Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Boo

Sometimes I’m my own worst enemy.

I decided to review one hopefully underexposed “top” horror film from every year for my Post Millennial Trauma section. As a result, I’ve waded through an enormous amount of schlocky crap from the more fallow years of the 21st Century hoping against hope to find something that would fit the bill. The vast majority of the films that I inflicted on myself are absolutely terrible and not even worth comment (Bloody Mary), being a hateful combination of inept, uninspired and frankly fucking boring. I toyed with whether or not to even bother writing this review, and in the end have decided to for two reasons: it’s got Dee Wallace Stone in it, and we all like her, and more importantly, the writer/ director actually started out writing for Fangoria. If that hack can produce such an obvious piece of Orang of Doom worthy shit then surely us good Changians must be able to raise the funding for the eagerly awaited masterpiece that is Astrodykes v Werewolves on the Moon.

Boo does not have the most promising opening that I’ve ever seen. Our intrepid heroine (who it turns out will have psychic powers for no reason other than that they had managed to paint themselves into a daft narrative corner requiring psychic powers to get out of)  is on the phone in a scene horribly familiar to anyone that’s seen Scream. Which is kind of the point of the whole film, actually. Anyhow, a guy in a mask turns up, except it turns out it’s her boyfriend (a twat of such earth-shattering magnitude his name is actually Twattus Ginormicus)  who has plans for them all at Halloween staying in an abandoned lunatic asylum. So, our assembled group of douchey teenagers go to the asylum and spend the night getting tormented by an evil paedo ghost before being picked off one by one and our intrepid heroine and two other douchebags (it never properly bothers explaining what they’re doing there, so I shall not be bothering either) escape.

This is a terrible film. It’s risibly bad and completely clueless. First and foremost, the central characters are enormously unlikable. Asshole boyfriend, for example, shags our heroine’s best friend within minutes of being in the building thereby sacrificing all sympathy for the character (which was pretty limited anyway), and his big idea of practical spook-related scares being fun is just an epic failure. Secondly, our heroine has psychic powers and a link to her dead mother (related to us in a jaw-droppingly slow piece of exposition) for the sole reason that someone needed to explain why the building is haunted, what the ghost is playing at and also to give them a means of escape from certain death. This last one is actually ignored anyway, as it’s Dee that comes to the rescue.

Which brings me around to the script- it’s a fucking mess. The story is contradictory and confusing, the characters are poorly drawn and unlikable and the dialogue is inept. The sole good line in the film is when the black characters says to douchebag “shoot me in the head and I’ll kick your arse”, and that’s not even a very good line. As if that’s not annoying enough the entire film has a slimy post-modernist glaze to it that really leaves the viewer cold. It’s just so fucking pleased with itself and there is no Earthly justification for this satisfaction. The relative failure of the writing here leads me to believe that anything we turn out will be vastly superior to this toss, because we won’t be as smug as this.

The acting, actually, isn’t that bad. Trish Coren tries hard as Jesse, but the character is an idiot with magic powers, Dee is fine as saviour nurse, and M. Steven Felty is reasonably scary and pretty disgusting as spectral kiddie-diddler Jacob. However, the whole edifice is bought crashing town by the truly woeful performance put in by Jilon Ghai as Kevin. Kevin is an asshole, and a severely unsympathetic and unentertaining asshole, but this is a grating performance nonetheless. I was actively screaming at the screen praying for him to get his just desserts.

The effects are pretty mediocre. There’s a nice line in exploding bodies, but the ghost effects themselves are pretty piss poor. Furthermore, they look completely fake, and as a result any time the film manages to manufacture any tension whatsoever we’re yanked out of it by a shitty flickering spectre lurking in the background being about as scary as fucking tellytubby. Fail.

Overall, this film is shit. It’s not worth watching and if it hadn’t been on Lovefilm’s “watch now” list then I’d never have bothered with it. Ordinarily when doing Vault reviews, I lean towards the generous and would give this shit, even if it’s completely and utterly worthless, 1 chang purely for Dee Wallace Stone, but I’m ill at the moment so my patience is fragile and as a direct result it can have a double eye-poke fuck you Orangutan of Doom. With a festive twist.

This is a boring, pointless, irritating waste of time that’s far too full of itself and is one of the more completely inane films that I’ve seen recently. I’d rather finish watching “Bloodrayne 2: Vampire Cowboys and Juggs are boring”  than waste another second of your time or my time on this shit.

Until next time,

Jarv.