Quarantine (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 18, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez, Columbus Short, Jonathon Schaech
screenplay by John Erick Dowdle & Drew Dowdle, based on the motion picture [REC] by Jamie Balageuro & Luis A. Berdejo & Paco Plaza
directed by John Erick Dowdle

by Bryant Frazer Blood and saliva flow freely in this faux-documentary mash-up of the 2004 Dawn of the Dead and The Blair Witch Project as a group of humans–residents, cops, firefighters, and TV journalists–are locked inside a quarantined L.A. apartment building where a strange, virulent infection is passing from person to person, turning them into powerful, frothing killing machines who'd just as soon take a bite out of your neck as look at you. The film begins as spunky soft-news reporter Angela (Jennifer Carpenter, best-known from Showtime's "Dexter") is shadowing a group of firefighters on the overnight shift. The first fifteen minutes or so comprise a getting-to-know-you collection of playful firehouse moments between Angela and two of the more handsome devils on duty (Jay Hernandez and Johnathon Schaech) before the movie segues smoothly into an extended, single-location horror show characterized by very long takes and an elaborate, almost theatrical blocking that makes Quarantine feel somewhat akin to a filmed stage play. It's the sort of premise John Carpenter could have nailed in the 1980s.

The International (2009)

February 18, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O’Byrne
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer
directed by Tom Tykwer

Internationalby Walter Chaw There’s a shootout at the Guggenheim in the late-middle of The International that is the only real clue director Tom Tykwer had anything to do with the film. The rest of it, despite its title reminding of that Christopher Walken SNL skit about velvet smoking jackets and attempted rape, is just more of the same musty prestige-y Topical Picture™ that usually stars people like Sean Penn or Kevin Costner instead of, as The International does, Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Bland and blander, as it turns out. A rumpled Owen is Salinger, some kind of ill-defined crusader for justice with a badge from Interpol and a dark past from Syd Field, while Watts, as ADA Elly, who spends her first scene with a Boston/Newark accent and the rest with her standard-issue Yank. They’re tepid on the trail of a big giant bank that has a nefarious plan to control debt, which I confess is what I thought banks do. With the picture more interested in mashing its thumb against the “Relevant” button than in creating characters of interest, villains who frighten, and situations that involve, Tykwer, for his part, seems at a loss as to how to employ his agile camera and so trusts a premise that’s already feeling a little mothballed for the collapse and bailout of our banking system. It doesn’t matter that The International doesn’t know what to be from one minute to the next–what matters is that it’s an exact replica of The Interpreter in every way that counts and is, therefore, completely, immanently, blessedly forgettable.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) [2-Disc Deluxe Edition]; Wanted (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition]; Mamma Mia! [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

February 17, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Crime, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Musical, Romance, Thriller, UK, War, ZERO STARS

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Rob Cohen

WANTED
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones
directed by Timur Bekmambetov

MAMMA MIA!
ZERO STARS Image B Sound A Extras C-
starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA
directed by Phyllida Lloyd

by Walter Chaw Fast becoming the post-Welles RKO without a commensurate Val Lewton to grease the transition from art to filthy lucre, today's Universal Pictures finds itself a long, long way from Psycho with a bumper crop of genuinely bad movies reverse-engineered from past box-office champions. Each of them–The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Wanted, and Mamma Mia!–broke the golden 100-million dollar mark, since they were made with just the Benjamins in mind; sadly, only the criticism of flaccid attendance was likely to curb an endless march of identical pictures this year. For the simpleminded, the success of these films despite the near-universal condemnation of them by anyone with a working prefrontal lobe is proof positive that critics are out of touch with the common man. On the contrary, I'd offer that, asked whether he thought the atrocious The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (hereafter The Mummy 3) would be financially successful, the average critic would have said he'd be surprised if it didn't do a hundred-mil in its first three weeks of release. Out of touch is believing that something is good because it makes a lot of money.

Mirrors (2008) [Unrated] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Romania

ZERO STARS/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound A Extras D+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck
screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Ian Pugh You have to hand it to Alexandre Aja: Although he applies his marginal talent to different ends from within his genre of choice, he remains fairly consistent in his psychotic bursts of rage and complete obliviousness to the same. Whether he's making awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about nothing (his anti-lesbian screed High Tension) or–somehow worse–awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about something (his remake of The Hills Have Eyes and now Mirrors), his targets are clear. In his eyes, women and rural folk are by turns cowardly, evil, and idiotic, deserving of nothing but a horrific death. How anyone could lump his brand of bloodthirsty hatred in with Tarantino or Argento–both real artists who have grappled with their own desires and talents in the context of fiction and reality–is, frankly, beyond me. Hell, even Eli Roth, for all his puerile masturbation and inexplicable worship of the nasty Cannibal Holocaust, has questioned his own methods on occasion. When Aja rips off Amy Smart's mandible just seconds after she steps into a bathtub in Mirrors, there's no thrill, no shock, no sense of accountability–only the niggling, terrifying conjecture that this man would go out and hurt someone given half the chance.

Coraline (2009)

February 11, 2009Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

***½/****
screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the book by Neil Gaiman
directed by Henry Selick

Coralineby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Best known for The Nightmare Before Christmas (although a lot of people still think that was directed by Tim Burton), Henry Selick returns to the realm of creepy stop-motion animation with an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's slim volume Coraline. Despite the addition of a character and an ending altered for, one suspects, purposes of padding, the book's sense of creepiness and agile grasp of the long blues of the pre-pubescent girl alone in a house with inattentive parents remain pristine. The picture's message retains the British-nanny scold of "be thankful for what you have," though Dakota Fanning's vocalization of the title character leans in and out of a Northwest American youbetcha. It suggests that of the many demons Coraline fights, the most treacherous is the grey beast Populism–the one that demands Teri Hatcher voice Mother (and Other Mother) and Ian McShane upstairs Russian circus performer neighbour Bobinsky. But credit Selick for in essence attempting a Charlie Kaufman film for children with Jan Svankmajer imagery–his invention almost making one forget that it would've worked better in an older, more mysterious, more fraught place than rain-swept Oregon. It is, after all, a picture that illustrates the horror of perfect domesticity in favour of perfect dysfunction: here, the threats of Stepford Wifery far outweigh the threats of a dual-income family, house poor and scrabbling to get by. Viewed as a movie about class, the three levels of Coraline's pink house–the top rented to Bolinsky and his dancing mice, the bottom to Spink & Forcible (Jennifer Saunders/Dawn French)–can be seen as some social stratification of which Coraline's Mother does not suffer well.

Push (2009)

February 11, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by David Bourla
directed by Paul McGuigan

Pushby Walter Chaw Here's the thing: I like Paul McGuigan's movies. They're facile, it's true, eye candy–if, on occasion (Wicker Park), brilliant eye candy–and slick genre pieces that aren't really about anything in the sense that they aren't at all resonant in any meaningful way. He's done a Hitchcock (Wicker Park again) and a gangster flick (Gangster No. 1) and a costume epic (The Reckoning) and a caper (Lucky Number Slevin), and now with Push he's done his superhero flick; and not a one of them has something to say outside itself. They're post-modern in that sense, pure genre pieces reliant entirely on our conversance with the medium to provide their form and function. They're feature-length music videos–and I mean this as a compliment–that hum along with a kick-ass soundtrack, sexy imagery, and the ghost of a narrative to string it all together. They go down easy and there's not much of an aftertaste. That being said, Push doesn't benefit from familiarity: the craft is excellent, there are moments in it that harbour tremendous potential, but at the end of the day it's just another superhero movie that suffers from not having Bryan Singer's alienation issues or Christopher Nolan's existential identity crisis. What works in McGuigan's other work as a nice corrective to genres burdened by too much close scholarship washes out in Push as either too late or, more likely, too soon. In any case, what plagues the film is that it lacks much in the way of difference.

Groundhog Day (1993) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Time Travel

***½/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, Stephen Tobolowsky
screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis
directed by Harold Ramis

by Bill Chambers I've heard the argument that Groundhog Day fails because it proposes the redemption of world-class crank Bill Murray–but, boy, does redemption fight an uphill battle against him. I suspect the criticism is misdirected at the prolific cinéma du redemption in general. Maybe the finest film yet directed by Harold Ramis (who's unfortunately been stuck in a high-concept rut since–his own personal Groundhog Day), Groundhog Day turns the titular Americana celebration into an existential abyss for Phil Connors (Murray), a self-centred weatherman for a TV station he considers a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things.

He’s Just Not That Into You (2009)

February 5, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly
screenplay by Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein, based on the book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
directed by Ken Kwapis

Hesjustnotthatintoyouby Ian Pugh It starts off as a puerile game of "Six Degrees of Separation" and just goes downhill from there: Janine (Jennifer Connelly) is married to Ben (Bradley Cooper), who's attracted to Anna (Scarlett Johansson), who has an awkward relationship with Conor (Kevin Connolly), who went on a date with Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), who gets dating advice from Alex (Justin Long), who killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. There are about five more movie stars inhabiting He's Just Not That Into You, but one would be hard-pressed to recall their characters' names without consulting the IMDb, and that's pretty much all there is to them. (The combined talents of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston result in a force so monumentally bland that it's either not surprising or very surprising that no casting director ever thought of it before.) My colleague Walter Chaw once wrote that you'll never refer to the characters in Crash by anything other than their broadest generalities, which is exactly how this movie would have it, since it makes it that much easier to project yourself onto these pale stereotypes and reduce the gender divide to a showdown between insensitive assholes and hypersensitive maniacs. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and it's a small world after all. Too easy–too tempting–to call He's Just Not That Into You the romcom equivalent of Paul Haggis's Oscar-winning disaster, but it doesn't give you a reason to think otherwise.

Sundance ’09: Earth Days

February 3, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
***/****directed by Robert Stone by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure how I feel about the environmental movement--the subject of Robert Stone's documentary Earth Days. There are two inarguable, somewhat contradictory truths at work here: mankind has been destroying and continues to destroy the planet he is inhabiting; and various doomsday scenarios predicted by the environmental and population-control movements have not come to pass. Stone shows us environmental leaders from three decades ago predicting that the sky will fall in 30 years. I sort of wish he had found room for a clip from Richard Fleischer's great 1973 film Soylent…

Ghost Town (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 3, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni, Greg Kinnear, Billy Campbell
screenplay by David Koepp & John Kamps
directed by David Koepp

by Walter Chaw It's appropriate that at the end of these cycles of films portraying New York as a convalescence ward (25th Hour, In the Cut, Synecdoche, New York, Hellboy II), we have a movie like David Koepp's Ghost Town that literalizes our wounded Metropolis as a graveyard. The picture joins Hancock among the year's more pleasant surprises, both loaded as they are with small payloads packed with little, unexpected explosions of pathos and intimate observation. Koepp's hyphenate stints (Stir of Echoes, Secret Window) have tended towards the supernatural by way of private dislocations, his spooks the manifestation of things left too long in the underneath. No less so Ghost Town, wherein asshole dentist Pincus (Ricky Gervais) survives a near-death colonoscopy only to find himself capable of conversing with the dearly departed–at least, those still tied to loved ones incapable of letting them go. Groundwork for a clumsy bit of pretentious tripe, no question, but Koepp lightens his avowed affection for overreaching by striving no farther than romantic-comedy rewards, balancing them with an admirable amount of leash turned over to Gervais's acerbic improvisations. It's interesting that the traditionally charming characters are cast as irritants or cads, their social facility viewed as defense mechanisms. Suddenly, the dental X-rays that unspool beneath the opening credits make perfect sense; Ghost Town is partly about a suspicion of surfaces.

Sundance ’09: Moon

February 2, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Sundance, UK
****/****starring Sam Rockwellscreenplay by Nathan Parkerdirected by Duncan Jones by Alex Jackson Lunar miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries when an accident lands him in his spaceship's sickbay. Upon regaining consciousness, he meets a facsimile of himself and begins to suspect that his employer and his robot companion Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) have been keeping something from him. While Moon has some kind of basic dramatic conflict and is centred around an actual story instead of impressive visuals (though Sam Rockwell playing table tennis with himself is a hella…

Sundance ’09: Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire

February 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire***½/****starring Gabourey Sidibe, Paula Patton, Mo'Nique, Mariah Careyscreenplay by Damien Pauldirected by Lee Daniels by Alex Jackson The enormous hype surrounding Lee Daniels's Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire (hereafter Push) is both validating and a little confounding. Leaving Sundance with Grand Jury and Audience awards in the dramatic category, the film is an incredible mess. It takes a lot of risks, probably more than it needed to, and sometimes it falls flat on its face. The backlash has already begun to set in, natch--one commentator on the IMDb writes, "It's all…

Sundance ’09: Kimjongilia

January 28, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, South Korea, Sundance
The Flower of Kim Jong II**½/****directed by NC Heikin by Alex Jackson Kimjongilia takes its title from a hybrid red begonia created in honour of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's 46th birthday. It is said to symbolize wisdom, love, justice, and peace. Director NC Heikin juxtaposes propaganda footage romanticizing Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung's North Korea against interviews with former oppressed North Koreans who now reside in South Korea. As political filmmaking, it's pretty crude. There really aren't two sides to this issue: Kim Jong Il is a bad guy and there doesn't seem to…

Blue Streak (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

January 28, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Martin Lawrence, Luke Wilson, Dave Chappelle, William Forsythe
screenplay by Michael Berry & John Blumenthal and Steve Carpenter
directed by Les Mayfield

by Bryant Frazer Very early on in Blue Streak, as Miles Logan, the character portrayed by a fast-talking Martin Lawrence, co-opts Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech to describe his own civil rights movement upon getting released from the joint after serving time for his role in a botched jewel heist, it's clear the film is aiming for giddy irreverence. But slavish conformance to most conventions of the late-1990s PG-13 action farce keeps it from scaling the kind of heights that Lawrence's confident and wholly unpretentious comic presence occasionally suggests.

Sundance ’09: The Anarchist’s Wife

January 27, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Spain, Sundance, War
**/****starring María Valverde, Juan Diego Botto, Nina Hoss, Ivana Baqueroscreenplay by Marie Noëlledirected by Marie Noëlle & Peter Sehr by Alex Jackson Affirmation, if nothing else, that Paul Verhoeven's Blackbook has become the dominant model for World War II pictures, Marie Noëlle and Peter Sehr's Verhoeven-esque The Anarchist's Wife alienated me early on by folding in stock footage to depict both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. On some level, I suspect this is a cheapoid strategy enabling the filmmakers to reserve more of their budget for costumes and sets. Whatever its intention, it dehumanizes the characters,…

Sundance ’09: Everything Strange and New

January 26, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***½/****starring Jerry McDaniel, Beth Lisick, Luis Saguar, Rigo Chacon Jr.written and directed by Frazer Bradshaw by Alex Jackson The philosophical question at the centre of Frazer Bradshaw's incredible Everything Strange and New is as rudimentary and pragmatic as they come: how do you find happiness? And if you never find happiness but stumble upon contentment, is contentment going to be enough to sustain you for the rest of your days? The film begins with thirty-something carpenter Wayne (Jerry McDaniel) reflecting on the early years of his marriage to Reneé (Beth Lisick). She was in advertising and made more money than…

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher 

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President’s Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism–though more fascinatingly, it’s another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher’s trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-‘catchable’ foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it’s about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal–not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac’s two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi’s (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer’s partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Sundance ’09: Boy Interrupted

January 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***/****directed by Dana Perry by Alex Jackson In 2005, Dana and Hart Perry's 15-year-old son Evan fulfilled a life-long obsession with suicide by jumping out his bedroom window. Documentary filmmakers by profession, the Perrys worked through their grief by making this feature-length memorial to him. Exactly the sort of thing that seems immune to criticism, the film is nonetheless admirably free of sentimentality. When Perry includes footage of herself pregnant with Evan, she does so as a professional documentarian economically conveying the depth of a mother's attachment to her offspring. Given that one of Evan's dying wishes was to be…

Sundance ’09: The Killing Room

January 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sundance, Thriller
**/****starring Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall, Timothy Huttonscreenplay by Gus Krieger, Ann Peacockdirected by Jonathan Liebesman by Alex Jackson Jonathan Liebesman's The Killing Room would still have been pretty hokey five years ago, but in 2009, with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama, it's looking nothing short of obsolete. Genre filmmakers are going to have to face the fact that the Bush years are over. One of our new president's very first acts while in office was to shut down Guantanamo Bay; if torture porn wants to survive into the next decade, it's going to have to reinvent…

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 22, 2009Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman's Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic–karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that's unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.