The unsatisfying Final Girl switcheroo

Oh Zombeavers.

You could have been the next Piranha. Instead, you were the next Piranha DD.

Just having bad animatronic zombie beavers isn't quite enough to make a bad movie transcendent. It also needs to be funny -- or, much funnier than this one was. Strangely, it is quite funny in its first 20 minutes before the titular creatures show up, but once they make their first appearance, the script loses all sense of how to plumb the natural ridiculousness from the situation. What could have been a cult movie ends up being just another movie that earns a low star rating, just another schlock horror that doesn't hit beyond its awesome title.

But I'm here today to talk about a different kind of disappointment to be derived from Zombeavers, one that has to do with its adherence, or lack thereof, to narrative conventions in general and genre conventions in particular.

Namely, the girls they cast were in all the wrong parts, and then, the wrong girls ended up dying in the wrong order.

ZOMBEAVERS SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

You are surely familiar with the horror trope of The Final Girl, such an established trope that it can (and should) be capitalized. She is the one guaranteed survivor of some kind of alien, monster, undead creature or serial killer. It is perhaps the most reliable and consistently applied trope in all of horror.

Zombeavers has three candidates for the correct Final Girl, and the one it chooses is the worst of the three.

Let's take a look at this cast. I'll provide photos so you get a bit better sense of what I'm talking about.

First there's Rachel Melvin as Mary. She is the most obvious choice for The Final Girl, as she is the sweetest and probably the most established as an actress. She's the first listed in the cast, anyway, and she was in last year's Dumb and Dumber To, where she was very sweet. Mary is the one whose family owns the cabin where they are having a girls weekend. (It's only a girls weekend because one of the girls was cheated on by her boyfriend, but more on that in a minute.) Mary is also the most chaste (she won't take off her top to go swimming) and she's the one who establishes the rules of no texting and no talking about boys. Plus, she's got that cute little button nose.

Then there's Lexi Atkins as Jenn. Atkins is a comparative unknown -- although there's a hyperlink to her page in the wikipedia cast for this movie, she doesn't actually have a page yet. Jenn is the girl who was cheated on, who might also be a good candidate as The Final Girl because of her betrayal. Having a zombeaver kill her off would just be piling on her existing misery. Atkins is pretty sullen, which is understandable for a girl whose heart was just broken. But she doesn't exude any likability, which could just be her inexperience as an actor. Anyway, you have no desire whatsoever to root for her. Her blonde hair also usually labels her as someone unsavory, by traditional Hollywood metrics.

Finally we have Cortney Palm as Zoe. She also does not have a wikipedia page. She's the slut. We know this because she is the only one who does take her top off when they go swimming. She's constantly making rude jokes and generally being ribald. And when her boyfriend inevitably appears (after all, you need men to knock off with impunity in horror movies), they have the most carnivorous sex. The sexual carnivore is usually the first to go in a movie like Zombeavers, because horror tradition dictates that a woman must be punished for acting on her sexual desires.

So let's examine where things start to go wrong -- not with the beavers, but with the narrative.

The first sign of trouble is when it's revealed that Mary is the one who induced Jenn's boyfriend to cheat on her. Jenn doesn't know this, but the arrival of the three boyfriends -- including Jenn's ex, who is trying to make amends with her -- means that it's about to become public knowledge. What's weird about this is that Mary is incredibly sweet, by all outward appearances, and she has already shown her purity by not taking off her top and by banning the use of cell phones. Yet she's the one who stabbed her good friend in the back.

An easy way to fix this would just be to swap these two roles. Atkins profiles more as a cheater and Melvin profiles more as an innocent. Why not just reallocate the resources you have to get the actors in the right roles?

Even keeping in mind that Jenn is the one cheated on, though, we still have a problem because Jenn is actually the first eliminated from contention to be The Final Girl. She is bitten by an undead beaver (off screen, which is one of this film's many curious decisions) and is the first to try to chomp her friends and convert them. (When bitten by a zombeaver, humans sprout beaver teeth -- a funny idea with a not-all-that-funny execution.) So insult is added to injury, or injury to insult, when the poor betrayed girl (who is the wrong actress cast in the first place) is among the first victims.

The film makes a misstep, as I've already mentioned, by having Mary be the one who betrays her friend. Well, then it makes matters worse by interrupting the crisis with an impulsive episode of bathroom sex between Mary and the guy she cheated with. This scene is included primary so a zombeaverfied version of Jenn can come in and bite his dick off, which I get. But it makes Mary even more terrible, when she should be sweet, and also makes her just seem stupid, when she was previously the one who seemed to display the most intelligence. I mean, who pauses from an ongoing zombeaver crisis to have sex?

Mary is not killed in this scene. She and Zoe both escape as Jenn, the rest of their men, a pair of older neighbors, and a local hunter are all picked off by the beavers. We know of course that two girls cannot survive, so maybe the movie is finally trying to reestablish Mary as The Final Girl, even though she's not the pure character we once thought she was. But then Mary is the next one to sprout beaver teeth -- even though we didn't see her get bitten either.

So Zoe gets to be The Final Girl. The one who should have been killed first.

Of course, there actually isn't a Final Girl, because right before the credits roll, Zoe gets splattered by a truck whose driver is texting. (Every zombie movie, by tradition, needs to have some social commentary, so I suppose this qualifies as this movie's version of that.) This scene also ties back to a joke at the very beginning of the film.

So after you've written all this, Vance -- you still call me Vance in these hypothetical scenarios -- wasn't it kind of pointless? Mightn't they have actually saved the worst death for the worst character?

No, because even if you are going to kill The Final Girl in a Final Joke, she's still The Final Girl. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You could argue that the filmmakers are consciously breaking the rules as a means of freshening things up or even as a means of surprising us. And there can certainly be good reasons to consciously break the rules. However, Zombeavers is the kind of movie that proves why the rules exist in the first place. The progression of character deaths is unsatisfying here, and that contributes to an unsatisfying entire final 45 minutes. That's breaking the rules for the wrong reasons, in my book.

Anyway, one area where I do agree with you: That was probably way too much to write about Zombeavers.

Number of sequels vs. number of dimensions

Saw VII is coming out today. Marking the seventh straight year -- and last, they tell us -- a Saw movie has been released the weekend before Halloween.

Except it's not called Saw VII. It's called Saw 3D.

I take issue in general with using the word "3D" in the title of a movie, in large part because it will only actually be experienced in the correct number of dimensions by a minority of the people who see it. Some will see it in a theater that isn't equipped for 3D, like the drive-in theater that sends me weekly emails, which had to specify it wasn't in 3D. Many more will see it later on video, where they probably either won't have the glasses or won't have the correct type of TV. Including the word "3D" in the actual title, then -- rather than saying [Title] in 3D!, a marketing campaign that would be limited to the period of time in which the theatrical release was being advertised -- is a kind of permanent deception of the viewing public.

But it looks like we're going to have to get used to seeing "3D" in the titles for movies, so let's not push that particular argument too far.

When it becomes really problematic is when the 3 in 3D is out of sync with the sequel number of the franchise in question. Like the Saw series.

Some series have gotten lucky. Some series -- like Jackass and Step Up -- were timed just perfectly so that the third movie in the series would be the one to take advantage of the current craze. Hence, this year's Jackass 3D and Step Up 3D. Hearkens back to the last major 3D trend, when the third Friday the 13th was in 3D, as was the third Jaws. (We should probably pause here to honor Pixar's restraint in resisting the urge to call their 2010 release Toy Story 3D.)

Or it can be the first movie in a series, like this year's Piranha 3D. I'm okay with that too. (Okay, you caught me -- this year's Piranha is actually sort of a third Piranha movie, as there were exactly two previously. However, Piranha II: The Spawning came out 29 years ago, so I hardly think this year's Piranha counts as a third movie to most viewers.)

But the Saw example is really problematic. Seeing the 3 on the poster may time warp some people back to 2006, when Saw III was coming out. (Though to be fair, they used roman numerals on those posters -- or actually, three uprooted teeth dangling from ropes.) For those expecting Saw VII to follow last year's Saw VI, there's a definite disconnect.

Which brings us back to the argument made at various times previously on this blog, about how studios think their franchises can get a boost if the latest release appears as some kind of a reboot. By destroying the sequel numbering system in the Saw series, they're trying to tell you that this movie could be something new and freshly worthy of your attention -- not just the seventh movie in a series. A roman numeral VII behind any movie title tends to cause snickers, even among its most devoted fans -- it's that point at which continuing on in a series strikes everyone as ridiculous. You might say that point should have logically been reached after a half-dozen, or even five, but the seventh movie really pushes it over the top.

Not so, now. Instead of this being the seventh Saw, it's the Saw that's in 3D. And also, the last Saw.

Or so they say.

I'll believe that when I don't see the next one in 2011. Or 2015. Or whenever they decide it's the perfect time to release Saw VIII.

Or, by that point, perhaps Saw 4D.

First in line

I don't usually go to see movies on opening night. But when I do, you'd think it would be a movie I was really jazzed about. You know, like the tweens who had their parents drive them to the theater for the 12:05 a.m. screening of Twilight: Eclipse, or the geeks who camped out for weeks before Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Nope, not really. In fact, last night was just the latest movie I saw on opening day/night despite having only mild interest in it. I should say, I had mild interest going in, and heavy interest coming out. Yeah, Piranha 3D was "super fun," as I said to the friend who saw it with me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I guess my thinking goes like this: If you go to see almost any movie during the primetime slot of its opening night, it's going to be a clusterfuck. Every movie has some subset of the viewing population that's interested in seeing it, and these are the people who will come out for that primetime Friday night show. That's nice when it means you're surrounded by like-minded individuals who plan to cheer and applaud; it's not so nice when you get stuck in the front row, because you bought unassigned seats earlier in the day, but didn't get there in time to claim something good.

And so I've developed something of a policy toward seeing movies on the day of their release: I'll see only ones I don't really care about.

Here are some recent(-ish), funny examples:

Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow). Released: September 25, 2009.

I didn't even know if I planned to see this in the theater, but I'd written one of my Friday morning pieces about it, and I was hankering for an after-work screening, so I hit whichever one started in the 4 o'clock range. As might be expected, the screening was fairly sparsely attended -- the movie ended up grossing less than $40 million, and I think I may have liked it better than anyone else in the world, except possibly Jonathan Mostow.

Splice (2010, Vincenzo Natali). Released: June 4, 2010.

I had gone through a bit of a rollercoaster in my feelings toward this movie, at first thinking it would be an exciting genre buster, then thinking it would be a completely interchangeable startle-scare horror film. I ended up going Friday afternoon because my boss had failed to comp me the afternoon on the previous Friday, before Memorial Day weekend, as he usually does, but had forgotten to this time. So I got out around 1 o'clock that day and took myself over to the theater. I don't know that the movie actually busts its genre, but it is unforgettable in a number of other ways -- some good, some I'm not so sure about.

The Last Airbender (2010, M. Night Shyamalan). Released: July 1, 2010.

This one doesn't quite count, because I actually saw it on July 2nd. The whole time leading up to it, however, I thought they were releasing it that Friday. Then for some reason they moved it up one day to Thursday. This was a similar situation to what was supposed to happen with my Friday-before-Memorial-Day early release, except on the Friday before July 4th, it did actually happen. This screening was also sparsely attended -- maybe everyone already knew that the movie had been ripped to shreds. Me, I thought it started out abysmally and then improved enough in the last 45 minutes or so that I thought it was fine. But because my failure to hate The Last Airbender is not what I came to talk about today, I'm not going to say any more about that.

Piranha 3D (2010, Alexandre Aja). Released: August 20, 2010.

And then there was last night. A friend and I had been trying to find some common ground on a movie -- a movie my wife didn't have any interest in seeing, at that -- and Piranha was what we came up with. We were trying to jam it in before my wife goes into labor (could happen anytime in the next 10 days to two weeks) and before he goes to Burning Man (next weekend). Plus, yesterday was his last day of work on a gig that was located down near where I live. So he got off work, we met for dinner, then went to the movie. In fact, we dilly-dallied enough that I thought we'd shot ourselves in the foot, getting to the theater only 15 minutes before the show was scheduled to start. But instead of having to crane our necks at the 3D from the front row, we hadn't actually needed to buy tickets in advance at all. Strangely, the theater was only half sold -- and this was a prime location on the Santa Monica Promenade, albeit a theater that probably hasn't been renovated in 20 years.

That could have been some kind of forewarning about the quality of this movie, but it wasn't -- at least not for me. My friend wasn't as enthusiastic about it as I was, but I was enthusiastic enough for the two of us. It was a rollicking good time -- exactly what I wanted it to be. Awesome piranha carnage and lots of hilarious gore -- stuff that made our audience howl, squirm and grimace. Some of the gore was truly horrifying -- I can't get that image out of my head of the woman being scalped by the outboard motor, pulling her face right off -- but Aja's tone was such that it was "all in good fun." Besides, the idiotic spring breakers who had come to the fictitious Lake Victoria were portrayed as so vapid and so obnoxious, it all really seemed like their just desserts.

A movie like Piranha 3D really argues for that opening Friday night showing. Even though we were only half full, we were the ones who were really excited for that bloody mayhem up on the screen -- and we probably enjoyed it a lot more than we would have during that 1:35 showing next Thursday afternoon.