THE FEAR
Well, yes, it is bad
It was only a matter of time. No movie can receive so much derision and fail to pique my curiosity.
Between Danny and Synthuser - and that's just two of this movie's detractors - one might be led to believe that The Fear is the most awful movie ever lensed. My expectations for this one were, well, unique - I've never before rented a movie that I fully expected to be one of the worst movies I'll ever see. It didn't help that there was a picture of a desiccated carcass on the back of the box which looks just like the same one on the back of Howling: New Moon Rising, which I might add didn't actually show up in that movie either. And the dummy-man on the cover looks like Frank Zagarino, the howlingly awful non-actor who starred in the dreadful Project: Shadowchaser as a killer android who wanted $50M for some reason and kept showing off his stomach. So I guess it was inevitable that I'd be a little, uh, underwhelmed by its badness.
Make no mistake, The Fear is a bad movie. But I've seen worse. A lot worse. I've seen worse in the last week.
A bunch of college students jaunt off to a woodsy cabin to do research into their deepest darkest fears. While they're there, they meet up with the researcher guy's uncle and his trophy girlfriend, not to mention Morty the big wooden dummy.
Now, I like dummy-horror just fine. I liked Magic, I loved Pin, and hey, Forrest Gump was pretty scary. I'd say that dummy- horror has a pretty good batting average so far. This movie, needless to say, brings that average down.
There's a central flaw here. We simply cannot be scared by all these people facing their deepest darkest fears unless we share them. A lot of movies have tried to pull this off, and every last one of them have failed. Watching other people scared by other people's fears is like watching them really get into country or rap music or something else you just don't care about. It's just lame. What's the point?
Speaking of rap music, this movie's loaded with rap music, which of course doesn't help. Also not helping is this white guy with dreadlocks who thinks he's black. He's obviously supposed to be comic relief. He fails, and fails badly. And he's got this chick that he introduces as his sister, and by the end of the movie, I had no idea what their relationship is at all.
Also of great annoyance is the fact that the uncle guy wears a Santa suit throughout most of the film, and there's this lame ending which I suppose is meant to be deep.
All this does add up to a bad movie, but it's not like this one doesn't have its scattered merits. Wes Craven pops up as a shrink, and he's actually pretty good. (he's actually better here than he was playing himself in New Nightmare, go figure) Whoever that guy was playing Morty the dummy convincingly came across as somebody who only stretches his legs about once every twenty years. And the movie does have a couple of foxy women, particularly superfox Heather Medway who would go on to star in that lame-o show "Viper". And if you don't blink, you get to see her topless. But remember, you can't blink.
Not reccommended to anybody but dummy-horror aficionados, and maybe the occasional Medway admirer.
I heard they've made a sequel. I dunno about most of you, but I'm pretty sure that that's Danny and Synthuser's deepest darkest fear.