11-11-11 Review
Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 11.11.2011
Darren Lynn Bousman ties to show audiences that an obsession with numbers can be scary. But does he succeed or have we ended up with another Number 23? 411's Jeremy Thomas checks in with his full review!
Directed by: Darren Lynn Bousman Written by: Darren Lynn Bousman
Starring: Timothy Gibbs - Joseph Crone Michael Landes - Samuel Wendy Glenn - Sadie Angela Rosal - Anna Lluís Soler - Javier Brendan Price - Grant Denis Rafter - Richard Crone Benjamin Cook - Cole Salomé Jiménez - Sarah Montse Alcoverro - Celia Lolo Herrero - Bookstore Owner
Running Time: 92 minutes
Rated R for bloody violence
Movies that play on non-sequel-defining numbers in their titles have a somewhat sketchy history with movie-goers this year. From Apollo 18 and 30 Minutes or Less to The Three Musketeers to I Am Number Four and more, audiences just aren't flocking to the theaters to see movies with digits in the name unless there is a Super or X-Men in front of it. Nor are movies where a protagonist is obsessed with numbers particularly successful; Jim Carrey, for example, had a notorious bomb with The Number 23, directed by Joel Schumacher. None of this has stopped Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw II and Repo: The Genetic Opera fame. The horror filmmaker saw a golden opportunity in an auspicious date, namely November 11th, 2011. With that came an idea, and that idea has brought forth his latest horror film 11-11-11 which stars Timothy Gibbs, Michael Landes and Wendy Glenn in the hopes of breaking the number curse at the box office.
The film stars Gibbs as Joseph Crone, an author who has suffered a personal tragedy when a deranged fan drew inspiration from one of his books and set fire to Joseph's house, killing his wife and child. Joseph has become a shut-in in his seedy hotel room; he rebuffs his agent (Price) who claims that his writing is important by calling his work "dime-store thrillers" and the only time he gets out is when he goes through the motions of attending group therapy sessions. It is at one of these sessions that he meets Sadie (Glenn), a woman who tries to talk him out of his shell. Unfortunately right after meeting her, the combination of a car accident that he inexplicably walks away from and news from Barcelona, Spain that his father is dying means that he doesn't have much time for "getting to know you" romance and it's off across the Atlantic.
In Spain, where Joseph grew up as a child, he is reunited with his ailing father (Rafter) and his wheelchair-bound brother Samuel (Landes). Both of the Spanish-residing Crones are men of the cloth, with their own small congregation that Samuel runs with the help of their father's caretaker Anna (Rosal). Joseph is firmly atheist, which rekindles an immediate tension between him and his family. It isn't long after arriving, though, that he starts to realize something peculiar; the number 11-11 occurs with alarming frequency in his life. His son's death certificate lists 11:11 as the time of death; his car accident occurred at 11:11 in the morning. Their mother died on November 11th giving birth to Samuel. And it just so happens that they are only a couple days away from November 11th, 2011 as well.
Though Samuel scoffs at all the signs Joseph claims to see, it becomes harder to do so when strange creatures start appearing in and around the house at 11:11 PM, captured on close-circuit cameras. As Joseph looks into it he uncovers a worldwide society of "eleveners" as they call themselves, who believe that the date will be the day a gateway opens and these mysterious creatures--Midwayers, as they are known--will cross over into our world. With his brother's life and possibly the world at stake, it's up to Joseph to determine the truth of it all and try to prevent what's about to happen, if he can.
According to Darren Lynn Bousman, he wrote the script for 11-11-11 based on a pitch given to him by the friend of a producer he had lunch with. By Bousman's own account, when he met with this producer's friend a second time the friend wanted to pitch the end of the film and when Bousman asked about the beginning, the response was "I don't care about the beginning, let me tell you about the end." That was how the film came about is fairly obvious when the film plays out because it has no real idea what it is when it starts out. The film rushes through the first act and yet seems like much longer than the actual time that elapses as it fails to give us much information. It almost feels like Bousman knows that what's happening in the opening act doesn't matter, so he throws in a scant amount of potential romance between Sadie and Joseph before rushing the character off to Spain for the important part of the film.
When I say important, I mean nonsensical and jump scare-filled. There are a lot of weird hallucinations that happen to Joseph as November 11th draws ever closer. He starts seeing the mysterious creatures--which more or less look like somewhat-less human versions of Darth Sidious, complete with robes--and has a vision of his charred son going up the wheelchair-enabled lift on the stairs. The idea is that the closer they get to the date, the more "real" the creatures become and the more intense the omens that Joseph sees but it certainly feels more like just strange, needless jump scares because there isn't anything that frightening in the actual plot. His father gets up out of bed to appear out of nowhere at times. Why? I couldn't honestly tell you. That's what kind of movie this is.
The whole silliness of it would work far better if there were some better-written characters. Joseph is an atheist, but of course we know that won't last because he's in a horror film and he's not a supplementary character who dies in the second act. It's only the work of Gibbs, best known as a soap star on Another World, that makes the character believable as he invests Joseph with the required weariness and makes his transition from non-believer to obsessive-believer hold weight. Michael Landes is unable to do the same with Samuel, who doesn't provide a convincing reason why he doesn't believe in these creatures and yet wants Joseph to put his faith in something. When he looks at a demonic face in the closed-circuit camera and says "There has to be a logical explanation for this," you want to yell at him to turn in his holy man card. In fact, it is his complete denial of what's going on in front of his face that makes a later plot development so obvious from early on, along with a few other tidbits dropped by the plot device known as their father and the obligatory exposition from an occult bookstore owner. Suffice it to say that anyone who has seen a lot of religious horror films should be able to see how this one ends a mile away. And I am not kidding...halfway through the film I wrote in my notes "Oh, let me guess" and the big twist at the end. I was not at all shocked to find out I was right; rather, I was disappointed that it wasn't something less obvious by the clues given.
The supporting characters aren't much better, unfortunately. Sadie's presence in the film is completely unnecessary and the role feels like a throwaway subplot only to pad out the running time to a full ninety minutes. After all, without her there would be little to no reason for the full first act and a good portion of the third. The role of Javier, an apparently-deranged man played by Lluís Soler, may as well be wearing a sign that says "expository character" as that is all he is really there to do, besides provide a bit of a threat to Joseph and Samuel. Joseph's agent is barely present and deserves about that much attention; only one supporting character comes out well and that is Anna, who gets some of the best lines which are delivered with a delicious dryness by Angela Rosal. At one point when Joseph refuses to get out of bed to attend his brother's church services, Anna tells him "I am not Kathy Bates, but I will go Misery on you if you are not up in two seconds." That's the kind of fun that this movie could have used more of.
Unfortunately, instead of the fun we get an unoriginal mess of a film. Any potential that Joseph had as a character who is finding his transition from atheist to believer a terrifying one is thrown completely out the window in the third act when he starts making the same mistakes that every horror hero makes in films like these. Gibbs is a good actor but he can't salvage a character that chases after a potential killer in a maze where said threat has the home field advantage or falls for the sudden appearance of his wife in one scene, even though she's been dead for a while. At the same time, Bousman fills the film with more conceits and contrivances that you can't help but laugh at times. It sure is handy that a character leaves just enough of his manifesto to give clues to the plot for Joseph in a big room where they can be found, or that Samuel and his father can afford closed-circuit security and internet but they seem to light candles everywhere to save power. Maybe they just like the ambience...it is certainly appealing to the nasty-looking creatures that can jump out of them at any moment. And of course, with any horror film full of jump scares we need music that telegraphs those jump scares well in advance, which is where Joseph Bishara comes in. Bishara did a great job with the score to Insidious, but here he plays it as obvious as your typical substandard horror film can be.
The biggest problem that 11-11-11 has is, ultimately, wasted potential. The premise, once you see the final act, is definitely intriguing and you can see where Bousman saw potential in how the movie was pitched to him, and you have decent-to-good actors trying their hardest to make it all work. But when the plot holes start coalescing together to form a gaping emptiness at the core of the film, all you're left with is another generic horror-thriller with a marketing gimmick, and not only do genre fans deserve better, Bousman is capable of far better. That makes an already-bad film seem almost worse when you realize what could have been.
The 411: 11-11-11 is an intriguing premise of a movie where everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. From the script that telegraphs its twists and undercuts its characters to the overreliance on ineffective jump scares to the disastrously, laughable poor choice to design for the monstrous creatures in the film, this tale of a man obsessed by a date on the calendar is about as scary as that scant description makes it out to be. Only the acting—particularly that of Angela Rosal as caretaker Anna—makes this even slightly worth paying attention to and by the time the film is over most horror fans will be complaining about how obvious and poor the end twist was. The many plot holes, unrealistic character turns and unnecessary subplots make this horror film another failed entry into the "numbers are scary" subgenre of cinema, one that will hopefully not be revisited for quite some time.
