DEAD BEFORE DAWN 3D - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Dreadful Canadian Horror-Comedy Besmirches Maple Leaf. This Niagara Integrated Film Festival (NIFF 2014) offering is best reserved for undiscriminating audiences.

LOWEST FILM CORNER RATING:

Delivered to films too bad to garner one-star (*).

Said films would normally then receive the "One Pubic Hair" rating, however, not to besmirch the fine pubic hair recipient Sharknado by lumping it in (so to speak) with genuine turds, I was forced to create a critical rating even lower for Ridley Scott's abominable The Counsellor.

The Rating is, quite simply and evocatively:

"TURD DISCOVERED BEHIND
HARRY'S CHAR BROIL AND DINING LOUNGE".

As pictured to the left, this an actual turd found by myself and Project Grizzly filmmaker Peter Lynch in the illustrious Parkdale parking lot behind Harry's wherein the two of us had just dined with writer Geoff Pevere.

Recipients of this hallowed rating since Scott's atrocity have been the wretched 2014 remake of Endless Love, the putrid Veronica Mars movie and the horrendous 2014 Godzilla.

Now, please feel free to add:

Dead Before Dawn 3D to the aforementioned list of recipients of this most appalling critical rating which will, one hopes, seal the work's fate in some manner of infamy.

How did I get into this movie?
Oh yeah, some Canadian paid me.
Gimme a Blue, eh?

Dead Before Dawn 3D (2013) Dir. April Mullen
"TURD DISCOVERED BEHIND HARRY'S CHAR BROIL & DINING LOUNGE"
Starring: Devon Bostick, Christopher Lloyd
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Some movies are so pathetic it feels like shooting dead fish in a barrel to bother reviewing them. Normally, Dead Before Dawn 3D would be such a picture as it's certainly a dead enough fish and the barrel it floats in reeks of rotting malodorous offals, but its filmmakers have ambitiously tricked the normally appealing Devon Bostick into taking the lead role, plopped the bankable genre icon Christopher Lloyd into a decent-sized cameo and bothered to shoot the film in stereoscopic 3-D. Chances are good that plenty of folks will be conned into laying out cold, hard cash to see this fetid tin o' tuna. This, then, requires further investigation.

The horrendously stupid and juvenile screenplay by Tim Doiron makes the fatal error of dialling the tone of humour down to the level of some half-witted inbred or worse, most suburban tweener-teener mall rats of, shall we say dubious breeding and/or rearing and in so doing, serves up some of the dumbest dialogue and hopelessly unfunny gags imaginable.

The plot, such as it is, involves teenager Bostick as a geeky lad living amongst the leafy greens of Niagara wine country who agrees to help out goofy grandpa Christopher Lloyd by holding down the fort at the wild-eyed old coot's occult shop. (Isn't that convenient?) Upon departing, Lloyd, on his way to pick up an award from an Occult Society, warns Bostick to never touch a mysterious urn.

Well, obviously he does.

Bostick, you see, is hung up on a teen babe played by Martha McIsaac who turns out to be an occult buff (conveniently) and when she and a bunch of other teens enter the store, the urn is retrieved for the babe's edification and breaks. Not only does the urn break, but the other kids begin joking about its occult properties and inadvertently conjure up one mega-curse wherein townspeople begin turning into combo-zombies-demons. As hell breaks loose, it's up to Bostick to break the curse.

Director April Mullen camera-jockeys the proceedings with near-borderline competence, but the movie is jam-packed with dreadful digital effects and sub-par makeup design work and the whole mess is finally so low-budget that the setting itself seems ludicrously under-populated. Not that the godawful script helps matters, but Mullens's directorial "touch" is to play everything for overwrought hilarity and/or horror - so much so, that the movie begins to plod with the kind of dullness one gets when a picture's frantic qualities just plain wear you down.

Apparently, Dead Before Dawn is the first stereoscopic 3-D film shot in its entirety by a female director and also purports to be the first-ever stereoscopic 3-D film made as a full-fledged all-Canadian feature in Canuckland. Both attributes mean little since the overall compositions of the shots are so dull that the depth of 3-D means zilch and the few comin-at-ya' f/X stink to high heaven. Also, Canada has actually generated a genuinely fine all-Canuck 3-D feature film. It might not be full-on back-to-back 3-D, but it was actually shot ON FILM as opposed to the much inferior red-cam digital. Oh, and it was made over 50-years-ago in Toronto. Directed by Julian Roffman (I'll grant you, he's not a female), his 1961 3=D effort The Mask is a genuinely cool movie and a far more historic contribution to both the history of genre films and, of course, Canadian film history.

Dead Before Dawn 3-D is one of those horrid Canadian films that wants us to applaud it because the movie was simply made and because its filmmaker chose to attack it - seemingly - to get into the record books, rather than to generate a good movie. Granted the picture was cobbled together to make money, but that's hardly an achievement when there are a lot of dreadful movies that make far more money than this will ever make and frankly, aren't quite as mind-numbingly mediocre.

Worse yet, is that the film seems genuinely aimed at a youth audience, but it dumbs itself down, treating them like morons. My own 13-year-old daughter Julia caught on to this while watching it with me. She occasionally reviews films at the Film Corner as my junior cub reporter (you can read some of Julia's reviews by clicking HERE), but after seeing Dead Before Dawn 3-D she yawned, then remarked, "I'm going to pass on writing about this, Dad. Life's too short."

Indeed it is.

Dead Before Dawn 3D plays at the Niagara Integrated Film Festival (NIFF 2014). For ticket info, click HERE.

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Decimation of Peter Jackson

Do any hobbits wish to clog dance?

The happy folk of the Shire need to kill a dragon, but will they? "By the big toe of Bilbo Baggins," you ask, "Will they?" Well, all I'm willing to say is it's going to take you 281 minutes to find out.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) 1 PUBIC HAIR

Dir. Peter Jackson
Starring: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I don't care how much money this or the other Hobbit movies make - suckers are born every minute - but I used to have something resembling admiration for Peter Jackson as a filmmaker. As if The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey wasn't bad enough, but part two of this dull, convoluted, interminable saga is beyond the pale. While it is thankfully bereft of the endless Hobbit clog dancing, mead guzzling and fiddle playing that permeated the first instalment of this folly, it now, sadly, has nothing going for it at all, save for dull roller coaster rides that we're forced to yawn our way through as there's little else to pay attention to.

Even worse, is that Jackson and his cohorts have gone out of their way to tamper with J.R.R. Tolkien's book in some unbelievably stupid ways. Now, let it be said, I have very little use for Tolkien, but "The Hobbit" was, at the very least, a relatively slender volume with an emphasis upon magic more than mayhem. However, this distended-stomach of a movie goes out of its way to concoct as many opportunities as possible to shoehorn in a ludicrous number of action and chase scenes to showcase the derring-do via the inexplicably ugly accelerated 48-frame-rate digital so that the usually crappy digital 3-D is even crappier.

Characters and events are concocted - not just for the aforementioned reasons - but to idiotically tie-in these new films with the Lord of the Rings trilogy so that watching all six back-to-back will yield a full epic a la the George Lucas Star Wars saga.

It's almost impossible to assess any aspect of this film properly since it, its predecessor and, no doubt, the final instalment have no real reason to exist in this idiotic form. Yes, the entire cast acquits themselves as best as one could hope for and there are design elements - mostly with the various monsters - that are in and of themselves kind of cool, but finally, all I can ask is, "For what?"

On a number of fronts, Jackson had already created a fine legacy for himself with virtually every film he's made, but so far, the woeful trilogy seems at best, little more than a cynically calculated cash grab and at worst, a pompous, misguided attempt to rewrite Tolkien so The Hobbit can flow more naturally into The Lord of the Rings. Chances are pretty good that if Tolkien had wanted to do so, he'd have bloody well done it.

What remains, finally, is little more than the image of a spluttering dunderhead jamming square pegs into round holes and getting millions of likeminded brain-bereft audiences to pay for it and cheer him on in the process.

"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" is playing everywhere.

BEYOND THE EDGE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Edmund Hillary Mt. Everest recreation ruined by 3-D.

Beyond The Edge (2013) **1/2
Dir. Leanne Pooley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There aren't many stories of sheer endurance for endurance's sake as awe-inspiring as Sir Edmund Hillary's legendary climb to the top of Mt. Everest in 1953. I wish I could say that Leanne Pooley's film, Beyond The Edge, is better than it is since it comes to us on the 60th anniversary of Sir Eddie's achievement.

The film - on one level is a fine coming-together of technical wizardry, exhaustive research and a very challenging approach to storytelling. Poole had seemingly unrestricted access to all manner of archival material - gorgeous 16mm colour footage, Alf Gregory's legendary 35mm stills and what seems like every audio interview with the participants that's ever been laid down to tape. This is all to the good. Adding to the mix is newly-shot footage in the Southern Alps that recreates key points of the expedition. Though I will confess to not being a big fan of recreations, I must concede that Poole does a fine job matching every aspect of the new stuff with all the archival material both narratively (very good) and visually (well, close but no cigar).

From a story standpoint, the movie will grip you in ways that many other movies could not have possibly achieved. Kudos to Poole's writing and direction on this front. Unfortunately, one is constantly taken out of the story by two things - the use of the abominable 3-D process for one, and the attempts to match the myriad of audio-visual materials in terms of the actual colour grading.

To the first point - 3-D seldom adds to the genuine enjoyment of a picture. The process is still flawed as it requires wearing uncomfortable glasses and worse, the glasses are polarized and darken EVERYTHING to distraction. Where this hurts the most, frankly, is in the 16mm motion picture and 35mm still footage - the colours of which are so heartbreakingly vibrant that in 3-D, they pale in comparison to what you know is there. Just try popping the glasses off periodically and you'll see precisely how egregious the process is. In fact, you can do this for pretty much ANY 3-D movie, but it hurts the most when utilized with real film footage from a time when colours were naturally more vibrant than what we're used to seeing now.

As well, some form of digital enhancement would have had to be employed to render these period images in 3-D and the images blown up (even when the original aspect ratio is maintained) feel horrendously compromised. For me, making "old" look "new" or "better" can often result in it looking far less stellar than it should.

To the overall colour timing, I'm even more disappointed as the attempts to match everything add another layer of muting which is continually disappointing. For me, I'd have been perfectly fine if the filmmaker did NOT try to match things in the colour grading and perhaps added some post-modernist layer to the proceedings for us to accept it. This, however, was NOT the intent. In terms of intent, I suspect it's state of the art - or, as state of the art as it's ever going to be.

Where I plan to give the film another chance is at home, on flat (not 3-D) Blu-Ray. I suspect for a whack-job like me, it will work beautifully. For everyone else, especially those who are more (wrongly and indiscriminately, I'm afraid) accepting of the 3-D process, they will no doubt not be bothered by this and hopefully can concentrate on the storytelling.

For me, the storytelling suffers.

"Beyond The Edge" is part of the TIFF DOCS series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 (#TIFF13) and you can order tickets directly for the TIFF website HERE.