COOL AIR (2006)

Studio:       Lionsgate
Director:    Albert Pyun
Writer:       Cynthia Curnan
Producer:  Robert Ladesich, Norbert Weisser
Stars:     Morgan Weisser, Wendy Phillips, Crystal Green, Virginia Dare, Lauren Sutherland, Norbert Weisser

Review Score: 

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Summary:

A struggling screenwriter moves into a Malibu boarding house and discovers that a mysterious tenant harbors a dark secret. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Opening text reveals that a Doctor Torres of Valencia was killed in a fire in the 1890’s. Following an expedition to Egypt, Torres became obsessed with the dead. Missing from his lab after the fire was a relic known as the Horns of Werethekau, a goddess who was the Egyptian Protector of the Dead. Rumors claimed that the horns had the power to reanimate the dead.

Struggling screenwriter Charlie Baxter rents a room at a boarding house in Malibu, California run by Mrs. Hayward. Mrs. Hayward’s autistic daughter Estella helps her with chores around the house. Two other tenants also board there. Across the hall from Charlie resides Arnold Deltoid, a former Disney animator who has become a recluse. On the top floor is a doctor whose room must always be kept at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The doctor can often be heard coughing and strange odors and liquids sometimes seep from the room.

Charlie finds himself attracted to Mrs. Hayward’s autistic daughter. When Mrs. Hayward sees Charlie speaking with Estella, she demands that he leave the boarding house within the hour. While packing, Charlie suffers a heart attack and a stroke. Knowing that a doctor resides upstairs, he stumbles towards the top floor room before collapsing on the staircase. The doctor emerges and places the Horns of Werethekau over Charlie’s chest.

Charlie awakens in his room and discovers that Doctor Shockner is a woman. As he recovers, she reads the script on his computer and sees that Charlie is writing a story about a mad doctor. Shockner offers her thoughts on the story. Charlie learns that Shockner blackmailed Hayward into letting him stay, as Shockner treats Estella for her autism.

Estella volunteers to feed Charlie the meals and liquid prescribed by Shockner. During the feeding, Estella fills in Charlie on the details of Shockner’s background. The doctor pays extra for custom air conditioning. When the air broke down one hot summer, Mrs. Hayward rescued Shockner by using ice. Meanwhile, Estella discovered that Shocker’s finger had rotted off her hand.

Later, Deltoid confronts Charlie, saying that he had the next turn, not Charlie. Charlie learns that Deltoid murdered his wife in a rage and her body is kept in a basement freezer. He paid money to Shockner for his wife’s resurrection. Frustrated, Deltoid later slits his wrists and dies in the freezer next to his wife’s body.

One day following his recovery, Charlie discovers that the house is warm. Hayward tells him that the doctor’s air conditioning broke, but the implication is that Hayward deliberately sabotaged it. Shockner fumbles downstairs and Charlie puts her in his bedroom. She reeks of rotting flesh and looks like a corpse. Before dying, Shockner reveals that she first died 127 years earlier and had learned how to cheat death from Doctor Torres. Shockner passes the knowledge to Charlie. Charlie then drives away from the house with the horns in his passenger seat. An epilogue reveals that Charlie became successful through a screenplay based on his experience at the Hayward house with Doctor Shockner.

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Review:

Charlie Baxter is a struggling Hollywood screenwriter who rents a room at a Malibu boarding house.  The cast of characters residing in the home is a motley crew of misfits and strange hermits.  Washed up trophy wife Mrs. Hayward runs the house with help from her “autistic hottie” daughter Estella (the movie’s term, not mine).  Of the other two tenants, one is a former Disney animator with neither the technical skills to work in the digital age nor the social skills to be anything more than a recluse.  Residing on the top floor is the strangest resident of all.  Behind that door lives Doctor Shockner, a mysterious figure that never leaves the room and insists that the temperature remain below 55 degrees at all times.

Because if you need the temperature to be under 55 degrees Fahrenheit constantly, what better place to live than Southern California?  It is not as if the summertime temperatures routinely reach triple digits or anything, right?

Given that the film begins with a background story about a doctor in possession of an ancient Egyptian relic rumored to raise the dead, and then introduces an unseen character who requires “cool air” at all times, the “mystery” at the heart of the story should be self-explanatory.  The essential flaw in the horror movie’s plot is that the reveal of the doctor’s true nature is fatally obvious from the start, removing any semblance of suspense.  And with that doctor having no more nefarious of a motive than cheating death, there is no room for any scene of true terror to take place either.  What the movie ends up with is a PG-style affair of bloodless boredom.

“Cool Air” opens with six consecutive screens of narrative text lasting nearly two minutes.  The story may be based on the literature of one of horror’s greatest authors, but the point of a movie is to tell a tale visually.  Delivering exposition through that much required reading right off the bat is a poor way to start a filmed story.

That wall of text continues unabated in voiceover form via incessant narration laid over the entire movie.  H.P. Lovecraft’s original story was indeed a first-person narrative, but the adaptation in “Cool Air” is an overindulgent screenplay focused on a constant barrage of neverending words.  Any doubt about that statement’s veracity is permanently shattered when the film begins staging conversation montages by superimposing the script onscreen as the narrator reads the same text.  “Cool Air” just cannot get enough of hearing, and literally seeing, its own words.

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The bizarre word fascination reaches its zenith by providing unnecessary narrative accompaniment to directly describe the very things already depicted onscreen.  Main character Charlie Baxter feels compelled to deliver an interior monologue about the pungent smell of a foul odor even as his face contorts into a scrunch and his nostrils flare.  Alternatively, the narration hits its nadir by opting for a first-person description of things that should be shown, yet are not.  Being a horror movie, it would be preferable to actually see the “clawlike finger” and “oozing rot” of a decaying corpse.  Instead, the audience is left to imagine the image for itself as we stare at Charlie’s face while he describes the horror using these terms.

Charlie is the lucky one, as he was able to look at something more interesting than the bare white walls of the house where the entirety of the movie is confined.  In an effort to add some type of visual stimulation to the drab location, many of the camera shots are perched in strangely canted angles.  But pitching the camera on its side is not enough to distract from the hollow sound quality where dialogue is near imperceptible.  Or from the blazing exterior whiteouts that rip through the windows in overexposed scenes.  The trifecta of poor production value is complete with pixilated digital effects that jump around a character’s face while she moves through the frame, as if the animator moving the swatch could not keep up with the minor action.

The total runtime is 78 minutes and that includes a combined total of 14 minutes for the opening credits and the end credits.  Do the math and that leaves just four minutes more than an hour for the film itself.  For good measure, “Cool Air” closes things off with three more screens of text before launching into what is possibly the slowest end credit crawl in movie history.  There must have been a legal requirement for the film to be 78 minutes, and the only way to pad that time was to put the credits through slow motion.

Devoid of a compelling mystery and lacking any visceral horror, “Cool Air” has no chance of being anything other than a dull and plodding exercise to see if an audience can sit still and remain awake for more than an hour.  Alas, the film seemed determined to be as dreadfully boring as possible anyway.

Review Score:  25

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