Netflix And Chill: Cold Comes The Night (2013)

Alice Eve stars in this film. I like Alice Eve. Bryan Cranston also stars in this film. I like Bryan Cranston. Logan Marshall-Green makes it three for three, even if I don't like him as much as I like the other two. So I figured that I might enjoy Cold Comes The Night, despite hearing bad things about it. I became even more optimistic when I saw Osgood Perkins as one of the co-writers. That optimism quickly disappeared as the film started to play out.

Alice Eve is Chloe, a woman having a hard time of things. She's trying to keep custody of her daughter (Sophia, played by Ursula Parker), trying to run a far-from-idyllic motel, and not on best terms with her ex (a cop named Billy, played by Marshall-Green, she has had an affair with). Things go from bad to worse when someone is killed on the motel premises, and that someone was supposed to be working with a dangerous criminal named Topo (Cranston). Chloe ends up enlisted by Topo to help finish a job that has been started, but she also sees a way that she might be able to turn the situation to her advantage, especially when she realises how visually-impaired Topo is.

I've not seen anything else from director Tze Chun, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Perkins and Nick Simon, and I'm unlikely to now rush to anything else with his name on it. Cold Comes The Night is pretty awful, and it feels even worse because of how the main cast members have their talents squandered. Every character and moment feels like an inferior copy from numerous other movies. It's a VHS that has been used to record the Christmas Day TV schedule on long play for two decades, with any real detail or entertainment value now completely obscured by shadows and lots of static. 

Eve tries to make things work, despite the fact that she has once again picked a dud to star in, and Marshall-Green has one or two moments that at least punctuate the tiresome awfulness of the whole thing, but Cranston overshadows both of them, and not at all for the right reasons. His accent, his physical performance, his energy in every moment just feels completely wrong, which is at odds with how well he does with better material.

I want to be angry at this, if only on behalf of the main cast members who surely thought they were signing on for something a bit better, but I can't even do that. There's nothing here to fuel my rage because, well, there's nothing here. The cinematography is unexceptional, the score is unexceptional, the editing is . . . etc, I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. I'm not even really angry at Chun. He doesn't put any stamp on the film, and I can go through my life fairly safe in the knowledge that I'll have probably forgotten his name by the time I ever, IF I ever, see another film from him.

I didn't like this very much, which I think I have made very obvious, and I'll hopefully never have to think of it again after today.

3/10

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Shudder Saturday: The Girl In The Photographs (2015)

Although not all horror movies need to fit nicely into a narrowly-defined genre pigeonhole, some films seem to make their biggest mistake in being far too non-committal to the genre. They want to be a thriller, or they want to be too funny, or they want to concentrate on some more serious dramatic elements. None of these things are wrong, depending on your movie, but they feel wrong when placed in a horror movie framework that you think has been reluctantly chosen by a director who couldn't figure out another approach.

The Girl In The Photographs is one of those movies. It's a thriller, for the most part, and a fairly standard one, but you get a bit more nastiness here and some gore in the finale. It's not enough, however, to distract you from the weak script, lack of logic, and poor acting from almost everyone involved (including/especially Kal Penn).

The standard plot sees a young woman (Colleen, played by Claudia Lee) targeted by some sick kidnappers/killers. They keep leaving her photos of their latest victim, photos that somehow show things clearly enough to be upsetting without giving away anything that could help the police. An arrogant photographer (Peter Hemmings, played by Penn) finds out about this, assumes that the psycho is homaging his work, and decides to head back to his home town, thinking he may lure the killer out and solve the case (yes, the plan is as dumb as it sounds).

Nick Simon doesn't have too many features to his credit, as director, but perhaps the most telling thing about his filmography is the fact that 2 Lava 2 Lantula! seems to be one of his better outings. He also helped write this script, alongside Oz Perkins and Robert Morast, and it's worth wondering just how well this could have turned out if it had been shaped by the singular, and more assured, vision of Perkins (who has built up a small, but acclaimed, filmography that has him marked out as a not-inconsiderable talent). From the character moments to the tonal slides, this film is one hell of a mess. Some people will still be able to enjoy it, messiness and all. I did not.

The performances really don't help either. Lee isn't too bad in her role, and there are some okay supporting turns here and there, but it's the bigger names who throw the film further out of balance. As much as I tend to like him onscreen, Penn is giving the worst performance I have ever seen from him here. He's a mix of Austin Powers (in standard photographer mode) and whoever you have met in your life that turned out to be the most irritating asshole you never wanted to meet again. Katharine Isabelle is onscreen just enough to remind you of how wonderful she is, and how the film would be much better if she was in the lead role (no offence intended to Lee, it's just . . . Katharine Isabelle), and Mitch Pileggi feels like he's only cast to make viewers go "do I know him? I think I know him, oh wait, that's him from The X-Files, isn't it?" That may seem unfair to Pileggi, who is just a working actor keeping himself in work, but his role feels just a bit too minor for him to be in it, which is what makes it feel even more like a simple case of distracting stunt casting.

I was almost more generous here with my rating, considering the things that seem perfectly okay, on a technical level, but the more I thought about it, the more I found to dislike. I don't want to mention the other performances, that range from the bland to the awful. I don't want to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who acts as if they were too worried about making an outright horror movie while being too inexperienced to make a cracking thriller. And I don't want to spend more time on a movie that felt like a waste of 95 minutes already.

3/10

The movie is currently available on Shudder, but I'd recommend picking something else on there instead.