Taylor Ri'chard/Zach Davis' THE FINAL PROJECT: the latest found-footage fumble

God damn -- they just keep on a comin', these nothing-new-under-the-sun, hand-held, found-footage exercises that began 17 years ago with The Blair Witch Project. With the exception of the terrific, engaging, funny, creepy and surprising Afflicted, there has barely been a movie in this new genre worth its salt, including that original boring and pretty awful marketing success, Blair Witch. Now arrives a film that marks the biggest waste of time TrustMovies has spent viewing both this year and last (maybe longer, too): THE FINAL PROJECT, the title of which comes via the video project a group of supposed college kids (they look a lot older) must deliver to their professor in order to get a passing grade. (The best thing about the film is its smart poster art, shown above.)

As directed, co-produced and co-written by newcomer Taylor Ri'chard (shown at left) and co-written/co-produced by Zach Davis (also a newcomer), the film begins with some barely understandable babblings (due to perhaps deliberately crummy sound) from a shadowy figure wondering why these kids would deliberately go into a known-to-be-haunted house. As Austin Powers might say, "Oh, come on!"

All too soon we realize that the sound is not the only thing sub-standard here. The visuals are even worse.  And both remain so throughout. I still do not quite understand why the filmmakers who dabble in this fairly new genre insist on providing some of the worst dialog currently going -- crammed with unsubtle exposition and attempting "realism" before art or entertainment.

These found footage "epics" desperately need characters with a trace of intelligence and wit, so that they can mouth some dialog that's fun and clever for a change, rather than the supposedly "realistic" but uber-tiresome stuff that comes out of the mouths of these cretins. The difference between the characters (their concerns and their dialog) in a joy like Paper Towns or the formerly mentioned Afflicted and the kids seen and heard here gives us the difference between a real movie and a big, fat waste of time.

Worse yet: So little happens for such a long while that audiences are likely to tune out well before the first scare (a comic one) arrives at the 49-minute point.  There's another scary scare at the 69-minute point, if you're still around. The entire film lasts only 79 minutes, with an extra full minute or more devoted to a supposedly frightening scratching sound on the soundtrack while the screen is black -- then appears a visual of a final newspaper article about disappeared students. All this extra nonsense allows the movie to reach its requisite 80-odd-minute running time.

Not a scene in the film has any originality; it's all been-there/done-that -- from playing the game of "Never-have-I-ever" and the inevitable sound of things that go bump in the night to dialog like "Mama, don't worry. Nuthin's gonna happen" and "We're gonna get outta here! It's gonna be all right!" If we are told -- and you can bet we are -- about an apparition in a white dress, you can be sure we'll see her eventually (as in the window above). Some of the other things we hear about, we don't see -- Civil War soldiers, for instance -- but as the budget here is miniscule, we are not surprised.

For awhile, the movie appears as though it might be more a simple murder mystery than anything to do with occult.  But so poorly made is the film that you can't be certain this was an intentional red herring on the filmmakers' part or the result of sheer laziness and lack of talent. The acting, from all concerned, is only as good as the dialog and characteri-zations make possible. The most interesting performance comes from Arin Jones (shown center, below, and three photos above), as the movie's most mysterious presence.

The surprising thing about The Final Project, however, is that it comes from the distributor, CAVU Pictures. CAVU releases a diverse slate -- from art films (Sunset Edge) to documentaries (The Real Dirt on Farmer John) to genre movie (Lucky Bastard). What unites these is their quality and originality. So I don't know quite what to make of this company's latest, well..., "surprise."

In any case, the movie opens this Friday, February 12, in Houston and Atlanta, and the following Friday, February 19, in Broussard, Louisiana, and on March 4 in New York and Los Angeles, and then expands nationwide. You can view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters by clicking here. 

Mac Carter/Andrew Barrer's HAUNT opens, and TrustMovies gets a heavy-duty dose of déjà vu

Yet another family moves into yet another haunted house in yet another movie that hopes to wring a little something special from this done-to-death situation. Regarding HAUNT, directed by Mac Carter from a screenplay by Andrew Barrer, audiences may be forgiven for immediately mixing things up a bit, beginning with that rather derivative title, which brings to mind a bunch of other movies: Haunts, Haunter, Haunters, Haunted, The Haunting, and so on, into oblivion. Not to mention the fact that the somewhat over-used subject matter should call to memory another ten dozen films -- from the old Amityville Horror and its remake to the more recent Insidious and that hugely over-rated piece of bump-in-the-night badness, The Conjuring.

Perhaps to help us distinguish the movie, someone (maybe Mr. Carter, who is pictured at left) decided to give us a definition of the word haunt right upfront at the movie's opening, where we can't miss the fact that the definition used here is certainly nothing like the usual one. No: instead it highlights the fact that a "haunt" can be a spot where animals come to feed. Ah-hah, we think: you've certainly clued us in! And then we wait, through what seems like eons of nonsense, to get to that moment -- the very end, of course -- for the awaited feeding frenzy. This is bullshit, which also results in boring, bad movie-making.

I don't quite know why, but some very good actors -- Australia's Jacki Weaver (above), Ione Skye and relative newcomer Liana Liberato evidently signed on to this one, and all do their best with pretty woeful material. The exposition plods, we get the usual scary faces out of nowhere (below), jolting sound effects deafen us, and a naughty wooden box appears that may bring to mind a low-end Hellraiser.

None of this comes to much of anything -- except the expected carnage (the tiresome point of almost all the movies in this particular genre) -- and the "story," once we piece it together from the dribs and drabs the filmmakers have dropped along the way, turns out to be a seen-that/heard-that yawn.

Ms Liberato, above, is as fetching as ever, even with those darkened eyes, which genre fans will immediately recognize as a very bad sign, while the would-be hero and son of the family (played with youthful enthusiasm and stupidity by Harrison Gilbertson, below) makes all the wrong decisions (another genre "must," it seems) as he leads the way into bad, worse and worst. Yes, the film is atmospheric, but filmmakers, please: It takes more than atmosphere & a few overused scares to makes a good horror film.

Haunt has just about cured me of this particular genre, as I have not seen a decent variation on the theme for ages now. I may try Vincenzo Natali's Haunter, however, as that director (Cube, Cypher, Splice) usually does not disappoint. Meanwhile, this film -- from IFC Films and running too long, even at only 86 minutes -- opens this Friday, March 7, in New York and maybe elsewhere, after a run on VOD for the past month that will probably continue for awhile longer.

HELL BABY: Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon attempt some rude horror humor

Don't you love a good horror movie? Even better, a good, funny horror movie? Best of all, a film that takes its tastelessness to new heights, er, depths? If only. HELL BABY, the new rude, crude and ugly comic horror flick from Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, tries for all of this, but except for a few good laughs, often of the second-hand variety, manages to mostly waste our 98 minutes -- which is, in any case, far too long a running time for this kind of movie.

This is especially too-bad because the film's three leading actors are usually quite good: Rob Corddry (above, left), Leslie Bibb (above, right) and Keegan Michael Key (below) have all done sterling work and certainly will again. Here they must content themselves with pulling mostly unfunny business and, worse, repeating it ad nauseum.

The filmmakers also take on roles in the film, playing a couple of mostly unfunny priests, below, who stop the action over and over again with their tiresome shenanigans. I suspect that if filmmakers Garant and Lennon and left their actors Garant (below, right) and Lennon (below, left) on the cutting room floor, the movie would have come in about 20 minutes shorter -- just the right length for the kind of spiffy spoof Hell Baby might like to be.

The plot? Corddry and Bibb plays husband and pregnant-wife who have bought a New Orleans "fixer-upper" that reeks of mange and much else that you wouldn't get near unless you were ultra-dumb movie characters trying your best to hold together a crap scenario. Mr. Key plays a homeless guy using the house as shelter (he always looks clean and nattily dressed for some reason, but maybe that's part of the humor) who keeps popping up over and over to scare the daylights out of the new tenants and bore us silly.

Bibb goes from nice to naughty in record time and is pretty funny doing it, while Corddry, who can be masterfully funny, gets far too little opportunity here. Also eventually on hand is the Bibb character's sister (played by Rikki Lindhome, above). There's also a fairly funny and very grizzly set piece involving a gynecologist, and more repetitive stuff that brings back and back and back a pair of local cops (left to right, below: Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel).

We do get to see that titular character born and (for a very few moments) bred. This concluding section may put you in mind of another, much better movie: Larry Cohen's It's Alive, made back in the day when horror movies were content to scare us and had not yet begun to overdose on would-be ironic humor.

I admit to laughing at some of the tastelessness on display, which can be pretty funny, if you've a fondness for this kind of thing. Yet the film, first to last, has a semi-improvised and slapped-together feel. I've always heard that real comedy takes discipline, but that's the single thing most missing from this odd concoction.

Hell Baby -- from Millennium Entertainment -- opens this Friday, September 6, in ten major cities: Click here to view 'em all, with theaters listed, too.  (In NYC, see the film at the AMC Empire 25; in the L.A. area, you'll have to drive to AMC's South Bay Galleria 16 in Redondo Beach.) The film is also currently playing via VOD, for those CPs who prefer to stay home and press the remote.