Movie Details
| Title: | Population 436 | |
| Director: | Michelle Maxwell MacLaren | |
| Year: | 2006 | |
| Genre: | Trapped in Crazytown | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 03.13.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 03.13.06 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: South by Southwest 2006 I ended the night by driving back downtown and finding surprisingly decent parking for the Alamo downtown. Nobody knew anything about this movie except that Jeremy Sisto was in it. I saw that as a good thing. Micah noted that since a short's playing before it, one of the two had to be great and the other had to suck. Well, the short was great. A scary little film about a children's doll that becomes a really creepy monster that his mother somehow controls and keeps in the closet. Very effective short. The movie... well, I'd say if it was trimmed down to an hour it would make a par-for-the-course episode of Masters of Horror. True Jeremy Sisto was in it but so was Fred Durst. Yeah, that Fred Durst. Rather than getting into the ugly specifics of why I didn't like it, I'll just say that I'm glad this didn't play last night right after The Lost. during the Q&A afterward, the director said that the movie was really more of a psychological movie than a horror movie so it was OK that it was all shot during the day. I wonder if that means it was some sort of endurance test that everyone in the theater was an unknowing participant in... My favorite part of the movie was when Micah leaned over and said "the sign [with the population number] never changes!" man... that made me laugh for a long time... and then had an aftershock whenever they showed the town sign again. Maybe for people who've never seen or read any Trapped in Crazytown stories the glaring "twist" would come as a surprise but... come on... there's a scene where Sisto (who plays a Census Bureau worker) has a list of years and every census year shows the population being 436... of course 4+3+6=13 and 1+3=4... not that that really means anything. There were about a half dozen of those types of thing in the movie... like how everyone stopped their clocks at 4:36 and some random 50s-era family was living in a cell in the basement and arcane books with pictures of burninating villagers in it... oops I've gone into ugly specifics. |
