Why can Cane get away with such flagrant violation of both law and logic? Well, because he’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It doesn’t matter what role Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing; somehow, someway he’ll end up gunning down bad guys in extravagantly ridiculous action set pieces. That’s why he’s there. He could be playing a burger flipper and he’d still manage to find a rocket launcher behind the deep fryer. In fact, the inclusion of Schwarzenegger goes a long way to explaining not just the plot holes in End of Days, but the muddled mash of both the horror and action genres.  The storyline is standard religious horror: Satan millennially returns to Earth in human-form in an attempt to procreate and seed a spawn. If he does so before the clock hits the thousand-year-mark (in other words, before New Years in any new millennium), he unleashes the Armageddon. There’s a specific woman he must impregnate – for some reason or another – and Satan and his minions seek out the young lady, whilst meanwhile a group of priests attempt to assassinate her before Satan can get his hands (and other parts) on her.

However, the inclusion of Schwarzenegger dictates that action formula will follow despite a plot better-suited to horror. So – as Jericho Cane – Schwarzenegger is sucked in to the Satan spawn scenario and with him plenty of action familiars. There’s the aforementioned helicopter stunt, battles with armed assassin-priests, a fist-fight with a demonically-powered old lady and a stupefying number of shoot-outs with Satan considering he’s immune to man-made weaponry. It’s a bizarre amalgamation of both horror and action, with both the scares and thrills suffering significantly. Too much time is devoted to Schwarzenegger’s action antics to focus on any scares or generate the potentially-frightening plot. Among the scariest moments is a subway encounter with a freakish-looking albino (who then shatters into pieces like glass along with any generated scares) and a sex-scene where Satan simultaneously screws both a mother and her (of age) daughter, whose bodies morph together for some reason never explained.

On the action front, the largest dilemma is that Satan just doesn’t suit the conventions of the action genre. While a villain that presents too little of a challenge can be particularly un-thrilling, the opposite can be just as problematic: that is, a villain who has almost unlimited power. Pitting a security personnel up against the Lord of the Underworld just isn’t believable – even in the universe of an over-the-top action flick – and both plot-holes and concessions of logic become a necessity to keep the story moving along on typical action course. End of Days goes to significant lengths to make it clear that Satan – being the nigh invincible figure that he is – cannot be harmed by any weaponry, even while in his human-form. Yet this is an Arnie-action film and thus needs the requisite gun-fights, so scene-after-scene Schwarzenegger shoots at Satan with guns, and grenade launchers, and so on – and of course scene-after-scene Satan is flung to the floor, picks himself up and sets off after our hero as if he’s just been toppled over playfully rather than riddled with bullets. It’s not just repetitive, but almost entirely nonsensical. Similarly, a variety of fundamental story issues have been ignored to keep Satan from simply dicing Jericho Cane into countless pieces as he would in real life. For instance, early on in the film we see Satan in his true-form, a CGI, translucent flying-lizard that can zip through the air at high-speeds and ignite explosions. Then the next two-hours-plus is spent with Satan chasing around Schwarzenegger in a middle-aged man’s body, which is assumingly why he can never seem to catch Schwarzenegger. Why wouldn’t Satan ditch this body for a few seconds and simply blow Schwarzenegger up? In another scene Satan magically appears in Schwarzenegger’s apartment, which raises the question of why he wouldn’t just magically appear next to Schwarzenegger instead of chasing him around on foot for the entire running-length? Along with limitless power come many limitless inconsistencies, purposely designed to keep the story moving.

When it comes to scares or thrills or any of the things we as an audience normally expect of a good horror or action film, End of Days constitutes a complete failure. Nonetheless, End of Days does work on another level, a level that typically even the worst of Schwarzenegger’s films operates on.  This is the type of film where every other sentence is a one-liner and the plots lack of logic is compensated with much ensuing absurdity. Despite any attempts at genuine scares or thrills falling short, End of Days never ceases to be entertaining, and this makes up for many of its shortfalls. There’s something very hard to hate about Arnold Schwarzenegger being tossed around by an overweight old lady (albeit a possessed one) or randomly blending day-old pizza and drinking it. Plus, any movie which has Arnie telling the devil himself that he’s a “fucking choir boy” can’t be all bad. End of Days is absurd, ridiculous, and downright dumb for the most part, but it’s also quite a bit of fun. If you’re looking for an Oscar-winner, hell, if you’re looking for something semi-coherent, skip it, but if you want something that will keep you entertained for two-hours, it’s worth a watch. And despite all its flaws, that’s more than you can say of most horror films.

A fitting statement from one of the featured subjects in Horror Business, a documentary on the horror film industry that has a lot of monkeys with cameras, but very few filmmakers. One doesn’t have to be part of mainstream Hollywood to be considered a director, but most of the no-talent hacks showcased within this movie are shooting stuff at the level and with the same amount of care as a high school student shooting their English Media project. There are a few small appearances from accomplished filmmakers involved in the horror business, such as H.G Lewis, Sid Haig and Lloyd Kaufman, but for the most part the featured “directors” don’t stand the slightest chance of ever making it in the horror business this film professes to be about.

The one exception is David Stagnari, an avid horror fanatic that is attempting to jumpstart a career as a director with his short film Catharsis. Stagnari is a person a lot of horror fans could easily relate to; a fan since he was a small child, Stagnari intelligently discusses the state of the genre today, what he wants to accomplish as a director and reminisces of his past experiences watching double-features at a drive-in, which has now been paved over and replaced by a “Babies R’ Us”. Although only a few clips of Catharsis are shown throughout Horror Business, you can tell that, even though Stagnari may never break it big, he is at least trying to create something of substance.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Ron Atkins, a pretentious douchebag (excuse the terminology, but it’s the most accurate description of the man) who doesn’t even attempt to make anything remotely worth watching. Armed with a consumer camera, Atkins shoots his films without the aid of lighting, a crew, a tri-pod, a script or most importantly, a single intelligent thought. The level his films operate on is best surmised in the instance where Atkins adds a subplot to his film in which Dick Cheney penetrates a dog in the rear, and then laughs profusely at the joke. His view that what moviegoers think of his films is irrelevant as long as he enjoys them is despicable and shows a total disregard for the (few) people who may end up renting or buying one of his films, but his wife’s reasoning that anyone who dislikes Atkinson’s movies actually enjoys them doesn’t even make the least bit of sense in the most warped of logic. Atkins then has the gall to trash Hollywood films for their poor quality, a bold statement coming from a director whose entire oeuvre is disregarding both the audience and any apparent attempt at quality on his part. As well as absent filmmaking skills, Atkins also has anger issues (he cusses out a teenage Burger King employee) and what must be a tendency to lie or at least stretch the truth to hyperbolic extremes, one example being his claim that he’s sold over 30,000 copies of his movies. Considering that on IMDb none of his films have over 94 votes as of this posting (and the average vote-count hovering below fifty), I find this very hard to believe, although admittedly there is the small chance that his parents have purchased 29,900 copies of his films.

The rest of the filmmakers fall somewhere in between the two: not entirely as reprehensible as Atkins, but none nearly as respectable as Stagnari. There’s an alcoholic who chooses his cameraman a few minutes before his shoot, two adult men still living in their parent’s home and producing schlock on par with Atkins, and an animator who specializes in flash animation. It’s about as far from the horror business as you can get. This doesn’t mean that Horror Business had to be a failure: if the documentary had focused on the pitfalls of the various directors and what holds them back, it could have worked. As it stands, Horror Business seems unfocused. There’s no message or apparent point behind the proceedings; it consists of interviews and behind the scenes set footage, stuff that would make a great special feature on a DVD, but isn’t sufficient or substantial enough to work as a film of its own. It retains a certain level of interest, but it never feels like a real movie. That’s the real problem with Horror Business: not that it focuses on people so far outside of the horror business, but that it doesn’t know what to do with them.

If you choose to watch Mr. Jingles, you will be strongly tempted to shut it off – and that’s just before the opening credits finish, which list what must be the equivalent of an entire small town, lingering on each name for enough time that you’ve re-read it five times over before it fades away. Half the crew is the same two or so people (who also appear to be related) and their names are repeated so frequently that by the time the credits finish, the director assumes you know them on a first-name basis and drops the last names. And sadly, you do.  After close to four minutes (which is quite a while if you think about it – near a tenth of the brief runtime), the credits finally come to a close and the film gets slightly more interesting from here on. I stress slightly.

Shot on a consumer camera with what appears to be a wonky focus button and recorded with what sounds like a tape recorder (good luck understanding a single word without the subtitles), Mr. Jingles begins with the titular Mr. Jingles invading a house and slaughtering a family. The scene is a good indication of what’s to come. Mr. Jingles slashes the dad’s front shirt and rips a sausage, doubling as intestine, out. He then bops the mom’s head to the floor with all the force of a cranky five-year-old. Meanwhile, the couple’s ten-year-old daughter, Angie, cowers upstairs in her closet. This ten-year-old is inexplicably played by a twenty-three-year-old woman, which remains a puzzling choice until the film flashes forward “Ten Years Later” and you realize they just decided to use the same actress who played Angie as an adult. They were apparently unable to find a real ten-year-old girl who could substitue for the brief prologue. Right before Mr. Jingles finds Angie and is about to do her in, two policemen burst in. One moves a toy plastic gun up and down and you hear some sort of popping sound, similar to the sound “Pop Rocks” make when dissolving.

The opening sequence effectively establishes what’s to come: along with the terrible effects work (i.e. sausage as intestine) and pure incompetence (a full-grown woman playing the ten-year-old girl), there’s the utterly irritating clown, Mr. Jingles, who spouts out stupid one-liners for the remainder of his screen time. In the opening scenes it’s – and I’ll paraphrase to avoid having to re-watch – “You have to be punished for twinkling your panties!” Later on, his lines degenerate to the point where he simply begins calling his victims “douchebags” and “fuckos”. Imagine if Michael Myers, before killing a victim, called out “Hello fuckos! How’s it hanging?”. It effectively kills any potential scares, not that there were any to begin with here, but you catch the drift.

You’ve seen the movies Mr. Jingles cribs from countless times before: it’s a combination of every bad slasher film you’ve seen and every bad demonic posession film you’ve seen, except the villain is initially an innocent clown falsely imprisoned on charges of pedophilia. While incarcerated, this Mr. Jingles vows to get revenge on those who have wronged him and dabbles in the occult, as one character explains in the tired cliché of “he sold his soul to the devil”. After acquiring supernatural powers and escaping from jail (which of course we only hear about in drawn-out exposition), he sets out to kill the relatives of those responsible, in this case young Angie, and a killer-clown variation on Halloween ensues. Eventually, after leaving an assortment of dead bodies littered around town, he ends up at a teenage party, where he hacks through the partygoers one by one as he tries to get to Angie.

The entire movie is primarily a lead-up to the party sequence finale and until then it’s essentially out-of-focus, inaudible filler. There are a few subplots thrown in to keep it interesting, including one that involves an elaborate prank orchestrated by some Goth kids that goes absolutely nowhere and one involving a grave keeper who knows how to kill Mr. Jingles that goes absolutely nowhere. By the time of the big finale, in which Mr. Jingles finally reaches the party and wreaks havoc, you’ll likely be bored beyond imagination and welcome the change of pace despite the ensuing stupidity. Some of it crosses the line into the unintentionally hilarious, but most remains simply bad. How can two girls run into the middle of a vast field, with no one around, only to have Mr. Jingles pop out and grab them? Where the hell did he come from?  How the heck does he manage to collect and assemble the bodies of everyone he has killed during the course of the night, roughly ten people, around a dinner table in approximately thirty seconds? How and why is a man who was hacked repeatedly with an axe and presumed dead now back with only a small knick on his cheek?

Then, after over 70 minutes of absolute idiotic tedium (although I can assure it will have felt about twenty times longer), Mr. Jingles manages to deliver one truly frightening final sequence, that is up there alongside the best moments of The Exorcist and Psycho in terms of sheer terror: the filmmakers leave it open for a sequel. Now that’s horror.

Which is why Tobe Hooper’s film adaptation of The Mangler comes as quite a surprise. No, it’s not scary, not even in the slightest and you won’t be woken up at night with nightmares of possessed laundry chasing you. Suffice to say, it doesn’t do for your dryer what Psycho did for showers, but it is quite entertaining nonetheless. And it’s probably the best possible adaptation given the source material. Most of the short story’s problems – beyond the premise itself – have been corrected, most importantly the ridiculous serious tone. In the film, there’s an acknowledgement of the premise’s silliness. The almost eager acceptance of kooky demon-possession theories by Officer John Hutton to explain the laundry’s malfunction in the story is replaced with initial skepticism and ridicule at the outrageousness of such an idea. In other words, he’s just as amused as we are. Even the tone seems to acknowledge how ridiculous the whole idea is, throwing in loads of over-the-top gore and Robert Englund hamming it up in double leg-braces and an eye-patch. Hooper has recognized the idiocy and adapted accordingly.

The movie sees Officer John Hutton, played by Ted Levine, investigating a series of deaths at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, where several women have been sucked into the industrial steam ironer, chewed up and folded out on the other side like a piece of clothing. What at first appears to be a series of baffling accidents turns out to be something more sinister, involving demonic possession, the owner of Blue Ribbon Laundry and a young girl.

As has been mentioned, The Mangler is never scary, but it is very interesting, a considerable feat for a film centered around an industrial machine grounded into a cement floor. There’s some great gore set-pieces involving the machine, but even when the gore falls to a standstill, the over-the-top characters keep it fun and lively. Levine’s officer is a prick who storms through the movie throwing curse-words left-and-right, his best friend is a kooky new-age hippie obsessed with the occult and the Laundromat owner is a senile cripple who never drops a decibel below a scream the entire film. It’s silly, highly theatrical and doesn’t get boring. It’s never scary, creepy or even very funny, but there are enough little oddities piled in to keep up ones interest. A steam-ironer-exorcism doesn’t feel as out of place here as it did in the story.

And beneath all the mayhem and hamming, there is actually something going on in this film. Several additions to the film, particularly a new ending, reveal a commentary on the corrosiveness of capitalism. By the end of this Laundromat-gone-evil flick, there’s more substance than not only the story and its cheap carnal thrills, but probably most other horror works of similar nature. It’s not the most nuanced commentary, but there are some interesting developments along the way and it seems to have flown over the heads of most who watched it.

The Mangler is typically regarded as one of the worst King adaptations. It certainly isn’t the best, but most of the criticism surrounding it stems from the ridiculous premise. Indeed, it is ridiculous and I’m not quite sure why this was made in the first place. However, Hooper has crafted the best possible film out of this silly idea, by not taking it to seriously and turning the focus from the inanity of evil laundry to something of more substance. I wouldn’t rush out to get The Mangler, but if you find an old VHS sitting around the house (as I did), it’s worth a watch.

The Game sees Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), highly successful in the finance business, even more successful at being a complete prick, submerged within a professional “game”, recommended to him and paid for by his drug-addicted brother Conrad (Sean Penn) as a birthday present. Reluctant to engage in the game to begin with, which is shrouded in vagueness and requires countless private details/information of participants lives, Nicholas soon finds himself under constant surveillance, being followed by mysterious people, sent cryptic messages and other annoying sentiments of the sort. However, the game quickly spirals out of control, with Nicholas thrust into countless life-threatening scenarios, unable to quit the game amidst shoot-outs, the destruction of his home and his brother’s mental breakdown. As the circumstances become even more grandiose than before and the game increasingly appears as if there are no limits to what it can do (including seemingly predicting the future and participants being granted superhuman strength), it becomes quite apparent that there better be a damn good explanation by the end for all the nonsense ensuing. Assumingly, Fincher just buckled under the strenuous task of tying it all together.

Part of the problem is that no ending could be completely satisfactory after what occurs throughout the prior two hours or so. It’s not the usual action movie nonsense, such as walking away from countless high-risk situations without so much as a knick, although that is featured in abundance. The problem is that the game is on such a large scale that it isn’t feasible. It’s not just because police officers, cab drivers and pedestrians in on it, nor is it because entire hospitals, entire restaurants and entire businesses are in on it, but because nearly every single person Nicholas encounters is. It reaches the point where poor Nick and a small handful of others seem to be the only people in the whole San Francisco area not in on it. As well, the game relies entirely on knowing what Michael will do at exactly any given point in time, something impossible without the means of telekinesis. He’ll hail a cab at this exact moment. He’ll jump off a ledge at exactly that point. He’ll swivel his head in that exact direction at that exact moment. It’s enjoyable, good fun, but there’s an accompanying uneasy feeling about how it’s all going to turn out.

While no ending could be completely satisfactory, the chosen ending remains the least satisfactory. All the lapses in logic are abundant throughout the film and these plot holes are cast aside in one of the most absurd twists in film history. It’s not that it heaps a million more plot holes onto the already towering heap, but that it essentially strips every single character of any semblance of intelligence or real emotion. I’m tip-toeing around the events of the ending in case people intend to watch the film, but the reasons, motives and logic behind the “game” for those involved are so far outside the realm of any fictional reality that they would only be acceptable within the realms of comedy, and even then it would be a bit iffy (indeed, there was a comedy within the last decade that employed a similar conclusion for nothing more than cheap laughs, and yet was still more plausible than this utter nonsense).

The worst part is that The Game presents its conclusion wrapped up in pseudo-intellect and a pretentious condescension, attempting to present some sort of meaningful lesson to both its character and the audience. It’s got all the fixings typical of a smart thriller: Academy Award nominated/winning talent, a moody low-key score, a meaningful moral, but it’s got all the intelligence of something with none. I’ve seen my fair share of bad endings before: one film ended with the characters all dying in a random explosion out of absolutely nowhere, another with the characters turning to the camera before unmasking the killer and shouting in street jargon ‘Yo, we’re not going to show you who the killer is. See you in the sequel! Bye”, and yet another one where a hotdog vendor turned out to be some sort of CGI demon-thingy. However, these were all preceded by equally stupid events and at least did not pretend to be anything other than dumb finales to equally dumb movies. The Game was somewhat enjoyable throughout and then ended with the equivalent of one of those atrocious endings, but masquerading as smart.

There are countless fans of “The Game”, and while normally I’m not such an elitist snob about these sorts of things, if they truly believe this to be an intelligent film in any sense of the words, they’ve been duped. It’s got all the fixings of one, but that’s all. This is the intellectual equivalent of “Freddy Got Fingered”. “Freddy Got Fingered” ended with Tom Green being ejaculated on by an elephant. I truly believe that would be a more fitting ending for “The Game”. Sure, Michael Douglas being sprayed with semen by a sexually excited elephant would be beyond silly, but at least it would wear it’s stupidity on its sleeve, rather than layered underneath countless pretensions. It would be a slap in the face to the viewing audience who invested two hours of their time, but at least it wouldn’t presume them to be idiots.

Throwing up an assortment of depravity and blood-drenched insanity into a film always makes for good fun, but never makes up for a lack of plot, lazy writing, or poorly-executed filmmaking, a few key problems that permeate through many of these gory, low-budget efforts. These are all issues readily apparent in “The Machine Girl”, a prior similar undertaking which, for all its excessive gore and dismemberment, was at its core really nothing much different than most substandard Hollywood fare. Here, directors Yoshihiro Nishimura (who tread similar ground with Tokyo Gore Police) and Naoyuki Tomomatsu have crafted both an emotionally-charged teen love story and a hilarious satire of popular trends, the film elevated by the over-the-top absurdities rather than reliant on them. High-school heart throb Mizushima finds himself in the center of a vicious tug-of-war between two lovers: Keiko, his high-maintenance girlfriend whose spineless vice-principal daddy bows to her every demand, and Monami, a new student in the school who falls for Mizushima’s kind personality…and who also happens to be a vampire. Of course, when the two girls get into a feud, Keiko is no match for the supernatural Monami and is flung from the top of a building. However, Keiko’s spineless father moonlights as a mad scientist and he reanimates Keiko, upgrading her with a variety of different physical attributes swiped from certain corpses. Now, the Vampire Girl and the Frankenstein Girl find themselves facing off in a battle to the death for Mizushima’s affection.

There are a plethora of outlandish gags to please any hardened gore-fan. Among the best are the Vampire Girl tearing a hole in a girls face and unraveling her skin like the wrappings on a mummy, a reanimated foot-hand creature, blood drops with a life of their own and the Frankenstein Girl tearing off an arm, screwing it onto her head and using it as a helicopter propeller to zip around through the sky. This is the love-child of a three-way between Looney Tunes, an early Peter Jackson film and a Troma movie. Nary two minutes go by where someone’s head isn’t being crushed in or where some appendage isn’t being attached to some other ludicrous concoction. It is amazingly fun, completely original and absolutely never dull. Even those who don’t enjoy the film, possibly too much for their tastes, will likely be enthralled by the madcap display enfolding in front of them.

However, it’s when the film steps back from the lunacy that it’s at its best. The characters at their best are, particularly Monami and Mizushima, surprisingly fleshed out, likeable and quite funny; at their worst, over-the-top caricatures that usually provide some satirical laughs. There are a lot of laughs mined from the absurd notion of falling in love with a vampire, as well as the battle being waged for Mizushima, the tone always light and self-deprecating, unlike the stuck-up seriousness of another unmentionable vampire-love story; one comical part has Mizushima proclaiming, as he narrates the battle, something along the lines of “Has anyone ever asked my feelings about this”, which sums up the ridiculousness of the obvious lapses of logic that allow the fight over him, and pretty much the entire film, to occur. Perhaps the funniest scenes involve those lampooning current teenage trends. The “emo’s” are part of an after-school wrist cutting club. The trend of imitating black culture is taken to absurd limits with a trio of girls not only in black face, but with afros, oversized lips and the refusal to drink any coffee but black.

The only shortcomings are the occasional limitations of the low-budget paired with the wide scope of the film’s imaginative dismemberment. Some of the effects, although most often not, are poorly executed. As well, the arterial spray of blood throughout the film is less than satisfying due to the reliance on CGI effects, which look both incredibly cheap and silly (in a bad way). The entire film carries a somewhat cheap vibe to it, which leads me to believe it was either digital video or inefficiency behind the camera. Regardless, these are small prices to pay for the amount of imaginative fun and hilarious splatter that “Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl” delivers, making it one of the better exercises in this type of frenetic insanity that so often falls on the wayside.

“Mirrors” has suffered a similar fate. Directed by French horror director Alexandre Aja, the same man behind “The Hills Have Eyes”, “Mirrors” is a remake of a Korean horror film, as well as the best wide-release horror film of the year thus far. While I’ll admit I probably enjoyed the film much more than most will, it’s still miles better than the critic’s lousy reviews or lackluster promotion would have you believe.

Kiefer Sutherland stars as Ben Carson, an ex-cop suffering from emotional issues after a “workplace accident” and a messy divorce. Sick of sleeping on his sister’s couch, he takes up a job as a security guard at an abandoned department store that was devastated by a fire many years back. The job seems easy enough, primarily consisting of walking through the building every couple hours, making sure there are no trespassers. Things take a turn for the worse though, after several strange encounters involving the mirrors in the building, and Ben begins to find that his own reflection is haunting him, not only at the job, but in any mirror or reflective object (or liquid) he comes across. Soon enough, Ben find his life, as well as his families, in danger.

“Mirrors” biggest strength is the storyline, easily one of the best horror premises to hit the screen in years (even if it is recycled). Reflections are practically inescapable, not only appearing just in mirrors, but in doorknobs, windows and water. The inescapability of reflections is what makes the idea of one’s reflection out to get them so chilling. They’re everywhere. You can’t escape them. Not since “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, where ones own dreams were the cause of death, has there been a supernatural premise that has gotten so much under my skin. The fact that whatever the mirror images do to themselves happens to their real life counterparts, only heightens the hopelessness of Carson and his family.

Alexandre Aja has already proven his ability to create genuine scares with previous films, but most have been of the brutal, violent kind, as opposed to the atmospheric chills usually employed in supernatural horror movies that are more reliant on the mood and feeling than shocking acts of brutality for scares. Surprisingly, Aja’s penchant for gore and violence complements the film surprisingly well. The sequences inside the derelict department store at night build up suspense very well, utilizing the eerie location with corpses manifesting themselves within the mirrors and screams emitting from within deep recesses of the building. It’s fairly generic stuff for movies like this, but Aja is talented enough stylistically to pull them off. However, it’s the sequences where Aja really lets loose that prove to be the most frightening. One sequence that takes place in a bathtub ends up being one of the most brutal and unsettling death scenes of the year. There are several of these sequences sprinkled throughout the film and they are extremely effective, utilizing a combination of brutality and atmospheric suspense that are, at the least, shocking. When a ghost pops out in one scene, it isn’t a pale, long black haired Asian woman, nor a semi-transparent floating apparition: it’s a half-naked female with half her body burned off, the flesh still sizzling off her burnt carcass as she wails in pain. That’s the difference between “Mirrors” and most other ghost films.

The biggest downfall of the film is when it tries to provide an explanation for the horrific events taking place in the second half. The idea of one’s image terrorizing oneself is horrifying on one level, but at the same time, it’s extremely unrealistic. Trying to explain why this occurs back fires on the film, as no explanation will make sense and instead, will just draw attention to the fact that this would never happen in real life, destroying a bit of the film’s effect. The audience doesn’t need to know why this happens. Ambiguity would be much more frightening in this case and wouldn’t take away from any of the other scares. Once you throw in a sub-plot about mental institution experiments and haunting tragedies taking place in the building, you lose a lot of the suspense. Despite the unwise direction the movie takes in its second half, it’s still entertaining and manages to retain a few good scares here and there, while finally rebounding in the last act.

“Mirrors” isn’t perfect (what film is?), but its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses and in the end, it’s the most enjoyable wide-release horror film of the year thus far (although personally, the only other decent wide-release horror film this year would be The Strangers). Benefiting from a brilliant premise and the unlikely combination of French director Alexandre Aja’s love of blood and brutality with an atmospheric, supernatural storyline, “Mirrors” is definitely much better than what one would expect of a typical Korean horror movie remake, let alone any horror movie that hits theatres.

It’s the 1970’s and Max Seed, an especially deranged serial killer, is killing people left, right and center. Clad in a leather mask, the murderer specializes in locking dogs, babies and women in his house, filming them until they starve to death and their bodies inevitably decompose. In his spare time, he enjoys watching videos of animals being mutilated. His list of victims is north of one hundred. Naturally, the police department makes it their top priority to capture Seed before he strikes again. Once they do have him in custody, he is sentenced to death by the electric chair. However, what the Warden doesn’t predict is that Seed will survive the three successive attempts at being electrocuted, and that according to state law, a convict must be released if they aren’t killed in three jolts (for the record, no such law actually exists). Despite some serious injuries, Seed does manage to make it through the three successive attempts. The Warden decides to do away with Seed once and for all, by burying him alive. However, Seed manages to dig himself out of the ground, and begins exacting his revenge on the Warden and the rest of the police department, going for them and their families.

Seed attempts to disturb and offend the viewer right from the beginning. Live footage of animal cruelty (courtesy of PETA) is shown for a couple minutes and after that, Max Seed smashes an infant against a bus pole. Merely a few minutes later, and for roughly ten minutes, Max’s sped up footage of victims starving to death and decomposing is shown. It’s obvious that Boll is trying to create the most depraved film he can, and for a little while, it works. My hands were clasped over my eyes during the live fox skinning and I was left shocked by the aforementioned baby-pole-murder, but by the time the last victim is shown decomposing in time-lapse, the shock-gimmick had already grown old and ceased to have the same impact.

Unfortunately, that’s all there is to the film. The revenge-driven storylines been done countless times before and the characters are only there so they can be brutally killed off. In some circumstances, that sort of mindless violence can be entertaining, but here any chance of fun being derived is ruined by the terrible pacing. A woman having her head hammered into oblivion is shocking, but when you stretch that out for three whole minutes, it’s just mind-numbingly boring, no matter how brutal it is.

It really is a shame, as Boll is starting to show real promise as a director. The film has a dirty, grimy feel to it that suits the story perfectly and the cinematography and editing stand-out in a genre where MTV-style editing and shaky camera techniques have become the norm. However, none of this makes up for the fact that the film is just a series of gory torture sequences stringed together, with no plot, no characters, and nothing to hold the viewers interest once the shock-value has worn off.

The problem with “Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer” is that it completely lacks an understanding of what made these horror-comedies, that it tries so hard to evoke, great in the first place. Two-thirds of the running time is primarily devoted to the film’s hero, Jack Brooks, a plumber and college student, as he goes to class and attempts to deal with his uncontrollable bursts of anger. There’s nary a monster in sight for the greater part of the film, barely even a drop of blood or the slightest attempt at anything horror-related. It’s just plain boring, which is the worst thing a film of this nature can be. Jack Brooks himself is not all that interesting, at least not enough to warrant the amount of screen time he’s given. All one needs to know about him is revealed in the films first ten minutes and from that point on, whenever he’s not beating the pulp out of a monster (and he rarely does), he’s repeating the same old stuff and is not worth watching. The movie goes nowhere, following him around on way too many psychiatric sessions and several scuffles with classmates. The fact that the film is incredibly formulaic doesn’t help much either. “Jack Brooks” is missing the “fun” element, which is the most crucial aspect of all the films it pays homage to.

Eventually things do pick up. Jack Brooks battles a few creatures, some heads are crushed in, a few humans are slaughtered, and then it’s over. Just like that. All within the span of about fifteen minutes. Granted, it is a good fifteen minutes. The monsters are all fairly inventive (and done entirely in camera) and there’s some great gore gags (the best being a zombies head crushed in), but after sitting through seventy-five minutes of pure tedium, fifteen minutes of excitement just isn’t going to cut it.

That’s really all there is to it. I could ramble on about the acting, which is fairly well done (especially horror icon Robert Englund in what is a non-traditional role for him) or how the creature prosthetics are a nice throwback to the days when films didn’t use an overabundance of CGI, but it really doesn’t matter. “Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer” is utterly boring and while Jon Knautz obviously does have the talent to create a good film (once again, the last fifteen minutes are killer and “Still Life” was amazing – check it out), “Jack Brooks” completely misses the mark. It has its successes, but they don’t change the fact that it’s not very entertaining at all, which is the only reason horror fans watch these campy films to begin with. The screening I caught this at had Knautz and most of the cast in attendance. One piece of information I picked up was that a sequel was in development and that this time, it would focus more on Jack battling monsters as opposed to “the creation of a hero”. My advice: skip this one and wait for the sequel.