Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 25, 2008, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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Current events inform both Daniel Myrick’s The Objective, which takes place against the backdrop of the war in the Middle East, and Jeff Fisher’s Killer Movie, which puts a horrific spin on the endless reality-television trend. For The Blair Witch Project’s Myrick, The Objective marks a return to the scenario of a group of people venturing into forbidding territory where mysterious forces threaten them, while Fisher has intimate knowledge of his film’s specific milieu, having served time on the likes of The Real World/Road Rules and The Simple Life. But while the former effectively makes an already harrowing situation worse with the introduction of the supernatural, the latter doesn’t come up with anything that’s as scary as, say, the prospect of sitting through a whole season of Paris Hilton hijinx.
Myrick, who scripted The Objective with Mark A. Patton and Wesley Clark Jr., pointedly avoids setting his military thriller in Iraq, which might have weighed the movie down with too much political baggage. Instead, the story takes place in post-9/11 Afghanistan, where CIA agent Keynes (Jonas Ball) hooks up with a Special Forces unit assigned to accompany him in seeking out a local cleric who can help win support against the Taliban. That’s Keynes’ cover story, anyway; he’s actually there to investigate satellite data that suggests a nuclear weapon is being secretly developed out in the desert. Accompanied by a local man, the squad heads out into the sandy, rocky wastelands, where the greatest threat would seem to be mines and armed attacks by their human foes.
Lensing on the same Moroccan locations utilized by the Hills Have Eyes movies, Myrick and cinematographer Stephanie Martin are able to elicit a sense of foreboding even in the sunlit, wide-open spaces. The deeper Keynes, Major Wally Hamer (Matt Anderson) and his men venture into the unfamiliar territory, the more hints they receive that they’re being shadowed by an inhuman enemy, and a few shades of Blair Witch crop up: Maps fail to accurately reflect the terrain they find themselves on, and the group comes across a collection of odd totems that portend the paranormal. Rather than a vengeful sorceress, however, the threat may be something that is not and never was of this Earth, and that even the heavily armed soldiers are no match for.
Myrick ratchets up the tension incrementally, with a good amount of it deriving from the increasing conflict between Keynes and Hamer, as the latter comes to doubt the CIA man’s stated motivations for the mission that has started to claim the lives of his men. Ball, who was mesmerizing in last year’s Tribeca feature The Killing of John Lennon, brings a quiet intensity to his turn here, and stuntman/actor Anderson is equally forceful in a more outspoken manner. The supporting soldiers don’t have particularly defined characters, but they’re all believable as grunts—in part because, aside from Blair Witch vet Michael C. Williams, they all have actual military experience.
While the threat confronting the team becomes more tangible as The Objective goes on, with fine use of odd and unshowy digital FX, it’s never fully defined. That will be intriguing for some viewers and unsatisfying for others, and at the finale, the subtlety of the supernatural elements gives way to a trippy, hallucinatory 2001-esque visual blowout that’ll have many scratching their heads. At the film’s debut Tribeca screening, Myrick stated that he wanted this ending to provoke discussion, and even if it’s more visually stimulating than dramatically conclusive, there’s something to be said for a genre movie that aims to stimulate speculation rather than neatly tying things up.
Killer Movie, conversely, leaves one with little to discuss beyond the question of whether it’s time to call a moratorium on movies about reality shows gone murderously wrong. There may still be an original way to combine slasher-movie thrills with satire of this pervasive programming, but that’s a tall order considering how familiar its tropes have become, and how much they’ve been dissected. In that sense, Killer Movie may be a victim of the very media oversaturation it seeks to lampoon.
As a TV crew infiltrates the small town of White Plains, North Dakota, ostensibly to document the winning streak of the high-school hockey team but actually hoping to capture a lot of background dirt, the movie introduces a series of predictable types. Producer Lee Tyson (Cyia Batten) is a bitch on wheels who’ll do anything for ratings and doesn’t care who she has to step on to get them. Blanca Champion (Kaley Cuoco), an actress who joins the production to research a role, is a spoiled, vacant celebutante with a lot more fame than talent. Agent Seaton Brookstone (Nestor Carbonell) believes in the pursuit of artistic truth—as long as it comes with a big commission. Etc. Thank goodness Jake Tanner (Paul Wesley), a hotshot young director called in to save the floundering project, is a likable sort who really does care about making good television. Unfortunately, his efforts are stymied by not only the crass influences around him, but a mysterious killer who starts snuffing the locals and network visitors alike.
There are scattered laughs here and there, but perhaps Fisher was too close to the material to go for a truly merciless or outrageous attack that the subject matter, by this point, truly requires. (It’s hard, for example, for Blanca to score as a parody of Hilton when the real thing has done such a good job of becoming a self-parody.) And while the murders are largely played straight, these sequences are neither creative nor intense enough to have much impact. What really undercuts Killer Movie’s effectiveness, however, is that the two facets of its plot don’t have much of a chance to inform each other, since for quite some time, the principals are largely unaware of or unconcerned with the slayings. (Is it sloppiness or a satiric point that the police are never once seen even attempting to investigate the crimes? Hard to tell.) A movie about a reality-series team taking advantage of the mayhem in their midst could have had some real bite, but instead we’re left with the surviving characters standing around wondering where the rest of the crew has gotten to.
Nor does the film offer the satisfaction of a good mystery; for the viewer, sorting out the villain’s identity largely comes down to keeping track of who hasn’t been on screen for a while, and the revelation feels random rather than an inevitable payoff to previously dropped clues. Equally random is the process of literal elimination that leads to one of the less sympathetic characters having the role of final-girl heroine thrust upon her. There’s some workmanlike suspense as the masked marauder takes off after the last people left standing, though the fadeout incorporates a psycho-movie cliché that’s as deserving of a good skewering as “non-fiction” TV. While it’s slickly made and professionally acted by all involved, Killer Movie could and should have been a lot sharper.
