Solarbabies (1986)

Best bad quote: "Cut your breath before you betray your putrid thinking!"

Solarbabies is a strange film that screams 1980's CHEESE so loudly you almost can't hear the whispers of the decent film that attempt to permeate its cheesy surface. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future where some sort of fascist, Earth hating police force control the water supply. They also run a prison for children, called the Orphanage, where children they've captured are indoctrinated into their ways in order to become good members of their police force. 

For some reason, they also are indoctrinated into the way of roller skating. Our heroes,  the Solarbabies, are a team of Skateball players (Lacrosse on skates). This really has no bearing on the plot, except to maybe establish why the heroes are friends, and to give the heroes faster means of getting around rather than walking. I don't know. Was roller skating cool in the 1980's?

The adorable Lukas Haas, called Daniel, discovers a glowing, sentient extraterrestrial sphere that communicates telepathically and does magic things. The sphere heals Daniel's deafness and later creates a thunderstorm in the Solarbabies' club room that results in a cheery, awkward water fight. 

Don't ask why I'm dressed as Raiden.

 Unbeknownst to the Solarbabies, they have a stalker who witnesses this little display. He's Darstar, some sort of gorgeous not-quite Native American falconer who is one with his owl. He's also played by Adrian Pasdar, he who gives all those blessed with sight a serious boner. (Guys and girls.) He decides to steal the sphere -for some reason- and runs away.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right here waiting for you. 

The movie already feels like it is running at a fairly fast pace, though a lot of time is spend watching the characters fuck around, but it is here that the story telling becomes noticeably choppy. We the audience know that Darstar stole the sphere, and it is conceivable that Daniel will go after it as he has a connection with it. But, we never see the Solarbabies find out about the theft, nor do we see Daniel leaving. The girl, Terra, tells the leader, Jason, that Daniel has gone after the sphere and the Solarbabies decide to go skating after him. It feels very rushed, like a lot got left on the cutting room floor. I felt like I was being told to "MOVE MOVE MOVE" by a gruff Colonel Director who was really eager to get on with it. 

What follows is a montage of skating and running away from the police, complete with terrible '80's music and impossible stunts. The Solarbabies were standing in the danger zone, but love just wouldn't leave them to ever stand alone. How'd they end up in Danger Zone anyway? Doesn't that highway have signs? At one point, the kids launch themselves over a huge crevice, like twenty frikin' feet, with just the power of love and their sweet ass wheels.

The jump in Speed is more believable.

 We find out, through a couple of slaughters and scenes of horrific torture, that the bad guys want to destroy the sphere for some reason. The heroes just want to keep the sphere away from them because, well, I guess it wouldn't be cool if it was destroyed. I said "for some reason"  and "I guess" because, really, we never really find out what the sphere really does (besides magic things). 

At the end of the movie, it destroys the dam that holds in all the water, creates a thunderstorm and then goes back to space. The breaking of the dam gives everyone free water. But, really, an extraterrestrial being came from space to free water for some humans living in a specific region on Earth? Did it jumpstart Earth's natural processes in order to get things growing again? Is it from a race that just really hates evil monopolies of life sustaining substances? Is it Jesus? We never really find out. 

   

Solarbabies is an interesting, if flawed, ride through 1980's apocalyptic fiction. There are many things I found laudable, but also many things I found laughable to the point of being awful. The laudable? The sets are cool. Tiretown had this awesome Mad Max crossed with a carnival thing going on that I found appealing. I was compelled by the sentient, alien sphere and what it was. (Though, we disappointingly never really find out its purpose.) Also, the effects are rather well done for the time period.  

  

The back story was interesting, with the fascist police state fighting with people called Eco Warriors and then stealing their children to be indoctrinated in prison-schools. Unfortunately, a lot intriguing ideas (more than I can cover here) have been reduced to half-baked threads that don't go anywhere. The film seems to have been reduced to bare bones, and that's a shame. And, the roller skating. It's just awkwardly shoved in there, like they needed something to appeal to kids. The roller skating scenes could have been better spent filling out the more interesting plot points.

This movie is much better than its title and premise suggest, but overall, disappointing. As a big fan of post apocalyptic movies and fiction, I think they often tend to try to do too much and end up having to skim off the basics in order to even have a viable movie. Solarbabies is certainly guilty of this. We are treated to too many interesting concepts that can never be fully explored within the time constraints. And, then, we waste time with fucking Lacrosse on skates.

Rating: 3 out of 5 Glowing Extraterrestrial Balls 

   

Titanic II (2010)

Best bad quote: "Airplanes are big, babe. Trains are big. This? This is monumental."

The Asylum sometimes puts out some pretty good films. I mean, pretty good as long as you think of them in the context of what they are: direct to DVD, cheap schlock made solely for raking in cash. When The Asylum does good, sometimes their films are actually decent movies, sometimes their films are just mindless fun, and, sometimes, their films are just hilariously bad. And, a lot of the time, unfortunately, their lowest common denominator films are just plain boring.

"Titanic II" is less electric boogaloo and more a bland Saturday afternoon film perfect for filling up time slots on SyFy. I find it hard to believe that you could take this ludicrous premise and make it bland, but it happened.  In the film, someone with too much money and too little grey matter commissions a replica of the Titanic, calls it Titanic II, and has it set sail on the exact date the original Titanic did. That someone would tempt fate that casually is inherently hilarious. However, the rest of the film's mediocrity really overwhelms that hysterical nugget of idiocy.

This surely will not end in tragedy.

The first three minutes of the film consists of some guy preparing for and then surfing a wave caused by a glacier falling into the ocean. You might wonder, as I did, if this has anything to do with the story. Surprisingly, it does. You see, the Titanic II's downfall this time is not just caused  by one man's hubris and a glacier. It's global warming and two huge chunks of glacier that fall into the ocean. The first causes icebergs to smash into the ship, piercing the hull. And, just to add insult to injury,  the second wave wipes out all the passengers who managed to escape via lifeboat and turns the ship over. The Titanic II's maiden voyage was even more of a clusterfuck than its predecessor's.

The "love-story" in this film involves the young-ish playboy who commissioned the ship and his ex-girlfriend, a nurse that he hired to work on the ship. Once the four women he showed up with die (or are rescued via helicopter), he and his ex make amends while frantically attempting to escape the sinking ship. As seen in the titanic piece of shit that was 2012, imminent death plus conveniently dead current love interest equals reconciliation for ex lovers. Let's hope that the next time my heart is broken by some douchebag, a disaster will soon be on the horizon to bring us back together.  

I appreciate that though The Asylum just makes films just for the money, films that essentially rip off Hollywood, occasionally their films skew enough from Hollywood to make them worth watching. They skew from Hollywood not only in the sense that the films are lower budget, B to Z grade films, but also in the sense that they do take some risks that we don't usually see in the typical Blockbusters. 

I say usually, because in this case, the male love interest dies saving the female's life, just like in Titanic. In most insipid movies like Titanic II, though, your possession of a love interest means you'll likely live if they live. I mean, who wants to survive a disaster if you've got no one to bone afterward? So, in this case, the love interests' death is a bit of a surprise. This isn't the "What if the movie Titanic had a happier ending?" that is expected.   

     

And really, that's all there is to say about the film. It's just bland. The CGI is bad, the character's are unlikable and the story is uninspired. I really wish the "Titanic II" could have been better, but The Asylum really failed this time. Despite a great title that is just begging to become a classic piece of B movie trashy fun, Titanic II turns out to be one of The Asylum's more forgettable films.

Rating: 2 Sets of Arm Candy out of 5

Skinned Deep (2004)

Best bad quote: "I didn't know if you were hungry, so I brought you some soup and money." 

A vacationing family get a flat tire and rely on the kindness of a weird old woman at a local rest stop. And, because the family have never seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they find themselves brutally and hilariously murdered by a strange set of monstrous siblings and their grandma-mother, Granny, after being invited to a dinner of raw flesh served on cardboard. There's nothing really interesting about the human family except that they are ridiculously stupid and annoying. Oh, and their acting is atrocious, but in a hilarious way. The mother, father and brother are, as I've said, thankfully, brutally and deliciously slain very early on. However, the "better actress," moody teenaged Tina, is kept alive because the sensitive sibling, Brain, wants to keep her. He's called Brain because he has a huge, grotesque exposed brain, often covered by a disgusting burlap sack. Despite his absolute filthiness and the murderous tendencies that run in his family, Brain is very sweet and just wants Tina to love him. 

Just look at that face. What's not to love?

  

Of course, because all homicidal families consist of radically different personalities, Brain's two brothers are completely different from him. First, there is Surgeon General. He's the bad ass motherfucker you see on the box art with the huge metal jaws. He does most of the killing in the family, though, disappointingly, not with his jaws. He does have a small hand held blade that's good for slicing throats and dicing stupid people. He slices Tina's little brother completely in half, for fuck's sake. Then, there's the veteran of hilariously bad movies himself, Warwick Davis. In Skinned Deep he plays an albino (or flour covered, I'm not quite sure which) twitchy, insane imp called Plates. On his back he wears a spring loaded basket of, you guessed it, plates and throws them at his enemies while laughing manically. He only actually kills one person this way, but it's the murderous intent that counts!

No! Not the plates! Not the PLATES!

 If the wacky homicidal characters don't have you interested yet, then what the hell is wrong with you? Ahem, I mean, then just wait! It gets more ridiculous. With Tina imprisoned in a room plastered floor to ceiling with newspaper,  Granny gets back to running her rest stop diner, where a group of geriatric bikers called the Ancient Ones stop for coffee. The leader of the pack stays behind in order to get some sweet grandma lovin,' but is quickly slain when Tina, who has escaped, begs for help. When their leader doesn't show up, the Ancient Ones go back only to discover his blood soaked jacket. Of course, this means war. The battle comes later, though.

In the mean time, Tina and Brain go on date! Brain dons a Kindergartener's construction paper and plastic bead Indian headdress and takes Tina for a ride on his motorcycle. While on their picnic Brain and Tina have a serious conversation about Brain's daddy issues with his Creator and Brain fantasizes that he were normal. Everyone wants to run down the streets of New York completely naked with their penis flopping about, right?

Don't laugh. He takes Arts and Crafts very seriously.

The next day Tina and Brain are wed in beautiful ceremony where several fat rednecks are slaughtered by Surgeon General and Plates waxes poetic about his love of plates. The ceremony culminates with Surgeon General and Plates forcing Tina to feed one of the rednecks sand until he dies. Pitiful Brain begs them not to make her do it because she is innocent, but the redneck just dies too darn fast for them to have a good conversation about it.

Look, I said don't laugh.

Luckily for Tina, Brain is a sweet boy and he decides to let her trauma subside instead of consummating their marriage the same night. What Brain doesn't know, however, that Tina's first kill has awakened an angry beast inside her- a beast that is thirsty for blood and vengeance. Brain comes to apologize to Tina and she tries to convince him to run away with her. Because he is basically a dweeby, filthy human with a huge brain and a homicidal family, he understandably declines. So, in the saddest and most hilarious scene ever, she rips open his head and he dies horribly, writhing on the floor. As he dies, the contents of his brain, wooden children's blocks covered in green goo, spill out and spell "LOVE." Tina stomps the blocks and when she lifts her foot, they spell "HATE." Harsh, man.

As Tina escapes into the bowels of the house, the Ancient Ones show up to wreak some vengeance of their own. One by one each member of the family, including the mysterious Creator- a headless, oily body builder with a loincloth labeled "DYNO-MITE!!" - meet their well-deserved fates in horrible, horrific and hilarious ways. The film even has a twist ending in store for poor Tina, who escapes to the local Sherriff's office. Well, it's a twist for anyone who doesn't know anything about horror movies, but still.

I did say horrifying.

  

When I first saw this movie in 2005 I was just getting into B-movies. Back then, I had a lot of fun with it. But, five years and many viewings later, I can honestly say that this is my favorite "bad" movie. Everything about this movie is hilarious, from the acting that's so bad it almost seems intentional to the absolutely balls out absurdity of the story. Skinned Deep is the epitome of the hilariously bad movie, or so-bad-it's-good movie, that we, as bad movie lovers hope to be blessed with when we put a new film into our DVD player.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Strangled Cats

  

Bonus picture:

Skeleton Key 2: 667 Neighbor of the Beast (2008)

Best Bad Quote: "This is hot sauce. And you'll dip your balls in it." 

 

Unbeknownst to me as I began my journey into the madness that is Skeleton Key 2, this was not the sequel to the 2005 Kate Hudson film The Skeleton Key. It took me about a minute to realize that I'd made a very grave mistake. I felt fear grip me as I discovered that this was not a terrible direct-to-DVD sequel capitalizing on a decent, if a bit insubstantial, horror film.

Skeleton Key 2 is a terrible, independent micro budget horror spoof comedy. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with independent, micro budgeted films. No, the key words here are horror spoof comedy, a trifecta of words that, if uttered together, automatically create a vortex of unfunny suck that threaten those who watch a film with those descriptors with permanent insanity.

Skeleton Key 2 is a film within a film. You, yes you, have been tied up and forced by a prancing, squealing man-child to watch Skeleton Key 2. In this moment you have no mouth and you feel you must scream. But, you have a hand, right? You can turn off the movie. No, you can't. You can't turn away from the horror before you. It's the best and most terrible train wreck you will ever see. And, you must watch. 

Your descent into madness continues as the hero, Howard (writer/director John Johnson), explains to you (yes, you!) that he is a new man. Because he wears a tie. It's like watching an unfunny sketch comedy show. You can't laugh, because it's so painfully not funny. However, you can't laugh at the awfulness of it either because it's not absurd enough. So, you cry. I did.

Nothing in the film makes sense. It randomly rips off Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, classic video games and TROLL 2. Though I never figured out what was really going on in the film, I do know that Howard had been summoned to the infamous town of Nilbog to rescue his attractive Indian friend, Cornelius. Nilbog might be goblin spelled backward, but in Skeleton Key 2 Nilbog is overrun with Smurf-faced zombies. Along the way, Howard is terrorized by a leprechaun, shadowed by a Hulk-ian demon, and becomes a participant of several orgies. In one scene, two women standing behind old washing machines are milked and the black woman produces chocolate milk. Really.

At one point, you manage to change the channel to a USA Up All Night type show called Cinema Insomnia while your man-child kidnapper is occupied. The host of the show lampoons Skeleton Key 2 with a scathingly accurate review saying it's a good thing for director/writer John Johnson that other people made movies with good ideas in them or he wouldn't have been able to make Skeleton Key 2 at all.

That John Johnson includes this is a real kick in the gut. Not only are you watching a movie that is pure, undiluted excrement, but then John Johnson reminds you that it is you who is the fool, not him. He made this filth, not caring if it were good, or even entertaining, and released it onto the unsuspecting world. And now you've wasted two hours (yes, two hours!) of your life not being able to turn away, slowly feeling as if you have descended into madness. Surely something could not be this bad? But it is, it truly is. Skeleton Key 2 is the worst movie I have ever seen. 

Rating: 0 out of 5 Demons Wearing Pink Foam Cowboy Hats

See this review also at badmovienite.com. Link.

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.