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00’s Retrospect: Dead on Arrival — Ten Horror Duds of the Last Decade

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this has been a great decade for horror films. Anyone who doesn’t think so simply hasn’t been paying attention. Of course, those successes likely wouldn’t have felt as sweet had there not been about four or five times as many bad ones, and following from that observation I’ve sifted through the cinematic garbage bin to put together this list of the worst. We’re not talking direct-to-DVD bargain-bin burners here; we normally expect those to be bad. We’re talking studio-released, mostly moderate-to-big-budget disasters with a lot of marketing and moolah behind them. These aren’t the hand grenades; these are the atom bombs whose explosions of craptastic-ness were too big to ignore. They’re listed in order of release rather than badness, since there’s just no way to rank these suckers in any meaningful order. They’re all terrible in their own unique and special way.


Queen of the Damned (Warner Bros.; February 10, 2002)


Poor Aaliyah. Not only did the R&B superstar have to die in a tragic plane crash, but her legacy suffered the final insult of being tarnished by this painful dud that came out the following year (worse yet, they actually dedicated the film to her memory). Hadn’t her family already been through enough? It’s not nice. Anyway, to be fair Queen of the Damned had a tough act to follow. It’s forebear, the beautifully conceived, well-acted, artful Interview with the Vampire, helmed by Crying Game director Neil Jordan, was one of the best horror films of the `90s. So we couldn’t have reasonably expected Damned to be better. Fine. But let’s just tell it like it is: this was a movie so bad that it helped kill both director Michael Rymer and lead actor Stuart Townsend’s film careers. Anne Rice famously reverted back to Christianity in 2004, and I can’t really blame her – if something I’d written was adapted into big-studio diarrhea like this, I’d probably turn to Jesus too.

FeardotCom (Columbia Pictures; August 30, 2002)


You forgot about this lil’ gem from early in the decade, did you? Well, allow me to give you a refresher. Stephen Dorff plays a detective investigating the deaths of several people who all died 48 hours after logging onto a website called…wait for it…FeardotCom!!! Ok, so the actual domain name is FeardotCom.com. I know, it sounds absolutely terrifying right? I’m shaking uncontrollably just thinking about it. What follows this mind-blowing revelation is a treasure trove of bad acting, editing likely to cause seizure, lame scenes of torture, and pathetic attempts at making a website called FeardotCom scary. I say double-bill this bad boy with the heinous American remake of Pulse and call it a night.

Alien vs. Predator (20th Century Fox; August 13, 2004)


Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator has everything you’d expect in an action/horror film based on those two beloved franchises: Aliens, Predators, slo-mo shots of Sanaa Lathan running from explosions, actors, sets, costumes, props. The list goes on and on, really. Just don’t expect any frills. You know, things like a believable plot, cool action scenes, well-drawn characters, a talented director, narrative coherence, fun. Wait, you actually were expecting all that stuff? Wow, look at Mr. High Maintenance over here. I don’t know what to tell you, diva. Go watch a James Cameron movie or something.

The Ring Two (DreamWorks; March 18, 2005)


Like most everybody else, I really loved The Ring. I thought it was scary, and fresh, and stylishly crafted by director Gore Verbinski. So when The Ring Two was released, I paid $14 opening night to watch it at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. That’s right, $14. Two miserable, sleep-inducing hours and 14 bones down the drain later, I limped from the Dome and suddenly felt a strange, sharp pain in my ass. And that’s when I realized: I’d just been gang-raped by Hideo Nakata and those sick bastards over at Dreamworks.

The Wicker Man (Warner Bros.; September 01, 2006)


Anyone who has seen the Nicolas Cage Wicker Man montage on YouTube (you can also just scroll down) – or worse yet, the film itself – knows that this remake of the `70s horror film is an unmitigated disaster featuring a painfully over-the-top performance by its star. Neil LaBute has made some good films, including the awesome In the Company of Men, but it seems the bigger his budgets have grown the worse the results have been. Of course, perhaps we should be thanking Cage and LaBute for The Wicker Man, as it’s one of the most unintentionally hilarious horror films ever released by a major studio. Nicolas Cage in a bear suit. Nicolas Cage punching and kicking women in said bear suit. Nicolas Cage punching and kicking women in general. Nicolas Cage screaming the following line at the top of his lungs: “Oh no, not the bees!! Not the bees!! AAAHHH!!” If it had all been on purpose, this would have gone down in history as one of the greatest comedies of all time.

The Number 23 (New Line Cinema; February 23, 2007)


Jim Carrey was awesome in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That film, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a sublime meditation on the nature of love and memory. Carrey, in rare form, was subtle and moving in his portrayal of a man broken by the loss of his girlfriend, played excellently by Kate Winslet. In a word, the movie was incredible. If for whatever reason you haven’t seen it, watch it. Oh yeah, Carrey was in another movie a couple years later called The Number 23, directed by professional hack Joel Schumacher. It tried to make numerology scary. It failed, big time. To be fair, the movie was up against a doozy of an obstacle from the start: IT TRIED TO MAKE NUMEROLOGY SCARY. Sorry, but the scariest thing here is Virginia Madsen’s visible addiction to Botox.

The Reaping (Warner Bros.; April 05, 2007)


Boy, director Stephen Hopkins sure has had a lot of second chances. His first mainstream feature was the lackluster fifth movie in the Elm Street franchise, The Dream Child. Strike one. Next up: Predator 2. Ouch. Strike two. Ok, well at least his next film was the fondly-remembered classic Judgment Night starring Emilio Estevez. No? Strike three. He’s out, right? Back to the dugout? Um, not exactly. He was subsequently hired to direct Blown Away (flop), The Ghost and the Darkness (flop), and Lost in Space (flop). Ok, I don’t mean to be crass, but who the hell is this guy banging that allowed him to direct another big-budget, major studio movie, this time the Hilary Swank CGI suckfest also known as The Reaping? The movie is so bad, that bitch should be required to give up at least one of her Oscars. Preferably the one for Million Dollar Baby.

Halloween (Dimension Films; August 31, 2007)


I know this movie has its fans, to which all I can say is: are you fucking kidding me? I loved The Devil’s Rejects just as much as the next horror freak, but this updating of the 1978 John Carpenter classic is balls. Sure, I was excited, really excited to see what Rob Zombie would do with the franchise, and I certainly give him points for ambition. But by giving Michael Myers a clichéd redneck-upbringing back-story he succeeded in milking all the suspense and mystery out of the thing. Aw see, he just had a bad family life! It’s not his fault! Give me a fucking break. It doesn’t help that the script is crap, the actors are lackluster (Scout Taylor-Compton is no Jamie Lee) and that the kills lack any buildup whatsoever. What a shame.

Prom Night (Sony Screen Gems; April 11, 2008)


In the odious PG-13 “horror” movie Prom Night, Lauren Conrad – oh I’m sorry, Brittany Snow – plays Donna, a blonde, vaguely human organism being stalked at her senior prom by some dude wearing a baseball cap who looks like he just stepped off an episode of To Catch a Predator. For some reason he’s obsessed with Donna even though she doesn’t seem to possess a modicum of either sex appeal or personality, and to take out his frustrations he starts killing a bunch of folks. Of course, if I were one of the cops on the scene I’d be less worried about the stalker than the fact that the victims don’t appear to have an ounce of blood in their bodies. This isn’t a horror film; it’s a 1

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Editorials

‘The Company of Wolves’ at 40: One of the Most Underrated Werewolf Movies Ever Made

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There’s a compelling idea in anthropology that many ancient werewolf legends are derived from our species’ need to rationalize the more animalistic side of humanity – which is why lycanthropy has historically been used to explain everything from medieval serial killers to cannibalism. While I personally think there’s a lot more to unpack when it comes to tales of wolfmen and women, this is still a great example of why so many of our most enduring fairy tales involve big bad wolves.

And in the world of film, I think there’s only one feature that really nails the folkloric origins of werewolf stories, namely Neil Jordan’s 1984 fairy-tale horror classic, The Company of Wolves. Even four decades later, there’s no other genre flick that comes close to capturing the dreamlike ambience behind this strange anthology, and that’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on one of the most underrated werewolf flicks ever made.

The Company of Wolves was originally a short story contained in the 1979 anthology The Bloody Chamber, a collection of deconstructed fairy-tales intended for mature readers penned by English author Angela Carter. With the book quickly becoming a hit as readers became fascinated with its subversion of classic folk stories and (then) controversial feminist undertones, it was soon transformed into a duology of BBC radio-dramas which adapted both The Company of Wolves and Carter’s reimagining of Puss-in-Boots.

These radio-dramas soon attracted the attention of then up-and-coming Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, who decided to meet with Carter to discuss expanding on her stories and bringing them to life on the big screen. The duo soon realized that a single short story wasn’t enough material for a feature-length film, so they decided to adapt all of Carter’s werewolf tales into a single anthology.

With a completed script and a $2.3 million budget, Jordan decided to tackle the project like a hybrid between a theatrical period drama and a schlocky monster movie. Effects-heavy creature features were a hot commodity back in the ’80s, with films like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London proving that there was an audience for horrific lycanthrope transformations, so the director soon recruited a team that could turn this odd collection of feminist folk stories into something commercially viable.

Not exactly a great pick for family movie night.

Shooting would eventually take place almost entirely within the England-based Shepperton Studios, with notable production designer Anton Furst (who would later be known for his work on Tim Burton’s Batman films) helping to bring Jordan’s vision of a darkly romantic fairy-tale world to life. Appropriately enough, production would also involve a real pack of trained wolves (as well as a collection of dyed dogs), though extensive puppetry and animatronics were also used to flesh out the more gruesome parts of the flick.

After a grueling nine-week shoot where budgetary constraints led to corners being cut on props and costumes, The Company of Wolves was finally released in September of 1984 – just in time for spooky season. In the finished film, we follow the strange dreams of a sulky teenage girl named Rosaleen (first-time actress Sarah Patterson) as the film unravels an Arabian-Nights-inspired tapestry of both familiar and not-so-familiar stories about big bad wolves.

From sexually charged cautionary tales to parables about female empowerment, this surreal collection of deranged bedtime stories is much more than the creature feature that the marketing initially suggested. Like a more horror-oriented version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Company of Wolves exudes that same kind of hormonal teenage energy that transports us back to a time when the world was both scary and exciting in equal measure.

That’s not to say that this is an entirely pleasant experience, however, and I’m not just talking about the film’s horror elements. A big portion of the flick’s overtly sexual moments involve the then 13-year-old Patterson coming to grips with her blossoming womanhood and the dangers of predatory men (usually marked with a humorous unibrow), something that naturally makes for some intentionally uncomfortable viewing – especially in the year of our lord 2024.

Obviously, I don’t think it’s my place to dissect (or even judge) the effectiveness of the film’s commentaries on being a young woman, but even as a man I can still appreciate the thought and care that went into crafting this Jungian cocktail of serious themes in a genre-movie package that almost certainly went on to inspire future werewolf movies like Ginger Snaps.

Not the worst wedding I’ve been to.

That being said, what really keeps me coming back to the film is the absurd amount of memorable imagery. From a wedding party being taken over by canines to lonely treks through snowy groves, this is exactly the gloomy world I imagined as a child when reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales – and the dreamy atmosphere is only enhanced by the movie’s overall theatricality.

This also extends to the effects, as it’s easy to forgive decapitated dummy heads and ripped rubber skin when everything is happening in a magical hyper-reality, with a great example of this is being the scene where Grandma’s head unexpectedly explodes like a porcelain doll when it’s knocked off by a wolfman. That’s not to say that the effects are bad, as several of these transformations are downright grisly and likely influenced future lycanthrope effects like those in Underworld and even Trick ‘r Treat (even if the wolf-dogs here often look more cute than scary).

Of course, these aren’t the only things that The Company of Wolves has going for it, as the main trio of Patterson, Micha Bergese and the late, great Angela Lansbury exceptionally bring these exaggerated caricatures to life and the orchestral score is an absolute delight. I also really get a kick out of that bizarre ending implying that the dangers of adult life have literally come crashing into Rosaleen’s bedroom.

The Company of Wolves may not be a perfect film, suffering from some wonky pacing and the classic anthology problem where some stories are clearly much more enjoyable than others, but I’d argue that the flick’s iconic visuals and powerful thematic throughline more than make up for any minor flaws. And while we’ve seen bigger and better werewolf films since then, when it comes to adult-oriented fairy-tales, this is one psycho-sexual journey that is still worth revisiting 40 years down the line.

The Company of Wolves

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