Movie Review - Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

I saw a photo in an issue of EMPIRE Magazine several years ago, and it made me wonder: is Gemma Arterton the next Kate Beckinsale?  I sincerely hoped so.  She has a nice face and that deadpan British accent that makes almost anything she says sexy as hell. The photo also helped, as she was clad in tight butt-hugging leathers and holding a crossbow, standing next to some guy (later I found out he was Jeremy Renner, star of The Avengers, The Town and The Bourne Legacy).  The photo was for a movie and it looked like an adventure in the same vein as Van Helsing--the type of movie set in Industrial period clothing but containing anachronisms, like sniper rifles with night-vision scopes or incendiary grenades.  It looked like it might be steampunk, so I checked the name:  HANSEL AND GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS.

That already sounded nuts, so I was waiting for a while to see this one.  It was a similar situation when I was waiting for the American release of Solomon Kane: fucking unbearable.  Eventually I got to watch this movie, and I did it in IMAX 3D! So how was it, you ask?  It seems that too much anachronism can spoil what would otherwise be a good fantasy yarn.

"I noticed the script says you're a diabetic, Jeremy.
Are you alright with that?" "No...but says here you
headbutt a grown man with no blood on your forehead
or bruising. You're as pale as a sheet Gemma; how is that--"
"SOUNDS LEGIT; let's do it!"

To start us off, this movie is a VERY loose adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about two kids who find a candy house, are captured by the cannibal witch who lives inside, and kill her in their attempt to escape.  Now these two kids have grown up to be Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and forward-thinking Gretel (Gemma Arterton), bounty-hunting the very supernatural creatures that mentally scarred them: witches.  They have come across several gadgets in their quest to rid the world of witches, like Mossberg pump-action shotguns, Tasers, split-level axial transforming perpendicular crossbows (you have to see it to believe it), folding rifles, carousel-loaded hand cannons, and what may be a Gatling or Maxim gun.  The most interesting part of the movie comes with Hansel and his "sugar sickness." It seems when the witch was trying to fatten Hansel up to eat him, she made him eat nothing but candy which made him sick.  Now in his adult life Hansel must take an injection of serum every few hours or he dies.  This makes Jeremy Renner's Hansel a diabetic hero (the first being Captain Novolin).  It's a good thing to have a weakness for a hero that seems somewhat invincible in the film.  Our heroine Gretel is not limited to such problems, and can fight without any real injury or hindrance.

Tenacious D says "THAT'S CALLED TEAM-WORK!"

Hansel and Gretel (whose makeup never smears, not even the blood) earn the enmity of a witch named...Muriel (played by Famke Janssen of X-Men fame) who wants to save her kind from these traveling murderers by sacrificing 12 souls during the Blood Moon--one for each month--and also needs the heart of a great White Witch to complete the ritual that grants any witch that drinks the brew created from the blood of the sacrifices to become immune to fire permanently.  A witch's enemies can tie her to the stake but she will not burn...totally worth the convoluted plan that can only happen once a year, I say.  Throw in some forgettable characters/love interests and discarded plot threads and you have an action movie for the summer...strangely placed in January.

Cool guys (and girls) don't look at explosions as they
walk away from them. Especially if they caused them.

I don't know what the goal of Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola was when he set out to make this movie, but it would seem he needed to hire a different editor.  If he requested this cut, then he needs to fix it.  The editing was all over the place, and clipped several establishing shots to shorten the running time.  There were some problems, notably in the final battle sequence when Hansel drops his shotgun, Gretel comes in with a weapon and she is struck and drops it.  The next shot is of Hansel's shotgun hitting the ground.  The way that's ordered it looks like Gretel had Hansel's shotgun.  This confused me, but not nearly as much as allowing an untrained person to handle a rapid fire machine gun in a crowd setting.  It's a damned good way to get shot and give the witches what they want, but apparently not in this world.  In any case, I expect a Director's Cut of this film, with all the stuff that should have gone in to fill in any problem issues.  Other than that, a film that had great props and artwork but still needs a shine and polish to be complete.

RATING: 6/10

Movie Review - Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

The 1980s were a busy decade for major disaster events across the globe, and 1986 was no exception.  The two big stories were the Challenger Explosion above Cape Canaveral, FL, USA (an event I witnessed on television in school) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster near Pripyat, Ukraine, USSR.  The Challenger explosion was more important to me at the time because I wanted to be an astronaut and it happened in America; what I learned about Russia came from movies like Rocky IV, Red Scorpion, and Red Heat.  While still important, I have seen what took place in Chernobyl and Pripyat and my heart goes out to the victims and their descendants.  More often, I hear of entertainment inspired by the disaster, and its aftermath--things like extreme tourism and urban exploration of abandoned Pripyat, the FPS video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and the horror movie Chernobyl Diaries.  These things never seem to display an understanding that a disaster happened there over 25 years ago and that one should be respectful of the victims.  Sadly, this very fact did not sell movie tickets or game units as much as "wander into a guarded radioactive exclusion zone and get scared/killed by radioactive mutant inhabitants".  If it didn't then I wouldn't have a movie to write about.

PRIPYAT EXPLORATION PARTY (from left to right):
Zoe the Norwegian, Michael the Australian,
Paul, Yuri the suspicious Russian tour guide,
Amanda, Natalie and Chris.

Chernobyl Diaries could have gone a completely different way, but for a vote and peer pressure.  Hence several stupid Americans--Chris (Jesse McCartney) and his very blonde girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Chris' brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) and Natalie's friend Amanda (Devin Kelley)--a Norwegian (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and her Australian fiancee (Nathan Phillips) meet up in Kiev to go on an extreme tourism run to Pripyat to tour the abandoned radioactive city with their highly suspicious Russian tour guide (Dimitri Diatchenko).  The usual happens when they reach spoooOOOOky Pripyat: the vehicle is crippled somehow, cellphones don't work, nobody answers the Walkie-Talkie, and everyone jumps at shadows.  There was a point where I waited a full minute waiting for a jump scare after I called it.  Throw in mysterious humanoid things that attack from the dark that seem to have a taste for raw flesh and you have a recipe for disaster.  Especially when you realize that had Chris just stuck to his guns, he'd be still be alive to tell everyone abut his not-so-awesome European trip.

Chris was present when the vote was cast and he didn't have to go. But everyone else was going, and he had just been outvoted...by Natalie, the woman he wanted to marry.  This should have been the linchpin to let him know he shouldn't marry this girl if she wasn't going to use her head on a trip to a foreign country where blonde White women  go missing and nobody cares but the men who buy them.  Instead, he's like "Oh OK honey, we can go into the poisonous radioactive zone; I can propose marriage to you later" and never gets the chance.

"Like zoiks, Scoob, I wonder when the rest of the
gang'll be back"  "REAH! Re-hee-hee-hee..."

There were several things that made me wonder about this movie, especially the throwaway line about Chris accepting a one-way plane ticket to Kiev from his brother.  WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT? WHO ACCEPTS A ONE-WAY PLANE TICKET ANYWHERE FROM ANYONE, WITH NO WAY TO GET BACK ALREADY SET UP? 

When Amanda takes pics and sees images of faces spying from shadowy windows and doesn't tell anyone, despite constant speculation and queries about whether people still live in the abandoned city? That's like setting up your entire crew to get killed.  Also, those guards don't stand there for nothing all day: they were obviously are there to hold a line to keep people out or things in.  These tourists were more concerned about the money they spent to go on a trip to a dangerous and forbidden area than staying under the notice of the law.  Blonde-ass Natalie even made the comment, "We might end up in a Ukranian jail or something".  Bitch, you're lucky your dumb ass didn't get kidnapped by the drunk guys at the beginning of the movie and sold into sex slavery.  That would have been a lot more interesting to watch if her friends broke through hell to rescue her  instead of finding her barely molested corpse behind some machinery in Chernobyl.

OK so they know they're not supposed to be in Pripyat,
they know that Chernobyl is hella contaminated, and yet
they all go chasing an ill-prepared tour guide who
brought them to this living graveyard in the first place
through its hallways. Morons.

Which now brings me to a BIG issue I had with this movie: instead of facing down wild dogs (whom they could have intimidated with their tool-using opposing thumbs), they chose to go further into the radioactive zone, even into the site of the disaster itself--the ruined Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.  Here, nature reclaimed only so much, and a miscarriage of technology changed those left behind.  When the surviving members head deeper into the site, they had a Geiger counter with them, ticking off all the way and getting more intense as they approached certain areas.  At times their skin would blister, they would feel sick, and one guy even went blind.  It was made clear to them at the start that they would have to leave after a period of time to avoid radiation poisoning just being in Pripyat...and yet they went deeper in to...I don't know, get more poisoning. There was no one to save, no reason to go deeper.  It's like watching a murder victim in a slasher flick run upstairs to escape the killer.

IT'S A TRAP!

While the movie was bad, the ending was both good and fitting: no one survived, everyone got what they deserved, and no one bred their genes to make more stupid people. There are two down sides to this movie.  For starters, this may be the only information people may learn about Chernobyl or the issues with nuclear energy.  Second, this film was more money in the hands of Oren Peli, the man responsible for the Paranormal Activity series--now on its fifth movie. 
PLEASE STOP HIM BEFORE HE KILLS BRAIN CELLS AGAIN--DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE, NOT EVEN ON BOOTLEG.

RATING: 2/10