Cache Me if You Can – A Film Review

Cache Me if You Can – A Film Review.

Mother – A Film Review

Mother – A Film Review.

Cache Me if You Can – A Film Review

Cache Me if You Can is an interesting film to try and review. Cache Me if You Can was conceived as a horror film and is executed as such, but the horror is by design not present in the early parts of the film or even truly built to until the very end.

Cache Me if You Can is described by writer and director Bill Mulligan as an attempt to create a horror short where you care about the two leads (and one presumes at the outset possible victims) by the end of it rather than simply waiting impatiently for annoying characters to be dispatched by the film’s monster/killer/big bad evil. On that level it succeeds quite well. This success is in part based on the writing and in part on the chemistry between the two leads, Emlee Vassilos and Robert Craft.

Vassilos and Craft play a young married couple on their way to a party when Vassilos notices that they’re very close to a multiple clue geocache. Geocaching, for those who don’t know, is a treasure hunting game where you use a GPS to play hide and seek with hidden containers placed in usually out of the way locations by other participants in the activity. The game involves finding the hidden items through a combination of a geocaching app and clues/riddles.

Our couple embarks upon their geocaching quest in what becomes a long day’s trek through the woods and swamps of backwoods North Carolina. Robert Craft’s character is not enthusiastically into his wife’s hobby so he of course finds himself climbing a high tree with questionable footing on their very first geocache. The first clue is a riddle that leads them to the next and each successive find gives them a clue to yet another. His enthusiasm for the hobby increases with the increasing value of each find — money, jewelry, rare goods — as the couple push on towards the final treasure.

Vassilos and Craft do a wonderful job with their roles. Both are extremely capable actors and they share on onscreen chemistry that makes them a very believable couple. The dialogue is light and fun and the exchanges between the two lead characters are enjoyable. The clues created for the story are quick and clever. The story succeeds very well through all of this in the first of its goals by making the characters very real feeling and people who you feel some level of involvement with.

But Cache Me if You Can is a horror film and it has to deliver on that level as well to succeed. The final act of the film is impossible to discuss without giving away the ending, but when the time comes for the film’s horror element to come into play the film does deliver.

At an overall length of approximately 20 minutes, the initial absence of horror in a horror short film doesn’t have the chance to wear out its welcome and the horror still carries an enjoyable punch when it arrives. You enjoy the characters throughout and even begin to enjoy the game whether or not you come into the film with any knowledge of geocaching. Cache Me if You Can is an Adrenalin Productions film and is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit. The DVD should be available soon through the Adrenalin Productions store.

Cache Me if You Can can be found on IMDB here – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2676434/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast

And on Facebook here – https://www.facebook.com/cachemeifyoucan?fref=ts

News on Cache Me if You Can screenings and other Adrenalin Productions news can be found here – http://www.adrenalinfilms.com/

Information on Geocaching can be found here – http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/hiking/geocaching.htm

Mother – A Film Review

Mother is a short film from Sick Chick Flicks that is currently doing the film festivals and convention circuit. The film is directed and produced by Christine Parker and based on a story by Amber Teachey. Amber Teachey is also one of the two leads in the film.

The basic storyline of the film is stripped down and lean. It’s also, to some degree, familiar territory. The film centers around the relationship, or some might say lack thereof, between a teenage girl (Teachey) and her mother (Catherine Mattson). What relationship we do see on film is one of a highly destructive nature.

Mother is not the type of mother that you would want. She quite openly displays resentment and contempt for her daughter. The underlying feeling in Mattson’s performance is of a woman who blames her daughter’s birth for the failures of her life since that birth. That resentment and contempt manifests itself in abuse that is mental, emotional, and physical. By the time we get a peek into this period of their lives, the daughter is well past ready to escape. This escape comes in the form of a boyfriend with an offer of a new home and safe refuge.

The night in question arrives and events do not go quite as planned. The remainder of the film follows the fallout of that night. Unfortunately, the details of the second half of the film are difficult to discuss without revealing too much.

Mother is not an easy film to watch. The performances by the film’s two leads are powerfully raw and both the directing and post production work create a visual feel to the film that only amplifies this. There were moments when I found myself uncomfortably shifting in my seat while viewing it. The reason for this is that Mother seeks out the horror for its edge in the most uncomfortable genre of all; real life. The odds are that you know these two people or have known them at some point in your life and, as such, the story strikes at places deeper and darker than the average slasher horror or the monster of the minute.

An additional edge comes through in the finished product that comes from its source. Story co-creator Amber Teachey is here metaphorically slashing her wrists and bleeding out onto the screen. When speaking at the screening I attended, she discussed that the inspiration for the story itself was largely autobiographical. The life she depicts on screen was inspired by what was once her own. And, again, that edge comes through powerfully in the onscreen performance.

Catherine Mattson plays the title character with a very gritty and dark tone in her performance. She radiates disappointment with her life’s lot and absolute resentment towards the source that she blames for that disappointment. You can very easily hate her, but at the same time, in one scene where Mother admits to her pastor that she cannot not be this way, there’s a subtle undertone in the performance that almost makes you feel sorry for a damaged human being who knows how damaged she is and seemingly cannot change.

Mother is still a horror short though and it does move into the supernatural by its second half. Or maybe it doesn’t. The supernatural elements of the film are neither heavy-handed nor overdone. The result being that you might be equally correct in interpreting it as the supernatural or as a fragile mind slipping the grip of reality. Even the ending is, in hindsight, open to two distinct interpretations; as different from each other as night and day.

And the ending…

There’s a word of warning that needs to be said before watching Mother for the first time. It is a film very much worth watching, but do not expect the obvious story arc from start to finish. The ending caught me off guard. So much so that I couldn’t even review it properly that night on the screening cards passed out at the event I was at.

There are certain patterns in storytelling that most stories follow and that most people are conditioned to following. When you get A, B and C, well, you then expect D. Maybe someone throws a curveball at you and they substitute D with 4, but even then D and 4 are close enough that the seeming difference from what you expected VS what you got are actually close enough that you still immediately accept it. Certainly Mother seems to be setting you up for an expected and, some might anticipate, justified ending. Mother instead gives you something else entirely in its last act. And what it ultimately gives you is not a bad thing.

Mother is a film that deserves to be seen. It’s also a film that benefits from multiple viewings in part because it’s a film that in its second half is so open to interpretation but in much larger part because it is in fact a very good film. And it’s a film that deserves discussion and thought afterwards as well.

Mother is currently being screened at festivals and conventions with a DVD to be released soon. The film is being distributed through Creepy Cherub distributors, a subsidiarity of Archangel Productions.

Sick Chick Flicks Facebook Page- https://www.facebook.com/SickChickFlicks

Mother’s Facebook Page- https://www.facebook.com/thefilmMOTHER?fref=ts 

Christine Parker – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2034378/?ref_=tt_ov_dr

Amber Teachey – http://www.amberteachey.com/

Catherine Mattson – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3932248/

Creepy Cherub & Archangel Productions- http://www.archangelproductions.org/CreepyCherub/CreepyCherubDistribution.html

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Archangel-Productions/128144606469

Dear Self-Proclaimed Zombie “Experts,” Please Shut Up

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Look, I don’t really care if anyone with an opinion wants to share it. I really don’t even have a problem with people who don’t bother to have informed opinions wanting to share their opinions when it comes to issues like entertainment and what they like or dislike in their horror. Hey, everybody has opinions. Everybody sees things and, for whatever intangible reasons, decide that they like or dislike things based on their own personal tastes. And, yeah, if you ask them to articulate the why behind their tastes, they’ll come up with a lot of reasons that they present as in depth analysis and (almost) as facts.

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Not really a problem there. Hell, I do it. That’s half the fun of discussing things with fellow genre geeks no matter what your personal favorite genre is. Debating the finer points of who has the worst taste is a time honored tradition on geek circles.

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But whenever something gets a big, pop-culture boom moment, the “experts” come out in droves. The “experts” are sought out and given book deals and TV interviews and paid good money to talk about something that they supposedly know something about. And right now, that pop-culture boom moment is shining its light on the zombie genre thanks to a nice slow burn that started with 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake and has exploded thanks to the comic book turned television series The Walking Dead, that’s where the experts are being sought out right now.

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Except, I seriously want to slap the stupid out of some of these experts; especially over the supposed zombie “rules” out there and the ever so fun debate of Fast VS Slow.

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We’ll go with the Fast VS Slow thing first…Look, I personally don’t care if you’re a fan of the fast or the slow zombie. I honestly don’t think that the speed of the zombie makes a film either good or bad. We have decades of bad zombie films that have both fast and slow zombies as well as some good films that include both kinds of zombies. It’s not the speed of the ghoul that makes a good or bad film, it’s the people behind the film that makes it a good or bad film.

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And, yes, for the record I am a fan of both fast and slow zombies.

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But there are a bunch of people that hate the concept of the fast zombie. They go on (and on and on and on and on and on) about how it’s just impossible for a zombie to run. It is, they repeatedly declare, absolutely ridiculous and completely unrealistic for a dead body to get up and run like a track star. They are, after all, dead and the dead can’t run. Interestingly, this line of thought seems to overlook the basic concept that it’s absolutely ridiculous and completely unrealistic for a dead body to get up, let alone get up, walk around, act like a herd animal and hunt and eat humans. But, hey, that’s their argument and they’re welcome to it.

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But a part of that hate of the fast zombie is the need to assign blame for the introduction of the fast zombie into the zombie genre. It’s somebody’s fault and, damn it, they’re standing at the ready to point the finger of blame. And you see this not just in the average fan, but you see it in the “experts” as well. The problem is, especially for the “experts,” they’re often wrong.

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This time of year we get a flood of horror related specials on TV and book stores put their horror related product in a place of prominence for shoppers to see and buy. And in the last few years, a lot of that stuff has either included zombies heavily or been devoted specifically to zombies. And what have I been hearing and reading? Well, not exactly something that I would call accurate information by the various experts.

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There are two camps that seem to make up the bulk of these “experts.” One camp blames 28 Days Later. 28 Days Later, they say, introduced the fast zombie to us. 28 Days Later was the first zombie film to make them fast and thus up the terror factor. The other camp blames the remake of Dawn of the Dead as they discount the zombie credentials of the 28 Days Later zombies. They are, so they will tell you, not really the undead in 28 Days Later. The creatures in 28 Days Later are infected, living humans suffering from something like rabies on steroids. Problem is, both camps are full of it.

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This, as a specific example, brings me to Jovanka Vuckovic. She’s in the camp of pointing to 28 Days Later as introducing us to the fast zombie. Now, what are her credentials insofar as being given book deals to write about zombies (see the picture above,) get interviewed about them and being paid money to contribute to zombie and horror related documentaries? Well, she’s the former editor of Rue Morgue Magazine, she’s worked in the film business, she’s been paid to write about horror in general for years now as well as lecture on the matter in general or about specific sub-genres in the horror genre and has been called by some the most influential woman in horror. But, well, she’s full of it. And what, to me, makes her comments about fast zombies and 28 Days Later look foolish is that she’s written the above book and that she’s written about the various films in the genre before she wrote that book.

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If you track down a copy of her book, she does a fairly good job of covering the history of the zombie in cinema. She covers the old Voodoo zombie, goes over how Romero changed the way we looked at zombies and covers in varying detail the huge number of films churned out in the 70s and 80s by American, Spanish and Italian film studios among others. She also does a nice bit of covering the popular zombie cult classic known as 1985′s Return of the Living Dead.

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And there’s the rub.

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Return of the Living Dead, if you’ve never seen it, has fast zombies in it. It has a scene where an entire herd of fast zombies overruns a group of police officers. It shows zombies sprinting at their victims. And it did this almost 20 full years before either 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake did it. And it wasn’t alone in this.

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Zombi 3 not only had running zombies, but it had zombies that seemed to be able to leap small buildings in a single bound. Some of the other low budget wonders of the 80s and 90s, including the sequels to Return, shared this habit of making zombies a bit more athletic than we saw in George’s films. And even if you somehow just want to look at theatrical releases in the 2000s as your measuring stick, you would still be wrong in saying that 28 Days Later was the first fast zombie film. 28 Days Later was first released in its native country in November of 2002. Resident Evil, acknowledged by Vuckovic and others as a zombie film, unleashed its fast and insanely jacked up and mutated zombies on cinema goers in March of 2002.

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But that’s not what the “experts” are saying in print and in interviews. From page 116 of Vuckovic’s book where 28 Days Later is discussed-

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“Finally- and most importantly- they’re capable of running, a characteristic totally new to the zombie subgenre.”

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Except, dear Javanka, it wasn’t and you should know better as you covered the other zombie films with running zombies that came before it. You just failed to mention the running zombies when discussing them. 

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So, to Vuckovic and her fellow “experts,” we get it. You don’t like fast zombies. You think that slow zombies are better than fast zombies. So why not just leave it at that? Why not say that your preference is for the shamblers and not the sprinters and just leave it at that. Because when you don’t, when you try to use your status as an “expert” to point he finger of blame at 28 Days Later or the Dawn remake, you do a disservice to not only yourselves (as your credibility on anything you say is now suspect,) but to the genre and its fans as well.

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You’re offering your opinion and your biases as facts and your doing it in things that are being sold or shown as scholarly (to greater or lesser degrees) works that people can learn something about the genre from. As such, you are essentially promoting misinformation. You make it harder for people to have discussions about the genre as those who are like-minded to your biases now have “experts” to point to when they want to support their unreality POV on the matter and younger, newer fans to the genre who are seeking this stuff out end up being armed with “information” that’s garbage when seeking out things that are a part of their new favorite genre or, even better, when trying to get into discussions about the subject. Plus, well, you look like a dumbass when you sell yourself as an expert and you keep saying stuff that’s ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag.

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Oh, and, please, while your at it… Stop trying to validate your preference as the “right one” with ridiculous arguments constructed around what’s realistic and what isn’t with regards to dead bodies getting up and eating the living. Not only are you essentially hinging your debating point on the idea that you can’t accept the seventh impossible thing before breakfast after accepting the other six without question, but you’re doing so when sometimes discussing movies where the source of the zombie plague is either unknown or flat out explained as being related to supernatural means.

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If the origins are supernatural, then you can’t really claim the scientific highground in the debate. What, a supernatural power strong enough to raise the dead and have them hunt humans can’t also tweak the dead to make them a bit faster than you like them to be? If the origins are unknown, then how can you say in any definitive way that whatever is raising the dead isn’t altering the undead muscle fiber and flesh? Hell, even if the origin is man made, whether a military super-soldier program gone wrong or an experiment in medical super serums, why would it not make as much sense as not that the experiment gone wrong might be partly doing what it was intended to do to begin with?

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Again, just say that you’re not a fan of the fast ones and leave it at that. If you’re just a fan of the genre and you’re arguing that fast zombies are just ridiculously impossible, lamenting the fact that “kids today” don’t get it and saying that films like 28 Days Later and the Dawn remake introduced fast zombies to the genre… Well, you just look like someone arguing an uninformed opinion. If you’re someone getting paid money to talk about the genre, making your living in part by talking about the genre and flashing your “expert” credentials in discussions, lectures and documentaries on the subject and you’re saying that… Well, you look a bit like an idiot. But you’re not alone in that, because this time of year we’re flooded with a higher than average band of happy “experts” who want to lecture us all about “The Rules” of the zombie genre.

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You see, there are apparently rules to the zombie genre that you must adhere to or your zombies aren’t “real” zombies and are “bad” zombies. And, of course, whenever we have rules, we have those who must explain those rules to we who just don’t know any better. There are two problems with this concept though.

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The first is that this concept is a path to stagnation. Two seconds of thought about the subject should make one realize that declaring that you have a rigid and inflexible set of rules that must be followed in each and every story is a path to boredom, stagnation of the genre and the downfall of the genre. Yes, there has to be a set of basic guidelines to ground your zombie creation in, but I think that pretty much ends at being undead and munching flesh.

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Every other creature out there has evolved to a greater or lesser degree. That doesn’t mean that every evolution has been for the better or that every evolution was permanent, but every other horror creature out there has evolved a bit here and there to keep them fresh. And, double bonus, some evolutions get so run into the ground and done to death that someone later comes along with a back to basics approach that gets the genre embraced all over again as the “new” pop culture fave. Change isn’t always bad and it is never permanent or all encompassing.

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The other issue with this particular breed of expert is that they’re often parading their personal preferences around as “The Rules” when in reality their version of “The Rules” doesn’t even match the source they claim that “The Rules” come from. They make up these rules to fit their personal preferences and then try to give them some sort of weight by declaring them to be George Romero’s rules. One of the most annoying offenders out there in the currant crop of “experts” is one Max Brooks.

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Now, I should say up front here that, as far as his fiction work goes, I love Max. I loved The Zombie Survival Guide, I loved WWZ and I loved The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks. I also count it among the great tragedies in my life that I had to work and couldn’t get off the evening that he was in my general area giving one of his Survival lectures. Granted, I wanted to slap him one night when on the late, great Fangoria Radio he went on a tirade about how badly Return of the Living Dead “damaged” the genre and how many years it took to “recover” from that, but that was his opinion (wrong as it might be ) and he has his right to it. But, I’m sorry to say, Max is a bit full of it at times. And a part of why he’s occasionally full of it is because he from time to time likes to pass of his rules as essentially Romero’s rules. And he’s not alone in this.

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But we’ll stick with Max here.

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“The Rules” as Max explains them are that zombies are mindless eating machines who never stop and never run. They’re slow moving hordes of unstoppable(ish) and inevitable death coming after you. And these rules are, as mentioned above, based in the classic works of Romero’s zombies. And again, as also mentioned above, he’s far from alone in this.

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And that always makes me wonder if any of the people, let alone the “experts,” saying this garbage actually ever bothered to watch Romero’s Dead films. And I always end up wondering that because Romero himself didn’t follow most of the rules that people set down in stone as “Romero’s Rules.”

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You want to talk jogging zombies? Watch Night of the Living Dead and watch the graveyard zombie chase after Barbra’s car.

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You want to talk running zombies? Watch Dawn of the Dead and watch the zombies at the airport charge the guy when he finds them inside. Granted, Romero now says that zombies can’t run, but it doesn’t change the fact that he put a couple of runners in his classic Dawn film.

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You say zombies aren’t coordinated enough to climb some structures like ladders or pull themselves up through small openings like an attic opening? Check out Dawn of the Dead and explain to me how in the hell all those zombies got up on the roof there at the end when the only way that they could was up a ladder and then pulling themselves up through a small opening in the ceiling.

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You say zombies are mindless? Romero never subscribed to that rule. In Night, you have the zombie in the graveyard struggle to get at Barbra, stop beating against the car window with its hand, look around and pick up a brick to use as a tool to smash the glass with. In Night, you have zombies pick up sticks and stones and throw them at light sources. In Dawn, you see a zombie use its memory of life to go to a fake wall, rip it down and lead other zombies to the living. And, of course, in Day and Land you had flat out thinking, reasoning, plotting and planning zombies.

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So in what films did Romero actually even bother to follow “The Rules” himself? Well, two of them to be honest with you. He followed them pretty damned closely in Dairy of the Dead and Survival of the Dead, the two entries into his franchise of Dead films that most of his fans and most critics complained were the weakest films in the franchise by far. Although, to be fair to the opposing point of view, the films getting panned might not have been as much about his restricting his creativity by following “The Rules” so strictly. My friend Bill Mulligan is a major Romero fanatic. He has… issues… with the most recent installments of the Dead franchise, but his problem with them are Romero’s much more clumsy handling of his message of the moment and how he lets that message and the politics behind it get in the way of the storytelling. And I agree with that to a degree, but I also feel like his zombies, now stuck in the mold dictated by “The Rules,” have lost a little something that they had back in the day when he was doing what he wanted to with them to fit the story’s needs and demands.

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The simple fact is that there really are no rules. Even if you declare that Romero made the genre, which is only half true since even Romero has said that he never intended his creatures to be zombies and that he lifted them from I Am Legend, that only makes the Romero’s rules. It does not set them in stone for all others to follow any more than Stoker’s rules for Vampires should have been forced onto Steve Niles or into films like near Dark. Everyone has a story to tell that’s their story. They have to come up with their rules. If they get the basics right, who the hell cares if they tweak the rest a bit so long as they tell a solid, entertaining story?

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But if you just can’t live with that concept, if you absolutely have to piss and moan about it, just frame your bitch fest as what it is. It’s your personal opinion and your personal tastes that you’re arguing and not some set of laid in stone rules. And your view of “The Rules” are just that; they’re yours. They are not anyone else’s and they’re not truly and 100% Romero’s Rules. If you’re a self proclaimed expert, don’t try and go that route. Not only do you come off looking like someone who doesn’t have the courage to let their POV stand as and on its own, but, well, you come off looking like an idiot to anyone else who knows anything about what you’re talking about.

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So, please, express your opinions as the “experts” you are as much as you want and make all the money you want to. Hey, it’s got to be a bit of a dream gig to make a living doing it. But, please, don’t declare yourself an expert or flaunt your expert status and then turn around and look like a damned fool and an idiot by replacing facts with your own personal opinions and preferences.

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And if you can’t not do that… Then, please, just STFU about it and stick to the parts of the genre that you like and agree with so that you can stop looking stupid.

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Thank you.

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Have a happy Halloween.