Weekly Cinemeh

Hello, and welcome back to Weekly Cinemeh. This week we decided to watch movies dealing with deep horror. Horror beyond words, if you will. All of us here are are big fans of this kind of horror and the interesting madness that follows it. This week was dark and full of terror. To the list!

1: Pandorum
Pandorum is about how feeling the emptiness of the universe can drive people mad. In the movie, the characters talk about a syndrome called pandorum, which affects people who go into deep space. It causes them to go crazy and experience extreme paranoia. The movie opens with a ship sent into deep space to colonize a planet and reveals that during their journey, Earth was wiped out due to an unknown cause. The main character of the movie wakes up from cryo sleep an indeterminate amount of time after the news arrived at the ship, and the ship has gone to hell. Its up to him and his lieutenant to turn on the ship's power to find out what the hell happened. Pandorum has some great atmosphere and is good at making characters feel like they are alone in the universe. The movie gets a little actiony after the first act, and I think it suffers for that reason. A film with the same basic story but without the monsters would have been great for atmosphere and tension, but it could have been a little boring, so I see why they didn't do it. I feel like, without monsters, it could have explored the theme that Pandorum tried to explore a little better (we are alone in the universe and that is fucking scary). The cast is good, and I like the way they handled the encroaching madness of the main character. Its a good action oriented horror movie, watch it.

Eshi: I enjoy Pandorum, scary space shit brings me great joy, but it has the most superfluous love story ever. I'm not even being hyperbolic, the love subplot is so meaningless that not only does it have no bearing whatsoever on the story, it almost isn't a part of the film. It might actually serve to be shitty emotional manipulation if it ever really made an effort to make the audience give a fuck. Fortunately, as I said, it isn't even really a thing, so the general badassitude of the rest of the movie doesn't suffer much for it. Denis Quaid plays fucked up almost as well as his brother Randy is fucked up in real life. Ben Foster is a dandy protagonist and Norman Reedus is tragically wasted. What do you want here? Its a space thriller, just go watch it.

2: Infini
Infini is very similar to Pandorum. Once again we deal with monsters in deep space, though this time its a little more direct at the beginning of the movie. Infini is an outpost in the furtest reaches of space that the main character is forced to go to, to avoid being killed by a team that was sent their previously who returned all murder crazy from their mission. Another team is sent in to rescue the main character and turn off a machine on Infini that would be sending volatile material to Earth. The film explores humanity's interaction with itself and with beings that are far beyond the scope of human understanding. Its an interesting movie, though I don't think it explores this theme enough, and chooses to explore the murder-crazy aspect a little too hard. It gets some significant credit for one aspect though: time dilation is a major plot point (something that a lot of Sci Fi movies ignore). The rescue team finds the main character almost immediately and they shut off the device soon after, but they have to wait for Earth to start the procedure to teleport them all back, which takes less than a minute on Earth, but 8 hours on Infini. This creates some great tension, and raises the stakes while still being plausible. The ending leaves something to be desired, but doesn't ruin the movie.

Eshi: It amuses me how many movies seem to play as "space makes people grumpy" as a plot point. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be grumpy about in movies that use that trope, but it seems overplayed. Infini does kinda cover some new ground, or at least go a different direction than Pandorum, but not by as much as I'd like. There are two bits of plot that I really dug; the interplay between Whit and Chester is a lot of fun, and then they abort a fetus, for good reason even, without being too painfully hand wringy about it. I really enjoyed both Pandorum and Infini, but, uh... maybe don't chain watch these ones.

3: Pontypool
Pontypool is a hard movie to talk about without giving spoilers so I will try to avoid them. Its a zombie movie with non standard zombies which spread, not with a normal virus, but via a conceptual one. Basically it is a horror movie that takes an aspect of humanity, language, and makes it our worst enemy. This is a bottle movie, much like the other two, but this time its on Earth (in Canada to be more precise). Bottle movies are a great way to do horror because it makes the possibility of just running the fuck away impossible. The cast is good, and its shot well. Its a fun movie, watch it.

Eshi: Just fucking watch this one. Its spectacularly shot, the plot is surprisingly tight for how little Oh Shit there is, and the tension is oppressive. Fuck yeah, that is all.