THE CORRIDOR / 2010 / 98 minutes (UNFINISHED REVIEW)

apparently this was gonna be the first review i was gonna publish on this thing. news to me, 2014 walsh.

this was the last movie i saw, horror or otherwise, in 2013 so it seems fitting that it is the first one that i am writing about in 2014 and also the first review i’ve ever written for this b*** so hey everyone happy new year good tidings and good luck to your families and sorry to the twenty people who have checked this page over the last two years when there has been absolutely nothing on it.

also spoilers are a sliding scale these days and i don’t wanna bum anyone out (that is funny because of words i am about to write) by revealing anything about this movie that they don’t wanna know and i respect an individual’s right to experience new things without having them sullied by thoughtless assholes or ignorant chumps or people who cut trailers etc so i will inform you that this review and all the reviews i write will contain a bunch of spoilers all the way through them and sometimes right in the first line. like for instance, you may consider it a spoiler that i have already given away which film was the last one i watched in 2013. if so, i’m sorry. that’s a call that you will have to make for yourself and you should feel free to do so with impunity. there is no judgment here, except of course for the judgment i have of the films i am reviewing and your judgment of those films and also of my reviews of them and also possibly of me as a person.   

so what The Corridor is is if Dreamcatcher: The Motion Picture was genuinely pretty great for about an hour or so before completely falling apart and becoming the Dreamcatcher that we all know and love with all the butt stuff and Morgan Freeman’s eyebrows etc. let me clarify that The Corridor does not literally contain any butt stuff. i don’t want to disappoint any orifice-related-trauma aficionados out there. i just meant that a bunch of dumb, laughable shit happens in the last twenty minutes of this movie that sullies all the good will it had built up before then.

actually speaking of the butt scene in Dreamcatcher, way back when i knew a guy who was a huge Stephen King fan who tried to convince me to see the film by reassuring me that all that stuff with the shit monster had made it into the movie and i just kept thinking “how the fuck are they gonna make it not funny to see a dude farting and pooping and then a slug comes out of his butt and then he dies? and also why is he using that scene to entice me to see the movie? do i seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy seeing a slug come out of a person’s butt?” (in his defense i do seem like that kind of guy) and then they didn’t even bother trying to make it not funny after all or at least they weren’t aware that such a thing could conceivably be funny so they played it completely straight which is actually why Dreamcatcher works so well now that i think about it man Dreamcatcher is a fun movie to watch y’all like watching Dreamcatcher?

but the thing is, Dreamcatcher is tonally fucked and completely misguided practically from the first scene (or if not the first scene then at the very least from the first time we see Damien Lewis smugly pottering around in his mind library and then eavesdropping on his friends through a window or something while they talk about their mentally handicapped childhood friend and then they propose a toast to him and call him their dream catcher for some reason but also they are also apparently proposing a toast to an actual dream catcher for some reason is that right? that just might be me being a little confused. note to self rewatch and review Dreamcatcher)   

The Corridor, on the other hand, starts pretty well and then keeps getting increasingly better until it almost hits greatness and peaks there for a while and then absolutely implodes.

to be honest though i was initially pretty skeptical of this one because the opening shots employ that distracted, floaty, haute-verite style that has become a signature look for a whole bunch of independent and low budget horror films and mumbledore movies lately and that i guess is supposed to imbue them with a sense of poetry or contemplation or something but which i just find incredibly fucking distracting. and i know that a lot of the time it could be budgetary constraints that prevent the use of a tripod or some sort of stable block of wood to rest the camera on or a camera operator who isn’t trying to practice Tai Chi while shooting a film but i dunno i just find the whole thing really precious and irritating and i just have this immediate negative response to that whole visual aesthetic now. i’m a reasonable guy and it didn’t have to come to this but then the floaty-cam critical mass that was A Horrible Way to Die – Confessions of an Eyeball Torturer was unleashed on the world and something inside me broke.

and the worst thing is that an actor who i really like, AJ Bowen, seems to only star in films that employ this nightmare cinematographical technique (see Rites of Spring for a recent example of this. i have unsuccessfully attempted to watch that thing probably five or six times now and i honestly can’t do it. could be a great film for all i know. and in its defense the floaty-cam isn’t even particularly intrusive in the parts i saw. i’m just so severely allergic to it now that even a floaty-cam wrapper in a bin across the street can send me into shock)

holding a camera still, or at least attempting to hold a camera still, when filming things that would probably benefit from a more static visual approach is not a stylistic device that is going to date considerably in the foreseeable future is all i’m trying to say. “the camera in that film wasn’t arbitrarily floating around enough during that establishing shot of a mailbox” is probably not a criticism you are likely to hear very often.

so when The Corridor opened with a series of arbitrarily floating establishing shots of a busted up living room i wasn’t exactly feeling great about the whole enterprise. but then all of a sudden there was some dude hiding out in an upstairs closet talking some crazy jibber jabber to himself and looking out into a hallway where a woman is laying face down on the floor with a bunch of meds and pill bottles strewn all around her and then downstairs some people who seemed to know at least one of the occupants of the house break in through the front door to find all kinds of weird shit scattered around the living room and so they tentatively make their way upstairs where they discover the unresponsive, possibly overdosed and probably dead woman just laying there looking like shit so they panic and rush around and argue and try to figure out what to do next and while this is all going on the crazy dude in the closet busts out of there and attacks them with a kitchen knife and cuts one of the guys pretty good across the face and then stabs another one of them right through the fuckin’ hand.

and i thought to myself “okay, The Corridor. you have my attention”

and then they fast forward a bunch of years and to show the passing of time one of the characters is wearing a bald cap. that might seem petty to you, that i went straight to the bald cap, but unless you have seen this film and the bald cap in question then you honestly don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. Look at this goddamn thing –

you can’t seriously tell me that that isn’t some Tim and Eric shit right there. the thing is, if they’d maybe gone for a thinner donut, or got rid of the little flap of hair on his scalp, maybe it wouldn’t be such a fucking distraction. but as it is it looks like a joke. and maybe that’s the point. it is entirely possible that the filmmakers thought that the actor who is rocking that thing (Matthew Amyotte playing a character called Robert “Bobcat” Comeau – apparently the dude was in Outlander!) just looked totally frigging hilarious as a bald guy and they’re right, he does look pretty frigging hilarious. but it is such an obviously artificial appliance that whenever the characters would get into some serious poignant shit i couldn’t concentrate because i was fixating so much on his goddamn head. if the bald cap employed in your film is distracting the audience during pivotal emotional moments then maybe it is time to find a new bald cap. or just don’t go as large. don’t go Full Recess. start with a little thinning on top. refer to the Norwood Classification and make adjustments where necessary. listen to the people around you when they tell you that having a dude wearing a bald cap like that in a film like this is a fucking dumb idea. luckily the film takes place during winter so for a lot of the time Bobcat Baldcap is wearing a sweet beanie.  

i know that i haven’t really mentioned the plot yet but that’s only because i wanted to get all that shit out of the way first. to let you know what i was up against while the film was doing its thing. to show you that The Corridor had to work extra hard to get me on board because of Bobcat’s stupid bald head and a few seconds of floaty-cam at the start of the movie that i was fickle enough to take umbrage with.

man, running thread here with these abandoned reviews huh. "here, let me describe the plot to you..." and then four years later here we are.