Mobster’s Rating:
My apologies to last February’s ‘Shelter’, which I wrongly assumed would be the worst supernatural thriller to show up this year.
Darren Lynn Bousman’s ’11-11-11’ makes that Julianne Moore movie about Satanic mountain witches look accomplished in comparison. Here’s a thriller featuring lost faith, phantasmal bogeyman, spooky calendar dates and a possible anti-Christ. All of those elements are wrapped up in a overcooked script, doused in icy blue filters, and scored to death by the typical screeching chords associated with half-baked horror movies. I dare anyone in the audience to still be paying attention with interest by the final, big reveal.
The story follows Joseph Crone (Timothy Gibs), a bestselling author of thrillers who has denounced God in the wake of his wife and son’s deaths, burned alive in a fire set by a crazed fan. Crone is having horrifying nightmares that involve religious imagery and his dead love ones trying to warn him about something sinister on the horiozn. When he goes to his dying father’s bedside in Spain, he reconnects with his brother Samuel (Michael Landes), a wheelchair bound preacher who leads a church and wants Joseph to return to the flock. Joseph starts seeing signs related to the date 11-11-11, and comes face to face with a supernatural enemy in the house that seemingly wants to dispatch Samuel and his church. Joe’s dying dad suggests that Sam might be some sort of new messiah and that he should protect his brother at all costs. Instead of scouring the host of ancient texts that sit around the house, the still skeptical, grieving Joe figures visiting cod conspiracy websites that haven’t changed their home page since 1998 is the best course of action. Cue lots of boring, convoluted discussions about God and the devil until eventually there’s nearly no dialogue at all and just boring, badly lit convoluted battles between God and the devil.
There’s not much to be said in defense of 11-11-11 because it doesn’t try very hard with any of its pieces. From purely a marketing perspective, the decision to make the pertinent date of the event the day the picture releases in theaters seems like a daffy one. Tomorrow, this movie will have even less relevance than it does today, although that’s not necessarily going to be a big drop. There’s also no good reason for the 11/11/11 conspiracy theory. I’ve never heard of anything previously in the annals of paranoid urban legend that suggests a connection to the date. So, it’s just made up, which is fine, but then there’s no effort on the part of the film to make us care about the nature of the date. What will happen exactly? Are the creepy creatures outside the house angelic messengers, or dark demons and will they open a portal to Hell, or vanquish the evil destined to rise from it? Will Joseph reclaim his faith? Will Darren Lynn Bousman ever direct a movie I can sit through without wanting to punch his editor and cinematographer in the face?
The performances, special effects and production design are all serviceable for a low budget production like this one, but they contain not a single bit of inspiration or real craft. There’s been work expended here, but it’s all been assembled wrong. Consider those intentional scare moments that populate the flick; they are mostly comprised of creepy looking people staggering out of the darkness right behind the central character’s head. Fine, but they usually come in the middle of an important piece of dialogue or information, and they are preceded by such a distracting musical accompaniment that the tension of the scene is castrated before the pay-off. It would be like one person yelling surprise at a birthday party before you turned on the lights. Its even more haphazard because none of these booga-booga moments really tie into the story the film thinks it wants to tell. At a script level, this is supposed to be a chronicle of an atheist reconciling his beliefs with those of his family, who are devout Christians actively trying to serve God. But all of that is just the bait and switch, the straw men lifted up to burn in the final frames of an absolutely boring, predictable and awkward reveal. You can probably spot the real villain by just reading the synopsis I provided above.
‘11-11-11’ is a piece of trash with nearly no real redeeming features. Credit to the production designers for the spooky interiors of that house in Spain, but that’s really it. I wonder if it had to be this way. Why do horror films that choose to deal with God and supernatural forces always insist on treating faith either as a joke to be mocked or worse, in this case, as a kind of fortune cookie magic trinket? Joseph is an atheist and for a few bright spots here, retorts with logical questions about the faith those around him easily subscribe to. But alas, Joe is in a grungy second-rate spook thriller, so his legit concerns are met with ‘I’ll pray for you.’ So we have a character without faith who will inevitably find it, not because he’s wrestled with hard questions, but because the movie will throw enough goblins and ghosts at him that he must believe in demons, and if then that, why not God? But if God is there, do Joe’s interrogations about his benevolence or goodness go away? Well, of course not, but the movie wasn’t interested in those anyway.
Conversely, why such a lack of strong people of faith in films like this? One of the reasons that The Exorcist works so well is that Merrin and Carras are who work out their beliefs and spiritual struggles in the real world, even before fighting the beast hiding inside of Reagan. I’ve talked to a few pastors working in the inner city who won’t say a word about spectral demons, prophesied dates or arcane conspiracies, but will point out that the testing ground for their faith is right around the corner in the meth addicts, the street gangs and destitute on the corner. How much easier is it when you have a CGI demon to face? Even in a shallow bit of escapism like 11-11-11, Bousman fails to make those toothless bogarts even half as compelling or dangerous.