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 orty minutes into the horror movie
"Trespassing" (aka "Evil Remains"), and this thought
popped into my head: "Jesus. I can't believe it. They're still
talking. It's been 40 minutes since the movie started. Why are they still
just sitting or standing around talking? What is this, 'Scream'
for the arthouse crowd?" Later, this thought surfaced: "This is
what happens when you get pretentious with a horror movie. For God's sake,
it's a horror movie. Where's my blood and guts, and why do I have to
sit through 90 minutes of endless, inane chatter to get it?"
Like all Slasher films in the
last 20 years, "Trespassing" concerns a group of pretty college
students who unwisely travels to a house in the boondocks so that one of
them can finish up his thesis on the nature of infamous myths -- or
something uninteresting and high-falutin' like that. They wantonly break
into the property and set up shop as if they own the place, and bad things
happen, and you grin as they die one by one because they're all such
unlikable asses. The film itself opens in the past, where a family's
mentally unstable son stabs dad in the head with a hedge clipper, then burns
mom with a can of gasoline. Should have brought sonny that bike he wanted,
dad.
In a nutshell, "Chattering -- " er, I mean,
"Trespassing", has got to be one of the talkiest Slasher Films
I've seen in -- well, ever. The film seems determined to spend all
of its time with actors sitting around, standing around, or driving around
chatting aimlessly about random subjects. When the graduate students
finally find the house, they spend 5 minutes talking about how old and
creepy it is. Later, inside the house, they spend another 5 minutes
talking about why a vase fell off a dresser. Then, when one of them thinks
he heard voices through his recording device, he spends another 5 minutes
talking about it with another character.
Later, when two more characters stumble across a room
with a bleeding ceiling, they spend yet 5 more minutes talking about why
the ceiling is bleeding, and what does it mean in relation to the universe
and the rising price of rice in China. When they stumble across the body
of one of their own -- Yep, you guessed it. Five more minutes of talking
about the body. You may think I'm grossly exaggerating, but you would be
wrong. And all of this takes place in the first 50 minutes.
While the boys are at the house chatting up a storm,
Estella Warren ("Planet
of the Apes"), our Fair Hair Lead, is out for a walk in the woods
with an unconvincingly dreadlocked Ashley Scott ("Walking
Tall"), who despite the dreadlocks, turns out to be a whiny
little wimp. It's not until 60 minutes into the film (with just 20 minutes
of screentime left, but actually only 15 minutes spent on the action at
the cursed house), that Warren finally figures into the movie. After she
and Scott fall into a trap, they spend -- Yep, you guessed it. Five
minutes crawling in the dark talking about how they fell into the trap and
what does this mean in relation to the Nasdaq being down at the end of
closing bell.
When Merendino's actors aren't regurgitating his
dialogue as if they were still in drama school trying to "act like a
tree", you can hardly see anything onscreen. Merendino, who once shot
a dogma movie, apparently has decided to keep the idea of natural
lighting. As a result, much of "Trespassing" is dark, especially
the scenes inside the house, with shadows obscuring most of the action.
When you see a character hanging upside down from a wall, having been
murdered (apparently while we were watching and listening to yet another
5-minute chatty interlude, I suppose), you are hardpressed to figure out
how he died, since you can barely see anything. Moments later, a character
is killed by a booby trap, but the whole thing is so dark that the
character could have stumbled into a wall and nailed himself in the head
and you couldn't tell the difference.
Of course it doesn't help matters that Merendino
insists on shooting the film in staccato style. Who does this guy think he
is, anyway? Definitely someone who isn't trying to please his horror
audience, that much is readily apparent. Does he even realize that there
are certain things you can and can't do when it comes to the small
audience that watches something called "Trespassing" aka
"Evil Remains"? And one of them isn't boring the audience to
death, only to make the whole thing so visually murky that they can't even
enjoy any of the good parts, i.e. the death and mayhem. Even the most
incompetent horror filmmaker knows that the blood and guts is the selling
point, especially since Merendino can't be troubled to give us anything in
regards to T&A except for some faux sex talk between Warren and
Scott's character that goes absolutely nowhere.
The only real bright spot in the entire film is
Kurtwood Smith ("Fortress"),
who was a fine character actor in feature films before becoming a fixture
on TV with the popular "That 70's Show". Smith has a cameo as a
college professor that one of the graduate students go to for information
in the beginning of the film; Smith returns later to warn off another nosy
(re: soon to be dead) graduate student looking for similar information. In
a movie with endless "hip" dialogue and a plot that gets murkier
as the aesthetics get murkier, one has to look for something as minor as a
cameo by Smith to find good things to say about "Trespassing".
It's that kind of movie.
Finally, there's nothing like a bag of .99-cent
Funyuns to drown out the sound of uninteresting characters trying to talk
you to death. With the Funyuns crunching away, I hardly noticed that the
characters were spending yet another 5-minute segment standing, sitting,
or crouching around delivering pointless dialogue when a good writer could
have gotten it done in 10 seconds. Alas, .99-cent bags of Funyuns don't
last forever, and by the 50-minute mark my bag was empty. And guess what?
They were still talking onscreen.
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