guy. This is guy Naïve Girl has a crush on and they share some sort of "Why didn't we ever get together?" moment at the beginning. There's the vacuous, bitchy blond. She's the brunette's best friend, but they hate each other throughout the whole movie. There's the other vacuous blond, but this one is sexy and possibly Australian (or has cotton in her mouth, I couldn't tell). Then, there's Kevin, the owner of the boat and birthday boy. He's a stoner, with a bad heart and used to be on the swim team. His friends think he retarded. Yes, he dies first. And lastly, there's the other vapid guy who does nothing except knowing "everything about boats." He knew so much about boats that he didn't check to see if it had a working radio first. As with most ridiculous movies with moronic characters, the characters names are not really worth remembering.

The director first tries to introduce you to the fact that this boat is haunted by flashing something on screen in the dark so fast you barely register that it happened. I hate these false "jump" scares in place of real horror because they are incredibly stupid, but the scare tactic happened so fast in this case that I was mostly left mildly confused. Was it something wrong with the film? The editing? Was it a subliminal message? I had to rewind it and single-frame step my DVD player to see what I was supposed to be scared of. Eh. It was some sort of irritated looking albino. 

This subliminal ad brought to you by Stay Puft marshmallows.

Our party-loving teens clean up their party boat so they can trash it again when they party that night. Did I mention they like to party? They get wasted and play strip truth-or-take–a-shot. Naïve girl gets all jealous that Take Charge Guy wants to engage in a boring soft core porn scene with Australian girl and huffs out of the cramped cabin into the night where nothing happens. The kids wake up in the morning to discover that somehow they've dropped anchor over night and are dead in the water, despite the Master Boater assuring them he left the boat on full-throttle or whatever all night before he passed out. Luckily Kevin shows up to entice them into smoking some "doobage" (he seriously says that) and they forget all about their problems. Oh, never mind. They take the opportunity to set up the plot by explaining all the ways they are afraid to die. The writer failed Writing Interesting Exposition class in school, I see.

Remember how much everyone bitched that the talking scenes in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof were boring and pointless? Tarantino's scenes served a basic purpose at least, despite what you think of them; they were a throwback, or homage, to '70's Grindhouse flicks. The talking scenes (and there are two notable ones) in Haunted Boat serve no purpose but to waste time. The characters don't really get killed by a supernatural force exploiting their fears because the end of the movie negates everything that had just happened in the film. And, if we exclude the end of the film, only one of the characters, Kevin, sort of gets killed by his fear, but there is not a supernatural force that looms over his death. 


Let me explain: After the doobage smoking comes to a close, the Take Charge Guy and the cotton mouthed Australian retreat to engage in some sexy times while the rest of the dullards decide work on their skin cancer and swim. The Blonde Bitch mildly teases Kevin into doing an unnecessary back flip into the ocean right after he revealed that he was afraid of having a heart attack and drowning. So, what happens? He has a heart attack and drowns, or is possibly eaten by a poorly rendered blind CGI shark that bashes its head on the camera resulting in an explosion of blood. Of course, it takes a minute for anyone to try and save Kevin (who is physically smaller than all the girls, I might add) because they have to get Take Charge Guy to save Kevin for some reason. The two blondes live up to their hair color stereotype when they try to use their cell phones to call for help and seem surprised that they can't connect to those buoy cell phone towers in the Pacific.


So, Kevin's dead and the kids are lost with no radio and the engine has stopped and… hey, let's toke and tell ghost stories. There are really no words that can explain how stupid and pointless this scene is, but I'll try. First, THESE STORIES HAVE NO BEARING ON THE PLOT WHATSOEVER. The ghosts in them don't manifest to haunt them later. The encounters with ghosts have not induced any character development, nor does telling the stories induce development of any sort in anything. Second, the ghost stories these idiots tell are about as haunted as this haunted boat gets, besides the Albino face that flashes almost subliminally in the scene every once in awhile. That's right. The most haunted this Haunted Boat gets is when Naïve Girl and Bitchy Blonde tell stupid stories about the one time one saw an Amish guy on a elevator and the other was hit on by the whisper of a guy that had gotten pegged by a car earlier in the day. The Australian girl tells some fucked up horror version of Snow White and Rose Red as if the story is supposed to be true. If you are going to tell Grimm fairytales, you don't have to horror-ize them to make the scary and fucked up; the guys wrote 'em like that already. Also, these stories aren't scary in any sense of the word except maybe scary bad.



After this boring detour of the main story the Australian chick decides to add some life-and-death tension by going and having a seizure. The other characters help her by failing CPR 101 by holding her down, trying to prevent her from swallowing her tongue by putting something in her mouth (swallowing your tongue cannot happen and don't put things in the person's mouth) and not turning her head after she vomits. (Choking on your own vomit would suck. Don't let this happen to a person having a seizure by turning them to the left side after the seizure ends.) . Oh, and they gave her Valium (pronounced "volume" for some reason). The Australian chick goes into a sort of coma after this, apparently because her friends know absolutely nothing about how the body works or very basic medical care.

Take Charge Guy and Master Boater decide their best option is to go out into the fog in the middle of the ocean and try to find a doctor. You know, those roving, seafaring doctors that open their practices out in the middle of the sea to help cure the Stupid Scurvy often developed by dumb teens in crappy horror movies. While the guys are drifting around in their dinghy another guy who sort of looks like the subliminal albino shows up to freak out the Blonde Bitch. He offers to help their sort of comatose Australian friend while she rants and raves about bugs on her and something in her ear.

If, at this point, you care to recall the beginning of the movie, you might remember that her fear is being eaten by bugs. Well, she doesn't really get eaten by bugs, nor is she really tortured by them. You might expect in movie that has a catch saying that each character "must face the terror of the one thing he fears most in the world, and each must answer to a fate of his own making," that there will be bugs driving her crazy the rest of the movie and subsequently kill her. Actually, the creepy albino pulls a bug out her ear and she vomits slugs Ron Weasley style and then goes back to sleep. Blonde Bitch doesn't like the creepy guy and threatens to kill him until he gets off their boat. So, he leaves. Yeah, he just leaves. That's It. The guy they've been sort of setting up to be out freaky Albino ghost killer just says, "Okay. I'm gone."

After that, Take Charge Guy and Master Boater come back but say absolutely nothing about their hunt for a seafaring doctor despite Naïve Girl's constant chattering and play-by-play of what just happened. The guys act sort of catatonic until Naïve Girl and Blonde Bitch decide to go to bed, leaving the guys sitting at a table having said absolutely nothing since they got back. I guess it's not a big deal that the guys you sent for help come back as vegetables. So, the guys disappear into a fog and leave behind the image of a melting Kabuki face.

In the morning, the Blonde Bitch goes into the bathroom and gets electrocuted by some exposed wires. This is death is rendered even more idiotic by the fact that Blond Bitch's fear was to be brutally killed by a stranger. So, how is her fear realized and her fate made by being electrocuted? Naïve Girl wakes up and freaks out until she finds a black cat in the cabin and cuddles with it all night until the real, less foggy guys show up. You read that right. The real guys show up, but then the girls disappear leaving Take Charge Guy alone. Take Charge Guy is then attacked by CGI-ish version himself. I think. His fear was to be killed by someone close to him, and there is no one closer to you than yourself! Except, he wasn't really attacked by himself because it was all a dream of Naïve Girl's.

There are several sequences in this part dreamed by several of the characters and I can't really remember the point of them or the order, but the final sequence is presumable not a dream and thus is the only one that matters. Naïve Girl wakes up the morning after their first drunken party and discovers that everything that had just happened was all a dream and her friends have died of drug overdoses. I think. They show track marks on one of the girl's arms, so I think this is the point the movie is trying to make. Naïve girl's fear is being alone, so she promptly freaks out and hangs herself off the side of the boat. Luckily some guys spot her and save her.

And, here comes the clincher! She was alone on the boat the WHOLE TIME! Everything was dream and a fantasy! The whole thing! The harbor master says in a voice over that he told her not to take the boat alone! Wow! What a twist, huh? And, for an even better twist, Naïve Girl goes to the harbor, sees her nonexistent friends taking the boat out and goes with them where they disappear into the horizon. Wow. That's better than all the M. Night Shyamalan twists put together. The whole, "haunted by their own fears" thing was all just a dream of Naïve Girl's and thus the whole movie is rendered moot. I think it's pretty damn amazing to invalidate your whole movie by trying to be too clever with your twists.

Luckily, my viewing of Haunted Boat was just a dream, so I suffer no ill effects from its lack of coherent plot and baffling dialogue, directing and acting. Though, when I woke up this morning I had a desire to smoke some doobage… doh!


Bonus: Most Idiotic Moment

The Naive Girl spots a very dead canary that Master Boater had been looking at on deck. She says in the most insipid voice. "Oh! What a pretty bird! Is it sick?" And, Master Boater says flatly, "It's dead." And she looks surprised. Well, as surprised as the actress can look.

Hot Boyz

This movie started out as a piece about racial injustice and corruption in the American criminal justice system. It seemed a noble effort to highlight a serious topic while utilizing an "urban" tone by casting rap artists. And, by noble effort, I mean a piece of poorly written, confusing, and nonsensical dreck. The only reason I watched this is because I was on a C. Thomas Howell kick. You may remember him as Ponyboy in movie The Outsiders. However, the movie barely features him at all.

I think the director/writer wanted to make a movie about rappers shooting up clubs and murdering countless innocent bystanders, banging chicks and swimming in bling Scrooge McDuck style. But, then, the producer said, "You know, we need a sad story to give your main character motivation to turn into an awesome gangster. People will love him if they know he has a heart wrenching past behind his murderous and asinine antics." That's where you get the first half and a bit of this awful film.

Stupidly named Kool is hooked up with a hot high school grad with a promising future. (Did you know Kool is Silkk the Shocker? Bet you didn't, not the way they plastered it all over the credits.) He's painfully uncool despite his recent ascension to a black belt in some vague martial art that comes in handy about one time in the film. Having him be a black belt in this movie is like giving the Terminator awesome flower arranging skills and having terrible scenes with his flower arranging mentor. Kool being a black belt has no bearing on the plot.

LaShawna’s, Kool’s girlfriend, mother hates him because he’s a want-to-be rapper and he hangs out with Snoop Dogg… or something. Despite this, LaShawna makes sweet love to Kool and then he lets her walk home in the ghetto at night. What a great boyfriend! Why does her mom hate him? On her walk of shame home, LaShawna comes across a man being shot and attempts to help him. The man is a cop and is being shot by another cop for some reason. I think it’s just because he has to play victim to the white devil corrupt cops, but I’m not sure. LaShawna panics when the police arrive and she runs home. She is promptly arrested and booked for murder despite the fact that she is the least likely candidate to have committed the murder other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So, now, for some reason, Kool must hook up with the King of Insanity, Gary Busey, and through corrupt means catch a slightly menacing neighborhood Mack Daddy to clear LaShawna. I liked how this was such a black-and-white case. LaShawna was there so they charged her right away even though the lead detective knew pretty well she wasn’t involved at all. There’s really no evidence that she did anything. Her incarceration is just a plot convenience to get Kool angry so he can be a cool gangster later.

Kool goes to a club to meet Mack Daddy. Here he uses his martial arts skills here to impress Mack Daddy and eventually tricks him into being arrested. However, the other corrupt white devil detective gets access to LaShawna and beats the fetus out her. Oh, I didn’t mention she was pregnant!?! She doesn’t mention this to her baby daddy either until she’s on her death bed. Excuse me while I stifle a sardonic giggle. Why no one wondered why she was practically dead after talking to Detective White Devil still puzzles me. And on the day she was supposed to get out of jail too! What a tragedy.

Detective White Devil decides that killing a girl who knew absolutely nothing about his vague crime was not enough, so he decides to perform a drive-by AT HER FUNERAL and shoot up her family and friends. At her funeral! I mean, there are bad cops, and then there are BAD cops. Kool steals a hearse and a boring chase scene ensues ending with a crispy Detective White Devil when his van explodes. (What? No making bacon jokes? A goofy joke like that might have saved this movie. Maybe.)

End of movie, right? WRONG! Now we are treated to Kool and his gang of Hot Boyz (the z makes it edgy, you know) getting his revenge on the world by shooting up casino goers and stealing stuff.( I’m almost convinced that the club/casino shooting scene is ripped straight from another C. Thomas Howell paycheck called “The Sweeper.”) He and his gang also break into Gary Busey's house and steal his weapons. This a great scene because of Gary Busey's queer little "Heey!" before he answers the door. See the scene here.

Everyone is looking for the gang, yet, no wonders why Kool can suddenly afford a mansion with basketball court. ‘Cause, you know, black people looooove basketball. Anyway, his gang gets cornered and they all die in an epic (read: boring) shootout. And Kool crashes his car into the water and escapes with his life. He is convicted and sentenced for his mayhem and murder, but is released after five years on a technicality. I guess you are supposed to feel triumphant for him because he stuck it to the man and did not have to do any time for his egregious transgressions. But, really, five years!?!

This was an awful movie with no direction, little or no acting, and a poor story. You’d be better off putting your balls in a vice rather than watch this. At least putting your balls in a vice wouldn’t be as painful.