Really Awful Movies

I Am Zozo

Maybe it should be called I am Yoyo, as in Yoyo Ma, because our tale begins with a rather bedraggled cellist Tess, who doesn’t look like she’s ready for the New York Philharmonic. Bow in hand, she’s recounting to a sympathetic therapist (“I was once normal!”) how she came by this sorry mental state.

I am Zozo, not as well-known as Ouija, is another teen “oracle board”-themed flick.

Shot very capably on Super 8, it features a group of five collegians, off to a cottage for some Halloween fun and frolic. This cottage is located on an island, and their Styx-like crossing adds some heavy Gothic ambience.

One kid Nick, is a budding amateur magician and dresses like one as well as a self-styled skeptic a la James Randi, and Mel is a pretentious Wiccan (a silly fad religion with no cohesive intellectual tradition, but we digress). Naturally, she explains the finer points of Samhain to a credulous Tess and breaks out a Ouija board.

Nick enlightens the two girls about the finer points of “idiomotor action,” in which people make movements unconsciously, i.e., that Ouija boards are basically nonsense. This, as they prepare for the night’s repast (a freshly caught fish, gutted in a rather pointless montage).

As the kids get increasingly drunk they naturally conjure up spirits, one of whom Zozo, tells them what time they’re going to die.

Kelly McLaren is terrific as Tess, the kids are pretty darn likeable, there’s some snappy dialogue (“Do you have a gun in the house? You kidding, my dad’s a liberal!”) but we have to admit we’re not the target audience for this by virtue of its tameness and our aversion to the mystical (we like our supernatural horror Italian – with vivid gore). As liminal fare for the teen/newbie set, this functions as a well-made psychological horror, one which will hopefully turn them on to more intense experiences.

*** (out of 5)

Fear Clinic

“Aren’t you going to put him to sleep?”
Dr. Andover: “We don’t deal in dreams here!”

An ironic statement, as Dr. Andover is portrayed by the one and only Robert Englund, whose career was built on nightmares.

In Fear Clinic we are told that there are “thousands of classified phobias…” Guess FDR was right: we have nothing to fear but fear itself!

Dr. Andover is an eccentric psychiatrist who develops a chamber that is part of “total immersive exposure therapy,” in which patients who’ve experienced PTSD revisit their traumatic experience through visualization in order to overcome it.

He’s got a gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere that’s his clinic and he’s frequently visited by survivors of a truly frightening mass shooting, in which a gunman clad in black machine-gunned occupants of a local diner. So far, his unorthodox treatment combining visualization techniques and a nebulous targeting of the neural structure, the amygdala, has proven successful.

However, when one of his patients, Paige, dies during the treatment the doctor is beside himself.

Soon, other patients are re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD, including a grad student Sara (“I could smell the gunpowder!”) and Dr. Andover is experiencing his own PTDS, including a Dali-esque dreamscape in which he encounters his deceased patient, her breasts stitched, who contorts in half in front of him, snap, crackle and pop.

As Dr. Andover hits the bottle and his mental state deteriorates, he is urged to treat catatonic Blake, who hasn’t said a word since the shooting and Caylee, the girlfriend of a famous motorbike racer, who is spewing black goo, a treatment byproduct more viscous than stomach bile.

“Everyone is scared of something.”

This is undoubtedly true. Fear Clinic is worth a look. Book an appointment.

***1/2 (out of 5)

Not to be confused with the 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy starring Carol Lombard, confusion still reigns in Nothing Sacred.

Blonde twin Delilah is in Paris, an Anglophone who develops impeccable French language skills in her motel room after performing a dramatic black arts ritual on her tongue.

Freshly Francophone, she wows the woman who runs the B ‘n’ B and heads out into the City of Light. On a street corner, Delilah comes across a tarot card / 3-card Monty street performer and presses him for answers about a quest to find a man named Chambers, which leads to a tour of some catacombs replete with skulls.

Now this Chambers, a practitioner of magic, was foretold by an oracle that he’d die at the hands of “two children of the same seed.” And this sorcerer was responsible for the death of Delilah’s mother.

Twin #2 is Blue, a guy from Oklahoma who has never met Delilah and who’s first introduced to viewers, asking a psychic for clarity (And at this point it should be mentioned that this reviewer might’ve required the same thing, as the film is wave upon wave of exposition that threatened to overturn a 9th Grade command of la langue française. You see, the first 15 minutes is all in French sans subtitles, which definitely didn’t help re: the film’s impenetrability.)

Delilah meets up with her fraternal twin Blue, kills the psychic and the duo embark on a journey to the Arc de Triomphe.

Inside the famous Parisian monument, she’s chased by a minotaur and the brother saves the day with a brick. They procure the beast’s horn, “getting what they came for.” (this was news to me, as there was no indication they were going to the Arc or for what purpose or that the horn was “a perfect compass”).

Finding the phantasmagorical Chambers proves difficult.

The duo tracks down his son, who is some real estate magnate and Blue goes undercover as an Oklahoma land developer. The magic apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, as Chambers’ son asks Blue to “gaze into the secret woods,” some kind of portal into the Sooner State of Oklahoma and then shows him the Glass of Narcissus.

Forgive this moment of solipsism, but this reviewer was then left completely and utterly flummoxed.

Later, there was apparently some globetrotting as the beginning of the film foretold via the very opening credits, that Nothing Sacred contained dialogue in English, French and Muskogee, a tribal language in Oklahoma. Didn’t stick around long enough to stamp the passport back to North American shores.

** (out of 5)