Category: Review

Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want it spoiled. Seriously. This is your only warning.

Okay, so. Awesome movie. I was literally on the edge of my seat nearly the entire time, slack-jawed, eyes unblinking as the spectacle unfolded before me. Once it gets going, it is non-stop. Amazing. And what you think you see in the trailers, what you don’t see, is spectacular. It left me awestruck, just like the main character of the movie though … I would have run faster and further and not stopped in that first moment. I’d read some complaints about undeveloped characters that were hard to care about, but I cared enough about the central tripod of characters (you didn’t think it was a coincidence that there were three of them, supporting each other, did you?) that everything else being secondary was reasonable – I don’t care if what’s her name and her daughter get left behind on the pier, what’s Robbie doing? The emotional stakes in this movie are as high as in any of Spielberg’s best work, and I very nearly cried a couple of times. If you’re one to cry at movies, be warned.

Also, while I don’t want to say too much, I DO have one main complaint. I have no fucking clue how Robbie survived. Whaaa!?!? Seriously, that’s more silly than every other close-call; that was an everyone-dies situation, and he ran face first into it, unarmed against an unstoppable enemy. Seriously. What is this? A TV sitcom where everything in the main characters’ life has to return to normal by the end of the show? Sure, there are billions dead who we never meet, and a handful of characters we do meet almost surely dead or dead right before our eyes, but ALL the main characters survive? What? Is Boston not good enough for a first-strike attack? Mom and Tim aren’t in any danger at all? Ray’s ridiculous story about drinking bad tea with the grandparents really is true?

I guess it makes sense: If Ray is secretly a little bit psychic, that would explain all his otherwise coincidental successes. Either that, or he blew himself up with those grenades and is stuck dreaming forever in the afterlife that his family is whole and safe and the aliens just suddenly died with no explanation, all at once. I think I’ve solved it.

Anyway, if you can forgive H.G. Wells’ method for defeating the aliens and you can forgive the painful reversal that is Robbie’s miraculous survival, there will be nothing to stop you from totally and relentlessly enjoying this movie.

Would you believe I offered to take my brother to it with me, on my dime, and he turned me down? I know he’s out of money, and by the time he has more, Fantastic Four will have bumped War of the Worlds from the biggest screens. Oh well.

You should not do the same – do not miss out on this exciting, engaging movie.

Wow.

Eww.

Okay, okay, admittedly, I am not a big fan of any of the “Coke” products, really. Not Classic Coke, not Diet Coke, not even Vanilla Coke. I prefer Pepsi over coke, and I prefer not to drink colas, generally. Which is why pretty much every other review of a soda on Modern Evil is by Iain. He likes colas. He’ll probably review this product soon enough.

But I was shopping last night, and my local Fry’s Marketplace had 20oz bottles of Coca-Cola Zero on sale, 2 for $1. I got one. I figured I could afford 50cents, even if it wasn’t to my liking.
So, there are two main reasons I don’t like Coke. First, it is bitter and not sweet. I don’t mind a certain degree of bitterness, if it is balanced by sweetness, and I prefer just straight sweetness, but Coke just tastes bitter to me, not sweet. Second, it generally has WAY too much carbonation. I don’t like much carbonation in the first place, and often will ‘shake out’ much of the carbonation in regular soda, but for most non-coke sodas, I can at least drink the normally carbonated product without choking to death. With Coke products, there is typically enough carbonation that it detracts so much from my drinking ability that I give up.

Coca-Cola Zero has MORE carbonation than ANY Coke product I have ever tried to drink. It’s crazy. Maybe I got a ‘bad’ bottle. Maybe it’s intentional. I don’t know, but I tried several times to just take a sip of the soda, or a normal drink, and 100% of the time, the carbonation caused a choking fit. So I shook it out, until the carbonation was merely a pleasant tingling rather than an overwhelming expansive and choking monster, so that I could taste the drink without dying.

Coca-Cola Zero has a lighter flavour and mouthfeel and, to me, seems less bitter and more sweet than other Coke products. Iain always talks about aftertaste, and I’m sure he’ll have something to say about Coke Zero’s aftertaste, but … I’m not even sure I tasted one. Lighter, sweeter, less bitter, but still recognizably in the Coke family. Not something I’d generally choose to drink, but not bad.

Well, except that if I drank it at full carbonation, I’d probably die before I got through one serving’s worth, let alone 20oz. I will not buy more of this product. But if you like choking to death on carbonation, don’t like calories, and think a lighter, sweeter, less bitter Coke sounds nice, you may like Coke Zero.

I was not scared by this movie. Even the things that were supposed to be startling were not startling to me. The story of why the house is evil gets a very brief treatment and doesn’t match up well with the symptoms we see during the course of the film. And a lot of the time, the things the ghosts/house are doing just don’t make sense.

Which is not to say the film doesn’t work at all. Some of the things that were going on (especially re: the boat house) were clear and specific and working to drive George Lutz (played amazingly by Ryan Reynolds) mad and get him to murder his family. And Ryan’s performance was outstanding. His transformation from the light-hearted, happy-go-lucky man that Ryan has played perhaps too often in the past into the fierce, angry, determined being that is being driven to acts of increasing menace and violence is well done. Perhaps too quick, to keep the pacing of the movie up to modern audiences’ standards, but otherwise believable and the scariest scenes in the movie feature George when he’s in between sane and that point of being totally under the house’s control. This is the most impressive performance I’ve ever seen Ryan Reynolds give, and it really shows his range as an actor.

The special effects are excellent, the lighting and cinematography are appropriate, the sound is sufficiently well-produced. The other performers do well enough, and the children were all well cast. Especially Jodie (Isabel Conner), a little dead girl, whose performance shines nearly as bright as Ryan’s. Phillip Baker Hall almost seemed to be phoning in his performance as a priest scared of the house; he has done, and could have done here, much better work.

Overall, if you are a fan of horror films, you will probably enjoy this one. I may just not have been in the mood to be scared. If you don’t like horror, or if you are highly critical or remakes and adaptations, stay away.
One more thing:

Ryan Reynolds is … very fit.

Remarkably so. The most memorable visual in the movie may not have been any twisted, bloody, rotting, horrible apparition, but Ryan Reynolds walking around without a shirt on.

Ripped. Ripped is a good word to describe him. I’d seen that he’d put on a lot of muscle for Blade III, but it’s all still there, maybe moreso, for Amityville. His entire upper body looked carved. Broad, muscular shoulders, well-defined pectorals, six-pack abs, huge arms…

If nothing else, watching The Amityville Horror instilled me with a renewed drive to work out. I actually used my Bowflex again this morning, did a full set of upper body exercises on it, was somewhat surprised that my strength seems to have gone up since the last time I used it. Plus I was easily able to do about 360 crunches (about half of them oblique) with 50lbs resistance. I’ve been working on following my diet (the one I’m writing the diet book for right now), and between that, getting back to using the Bowflex, and probably some bicycling, maybe I can get into that kind of shape myself.

I mean, if Carrot Top and Van Wilder can do it, I can. Right?

(Have you see Carrot Top without a shirt? I thought it was a fake chest at first.)

p>If you don’t already know what nbt is about, go to neverbeenthawed.com and watch the trailer, maybe look around the extensive site, and then come back here to read what I have to say about it.

Now, assuming you’ve watched the trailer, you probably already have a good idea about whether or not you’ll like this film, and the basic elements that run through the experience. My review probably won’t sway you one way or the other – you either like offbeat humor, faux documentary style, and can handle (or better yet, appreciate) the humor of the skewed and hypocritical “Christian” characters, or you can’t. If this movie were rated by the MPAA, it would get an R rating for “language” and “suggestive dialogue” alone – so if you’re sensitive to obscenities, you, too, should stay away.

For the rest of you, my review:

nbt – never been thawed – is shot in a faux documentary style; a documentary about a group of people who collect frozen TV dinners. Or “Frozen Entree Enthusiasts” as they prefer to be called. The “documentary” covers a brief, intense period for the Mesa Frozen Food Enthusiasts Club which comes to a peak with a Frozen Food Enthusiasts Convention. Does it sound ridiculous? It should. But by the time the movie actually arrives at the convention, Frozen Entree Enthusiasm has been put into perspective against the lives of the members of the club and seems quite reasonable by comparison.

You see, each of the members of the club we get to know during the course of the film has a day job or other hobbies that make collecting frozen dinners seem reasonable. The ‘leader’ and most dedicated to collecting frozen entrees is Shawn, the frontman for a hardcore punk band which changed its lyrics – and little else – to become a “Christian” band, The Christers, because he thought he could make more money by doing so. Some of the funniest moments in the movie, however, come from his day job – he works part time as a dental hygenist, and the way he does his job is just … funnier than whatever it is he was saying during those scenes. His band is managed by Milo, a man who founded the “No Choice Cafe” chain of restaurants, which are all located next to abortion clinics, so the patrons can protest on full stomachs – and so he could cash in on the huge crowds that always seemed to gather around the clinics. One of his regular patrons, Shelly, became a frozen entree enthusiast after seeing Shawn’s band perform. She works as a counselor at an abstinence center, where she takes calls all day on an “intercourse prevention hotline.” Seriously.

And it goes on and on, with quirkier and quirkier characters, until – when you know them all and are just watching them go through the everyday struggles of their lives – it’s their other features that seem to stand out, and frozen entree collecting seems pretty normal. It is in taking this central theme and transforming it under the surface into something almost acceptable, almost reasonable, that nbt most strongly succeeds conceptually. Of course, the fact that the movie is pretty continuously laugh-out-loud funny is pretty nice, too.

There are several levels of humor working in the film, ranging from low-level urine and testicle-related joked to the post-modern meta-humor of the very concept of the “mockumentary”, with plenty in between, much of it in the lives of the characters, as mentioned above. Something I appreciated about the humor was that rather than making fun of Christianity itself, the characters and situations represented a parody of the people who claim to be Christian for personal financial gain rather than any level of personal spirituality, belief, or faith – it was clear (to me) that Milo and The Christers were not meant to be seen as “real” Christians, just as people trying to make money from the market that real Christians represent. Some Christians will probably be offended or upset by the way that the attendees of The Christers’ concerts actually appreciate the non-Christian behaviour of the band, and some will be upset by a lot more than that in this movie, but I think the way the subject matter is handled is well-aimed and clearly not an attack on Christianity.

The cinematography did not take my notice, which says a lot – many amateur and first-time film makers make mistakes in lighting and shooting that detract from their films in a serious way, but nbt did not noticeably suffer from inexperience. In fact, there were several shots where I really noticed and appreciated the lighting, framing, or visual characterization of the mood of the scene. There is one scene where it is difficult to determine whether a too-bright spotlight shining on a white door in the background is intentional and symbolic or a lighting miscalculation, but overall the work is good, especially considering that it appears to have been shot entirely on video.

The cast of first-time actors is effective and compelling. The production design is well thought out and pervasive. The music is appropriate, clever, and funny. The special effects are generally well-done, and would probably go unnoticed by most; they are effectively integrated. The overall sound quality is good and far superior to some other locally produced independent films I’ve seen, though still noticably “noisy” in some places.

And did I mention that the frozen dinners have never been thawed?

(Okay, that’s not true. I understand that due to the heat constraints of filming in GMPhoenix in the summer, some shots of frozen entrees were merely of empty boxes because the dinners kept melting.)

Still, I highly recommend this movie. Oh, and if you go this weekend (4/15/05 and 4/16/05) to the 7PM or 9PM showings, you can meet the people who made the film! Check out their website for more details.