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What's It About?: Sarah (Sarah Chalke) and her mother Rosemary (Markie Post) move from California to the small New England town of Pinehurst, where they move into a house where a witch was burned 300 years ago. The witch, with her last words, threatened to destroy her killers; something the present-day Descendants Club takes seriously. When people start dying, suspicion goes everywhere, and Sarah is the prime suspect as both the killer and a descendant of the witch. FAIR WARNING: Though I've tried to keep the major spoilers in a seperate, marked section at the end, a few small ones may slip in throughout the body of the review. Count yourself warned. Going through my archive of movie reviews, I plucked a couple out for this particular piece. Basically, they were raves, stating that the film was fun stuff and creepy, in the mold of movies like "I Know What You Did Last Summer". In fact, both the front and back of the movie box note this fact. I knew I should have placed more significance on that fact. I wouldn't go so far as to call it utter crap, but I'm not going to hand out anything in the 8-9 out of ten range either. It's a perfectly okay horror with some inconsistent writing and great amounts of TV sanitation. Your results may vary. First things first, let's look at the main character. Sarah. Sarah Chalke, the actor, playing Sarah, the new teen in town, assumed to be Sarah, the destroyed witch. Oh, that's just witty. The movie tries to paint her as a tortured soul; a displaced teenager in the middle of a very tough town to outsiders AND having what boils down to a witch-hunter's club after her. I'd be more sympathetic if the character weren't so needlessly sarcastic. She doesn't even make the attempt to be nice to a single person on the first day of school, and the writing around it all makes it all too obvious that we're supposed to be like, "Whoo! You go, girl!" Sorry, no. And if I'm wrong and she's supposed to be unlikable, then may I ask why? After all, she's the movie's main focus, and the screenplay invariably takes her side whenever any major issues come up. If we're set up to not agree with her, that makes a lot of the "poor Sarah" time rather hard to take. Heck, her mother even gets mad at her on-screen for her lip! I don't care if it's an old-fashioned attitude; I'd rather like the people whose eyes I'm looking through during a movie. There's more yet on top of that, but I'll save that for the Spoilers section. Next, the Descendants/witch-hunter's club. The build-up that the group as a whole gets is pretty strange. At first, they're just a bunch of jocks and popular people hanging out together, then they're sort of serious, then the movie flips-flops the whole rest of the way on "is it a witch-hunter's club or a clique?" However, I'll admit that tying together the descendants of the original witch hunt isn't a bad idea, and extra kudos for at least trying to take it seriously, rather than just showing them as insane Heavens-Gate-type cultists. Picking on the membership itself, we've got about two-and-a-half characters out of five. One character is a cheerleader who gets little screentime before dying halfway in. One's a mostly comic-relief jock who gets to a bullying Obvious Suspect before meeting his fate at the three-quarter mark. That leaves Kyra (pronoucned 'Keer-a', played by Soleil Moon Frye), Eric (Christian Campbell), and Debbie (Maggie Lawson). Kyra gets cited (however positively) for 'sleaziness' in other reviews of this movie, which I don't get. Maybe a bit, but not overly much. At any rate, Frye does a good job with the role and kept my interest more than the bitter Chalke, despite the 'nastiness'. Eric gets to be leader of the Club and Sarah's love interest (although he's with Kyra to start). Fortunately, for the most part, this is accomplished more by showing him to be level-headed, competent, and strong-moraled rather than just on virtue of having the most screentime. Debbie gets short shift for most of the movie, mostly being reduced to the 'pretty cheerleader' stereotype, but she gets slightly more at the end. Too little, too late, but it at least saves her from being a walking mannequin type of role. Charlie (Ben Foster) is the main one I had gripe with after Sarah. His character and motivation swing around like a drunk trying to park a backhoe, and it doesn't help us very much. At first, he's the school nerd who help runs a vaguely Eastern bookstore, then he gets treated as a homicide target after nearly burning himself up (don't ask me, I just report it), then he's suddenly a sixth Descendant out of nowhere. His character arc is muddled and often forced, and while Foster can often get us to identify with him, the plot writhings throw you right back out. And that's not counting the final dealings with him... Also, there's a creepy history teacher hanging around, but he's what you'd call a red herring; in other words, he's non-essential to the plot. Well, unless you could 'looking like a small-time Sean Connery' as essential. So, what is it about this movie that irks me? First of all, the obvious TV presentation. Most of the scene transitions are obvious places to put a commercial, all the deaths are presented off-screen (and badly done; you wouldn't know most of the people were actually dead until someone brought it up in dialouge), the most violent scene in the film goes first (to hook people that are channel-surfing) and one scene of smoking is the worst we get from a clique of teenagers in a horror film, despite the usual genre standards on nudity and profanity. Not that they're essential; just saying. Oh, and the titles are plain text superimposed on the first few seconds. And, annoyingly, there's no credits linking character name to actor. Second of all, the movie's too desperate to point fingers. Everyone gets fingered as a suspect, no matter how implausible it would be given the actual outcome. Yeah, all horror movies give all of the cast turns as suspects, but here it just reeks of false scares. In particular, Kyra gets suspected at one point because her boyfriend was stolen. Uh-huh. Number one, that's a weak excuse to go after the whole group. Number two, the killer stands around six-foot and is extremely agile. Kyra is around five-foot-two and, given that she'd have to be on stilts to hit that height, probably wouldn't be able to do things like wrestle Eric (which the killer does at one point during the movie) or run that fast. And at least Eric, having seen the killer, could figure that out. If there was more thought behind the accusations, the writers could have found ways around those obvious holes, but no one paid attention. Thus, the movie makes you go "huh?" once in a while because you're trying to figure out why it's going there. Third, it looks too much like "I Know What You Did Last Summer", or other horror blockbusters for that matter. Towards the beginning, Sarah gets a phone message (from an unconnected phone) saying, "I've been waiting for you". The killer ends up with the aforementioned phrase as his catchphrase. The killer is dressed in a black robe, has a face mask, and uses either a knife or a set of claws. Heck, adjust the timing of IKWYDLS from one year to 300, and you've got the same basic plot in "wrongly murdered peasent goes after killers". Jeez, that's original. Give me all you want about basing it on the same book and it being the same writer ("Gallows Hill" by Lois Duncan, the inspiration for IKWYDLS)...this is just lazy, and is a little too similar to account for it with "same genre". Lastly, the ending sucks. Hard. Sarah is tied up for burning as a witch, for no apparent reason other than hysteria. Sarah starts naming suspects for the real murderer, then TAKES IT BACK EVERY TIME! Heck, she doesn't even bother to give a reason for Kyra, she just names her, lets everyone else turn on her, then says, "No, it's not her!" What?! The real killer then shows up, eventually gets taken down (by Sarah, even though the three others were previously fighting him AT THE SAME TIME), and then it's unmasking time. Charlie is unmasked as the killer, with the motive that he lied about his ancestry, and that his mother was run out of town for being unwed and teenaged. Benefit of the doubt, I guess, although SOME set-up would have been appreciated, given that the movie never says a single thing about it. The gang buys it, because the records only say that there's five Descendants, and with Charile, that's six. However, the very end consists of Sarah giving a speech about getting revenge, lying about the number of Descendants, and stating "two down, four to go". Bullshit. I don't know how the hell that's supposed to tie together. Did Charlie take the fall (for two homicides!) to protect her secret, knowing he could get killed along with the rest and getting nothing out of it? Did Sarah possess or talk Charlie into doing the killings, all the while maintaining innocence? As cool as that last point sounds, the writers don't even hint at that, and there's no way I'm giving the writers point for something they didn't even think of. However, it all boils down to the writers DESTROYING their resolution for the sake of a possible sequel, and it doesn't work in any way. Nice try, but no. So in the end, we have a somewhat intriguing premise stuffed into a TV movie with one of the worst wrap-up endings in years. Maybe seeing things through the eyes of the Descendants Club would have helped, and maybe just sticking with dissention in the ranks would have helped even more. Still, you can "what-if" all you want and it won't change what's done. This movie has a good one stuck inside it, but Sarah and the ending keep it jammed down. It works out to average with a side of annoying. More than you'd think from a TV-horror movie, but not too much more. - Jimmy Vibes |