Alive or Dead
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 83 m, 2008
Directed by Stephen Goetsch. Stars Ann Henson, Angelica May, Gretchen Busenitz, et al.

Though Alive or Dead is at best a poor man’s The Hills Have Eyes (and it doesn’t matter if you take that to mean Wes Craven’s overrated original or Alexandre Aja’s underrated remake), its first few minutes seize your interest—your prurient interest. A curvy brunette, Maria (Ann Henson of The Legend of My Heart Shaped Anus), is driving along a remote stretch of gravel road in the middle of the night. She’s destined for her boyfriend’s cabin, where the promise of some hot and heavy coupling has made her more goatish than Stacy Schuler after taking in a Little League doubleheader. But thanks to her cell phone, the foreplay is already in progress: “Damn, girl, rubbing against you, it’s like a Slip ‘n Slide down there,” her fellah moans, stroking (we assume) his “engorged man-muscle.” And while this hopeless romantic carries on with his fantasy about desecrating his sweet’s holiest of holies, Maria slips her free hand down her lowriders and starts to rub one off. But she can’t quite reach the big ‘O,’ so she rifles through her purse for her little, blue vibrator. Unfortunately, it rolls off the seat and out of reach, and I say “unfortunately” because, doggone it, I was really, really, really looking forward to seeing the so-called “blue wizard” work its magic. But Maria is nothing if not resourceful: she takes the end of the phone charger that’s meant for the car’s lighter socket and plugs it into herself. (Ah, cripes, I’ve just caught the mother of all earworms: “Sometimes love don’t feel like it should…”) Her trip to the moon is aborted, though, when she comes upon a creepy, seemingly abandoned bus on the side of the road. On one of the bus’s windows, the words “Help Me” are scrawled in ketchup, er, blood. Maria describes this grisly scene to her beau, who responds, “That’s like the beginning of every shitty horror flick I’ve ever seen.” Yeah, welcome to my world, sport.  

Her guttiwuts aflutter, Maria decides that it’s prolly best to make like a tree and get outta there, but some honkin’ nails placed strategically in the road render her SUV’s right front tire flatter than a Robert Stack line reading. And now we’ve reached a plot point that has become de rigueur in contemporary scare shows: doing in the cell phone. This, of course, insures that our heroine remains stuck in the sticks and vulnerable to its banjo-picking (and emphatically anti-technology) white trash culture. Sure enough, just as Maria gets hold of her auto club, her phone’s battery goes kaflooey. She tries to juice it up, but the part of the charger that she got chummy with earlier isn’t rising to the occasion. (Holy frijoles, her vaginal secretions must be more corrosive than the vital fluid in one of H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs.) Well, now that she has nothing better to do, Maria decides to check out that bus from Hell. And what she finds in there would make Gary Michael Hilton himself feel right at home: a mess of mutilated bodies and a young woman in chains, her face concealed by a mask that’s been scrappily stitched together from a variety of animal (and maybe even human) skins. The young woman, Sarah (Angélica Magaña), is still alive (and apparently intact), but before Maria can figure out how to free her, an uncombed character (no, it’s not Dirty Sanchez) approaches the bus. Maria, having ducked out of view in the nick of time, observes the man as he sweats to pull aboard a new body—one that looks like a cross between Sasquatch and Ron Jeremy. (It’s actually first-timer L. Flint Esquerra, who’s been made up by Anthony Grow and company to look even more repulsive—if such a thing is possible—than the infamous “Hedgehog.”) After unceremoniously dumping his dazed and confused cargo on the bus’s blood-spattered floor, the scruffy jerk gets behind the wheel and takes off for God knows where, oblivious to the accidental stowaway hiding in the back. 

Come daybreak, the bus arrives at its destination, which is a castle (complete with a pirate flag atop its greatest tower) surrounded by miles and miles of inhospitable desert. (You half-expect a gaderffii-wielding Tusken Raider to come charging through the dusty winds.) The unconscious fatso, whose name according to the patch on his overalls is Frank, comes to and subdues the driver. Sarah, meanwhile, is liberated from her restraints, allowing her to at long last reveal the cutesy-wutesy visage behind that ungodly Leatherface-style mask. But I guess even Sarah Jessica Parker would look like the most beautiful thing on two legs in the company of Frank. His head is shaped not unlike a Cro-Magnon’s, and his jowls are riddled with boils the size of golf balls. He’s an inarticulate dunce, to boot, grunting and growling like Frankenstein’s monster. The girls manage to break away from him when they go into the medieval abode to look for a landline, but their room-to-room search (which seems to go on forever and a day) yields some business that only serves to further muddy the waters. And soon Frank is chasing them in and around the fortress, hungering for a bite of their shapely gams. Oh, did I fail to mention that Frank is a cannibal? Well, he is, and he’s gone without his breakfast (which I’m sure we can all agree is the most important meal of the day) long enough. 

As it plods along, Alive or Dead becomes more and more incomprehensible. I might’ve forgiven it for that had it offered at least one bona fide thrill, but, alas, what ultimately goes down is about as exciting as listening to an Eagles record. (Ol’ Hitch’s assertion that an audience would sooner be baffled than bored will forever hold true.) There are gags worked in here and there that fail to break the monotony, like the pizza-faced teenager (Frank, Jr.) who keeps snatching severed hands and feet off the bus. (I’m amusing myself with a mental image of Kenny the Shark flagging down a Schwan’s truck that’s being operated by Vlad the Impaler.) There’s also a crazy pregnant woman who’s locked away and literally within minutes of adding to Frank’s flesh-eating brood. But the most ludicrous bit involves an aged monk who shows up out of nowhere to share the long, sad story of how Frank came to be. Most viewers will treat the old fart’s ramblings like an Obama State of the Union address and turn a deaf ear, but those who try to follow it will find that it only raises more questions than it answers. (What had me scratching my head was how the monk’s two-shot Derringer was able to fire off three shots.) 

Alive or Dead is clearly a dud, but its cast makes an honest effort to rise above the incessant dopiness. As Maria, Henson (who looks a bit like Linda Gray) is easy on the eyes (well, her body is, anyway), and she gives a natural, no-frills performance. She’s game for some comic relief, too, but she’s working with jokes that would throw off a practiced comedienne like Phyliss Diller. (When Maria first enters the castle, she calls, “Lancelot? Arthur? Sean Connery?”) The folks behind the camera get a lot of mileage out her fanny, though, as well as her pierced navel, which is distracting in the way that Estella Warren’s exposed parts were in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. Magaña, on the other hand, doesn’t show much skin, so we’re more sensitive to the dumb dialogue that’s been stuffed into her piehole. When Maria asks her where the bus is taking them, she responds, “To Hell.” Nobody—and I mean nobody—can say a line that and keep a straight face, which is probably why she played the scene with her face covered. 

Alive or Dead’s worst bit of casting involves what is arguably its most important character: the castle. Though an actual residence, its facade looks like something from a cut-rate theme park. I understand that the filmmakers were working with a measly budget and that they had to make the most out of whatever they could score on the cheap, but surely some effort could’ve been made to help the joint look more foreboding. The biggest problem lies with its interiors: there is no consistency to the décor, and the rooms appear to have been shot in whatever state they were found. (If the bric-a-brac was brought in, it was done so without rhyme or reason.) The whole blasted structure lacks mystery, menace, and it doesn’t help that it’s lensed entirely in broad daylight. Certainly dark corridors, cobwebbed staircases, and flickering light bulbs (it would probably be asking too much for a hellacious thunderstorm outside) would’ve brought some much-needed spookiness to the proceedings, but the abundance of light exposes the flatness of the layout and minimizes its threat. In some cases, utilizing practical locations can create a stronger sense of authenticity, if not a more plausible geography. This, however, is not one of those cases. You don’t appreciate how important set design is to a picture until you watch one that disregards it.  

Alive or Dead (I have yet to make sense of that title) was directed, written, produced, photographed, edited, and, for all I know, catered by Stephen Goetsch, so he deserves 99.9% of the blame for how poorly it shaped up. It’s boring, nonsensical, and not the least bit scary. Composer William Anderson (whose forte is scoring animated TV shows like “Biker Mice from Mars”) tries to compensate for the lack of eerie atmosphere, but he has a tendency to telegraph the shocks, which is something that drives me nuts about the music in most horror movies. Still, you can’t fault Anderson for coming up short; he’s not given much in the way of inspiration. Goetsch’s camera work is unadventurous, often blunt. The setups are of the 1,2,3 variety, suggesting that this aspiring auteur possesses only the most necessary understanding of the language of cinema. For the life of me, I don’t know what compelled him to make something as meaningless as Alive or Dead. Was it simply a way for him to cut his teeth? Perhaps, but the intrinsic limits of the genre aside, this isn’t much of a debut. This isn’t much of anything.  

August 6, 2011 

© Copyright 2011 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.