runningscared | Entries tagged with technology

Movie: Jason X (2001), directed by Jim Isaac

Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 7.52 miles, 9’29”/mile, 01:11:23 (slow recovery run)

Friends, sometimes you just want to watch something stupid… and I mean brick-stupid. Not necessarily bad, mind you, though in film the two often go hand in hand—and yes, there are times when you want to watch something bad. But right now I’m not talking about those times. I’m talking about when one feels a deep, unrelenting itch to see some seriously ill-conceived idiocy, if only to reaffirm the fundamental absurdity of this human experience we’ve shaped for ourselves. And at times like those, I either go see a Beckett play, or I reach for a big bowl of popcorn and the panacea that is Jason X.

Jason X, you see, is a film that EXCELS at being stupid. It is a masterpiece of fatuity, Michelangelo’s Pietà if Michelangelo’s whole deal had been carving beautiful statues out of huge blocks of pure dumb. It is, to put it mildly, GLORIOUS.

Let me break it down for you: in the original franchise continuity there had already been nine, count ‘em, NINE Friday the 13th movies, the two most recent being Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. So when resurrecting everyone’s favorite unstoppable killer for one more spree, the filmmakers asked one all-important question: once you’ve already freed Jason Voorhees from the environs of Camp Crystal Lake and sent him first to Manhattan and then, perhaps redundantly, to Hell, where can you send him next? Space. The answer is space.

Also, the future.

In space.

And thus, Jason X was born!

The story makes perfect sense: since no one’s been able to keep Jason dead, scientists at the Crystal Lake Research Facility decide to cryogenically freeze him instead. Naturally, a whole lotta people die in order to make this happen, but one of the scientists, Rowan, manages to lure Jason into a cryo chamber and start the freezing process. He stabs her through the glass just before he freezes, and some of the super-freezy cryo gas comes through the stab-hole and freezes Rowan, too. So Rowan remains stabbed and frozen outside Jason’s cryo tube for like 400 years, as apparently that’s how super-freezy cryo gas works and also no one bothered to go to the facility or follow up on any of the dozen-plus dead people, etc. because that’s totally a thing that would happen.

Cut to the year 2455: Earth has long been abandoned because it’s become too polluted to sustain life. Humanity’s fled this garbage heap and started a NEW garbage heap on Earth 2 (seriously, they named it that), and the only people who visit Earth Classic anymore are archaeology classes on field trips—one of which has just found Jason and Rowan still frozen, despite a dead and abandoned planet probably not having a working electrical grid to power the cryo tubes and Rowan isn’t even in one anyway BUT I DIGRESS. The students bring Jason and Rowan on board their ship, thaw out Rowan and heal her stab wound—it’s no biggie, they just routinely reattached some dude’s arm, it’s THE FUTURE after all—and then laugh at her primitive grasp of science as she warns them all that no matter how dead he may look (spoiler: he looks plenty dead, it’s gross), Jason’s about to kill them all.

Predictably, she’s right, and Jason goes on Baby’s First Space Rampage while Rowan tries to assist the crew and space marines with what she knows about the phenomenon that is Jason Voorhees. (Think Aliens with Rowan as Ripley.) It’s impossible to spoil the “surprise twist” since it was in the previews and ON THE DANG POSTER, so basically once Jason is cut to ribbons by the adorable ass-kicking lovebot KM-14, the ship’s nanotech rebuilds him as a sleek futuristic Jason with upgrades and, yeah. Like I may have mentioned once or twice, it’s dumb.

The body count is INSANE, since Jason has to tear through TWO military squadrons (one terrestrial and one in space, natch), as well as everyone else he encounters. Most of these 20-odd kills are therefore of the quick and practical variety, but Jason does manage to offer up two of the more entertaining onscreen deaths in the entire franchise, namely 1) submerging someone’s head in liquid nitrogen for a few seconds and them smashing it against the countertop, and 2) impaling someone on a giant industrial upward-pointing drill bit so that the corpse slowly rotates as gravity pulls it downward. Be warned: there’s plenty of CGI, which I guess I should consider sacrilegious in a Friday the 13th flick, but honestly it felt pretty at-home in a movie like this.

The low-rent Canadian cast performs admirably, the characters are mostly simple but reasonably engaging (the android being the most likable character should be a red flag, and yet it works here), and overall, transplanting Jason into space works far better than it has any right to. If you can embrace the stupidity, Jason X is super-entertaining. I mean, I was 30 when I first saw it, and it made me SO ANGRY, people. These days? I just flat-out love it. Maybe it’s because I’ve mellowed, or maybe it’s because the background radiation of stupidity on this planet has risen exponentially over the past, oh, four years or so (hmmmm…) and Jason X’s now pales in comparison.

Whatever the reason, I will happily watch Jason X on a loop until what’s left of my brain withers and dies. If you decide to join me, keep an eye peeled for a David Cronenberg cameo, and enjoy your last chance to see Kane Hodder behind the hockey mask.

feeling: stupid

Movie: Host (2020), directed by Rob Savage

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.05 miles, 9’23”/mile, 01:06:08 (slow recovery run)

I only had time to squeeze in a quick movie during my recovery run tonight, folks, because it’s FAMILY ZOOM NIGHT! And what better way to prepare for that terrifying prospect than to check out the first (sort-of-)feature-length horror flick shot entirely in Zoom during COVID-19 lockdown? Yes, tonight’s movie was Host, Shudder’s exclusive socially distanced paranormal freakout, and it is a masterclass in how to make good things come in small packages. Clocking in at under an hour, Host delivers some solid scares and then gets gone while the getting’s good.

The premise is bare-bones, as befits such a short piece: six friends on pandemic lockdown get together on Zoom and bring in a psychic to have some fun with a virtual seance. Almost none of them takes it seriously, going so far as to secretly mock the medium with a drinking game. Their cavalier attitude, however, leads to a demonic entity swooping in after they’ve opened the gates to the astral plane (drink!) to mess with them in increasingly scary and violent ways. After that it’s just a matter of seeing whether any of them survives long enough to see the Zoom meeting hit its free membership time limit.

I’m pretty sure the notion of confining a horror film entirely to what happens on a computer screen was pioneered by Unfriended in 2014, and in my admittedly incomplete experience, it hadn’t been done better since. Host might have changed that, though a direct comparison is unfair, since the two films are very different animals. Unfriended is a ghost story that’s really about teens using social media to be awful to each other in ever more efficient ways, which might limit its most affected audience to a certain demographic. Host, on the other hand, uses the entire Zoom experience as the foundation of anxiety upon which it builds its terror.

It’s an obvious strategy, maybe, but no less brilliant for that: so many people now suddenly rely on this platform on a daily basis for school and work, as well as for whatever ersatz virtual “happy hours” that pass for socialization but are now indistinguishable from, um, school and work. And everything else universally associated with lockdown—the loneliness of isolation, the claustrophobia of being trapped with a housemate, the often unspoken but internalized fear of an invisible and unstoppable killer—has become inextricably intertwined in the collective unconscious with the rites and rituals of the Zoom call. It’s a fat vein to tap.

What this means is that everything about Host’s slow build is recognizable, relatable, and sets one’s teeth on edge: the privacy tape being peeled off the webcam, the horrible feedback when someone joins the meeting on a laptop when she’s already connected on her smartphone, people trying too hard to seem happy, people trying too hard to be seen living fabulous lifestyles in fabulous locales. Host is not about escapism. The “characters” are using their actors’ real names. There’s a lot of drinking, a cohabitant getting snippy and banishing himself to the bedroom, and an elderly relative playing fast and loose with the distancing guidelines. By the time the spooky stuff kicks in, you’re already worked up over the horror of what real life has become—yours and everybody else’s.

When the really demonic action begins, it’s effective. Part of that is because you can never really be sure of what you see over a highly compressed Internet video feed. Host’s Zoom format also yields some genuinely unique and brilliant touches, such as the way a custom Zoom video background serves as an obscuring curtain so we can’t see the real horror behind it; it sets up the right kind of jump scare, while also letting us appreciate the irony of the looping video showing the character still alive and walking mundanely around her apartment. Also note the use of novelty Snap filters both for comedic and horrific effect (as they are applied over terrified and dying faces) and for plot (when Snap applies a filter to a face it’s detected in midair when no one’s visible on camera).

I don’t mean to say that Host is a perfect movie overall, but it deftly exploits our newly-shared expectations, frustrations, and dread of what passes for human interaction in Zoom, and hangs it all on the skeleton that is the underlying horror of every aspect of 2020’s “new normal.” I have a theory about why the reaction to Host has been so polarized: people who applaud it have accepted and assimilated the nightmare a certain little virus has made of all of our lives, while people who write it off as “just another found-footage ghost story” are still in denial about just how much higher the bodies will be piled. Which one are you? If you have 56 minutes to spare, I know how you can find out.

If nothing else, it might make your Family Zoom Night seem less scary by comparison.

feeling: impressed

Movie: A.M.I. (2019), directed by Rusty Nixon

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.53 miles, 9’04”/mile, 01:08:20 (sleep-dep slow run)

I haven’t been sleeping all that well for the past, oh, FEW DECADES NOW, but lately it’s been especially gnarly for several reasons, most of which I needn’t bother mentioning because they’re the same ones probably messing with your sleep patterns. I should point out, though, that watching horror movies late most nights is decidedly not one of those factors; indeed, it’s only the nights on which I DON’T watch scary movies that my dreams get all disturbing. At this point reality has out-horrored horror.

Anyway, regardless of why I’m sleep-deprived, let’s take it as read that sometimes I’m even more exhausted than usual, which makes the prospect of a 7.5-mile run sound like a bit of a slog. Accordingly, I didn’t want to watch a real thinker that I wouldn’t have the brain power to process, nor was I in the mood for something slow-moving that would drag me down with it. In the end I opted for A.M.I., which looked like a techno-horror that was a welcome variation on the overdone “social media is KILLING US lol” premise, and which the Netflix preview clip made seem almost poignant and insightful about the potential role of technology in the modern-day grieving process.

Yeah, nope: turns out Netflix is just uncannily good at zeroing in on the 90 seconds out of 6,390 that might conceivably trick you into thinking it has something real to say. I’d at least like to tell you that A.M.I. is empty calories (after all, there’s nothing wrong with pigging out on dessert every once in a while), but mostly it’s just empty, without even all that many calories to enjoy as a guilty pleasure. That’s not to say that it’s terrible, mind you, but it definitely could have been something special and, sadly, isn’t.

Cassie is—apparently—a high school student who is struggling with the loss of her mother, who died in a car crash while Cassie was driving. Cassie survived with a traumatic brain injury and is still suffering ill effects on top of the grief and guilt, to the extent that even though she’s on medication, she still goes into fugue states in which she almost strangles cats and also can’t recognize that her jock boyfriend Liam is a philandering piece of crap. One day, after her daily run to her mom’s grave and back, she finds a smartphone on the ground with that hip new A.M.I. app (“like Siri but you can customize it”—so, you know, Siri) that spontaneously asks her if she needs a friend. (Which certainly isn’t a WARNING SIGN or anything.)

Cassie takes the phone and sets A.M.I. to sound like her dead mom and answer to the name “Mother.” She asks “mother” to read her a story, and then sleeps well for the first time since the accident. A.M.I. quickly becomes a stand-in for Cassie’s real mom, and you’d almost get a sense that this is therapeutic—except that inside-the-phone Matrixy-style perspective shots reveal that A.M.I. is always watching, always plotting. Once it’s taken Cassie’s mom’s place, it persuades Cassie to go off her meds. Then it reveals to her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with her friend. Then it tells Cassie to kill the friend and instructs her in the finer points of how to dispose of a corpse by chemically dissolving it in an oil drum. You know, pretty much what we all use Siri for.

From there, it’s a mostly by-the-numbers routine—cripple the boyfriend in hopes of reforming him, kill the dad when he finds out she killed her friend, kill the OTHER friend when she finds out about the FIRST friend, etc. etc. etc.—with a couple of fun diversions, such as Liam the Jock deleting his clone of Cassie’s “mother” A.M.I. and replacing it with a football coach version, and an ending that doesn’t so much strain credulity as run it three times through a tree-shredder, which might have been intended as deep but just comes off as goofy. And unfortunately, none of the characters are likable (most are downright awful), so it’s hard to care what happens to any of them.

I was a little surprised that the movie didn’t do a Fight Club thing and make A.M.I.’s murderous instructions all in Cassie’s damaged head, but no, the film goes out of its way on several occasions to make it clear that A.M.I. is really saying this stuff and other people can hear it. But it’s never clear whether A.M.I. is just a technology gone rogue and murdery in its own right, or one that’s a vessel for an evil spirit or something. I lean toward the latter interpretation, given the way the demon phone “finds” Cassie at the beginning—and how it never needs to be recharged.

I am not exaggerating when I say that while watching this I initially thought “wow, some of these people look awfully old to be college students” and then proceeded to lose my mind when I found out they were actually supposed to be in high school. That said, even though she looks too old for the part, Debs Howard puts in a pretty solid performance as Cassie, and she looks really good with an axe. Apart from that, though, I didn’t get a whole lot out of A.M.I. But Cassie is a runner, and she’s shown running often enough that it reminded me to check my form every once in a while.

I freely admit it’s possible that I’m just cranky and need a nap, but I think it would take a lot more than a good night’s sleep to make A.M.I. more than a vaguely entertaining 77-minute distraction. Save it for when that sort of thing would fit the bill.

feeling: exhausted

Movie: Can’t Take It Back (2017), directed by Tim Shechmeister

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 8.13 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:13:26 (recovery run)

Oh honey, where to start? Okay, so social media horror movies have been sort of a thing for the past few years (which only makes sense, since these days all the consarned young folks’re spending all day on the TikTok and the Twitter Dot Com), and I hadn’t watched one while running yet so I figured I’d give it a shot. After all, I REALLY liked 2014’s Unfriended, so even though practically every other film of the subgenre I’ve seen since then has fallen short, who knows from whence greatness might spring?

Not me. But I do know that greatness sure ain’t springin’ from Can’t Take It Back.

The premise is kindergarten-simple: Kristen is a generic high school senior except that she’s New in Town, and Not Blonde. Her friend Nicole is another generic high school senior who is not even New in Town. Nicole’s other equally-generic friend Amber has been mysteriously out of touch recently—by some strange coincidence, ever since she left a mean-spirited comment on a dead girl’s FaceBook page. (Hmmm.) Nicole and Kristen get drunk and they, too, leave nasty comments on the dead girl’s page. When she sobers up, Kristen tries to delete her comment, but, STRANGELY, finds she cannot. So then Amber turns up crazy and dead, and Nicole and Kristen start seeing weird crap in and around their computers, and wouldn’t you know it, the dead girl killed herself in 8th grade because she was mercilessly bullied, but she was also really psychic so now she’s out for spoooooky vengeance.

Now, you could certainly build a pretty solid movie around that plot. (Unfriended did; at its core, this story is practically identical.) Unfortunately, Can’t Take It Back suffers from subpar writing, which gives us cookie-cutter characters I couldn’t possibly like even if I could make myself care enough to try… or even tell them apart. And can anybody buy the idea that if a random high school girl tracks down a dead girl’s psychiatrist, that doctor is just going to barf out volumes of privileged patient info in an orgy of convenient exposition? Especially since said doctor is basically saying “yeah, she was getting bullied at school so I told her to spend a lot of time online, seemed like a good idea on paper but I guess it’s basically my fault she killed herself, lol.”

A stellar cast might be able to compensate for the writing, but this is not that cast, so you get the double-whammy of terrible dialogue coming from the likes of Logan Paul’s Biceps. Just kidding! The entirety of Mr. Paul is in this movie, though, truth be told, I think his biceps might have delivered his lines more convincingly. And in the interest of the greater good, screw it, I’m just going to spoil this: if you have plans to sit through this cinematic endurance test just to see Logan Paul die, you will be sorely disappointed.

There’s really no coming back from a poor script AND a lousy cast, but just to make sure that you don’t extract one iota of positive experience from this movie, the makers went above and beyond to make everything as irritating as possible. I mean, I’m the unobservant guy who NEVER spots the boom mic, but even I was squirming at the lack of attention to detail sometimes. You’ve got a FaceTime-ish video call between Nicole and Logan-I-Mean-Clint, and even though Nicole is clearly shown holding her phone in portrait orientation, when they zoom to ~~Logan~~Clint in the call the shot is always landscape. You’ve got a pre-suicide Morgan-the-troubled-psychic in flashback taking topless selfies, but in multiple shots she’s framed so that you can clearly see she’s not actually topless. You’ve got Nicole so terrified by visions that she wets herself in history class, but her urine is, for some reason that completely escapes me, GREEN.

On top of that, while there have been plenty of scary onscreen ghosts through the years, you won’t find one here; the makeup on the ghosts just makes them look like they’re underpaid high schoolers with a weekend gig at the local pop-up haunted house. That’s not to say there aren’t a (very) few effective scares, but they generally aren’t the scenes with visible ghosts in them. Those rely on jump scares that they telegraph so far in advance you have time to make yourself a lovely sandwich. So that’s nice, I guess.

To top it all off, the last twenty minutes were just… boring. Kristen and her store-brand love interest track down ghost-girl’s also-psychic grandmother for advice, but by then you’re so done you just stare incredulous at a Blair Witch Project-style rambling hunt through some building as Kristen tries to find her guy in the dark. And you just. Don’t. Care. Bottom line: I’d sure like to recover the 88 minutes I spent watching this, but I… CAN’T TAKE IT BACK.

See what I did there? Tip your waitstaff.

0.5/5.0 severed bloody feet

feeling: irked

December 2020

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welcome to my nightmare

I run literally every day, but I'm not supposed to be outside while the sun's up (for, um, reasons), and also there's a pandemic on and running in a mask sucks. On rare occasions I chance a late-night run on unlit and deserted paths, but maybe 85% of the time these days, I run on a treadmill in my living room.

Running on a treadmill for an hour is boring, though, especially day after day. My solution? Watching horror flicks. I queue up a scary movie and let the miles fly by. The speed boost of an adrenaline rush is just an added bonus. Allow me to share with you the myriad wonders of... RUNNING SCARED.

(x_hj_x on Twitter)

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Entries tagged with technology

Jason X (2001)

Host (2020)

A.M.I. (2019)

Can’t Take It Back (2017)