The Adventures of Expatboy

A couple of posts back I had mentioned that in Detroit I saw the movie "Ultraviolet" in an empty theater. That wasn’t an exaggeration. I was really the only one there. Kinda creepy I thought. But then, since the movie was somehow a "horror-ish" movie because the protagonist was a vampire, well, the theater owners probably decided that it would be best to show trailers for other horror films. Now that really started to freak me out. First up was "Silent Hill", a movie adaptation of a video game.. but the trailer for this one was really good.. good meaning scary. Next up was the trailer for the "Omen" remake, "Omen:666". Now that really scared the pants out of me. That and being alone in a large, dark, empty room, was practially traumatizing. I was half thinking of running out of the theater screaming and pulling my hair out!

I’ve never really been scared of American and foreign horror movies before, most likely because of context. Meaning yeah, how could I be scared of Dracula or Frankenstein or Jack the Ripper, when they probably have never even set foot in ‘Pinas! Back then I was scared of aswangs and manananggals, who could very well be hiding in a nearby bamboo or banana grove.

It all changed of course when I set foot in London. After work I would usually walk back to my hotel on the picturesque cobblestone streets. At night though, it was "picturesque my a$$!" I was scared sh!tless of Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd (the demon barber of Fleet Street!). Jack the Ripper because he was Jack the Ripper, and Sweeney Todd, because, dammit, I was walking on Fleet Street every night on my way home! Never mind if they were more than a hundred years dead!

I remember my mother telling me not to worry about fictional characters like Jack the Ripper. Why not go on a walking tour and view historical sites like Sherlock Holmes’ apartment. I did not hesitate to tell her that it was Sherlock Holmes who was fictional, and that Jack the Ripper was real.

Here in the US of A, I started to feel my fear of ‘Pinoy horror wane, and American horror start to wax. When you think about it, its hard to find a banana tree let alone a grove of them in New York City.

Back to the present. When I finally lay down to bed in my hotel room that night, I was trying to rationalize my fear of the trailers that I saw earlier that evening. The mental conversation went on something like this:

"Come on, don’t be scared, its a remake for crying out loud!"
"But the pasty-faced boy looked really scary!"
"That whole ‘Omen:666; isn’t even based on solid religious dogma. In Revalations, 666 is actually Emperor Nero , and the ‘7 heads and 10 horns’ of the Beast? That’s the 7 hills of Rome and the 10 Provinces!"
"But the pasty-faced boy looked really scary!"

It was worse when I saw "The Ring" back in 2002. I wasn’t able to fall asleep for days, and I got so sick from lack of sleep that I had to skip work for a couple of days. Never mind that the TV was too small and on top of the dresser that Sadako would be "wa poise" if she fell out of the TV on to the floor. I swore back then that I would never again watch a horror film..

..But the "Silent Hill" movie looks realll interesting…

What I was amazed to find out going into the movie theater was not the fact that it was totally empty excluding myself (I’m not kidding), but the fact that "Ultraviolet", starring the ever-flexible Mille Jovovich, was actually a vampire movie, in the vein of "Blade" and "Underworld", only in techno instead of goth. Directed by Kurt Wimmer, who also directed the cult favorite "Equilibrium", which I bet none of you have ever heard of, Mille plays Violet, a haemophage (vampire), who attempts to save Six, played by the eerie Cameron Bright (the boy in Nicole Kidman’s movie "Birth") from dissection by an organization that sounds eeriely like a Techno-corporate Catholic Church.

Instead of feeling copped-out by the terrible production values and unpolished script, I felt terribly disappointed because it could have been a great movie, because of the amazing ideas that were set forth in the 88 minutes of screen time. It was a case of poor execution. Case in point - the CGI. It looked like it came straight out of the studio that did "Shaolin Soccer" or worse, "The Returner", and it probably did, since the movie looked like most of it was shot in China. Almost embarrassingly amateurish. Next, the script and the dialogue, which was also written by pareng Kurt Wimmer. It didn’t have noticable plot holes, or embarrassingly silly plot twists (like infecting the alien ships with a computer virus in "Independence Day". I mean, come on! Were the aliens running on MS Windows 3.0?), but issues of pacing, and people saying the same words over and over.  I mean, didn’t he have someone do some polishing on his script? The dialogue was so repetitive, it started to grate irritatingly in my ears.

Hopefully this also becomes a sort of cult classic, like Robert Rodriguez’s "El Mariachi" series, wherein they can make sequels that fix all that was lacking in the first one (first and foremost a real production budget). The world of "Ultraviolet" is intriguing, but the window we currently see it through, it at best, foggy.