Film Review: Lake Mungo

Bit out of focus there, dude.
Probably just need to adjust the lens a bit.

'Mungo' - now that's a scary-sounding name, isn't it? Like 'Edgar'. Or 'Maxine'. Or 'Heather'.

I'm dead, me.

So; Lake Mungo. It's YET ANOTHER film about a haunted lake. Jeez, how many haunted-lake films does that make? Oh, that's right, only one. Because a plot which relies on a haunted lake is a terrible idea; the sort of thing that a stoner would dream up twenty-seven years into his career, shortly after befalling some form of blunt-trauma head injury.

Putting the dire concept aside, what do we have? Well, we have an Australian family visiting a haunted lake (snigger) for a holiday (fuck you, Thomas Cook!), only to find that their daughter is to be viciously murdered by the ghostly, demonic presence haunting the lake. Does it count as 'murder' if one of the parties is already deceased? I'm not entirely sure that it does. How would you even put a ghost on the stand?

Yeah, the trial's not going too well to be honest.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed though, or at least, I would be, if they hadn't decomposed and fallen off.

It's really annoying, losing your daughter in a haunted lake, so the dead girl's family spend the next 90 minutes explaining just how annoying it is. It's the sort of thing that I can image my mother watching, just so that she can tell her friends how 'thought-provoking' it was afterwards.

Is this, A. 'thought-provoking', or B. 'blurry'.
It's a tough call.

Turns out - it's quite boring being dead. To liven things up a bit, Dead Girl decides to start making repeated appearances in family photographs. You know, it's funny; most women H-A-T-E it when you take their photo, but Dead Girl, she's all like 'Hey! Hey take my photo y'all! Cmon!'. Dead Girl loves the camera, which is good, because  I think we can all agree that she's pretty photogenic.

H-O-T.

Dead girl's family get a bit 'all up in yo' face' about their daughter making a posthumous guest-appearance in their photo album. They start asking questions, mainly questions such as: 'What the shit is going on?', and ' Why is our recently-deceased child appearing posthumously in family photographs?'. 

Say 'cheese', bitch!

Dead Girl: now officially overstaying her shitting welcome.

 Dead girl - seemingly a relentless self-promoter - steps-up her campaign for attention by going digital -she quickly tires of photography (bor-iing!) and graduates to video media....and...uh...and also to beating the living shit out of her elder brother. Basically, Dead Girl, she's all like: 'Hey! Notice me you ignorant cunts!! I am here y'know!'.

Dead Girl: she's such an applause-pony.

Dead Girl's family respond to this desperate cry for attention by...well, they sort of don't. Mostly, they ignore it, in fact. To be fair - that's the best thing to do with an attention-whore, y'know, just ignore her and she'll go away. Probably.

Seriously guys; just ignore her and she'll tire of it eventually.

Dead Girl doesn't go away; instead, she reveals (SPOILER ALERT!) that she had icky, under-the-legal-age-of-consent sex with her next door neighbour and his oddball wife. There's quite alot of photographic evidence about Dead Girl's extra-curricular bedroom activities, and, as you can imagine, Sex-Pest Neighbour and Oddball Wife don't really want anyone to find out what they've been up to.

Dead Girl's bedroom: not a safe hiding place for sex videos.
Makes you look a bit guilty, apparently

Here's a tip, boys and girls: if you don't want someone to find out who you've been fucking, don't film it. The sinister neighbours try in vain to get back the sex video that they made with Dead Girl, but they can't locate it. That's the thing with being a Paedophile, it's an administrative nightmare. The neighbours make a run for it and are never found, but at least now we all know...uh..well we know that Dead Girl had been having sex with her neighbour.

Don't judge me you cunts!

Dead Girl's brother steps forward and admits that he's actually been faking the seemingly-ghostly footage of his sister; apparently 'he thought it would make things better'. Now, I'm not being funny, but what in the shit was this fool thinking? How is pretending that your dead sister is haunting you going to clear things up?

All better now?

Dead Girl's family decide that it's time to take a breather, so they go to visit the place where Dead Girl went on her last school trip. The place they go to is called 'Runtime has now reached 96 minutes probably time to wrap this shit up y'all'. They find out that Dead Girl buried her mobile phone and her favourite bracelet on the school trip, and they keep asking 'Why?'. 'Why would she bury her favourite bracelet?!' and the audience has this to say in response: 'We don't give a pair of plastic tits why she buried her damn bracelet, just show us the fucking ghost so that we can all go home'.

Nice place; shame about all the mounds of discarded teenage paraphernalia.

Watch out now, because THE TWIST is on its way! Woop woop! Everybody loves a twist! Dead Girl's family come to discover that Dead Girl was in fact being haunted....being haunted by her future self. I'm just going to let that sink in a bit with you, kay, cos it's, uh, it's pretty special. And I want us all to take a moment just to...absorb.

This is what's referred to as a 'weak ending'.

Now one thing's for sho', we're ALL being haunted by our future selves. Every time that I look in the mirror and see left-over splashes of booze congealing on my face, and cold Fillet-o-fish matting my five-o-clock shadow, I see how things are going to pan out, and it ain't pretty. What I didn't realise was that I have been wasting my self-disgust and personal sense of self-loathing on myself, when I could have made it all into a feature film and shared it with you lucky fucks years ago.

So what have we learnt from Lake Mungo?

• Stop filming shit that you don't want people to see! (I'm talking to you, Scarlet Johannssen).
• Australian teenagers lose their virginity to their neighbours.
• Family camping trips always end in disaster.
• Don't invite a medium into your house, because he'll probably start trying to fuck your son.

Film Review: Insidious

Jessica Rabbit gave me Mixi; Fuck you Jessica!

Hollywood Producer #1: 'Let's call it 'Insidious', yeah, because that sounds kind of haunted and shit'.

Hollywood Producer #2: 'What the shit does 'Insidious' mean, Dude? That sounds awesome!'

Hollywood Producer #1: 'I'm pretty sure that it means good return on investment in French'.

Hollywood Producer #2: 'OK sweet; that sounds perfect! I'll give that guy from 'Hard Candy' a call; he's got this rep for only getting involved with good projects, so by association this film will also be a huge success, even if, on the face of it, the production appears to be a total critical failure'.

Happy with my shiny face.

Hollywood Producer #1: 'Great - so who should we get on board to play the wife?'

Hollywood Producer #2: 'How about approaching Rose Byrne? She's got that whole 'vague melancholy expression' thing going on, which is, like, so insidious'.

Rose Byrne: so insidious.

Hollywood Producer #1: 'That is SO true. She's, like, totally insidious'.

Patrick: 'Why do you always look so sad, Rose?'
Rose: 'It's kind of my thing, y'know, like how YOUR thing is that really shiny face?'
Patrick: 'Oh, cool. That's so insidious'.
Rose: 'I know! Right?'

And so to 'Insidious', a word which actually means: 'Proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects'; a mixed metaphor then, for both the artistic integrity and the box-office performance of 'Insidious' as a whole. 

Advocates of the silver ring thing explain why virginity is, like, so insidious.

We have a husband-and-wife team (Patrick Wilson and Rose Bryne respectively), who live in what appears to be a haunted log cabin of near-ecumenical proportions. Rose spends alot of time sitting at her piano, listening intently to baby monitors, and singing in a mournful voice, while Patrick busies himself with falling asleep at his desk and buffing his face. 

I said YOU REALLY NEED TO GET OUT MORE Rose!

It's never made entirely clear why Rose is so resolutely fucking mournful all of the time; although there is mention made of her hard life AS A STAY-AT-HOME MOM. Yeah, it's pretty tough shopping at Target and sitting on a piano stool 24/7. Keep your chin up, Rosie! We're praying for you babe.

Eventually, Rose tires of listening to the baby monitor and starts a passionate affair with a nearby ghost.

Considering that she has three kids, Rose doesn't seem to get much in the way of housework done, although when Patrick comes home from his job as a UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR (good job, casting agents!) he often says things like: 'Well done Sweetie, you did a great job', and 'Don't worry sweetheart, things will get better soon'. Don't encourage her Paddy, she didn't do shit. She's been watching Judge Judy since 8AM.

Uh..good job?

Maybe the P-Man is just trying to boost Rose's confidence, because they seriously have a pretty sweet life going on from what I can see. To be 100% fair to Rosie, at one point she does have to (drum-roll please)......take the trash out. Well shit, I can see now why she be bitchin' and moanin' the whole damn time! 

As if taking the trash out once in a period of several weeks WASN'T BAD ENOUGH, Rosie also has to contend with the fact that some fuck keeps hiding her sheet music.  Now, I'm not exactly sure why Rosie needs her sheet music, because the only reason she and Patrick moved to the new house was so that she could write some new music. It's not like she needs to go over her old material or anything. FOCUS ROSIE! Stop looking to the past!

P: OMFG the trash is full again!
R: How is that POSSIBLE? I just took it out like three weeks ago! Motherfucker!

Rose's travails with her missing sheet music aside, it's difficult to see why this couple are so down all the time.  Of course, there is the fact that their son is in a coma. That's right; a coma. He wasn't in a coma at the start of the movie, but then again neither was I.

Busy astral-projecting.

So their little boy (Dalton), is in a coma. Except that it isn't a coma, and the medics just can't figure out what's wrong with him. I'm pretty sure that if Dalton's Consultant Paediatrician spent more than ten seconds around Rose, he'd totally get it. A 'comatose' Dalton returns to the log cabin so that Rose can bore him to death. Sorry, I meant so that Rose can 'nurse him'. And that's when all the weird, haunted shit starts kicking off; the first weird thing being that Darth Maul turns up and starts bumming around the dining room table; I took this to be a sign that Patrick had sought solice from his wife's incessant musical mediocrity in the closest sexually-available neighbourhood figure...from Star Wars. At least it wasn't Ja-Ja Binks though, right Rose?

Patrick and Darth Maul: their eyes met over a comatose 7-year-old.

We weren't planning it; it just sort-of happened. 

It's pretty tough when you find out that your husband has been sleeping with a fictional character from the Star Wars franchise, but Rose and Patrick decide to work through it. Trouble is, more and more ghosts start making an appearance, including one which appears to be Tiny Tim from 'A Christmas Carol'. You'd think that Dickens would at least have been given a brief mention in the credits, but N-O-T-H-I-N-G. 

God bless us, everyone.

That hat is a BRAVE look there, my friend.
It takes a real kick-ass white boy to carry that off.

Rose and Patrick decide to hire first a disinterested priest and then a comedy medium to bring Dalton back from the Neverworld. Sorry; the Neverwhere? The NothingWorld? The LazyEnding? The WasteOfFifteenBucks? 

Here to help.

The Medium tells Paddy and Rosie that Dalton is a gifted Astral Projectionist. Oh. Well that make total sense. We can just roll the credits right here then, because that explains E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. No more clarification needed here! The Medium also tells Paddy that he is also a gifted Astral Projectionist, which makes sense because Astral Projection is a dominant allele notoriously passed on through the male gene. Good.

Has anyone seem my hubby?
Dickhead bailed on my ass.
Reckon he been creepin' wit that ho' Loretta.

Inexplicably, Miss Havisham from 'Great Expectations' turns up. And they thought that Dalton was lost! Miss Havisham seems to have a bit of a thing for Patrick, and the two of them really hit it off. Just to be clear, by 'hit it off', I actually mean 'she repeatedly tries to murder him'. 

Patrick goes to the Neverland ranch to hang out a bit and save his son and shiz; but before he goes, the medium warns him 'not to draw attention to himself'. So Patrick, once he arrives at the Neverland ranch, immediately starts SHOUTING DALTON'S NAME AND GENERALLY DRAWING ATTENTION TO HIMSELF. Patrick wanders up to all the Neverland ghosts which look generally bad-ass and threatening, and asks them if they have seen his son. I'm not being funny, but basically Patrick does the complete shitting opposite of what the Medium tells him to do.

I'm a professional.

By a stroke of complete luck, Paddy runs into Dalton and they both try to escape Neverland together. It's looking pretty good, and they are both about to escape when Paddy decides that now is definitely a good time to kick back and jus' chill for a bit. He tells Dalton to go on without him, basically for no apparent reason at all. Good.

So, uh..she has to wear the gas mask 'to talk to the spirits', right?
Which educational establishment did she qualify as a medium from again?
Oh, that's right; none.

Dalton leaves his father to hang out with Miss Havisham, and runs into Darth Maul on the way. Now you'd think, wouldn't you, that Dalton running into the murderous, sociopathic, homicidal maniac demonic presence (which has its heart set on killing him and taking over his body) would be a BAD thing right? But, uh, but it isn't. And Dalton makes it back to the real world without incident. Don't hold your breath for an explanation, btw, because there isn't one. 

Sup.

Patrick's back, too, and he's as shiny as he ever was. He's also possessed by the demonic spirit of Miss Havisham, but he still looks pretty hot so plus ca change, right? Miss Havisham should probably take it easy for a few days, y'know, blend in a little bit so that nobody realises she has possessed Paddy's body and abandoned him to die in the Neverworld. So she does this by....immediately murdering the medium. I know where she's coming from, though, because the medium took her picture when she wasn't ready and that's enough to piss anyone off.

So what have we learnt from 'Insidious'?

• Hollywood hasn't got a dictionary, and even if it had one, it would consider it surplus to requirements.
• Patrick Wilson stays shiny, even after a trip to the third realm and an episode of demonic possession.
• Astral projectionists are playful explorers but it occasionally gets them into trouble.
• Psychic mediums are, without exception, elderly women.
• It isn't necessary to come up with new, original, exciting concepts for movie monsters when you can just regurgitate any ol' shiz from previous cinematic and literary triumphs. Regurgitation+shiny-faced-actor+spooky kid-PROFIT.