Review: "Rampage"

I found that a lot of the movies at 2009's Fantastic Fest were variations on standard themes and were executed competently and in many cases with enthusiasm, but were without the fresh vision, startling twist, or new angle to lift them from serviceable to memorable. This becomes all the more apparent when one takes in 20 to 30 movies over the course of the festival, as I typically do. Almost all of them are pretty good--very few are flat-out bombs without any redeeming features. But the sheer viewing intensity endured during this compressed period means that any given movie really needs to fight hard to rise above simply being the best available selection for the three o'clock slot on Tuesday. After awhile, it's easy for a bit of numbness to set in and for the movies to blur together. So what I'm looking for is those that manage to stick in my mind afterwards.

With that being said, is "Rampage" actually a good movie? It's...good enough. Not great, not excellent, but competently directed (by the usually reviled Uwe Boll) and with some nice performances. What raises it above the background noise is that it subverts the experience of viewing a horror movie. We have no problem watching a group of young people bumble into trouble and get slaughtered for their transgressions, howsoever minor those might be, down to the level of just being naive and dumb enough to fall into a killer's snare, as in this year's "Macabre". Of course, the implicit pact of most such slasher flicks is that escape is possible, and there's a fighting chance for the clever and determined, and there will at least be a Final Girl. The Other is vanquished, and the social order usually gets restored until the next sequel.

With "Rampage", we follow not the victims, but the killer, and suddenly the viewing experience becomes far less comfortable. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of the victims have done nothing to merit their fate--no one has committed the usual minor sins that invoke a slasher's vengeance, and none of them are trespassing into the forbidden backwoods or that old creepy house. They're minding their own business, walking around on errands in the middle of a drab small town, and they're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have no hope of fighting back and are simply relentlessly gunned down left and right. And it's very chilling to watch.

Of course, this is not, by any means, the first time any filmmaker has tried to rub in our collective face the fact that we enjoy watching people get hacked up in the standard horror flick. But here, at least, the approach is very matter-of-fact, without the smirky superiority of a judgmental "Funny Games". And Boll has another reversal or two up his sleeve to flip the perspective yet again and show the events in another light.

"Rampage" definitely provokes the obvious question of what you would do if you saw this guy coming--would you run, hide, try to be the hero? How can he be stopped? Incidents like this are not at all far-fetched (and the L.A. bank robbery of a few years back by a team of body-armored thugs with automatic weapons is a clear inspiration). But in raising the additional question of why we are watching in the first place, and why we enjoy movie massacres and buckets of the red stuff, and by doing so without artistic pretensions and histrionics, "Rampage" at the very least succeeds in sticking around in the memory longer than the bulk of this year's offerings.