Days of Horror: Habitat
Apr. 20th, 2009 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiHabitat. 1997. Written and directed by Rene Daalder. Distributed by A-Pix.
Russ Meyer protege Rene Daalder is one of those writer-directors whose vision far outstrips his talent. Massacre at Central High isn’t quite the brilliant film that its cult following would have you believe, but it’s got some nice touches that hold up well and sow the seeds for future movies. Alas, Habitat, his mid-’90s post-global-warming horror flick, is burdened by the fact that Daalder writes awful, awful dialogue, and insists on putting said dialogue in the mouths of actors who are mediocre at best. Also, there are those pesky issues of plot and characterization.
This one begins with a Scrolling Screen of Exposition. Yeah. Because movies, after all, are a really shitty medium in which to practice, “show, don’t tell.”* Anyway, we learn that in the not too distant future, the ozone layer has been destroyed, the world’s coming apart at the seams, and cats and dogs are living together.
We cut away to the police no-knock raiding a house. After three men burst through the door, a bad actor comes to the scene and chews out the officer who sent his men in. Right on cue, the three cops stumble out of the house, choking and dying and kind of yellow. The bad actor (who later turns out the be a CDC employee) examines the bodies and explains that the men are covered in pollen. Yes, three men have been plant-spooged to death!
We cut to the desert, where the former residents of the house are driving off to start a new life. In one truck, we’ve got Hank (played by Tchéky Karyo, the poor man’s Jean Reno) and his ponytailed friend/brother/lover/assistant, who probably has a name, but it never sinks in, so we’ll call him Ponytail.
In the other one, we have Alice Krige! You might know her as The Borg Queen or as Bathsheba to Richard Gere’s King David,** but here she’s playing something really creepy: Clarissa, Hank’s wife and the mother of Balthazar Getty! Getty, playing a teen named Andreas, is doing his best Charlie Sheen impression, moping about having to leave the fun of the city for the crappiness of the desert.
During the move-in scene — in which we learn that Ponytail Guy is actually a former college buddy of Hank and Clarissa’s who works for the CDC but sympathizes with Hank’s goals — we get necessary exposition. See, Hank is a Mad Scientist who has stolen equipment and broken numerous laws, including ones involving molds that can eat through steel. Also, they may cause mutations. Do not taunt happy fun mold.
Mother and son wander into town to the local cactus shop***, where they meet three women playing cards. While Clarissa tries to explainit all why she needs sprinkler systems, Andreas wanders around and meets a cute blonde named Deborah. She’s the daughter of the town’s gym teacher, but he hits on her anyway, using the old, “I can see that this plant still has a spark of life” trick as a way to hold her hand. Works every time.
Meanwhile, back at the house, Hank monologues about the fools in the establishment who never listened to him, and then proceeds to chop into the wall looking for worms. Alas, he was too much of a fool to make sure he wasn’t chopping into a water pipe, and faster than you can say, “in my science courses, I learned proper lab safety techniques,” water bursts into the room, knocking over Hank, the electrical equipment, the molds, and anything else that’s in the lab. He gets covered in mold and water, and would presumably be dead of either electrocution or drowning if we didn’t know this was a horror movie.
Meanwhile, Andreas meets the neighbor’s teen son, who shows him the town. They run into Deborah again, sitting in a car with her boyfriend Blaine, who is — and I realize that this might come as a shock to you, as this never happens in films in which The Girl already has a boyfriend — a bully and an ass. So is her gym coach dad****, who in one of those moments that shows that he’s a Classy Dad, tells Blaine, “keep an eye on that new kid. I don’t want him sniffing around my little girl.”
As Andreas wanders around, Clarissa arrives home, and although she can tell something’s up, due to the slime on the stairs and the stench in the house, Hank himself appears to her, looking perfectly normal! They make love, with Hank tossing out biobabble as a form of foreplay in some form of unintentional tribute to Kevin Kline’s seduction of Jamie Leigh Curtis using foreign words in A Fish Called Wanda.
Post-coitus, Hank starts to show the effects of his earlier dunking, as slime appears on his back, a cloud of CGI-based pollen***** springs from his mouth, and his eyes glow green before he finally vanishes in a puff of illogic.
Clarissa is strangely not that disturbed, and when Andreas gets home, she explains to him that Hank was working on “accelerated evolution,” and that this was the result. Within days, the entire house has turned into a greenhouse, with strange plants appearing everywhere.
Meanwhile, we get back to the Teen Comedy plotline. After their Meet Cute at the cactus shop, Deborah and Andreas make eyes at each other when they can, but stupid Blaine keeps getting in the way. We get the usual set of confrontations and challenges. Eventually, when Andreas and his one friend are hanging out atThe Bronze a local bar/pool hall that happens to allow minors to visit, a confrontation between the alpha males leads to Deborah and Andreas making out.
Naturally, Blaine has had enough, so he challenges Andreas to fight in gym class (which, being run by Asshole Coach, is really just a series of boxing matches). But Blaine, being a Generic Teen Bully, naturally doesn’t play by the rules. In fact, he and his gang grab Andreas and tie him up outside. You see, the lack of ozone means that Andreas will eventually burn up, getting third-degree burns after a few hours. And inside, everyone will just assume that Andreas chickened out, and that Blaine won the fight.
If you’re thinking, “hey, that’s not very logical,” well, you’re probably right. I mean, aside from the fact that it’s murder, there’s also the fact that someone would likely see something (in fact, if it’s that dangerous to go out in daylight, someone likely would be monitoring school doors), and the fact that it takes one hell of a hight degree of psychosis to kill someone like that.
But it doesn’t matter because A) Deborah figures out that something happened, and goes outside to rescue Andreas, and B) Andreas didn’t even get any first degree burns! He’s a freak!
He’s also an idiot. After confronting Blaine (and having his complaint dismissed by Coach, who appears to be the only authority figure at the entire school), he heads to the locker room, where once again, Blaine and the Blainettes attack him, this time scrubbing his tummy with a wire brush.
When Andreas gets home to his indoor forest, his mom sees that he’s hurt, and all of a sudden,Tinkerbell the CGI swarm that used to be his dad engulfs him and heals his wounds! Andreas now learns that his parents actually created him as a science experiment, to see if they could get humanity to start to evolve.
Meanwhile, Coach learns about his daughter’s kiss and confronts her about it. They get into a fight, and she runs out to mope. Naturally, she ends up moping at the same spot Andreas uses, and after some brief discussion, they decide to steal Coach’s convertible and drive to the nearest waterfall to go skinny dipping. It makes perfect sense to them, at least.
While they drive out to skinny-dip — a drive that takes all night — Coach confronts Clarissa, and immediately suffers allergy attacks on entering her house. He makes a bunch of threats to her even as they trade innuendo (he says the house is “hot and wet,” she counters by saying that she’d prefer “warm and moist”), and eventually starts throwing up due to all the pollen in the house. As he runs to leave, a vine attempts to strangle him, but he escapes, and as soon as he gets home, calls the CDC.
While Coach waits for the CDC, he tells Blaine and his buddy to “make sure no one leaves that house,” which they assume means they should grab a can of gasoline, go inside the house, and attempt to burn it down. Naturally, Things Go Wrong, as Blaine’s friend gets drowned when a chunk of the house falls on him and knocks him to the basement.
Oh, and while all this is happening, Deborah and Andreas are skinny dipping. Lots of making out under the waterfall as the sun rises. Alas, their fun ends when Deborah gets a nasty sunburn, because she is “just a normal girl. I’m not special.” Andreas notes that he loves her, which makes her special, and we have our brief John Hughes moment before they head back to town.
In one of those perfect bursts of timing, the pesticide-toting CDC folks — including Ponytail and Bad Actor, whose name turns out to be Strickland — get to town and enter the house around the same time that Deborah and Andreas do******. Coach also steals a Hazmat suit and enters the house. Naturally, as folks get split up, the generic CDC workers start to get killed off.
Coach, for reasons that make no sense to me after two viewings, smashes the facemask of one guy, who then gets eaten by the carnivorous earthworms who naturally abound in this house. The sentient vines rip another guy’s helmet off and zombify him the way plants always have since the dawn of time, and a worker with a flame thrower, in a panic, roasts the zombie guy and his oxygen tank. Oops.
Eventually, Coach finds Clarissa and, after shouting, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” shoots her. Then, in a twist that I’m sure no one saw coming*******, she turns into another one of the pollen/bug/CGI swarms! Coach is unfazed, and pulls an Arnie-lite, uttering, “I always knew, deep down, you were a pest,” as he sprays her with the pesticide gunk.
Alas, even as Strickland is getting killed downstairs by the evil vines, Coach gets stripped of all his clothing by Hank, and then tossed in the basement to die. Elsewhere in the basement, Deborah get swarmed, and Andreas is afraid that he’s lost the love of his life, but Hank was only swarming her to cure her sunburn! Then Hank and Clarissa appear to wish Those Two Crazy Kids good luck with their life, and to repopulate the earth withmutants the next stage in man’s evolution. They then fly off, like tinkerbells in the night, and the world is a better place.
Of course, Blaine doesn’t die, even though he’s an attempted murderer. In fact, his only punishment is losing the girl. An a handful of innocent CDC agents and cops did die as the result of Hank’s meddling with Mother Nature. Which would be fine if this were a well-crafted movie with lots of intriguing moral gray areas. And it feels like that’s what Daalder wants it to be. But the acting is so uniformly terrible, and the dialogue so clunky, that the entire process never feels like anything other than a Sci-Fi channel flick with better f/x. Worth a rental, maybe, but not much more.
Bonus Fact #1: Krige and Laura Harris (who plays Deborah, and who had good roles in The Faculty and on Dead Like Me) would go on to star in an even worse horror flick, The Calling.
Bonus Fact #2: Getty would go on to star in two better horror flicks, The Tripper and Feast.
Bonus Fact #3: Dave McKean is thanked in the credits.
Bonus dialogue: “I am so sick of eating what you scrape off the walls and find under the couch. . . Most people don’t mow their carpets twice a week. “
*And yes, Star Wars gets away with it. But that’s like bringing up The Beatles and The Rolling Stones when attempting to refute Wyatt Frame’s claims that the most successful bands all have “and” in their names.
**Or possibly from Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers, which on any given day is a contender for the title of “Worst Horror Movie of All Time.”
***Really.
****Yes, this one’s a cliche, too, but I’m willing to let it slide. I still remember Coach Voelkel from high school, who could easily have been the model for the coach in this movie.
*****Or possibly bugs. It’s really hard to tell with the CGI. It’s basically a cloud of moving yellow dots. It’s entirely possible that Hank has actually turned into Tinkerbell.
******Well, the latter are distracted briefly by a brief fight with Blaine, which ends when the neighbor’s kid, sick of Blaine’s bullying, hits the latter with a 2X4. That scene, like the one in which Blaine’s best friend enters the house and is hit on by Clarissa, or the two stupid boxing matches at school, or the scene in which Ponytail enters the house ahead of the CDC folks to try to talk sense into them, seems to be there to make sure the film doesn’t end up with a runtime of sixty-eight minutes.
*******By “no one,” I mean “Daalder’s mom,” of course.
Russ Meyer protege Rene Daalder is one of those writer-directors whose vision far outstrips his talent. Massacre at Central High isn’t quite the brilliant film that its cult following would have you believe, but it’s got some nice touches that hold up well and sow the seeds for future movies. Alas, Habitat, his mid-’90s post-global-warming horror flick, is burdened by the fact that Daalder writes awful, awful dialogue, and insists on putting said dialogue in the mouths of actors who are mediocre at best. Also, there are those pesky issues of plot and characterization.
This one begins with a Scrolling Screen of Exposition. Yeah. Because movies, after all, are a really shitty medium in which to practice, “show, don’t tell.”* Anyway, we learn that in the not too distant future, the ozone layer has been destroyed, the world’s coming apart at the seams, and cats and dogs are living together.
We cut away to the police no-knock raiding a house. After three men burst through the door, a bad actor comes to the scene and chews out the officer who sent his men in. Right on cue, the three cops stumble out of the house, choking and dying and kind of yellow. The bad actor (who later turns out the be a CDC employee) examines the bodies and explains that the men are covered in pollen. Yes, three men have been plant-spooged to death!
We cut to the desert, where the former residents of the house are driving off to start a new life. In one truck, we’ve got Hank (played by Tchéky Karyo, the poor man’s Jean Reno) and his ponytailed friend/brother/lover/assistant, who probably has a name, but it never sinks in, so we’ll call him Ponytail.
In the other one, we have Alice Krige! You might know her as The Borg Queen or as Bathsheba to Richard Gere’s King David,** but here she’s playing something really creepy: Clarissa, Hank’s wife and the mother of Balthazar Getty! Getty, playing a teen named Andreas, is doing his best Charlie Sheen impression, moping about having to leave the fun of the city for the crappiness of the desert.
During the move-in scene — in which we learn that Ponytail Guy is actually a former college buddy of Hank and Clarissa’s who works for the CDC but sympathizes with Hank’s goals — we get necessary exposition. See, Hank is a Mad Scientist who has stolen equipment and broken numerous laws, including ones involving molds that can eat through steel. Also, they may cause mutations. Do not taunt happy fun mold.
Mother and son wander into town to the local cactus shop***, where they meet three women playing cards. While Clarissa tries to explain
Meanwhile, back at the house, Hank monologues about the fools in the establishment who never listened to him, and then proceeds to chop into the wall looking for worms. Alas, he was too much of a fool to make sure he wasn’t chopping into a water pipe, and faster than you can say, “in my science courses, I learned proper lab safety techniques,” water bursts into the room, knocking over Hank, the electrical equipment, the molds, and anything else that’s in the lab. He gets covered in mold and water, and would presumably be dead of either electrocution or drowning if we didn’t know this was a horror movie.
Meanwhile, Andreas meets the neighbor’s teen son, who shows him the town. They run into Deborah again, sitting in a car with her boyfriend Blaine, who is — and I realize that this might come as a shock to you, as this never happens in films in which The Girl already has a boyfriend — a bully and an ass. So is her gym coach dad****, who in one of those moments that shows that he’s a Classy Dad, tells Blaine, “keep an eye on that new kid. I don’t want him sniffing around my little girl.”
As Andreas wanders around, Clarissa arrives home, and although she can tell something’s up, due to the slime on the stairs and the stench in the house, Hank himself appears to her, looking perfectly normal! They make love, with Hank tossing out biobabble as a form of foreplay in some form of unintentional tribute to Kevin Kline’s seduction of Jamie Leigh Curtis using foreign words in A Fish Called Wanda.
Post-coitus, Hank starts to show the effects of his earlier dunking, as slime appears on his back, a cloud of CGI-based pollen***** springs from his mouth, and his eyes glow green before he finally vanishes in a puff of illogic.
Clarissa is strangely not that disturbed, and when Andreas gets home, she explains to him that Hank was working on “accelerated evolution,” and that this was the result. Within days, the entire house has turned into a greenhouse, with strange plants appearing everywhere.
Meanwhile, we get back to the Teen Comedy plotline. After their Meet Cute at the cactus shop, Deborah and Andreas make eyes at each other when they can, but stupid Blaine keeps getting in the way. We get the usual set of confrontations and challenges. Eventually, when Andreas and his one friend are hanging out at
Naturally, Blaine has had enough, so he challenges Andreas to fight in gym class (which, being run by Asshole Coach, is really just a series of boxing matches). But Blaine, being a Generic Teen Bully, naturally doesn’t play by the rules. In fact, he and his gang grab Andreas and tie him up outside. You see, the lack of ozone means that Andreas will eventually burn up, getting third-degree burns after a few hours. And inside, everyone will just assume that Andreas chickened out, and that Blaine won the fight.
If you’re thinking, “hey, that’s not very logical,” well, you’re probably right. I mean, aside from the fact that it’s murder, there’s also the fact that someone would likely see something (in fact, if it’s that dangerous to go out in daylight, someone likely would be monitoring school doors), and the fact that it takes one hell of a hight degree of psychosis to kill someone like that.
But it doesn’t matter because A) Deborah figures out that something happened, and goes outside to rescue Andreas, and B) Andreas didn’t even get any first degree burns! He’s a freak!
He’s also an idiot. After confronting Blaine (and having his complaint dismissed by Coach, who appears to be the only authority figure at the entire school), he heads to the locker room, where once again, Blaine and the Blainettes attack him, this time scrubbing his tummy with a wire brush.
When Andreas gets home to his indoor forest, his mom sees that he’s hurt, and all of a sudden,
Meanwhile, Coach learns about his daughter’s kiss and confronts her about it. They get into a fight, and she runs out to mope. Naturally, she ends up moping at the same spot Andreas uses, and after some brief discussion, they decide to steal Coach’s convertible and drive to the nearest waterfall to go skinny dipping. It makes perfect sense to them, at least.
While they drive out to skinny-dip — a drive that takes all night — Coach confronts Clarissa, and immediately suffers allergy attacks on entering her house. He makes a bunch of threats to her even as they trade innuendo (he says the house is “hot and wet,” she counters by saying that she’d prefer “warm and moist”), and eventually starts throwing up due to all the pollen in the house. As he runs to leave, a vine attempts to strangle him, but he escapes, and as soon as he gets home, calls the CDC.
While Coach waits for the CDC, he tells Blaine and his buddy to “make sure no one leaves that house,” which they assume means they should grab a can of gasoline, go inside the house, and attempt to burn it down. Naturally, Things Go Wrong, as Blaine’s friend gets drowned when a chunk of the house falls on him and knocks him to the basement.
Oh, and while all this is happening, Deborah and Andreas are skinny dipping. Lots of making out under the waterfall as the sun rises. Alas, their fun ends when Deborah gets a nasty sunburn, because she is “just a normal girl. I’m not special.” Andreas notes that he loves her, which makes her special, and we have our brief John Hughes moment before they head back to town.
In one of those perfect bursts of timing, the pesticide-toting CDC folks — including Ponytail and Bad Actor, whose name turns out to be Strickland — get to town and enter the house around the same time that Deborah and Andreas do******. Coach also steals a Hazmat suit and enters the house. Naturally, as folks get split up, the generic CDC workers start to get killed off.
Coach, for reasons that make no sense to me after two viewings, smashes the facemask of one guy, who then gets eaten by the carnivorous earthworms who naturally abound in this house. The sentient vines rip another guy’s helmet off and zombify him the way plants always have since the dawn of time, and a worker with a flame thrower, in a panic, roasts the zombie guy and his oxygen tank. Oops.
Eventually, Coach finds Clarissa and, after shouting, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” shoots her. Then, in a twist that I’m sure no one saw coming*******, she turns into another one of the pollen/bug/CGI swarms! Coach is unfazed, and pulls an Arnie-lite, uttering, “I always knew, deep down, you were a pest,” as he sprays her with the pesticide gunk.
Alas, even as Strickland is getting killed downstairs by the evil vines, Coach gets stripped of all his clothing by Hank, and then tossed in the basement to die. Elsewhere in the basement, Deborah get swarmed, and Andreas is afraid that he’s lost the love of his life, but Hank was only swarming her to cure her sunburn! Then Hank and Clarissa appear to wish Those Two Crazy Kids good luck with their life, and to repopulate the earth with
Of course, Blaine doesn’t die, even though he’s an attempted murderer. In fact, his only punishment is losing the girl. An a handful of innocent CDC agents and cops did die as the result of Hank’s meddling with Mother Nature. Which would be fine if this were a well-crafted movie with lots of intriguing moral gray areas. And it feels like that’s what Daalder wants it to be. But the acting is so uniformly terrible, and the dialogue so clunky, that the entire process never feels like anything other than a Sci-Fi channel flick with better f/x. Worth a rental, maybe, but not much more.
Bonus Fact #1: Krige and Laura Harris (who plays Deborah, and who had good roles in The Faculty and on Dead Like Me) would go on to star in an even worse horror flick, The Calling.
Bonus Fact #2: Getty would go on to star in two better horror flicks, The Tripper and Feast.
Bonus Fact #3: Dave McKean is thanked in the credits.
Bonus dialogue: “I am so sick of eating what you scrape off the walls and find under the couch. . . Most people don’t mow their carpets twice a week. “
*And yes, Star Wars gets away with it. But that’s like bringing up The Beatles and The Rolling Stones when attempting to refute Wyatt Frame’s claims that the most successful bands all have “and” in their names.
**Or possibly from Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers, which on any given day is a contender for the title of “Worst Horror Movie of All Time.”
***Really.
****Yes, this one’s a cliche, too, but I’m willing to let it slide. I still remember Coach Voelkel from high school, who could easily have been the model for the coach in this movie.
*****Or possibly bugs. It’s really hard to tell with the CGI. It’s basically a cloud of moving yellow dots. It’s entirely possible that Hank has actually turned into Tinkerbell.
******Well, the latter are distracted briefly by a brief fight with Blaine, which ends when the neighbor’s kid, sick of Blaine’s bullying, hits the latter with a 2X4. That scene, like the one in which Blaine’s best friend enters the house and is hit on by Clarissa, or the two stupid boxing matches at school, or the scene in which Ponytail enters the house ahead of the CDC folks to try to talk sense into them, seems to be there to make sure the film doesn’t end up with a runtime of sixty-eight minutes.
*******By “no one,” I mean “Daalder’s mom,” of course.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-20 03:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-20 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-20 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-21 03:19 am (UTC)Ironically, when we first changed to a new cable company with a lineup that included the Sci-Fi Channel, the very first time we turned to that channel... this was the movie that was on.
Thankfully it was quite near the end, so we just said "hunh, probably makes more sense if you saw it from the beginning" and didn't realize what a bullet we had dodged...