Kari Wuhrer

  • King of the Ants (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Seeing “The Asylum presents” pop up at the beginning of a film is usually a warning. With very few exceptions, The Asylum specializes in bottom-of-the-barrel genre productions with inane scripts, terrible special effects and cheap production values. But that’s now – The Asylum started with slightly loftier intentions, and early production King of the Ants is a glimpse at what may have been a very different company had it not found a more profitable racket. One notable difference is the calibre of the director: Stuart Gordon doesn’t have an impeccable filmography, but you can’t talk about him without mentioning Re-Animator and From Beyond, and that’s already a better filmography than most of The Asylum’s other directors. The result can be seen in the mean thriller that flows from King of the Ants’ opening moments, as a young man gets caught in a sombre assassination to ensure that a corruption scandal is never brought to light. Clearly influenced by a sadistic strain of neo-noir, it charts in often painful and gory detail the downfall of its protagonist through ever-escalating moral degradation and violence. King of the Ants never lets good taste or plausibility win when there’s an opportunity to be gross or gory – there’s a particular juncture at the mid-point of the film where we’re supposed to accept that the bad guys’ plan is to beat the protagonist into brain-damaged amnesia. It’s ludicrous, but it’s meant to make viewers feel intensely uncomfortable and that fits in the film’s logic. As a result, King of the Ants eventually becomes too contrived and mean-spirited to remain engaging: the tricks of the screenwriter (Charlie Higson, adapting his own novel) become too outlandish, and don’t help the film find a consistent tone in-between dark suspense or outright horror. It’s nice to see a few C-list actors show up for a while, most notably George Wendt in a very dark role, Ron Livingstone in a short cameo and Kari Wuhrer as the film’s lone female character of note (and object of the protagonist’s desire). I’ll give King of the Ants one backhanded compliment, though: as flawed and ugly as it is, it’s notably more striking than the average film that The Asylum would go one to churn on a regular basis.

  • Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

    Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) There are now ten films in the Hellraiser canon and Hellraiser: Deader is the seventh of them. As luck had it, French-Canadian horror channel Frissons TV had itself a merry little Hellraiser marathon from the first to the seventh instalment, and now that I’ve caught up with my DVR recordings, I have no intention of seeking out the later ones. To be entirely fair, Deader is not a completely terrible film. It has a few scattered ideas, some visual sense within the limits of its low budget and Kari Wuhrer in the lead as a journalist investigating a mysterious sect videotaped reviving someone from the dead. Originally written as an original script only to be retooled into a direct-to-video Hellraiser sequel, Deader shares far too many characteristics with the other members of the fifth-to-seventh instalments of the series. It has a halfway-promising premise half-heartedly retrofitted into the Hellraiser mythos (making the Cenobites irrelevant, and whatever “rules” the first instalments offered completely discarded), with some down-and-dirty low-budget visual style and lead characters that could have led to something better if anyone had been paying attention. Deader is branded as a “Stan Winston production,” but aside from a mildly effective scene in which the protagonist has to contend with a knife piercing her through the chest (somehow a survivable injury!), there’s not much here to do justice to the special effects legend. Like its previous two brethren, Deader does not scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of horror movies, but it’s still not that good and could have been better if not branded with the Hellraiser title—although, frankly, the entire series (now that I’m stopping at seven instalments) has specialized in wasting its opportunities. In retrospect, even the first film makes promises that it, let alone its sequels, never came close to fulfilling: there is something in its BDSM union of sex and violence that could have been profoundly unnerving but seems almost consciously toned down, either by the filmmakers’ incompetence, insufficient means, lack of audacity or a simple poor misconception of the potential they were handed. We’re left with half-formed ideas, bad special effects, no continuity of vision and what’s perhaps the biggest belly flop of the 1980s horror franchises. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the series still didn’t completely autodestruct by the fifth instalment, but I was going with very low expectations from the get-go.