This week on Trailer Talk: Apocalyptic friendships, stovepipe hat slayings, and hollow faces.

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

I will tell you exactly why this movie has me intrigued, and it’s not that first time director, Lorene Scafaria, has assembled a fantastic cast of some of the best comedians working in America today.

I like how it presents the apocalypse as a slow burning inevitability and how that impacts modern society. There is little of the hysteria and violence that apocalyptic movies usually revel in; instead the trailer presents some of the interesting ways a person would respond to having a deadline on their existence.

We see depression, we see denial, we see a mass outbreak of mid-life crises, we see acceptance, we see people clearly tripping balls in restaurants. A drama would be more likely to focus on the sorrow, action movies will focus on the fear, but a comedy has room to explore the ridiculous spectrum of the human condition. It can be honest and find the humour in that, this is what intrigues me about this movie.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER

I’ve never seen a more self-serious trailer for such a retarded concept. OK, not since Sucker Punch. How well did that turn out?

My initial reaction to the trailer was one of dismay and disgust. Lazy, thoughtless genre mash-ups are my pet peeve and the idea of Abraham Lincoln fighting vampires offers me all the substance and staying power of a mouse’s fart. There’s no clever pop culture commentary here, no perspective. It’s just one one of those stupid questions your friends ask when everyone is drunk, spun out of control and handed a multi-million dollar budget: “Wouldn’t be cool if HISTORICAL/LITERARY FIGURE A had to fight FICTIONAL MONSTER B.”

You may as well have President William Howard Taft wrestle Sasquatch or Sherlock Holmes hunt Predators.

Funny ideas? Sure. You could riff on that idea for a good ten minutes and have a great time. Can you imagine stretching a story out of that idea? Can you imagine someone actually sinking millions… millions into making that possible? That’s when it becomes grotesque and harmful to our culture.

There’s no point to these mash-ups. If there’s no point then there’s no backbone to hang a story on and it’s going to start buckling quickly once the novelty of a stovepipe hat-wearing vampire slayer wears off. It is no surprise that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is bereft of purpose, given this idea spawned from the cerebral slop bucket that is Seth Grahame-Smith, a man who makes a career out of playing Mad Libs.

To even begin to make this empty headed concept work would require some remarkable talent and, I’m sorry to say, I just don’t believe Timur Bekmambetov (or X-Men 3/Sherlock Holmes scribe Simon Kinberg) would be capable of the deft tonal balancing needed to sell such a shitty idea. You can either take it too far into camp territory and people tune out or you bury it in dourness and have people laughing at it. The tone presented in the trailers, and by all accounts the film entire, struggles to sustain itself for the duration of a trailer. I am not convinced.

INTRUDERS

I have a soft spot for any horror movie that tries to create something from their villain. Even the ones that don’t really work (like Chromeskull) have a charm to them because someone put in the effort to make these characters stand out and, ideally, endure.

A lot of recent haunted house movies of late just don’t aspire for iconic status, the most iconic image of the Paranormal Activity series is a door slamming or someone being pulled out of bed. Insidious made an effort, giving the spirits and demons a visual identity, but there’s not much of a hook to them.

So I appreciate the trailer for Intruders in trying to create a mythology for their central antagonist, Hollow Face. It’s a great name, for starters, the kind of thing a frightened child would think up and it conjures up a lot of intense imagery.

An aside, it’s curious that they cite 28 Weeks Later as the credit to back up Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s “visionary” status when he’s basically just filling in Danny Boyle’s colouring book for him.

Beyond that, I’m not feeling it. It looks fairly standard, hardly visionary, Clive Owen’s instincts for picking projects has been abysmal of late and it doesn’t really offer anything to fear other than a hooded man lurking in shadows and CGI face morphing that we have seen a hundred times before. If they called it “Hollow Face”, maybe I would be more enthusiastic, but Intruders is incredibly generic and I fear the film will reflect that.