Population 436

Population 436 (2006): Rockwell Falls, the town with the titular population number reminded me a bit of an old roach motel commercial, you can check in but you can’t check out. Jeremy Sisto plays a census taker who comes to town and finds out the population has been the same for hundreds of years. The town’s people are friendly but some are a bit off center and many are downright pixilated. The mayor is clearly hiding something and the town doctor seems unable to cope with ‘the fever’ which seems to strike regularly. If you’ve ever watched the old Twilight Zone you will find yourself in familiar territory. While not original, the movie does a reasonable job presenting its case for the town’s existence and its peculiarities. Sisto soon finds he is now considered a permanent resident and discovers what mechanism is used to keep population growth under control. The rest of the movie is about his attempts to leave town, avoid ‘the fever’ and the town doctor’s cure. The old saying ‘beauty is only skin deep’ sure applies to this town. The movie is rated R for: smiling lobotomy patients, brief nudity, a plethora of good ole boys, unhealthy festival queens, unhealthy light dimming, unhealthy health clinic, excessive voltage, excessive apple pies, and especially for the ‘modern’ hospital supporting the town.

The Fountain

The Fountain (2006): Beautifully filmed with lots of dreamy special effects, this appears to be a time travel movie spanning from the Spanish Inquisition to some sort of floating Zen Buddha like future. Loosely based on the fountain of youth legend, it substitutes a tree of youth in its stead. Now this introduces some wonder as to why the thing wasn’t titled ‘The Tree” unless the producers thought not enough people have heard about the tree of youth legend to come out and spend money on this movie. They probably spent so much on special effects they couldn’t afford a fancy fountain and found the supernatural tree in the props department back in the marked down reduced price section. I’d relate the story to you loyal readers but I can’t figure out what the herpies was going on. Apparently, some Spanish conquistadors stumbled into Incas, or Mayans, or Aztecs or other tribe and managed to get killed but one shows up in the future (now) trying to cure the same girl who played the Queen of Spain in the past sequence. Meanwhile, somewhere in the future, this same guy is in a glass ball floating around in the universe snipping bits off the tree and drinking a brew made with the bark. Then the tree sort of dies and the whole movie ends. I’m sorry; this one was way over the Tapehead’s head. While visually appealing, it lost traction in the logic category. The movie is rated PG-13 for: excessive floating, excessive bark chipping, excessive monkey healing, and for the massive influx of confusion generated during the film.

Hide and Creep

Hide and Creep (2004): This is sort of a southern fried zombie horror comedy. Shot near Birmingham, AL. by locals, this low budget zombie fest hits on many cylinders and captures our southern zeitgeist rather well. The movie opens with a naked guy in a tree and goes down hill from there. It seems aliens have abducted people and somehow learned to animate the dead. Don’t expect a lot of detail on how this all works just sit back and enjoy the zombies. You get standard zombies, well dressed zombies, red neck zombies, zombie clergy and even zombie strippers, what more could you ask for. And this is a real low budget affair so don’t expect your zombies to look like much more than the producers friends with white face paint and lots of eye shadow. There is a lot of good dialogue and some typical southern traditions to be lampooned. One favorite was the fellow watching the pre-game show to the big football game getting extremely irritated about the local news breaking in to explain his town is being invaded by zombies. In true southern tradition, football takes precedence over national disasters. And there is also a long Tarantino-esc soliloquy about the differences between coke and pepsi that could only happen in a movie about the South. Overall, its armed red necks to the rescue defeating red neck zombies with a short lived FBI agent thrown in to the mix. You could spend time watching a whole lot of worse movies than this surprising little low budget B movie from the Deep South. The only real flaw I could see was that all the zombies were rather young looking, what happened to all the dead old people? The movie is rated R for: naked male buns and naughty bits, topless zombie strippers, multiple head shots, swearing pastor, and especially for the naked gal falling from a flying saucer into a pool.

The Hamiltons

The Hamiltons (2006): There was an old Sesame Street song called ‘It Ain’t Easy Being Green” that would seem to apply to the Hamilton family as depicted in this movie. However, you need to substitute ‘a normal middle class family’ for ‘green’ to validate the comparison. You see, while the Hamiltons appear normal on the surface, they do have some rather unsavory family practices that make it hard for them to fit into suburbia forcing them to move around a lot. Told from the perspective of the high school age son, it turns out that their parents have died and his oldest brother is trying to keep the family together under some rather unusual circumstances. The post high school age twins are of little help, he being a semi-employed underachiever and his sister a Goth girl without much redeeming charm. They also have a younger brother who is locked up in the barn, never seen but growls a lot and appears to be very hungry.

The high school teen is having problems in school and clearly is not happy with the way his family behaves. This negative reinforcing behavior includes kidnapping people and hanging them from the rafters in the barn where they eventually disappear. Initially, you are not shown exactly what happens to these poor folks but you can tell ‘it ain’t normal’. The oldest son has meetings with a social worker trying to work out their problems and one is constantly wondering what the herpies is really going on. Suffice it to say; it turns out this is really a coming of age movie as the teen boy has tackled his puberty problems head on by the end of the movie. A low budget indie production, this movie, while not great, shows a lot of talent in looking at a new angle to an old horror genre. Recommended for fans of horror movies but normal folks should probably pass on this one. The movie is rated R for: brief breastulations, involuntary blood donations, massive hanging around, multiple elbows to the head, dead social workers, dead students and especially for letting the youngest son out of the box early.