Atomic Nerds

We’re not quite the B movie freaks that Correia is, but we do watch our share and enjoy them for what they are- low-budget, low on the radar, and sometimes surprisingly good for what they are. After a mind-numbing experience watching Fingerprints, a movie that proves that even little dead ghost children are boring as shit if your protagonist is so passive that the plot and entire supporting cast have to make herculean efforts to drag her from plot point to plot point the whole way, we had a much better time watching Hallowed Ground. The movie’s appeal most definitely does not come from the shocking twists and turns the plot takes, so if you really REALLY care about spoilers stop now, but believe me, I’m not going to tell you anything you won’t have been able to work out for yourself well before it happens. If it seems like it could conceivably be a surprise, I’ll keep it to myself, ‘kay?

The star of the movie is Jamie Alexander, who seems to have made a minor name for herself as a direct-to-DVD scream queen. She’s not bad- she’s pretty cute, and she is at least capable of conveying the required B movie emotions: confused, panicked, and pissed off. We’re quickly hinted at that she has some sort of angsty background regarding a lost child, but I’ve already forgotten the details other than that there was one. I’d say she needs to brush up on her angst, but nobody really wants more of that unless they’re watching a much artier class of movie and, say, are endurance-testing their boyfriend’s capacity for movie watching. In any case, she’s driving across Flyover Country Where They Grow All the Food, America, and suffers a plot-related severe mechanical failure, conveniently dumping her right into Creepy Small Town, Flyover Country. The place actually wouldn’t be at all creepy if it weren’t for the fact that we were shown an apparently relevant scene right before involving the requisite creepy… let’s call him a preacher, they couldn’t seem to decide if this was a Catholic agricultural cult or a Protestant one… leading a crucifixion out in the corn fields.

As a brief digression, why is it always corn? I get that running desperately through the tall corn makes for a much better suspenseful chase scene than running through a watermelon patch, but there is more than one crop in the world that grows to a decent height. Why not use kids and have a tense chase through a wheat field? It would at least be new.

In any case, as soon as Plotmobile is stashed in the town garage, our heroine wanders into the local diner and is immediately pounced upon by Suzy Exposition, who is a tabloid reporter of some sort and immediately tells her all about the town’s macabre history, apparently completely against the heroine’s will. This is the sort of movie where making more sense than the minimum required to move the plot along isn’t really high on the list of priorities, so the viewers and the protagonist good-naturedly go along with Suzy Exposition dragooning her to go out to the original creepy cornfield with creepy farmhouse to take some sensationalist photos of the grounds and a staged scarecrow crop, since the gory detail of the original story was that the creepy preacher used to make human sacrifices to use the sinners of his flocks as human scarecrows, being as he thought crows were agents of Satan, or at least agents of low yield. The important detail about Suzy Exposition isn’t how much sense it makes for her to be there or to involve a random woman whose car broke down, it’s that she’s really, really annoying, the viewers want to see her killed horribly as soon as possible, and the movie obliges us almost immediately when the scarecrow comes to life and fucks her up Flyover-style. This was so gratifying we cheered aloud.

What you need to realize if you’re pondering whether you might enjoy this movie is that it is not scary unless you’re under ten years old or so. Oh, it has some gruesome moments, and some points of suspense, and a few goose-you surprises, but it’s not so much scary as it is fun. It has a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, and while it’s played straight enough that it’s impossible to tell whether we’re meant to be laughing with or at it, since it doesn’t otherwise have that ham-handed trace of an incompetent writer and director trying too hard to get you to take them seriously, I’m thinking it was deadpan tongue in cheek. It also has a few plot details that are low-grade subversions of the sorts of ways this story- and seriously, it’s been done many, many times, corn and all- that back up this point of view. Suffice it to say, the immortal angry spirit of the crow-hating preacher really needs to get himself a better grade of prophesy and a better grade of fanatical followers; if it weren’t for the parts where they’re raping or killing, they remind you of nothing so much as a group of small-town Lutherans going along with the church bake sale to humor the padre. It’s actually a little sad when they get killed off- they didn’t SEEM such a bad sort…

The other really nice thing about this movie is that the protagonist has evidently read the Horror Movie Survival Guide and taken that shit to heart. Normally female protagonists in B horror movies come in exactly two flavors: the classic formula, which is the virginal run-and-screecher who spends the entire movie in a flailing panic and mostly survives through a combination of sheer luck and the other characters inadvertently acting as human shields, plus perhaps some life-preserving property of enormous breasts and extremely tight pants. The other sort is basically Scruffy the Slasher Slayer, whose outfit is every bit as revealing as the screecher’s but is mysteriously tough, strong, and freakishly well armed despite apparently weighing a hundred pounds soaking wet. The protagonist of Hallowed Ground is neither; she’s wearing practical clothes, but it’s because she’s a normal woman on a road trip, not because she dresses to stake things through the heart and set them on fire. She’s not armed, but once shit starts going down she immediately makes sure she is. When the police leave her alone in the station, she searches it and grabs a shotgun- which by the way she knows how to use, the gun handling is shockingly good for a movie like this. Left alone in ANY situation, she instantly arms herself with whatever she can and uses it sensibly if not expertly. She runs when she can and when she’s just made sure she’s not running straight into danger. She’s that very rare case of scream queen that survives the movie because she obviously deserves to, and the movie doesn’t bother to beat it into our heads that it’s because she’s such a badass either.

The main character and the actress playing her are gratifying enough to watch and the plot and writing capable enough for what they’re doing that the movie qualifies as 83 minutes of pretty decent entertainment, especially if you involve moderate amounts of alcohol and a friend of similar sensibilities for some hollering and mocking and general audience participation. If this kind of movie is your thing, give it a look.

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