Monday 29 June 2009

Stop, its Captain Hammer time

There are very few films that have me screaming at the screen in rage.

Let me re-phrase that, there are very few films I have seen that have left me angry enough to be screaming at the screen. Usually I have the good sense to avoid them. One I didn't miss was Mildred Pierce, a 1945 film that I practically walked out of when it was show to me in college. It was insulting, degrading to watch and if anyone liked it I would suggest you check to see if they ever had a brain.
Another was A Knights Tale. It was so bad I did leave the cinema.

Why am I telling you this? Well while the last two were seen in trepidation last night I saw a film I wanted to see for a while. White Noise 2:- The Light. The cast looked interesting, Nathan Fillion and Katee Stackhoff (Mal Reynolds and Kara Thrace respectively). The plot could have been fun too, a man coming back from the dead is able to see who was going to die. It wasn't going to be Lord of the Rings but it might have been fun.
Oh boy... it wasn't
Okay, let's look at the plot, with a few spoilers. I already told you that Fillion's character (Abe) can see when someone is about to die. The twist is that if Abe saves someone's life that person becomes an agent of the devil, killing a lot more people exactly three days later. At first glance that could be interesting. It's not, but we'll get back to that later.

In the first five minutes Abe sees his son and daughter shot in front of him and decides to kill himself. After he is resuscitated he begins to see auras around those people who are going to die. At no point is this suicide addressed and it's neatly forgotten. In fact his only doctor is half crazy and happens to info-dump the whole "you see dead people" part of the plot before conveniently dying of a heart attack.
We next see Abe back at work (at no point are we told what his work is) where static on computer screens (urm..) directs his attention to those who are about to die.
Abe ignores all of this until an encounter with a homeless man who is killed on train tracks. He then sees the ghost of the homeless man and decides to stop it happening again. Saving people's lives give him a purpose (something this film was missing) and he saves three people. Including the pretty nurse that he had at the hospital, Sherry (oh hello Stackhoff).
Unfortunately we learn that Sherry has a crush on him (of course she does) and that, because the devil possesses saved people on the third day she's going to kill, like the other two Abe saved. Worse still she works with kids.
Of course she doesn't end up hurting anyone. In a mind bending final Abe ends up having to kill her for some reason that is never adequately explained, but gets killed by police before he can carry it out, in exactly the same diner his own family were killed (wha...?). With Abe dead Sherry is in shock and carted off into an ambulance, where she is promptly possessed.
Follow that, good it gets worse! Luckily for the bus full of old people and the tanker full of petrol the ambulance is heading towards (nuns and dynamite... not even original) Abe's ghost kills Sherry, freeing her and letting the ambulance miss.
Re-read that last sentence, I'm not kidding. Abe becomes a ghost and uses his powers of intangibility to kill her before the Devil can use her to blow up a bus full of old people. And that's the end of the film.

There aren't words to describe how bad this film is, it is horrendous. The acting is alright, mostly because I think Fillion is always charismatic and Stackhoff is just a great actress but everything else is so God awfully bad it should be avoided like the plague. There's no explanation, no sense or logic just empty stupidity.

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