Adam’s Crawl Space: Hollow Man 2

First off…Holy shit.  Ok.

The original Hollow Man was actually somewhat interesting.  It was Paul Verhoeven’s take on the Invisible Man, and featured Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Caine leading a team of scientists in researching invisibility.  Caine decides to use himself as the test subject because he’s an arrogant prick and ends up slowly going nuts and tries to rape and kill everything.  The premise was cool but the execution wasn’t so hot.  Though extremely flawed, it’s a guilty pleasure of mine and if it’s on television, I’ll catch myself watching it a little too long.  The tiny shred of rapport that Hollowman had built with the audience is now officially gone.  I have seen the sequel, Hollowman 2:  Hollower Man and after 4 attempts to finish this festering pile of hot garbage, I’m left feeling abused and like I got a good invisible rogering myself.

Hollow Man 2:  I Ain’t No Holla Back Man is about as bad as it gets when it comes to direct-to-video sequels.  10 minutes into the movie, I was squirming and it had nothing to do with the man who just had his neck sliced open with a cell phone.  This feeling was purely based on the fear creeping into me, the fear that this movie was going to feel a lot more like three hours as opposed to one and a half.   This movie stared me down, opened up my soul and demanded to know just who I was and what the fuck I was made of.   It dared me.  It dared me to turn it off, and I did.   While in the fetal position I questioned my ability to finish it, and wept while thinking of the future rivers of shit I’d be wading across for the sake of the Crawl Space, and for you.  But I picked my sorry ass up off of the floor and I stared right back at Hollowman 2.  I stared right into the glowing eyes of this demon and challenged it to finish ME.

So anyways, enough of that shit.  I fucking won.  I’m alive and in case you’re not following me at this point, this movie sucks.   Surprise!  Oh, right, I’m sure you’d probably like a plot rundown.  Here goes:  The invisibility program that was abandoned after Sebastian Caine got all oogy and rapey was resuscitated. It was tested on soldiers; one of them was Christian Slater’s character, Michael Griffin.  Of course the ultimate goal here was to use these men as weapons.  The subjects didn’t cope with the invisibility well and their organs would turn into goop or something along those lines if they weren’t given the buffer.  Well, they never gave Griffin this buffer substance, intentionally, and now he’s gone rogue in order to obtain it.  An ex-employee of this program knows how to get what Griffin wants, I forget her name.  It doesn’t matter- fuck her and fuck her ridiculously long neck.  Seriously there’s a scene that is shot from an angle that makes her already freakishly long neck look like a god damn giraffe.  It’s actually pretty amazing.   Griffin is also having a lot of fun killing shit along the way.

At no point was this movie suspenseful or engaging in any way.  B grade flicks like this are absolutely dependent on the performances of the actors; it has to be fun and tongue in cheek really.  None of that is here, it’s played completely straight and aside from the boring script, the performances across the board are all painfully fucking dull.  Dull is being extremely nice.  The most entertaining performance in the movie was that of a homeless guy who was onscreen for less than a minute.  Who the fuck thought that Peter Facinelli would make a serious detective?  This is Mike Dexter from Can’t Hardly Wait, people.  Casting Christian Slater as the invisible crazy soldier was pretty genius though and I took it as a peace offering.  I didn’t have to see him for almost the entire running time of the movie, except for maybe 5 minutes, tops.  No one needs more Christian Slater, ever.

So was there anything I liked about the movie?  No.  A couple of things made me chuckle slightly, but overall not a fucking chance.  The first chuckle worthy scene would be in the beginning with the guy getting his throat cut with the guts of a cell phone.  That was ok.  There’s also a scene with Slater, invisible, running through a sidewalk full of pedestrians knocking them around like human dominos.  It was so awful and silly I couldn’t help but laugh but I had to make sure it was a genuine laugh because the man behind me with the gun to my head knew the difference.  Seriously though, there really isn’t anything to like here.  As a straight up stalk and slash movie, it fails miserably.  The gore is extremely light and is mostly handled off-screen; a complete copout.  The special effects are really nonexistent until the end, and even then they either had a five dollar budget or there have been no advances in CGI in the past 10 years.  There are boobs in the first 10 minutes but it’s brief and no breasts are seen again.  If a movie ever needed boobs it was this one.

The verdict on Hollow Man 2:  Hollowed Hollowers of Hollowing Hollow, is this:  FUCK.  That’s right, the final word is just that, FUCK.  See you next week.  Fuck.

Welcome readers, to Adam’s Crawl Space’  Now, exactly what the title of this column means, I’d prefer to leave open to interpretation.  The image that comes to mind personally is that of me, huddled in my dark, creepy “crawl space” if you will (me in my bedroom and a laptop) and watching things that are artistically questionable.  Basically shit that you would never expect me to watch and review, I’m going to do.  It won’t all be Olsen twins movies (although those are definitely coming) but it will as I said, be films that shouldn’t necessarily be called “films.”

Recent posts by Adam

• The Other Guys - August 10th, 2010
• Trailer: Jackass 3D - August 6th, 2010
• Dinner For Schmucks - August 3rd, 2010
• The Avengers Have Assembled - July 25th, 2010
• Trailer: Dexter Season 5 - July 24th, 2010

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