Even The Jeepers Creepers Thing Was Better

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I love Netflix because every once in a while, when you haven’t paid attention to your queue for a while, it sends you something that makes you wonder what on Earth you were thinking to add it to the list.

So last night I wound up watching The Mothman Prophecies—and I gotta say, it was disappointing.

I mean, come on, dude, it’s not like it’d take much to get me into a movie like this. This is not some edifying art movie that will change your reality and open your head to new interpretations of this mad world we all live in. This is a movie about freaking Mothman. All you really need in this movie to make me happy is, well, Mothman .

Mothman’s one of my favorite modern folklore legends. How can he not be? I was looking forward to a Hollywood portrayal of a giant winged nightmare creature chasing people around in a small town. There would, I figured, be lots of fwooshy effects as he flapped past, terrorizing them with its glowing red eyes, creepy high-pitched banshee shrieks, and completely obscure motives. People would sputter and gibber and try to floor it, except Mothman would keep up effortlessly with them, a shadowy figure in the fog.

So you can see how I was disappointed when, apart from a moment in the beginning where he rather ingloriously gets hit by a car and a couple of hidden frames in the rest of the movie, Mothman elects to conduct his reign of terror exclusively through menacing telephone calls to Richard Gere.

Okay, he supposedly terrorizes other people, too, with a physical presence, even, but in the movie—which has the advantages of fiction and special effects—he always manages to do it just before Richard Gere and the audience show up. So instead of scenes of, “HOSHIT IT’S MOTHMAN GET IN THE CAR AND DRIVE” you get scenes of, “Well, last night he done showed up at Makeout Point! I seen it with my own two eyes!” Which is all fine and good for the actual legend, but I was kind of hoping they’d soup it up with the supernatural, what with this being, y’know, a movie.

Pretty much the only things they really got right were the glowing red eyes and the fact that a bridge fell down.

I will say that this movie is marking the tail end of the era of Movies With Creepy Scenes Where The Phone Rings Even Though It’s Not Plugged In.* No matter how much I try to imagine it, “My cellphone is still ringing—and it’s out of batteries!” just doesn’t have the same, ahem, ring.**


*It does get points for the comically old-fashioned phones in Small Town. Gere’s the only guy with a cordless landline at home.

**And the pathetic fleedle fleedle of a cell phone, or a wildly inappropriate out-of-tune song, would only be scary if done very, very well. It was much easier with those old phones that were trying to kill you with noise.

Comments

[luinmir.livejournal.com]

Not being a horror genre aficionado myself, I hadn't thought about the phone thing before. Future generations will require so many explanations to understand why they're supposed to be afraid. o_o

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

"The phone is NOT PLUGGED IN!" "... Yes. So?" "But don't you SEE? It's not ..."

I also like how that has changed "The phone calls are coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!" Back in the day, it confused me because hang on, did that mean the house had TWO WHOLE PHONE LINES? Who the hell needs that many?

There was a Zits comic once where Jeremy shows off his new invention for the landline--a cord that ties the receiver to the cradle, so the receiver won't get lost.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. If the movie had previously slipped in the cell phone ringing, it could be an effective freakout for it to ring at an appropriate/inappropriate moment with a warped, slowed, distorted version of its normal ringtone. Or it could use the device of the cell phone ringing while its owner is desperately trying to hide in an inadequate hiding spot.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I like that first one. And I suppose if the phone suddenly started TALKING, it'd be scary.

But still. ;)

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

where he rather ingloriously gets hit by a car

I now have this image of Mothman splattered on the windshield, being sprayed with the windshield washer and swept off by the wipers...

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It is now a Far Side cartoon in my head.

[igntethestars.livejournal.com]

Apparently the book is better (go figure).

I never saw that movie - I heard it was terrible, and just never bothered myself with it xD I'ma little too in love with urban legends and crytids to sit there and yell at innacuraccies in a movie.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Okay, you clearly missed the entire point of mothman. Mothman is not a creature that attacks people. It's a portentous creature, like a banshee.
You weren't supposed to go in there expecting a monster movie because that's not what it was.
I love that movie, even if it is, yes, far inferior to the book, mainly because all the things recorded in the book allegedly really happened.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Indeed I have not. I know that people connected Mothman with disaster, suggesting he either heralded doom or simply caused it. What bugged me was that the whole point of Mothman is that his portents weren't through phone calls with cryptic, coded messages. The mythos says he's supposed to APPEAR. I was hoping Hollywood would run with that. I didn't want to see him attacking; I wanted to see him terrorizing. He did that quite well.

I didn't like that they made him speak, either. The simple banshee shriek is a lot creepier.

Basically, the movie just wasn't what I'd hoped for. Too much prophecy, not enough Mothman.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Granted, the real-life Mothman is just a sort of pilot fish for the actual phenomenon that caused the prophecies. That's why, I think, they made it such a minor part of the story; as it was a relatively minor element in the real events, albeit the most conspicuous.
Incidentally, there's no direct evidence in-film that Indrid Cold was a Mothman, although It's clearly associated with them. I never got the impression that they were one and the same.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I thought The Matrix did creepy cell-phone fairly well.