The key to a great horror movie is to either have such a tight plot that the audience doesn’t have any questions or to keep things moving along so fast that they don’t have time to ask questions. Neither of the new movies I watched today in my Halloween movie marathon that included Halloween III, Dawn Of The Dead, Evil Dead, Halloween and others), can say to have that quality, though that doesn’t mean they’re altogether bad flicks.

I don’t remember exactly where I saw a preview for The Perfect Host, but it looked intriguing. There’s so many twists in this movie that I don’t want to spoil much, so I’ll say that if you like psychological thrillers, this one might be up your alley. Even the trailer has spoilers so you’ve been warned. WE’RE IN SPOILER TERRITORY FROM HERE TO FROZEN. So, the trailer revealed that a guy who’s on the run after robbing a bank winds up breaking into a guy’s house (played by David Hyde Pierce). As it turns out DHP is something of a psycho and flips the script on the criminal, not just capturing him, but throwing a party in his presence/honor. This turns out to be the case in the movie, though we don’t get to that point for about 20-30 minutes which kills a lot of the tension that’s supposed to build when the criminal is trying to convince DHP he’s someone he’s not. We already know from the trailer that he’s a bad guy too, so either don’t put that in the trailer or get to the point a little faster.

But, as I said, that’s not the only twist and this flick has more of them than a pretzel factory. As it turns out, DHP isn’t really having a party, he’s just nuts. The party scenes are all in his head, meaning he’s doing all these actions while the criminal just looks on and waits for death. Apparently, DHP has these “parties” on a regular basis with a set schedule and everything, leading up to the victim’s eventual death. So, there’s you’re source of tension, right? Well, not so much because DHP plays the part pretty wackily. Had he been less over the top about everything, he’d seem like more of a threat. But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to land because in yet another twist, the criminal gains his freedom through a game of chess, until he gives DHP shit and winds up getting knocked out. Cut to the next morning when DHP looks pretty satisfied and puts a picture of the dead criminal in his scrapbook. But that can’t be the end, right? We’ve seen too many twists already, plus this supposedly clever psycho just left the criminal out in the garbage seemingly in front of his house. It’s all a ruse! Well, just the death part as DHP used make up to make it look like the criminal was dead.

And the surprises don’t stop there as it turns out the DHP is actually a cop! A WHA?! Now, I didn’t see that one coming, but nothing was really surprising at this point because everything was supposed to be surprising, you know? Besides, I doubt whether someone with the clear psychological problems of DHP’s character (he has all these fake people writing him post cards that he himself writes, not to mention all the phantom party guests) could hack it as a cop, especially a detective or whatever he’s supposed to be. There’s more twists after that involving why the criminal committed the robbery in the first place and DHP’s secret possibly getting revealed to his fellow cops, but by that point I was kind of just waiting for the movie to be over. I was too questionable about the details and then started looking hard at things and they started falling apart for me. It’s too bad, too, because I think DHP could have had a really impressive performance here if he had played it a little tighter (or the director had told him to do so).

So, I guess the lessons learned from The Perfect Host are to give less away in the trailer, keep the performances in check and ease up on the supposedly shocking twists because they tire/bore your audience after a while.

Frozen suffered from entirely different problems in my opinion, though that opinion might have been unfairly elevated by the praise of some of my horror-loving friends. I had actually forgotten that it was written and directed by Hatchet and Hatchet II‘s Adam Green, which would have probably raised expectations even more. When I first heard the concept for this flick, I was immediately doubtful, a whole 90 minutes about three people stuck on a chair lift? It can’t be good. That’s a Twilight Zone/Tales From The Crypt episode. But people liked it.

The thing about Frozen is that, even for it’s change in scenery and odd locale, it’s basically a slasher movie and thus follows all of those conventions. You’ve got a group of kids making a stupid decision (begging a guy they bribed who clearly doesn’t give a shit about anything, to let them go on one last run down a ski mountain), making more stupid decisions and then the killer either getting them or not. In this case, the killer is wolves. And, of course, there’s a SPOILER final girl who winds up having an ending like pretty much every horror female ever.

None of which is necessarily bad, but I had expected so much that I was waiting for it to transcend what was happening and it never did. The dialog between the characters was alright, but nothing amazing, though it’s hard to say if this is the fault of the writing or the performances. I also felt like some of the decisions they made were so stupid that I didn’t care so much anymore if they died or not (I don’t have these feelings in real life, but in horror movies where that’s the point, sometimes I just want to skip the crap and get to those scenes). But that only happens when I’m not engrossed and I didn’t find anything engrossing about this movie aside from the fact that people were getting hurt and that’s sad.

My main problems are SPOILERY, so be warned. I can buy that they want to make one last trip down the mountain even if it’s shockingly stupid. Most slasher movies hinge on something like this, so it’s a suspension of disbelief I’m okay with. My first problem was the terrible facsimiles of New England accents. I actually didn’t realize at first that the movie was supposed to be set there and had I not met my wife, I wouldn’t know the difference, but I did and these are the worst NE accents I’ve heard in a long time. Related to that is the fact that the movie is filled with wolves, which I 1) don’t believe exist in NE and 2) think would be somehow kept away from a ski mountain, even one that’s been closed down for the week. I also have a problem with the idea that a ski resort wouldn’t check it’s lifts and property better, but that’s just me. I might be wrong about all these things, but they bugged me and like I said above, when things bug me about a movie, it knocks me right out of the story. I also think that the first guy that jumped down should have attached his board to distribute the weight of the fall, but not everyone’s a genius.

At the end of the day it was a mostly well put together movie with some really good special effects which was a surprise given the film’s setting. It’s mostly tight and attempts to build character, but it’s in a really familiar and obvious way (two buddies, one has a girlfriend, you can imagine a good portion of the dynamics there). It just didn’t grab me because there were too many elements that didn’t feel or seem right. I could be wrong about everything that seemed off and very well might be, but it was all too distracting for me to ever really get engrossed in the proceedings.