Friday, December 6, 2013

Jason goes to Holehead--Day 4

Okay, I'm falling too far behind on my blogging. Stupid...employment.

Last Monday started with GHOSTLIGHT. So...a guy wins a radio contest with a $50,000 prize. All he has to do is spend one night in an old theater that's the site of a famous murder 80 years ago. Despite that kinda cheesy sounding setup, I was willing to give it a chance. There's a domestic drama with he and his wife obviously trying to get over some past trauma (no spoilers, but I think it was supposed to be a surprise. It isn't.) The owner of the theater is appropriately eerie looking/acting. The acting is...not great, but good enough for Holehead standards. Ah hell, I'll jump right to what ruined it completely--the music. We start with a dream sequence of a woman...I guess you could call it "singing" because that's what she's trying to do. But it doesn't end there. The soundtrack in general is badly overdone with creepy music, or stingers to tell you when to be frightened. I like to be generous and believe if the soundtrack weren't so over-the-top bad and insulting, there might be a watchable movie in there (some of the audience wasn't so charitable.) As it is, I left the theater with one question--has director Jeff Ferrell ever...heard...music?

Then the late show at least had a solid musical footing. DISCOPATH is the story of a man with a bit of a mental problem. Normally Duane is just kind of a socially awkward loser. But when he hears disco music, he freaks out and kills people (hence the title.) This stems from an old childhood trauma that is about as silly as 'Disco killed my father!' And that's the thing about the movie--it's pretty silly, with amazing cheesy clunker lines like, "Calm down! Your friend is dead!" that had the audience laughing pretty hard. But this isn't really a movie that takes itself seriously, and even the dumbest moments had a sort of cheesy 70s exploitation vibe to it that made me willing to roll with it and have a good time. Plus (without giving anything away) the ending was pretty damn cool, and leaves it open for a sequel.

Total Running Time: 171 minutes
My Total Minutes: 344,055

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