Pain Watch: Ember Days (2013)

Watched:  06/21/2024

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sean-Michael Argo

Where to start?

Since high school, intentionally watching bad movies has been a routine part of my film viewing.  I couldn't count how many bad movies I've watched with the aid of MST3K, RiffTrax, Dug, etc... or just putting a bad movie on myself and giving it a go with no professional support.  But the number of these films watched has been... astronomical.  And, in fact, my guilt regarding watching so many bad movies is part of why I've recently taken on my homework task of watching movies by the big name directors I've previously avoided.

And so it is that, thanks to Dug, I've now seen a movie that was not just bad for many of the reasons a movie doesn't work out (flat acting, a wandering script, horrendous editing...), but Ember Days (2013) pioneered new and innovative ways in how it chose to be a very bad movie.  It's one of those movies where you'd love a whole other movie to cover what went into this movie, what the filmmakers were thinking, and how they think of their product now.  

I do not say this lightly:  this is possibly one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  That's a spot which is, honestly, pretty hard to reach (and I'm pretty sure is usually occupied by Monster-a-Go-Go).  And I say this in the same year I watched Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven.  

If I have any sympathy for the film, it is most certainly due to the zero-budget nature of the production.  And, yes, I appreciate that a bunch of people outside of Hollywood decided to make a movie, and you shouldn't bag on people trying.  

But I watched it, and I'm here to tell the tale.

What makes Ember Days so magical?

Well, it's a fantasy movie.  Sort of.  Shot entirely on HD consumer-grade video, it's a would-be epic tale about the various gods and mythological figures you know from your Edith Hamilton and Google searches that are, for unexplained reasons, living in what is clearly Olympia, Washington.   

The basic story, as near as I can tell, is that our characters are supposed to be the Gods of myth, with major characters including Hermes, Hecate, titans such as Cronos, and a clutch of sort-of familiar pagan/ Celtic concepts like faeries, snow queens, etc....  

The Winter Queen (who looked like Elizabeth Shue from Wish) isn't going to wait to claim the throne from the Summer Queen (a lady whose web presence just screams "I am going to be difficult"), and so has a coup, banishing her to "the spirit woods" or some shit.  Which, by the way, seem to be an easy walk from Warehouse Town.

This causes, for reasons, a problem with Hecate and the writer/director Brand the Faun, as a demon has to posses Brand to...  ugh.  You can see where this is going. 

It's a movie that's a bunch of fantasy shit, like they read Neil Gaiman, failed to understand that he's writing character-driven stories, and only grokked the part of American Gods where he name-checked a bunch of deities.  

btw - An actual, Ember Day is a Catholic/ Celtic concept of taking a day off to mark the season.  So add that into the mythology gumbo we're playing with.

The thing that broke me was that:

1. It's a movie comprised entirely of exposition.  Exposition delivered endlessly, relentlessly and nonsensically, via dialog, monologue and voice over.  
1. There is nothing *but* exposition.  Every line is describing what has happened, will happen, or what is currently happening.  Sort of.  Because the movie only has essentially two or three plot points.  And refuses to explain its own concept.  
1. Our characters are supposed to be the Gods of myth-  but they live in a modern setting, where we're in empty warehouses, workshops, 70's-era build apartments with Grandma's hand-me-down sofas.  But also in the woods sometimes.  Or at the shore around docks and cranes.  They carry guns.
2. So what's the deal?  I don't know if they were supposed to have all fallen and have to work at the Piggly Wiggly alongside mortals, or if they just flit about from rave to Ren Faire or what.  There are no human characters seen in the movie.  Just our characters in rave clothes and make-up from a local theatre troop.
3. Like, are the gods making cars?  Spray painting graffiti on walls?   Where is everyone, and what are they doing? 
4. It's never explained what will be affected if the Winter Queen wins.  Something about Nephilim, but why they're a problem is just, like, implied.  And with all the fucking talking, you'd think someone would say "oh, yeah, if X happens, then Y will occur, because those guys are real dicks."  Even Monster-a-Go-Go explains its stakes.  We know what characters want and do not want.  This movie is way, way less clear.
2. The writer/ director seems convinced that we need to hear someone talking in every frame of the film.  Thus, someone is always talking, which, in turn, means more exposition that goes absolutely nowhere.
1. There's an argument you want for exposition to happen during scenes of other action.  This happens - but here it feels super confusing given the style of delivery and why they're talking about what they're discussing during that moment.
2. And they just stop to talk, like, 60% of the time.  So, lots of scenes of people just talking in warehouses and the woods.
3. It's written in a sort of artless faux-classical mode one can find in the endless stream of YA Fantasy and old Thor comics.  
1. It's intended to elevate the material and give it a sort of timeless, high-brow flavor,  that in the right hands can work.  
2. In the hands of our writer/ director/ producer/ star - it's just nonsensical word salad, counting on the notion that if you use nothing but SAT words, you've nailed it.
3. Clearly someone was being paid by the syllable.  
4. But it also makes it impossible to listen to for any length of time, as the dialog becomes meaningless.  The 50-cent words are piled up in run-on sentences that probably work on page, and maybe as one-off sentences, but make no sense as delivered by the talent we've got on hand.
2. This is a fantasy movie based in the sub-sub-sub genre of "Mythpunk" 
1. which combines the following
1. Cybergoths
2. LARPers
3. Dubstep
4. Rave-wear
5. Ren-Faire costumes
6. machine guns
7. swords (because you gotta)
8. Celtic faerie stuff
9. Greek Myth
10. empty warehouses
11. 1970's-build apartments
12. rainy alleyways
2. In practice, I'm sure this *can* read interestingly, and I remember picking up a book in the early 1990's about a rift between LA and Faerieland that was probably an early entry in the genre.  I think there's a Netflix Will Smith movie where he works with an orc or some nonsense, that sounded like Alien Nation, but with Tolkein stuff.  And I am not going to police you on your favorite genre material, but I will say - this stuff seems really hard to pull off as it's really a fetishization of several things put into a blender and frappe'd.  
1. This movie ain't it
3. The movie has the final fight take place off-screen.  After 90 minutes, it just sorta ends and we're informed via more exposition that this fight will take place, and then I guess it does.  It's unclear what happens for the most part for the last part of the movie, and, arguably, everything that happens before that.  But, yeah, it essentially sends Poochie off to his home planet where he dies off-screen.

The cumulative experience is that you're watching people run around for 90 minutes with no real notion of who they are, what their deal is, why we should care, and what is happening and why.  Which, frankly, is hard to do.  But here we are.  

It has a real "made for Mythpunk fans by Mythpunk fans", so there's an unapologetic approach to the movie.   But my suspicion is that aside from folks who read the script or who were in the movie - even Mythpunk fans were left wondering wtf they were looking at by minute 10 of this movie.  And, much like superhero movies til 2000 or so - how nuts the things on page end up looking on screen when you try to stay true to the vision (on a budget).  

Mostly, writer/director/actor/ white-boy-dread-enthusiast Sean Michael-Argo, seems to have talked friends from his local LARPing community to join with his online Wiccan pals, wear what they already have and be in his movie after 10 minutes in the make-up chair.  

The usual dude with a camera made a movie stuff is here, too.  There's a lot of enthusiasm, but no idea how to structure or pace a movie.  No idea how to make the characters matter to the audience except that they're the ones the camera shows most often.  Bad lighting.  Shitty FX.  Big ideas that are handled terribly.  I think one of the actors must have quit, because he just sort of disappears at the end.  You get the idea.  

Anyway - talking about all the ways this is bad is like talking about why a three-week-old cow pie doesn't taste good.  

But, man, all I can tell you is that the movie streaming for free on Amazon Prime, and I cannot recommend enough.   Or, you can read the novelization.  Because writer/ director/ star/ potato-man Sean-Michael Argo has written dozens of self-published novels (well done, my guy!) and been involved with many, many genre movies made in the general Washington State area with his fellow LARPers - there's way more of this content than I imagined.