Prime Time: Cynthia (2018)

The thing to bear in mind about Cynthia is that it is a horror comedy. That becomes obvious from the very first moments of the film, but it may not be so obvious from the blurb and poster/cover art. And it is sometimes an enjoyably wild horror comedy, although the bloodshed and gore never matches the level of the humour.

Scout Taylor-Compton and Kyle Jones play Robin and Michael, a couple desperately trying to have a child. The good news is that they succeed. The bad news is that there’s something else there, a mass of excess tissue that will be disposed of by the hospital. That’s the plan anyway. It’s just a large cyst.  But that messy lump (the titular Cynthia) wants to live, even if that means she has to kill others.  

Written by Robert Rhine, this is a silly “killer kid” movie that knows how silly that idea is, especially when the child is a complete newborn, and decides to use it as a framework for a number of increasingly silly encounters (there’s a cameo from Bill Moseley that has to be seen to be disbelieved). The performances are often pitched between terrible and odd, but the film is helped by the cute and mis-shapen design of Cynthia, a statement underlining the tone of everything.

Directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage (I have seen one other film from them, it was nowhere near as much fun as this) make the most of a script that uses some potentially sensitive topics for creating absurd scenarios. Whether it is the difficulty of trying to conceive, the journey of self-discovery that has people eventually becoming comfortable with their sexuality, or doing whatever it takes to protect a child, no matter what “mistakes” they make along the way, Cynthia is gleeful about it all. It is noticeably strange though, with so much being fair game, and a seemingly enjoyable lack of worry about people being offended by the content here, that the film feels at its most prudish when shying away from two gay characters about to kiss. Maybe it was just coincidental, maybe it was a joke that didn’t work for me, but it felt like the only time the directors seemed “squeamish”, for want of a better word.

Taylor-Compton is game enough in her role, and Jones is a lot of fun alongside her, the two often bickering like a couple mired in a depressing soap opera plot. Rebecca Marshall lends decent support, playing Jane, the sister of our lead character, and Sid Haig has fun in the role of a cop investigating numerous suspicious deaths. There are some other fun little performances, but the bulk of the praise should go to the people puppeteering Cynthia, a creation that reminded me slightly of Glen/Glenda from Seed Of Chucky.

Although rough around the edges, and full of moments that wallow in crudity, Cynthia is made with just enough polish to elevate it above a lot of cheaper, and schlockier, movies. The humour will annoy as many people as it amuses, but I would still recommend giving it a go, especially if you’re not easily offended. The highlights of the third act make it worth your while.

6/10

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Prime Time: Flight 7500 (2014)

Directed by Takahi Shimizu, the man who delivered so many great scares in the Ju-On: The Grudge movie series, as well as some other decent films, you could be forgiven for expecting good things from Flight 7500. Those expectations should be drastically lowered when you notice that this is written by Craig Rosenberg, a writer who also delivered The Uninvited (a middling remake of a classic) and The Quiet Ones (which is just terrible). Expectations should then nosedive when you realise that this is based on/inspired by a true story.

A varied bunch of passengers get on a plane, all seated and looked after by Laura Baxter (Leslie Bibb) and Suzy Lee (Jamie Chung). You have a pair of newlyweds, Rick (Jerry Ferrara) and Liz (Nicky Whelan), a moody goth (Scout Taylor-Compton), and Brad (Ryan Kwanten) and Pia (Amy Smart), a couple who have recently broken up, but don't want to ruin a non-refundable holiday for their friends by letting them know. There are others on board, some of them getting a story arc, many of them not, but it's this core group that becomes the focus of the movie.

I hope people don't misunderstand me here when I say that this is genuinely awful. While it is technically decent enough, in terms of the sound work and some general cinematography, it's almost constantly getting enough wrong to ruin any potential scares and/or atmosphere. The geography of the plane, the positioning of characters compared to one another, the confused looks from people as sounds or movements occur just off-camera, it's all very poor. And for a film set on a plane, it rarely feels as if it is actually set on a plane (I am talking about the background noise and little movements that you normally see in plane-set movies, replicating the real experience, they're missing here).

That might not be so bad if the cast was stellar. This is not a stellar cast, and they're sorely mistreated by Rosenberg's weak script. I tend to like Kwanten, but he's rarely managed to get himself movie roles that work well for him (a notable exception being the excellent Red Hill). I tend to dislike Smart, and have rarely seen her in a role that another actress couldn't have done better with, but it's not her fault that this movie decides to give her a few lines of dialogue and then largely act as if she's a background character. Bibb and Chung are treated slightly better, and Whelan is made so smug and lacking in self-awareness that she 's amusing enough, but those are the only people who have some trait that makes them remotely memorable. Even Taylor-Compton, doing standard goth girl schtick, suffers from writing that confuses hair and make-up with actual characterisation.

The ending, which at least comes along soon enough (the runtime is only 80 minutes, approximately), is obviously part of the movie that some felt would make the whole journey worthwhile. It doesn't, and those familiar with the real-life event this is based on may find that it leaves an unpleasant taste. It doesn't justify anything that viewers have just sat through, and it easily ranks as one of the worst horror films from Shimizu, who has so many other greats you can choose from.

2/10

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Netflix And Chill: Ghost House (2017)

Scout Taylor-Compton and James Landry Hebert star as Julie and Jim, a young couple on holiday in Thailand who end up having quite a bad time of things. All goes well initially, until they are befriended by Robert (Russell Geoffrey Banks) and Billy (Richard Gray). One big night out leads to a trip to a "ghost house" graveyard, which in turn leads to Julie becoming seriously unwell. Medical professionals can't help her. She's either imagining that she's being tormented by an evil spirit or she's actually being tormented by an evil spirit.

Let me begin by telling you what a ghost house is, in case it isn't obvious. They are small houses that are supposed to provide somewhere for spirits to reside (and, in fact, a quick Google search shows that they seem to be more commonly known as Spirit Houses). Offerings are often placed there and it is considered bad form to neglect them. Basically, to my ignorant eyes, it's a birdhouse for the dead.

Written by Kevin O'Sullivan and Jason Chase Tyrrell, from a story by Kevin and Rich Ragsdale, Ghost House is a decent mix of the kind of thing we've seen successfully marketed by Blumhouse in recent years and a healthy dose of Thai flavouring. Most of the scares are jump scares, including an extended sequence in which someone is plunged into darkness and keeps having problems with their flashlight just as something moves around them, but there's no denying that they're well done jump scares, helped by some impressive design work on the main evil spirit.

Rich Ragsdale is also the director, doing a decent job, especially when it would seem to be a relatively low-budget work (not at the bottom end of the scale, by any means, but also doesn't seem to have had any well-known companies offering to help out on the cash front). Whatever the budget was, and I can't seem to find that information just now, Ragsdale has done his best with it.

Hebert is a bit weak in his role, but that's not so bad during many of his scenes with Taylor-Compton, mainly because she does a really good job of showing the toll on her mind and body as she is being continually affected by an evil force. Her performance is so good that I will actually start looking out for her future movie appearances, and she has a few due out in the next year or so, where I was previously unimpressed by the little I had seen of her work (I blame Halloween II - 2009 - for that). Banks and Gray both do decent work as the friendly strangers who may have ulterior motives, Mark Boone Junior is enjoyable in a small, but important role, Michael S. New is very likable as a local guide named Gogo, and both Wattana Koomkrong and Wen-chu Yang do good work as, respectively, the potential saviour or destroyer of our leading lady's soul.

There's easily enough here to appeal to people who enjoy their horror films with some ghost or demonic activity in the mix. Some may resent the amount of jump scares, and all horror fans will recognise that as a common problem in many modern horrors, but I think it provides a decent helping of atmosphere to go along with those jumps.

6/10

The movie might be available here on shiny disc.
Americans can pick it up here.

April Fool's Day (2008)

If you're going to do a remake then this is the way to go about it. For starters, the original movie wasn't exactly a perfect film and it wasn't exactly universally loved. Getting some bright young things in front of the camera to be put in danger is a given but it's a plus when you get someone behind the camera like Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores (AKA The Butcher Brothers). The two men have already done some good stuff in the horror genre so I lift my hopes slightly when I see them attached to a project.

Taking the screenplay by Danilo Bach as a loose template (there are easy points of reference for those who have seen the original movie but this is also different enough to feel like quite a different beast), The Butcher Brothers also engage the help of Mikey Wigart in crafting something that's slick and disappointingly bloodless and amusingly ludicrous.

A prank goes horribly wrong and those involved find themselves threatened some time later. That's all you need to know. Yes, it's a mix of I Know What You Did Last Summer and the original April Fool's Day and Valentine. I don't care what you think of me, I LIKED those movies. I didn't love them but I liked them. Despite strong disapproval from almost everyone I know I actually really like Valentine (just such a great mix of old school slasher style and post-90210 teen sheen) so there you have my position on such glossy fare, for what it's worth.

April Fool's Day has some fun moments, and the cast has a couple of decent starlets in the shape of Scout Taylor-Compton and Taylor Cole, but it's all just a bit too bland to be solidly entertaining. The fact that it comes from The Butcher Brothers makes the tame nature of the movie even more of a disappointment and it's not helped by the rest of the cast - Josh Henderson, Joe Egender, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Samuel Child, etc - looking as if they have wandered in from the set of Cruel Intentions 5 or The Skulls 6 (both of which are sequels that I'm well aware don't exist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . yet).

I wouldn't go out of my way to see this again, and I certainly wouldn't rush out to buy it, but if it was on I could manage to sit through some of it. And if I see it anywhere at a bargain price I may well just have to buy it to satisfy my DVD-buying addiction.

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/April-Fools-Day-Scout-Taylor-Compton/dp/B0012OTRWA/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1342638801&sr=1-2