Triskaidekaphilia: 'The Thirteenth Chair' (1937)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

I suspect that the 1929 version of The Thirteenth Chair, directed by the great Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks, etc.), is probably better than this 1937 remake (both were based on a 1916 play), but neither one is widely available, and this version happened to air on TCM, so it's the one I'm stuck with for now. It's not that bad, really, just kind of forgettable, a rather silly closed-door murder mystery that's both convoluted and rushed. It takes place in Calcutta for no good reason, although virtually every character is a white British person, and certainly no scenes were filmed anywhere near India.

After a rather unpopular gentleman is murdered, his friend gets the bright idea to stage a seance with all of the suspects in attendance, which will somehow lead to the murderer revealing him or herself (it's not clear exactly how this is supposed to work). Instead what happens is that the dumbass friend gets murdered during the seance, and now there are 12 suspects for both his murder and the original murder (the dead guy was sitting in, of course, the 13th chair). Thus the inspector who agreed to this stupid plan in the first place shows up to interrogate everyone and find the culprit.

There's some amusingly dry humor in the interactions among the characters, but the large cast is so cluttered that it took me half the movie just to get a handle on who everyone was (and even then I wasn't always entirely clear on it). After a while the red herrings and sudden reversals get pretty tiresome, and the ultimate resolution is simultaneously too neat and too random. The inspector treats everyone involved with obvious contempt, but then the suspect that he's completely convinced is the murderer turns out to be the wrong person, and he only finds out because the medium who conducted the seance (and is also the mother of one of the suspects) insists on yet another elaborate entrapment scheme that finally reveals the true culprit. But by that time, there had been so many twists that I had completely lost interest. Maybe eventually I'll get to see if Tod Browning managed to make the story any more interesting.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Way Back Home' (1931)

It's always fascinating to see how people who were once huge figures in pop culture can end up almost completely forgotten, leaving their work as emblems of the fleeting nature of fame. I came to Way Back Home as a Bette Davis fan, and she's certainly the one member of the film's creative team whose reputation has endured over the decades following its release, but Way Back Home is not a Bette Davis movie: It's a star vehicle for Phillips Lord, a massively popular radio personality bringing his well-known character Seth Parker to the screen for the first time. These days, it's unlikely that anyone but a hardcore old-time radio fan has heard of Lord or Seth Parker, but at the time the movie came out, both were huge stars.

That background info helps if you want to understand why this movie focuses on a 29-year-old guy in old-age makeup, delivering folksy wisdom to the backward residents of his small Maine community. According to Wikipedia, Seth Parker is meant to be a preacher, but he never sets foot in a church during this movie, and he spends most of his time just sitting around his farm and meddling in people's business. The movie's sense of humor is relentlessly corny, and Seth is an irritating busybody, although his lessons are sometimes remarkably progressive for 1931. Seth and his wife have adopted a young boy to save him from his drunken lout of a biological father, and their efforts to keep the violent man away from his son are the closest thing the movie has to a plot.

Elsewhere, Davis plays Mary Lucy Duffy, a young woman whose father forbids her from marrying the boy she loves, because he was born to an unwed mother. Even more than raising an orphan, Seth's handling of the Mary Lucy situation is pretty forward-thinking, as he defends the poor single mother from the scorn of the town, and does everything he can to make sure that Mary Lucy gets to marry her true love, despite what her father decrees. Davis' performance is earnest and sunny, and like every other actor in the movie, she plays second fiddle to Lord whenever he's onscreen.

The message may be slightly ahead of its time, but the delivery is as old-fashioned as it gets, with plenty of scenes that could have been lifted directly from radio, including long interludes of Seth singing hymns with his neighbors and an opening comedy bit that highlights the confounding logic of backwoods business dealings. Combined with the haphazard plotting, it makes the movie a serious chore to watch. I can imagine big Seth Parker fans in 1931 getting a kick out of seeing their favorite character on the big screen, and probably recognizing some of his signature radio bits. Divorced from its original context, however, Way Back Home is just a bunch of lame, hokey jokes strung together into a tedious narrative. (And while he continued to have a successful radio career, Lord never starred in another movie.)

'Rush' and 'Satisfaction'

Under their generic titles, USA's new dramas Rush and Satisfaction are both trying to do something a little different for the network, but neither one really succeeds. Rush is by far the more familiar USA show, a medical procedural with a slight twist, although it attempts a darker tone than most of USA's relatively lighthearted procedurals. A little bit House, a little bit Royal Pains, a little bit Ray Donovan, Rush follows the title character (Tom Ellis), a hard-living doctor who caters to the private needs of L.A.'s rich and famous, when they have medical problems that they need taken care of on the down-low. Dr. Rush has his own problems with recreational drugs as well as a vaguely alluded-to traumatic past, but it's all pretty standard tortured-hero stuff. He purports to be cynical and uncaring, but of course by the end of the first episode he shows that he really does have a moral code.

In that sense, Rush conforms pretty well to the USA drama template, with characters like Burn Notice's Michael Westen who operate outside the law and appear to be selfish on the surface, but are good people at their core. It's somewhat surprising to me that Rush was created by filmmaker Jonathan Levine, who wrote and directed the pilot, and whose film work (including The Wackness, 50/50 and Warm Bodies) has impressed me with its emotional warmth and humanism. Rush is so generic that it seems like it could have been created by anyone, and the biggest disappointment for me is that Levine didn't come up with something more distinctive. Like most of USA's procedurals, Rush will probably be pleasant enough to watch in the background while doing something else, but is unlikely to rise to the status of appointment viewing.

Satisfaction, on the other hand, isn't just offering a slight tweak on the typical USA formula; it's a full-on serialized relationship drama, focused on the turmoil in the marriage of middle-aged suburbanites Neil (Matt Passmore) and Grace (Stephanie Szostak). That's not to say it's exactly original, though, just that it looks more like an AMC or FX or Showtime show than a USA series. It borrows heavily from American Beauty and other narratives about how tough it is to be a white, middle-aged, upper-middle-class man in the suburbs, and as such the tone gets tiresome very quickly. But the pilot does take a few unexpected turns, and it moves the narrative along pretty briskly, to the point where what starts out as general ennui ends up in some rather extreme places by the end of the episode.

Those places are actually so extreme that it's a little tough to see where the show will go beyond the first, extra-long episode, which often feels more like a feature film than a TV pilot. Neil and Grace go through an entire arc of dissatisfaction and rebellion in the single episode, more or less reconciling by the end. Some of the more out-there plot developments seem unsustainable, although from what I can tell the characters involved in those developments (to be appropriately vague in case people are worried about spoilers) are series regulars, so I guess the show will continue to explore those avenues. It's tempting to give Satisfaction too much credit just for breaking out of the USA mold, but the performances are pretty bland and the characters are often insufferable. It may not be copying other USA shows, but it's still copying something.

Premiering tonight at 9 p.m. (Rush) and 10 p.m. (Satisfaction) on USA.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The Hour of 13' (1952)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Peter Lawford is charming in the otherwise unremarkable mystery The Hour of 13, based on the 1933 novel Mystery of the Dead Police (which was previously filmed as the 1934 movie The Mystery of Mr. X). Lawford plays debonair jewel thief Nicholas Revel, who (through some rather unlikely contrivances) finds himself the chief suspect in a series of murders of London police officers, and must resort to even more contrivances in order to clear his name. Along the way, he's also hoping to cash in on a valuable emerald he stole from a socialite (which is what got him in trouble in the first place) and possibly seduce the daughter (Dawn Addams) of the London police commissioner.

It's all rather breezy for a movie in which innocent policemen keep getting brutally murdered. Although Revel is in constant danger of being arrested for horrible crimes, he never seems particularly worried, and he takes foolish, unnecessary risks in order to spend more time with Addams' Jane, or just to nudge the police in the right direction for him to be able to sell his emerald quietly. Lawford's inherent likeability helps sell the improbable character, but even he can't compensate for the convoluted absurdity of the story, which gets more ridiculous as it goes along.

The Victorian setting (it takes place in 1890) lends some class as well, and the movie gets in a few amusing digs at the exaggerated British politeness of the time. Still, the mystery is completely uninteresting, and when Revel unmasks the villain at the end, his identity and motives are essentially meaningless. The title, too, is a bit nonsensical, referring possibly to the times at which the killer sends warnings of his impending crimes to the police (always at 1 and 3), or to the number of people he's planning to kill. It's a peculiar title for a mostly forgettable movie, although it did at least inspire the name of a heavy metal band.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'The Working Man' (1933)

The inherent creepiness of George Arliss is just one thing that prevents The Working Man from being the charming comedy it's clearly aiming for. Really, Arliss' creepiness only exacerbates the problems with the plot, which features the main characters rather callously deceiving each other for dubious ends, and then just shrugging it off and laughing about it. The convoluted set-up finds Arliss' shoe magnate Reeves passing himself off as a harmless old man as he befriends the irresponsible young heirs to his late rival's company. His own business has been taken over by his ruthless nephew, so he decides to work behind the scenes to build up the competition. But then he takes a liking to the flighty young people (Bette Davis plays the daughter), and through another convoluted set of circumstances, manages to get himself appointed as the trustee to their inheritance so that he can mold them into upstanding citizens.

Got all that? That doesn't even take into account Davis' character's work undercover at Reeves' company (where she falls in love with the unscrupulous nephew) or the underhanded dealings of the manager at Reeves' rival's factory. The 78-minute movie has a dizzying array of plot twists, but it's all treated as completely inconsequential. Arliss gives Reeves a condescending paternal manner that makes him feel like the movie's villain, even though he's meant to be the level-headed voice of reason. The poor kids just want to cut loose and have some fun after their father has died and left them his fortune, but Reeves tricks them into becoming boring businesspeople.

The Working Man is ostensibly a comedy, but it's more off-putting than funny, and by the end it's just exhausting. When Reeves reveals his deception to the two young people, they don't even get mad, despite the fact that he's manipulated them and held their rightful inheritance hostage. Davis does a decent job of playing the silly, flighty girl, but this isn't a challenging role for her, and the movie really belongs to Arliss -- which is, for the most part, to its detriment.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan' (1989)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Sadly, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is the last movie in the original Friday the 13th series that I'll be able to write about for this project, since the rest of the movies before the 2009 remake (Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason) lack the number 13 in their titles. Also sadly, Jason Takes Manhattan is a pretty lame send-off, lacking even the meager charms of some of the earlier installments in the series. The biggest problem is the grossly misleading title, which promises a New York City rampage for the hockey-masked killer, even though budget constraints infamously kept the production from actually being filmed in NYC (aside from a handful of scenes). Instead of slashing his way through the Big Apple, Jason spends most of his time as a stowaway on a New York-bound cruise for graduating high school seniors from near Crystal Lake. A more accurate title might be Jason Takes a Boat.

Of course, while he's on the boat, Jason busies himself with killing as many of the attractive, dumb teenagers as possible, in his usual manner. As in Jason Lives, he's resurrected thanks to a timely jolt of electricity, and as in The New Blood, he rises from the bottom of the lake itself. The method of Jason's return doesn't really matter, of course (it's presented in as perfunctory a manner as possible), but even Jason's murder spree feels entirely rote this time around. The killings are surprisingly tame, often with minimal bloodshed, and Jason's status as an entirely supernatural force (at one point he literally punches a guy's head off) makes him essentially indestructible, taking any possible suspense out of the story. He dutifully picks off the interchangeable characters one by one, until no one is left except the Final Girl (who has some questionable backstory connection to Jason) and her love interest.

At least by that point they are actually in New York, although even the scenes set in New York were mostly shot in Vancouver. The last 20 minutes of the movie do feature some of the moments you'd expect from a movie titled Jason Takes Manhattan (Jason in Times Square! Jason on the subway! Jason in a greasy diner!), but mostly the characters end up running around back alleys and tunnels that could be anywhere. Jason's final defeat hinges on a nonsensical alleged function of New York City sewers, and the attempted thematic resonance with the main character is completely hollow. At the end, the last survivors just walk off into New York City as if none of it meant anything, which of course it didn't.

Previous Friday the 13th entries:
Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

White Elephant Blogathon: 'Underground Aces' (1981)

For past editions of the White Elephant Blogathon (in which participants write about a randomly selected movie chosen by another participant), I've covered the innocuous Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar Mutts, the bizarre Scorpion Thunderbolt and the tedious The Beast of Yucca Flats. This year I was assigned Underground Aces, which is probably the most entertaining movie I've gotten to write about for this project, even though it is, like all the other White Elephant movies I've written about, completely terrible.

In the vein of Caddyshack or Car Wash, Underground Aces features of a group of fun-loving misfits working menial jobs for an uptight boss, but mostly spending their time goofing off and hooking up. In this case, they're parking attendants at a Los Angeles hotel, which offers plenty of opportunities for "comical" vehicular carnage. These people destroy more cars than a demolition derby, and should certainly all have been fired and/or arrested long ago. They don't even face much opposition from the hotel's useless authority figures, a deadpan manager played by Jerry Orbach and an apoplectic head of security played by Frank Gorshin.

Orbach and Gorshin are just two of the familiar faces in the cast, which also includes Melanie Griffith, Dirk Benedict (of Battlestar Galactica and The A-Team fame), future Police Academy star Michael Winslow (playing a character who speaks exclusively in sound effects), Robert Hegyes (aka Epstein from Welcome Back, Kotter), and B-movie staple Sid Haig. Despite the surprising star power, Underground Aces is a strictly second-rate affair, a haphazard collection of lame jokes and one-dimensional characters, with barely any plot to speak of. The most prominent storyline involves some sort of Arab sheik posing as a parking attendant in order to seduce a bride-to-be whose wedding is being held at the hotel, and it manages to be both sexist and racist, in addition to completely nonsensical.

The actors breeze through their roles with minimal effort, and the comedy is similarly half-assed. This is the kind of movie that features two different fast-motion montages set to "wacky" fiddle music. Aside from a predictable gag involving a woman getting her clothes ripped off after they're caught in a car door, there isn't even any nudity to distract from the lazy writing and bored performances. The movie peaks during the opening credits, with the funky theme song by the Commodores playing over images of the wide variety of parking structures in Los Angeles. Neither that liveliness nor that authenticity shows up again for the rest of the running time. (The whole movie can be seen on YouTube, if you're curious.)

Kevin Cecil wrote a very thoughtful piece on my pick, The Minstrel Killer, aka Blackface Killer.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Kid Galahad' (1937)

There's an impressive grittiness to the early scenes of Kid Galahad, essentially ending once the title character gets introduced. Before that, director Michael Curtiz offers a tour through the seedy underbelly of the boxing world, with Edward G. Robinson as a sleazy manager and Bette Davis as his girlfriend and right-hand woman. They may be unscrupulous, but they're not as bad as the crime boss played by Humphrey Bogart, who's always undermining their efforts to groom a new champ. After their latest prospect goes down in flames, they retire to a hotel suite for an epic blowout before finding a new fighter to groom, and Curtiz shoots the debauched party in a series of long tracking shots that are almost Altman-esque in their use of overlapping characters and dialogue.

Unfortunately that party marks the introduction of upstanding farm boy Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris), a bellboy with natural boxing talent whom Robinson's Nick Donati decides to take under his wing. After Davis' Louise "Fluff" Phillips dubs him Kid Galahad, he's on his way to becoming a champ, but he's so wholesome and honest that he's completely immune to all the nasty dealings going on around him. Morris gives a bland, one-dimensional performance, which is especially disappointing to watch opposite Davis as the angst-ridden Fluff, who's loyal to Nick but longs for a calmer, more traditional life. She watches while Ward falls in love with Nick's fresh-faced sister, completely ignoring the experienced woman silently pining for him.

The problem is that Ward doesn't seem like he's worth pining for, and the drama surrounding the rivalry between Nick and Bogart's Turkey Morgan is as underwhelming as the love story between Ward and Nick's sister. Davis adds some dimension to her character (far more depth than you'd expect from someone named Fluff), but the movie itself is as insubstantial as Morris' performance. It was remade in 1962 starring Elvis Presley, who can at least add some singing to his bland, one-dimensional acting.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen' (2008)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

I'm pretty sure this is the only movie I'll be able to watch for this project whose titular number comes from being the 13th movie in a series. Yes, Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen is the 13th (and so far final) movie in the seemingly unkillable Witchcraft low-budget horror franchise, which started with the original Witchcraft in 1988. I may be a conscientious critic most of the time, but I did not feel the need to watch all 12 previous Witchcraft movies before tackling this one, so some of the plot details may have gone over my head, although I doubt anything here is complicated enough for that. The main character here is Will Spanner, aka Will Adams, aka Will Stocton, who has been a central character in the series since its beginning, but it doesn't really seem essential to know that in order to follow the rudimentary plot.

Star Tim Wrobel is the eighth actor to portray Will over the course of the series, according to IMDb. I'm not sure how the previous actors fared, but Wrobel does not give off the vibe of "powerful, feared warlock." Instead he's more schlubby office worker, and much of the film takes place in Will's office, where he now works as a lawyer, content to keep his mystical powers at bay and use his legal expertise to help people in need. But he's called back into service when a coven of witches starts killing other warlocks and ripping out their hearts, in hopes of fulfilling a prophecy that connects back to Will's convoluted past.

That sounds way more interesting and exciting than the actual movie, which was clearly made for virtually no money and suffers from terrible acting, bargain-basement special effects (looking like the demos on a free graphics program) and basic technical problems. The picture is often too dark to make out the action, and the sound mix makes much of the dialogue indistinct. Not that the writing deserves to be heard loud and clear, of course; it's a mix of horror-movie cliches, awful softcore sexploitation banter and occasional random absurdities ("If I wanted to make love to a glass of water, I would've gone in my kitchen!" yells some mystical guru right before getting sex-murdered by an evil witch).

Even the requisite nudity and sex scenes are desultory and poorly lit, and it's pretty laughable to watch every female character in the movie throw herself at Wrobel, who looks like a slightly younger, slightly more rumpled Ray Romano. The climax promises an epic confrontation with a character who connects back to the series' origins, but it's just as shoddily constructed and ineptly acted as everything that leads up to it. So far, there has been no word of a Witchcraft 14, but thankfully, I would have no reason to subject myself to it anyway.

'Playing House'

Usually when Jessica St. Clair or Lennon Parham pop up as guest stars on some comedy show or in supporting roles in movies, I'm happy to see them. They contribute something sharp and funny and then bow out at exactly the right time. I'm less enamored of the projects that have the pair as the main focus; a little of them goes a long way, especially when they're teamed together. I thought their short-lived NBC sitcom Best Friends Forever was pretty grating, and their new USA sitcom, Playing House, is only slightly more tolerable. Like Best Friends Forever, it features the two creators/stars as best friends who move in together after one of them experiences a personal crisis; in this case, Maggie (Parham) is pregnant when she discovers that her husband is having an online affair, and so her best friend Emma (St. Clair) moves in to help her get through the pregnancy and raise her child.

Presumably the show's focus will shift a bit once the baby's born, but for now it's a buddy comedy much like Best Friends Forever, and like that show its main problem is that St. Clair and Parham's characters are completely obnoxious. I've seen a few articles recently praising the duo's portrayal of female friendship, and they do have a convincing bond (they're best friends in real life, too). But they reinforce each other's most irritating qualities, and while they may offer a realistic look at the strong dynamic between platonic female partners, it doesn't really matter when those partners are shrill and unfunny.

Playing House is less crass and annoying than Best Friends Forever, and when it focuses on the emotional connection between Maggie and Emma, it can be sort of sweet. But as a comedy, it's mostly a failure, especially when it comes to portraying any characters other than the central duo. The second of two episodes provided for review tries to feature Keegan-Michael Key's Mark, a small-town cop and Emma's ex-boyfriend, in his own subplot, but the writers clearly have no idea what to do with him as an independent character. St. Clair and Parham have a good handle on their own relationship, but maybe they need to stop trying to make sitcoms about it.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m on USA.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Apartment 1303' (2007)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

One thing I've learned from this project is to avoid all apartment numbers with 13 in them. After the horrors of India's 13B, we move to Japan for Apartment 1303, a fairly familiar horror exercise with your basic stringy-haired female ghost. It's actually more of a traditional haunted-house movie than a J-horror tech nightmare, with an extensive back story about abuse and murder taking place in the titular apartment. The beginning of the movie quickly shows two different young women jumping to their deaths right after moving into the apartment. It turns out that a number of young women have done the same thing, and yet the rental company doesn't seem to have any problems finding new people to rent the apartment (apparently only young women are interested in living there).

Main character Mariko is the sister of the most recent victim, who decides to unravel the mystery with the help of a rumpled police detective. Star Noriko Nakagoshi brings some emotional weight to the role, which helps ground the mostly silly story, but the supporting performances are more cartoonish, and the cheesy special effects don't help. As Mariko learns more about the haunting of the apartment, the movie takes a lengthy detour to recount the back story, which involves an abusive mother who's killed by her own daughter. Eventually Mariko faces down the ghost of the daughter, but the climax is neither scary (thanks mostly to the aforementioned cheapo effects) nor emotionally involving (since Mariko has no real connection to the ghosts).

Mostly Apartment 1303 is a rote collection of haunted-house and J-horror tropes, held together by one decent performance and a whole lot of bad ones. The movie ends with what is probably meant as a chilling final moment, but it comes off as more of a shrug, thanks again to the cheesy effects, but also to the complete lack of engagement in the characters. Some girls jump off a balcony, and then some other people do, also. Nobody cares.

'The 100'

At least in its first two episodes, The 100 seems to be struggling between a gritty, Battlestar Galactica-style sci-fi drama and a swoony teen romance, and since it airs on The CW, there's a good chance that the second mode will ultimately win out. Like Battlestar, the show follows a tiny core of humanity that has survived the near-destruction of Earth and is living in cramped spaceships; in this case, survivors of a nuclear holocaust have been inhabiting a complex of multiple space stations for nearly 100 years since nuclear war wiped out most of Earth's population. The scenes that take place on the space stations, with character played by actors like Henry Ian Cusick, Isaiah Washington, Paige Turco and Kelly Hu, have a strong Battlestar vibe, as worn-out commanders and officials try their best to make impossible moral decisions.

But the core of The 100, and the source of the title, are the 100 teenage characters who are sent back to the desolate Earth to see if it can be re-inhabited. They're all convicts who would probably have been sacrificed in the resource-deprived society in space, so they're prone to violence and rebellion, and that plus their teenage hormones makes for a very volatile situation on the ground. While there are some Lord of the Flies-like moments of violent chaos, the show is just as interested in which of the pretty people will hook up with each other, and there are plenty of Tumblr-ready relationships being formed already. With its rudimentary production values and inconsistent acting, The 100 feels a bit like an old-school basic cable series, but airing on Syfy or USA probably would have freed it from the obligation to appeal to a teenage fangirl audience. On The CW, the 'shippers are likely to end up at the helm.

Premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on The CW.

The 'Veronica Mars' movie

First off, I was one of the Kickstarter backers of Veronica Mars, so it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to consider me in the tank for the movie. But that’s pretty much the entire point of a movie financed via nearly $6 million in donations from fans of the 2004-2007 cult TV series. Unlike Serenity, the 2005 movie adaptation of Joss Whedon’s little-watched TV series Firefly, Veronica Mars isn’t really designed to introduce a new audience to the title character (Kristen Bell) and her friends and enemies. While it does feature a stand-alone plot (and take place nine years after the end of the TV series), the movie is structured around callbacks and inside jokes, the kind of references that will make hardcore fans gasp with delight (as they did at the midnight screening I attended).

That’s not to say that the movie is nothing more than fan service. The callbacks and references were an important part of the TV series, too, so it makes sense that creator Rob Thomas (who directed and co-wrote the movie) would include them in the movie version. A big part of the appeal of Veronica Mars both as a TV show and as a movie is the collection of shady characters in Veronica’s hometown of Neptune, California, to which she returns after a nine-year absence. Since the show ended, former teenage detective Veronica has graduated from Stanford with a degree in psychology and come in at the top of her class at Columbia Law School, and she’s up for a job at a prestigious Manhattan law firm when she gets a call from old flame Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), who’s been charged with the murder of his rock-star girlfriend (who also happens to be an old high school classmate).

Veronica’s return to Neptune to help Logan conveniently coincides with her 10-year high school reunion, which is a good excuse for Thomas to trot out brief appearances from a whole range of supporting players from the TV show. The central mystery isn’t as compelling as Veronica’s investigation of her best friend’s death during the show’s first season, but the involvement of Logan as the prime suspect definitely ups the stakes for Veronica. Whenever it seems like Thomas is just placating fans with familiar references, he’ll throw in an unexpectedly strong emotional moment between Veronica and Logan or Veronica and her private-eye dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni).

It also helps that Bell is always at her best as Veronica, and she slips back into the role like no time has passed. Thomas and co-writer Diane Ruggiero are still great at coming up with snarky banter and hard-boiled narration for Veronica, and although the movie may be clumsy at times, it’s always entertaining. Fans may quibble about certain aspects of the story (more time for Veronica’s buddies Wallace and Mac, who seem to get short shrift in favor of Veronica/Logan swooning, would have been nice), but ultimately Thomas, Bell and the entire cast and crew have done exactly what they promised their Kickstarter backers they would do. It’s hard to argue against such an obvious labor of love.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Eerie' (2013)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Although the title of 13 Eerie does actually refer to something in the movie, it still comes off like one of those low-budget genre movies that added the number 13 to its title to make it seem more menacing (as I have mentioned before). Theoretically, the title is the designation for the plot of land where a forensic science professor (Michael Shanks) is conducting his final field exam for a group of six students. It's part of the grounds of abandoned penitentiary Eerie State, presumably the 13th sector in the area. The professor's exam involves strategically placing dead bodies in various places on the grounds, and then having his students examine them to determine the cause of death. I kind of doubt that real forensic science courses actually involve this sort of exam, although I suppose that if people donate their bodies to science, maybe they are okay with having them molested by forensic science students in a random field somewhere. I'm not entirely sure that these bodies were donated, though, since the professor's colleague tells him at the beginning of the movie that the exam better not take too long, because the bodies have to be returned to the morgue.

Whether it's realistic or not, it's kind of a clever setup for a zombie movie, which of course is completely botched. Wouldn't it be scary if the supposedly dead bodies that the students are working on suddenly came back to life and attacked? Yes, that would be scary, but that's not what happens here. Instead, there are some zombies just hanging around the area, apparently waiting for some students to show up so they can be eaten. The zombies are remnants of some vaguely defined experiments that occurred at the prison many years ago, before it was shut down. So they stalk the students while the asshole professor denies that anything weird is happening and orders the students to get back to work. Eventually after a couple of the students get zombified, the professor acknowledges that bad shit is going down, and he teams up with the students to run away from the zombies.

That's about all there is to this movie. The characters are less than one-dimensional, and the interesting setup dealing with forensic science is pretty much abandoned once the zombie attacks start (it's not like the students use their scientific knowledge to defeat the zombies, which would be interesting). The acting is serviceable, and the cast includes C-listers like scream queen Katharine Isabelle and former Roswell star Brendan Fehr. The effects are decent for a low-budget production, but there's nothing particularly creative or gruesome. The second half devolves into some rote running and fighting, and the ending is laughably abrupt. What starts out as somewhat creative quickly becomes generic and forgettable.

'Saint George'

The business model for the so-called 10/90 shows (with a 10-episode first season followed by 90 more episodes over the course of about two years) like Tyler Perry's TBS sitcoms and FX's Anger Management emphasizes quantity over quality, so it's not surprising that FX's George Lopez vehicle Saint George, another 10/90 project, comes off like an assembly-line product. With its ugly, flat visual style, cheap-looking sets, abrasive laugh track, broad acting and hackneyed jokes, Saint George is as generic as sitcoms get, a little like the prefab reruns on TV Land, only not quite as appealing.

Lopez stars as what is basically a fictionalized version of himself (named George Lopez), of course, a semi-retired energy-drink mogul who's taken up teaching for reasons that are not explained in the pilot. He's recently divorced but still close with his ex-wife, who's a key member of the supporting cast along with his preteen son, his mother, his uncle and his cousin. They all exist pretty much solely to make jokes at George's expense, but it's not like George is much more of a well-rounded character than they are. He doesn't spend any time running his business and barely spends any time teaching, his relationship with his ex-wife seems friendly, and the worst he has to deal with are some harsh but loving words from his mother.

Although the supporting cast includes hardest-working man in straight-to-video movies Danny Trejo and veteran character actor David Zayas, the performances are all aimed at the cheap seats, augmented by an overbearing laugh track. The jokes are lame and obvious, and frequently sexist as well (a whole storyline in the first episode involves George's cousin texting random women pictures of his penis as some sort of dating strategy), especially when they focus on George's sexually voracious colleague. Lopez is more likable than Charlie Sheen, so Saint George isn't as painful to watch as Anger Management, but there's the same sense that everyone involved is just trying to churn out as much product as they can as quickly as possible so that they can get it over with.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on FX.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13B' (2009)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Bollywood is one of my major movie blind spots, but as I've said before, this feature often exposes me to new genres or movements with which I was previously unfamiliar. My guess is that 13B is not exactly a great starting point for exploring Bollywood movies, but it fits with the theme, so here it is. Unlike the typical Bollywood production, 13B isn't filled with lavish musical numbers, nor does it have any large-scale action or romance. Instead it's a sort of Bollywood-ized version of the J-horror trend, with a story about ghostly infestations terrorizing a family (mostly via technology) in an urban apartment building.

Although writer-director Vikram K. Kumar doesn't follow every Bollywood convention, the movie does have an inflated running time (just over two hours in the version I saw, although IMDb lists a version that's 20 minutes longer), and the action stops abruptly at one point for a completely incongruous musical number, which comes off as sort of a fantasy sequence featuring the two main characters (there's no explanation for why the harried businessman and his stay-at-home wife are suddenly glamorous pop stars for three minutes). The rest of the songs are confined to one time-passing montage and a music video that plays over the closing credits, so that Kumar can work on building tension in his haunted-house story without the characters having to stop and sing every few minutes.

Not that he does a very good job of creating suspense, however. The movie begins with an extended family moving into a brand-new high-rise condo (the title refers to their unit number), where inexplicable spooky things immediately start to happen (the milk always goes sour, the elevator doesn't work, cell phones take distorted pictures). But Kumar eventually focuses his attention on just one creepy element, a daily soap opera that appears to air only on the family's TV, with events that mirror (and foreshadow) their own lives. The logistics of this concept are completely nonsensical, especially when main character Manu (R. Madhavan) eventually tracks down an explanation. The whole second half of the movie is a mess of belabored exposition that completely undermines any creepy atmosphere developed early on.

Aside from the occasional musical interludes, 13B's other main Bollywood characteristic is the broad, melodramatic acting style of its cast, which goes against the subdued, ominous tone of Kumar's J-horror influences. Even when terrified, the characters are constantly mugging and overemoting, so the supernatural happenings come off as more goofy than scary. It doesn't help that the special effects are chintzy and the cinematography is flat. Clearly there are a lot of things that Bollywood movies do well (and I probably ought to expand my horizons in that area), but horror is not one of them.