Candy and a Movie: Movie #53 Intruders

Intruders (2011)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1634121/

So last week I had a pretty solid migraine that involved not being able to sleep for like 37 hours. That’s like Alaskan crab fisherman hours. As Brennan Huff said, it was the deadliest catch without the crabs. As you can probably imagine, I required a decent amount of recovery sleep to get back on track and it’s finally time to make another post. A big welcome to Slovakia, Albania, Costa Rica (rich coast), Czech, Romania, Poland, Finland, Israel and Zimbabwe first time readers who came on in my short absence.

Clive Owen is kind of the man. The guy just has swagger or something. He does a movie like Children of Men in which he is manly and then he does a chick flick and I still get the feeling that he is cooler than me after watching it. That never happens with dudes in chick flicks. What we are getting at here is a very possibly mini man crush and I’m not even getting into the accent. Basically this is a thriller monster movie with starring Clive Owen. I like five of those last seven words so watching this was a no brainer even with its 33% rating on rotten tomatoes.

Movie starts off with a Spanish kid being told to go to sleep by his pretty hot Spanish mom. He hears a noise outside and thinks that it’s his cat, Meow. What kind of a name is Meow for a cat? I’ve said it before; Cat Damon, Battle cat and Dr. Whiskers are all way better and probably more acceptable by society. He climbs out of his second or third story window onto some scaffolding during a night rainstorm to look for the boringly named feline. He turns around, peeking back at his window and spots a giant shadow monster flying inside. He then follows it in. Wrong. I don’t care how safe eight year old or so you thought that your room was but once you’ve seen a monster fly inside, it’s compromised. Do not go back in there. Like I said he does and follows some noises into his mom’s room where the thing is on top of her. There is some struggling going on and I hope it was just fighting and not ra ra raping because it looked a little like it could’ve been.

The boy gets the monsters attention and it chases him back through the house and onto the scaffolding. It grabs the boy but it flipped off. Or not. It’s hanging off the side by the boy’s leg. The mom runs outside and is trying to get the monster off when, when, when?!? He wakes up. It was all a dream. I kind of thought that it was too and I’m not just saying that. The mom is there and tells him that it was just a bad dream. Pretty intense first scene.

Jump to Clive Owen who is a construction worker on a sky scraper. He calls his daughter and mid call her cat goes missing. I’m starting to notice a trends between cats and their owners getting into dancer. The girl finds the cat in a tree and climbs up to retrieve it. While up there she finds a hole in the tree’s trunk and sticks her arm in it. Wrong. Just like the other boy going back into his room, you don’t stick your little arm in deep, dark tree holes. Come on. She drops her bracelet in there but does find a box. Inside is a piece of paper about someone wanting to have a face. Their name is hollow face. I still haven’t decided if I like that name or not. On one hand, it sounds pretty metal. On the other, it sounds like the very first name they thought of and didn’t put much effort into it. She continues reading and hollow face rips the face off of a boy in her class. Crazy. Then she stops reading the story and appears in front of her class. She had just read to all of her classmates about a monster that rips their faces off. To me that sounds like a total psycho who wouldn’t have any friends because everyone would be afraid of her. Brits.

Owen comes home to his freaky daughter’s birthday party with only a teddy bear as a gift. Lame. We also get to see that he is married to the chick that plays the red witch on game of thrones. These happen to be the only times I’ve seen her actually and she’s gotten super naked in both meaning she must be like the Kate Winslet of British movies. That night, the girl gets to work on adding to her jacked up story. Hollow Face needs a face and is out hunting for kids, stuff like that. She walks to her parent’s room and sees them naked. Happy Birthday girl! Your parents took the getting into their birthday suits joke way too far. Clive tucks her back in and at this point, I kind of want to see what her face would look like without a face (if that makes sense).

Jumping to the Spanish boy who is now back in his bed when his room starts raining shadows. Kind of cool looking. The next day the mom takes the boy to church to get help from a higher power but then backs out before seeking any assistance. Sounds like the waste of a day to me.

Back to Clive who saves his buddy from falling off a skyscraper at work. That night his daughter sees herself in a mirror without a face and Owen dreams of the dude from work not having a face. I don’t know what the heck is going on but it’s creepy. The daughter goes to him because she had a nightmare. He does what any good dad would do and takes her out to the creepy shed behind the house. There he says that to defeat a monster, you have to enter their story. He then pulls out some old black jumpsuit, hangs it on a rake like it’s a monster and lights it on fire. I take back just ripping on his parenting skills, this is kind of awesome. The mom rushes to the burning monster and puts the fire out. Party pooper. She tells Clive to get rid of that thing. All I can think of is now that this movie has gotten all fantasy, this is now a charred, pissed off monster going to be lurking around.

Spanish boy then has another run in with his own Hollow Face. It hides behind him so he can’t see the thing whenever he turns. Creepy. The next day a priest shows up and says he’ll help the boy. Meanwhile Clive goes in to check on his daughter and she is staring at a wall, just turning the light on and off. Says that the monster is inside. All I’m saying is that you can make a new, normal daughter Clive. Let the monster have this freak show. She is just not normal. Clive says no one is there but then sees that someone is there and it’s the black jumpsuit thing that they burned. They fight and the monster gets away. If ever there was a spoiler that there was no monster and that none of this really happen is that it did manage to get away. I’m pretty sure that there is no creature getting away from a Clive Owen fight. So there you go. Right before the Hollow Face got away, he kind of ripped the girl’s mouth of without ripping her mouth off( if that makes sense).

Back to Spanish boy who room starts raining shadows again. You know, that is only a bad thing if it’s night. If I’m going to sleep and a creepy darkness starts pouring from the sky, I’m creeped out. If I’m standing in line for Space Mountain in June at like 2:00 P.M. and darkness starts forming around me, I’m not getting out of the way. It is night time in the movie however and Hollow Face shows up. Right as the monster jumps, the boy wakes up and there is an older priest sitting next to him now. The priest leaves, talks to the younger one outside and says that they are both crazy. The boy needs a psychiatrist, not a priest.

Clive’s daughter is at a psychiatrist because now she is not talking after having her lips removed (but they’re still there). The girl then keeps adding to the story like a dummy, giving the monster new ways to get at her. Whatever she writes seems to be coming true so you would think that she would write that the monster went away or maybe they became friends or she could always just stop writing so it would cease to be but noooooo, she has to write about how she is doomed and stuff. Clive gets security camera’s placed in her room and it becomes Paranormal Activity 4 in there. Hollow Face comes back again that night and gets away.

The priest goes ahead and performs a little exorcism on the Spanish boy. Hollow Face shows up at the church but the priest points out that no he doesn’t, it’s only a statue.

LET’S JUST GET TO THE END

Ok so I didn’t like that last scene at all. Made me think that Hollow Face isn’t real. I know that I shouldn’t be disappointed in finding out that a made up monster isn’t real, but I want to believe! Clive goes back to the psychiatrist who thinks that he and the daughter are hallucinating about this whole thing. They look at the security footage and it shows that there was no Hollow Face. Now both sides are telling me that there is no monster. It all happened so fast. Sad. Basically they tell Clive that he isn’t allowed to hang around with the family anymore because he is loony. After some more interviewing of the daughter, she reveals that she knows that Hollow Face isn’t real but her dad doesn’t. What? I still have no idea with how they will end this.

Clive goes back to his house (every house in England looks the same by the way) and checks out the girls room. The girl comes home (Clive is hiding in her closet because he isn’t supposed to be there) and she writes leave me alone at the end of the story. Then throws the story quickly in the closet. Movie skips back to the Spanish boy who is writing the story. He hears something but no shadows come from the ceiling this time. The mom hears it but is now sleeping with some other dude who tells her not to go to the boy. Great advice. Kid puts the story that he is writing in the same box that the girl found it in and in the same tree that she did as well. Ohhhhhhhhhh now it all makes sense. The boy is Clive Owen. That’s how the stories are connected. He goes back home, climbs up the tree and sees his daughter’s bracelet in the hole.

He rushes back home only to see that his daughter is having a full on night terror. She went to sleep and the ceiling shadow thing happened but this time her whole room kind of melted away too. Could’ve looked awesome if they had more money to work on the CGI. Instead it looked like crap. Hollow Face rips her whole face off and she gets thrown into Clive’s flashback. Hollow Face was really his dad who just got out of prison. The dad had just showed up one night to take him away and the mom didn’t like that so they had a fight. Clive walked in on them fighting and the dad chased him through his room out onto the scaffolding. More fighting and the dad falls to his death in a puddle of wet cement. What a messed up family. The girl wakes up and everybody hugs. Hollow Face is shown running down an alley, dissolving until there is nothing left.

MEH TWIST OVER

Favorite Scene : Definitely lighting the jumpsuit on fire. Way to take control of a nightmare

Favorite Lines : Nada

Rating : 6.5 of those giant hollow Easter bunny chocolates. There were times that I was very into the movie but I wasn’t a fan with how it was ended. It seems that the ending ruined it for most people in all of the bad reviews that were written about it. It was corny for sure but didn't make me upset at all and I still think that it was great at the beginning and that alone saves it from being a crap movie. It felt a little like The Orphanage at times which is a great movie and I think if you liked that, then this could be worth watching once. The director is also the same guy who did Intacto (movie 44) so that’s two decent and weird movies that I’ve seen of his. I also just checked to see that he is directing a remake of the Highlander movie. Oh boy.

Alternate Ending : SPOILERS. This is what I wanted. There is no twist and the monster is real. The girl gets her face ripped off and it gets replaced with Nick Cage’s face.

What I would do if I was the main character: If I was Clive Owen, I would’ve probably shot the monster in the face like Clive Owen is supposed to do. Then I would’ve gotten a lady to fall in love with me and then have to leave her, breaking her heart. Also like Clive Owen is supposed to do.

What happens in the sequel? Intruders 2 : Locks Are For Squares. The daughter’s kid starts being haunted by Hollow Face. It’s literally the same movie, just a generation down.