Director:David Slade
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page, Sandra Oh
Release: April 14, 2006
Synopsis: A smart, charming teenage girl, Hayley probably shouldn’t be going to a local coffee shop to meet Jeff, a 30-something fashion photographer she met on the Internet. But Hayley’s ready to have fun, and soon she’s mixing screwdrivers at Jeff’s place and stripping for an impromptu photo shoot. It’s Jeff’s lucky night – until his vision blurs and he passes out. Turns out Hayley isn’t as innocent as she looks after all. In fact, she has a lot on her mind. Like getting Jeff to confess to his penchant for teenage girls – and to what he did to Donna Mauer, the girl who disappeared from Jeff’s favorite coffee shop. When Jeff awakens, he’s tied to a chair. If he doesn’t cooperate, Hayley has something to help him along–a little surgical procedure she picked up on the Internet. All she needs is an ice pack. And a knife.

Prognosis: Negative. Okay, right out of the gate, I’m not sure if the material isn’t so much provocative as it is derivative.

I know that pedophilia is a subject that has been touched on as of late in the really well made WOODSMAN and has been so creepily depicted in HAPPINESS that you feel like washing your eyes out with bleach after having seen it. The notion of adults, namely males, who seduce young’uns is nearly a genre all in itself and, my opinion is, that instead of every person making this kind of film having to field questions about the controversial nature of their movies there should be a dialogue in the press about how this informs the genre in a new or fresh kind of way. I am bored to tears, and I assume the filmmakers are as well, when the focus is on public sentiment than it is focused on how a new angle is explored that others have not.

What I don’t like, then, about this trailer is that I frustratingly sit through this thing in hopes I’ll be treated with that very same freshness. What I get, though, is an opening that is reminiscent of CRY_WOLF when an IM exchange goes by blisteringly fast. I realize realism isn’t on the list for a slasher-type movie but this is a movie about some adult diddling a child. Save that, there is a real good sense of creepiness that is pasted all on this thing. You get the feeling all is not bubbles and gum.

Heuristically, the exchange between these two should be a cautionary tale about kids using the Internets whilst unsupervised but this is material for the 10 o’clock news team with Ric Romero telling us something we already know. Nothing really earth shattering about this flimsy set up but it does get going when the young girl and dude hook up. Again, I expect something, anything, but these two talk to each other in a Saturday Morning Special cadence and has be rapping the counter with my fingers.

Hopefully trying to get something new out of this trailer I play this on and then am treated to a moment where creepy guy wipes off a hunk of chocolate cake off the lips of his young prey with his fingers. Please. Does anyone ever have that much schmootz on their face that they leave some honking piece of food left on their lips without quickly reaching for a napkin?

The cinematography, though, is really engaging and that is what is saving this trailer from just being a waste of everyone’s time. The screen time shifts in an elapsed sort of way as the lo-fi music beneath everything makes it all seem more and more desperate.

You get the obligatory Sundance props, which ought to be earlier on in this presentation, while getting the feeling that there is more to this guy than just his predilection for sweet meat. I don’t know if the angle here is that the prey becomes the predator but that’s what the quick clips would have you believe.

If this is the case, then, what’s here is more of a man bites dog kind of a story and, if it is, will that be original enough to have people see this movie? I don’t think it is for me.

Director:Gregory Dark
Cast: Glen Jacobs, Joseph Cappellitti, Craig Horner, Tiffany Lamb, Penny McNamee, Samantha Noble, Matthew Okine, Michael J. Pagan, Luke Pegler, Cecily Polson, Rachael Taylor, Christina Vidal, Steven Vidler, Michael Wilder
Release: May 19th, 2006
Synopsis: A group of youths from a juvenile corrections facility are assigned to renovate an old hotel over the weekend and end up being terrorized by a crazed serial killer who dwells on the upper floors.

Prognosis: Negative. I appreciate the chance to ogle some woman taking a shower all by herself, never minding that no woman who looks as good as her would themselves to take one in a shower stall so covered in muck and crap without making a man clean it first, but I don’t think there is an appropriate amount of time for me to feel she is in any danger. The camera shifts so much that it feels blocky, forced and too rapidly gone through. By the time her scream echoes away and I am greeted with the WWE Films logo I am wondering what just happened.

I love that instead of getting some basic information about what led a pack of good-looking teenagers into one of the most dank looking movie set ever created we are instantly greeted by the WWE wrassler Kane being all mean and ugly.

I don’t mean to dismiss this obvious teensploitation flick ever so quickly but even for the awful HOUSE OF WAX and the recent, better than it should’ve been, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE had the supposition in its trailers that people might want to know what happened to these kids which have led them to this moment; I would’ve liked to have seen that but what I get after the initial ugliness of Kane splashes across the trailer is a lot of girls screaming.

How is this supposed to get me to part with my money?

It doesn’t and that’s the problem. If you want guys to come out to see chicks get brutalized and objectified in their shower stalls then I think you’ve got something in this trailer. If your aim is to capitalize on the success of a wrestler whose prowess on the screen seems to be a whole lot of non-talking and walking menacingly with an axe then I think you’ve got something in this trailer. But I don’t think this is all there is. At least I hope there isn’t.

One of the best things about horror movies, good horror movies, is the wafer thin plot upon which they’re built on. No matter how miniscule the situation you’ve got to explain how these people arrived at the point at which everything goes south for them. Even if it’s because one of the chicks really needed to take a dump in the middle of a long road trip through a small New England town which, gasp, doesn’t show up on any map whatsoever then at least it’s something.

A trailer based on nothing but money shots which don’t buy you any currency with me isn’t just lazy trailer making it’s bad business sense which presupposes an audience who you seriously misunderstand and misjudge. Give the kids a little more credit than this trailer.

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Ivana Baquero, Doug Jones, Sergi López, Ariadna Gil, Maribel Verdú, Álex Angulo
Release: October, 2006 (Mexico)
Synopsis: “Pan’s Labyrinth” is the story of a young girl that travels with her mother and adoptive father to a rural area up North in Spain, 1944. After Franco´s victory. The girl lives in an imaginary world of her own creation and faces the real world with much chagrin. Post-war Fascist repression is at its height in rural Spain and the girl must come to terms with that through a fable of her own.

Prognosis: Lost in transition. One of the worst things I had to endure in college English classes, as I reached higher levels of completion, was having to be tested on being given whole passages without any context and having to attribute the author of the work and the work it was taken from. It was brutal, yes, but one of the things it taught me was that authors have fingerprints. There are, stylistically, ways you can tell where something came from. This is why, yes, I admit, I was going to goof a little on the plasticity of the set/location used to create the world in which these characters live.

It kind of feels like it’s a Little Red Riding Hood/Beauty and The Beast, don’t even get me started on the ironic Ron Pearlman connection, and the cinematography hearkens back to HELLBOY’s dark and gloomy atmosphere. There is no question that this is a Del Toro movie but the question is whether there is more substance than there is style.

So, as the trailer opens and you have some galloping girl walking down some steps that lead down into a pit, which no girl would ever go alone, I half expect the B.P.R.D. to come out with a red looking demon leading the charge. It’s creepy in a way, and that’s testament to Del Toro’s ability as a filmmaker, and it only gets a little more weird when one of the pieces of flora in the underground lair of the odd and strange comes alive.

Before you can say “Wha? Huh…” the screen snaps quickly away to a faceless mutant, I don’t know how else to say it, who is sitting at a wooden table with a pair of albino pink eyes sitting on a plate as its claws(?) extend slowly from its hands. I can’t account for why this is inserted like a bon mot but the subsequent scene of the same stupid girl who went down below into a dark cave walking through a fairy dusted opening of a cave of some sort.

My head hurts from the reliance of showcasing the oddness of this movie and I can’t for the life of me understand why you would want to be so clever as to offer nothing as to where any of this is coming from.

We revisit the mutant from before who now has eyes in the palm of his hands, embedded in his hands, and this finally (for whatever reason) seems to put a little fear into the chick’s heart as she looks ready to soil her Underoos.

I love it, and I am giving genuine props, that we get a little bit of EXORCIST type of breathing underneath the wordless, musicless quick clips we’re offered. The one problem with this is that the clips barely, barely, come into focus before jaunting off to another clip that wholly has no bearing for the one that preceded it. I’m not trying to complain but this is already a weird kind of movie and this isn’t helping.

I like Del Toro. I loved DEVIL’S BACKBONE back when no one else knew who he was. I’m not touting my ability to recognize any kind of talent out of anyone but even that movie was able to establish a linear pattern of events that leads up to the creepy. I don’t get that here and that frustrates me. I want to know more about this movie without having to consult the IMDB and I want the trailer to tell me what it’s all about.

Director: Kevin Smith
Cast: Jeff Anderson, Brian O’Halloran, Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Marty Kudelka, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Wanda Sykes
Release: August, 2006 (Tenative)
Synopsis: The sequel picks up 10 years later. “It’s about what happens when that lazy, 20-something malaise lasts into your 30s. Those dudes are kind of still mired, not in that same exact situation, but in a place where it’s time to actually grow up and do something more than just sit around and dissect pop culture and talk about sex,” Smith said during an interview at his Hollywood office. “It’s: What happened to these dudes?”

Prognosis: Positive. August 30, 2004.

This was when WheelieBlog.org was officially taken away from the public as an available web site where people could champion and meet other like-minded individuals to talk about what is, ostensibly, the greatest stunt one can perform with a their Huffy. When Randal uses his official Mooby kiosk to inevitably conduct non-business related surfing it is this site, whose logo is a wheelchair, which looks to be used for whatever nefarious purpose it will serve him. What this site and the date referenced above have to do with the movie, then, is that you begin to see that this wasn’t a movie that was slap dashed together with the only aim of milking these characters for one more go around on a whim. Fanboys may have raged about the working title for the film, PASSION OF THE CLERKS, which doesn’t appear anywhere for good reason, logical reasons if you have half a cell in your brain that’s firing, but there’s no other way to put it than this trailer gives the devotees of Smith’s movies enough to make this more than a teaser and defies convention with the choices made in its ultimate construction and delivery.

Primarily, the trailer doesn’t adhere to traditional notions of what the teaser should be. Instead of just giving a whiff of a story and going the tease route, most egregiously executed by the makers of the X-MEN 3 trailer, this is actually a mix of teasing yet satisfying nuggets of possibilities and innuendoes. We may not know how things are going to begin, peak and then crescendo but it does start at the most logical point of reference and then uses this moment to take point for the rest of the tease.

As a point of fact that you can put down in your Rolodex or Etch-A-Sketch I don’t think Anthrax’s “Among the Living” has ever been used for a teaser, and I don’t think it will again anytime soon, but it’s utilized appropriately not only in capturing the frenetic nature of what is surely a movie that has to balance multiple characters all at once like some That’s Incredible! dinner plate spinning maestro.

So, when it’s Dante who says, “Oh..my..God” after opening the lock to the nefarious and infamous Quick Stop (which should’ve been his demise had the ending not been changed) you don’t know, and not shown, what is causing him to react thusly. But, we’re not left to be teased too long as the aberration of a seemingly-still-unemployed Jay and Silent Bob in the Mooby parking lot causes the kind of geek joy which seemed all but snuffed out at the end of JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK. Say what you will about Jay and Bob but if you’re any kind of fan of CHASING AMY who could deny the righteousness of Bob explaining his desire to be a dancer in Vegas? It’s nice to see the duo back again like some Riggs and Murtaugh team-up.

It’s then on to the introductions of our players as we get a little bit of movement from the likes of Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith and the rest of the old crew. It’s also about here when we get Randal doing his best not to do any work while working, a true hallmark of his character’s ethos from the first film, as he applies a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it penis, in full explosion mode, next to Trevor’s face on an Employee Of The Month plaque; one hopes that there is a young liege/master relationship here where Randal passes on his encyclopedic knowledge of all things slack to a younger generation.

I must give my whole one sentence paragraph props to a Village People looking Ben Affleck who rocks a handlebar moustache with as much aplomb as any 70’s era pornographic movie star who has come, and come again, before him. Well done and he didn’t even have to say a word.

I don’t know how to correctly categorize the number of quick clips, my Adult Attention Deficit Disorder pleasure center was delighted if not overwhelmed, which assaults us with images and sights that have nothing and everything to do with one another. I am at a true loss as to why it seems everyone at the end winds up at what appears to be a club for either a concert of some kind (my only indication is the Morris Day & The Time ending to JASBSB which worked well as a punctuation mark on the whole movie) or night of disco dancing and would thus explain Affleck’s appearance but this is a teaser trailer that teases well.

Sp, what happens when characters are allowed to grow up, to get into their thirties and hopefully realize that the world doesn’t revolve around their own problems and then be revisited years after their first ending was so satisfying? Only months from now will tell.

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