Sleeper Cell: Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer (2007)

Jun 252010

Welcome to installment number 2 of the movies you shouldn’t at all feel bad you missed. This week’s straight to DVD feature had a 2.5 million dollar budget and debuted to mixed reviews at the Sitges Film Festival in Barcelona. But, unlike last week’s fare, John Knautz’s Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer at least had a cover feature on a major movie magazine.

Outside of beautiful women and German Shepherd puppies, a good horror movie starring a rubber monster is probably the greatest thing in the world. I’m all for technological advances in movie-making. Despite the money-grubbing studio execs and shameless rises in ticket prices, I’m totally loving this whole 3-D thing. It’s fun! And I love James Cameron for bringing computer generated characters into their own with The Abyss and Terminator 2. Even though they look fakey, they were a giant leap forward. The sprite program used in Independence Day for the climactic aerial battle scene is incredible. And even though Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ranks high on my mental list of the¬†Worst Movies of All Time, the character generating program “Massive” developed by the WETA workshop is mind-blowing. But, I still grew up in the 80s, and as I’m slowly, but surely, becoming an old man, I still love a guy in a costume tripping over props.

Ed Wood movies are terrible, but can you even begin to imagine how coma-inducingly awful they would’ve been with stop motion animated squid arms matted onto the live actors? Even the motor-less rubber octopus (stolen from the Republic Studios back lot) used in Bride of the Monster was miles better than the sharks in Deep Blue Sea. There’s just something better about the thing actually¬†being there. The scariest movie monster I ever ever saw growing up was a rubber monster – in the hallway in between worlds in 1987′s Hellraiser.

Bride of the Monster

Rewatching Clive Barker’s movie now, the trans-dimensional hallway scene is pretty damn goofy, and nowhere near as frightening as, say, a decent episode of “Ghost Adventures” (only on the Travel Channel), but as a 6 year old, ready to believe, it scared the living Christ out of me, and no doubt has something to do with my current irrational fear of long hallways (like the service hallways in shopping malls or, say, the 15 foot corridor right outside my old bedroom in my childhood home).

Top 5 Rubber Monsters (The Boring Non-Haiku, At-Least-I-Put-In-A-Picture Edition)
5 – Rodan

4 – The Ghoulies

3 – Jabba the Hut

2 – Godzilla

1 – The Spacing Guild Navigator!
¬†
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I think there was a movie or something I was supposed to be talking about…

So when Jack is little, he’s out camping with his family, and a monster attacks in the night, eating them all. As you’d expect, Jack grows up with no one believing his story. Thus, grown Jack (You may remember Trevor Matthews from such films as Moment of Truth and Teen Massacre. Yeah?) doubts his own sanity. Related to his incredible loss and self-doubt, not to mention his dead end plumbing job, is an untrollable rage he feels whenever threatened. And from square one, we can see where this is going. The only question in a b-grade horror movie is, “Can it deliver the goods?” To help answer this question, we call upon the incredibly successful, classically trained superstar actor, Robert Englund (star of horror standards The Mangler, Eaten Alive and the immortal original hit mini-series V). Can I get an amen?

Englund is Professor Crowley, teaching chemistry or somethinng to night school miscreants. Jack is taking his class in an effort to impress his whiny, shrill¬†girlfriend (Rachel Skarsten, “Birds of Prey,” American Pie Presents Beta House). I know. It’s complicated. Try to keep up. Crowley has a plumbing problem; Jack offers help; plubming problem is actually an ancient evil in Crowley’s front yard (what else?); in a daze, Crowley digs it up; …well, the next is so awesome, it’s unfair to just make it a semi-colon:

The “evil” overtakes Crowley in one of the greatest screen body-invasions I have ever¬†… no exaggeration here …
ever¬†seen.

And really, one of the joys of these kinds of movies is the acting. I know it’s bad. But it’s not really any worse than a few of this past year’s Oscar nominees. And really, we don’t¬†want good acting. Good acting is great for Jaws and Silence of the Lambs, but doesn’t really belong in b-movies. We really just want something as good as we imagined ourselves when playing pretend in the backyard when we were 8 with a Frisbee strapped to our backs by shoelace arm straps¬†representing our very own Ghostbuster Proton Pack. Ok, maybe that was only me. But, for the glory of the horror/comedy to work, none of the actors can seriously look frightened or like they were in any¬†actual danger. It wouldn’t work.¬†

Go Bruce, Go!

And this really does work. The fake-danger scenario comes from actor/director relationship. And for my money, no one does it better than Sam Raimi. Of course. Army of Darkness is the perfect horror/comedy. The interesting thing about Raimi’s movies is that his actors¬†do genuinely look frightened.

What makes it silly is Raimi’s over-the-topping the hell out of the scenes with talking puppet skeletons or the like, along with playful music to walk the tight-rope. The relationship in Jack Brooks is much more co-dependent, with the actors pulling stupid faces and playing to the ridiculous. There’s not much better than seeing Robert Englund run head-long into a wooden door while wearing shark-eye contacts. It’s great slapstick. And here’s hoping Raimi watched this and remembered what made him so great in the Evil Dead trilogy and Darkman and also realized how horribly flat Drag Me to Hell felt in comparison (see Adam’s eloquent dissenting opinion here).

The Jack Brooks model of horror movie-making follows pretty closely the model put forth by Sam Raimi in Army of Darkness. Jack has a dead-end job and a girl that can’t stop being attacked by horrible monsters. And while the genius and quick wit of Ivan and Sam Raimi’s script is missing from Jack Brooks, the movie mechanics are all there to give¬†85 pretty awesome minutes of knock-down, drag-out, b-movie ass-kicking. So screw my¬†history lesson¬†on the long and storied tradition of b-horror movies set¬†on high school campuses. And forget the short notes on whatever random tangent I think might be pertinent to the plot, like the success to failure ratios of anger management classes. This movie is about a dude who has to kill stuff or die. Now if you can get with that, you’re exactly the kind of person who will shell out the clams to snatch this DVD up from the 5 dollar bin at your local grocery store. And if you’re not? A peace offering.