Shrooms (2007) and a Specific Twist Ending

Spoiler Alert: The following post for the Sunday “Bad” Movies will spoil the endings of a few movies.  One such movie is this week’s film, Shrooms.  A second movie will be one that I thought of while watching Shrooms.  It was a movie called High Tension.  The third film that will be knowingly spoiled is a 2003 movie called Red Riding Hood.  If there are any of the three movies that you have not yet seen and don’t want spoiled for you, stop reading this post now.  Ready any further is your own fault.  I don’t want to see any complaints about spoilers.  Not that anyone actually reads these posts.  But, you know, I felt that I should warn you.

There are a lot of ways that writers try to make a story interesting, and one of the most well-known and accepted parts of making a captivating tale is for it to contain a twist ending.  You leave the audience in a state of shock as what happened prior in the story is turned on its head in the final moments before the conclusion.  Something happens that changes everything.  Happy can take a left turn into morbid sadness.  Or one detail can be revealed that makes all of the prior events have a different meaning.  The point of it is to be impactful and leave the audience thinking about what they have experienced.  But, sometimes the thinking can lead to the realization that some things do not add up.

This whole idea of things not adding up when the twist occurs in a movie was inspired, of course, by Shrooms.  No, not by me taking hallucinogenic drugs and going on some sort of out-of-body mind trip.  I am talking about the movie Shrooms.  This 2007 film is about a group of friends who travel to Ireland for a trip of mushroom gathering.  The wooded area in Ireland that they travel to is the former grounds of an insane asylum.  One by one, the friends are being murdered by someone who may be an escaped asylum patient hiding out in the woods.

Now, this might seem like a fairly straight forward movie.  Friends dying as a mental patient is murdering them.  It is your basic slasher flick.  That is, until it isn’t.  One of the friends has ingested one of the most powerful mushrooms and it is revealed at the end of the movie that she was actually murdering all of her friends.  There were no escaped patients attacking the people that came into the woods.  It was one of the main characters all along.  She was doing the killing.  She was the reason that all of her friends were dead.  That was the twist and it made some sense, but it didn’t make complete sense.  There were some things that seemed off about it.

Most of the problems with the twist come in the form of the character’s ability to actually be in those places.  It was set up early in the movie that the mushroom that she took could give the ability of premonition.  She would be able to see into the future and know what was going to happen to people.  Every once in a while, she would have a vision about the death of one of her friends.  All of the visions came true.  The only difference was that she was the reason for their death, not some dark entity.  However, in certain instances, there was no way that she could possibly have been in the location of the death at the time of the death because she was with another friend.  The whole “main character is a killer” twist is shared with another movie I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

High Tension was directed by Alexandre Aja and released in France in 2003.  It would be two more years before an American release.  I saw it around 2006, so my mind is a little foggy on the details of the movie.  I do remember the twist ending, though.  In a final turn of events very similar to Shrooms, it turns out that the main character whom the audience has sympathised with throughout the entire movie is, in fact, the serial killer they have been dealing with.  I remember feeling betrayed and not being able to figure out how everything could have worked out with her being the murderer.  I probably should have rewatched the movie before writing this stuff in order to get my writing right, and to see if I still feel that way.  Oh well.

The two movies I have already outlined show the difficulties in having the main character be revealed as the killer in the movie.  However, this is not the only variation of this kind of twist.  While watching Red Riding Hood, the 2003 horror film directed by Giacomo Cimini, I experienced a similar revelatory twist at the end of the movie.  The entire film had set up the premise that a girl was committing vengeful murders with her dog.  It was revealed at the end that the dog was not real and the girl was actually killing all of the people by herself.  This particular version of the twist made more sense than the other two because the girl was at the scene of the crime each time anyway.  In terms of logistics, it all added up and made sense.

Not all the movies that use the twist of the main character being the killer make sense.  A lot of the time they make very little sense.  That does not make the movie less enjoyable up until that point.  If you enjoyed it before the twist, you enjoyed it before the twist.  You cannot change that.  It can change your view on the movie as a whole, but it can’t change how much you enjoyed the movie before the twist was revealed.  I enjoyed Shrooms before the twist ending.  It was a fun little horror movie that played on the slasher clichés while adding in another layer with the mushroom premonition stuff.  The lackluster twist doesn’t change that.  I might think the movie does not hold up as a whole because of the twist, but I enjoyed it until the twist happened.  It is worth checking out, even if it gets a little weird and dumb near the end.

I have a few notes for you, of course:

• Shrooms was suggested to me by @SincereBC.  He also suggested 8213: Gacy House, one of the movies in the Paranormal Entity group of movies.
• Another horror movie that was influenced by drugs was Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.
• Have you seen Shrooms?  Do you like the ending?  Do you like the movie?  Are there other movies that you can think of with similar twists?  Feel free to write about the movie in the comments.
• I am also taking suggestions for future movies to watch, like I always am.  You can suggest in the comments or you can hit me up on Twitter.

Dubbing and Dig Your Grave Friend... Sabata is Coming (1971)

When it comes to watching foreign language films, there are three ways to go about it.  One is to watch the movie as it was made.  The second is to watch it with subtitles that allow you to understand the words that are coming out of their mouths.  The third way, and the one that I will be writing about in this post, is to have an audio dub over the dialogue in the movie so that the characters are speaking your language when the actors clearly are not.  The English dub is how I watched the movie Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata is Coming.

Dubbing has had a place in film since the early days of talkies.  As audio began to be introduced into film, musicals became one of the most popular genres.  The general population liked the merging of moving pictures and music.  However, there were many actors whose singing voices were not up to the level that the studios wanted them to be.  That meant that other people had to be brought in to record the singing voices for the characters, and their vocals were dubbed over the actor’s voice.  It made the movies more bearable for the audiences who were going to see them.

As the industry moved on, dubbing primarily became used for foreign films being released in markets where the audience did not speak that language.    If a movie was in another language, it was easier to market it with English dialogue instead.  Thus, theaters were able to release monster movies from Japan, Samurai films, kung-fu movies, and Spaghetti Westerns.  The audio track would be swapped out for one in English, with different people voicing the characters.  Voila!  It was ready for consumption in North America.

Eventually, subtitles would be used as a substitute for dubbing.  The use of subtitles allows the original inflections and vocal performances to come through while still letting the audience understand the other language.  It allows the original actor to fully display their performance, whereas dubbing takes away some of the work that the actors did in the movie.  This is especially true of animated films where dubbing takes away the entire performance of the original voice actor.

There is an argument to be made for some people when they say that they don’t want to read their movies.  They would rather sit there and turn off their brain for a while.  They want to stare at the screen without moving their eyes to follow along with the words.  They think that movies are meant to be entirely visual and non-textual.  These people seem to forget that there was ever a time with silent films, where the only way to convey dialogue was through the use of text.  They act like film has always had audio.

I tend to prefer watching a foreign language film with subtitles.  I like to get the performance of the original actor when watching something.  Dubbing can have emotion in the dialogue as well, but sometimes loses out on the cultural aspects of it.  Japanese, Koreans, Swedish, and Americans might mean similar things, but each culture has their own little details in language that can never be replicated in another language.  There is also the added detail of dubbed dialogue not matching up with the vocals.  The striking visual of someone saying something and different words being uttered can be distracting.  Subtitles help to alleviate that.

Some genres get a pass by me when it comes to dubbing, though.  There are certain genres where the use of dubbing actually helps with the experience.  I don’t know how, I don’t know why.  These genres just get a little bit more magical if they are dubbed.  For whatever reason, they are more enjoyable.  They feel more right with the dubbing.  It is a strange thing to say, but it’s what I think of the genres.  The two main genres that I feel this way about are kung-fu movies and Spaghetti Westerns.

Maybe it’s because I grew up with the dubbing of kung-fu movies being the butt of many jokes.  Or it is the over the top nature of the action and story in the movies.  Either way, the dubbing in the subgenre really helps to make the movies what they are in my mind.  They wouldn’t be the same without the hilariously out-of-sync dialogue and heightened vocal performances that were done through the dubbing process.  The package of the movies and the dubbing has been instilled in me since my childhood and it would feel wrong for them to not be combined.

The other genre, Spaghetti Westerns, does not end up being the butt of a joke.  The genre is taken seriously.  It could be because the dialogue has a better chance of lining up with the mouth movements.  Or it could be that the stories used for Spaghetti Westerns are more thoughtful and respectable than those of the kung-fu films.  Whatever the case may be, Spaghetti Westerns are like kung-fu movies in that the dubbed versions of the films seem like the right versions of the film.  The dubbing is actually essential to many of the movies because the actors come from different countries and speak their native language while being filmed.  The dubbing puts all of the dialogue into one language so that you don’t need to be fluent in multiple dialects to understand it.  It makes the dubbing a part of the genre.

Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata is Coming is a movie that can help to highlight the dubbed nature of the Spaghetti Western subgenre by giving reasons that the dubbing is necessary.  Richard Harrison played the main character, Steve McGowan.  He was an American from Salt Lake City, and spoke English.  Fernando Sancho played Steve’s partner in crime, Leon.  The actor hailed from Spain and likely spoke Spanish as his primary language.  The actor who played the titular character of Sabata, Raf Baldassarre, was an Italian who spoke Italian.  Each actor spoke their own language while filming, which is apparent in the couple of scenes where the dubbing dropped out and I could hear their spoken languages.  The English dub helped to have the characters speaking one language, most of the time.  It also helped to support the American setting of the movie.

Now that I wrote that, I think the reason that the dubbing of Spaghetti Westerns is more accepted than the dubbing of many other styles of film is because of the setting.  Spaghetti Westerns tend to be set in the United States of America, where the Wild West was.  So, having the characters speak in Italian, Spanish, German, or whatever language they spoke would seem out of place in a location where people would normally speak English.

No matter what the reason, Spaghetti Westerns and kung-fu movies are two of the only areas in film where I would definitely choose the dubbed versions over the subtitled versions.  Almost any other time, I would prefer to watch a movie in its original language with subtitles.  I don’t mind reading during my movies.  I want the movies to move me and the best way for them to do that is to retain as much of the intended vision as they possibly can.  Movies are about the experience and the best possible experience is what you want.  It’s what I want.  A good experience.

Do I have any notes?  Sure.  Here they are:

• Other foreign (not North American) movies I’ve watched include Attack of the Super Monsters and Infra-Man.
• I watched Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata is Coming from one of my many Echo Bridge released movie sets.  I wrote a little bit about Echo Bridge when I watched Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned.
• Do you prefer dubbing or subtitles?  Are there subgenres of film that you prefer dubbing in?  What are your thoughts on dubbing?  If you have answers to any of these questions, feel free to drop them in the comments.
• You can also leave any suggestions for movies to watch in the comments.  I take all bad movie suggestions into consideration when I make the schedule.  If you don’t want to leave the suggestion in the comments, you could always contact me on Twitter.

Iron Eagle Series (1986, 1988, 1992, 1995) and Movie Titles

The easiest way that a movie can leave an impression on someone is through the title.  The title is the most accurate way to describe a movie and one of the first things that people think of when thinking about movies.  This is why it is important for the people behind a movie to figure out the right name for it.  The title will be the most frequent representation of the movie.

Finding the right title for a movie can be a difficult task and there are numerous ways that directors or producers go about doing it.  Sometimes the titles work as a good representation of the movie and other times they don’t.  But what makes one specific title better than another?  That is all up to the opinion of the person reading or hearing the title.  I can and will hypothesize, however.

If you want to go with a simple title for a movie, you go with the name of the main character.  It is easy to think up because you already have the name of the character.  For people that have seen the movie, it is a memorable title because there is a face to associate with it.  And if the main character survives, it will be an easy title to franchise without having to worry about the plot fitting the title, or finding a new title for each installment.  An example of a movie that uses a character’s name as the title is Alex Cross, the 2012 film directed by Rob Cohen and starring Tyler Perry.

Naming the film Alex Cross makes sense from a production standpoint.  The movie is a reboot of the franchise made popular with Morgan Freeman in the role.  The reboot now had Tyler Perry in the role and needed a way to get people to think of the character as Perry.  Naming the new franchise that way made the character and actor stand out in people’s minds.  The franchise may not have been successful in rebooting itself, but the name was a valiant effort in creating a new brand.

In a similar fashion to movies that use a character’s name for the title, there are movies that give both a character’s name and their job as the title.  The reason for this is to give the facial recognition as well as a hint to what will be happening in the movie.  In most cases, this form of titling is used for comedies.  The problem with franchising this kind of title comes in the form of the story itself.  There are difficulties in finding multiple stories to tell within certain jobs.  There is also the possibility of a character losing their job but needing to get it back for the sequel in order to have the name make sense.  This is sometimes fixed by giving an entirely different subtitle, which alleviates part of the pain of franchising the title.

The movie Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo is a good example of this kind of title.  It gives the audience the recognition of Rob Schneider’s character and it foreshadows the fact that he will be selling his body for romantic encounters throughout the movie.  Franchise titling also worked fairly well since the sequel used European Gigolo in place of Male Gigolo to signify that Deuce Bigalow was now in Europe and still doing the gigolo thing.  Sure, the first movie didn’t give the location of Deuce Bigalow in the title.  But if you want to franchise a movie subtitled with a job, it is a fairly good idea to alter the subtitle rather than add a number after the subtitle.  It keeps you from nearing the ridiculous with titling the different installments.

Hinting at the movie’s plot in the title does not only occur in movies where a job description is presented in the title.  Oh no.  There are titles to movies that present the entire premise.  They lay out what the movie is in the hopes that the title of their insane plot will catch the eye of an unsuspecting potential viewer.  The more ludicrous the concept is, the more bizarre the title will seem to someone who stumbles upon it.  It is a simple way to get across what is about to be seen while also making people aware of its existence.

Snakes on a Train, a knock-off of the equally hilariously titled Snakes on a Plane, spells out exactly what it is in the title.  It is a movie about a train on which there are snakes.  If you saw the title of the movie, you would think that there were snakes on the train.  You would wonder why they were there and how they got there.  You would ask why people wouldn’t get off the train.  You would think about the different ways that the people on the train could be harmed by the snakes.  There are lots of questions you could come up with by reading the title, but one that you wouldn’t have to come up with is what the movie is about.  The title already told you that.

Other movies take a more subtle approach in using their titles to hint at what they are about.  They take the premise and use wordplay to present the concept in the title without outright saying what the movie is about.  It gives somewhat of an idea but does not plainly state it.  It still gives the story of the movie in a way, though.

The example of this that comes to mind right away is Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.  Surely, the people with an interest in the movie have a slight idea as to the story of Hansel and Gretel.  They know that the story is going to be retold in a new way.  The way will likely be through the use of drugs since the title includes the words “get baked.”  Not only does the movie give a vague idea as to what the story will be, though.  The use of the words “get baked” has a double meaning as it also alludes to the conclusion of the original story of Hansel and Gretel.  You know, with the oven and all that?  It’s a solid title for a solid film.

The last kind of title that I would like to highlight in this post is the kind that helped to inspire the post.  This final way to title the movie is to take some element from the movie that could only be understood by watching the movie, and put it as the title.  It could be an object.  Or it could be a description of a thing.  Either way, you would only know about it through research or actually watching the movie.

What movie inspired this entire post of ramblings about the way movies are titled?  It was actually four movies.  The Iron Eagle movies, which each feature “Iron Eagle” in their titles, though the phrase is only relevant to the first film.  Doing some research into the meaning of the phrase, “Iron Eagle” I found that it means a colonel that will not be promoted to general.  That describes Louis Gossett Jr.’s character in the first film.  In the second film, the character is a general, making all of the sequels have meaningless titles.  The only reason that Iron Eagle even fits the movies is that they are the same series.  Not that they feel like the same series.  Every movie feels like a movie from a completely different series.  And the title does not help to make them feel more like the same franchise.

The problems with titling mostly come in the form of franchises, as filmmakers attempt to keep some sort of name recognition while also growing out their movies.  Like I said, I cannot say for sure what makes a good title or a bad title.  All I can do is give you some information about the different ways that movies can possibly be titled and maybe it will allow someone with more knowledge and a better writing skill to come in and make a great think-piece on the topic.  And when that comes out, I will be one of the people excited to read it.

There are obviously going to be a bunch of notes for this one:

• Louis Gossett Jr. appeared in all four of the Iron Eagle movies.  He is the only actor to appear in all of them.  Jason Gedrick and Uri Gavriel appeared in Iron Eagle and Iron Eagle II.  Jason Blicker appeared in Iron Eagle II and Iron Eagle IV.  Those are the actors in multiple Iron Eagle films.
• Mitch Ryan made an appearance in Aces: Iron Eagle III.  He previously appeared in two other Sunday “Bad” Movie flicks.  They were Halloween:The Curse of Michael Myers, and Ed.
• Michael Alldredge showed up in Iron Eagle after having appeared in the Sunday “Bad” Movie titled Robot Jox.
• Tim Thomerson had a decent sized role in Iron Eagle.  He had a small cameo in Evil Bong.
• Do you know F. William Parker?  He was in Iron Eagle as well as Jack Frost.
• Another actor in Iron Eagle was Dominick Brascia.  He was also in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.
• An actor named Fred Dalton Thompson was in Aces: Iron Eagle III.  He was also in the movie Baby’s Day Out.
• And then there’s Phill Lewis, an actor from Aces: Iron Eagle III who made an appearance in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2.
• The movies I mentioned throughout this post were Alex Cross for the character name, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo for character name and job, Snakes on a Train for spelling out plot in the title, and Hansel and Gretel Get Baked for the wordplay.
• I know there are some kinds of titles that I left out.  Quotes and places are two of them.  Are there any more that you can think of?  Leave comments with the other types of movie titles that you can think of and I may do a sequel to this post sometime in the future.
• If you have a movie that you would like to see covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, feel free to leave that suggestion in the comments or contact me on Twitter.  I’m always open to suggestions.