Schlock Corridor: Day Six

SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: Fading Of The Cries

Netflix told me this was a film about a deadly warrior guiding a young woman home through a rural community under siege by demonic creatures, which made me think of those annoying escort missions from Resident Evil 4. Not the movie Afterlife, but the videogame that everybody seems to love. It was fun, I suppose, but I don't understand the intense rage from the video game fanboys who piss all over the movies for their awful storylines. The Resident Evil games, in terms of story, are hot garbage. They are some of the dumbest, most nonsensical games I've ever played. The movies are eerily like the games in that sense, so why can't the fans just embrace the horror and love these terrible motion pictures like the throngs of people who keep seeing these fucking things in theaters, ensuring that this cinematic series will just keep shambling along like the zombies that both sides of the Resident Evil franchise have seemingly forgotten about.

This has nothing to do with 2011's Fading Of The Cries, really, I just don't want to talk about the movie at all. Because it's terrible. The synopsis had me thinking of a story about a civilization overrun by monsters of all shapes and sizes in the wake of some supreme evil's rise to power, with communities banding together to hold back the tide of evil, isolated from each other in this brave new world of gods and monsters without the aid of such conveniences as internet access and electricity, living a simpler, more agrarian existence by day and lighting their fires to stave off the darkness every night. Perhaps our hero would be tasked with escorting a young woman who holds the key to defeating the demons once and for all to the relative provided by an order of warrior priests located in some isolated old monastery, with an army of drooling nightmares standing in their way that will stop at nothing to kill them both and feast on their entrails.

I don't know, maybe I was thinking too ambitious. Based on my insane hopes for The Dead Undead, I seem to be making a habit out of that. To be fair, Fading Of The Cries contains a few elements from the movie that unspooled in my head before I watched this shit heap, but that just bummed me out because nothing in this movie is executed properly.

The main plot follows Sarah, a petulant young woman who treats her caring mother like garbage for no discernible reason, stealing a bottle of hooch and her late uncle's necklace before heading out for a night on the town with her best friend, whose name I simply can't remember. Maybe two minutes after they meet up and start wandering around on the suspiciously empty streets of their unnamed community, a bunch of eyeless ghouls pop up and start chasing them both, quickly dispatching Sarah's friend with an explosion of digital gore so poorly rendered, I wondered if it was meant to be a joke.

The ghouls come after the panicking Sarah, accompanied by a cacophony of stock screams pulled from a low-rent sound library that you'll instantly recognize from a variety of films of all stripes. The most prominent of these screams was used in John Woo's 1996 masterpiece Broken Arrow, when the villainous henchman played by Howie Long plunges to his death from a train car. This scream. It's so jarring and out of place I started to convince myself that this movie was actually some kind of parody. And then an action movie cliché walked right out of the shadows in his long black coat, brandishing a katana, swinging wildly at the throngs of ravenous ghouls as they descended upon our hapless heroine.

What the fuck was I watching? I started laughing, because I assumed this was meant to be a punchline of some sort. Even the title, Fading Of The Cries, is so melodramatic and overwrought, there's no way this was supposed to be taken seriously, right? This had to be a low budget spoof of action/horror tropes, like the endless parade of lowest-common-denominator parodies spawned by the Scary Movie franchise. Nobody in the year 2011 could write a story like this and expect people to just take it at face value.

The mysterious swordsman is named Jacob, who I believe was played by a department store mannequin. I can't be sure his facial features were even real. They look like they were painted on by some surly intern holding a grudge against the director because he thought this project was going to be his big break until he stole a glance at the screenplay and saw the title Fading Of The Cries and had to fight the urge to leap into oncoming traffic right then and there, because he realized he'd been duped.

I can't recall ever seeing this so-called "actor" even move his mouth in time with his dialogue. I don't think he's real. IMDB assures me that his name is Jordan Matthews and he was discovered by the grandson of somebody named Stella Adler and underwent "intense stage training" in New York City, but I don't believe a word of it. My mind can't accept the reality of this "Jordan Matthews". I feel like Sam Neill in John Carpenter's underrated In The Mouth Of Madness, slowly losing my mind as fiction and reality converge and everything I've come to depend upon is proven to be nothing more than a comforting illusion torn asunder by my own vapid Sutter Cane surrogate.

Breaking away from the ghouls, Jacob leads Sarah to an abandoned church which is quickly breached by what appears to be a man suffering from a severe case of psoriasis. So severe, in fact, that while everything else on screen is in perfect focus, he was digitally blurred in post-production in an effort to spare the audience from having to get a closer look at the poor wretch. Jacob limply swings his sword at this blurry doofus for a few seconds, then I guess he loses interest and checks his phone for any new messages while the "monster" just jumps right through the wall like it wasn't there, leaving a gaping monster-shaped hole in his wake, which is quickly filled by a giant swarm of digitally-created bats that neither of our protagonists seem to notice as they harmlessly circle their empty little heads.

Retreating below, into the catacombs of the church, Sarah is startled to find herself in a massive chamber that looks almost identical to the great caverns of Moria as depicted in Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Fellowship Of The Ring. Jacob explains that this insanely huge subterranean structure runs underneath the entire town, and was originally constructed as a place for churchgoers to congregate shortly after the town was founded, which isn't really an explanation at all. What does that mean? How were they capable of creating something like this? Why would they create something like this? This fucking cavern spans the fucking length of the entire fucking town... why?

Fuck you, Fading Of The Cries.

More monsters show up and chase our heroes as they run in place in front a green screen, which doesn't look awkward at all, by the way. Brad Dourif (what?) shows up to have a short conversation with Sarah, telling her how the monsters are after her necklace, which was stolen from him by her uncle several years ago, and if she gives it back the nightmare will end. I guess he just kept his Grima Wormtongue outfit from the Lord Of The Rings movies, because that's what he's wearing here. He's a necromancer named Mathias, and everybody in this movie insists on mispronouncing the word "necromancer", which was driving me up the goddamn wall by the time it was all over. The word is traditionally pronounced Neck-Crow-Man-Sir or Neck-Cruh-Man-Sir, but this movie insists on pronouncing the word Neck-Craw-Mince-Uhr, with the emphasis on the second syllable. It's fucking stupid, and it pisses me off.

Anyway, Mathias lived in a big house in town once upon a time, and after the death of wife and unborn child he became obsessed with the dark arts, searching for a way to resurrect his family. The town rose up against him and killed him, I guess, but because he's a necromancer he stuck around and left his journal in his old house, where Sarah's uncle found it and picked up where Mathias left off. Uncle Michael recently lost his own wife and daughter, and through a series of flashbacks interspersed throughout the film, we see his gradual decent into madness as he delves deeper into the mysteries of Mathias' journal, eager to resurrect his own family, as we're constantly reminded during these sequences by the character's astoundingly terrible faux hard-boiled inner monologue.

Michael is played by Thomas Ian Nicholas, whom you probably remember from 1993's Rookie Of The Year, that delightful story about a boy who can throw baseballs really, really fast. This guy can't act. Maybe he had some kind of adolescent charm in the halcyon days of A Kid In King Arthur's Court, but that's all gone now, replaced by a haggard, bug-eyed adult who can't convincingly portray anything resembling human emotion whenever a camera is pointed directly at his oily face. This asshole didn't just co-star in Fading Of The Cries, he also co-produced the damned thing! He's partially responsible for this nightmare's existence.

I can't... I just can't keep doing this. How much have I already written about this fucking sinkhole of a movie? I guess Jacob used to live in Mathias' house once upon a time, but the psoriasis monster killed his family, then killed him, while he watched himself get killed? That's what the movie showed me! Uncle Mikey touched his young niece's forehead, apparently casting some sort of protection spell to ensure her survival, and the result of that protection spell is a resurrected Jacob... who then fails to protect her because her own zombified mother ends up killing her while Jacob attempts to rescue her sister, who has been kidnapped by a sneering and scheming Brad Dourif, the only actor in this endeavor who bothers to actually emote while onscreen. He's hammy as hell, over-acting like nobody's business, but at least he's entertaining.

Some bullshit happens, Jacob destroys the evil necklace which is somehow the source of Mathias' accessorizing necromancy powers, then he escorts Sarah's sister home, where she finds herself an orphan after discovering her entire family has been destroyed while she was out. Jacob pouts... at least I think that's what he's supposed to be doing. I can't really tell, because his expression never changes. He fucks off back to Casa de Mathias who can't die because he's a Neck-Craw-Mince-Uhr, so Jacob decides to relieve his stress by spending the next millennium or so carving up the unkillable dead guy with his trusty sword in this empty town, because literally everybody is fucking dead. I guess Jacob is upset. And so am I, after wasting ninety minutes of my life watching this rotting corpse of a movie.

It's so cheap-looking, for a start, a victim of awful digital color grading in an attempt to make the movie look "moody", but it just looks like blue-tinted garbage. This film is buried by an overabundance of terribly composited digital blood splatter, laughable sound effects and a musical score more evocative of any given episode of Little House On The Prairie than an action-packed horror fantasy romp. The fight choreography, which is a vital component of any film of this ilk, is woefully inept, focusing more on having our sword-swinging lead strike a series of "badass" iconic poses rather than bothering to actually portray him as a competent warrior. And he can't even get the poses right, looking more like a kid acting out scenes from one of the Matrix movies and failing miserably to look as cool as Keanu Reeves under the guidance of a master like Yuen Woo Ping.

I don't know if you could tell, but I fucking hate this miserable excuse for a movie. It's absolutely worthless, and I can't fathom the motives behind the people who financed this grueling experience. At first, I thought it was a joke, then I realized it was taking itself far too seriously. Eventually, I found the joke was on me, because I actually watched this thing. I watched Fading Of The Cries, and I genuinely wish I hadn't. Better luck next time, I guess.

TOMORROW: Deadly Blessing