Evolution At Its 90sest

Nothing warms my heart finer than when a friend recommends a terrible movie knowing it was made for my questionable taste. Hence, today’s obscure 1995 Instant Watch treat comes courtesy of my pal James, aka Equal Opportunity Dork.

He is a real American hero.

Quick Plot: All the cool kids are really into this totally rad new thing called “virtual reality,” so much so that young Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall, who would later rename himself Ethan Can’t Hardly Wait Embry) spends a whole lot of time trying to get the top score for an arcade game in order to win a major contest. And this being the movie you’re currently watching, he does!

Cue the not-that-exciting ceremony as a wealthy toy baron and his head developer crash the Baxter home with Evolver, a Johnny 5-ish little robot designed to play laser and ball tag around the home. Though he at first seems like a more advanced vacuum, Evolver is programmed to improve after every game, thereby becoming an unstoppable player who will dominate his top opponent. It’s perfect for the upcoming Christmas season!

Well of course, that’s what the toy developers hope and that’s why, despite receiving reports from Kyle that Evolver is getting a little too competitive, the experiment continues. See, the entire contest thing was simply one of corporate America’s more elaborate market research schemes and ending it prematurely will never prepare them for the inevitable January product recall.

As you can guess, Evolver EVOLVES a tad too aggressively for a nice broken suburban family to handle. Though Kyle and his pal try to corrupt the little robot by recording camera footage in the girls’ locker room, rascally Evolver would rather hunt down the dreaded half-shirt wearing bully and shoot his eye out or head to the arcade to electrocute a pair of stoners. It’s not until he launches an all-out attack on Kyle’s precocious sister Ali (or ‘Jerkbrain,’ as Evolver prefers to call her) that things get serious.

Evolver isn’t a very good movie by any means, mostly because it suffers from two serious but separate cases of identity crisis. One is its time period: released in 1995, the film feels far closer to the techno explosion of the late 1980s. This is best viewed with Chopping Mall or Deadly Friend, not Virtuosity or The Net. The odd anachronistic quality it seems to have, however, is more amusing than offensive.

The bigger problem is that Evolver was probably made with no real clue as to how much of a horror film it was allowed to be. The hero is a 15-year-old nerd whose biggest drama stems from being in the, as his crush says, Divorced Kids of America Club, which yields plenty of easily resolvable conflict with his never-home single mom. But it ain’t E.T. when there are boobs on display, eyeballs being shot out of heads, and cars dropped on adolescents. Except the adolescent miraculously survives, probably because at some point someone on the production team pointed out the fact that the subject matter and style was far more suited to teenage boys and maybe killing them was a mixed message? It’s quite confusing.

Until a slew of Hilary Duff collaborations, director Mark Rosman’s best-known credit was the fun if unexceptional House On Sorority Row, a more blatant slasher that knew its audience and gave them the goods. I imagine Evolver was originally intended for a PG-13 audience before failing the MPAA’s standards and reinserting some of the more violent action to justify the R. I have no evidence to back up such a theory, but it’s one way to explain the bipolar nature of Evolver.

Not that I’m necessarily complaining. The weird inconsistency of Evolver is part of its charm from a nostalgic standpoint. And hey, considering the lack of 1990s killer robot movies, I'll take what I can get.

High Points

Though the script doesn’t have nearly as much as it could have with the concept of a cute WALL-E slowly becoming self-aware, any moment were Evolver gets to freestyle is highly amusing

Low Points

The entire production feels, how do I say, small. It’s obvious that Evolver didn’t have a large budget, but it still seems like the movie wasn’t ever trying to hide that. We have ONE evil robot, ONE human kinda villain, NO boxes of Evolvers-to-be waiting to take over the world, and so on. I’m not asking for SKYNET rallies, but showing us some blueprints or sales records or overseas factory mass labor or SOMETHING to give us some form of scale of what’s at stake other than one dull family

Lessons Learned

Prototype war robots can survive car flipovers that instantly kill seatbelt-wearing humans with nary a scratch

Similarly, doughy teenagers can survive automobiles being dropped on their faces with just a few days of hospital care

Half-shirts were apparently still in for bullies circa 1995

Evolver can’t lose!

Hey! That’s…

The robotic voice of W.H. Macy, better known to most filmgoers as William H.

Token Broken Family Exchange

Mom: Even your dad says-

Bitter Child: Dad’s not around anymore, IS he?

The writing and delivery of this moment was simply too good not to mention

Rent/Bury/Buy

Any genre film fan with a soft spot for unremarkable and highly dated trash will get a mild enjoyment out of Evolver. The movie is rife with weird timely moments to bring you back to the early ‘90s, and the titular villain himself is fun when he gets the chance to be. Worth the energy of a Netflix stream and not much more, unless you just REALLY like robots, Ethan Embry, or W.H. Macy’s sexy robotic vocal chords.

Master of the Pedlar's Inn

Oh fiddlesticks. I really wanted to like The Innkeepers. Actually, based on my adoration for Ti West's House of the Devil and my genuine belief that he was responsible for the good parts of the not really that good Cabin Fever 2, I wanted to LOVE The Innkeepers.

Sigh.

Quick Plot: The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a quaint little historical hotel about to close its doors forever. On its last weekend in business, clerks Claire (Last House On the Left's Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) decide to pull some Ghosthunters action and see if they can find any genuine evidence of its supposed supernatural guests. Along the way, they kinda sorta help out the natural guests: an aggravated single mom with her young son, a mysterious old man, and a former sitcom star (Stakeland’s Kelly McGillis).

What follows is some chipper banter between Claire and the nerdy Luke, followed ever so slowly by the confirmation that yes indeed, there’s a ghost afoot at the Pedlar Inn. Much like House of the Devil, the film’s style is to charm us with its lead before subjecting her to all sorts of scary movie hijinks…at the last possible minute.

I hate being this kind of person when discussing film, but here goes:

The Innkeepers is no House of the Devil.

Now in most worlds, this would be more than fine. No director should spend his or her career making the same film over and over again (helLO Tim Burton), but the issue is that The Innkeepers feels like it’s trying so hard to BE The House of the Devil with a softer edge. It’s not just the concept of the film being a throwback to late ‘70s genre style; it’s that the pacing and characterization feel directly cut from the same fabric, just dyed a different color or some other analogous comment. There’s even a Greta Gerwig stand-in (Lena Girls Dunham as a chatty barista) tossed in for comic relief.

So logic would dictate that if you liked The House of the Devil, you’ll like The Innkeepers…but I didn’t. I didn’t because it wasn’t ever dark enough to be genuinely scary, nor could it ever find its solid footing as comedy. The climax happens in 10 minutes (I know—just like HotD) but for me, it simply did nothing.

As an hour-long Masters of Horror episode, The Innkeepers would have worked great. Perhaps it will age well in ten years as a sort of underrated good genre film that people expected the wrong thing from the first time around. I won’t rule that out. I just also have no desire to rewatch it soon and make that decision.

High Notes

Much like Jocelin Donahue’s one-woman show in House of the Devil, Sara Paxton finds the perfect notes to make Claire likable, cute, and sympathetic

You know how annoyed I get when horror films make obvious and forced homage to older classics? (i.e., look at how I named my characters Romero and Carpenter!). Hence my utter glee when Luke informs Claire that he took Room 216 and she responds “Of course.” Now anyone with a passing familiarity to The Shining will deduce Room 216 gives a comfortable closeness to Room 217 and can get the joke without another word of explanation. THIS is how you honor a past film

Low Notes

The utter disappointment I felt watching something mediocre and unambitious from a director that I know can do better

Lessons Learned

Saying I love you on IM is like saying it during sex

Psychic conventions are generally held in small Pennsylvanian towns

Never skimp on bread. You’ll always regret it

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa????? Moment of Me Watching the Film

I was eager to explore IMDB because I thought the little boy was played by the same child actors as Lysa Aryan’s 6-year-old-and-still-happy-to-be-breastfed son on Game of Thrones. Sadly, he is not, but GUESS WHAT? The character’s mother? Gina from the early ‘90s era Sesame Street. I have no idea how to feel about that, other than glad she’s not breast-feeding her too-old son

Rent/Bury/Buy

It’s easy to blame my disappointment with The Innkeepers on expectation. But if Ti West was worried that people would be disappointed with Not The House of the Devil, then why make a film that carries so much of The House of the Devil into every frame? Anyway, this is, as you would expect, decently made, affectionately scored, and well-acted. It just did not work for me in the least. I’d love to hear people tell me I’m wrong, so if there’s something I didn’t get, go head and give it to me. Especially if it’s loaded with cheese. I’m really hungry.

Horrible Non-Horror: Kazaam!

"I was a medium-level juvenile delinquent from Newark who always dreamed about doing a movie. Someone said, 'Hey, here's $7 million, come in and do this genie movie.' What am I going to say, no? So I did it."—Shaquille O’Neal

With logic like that, it’s almost hard to be too tough on Kazaam, one of the more infamous critical bombs of the 1990s. Then again, the fact that O’Neal made $7 million off it AND rapped extensively throughout the process eliminates any guilt I might have.

Quick Plot: When a wrecking ball knocks into the window of an abandoned antique lamp shop, the disembodied voice of an NBA all-star is released into a boom box soon to be discovered by Max, an unhappy sixth grader struggling to cope with his mom’s impending marriage to a perfectly nice fireman, the mystery of having never met his deadbeat dad, and daily beatings from Latino bullies. Poor white kids in the ‘90s!

It looks like SOME screenwriter watched a whole lot of live action 1990s Disney kids’ films, eh?

Upon finding the mystical boom box (and yes, this being 1996, one could and should take a chug of Zima every time the words “boom box” are used), Max frees the titular genie Kazaam, who introduces himself via rap.

Well, I think it’s rap. Shaq basically talks in rhyme and music plays underneath him. That’s the same thing, right?

Although Max is guaranteed three wishes, Kazaam’s skills are a little rusty, rendering the kid dubious of his newfound rapper’s delight’s actual powers. What follows is a not-creepy-at-all sequence wherein Kazaam starts following the kid’s every move, be it to find his smarmy music pirating dad or, um, to bed.

But back to the music pirating, since that’s the ultimate plotline Kazaam’s script chooses to follow. Makes sense really: if there’s one thing 6-12 year old audiences want in their mainstream family comedy films, it’s a morality lesson about the illegal side of the recording industry. Will Max’s absentee father learn that videotaping live performances to sell on the black market for an evil mustache twirling, genie hijacking Arab is wrong? Ain’t NO villain worse than a sham recording studio executive!

Sigh. Even The Nucracker In 3D knew that when in doubt, toss in a Nazi.

Directed by Paul Michael Glaser (the man responsible for two of my vastly different guilty pleasures, The Running Man and The Cutting Edge), Kazaam stands today as hilariously ill-planned attempt to create a Rock-like movie star using a cookie cutter kids’ film. It pains me to say this, but Shaquille O’Neal isn’t actually the worst thing about Kazaam. Like a lot of athletes-turned-thespians, the man can’t quite act, but is surprisingly likable when just hanging around.

Just ask Max’s mom, who temporarily forgets her engagement to a hot NYC firefighter to flirt with the 7’ tall self-proclaimed tutor to her tweve-year-old son.

This being Kazaam, however, Shaq doesn’t JUST hang around. He raps. He does the cabbage patch. He delivers lines like “This puts the boom in box!” in a manner that, despite his self-describing introductory song, is neither contagious, outrageous, nor spontaneous.

Although I’m not saying it isn’t funny.

No, the problem with Kazaam—aside from its very existence—is that it’s so clearly written as a product by people who can’t quite really write to begin with. Nevertheless, screenwriters Christian Ford and Roger Soffer grabbed a batch of proven tropes—fatherless kid, teen bullies, magical (literally) Negro, stock Arab villains (aaahhhh the ‘90s), product placement—and mushed them into something of a movie. With an incredibly unlikable brat of a protagonist and a muddled plot (remember: the bad guys in this KIDS’ FILM are music bootleggers) Kazaam is rather wonderfully miscalculated.

Also, a tad, perhaps one might say, racist? Or just weirdly unaware of some of its implications. See, when a black man tells a bratty young white boy that the kid is now his master, something slightly wrong is going on. “I own you!” Max later shouts when Kazaam dares to ignore his whims. Yes, this post is coming from someone who epically ranted against The Blind Side to the occasional ‘you’re overreacting’ comment, but PLEASE don’t tell me I’m not supposed to be reading anything into A WHITE BOY OWNING A BLACK MAN.

Perhaps one could think of Kazaam as a ‘90s version of The Toy. Except with rapping. And with the grand comedy skills of Richard Pryor replaced by the wooden enthusiasm of a basketball player. And with Middle Eastern music pirates standing in for Jackie Gleason, piranhas, and the KKK.

Did I mention the rapping?

High Notes

Shaq gets a “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” moment, and you KNOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW how much I love those

Low Notes

It’s not my place to criticize a film I’m only watching BECAUSE of its awful reputation, but even the bad movie lover in me can’t find a proper rationalization for why concert bootleggers made sense as Disney villains

Lessons Learned

Building a neutron bomb can be a little dangerous

Romeo once said to Juliet, “grab four of your friends and we’ll have a sextet.” Weird how I don’t remember that scene from 9^th grade English class

Nubian goat eyes is the food of kings

Men are like buses. There’s always another (sound advice for a mom to pass onto her child)

In life, there are no second chances. No. Second. Chances. Well, there are if your genie becomes a djinn, but what are the odds?

The Winning Line

“And if you girls are hungry, let’s green egg and ham it”

Rapped, of course. I chose this particular lyric because from henceforth, I shall no longer use the term “Let’s get something to eat.” No no no (or as Matthew McConaughey would say in Magic Mike, “Nahhh nahhh nahhh”). My goal in life is to now see how long I can go constantly saying “Let’s green eggs and ham it” before being beaten senselessly—actually, sensibly—by friends, family, waiters, take-out cashiers, or anyone with hearing on the street

The Winning Possibly Really Inappropriate Sodomy Based Line

In a film rife with slightly discomforting scenes between a preteen and his full-grown friend with no sense of boundaries, it’s kind of a twist that The Winning Possibly Really Inappropriate Sodomy Based Line does NOT come from the mouth of a genie. Instead, there’s this:

“There’s only one place this will fit!” threaten the bullies as they wave a small key in front of Max’s terrified eyes. Um…ew?

Basketball!

Just in case you were worried that Shaquille O’Neal forgot his athletic roots, fear not:

Law & Order: SVU Alert

You KNEW I couldn’t let this one go: Max’s mother is played by Ally Walker, best known to current television audiences as the villainous Agent Stahl on Sons of Anarchy but ALSO special for guest starring in a pretty ridiculous episode of my favorite criminal justice program. In Season 11’s “Conned,” Walker played a psychiatrist who was controversially into electro-shock treatment and positively scandalously into sleeping with her thirteen-year-old patient, who was also the father of her baby. Just another day in SVU

Rent/Bury/Buy

Kazaam is pretty much as bad as you probably think it is, so those (like me) who look forward to such validation will certainly benefit from a rental. The disc is tragically sans special features, but it does have this as its menu:

Which is almost worth owning in itself.

Don't Stop Stock Footaging

I’m going to let Netflix take care of this:

“Using a risky transplant operation, Dr. Hewlitt (Justine Bateman) restores the vision of newly blinded Aaron (Cory Monteith) by replacing his eyes with those of an injured wolf's. Now, Aaron can see in the dark, and his dangerous wolflike behavior only increases with time. Part wolf as well, museum curator Lydia (Tinsel Korey) decides to help Aaron, but Dr. Hewlitt's colleagues are convinced the man-wolf is dangerous and resolve to hunt him down.”

RIGHT?!

Quick Plot: In gloriously foggy stock footage, wolves hunt bison across a beautiful prairie.

I'm going to pause right now to say something of vital importance: I hope you really like watching stock footage of wolves. Because if you choose to watch Hybrid, you are essentially choosing to watch about 58 minutes worth of, you know, stock footage of wolves.

Still with me? You're brave. Brave, like a WOLF.

After what feels like 9 hours worth of wolves running freely as credits roll, we meet a biologist (played by the lesser Bateman Justine) explaining to two dozen local doctors that she's heading military experiments on transplanting animal body parts into humans. The "confidentially recruited" 24 local doctors are asked to help find possible participants for such an experiment but to be really quiet about it. Somehow, the fact that every single doctor from the nation of Canada knows about this "secret" and therefore it's no longer a "secret" is never acknowledged.

We'll forgive this, because while Dr. Not Jason Bateman is describing her work, we get the pleasure of seeing a chimpanzee with Siberian husky eyes. It's cute.

Moving on...

Finn Hudson--er, "Aaron" but it's oodles more fun to refer to every character Corey Monteith ever plays as "Finn Hudson" so we shall--works as an operator at some sort of plant. Or something. I thought he was a security guard who spends his work days playing video games, but I'm apparently just not as smart as this movie. Or maybe I’m just lost because for a good 8 minutes, there was no insertion of stock wolf footage. Now I’ve forgotten what movie I’m even watching.

Pull it together Emily! Be one with your spirit animal!

(sigh) That's better

A fire breaks out at the plant security video game land where Finn works. Ever the hero, Finn races through flames to save the idiot whose chainsmoking habits started the explosion in the first place. I guess that’s supposed to tell us that his character is  noble (like a WOLF), and we’ll have to accept it since it’s the only—and I really do mean only—thing we ever learn about Finn Aaron Hudson.

Meanwhile, over in the local Native AmeriCanadian reservation, teacher Lydia (although the Netflix description says museum curator, but who’s counting?) drives home to discover a dying—you guessed it--wolf. She promptly drives it to the vet, who even more promptly passes it on to the local military biological research facility (EVERY town has one of those) where the overenthusiastic doctor from the intro does some radical surgery. Before you can say Don’t Stop Believing, Finn Hudson wakes up with beady yellow wolf eyes.

Sometimes the universe is very generous. Sometimes the world seems to say, “Emily, I haven’t been nice to you lately and I want to make up for it with a gift. It’s nothing extravagant or expensive—heck, this being SyFy, it probably cost less than a trip to Super Cuts with a Groupon—but it’s just a little something that I think you’ll appreciate. Something to say, ‘don’t feel lost and alone. I care.’”

Oh Universe! You’re making me tear up here!

See, Corey Monteith doesn’t just get wolf eyes (and therefore, wolf night vision). He gets misaligned wolf eyes that seems to keep one pupil located south and the other pointing to the sky. He doesn’t just start having wolf feelings; he begins to FEEL what wolves FEEL, mostly in stock footage form. His appetite changes towards the rarer meat side, making him become, dare I say it, HUNGRY LIKE A WOLF (a song which, hey! was even covered on Glee).

Best of all, Aaron/Finn catches the newest symptom of 21^st century werewolfishness: an allergy to shirts.

Perhaps it’s the presence of Twilight franchise actress Tinsel Korey, but by the end of the 90 minute Hybrid, Corey Monteith gives Taylor Launtner a run for his residuals in the Who Wears a Shirt Less contest that every young male actor dreams of winning.

Except unlike the buff and brown Launtner, Monteith sports a farmer’s tan and runs like a kid who ducked out of gym class his whole life with falsified claims of asthma.

And run he does! Hilariously! And a lot. Almost as much as those stock footage wolf actors run, but in more of a gentle jog kind of manner. It’s fairly wonderful.

So to break down: Hybrid is essentially a hybrid film of four ingredients:

1-65% stock footage of wolves. Did I mention the stock footage of wolves?

2-25% long shots of Corey Monteith’s awkward 5K training

3-7% bland dialogue by Lydia about the importance of heritage and landzzzzzzzzzzz

2%-other stuff of little importance (although watching a nurse at the research lab discover adorable loose chimpanzees and react as if fleeing from Leatherface is kind of amusing)

4- 1% stock footage from the buffalo’s point of view

Of all this action, 80% is scored to what must have been public domain Native Ameri-Canadian tribal drum and flute music, with the remaining 20% playing out to a very conspicuous, very bad rap reggae something. There’s a love scene, which is about as sexy as flossing your teeth after eating a lot of broccoli. A bar brawl that makes me sad to see so much wasted beer. A last act introduction of villainous soldiers that just leaves you missing that comforting stock footage rather than, one hour and ten minutes into a 90 minute film, having to decipher one camouflage clad character from the next.

We have no real reason to ever care about Wolfboy, because we know absolutely nothing about him prior to his transplant. His romance with Lydia is as stiff as Finn’s scenes with Lea Michelle’s Rachel, only worse because we don’t even get the bonus of choreography. And of course, when all else fails, director Yelena Lanskaya simply cuts to the same reel of wolf film, all scored to the same generic tribal tunes. It’s terrible, and yet, it’s exactly what I wanted from a SyFy movie about wolf eyes.

High Notes

Well um, see, the thing is that…uh…wow! Look over there! I see WOLVES!

Low Notes

Aside from the fact that the film is just not good at any real point, the third act soldier hunt—which literally spends about 10 minutes with brand new characters we can’t tell apart—is just a painfully sluggish way to bring down an already sluggish film

Lessons Learned, Canada Style

So let’s say you’re a world class biologist conducting groundbreaking research for the Canadian military. Where might you go when an experiment goes wrong? Why, hop on that Interweb and hit up LycanthropyResources.Com of course! Modern science at its best

During the process of making love, it is customary that the man removes his shirt while the woman remains fully clothed at all times

In Canada, young men read magazines from back to front

When in need of content to pad out the running length of your film, there are two handy tricks one might try: 1) STOCK FOOTAGE OF WOLVES! and of course, the far less obvious 2) Have your lead character have a spiritual experience that is essentially a montage of the entire film that ran before it, complete with—wait for it—STOCK FOOTAGE OF WOLVES

Rent/Bury/Buy

Thankfully, Hybrid is streaming on Instant Watch and does not require any monetary effort to view. Bad movie fans will enjoy its awfulness, but be aware that this is bad in a ‘so dull it’s good’ way (which makes it more interesting than Basic Instinct 2, if that makes sense on your cinema scale). Considering this is part of SyFy’s “Maneater” series (the same brand that bred the similarly terrible yet on some random level amusing Blood Monkey), you should know whether it will bring you enjoyment or not. Basically, if you like wolves, this was made for you. If you want to see Corey Monteith stumble through dialogue with even more clumsiness than he does on Glee, this is for you. If you want to see a really awkward white dude run like a really awkward white dude, then by all means, queue up Hybrid. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.