By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs. The Rest: Final Destination 5; A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy
Final Destination 5 (Also Blu-ray/DVD/ 3D/ UV Combo) (Two Stars)
U.S.: Steven Quale, 2011 (Warner Bros.)
In Final Destination 5, as in the other Final Destinations, blood is the money shot. The actors, or their characters, are expendable (again), and a guy named Bludworth, or his boss Destiny, is breaking up that old gang of mine (again).
Such a deal. For only the price of a DVD rental or buy, you get to see, in this movie, a half dozen or so attractive, personable young actors and actresses being hideously killed in imaginative ways. People are bashed to death, sliced in two, chased with cleavers, lasered to death, blown out of planes and dropped off a disintegrating suspension bridge — and each time, the sequence is carefully planned and meticulously executed. There’s no denying that Final 5, directed by Steven Quale, James Cameron’s second unit guy on Avatar, is well-made, and it may well be the best of this tawdry series, as some say, though I haven’t seen enough of them to judge.
As in the previous four entries, some character experiences a premonition of death (usually in a plane or vehicle about to crash, but here on a suspension bridge about to collapse). They wake up to avert the catastrophe, and help others escape — but then they all find themselves the targets of a malicious destiny (represented here as previously, by actor Tony “Candyman“ Todd playing a coroner named Bludworth). Death apparently feels it was robbed, and the survivors must be rubbed out in a series in a series of seemingly spontaneous “accidents.” There’s apparently one new wrinkle: You can avoid death a second time if you kill somebody to take your place.)
That’s the main appeal and shtick of the movie: those ingeniously staged accidents that look like Rube Goldberg inventions in reverse, or like the torture murders of Saw, rescripted by a more finicky maniac. So we get painstakingly staged scenes of a beautiful young gymnast jumping on a gym-horse, on which a screw has been dropped (one of the high points); a lecherous schmoo named Isaac (P.J. Byrne) going for an oriental massage that turns nasty; and (the low point), the eye-opening fate of bespectacled, leggy Olivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), who has laser corrective eye surgery, during which the ophthalmologist incredibly walks off while the laser is running.
Though Quale shows some flashy technical expertise in his bloody set-pieces, it gave me no pleasure to watch them. Nor did I feel any suspense, because according to the rules of the Final Destination game, the main characters (those who were spared in one accident) have to die, eventually. You know they’re goners almost from the moment you first see them, or at least if you’ve ever seen another Final Destination. Nor is there any explanation of why there’s no ongoing police investigation into this mysteriously recurring phenomenon, or why this stuff keeps happening — other than the fact that it’s time for another sequel.
It didn’t really help that, that the F.D.5 death set-pieces were done with such obvious technical skill, edited so crisply, shot so well. I guess I would have liked the movie a little more if the non-carnage dramatic scenes in between the slaughter weren’t so vapidly written and indifferently acted. But how can you blame the writer, just churning out the bloody business as usual? How can you blame the director, who was engaged to stage torture with pizzazz? How can you blame the actors — who were hired to get ripped apart?
The big question: Why do so many teenagers and twenty-somethings love to see movies, even badly made movies, where a bunch of people — all young, all attractive, except for an occasional goofball — are slashed, bashed and bloodily massacred one by screaming one, by either a psycho serial killer, a fiendish monster or zombie, or here, by the not-so-fickle finger of fate? I just don’t know. But believe me, a lot of Hollywood is looking for the formula — and their patron saint may be a maniac swinging a marketing hook.
Extras on Blu-ray: Alternate Death Scenes; Visual Effects of Death; Featurette Circle of Death, Your Final Destination.
A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (One Star)
U.S.: Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck, 2011
The new Jason Sudeikis sex comedy A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is pretty much a bad, newfangled mess. Try as they might, writer-directors Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck can’t make this cinematic crap-ball float in the toilet bowl, even with a fairly funny or attractive cast, including Sudeikis as Eric, the wing man or orgy master, Lake Bell, Tyler Labine, Michelle Borth, Nick Kroll, Lindsay Sloane, Martin Starr and Angela Sarafyan as the eight main orgiasts, and Lucy Punch, Will Forte and Leslie Bibb among the onlookers, with Bibb the movie’s main romantic interest for Eric. The filmmakers try to wake us up with partial nudity, (supposedly) on screen sex, (supposedly) on screen swing clubs, little old ladies with dildos (Lin Shaye) and (supposedly) on-screen orgies. But it still sinks and stinks, unstoppably.
For some, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy will be offensively crude and lewd; for others it’ll just be offensively unfunny. It’s an incredibly dumb, annoying movie that‘s close to a total waste of time. (Close? I’m too kind.) Even though Gregory and Huyck were longtime gagmeisters for David Letterman and “The Larry Sanders Show” and “King of the Hill” and others, they seem to have forgotten how to tell a joke, or at least how not to keep telling the same joke. Their characters, supposedly college-educated yuppies in their late 20s or early 30s, talk about almost nothing but sex, seem to be interested in almost nothing but sex. (Not necessarily unrealistic, but monotonous.) “What’s up with all the dildos?” Bibb‘s Kelly asks when she sees the group, and that might serve as the movie’s alternate title.
Sudeikis, smirking away, plays the Bradley Cooper character, Eric, who’s been holding big wild parties at his father’s place in the Hamptons for years, bacchanals which always include the core group up above — including the noisy hoe-down we see at the beginning, which features lawnmower races, farmer garb and, on the hors d’oeuvres table, a bean dip bowl in the shape of a toilet. (That’s about the level of the humor throughout.)
But all things must pass, and that includes bad movies. Faced with the imminent sale of the summer place by his dad (Don Johnson, no less), Eric decides that their last really special party will be a private get-together of the core group, his eight best friends, and they’ll have a good old fashioned orgy — something the gang has never experienced because they missed the ‘60s and ‘70s and then got scared off during the AIDS era (which is still going on, of course). The theme of the orgy will be The Kama Sutra — whose erotic illustrations will provide the game plan. The result is mechanically written, sloppily directed, indifferently acted, and full of lousy photography that you can barely see when it’s dark, and don’t want to see when it’s light.
Amazingly all eight of them finally agree: nervous therapist Alison (Bell), uptight lawyer Adam (Kroll), Sue (Forth) who has a big crush on Eric, self-conscious Laura (Sloane), frustrated rocker Duquez (Starr) and his lady Willow (Sarafyan) and the guy who’s most into the orgy, Eric’s’ pudgy, heavy-smirking near constant sidekick, Mike McCrudden (Labine). There are also two more of Eric’s special buddies: newlyweds Glenn and Kate (Forte and Punch), who were politely not invited to the orgy, because they just got married, and they’re already parents. (Glenn and Kate do show up and, in the movie‘s most idiotic sight gag, they’re wearing Native American garb and war bonnets because they misunderstood Eric’s admonition that, in honor of the Kama Sutra, everyone should dress as Indians.)
I realize movies like this are not exactly supposed to be plausible. But A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is one bacchanal that makes you feel bad just walking out of the theatre.
