So I Say

I was with some people the other night, and we were all together to help a mutual friend test out some games he'd devised for a movies-based podcast (something which maybe I ought to have got off the ground myself by now). We played the games (a couple of which I won), drank a very little and ate some pizza. It was a good time, and it was a case of being very glad I'd made the decision to leave the house. It's funny to find that people don't see my great difficulty with socializing, but then I can see how you might miss it.

In any case, the night was not quite over. The host and mutual friend volunteered to give a guy a ride to the nearby train station (asking me to find something to play on the TV while waiting for his return- I opted for "Johnny Mnemonic"), and another few left, but some of us were content to hang out a little more. On his return, we interrupted the Keanu Reeves film and watched one called "The Taint". I hesitate to describe it in detail.

The Taint is a rather poorly-made horror film. It concerns some kind of virus that converts its victims into some kind of sexual zombies. Shockingly graphic male nudity abounds throughout, and disturbing carnage is in evidence more often than not. It's a repulsive movie that I never would have even begun to watch of my own accord. I may be an extremist in terms of movie watching, but some of the people I know make it apparent that I'm not on the fringe by a long shot.

Like I said, The Taint is a terrible movie. The acting is abysmal, for one. They seemed to cast exclusively non-actors, and you'd expect better acting from randomly chosen people, so I guess they had some bad luck on that score. Everyone's really bad, so maybe it's just accumulated screen time that makes the lead seem worse. There's one guy who wears a bizarre mask, and so long as he has it on, he's a little less bad.

Two of the three things that I decided would improve the movie would be, as you might guess from above paragraphs, any kind of better acting and toning down the perverse violence and display of male genitals. I said to friends that if they'd treated the latter as Spielberg did the shark in "Jaws", it might have had some useful impact. As it was, incredibly, it was something you toned out as the movie went on.

The third thing they could have improved was the script, which was not beyond salvaging. You have scientists who unwittingly unleash this plague on mankind while inventing some kind of virility injection. You have local teenagers who get caught up in the zombie apocalypse that follows. It seems quite reasonable to devise some way in which the teens are instrumental in stemming the tide of the crisis or in which they merely escape to some safe zone. As the film stands, the script is a morass of flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks and needlessly confusing and unproductive present-day sequences. It's a mess.

After watching it, I offered the controversial opinion that the film was not one of the worst I'd ever seen. I found it at least watchable. As is often the case with my opinions, this one was mercilessly challenged, and demands were made that I support it with movies that were actually worse. I declared that the Brad Pitt film "Tree Of Life" was worse, since it was such an incomprehensible three hour slog of scenes that I didn't feel qualified as mise-en-scene. This yielded incredulous howls, and I felt once again that I am doomed to never have my beliefs met with acceptance. So be it. The movie was horrifying to watch, and yet it met my bare minimum standards. I stand by what I said.