Zachary FenellSaturday Boners: Deaths of Ian Stone
March 7th 2009 18:21
Deaths of Ian Stone, 2007
Except in this case, the "ending" of the Deaths of Ian Stone took up a whole half of the movie, it seemed.
The first half was actually pretty fascinating. It was like Dark City crossed with Groundhog Day. The main character ended each bit with being killed in a variety of ways, and then he wakes up in a slightly different world each time, without any memory of what had happened before. He can only remember his life back to the previous murder.
And then... he starts resisting. Okay, that makes sense... He's trying to hold off the murder for as long as he can, he's running, he's dodging, sometimes it doesn't work...
And then something goes wrong.
I don't mean that something goes wrong with the murders or the memories. I mean that the story itself takes this ridiculous left turn at Albuquerque and never makes it back to a reasonable place.
It turns out that the whole upshot is that these weird alien things are feeding on the fear and the terror of the moment of death, and he does this weird thing to them that they don't understand, except maybe he's not a human after all and really one of them, or maybe he used to be human and then... or maybe... or maybe... or maybe...
When the monsters showed up, I thought, "Okay, I can roll with this, not a big deal..." But one of the crucial elements of suspense and horror is that you may or may not ever seen the monster. It's the mystery of the thing, the difficulty of understanding the motivation or the method that makes it scary. Full frontal monster-ness just really ruins it, and if you add cheesiness to it... well, then you've just lost the battle.
Maybe if the second half had been done differently, it might've made a difference. The story had such potential, and then it Hollywood-action-film-ed out on us. Blech.
1.5 Stars
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