The Farmhouse

2008

EXTREME SPOILERS

The Farmhouse is a straight-to-vid horror/thriller with a lot going on. It is one part domestic melodrama, one part torture porn, one part crime thriller and one part supernatural horror film. Yup, a lot going on. Probably too much.

Oddly enough, I've already spoiled the movie for you. "That doesn't make sense," you think? But it does. I spoiled things when I told you that there are supernatural components. That seemingly innocent statement is a spoiler because the supernatural elements don't enter the film until the last couple of minutes, when all the plot loopholes are explained by supernatural mumbo-jumbo. The supernatural is the hole card which changes everything at the end, kind of like the improbable straight flush which flummoxes the Cincinnati Kid. Before the supernatural enters the picture, the Farmhouse establishes a variety of red herrings to get the audience to seek a rational explanation for some outlandish and surreal goings-on.

That's not as bad as it sounds. One of the most famous short stories in American literature, Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which was also one of the most acclaimed episodes of "The Twilight Zone," follows that same structure. In addition, the same sort of last minute "Guess what? Not real!" switcheroo has driven some pretty good movies as well. An Adrian Lyne film called Jacob's Ladder comes immediately to mind.

Of course, those two works were not really supernatural, except to the extent that they took place in a first person point of view, and most people's thoughts and beliefs include some sort of supernatural elements. In those two cases I cited, the authors simply misdirected us into believing that certain confusing events on screen were actually happening, when in fact they were just pictorializations of the stream of consciousness. The authors created a dramatic and effective tone shift by waiting until the last moment to pull the rug from under us and tell us the truth.

Unlike those efforts, Farmhouse takes the supernatural elements way over the top. Prior events don't just seem confusing because they reflected somebody's confused dreamscapes, but because they were really happening to the characters - just not on our plane of existence. That moves the device too far in the direction of cornball pulp, all the way to the point where we want to groan at the ending and call it a cop-out rather than to take pleasure in its cleverness. Indeed, most people would probably call this film's big revelations silly rather than poignant, especially when the clarifications are delivered by people in grade-B Halloween costumes.

Bottom line: a good enough film to get me to watch all the way to the end to get the explanation, but not good enough to leave me satisfied by it.

Kelly Hu did a dimly lit topless scene.

 

The Proposal

June 2009

This Sandra Bullock film will not come out until mid-summer, but it's fun to look at some Hollywood shenanigans once in a while. The standard sized trailer (DVD size, 480 lines) has a PG-13 nude scene from Sandra Bullock, in which her breasts are only covered by her arm and hand, and her pubic area is only covered by a washcloth, thus revealing her to be almost naked.

Film clip here, capture to the right.

That's actually pretty sexy.

However, the HD trailer (1080p, same as Blu-Ray) has a watered-down PG version of the same exact scene, in which Sandra has a towel wrapped around her as she leaves the bathroom. I can't speculate why the HD trailer would be tamer, other than to guess that Sandra's naked, wet, glistening body is just too spectacular for any mortal to view in HD without being blinded, or perhaps turned into a pillar of salt, or at least something salty-tasting, like Cheetos or semen.

Film clip here, capture to the right.