11/11/11 (2011)

My Netflix Instant Queue is getting out of hand. I don't know exactly how many titles are on there, but I can tell you that between the horror movies I keep stumbling upon for this month's viewing and the shows my lovely wife keeps putting on there to entertain our almost-one-year-old, it is literally a crap-ton of programming. Literally. My "Recommended For You" feature just suggested "A Nightmare On Seasame Street" and "Dora: Portrait Of A Serial Killer." I tell ya, it's getting out of hand.

Today I selected one that I hadn't heard much buzz about, but had nevertheless intrigued me. Last year, Darren Lynn Bousman, director of Saw II, III, and IIII (the Saws weren't known for their adherence to strict rules of Roman numerals - just ask Saw IIIIIII) put out an apocalyptic Devil-y movie that was released on and revolved around November 11, 2011. The idea was something akin to when Hollywood decided to remake The Omen (terribly) simply because they could hit a release date of June 6, 2006 --- 6/6/06, or 6/6/6 if you bought what the Hollywood machine was selling.

Okay, so put one out on November 11, 2011, tie in some other numerological mumbo jumbo and you've got yourself a horror movie. Let one of the Saw guys direct it? I'm in.

So here's the deal. I select 11/11/11 from the IQ. The credits fire up and we're on our way. I don't recognize any of the names here, but that's no real surprise. But wait - it's not even the right director. Uh oh. Oh no - there it is in black and white - An Asylum Films presentation.

Damn you, Asylum Films. You got me. I've been mockbustered.

If you don't know about The Asylum, they are the production company that swoops in just before a big Hollywood movie is released and drops their own very low budget version onto dvd (or SyFy) with a similar title and similar artwork. Transformers at the box office? Try our giant robot movie, Transmorphers. Snakes On A Plane? Meet Snakes On A Train. Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, The Amityville Haunting, The Day The Earth Stopped... All of these can be yours from The Asylum if you don't care about good special effects, story, acting, and so forth. Somewhere along the way, The Asylum got the idea that Bousman's 11-11-11 (now I get it) would make some money at the box office (it didn't), so they beat them to the punch with 11/11/11. See what they did there?

But hey, a movie's a movie, right? I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I resisted the urge to hit the ol' bail-out button and stuck with my knockoff.

As expected, it looked cheap. But at least with a movie about a neighborhood full of Devil worshippers trying to bring ol' Brimstone Britches into the world through a boy who turns 11 on a certain date, you don't have to worry about spectacular special effects. Honestly, the budget was plenty to pull off this story, convoluted and confusing as it was. It helps when you don't have to pay for real actors.

The biggest problem with 11/11/11 is that it was just unremarkable. Asylum films are frequently good for a laugh, such as in their so-bad-they're-good original productions Mega Pirahna and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Sometimes they even approach a quantum of competence like in the surprisingly solid 2-Headed Shark Attack. (Really!)  And sometimes they are so awful that you can derive a certain pride in having had the courage and willpower to sit through the whole thing. I'm looking at you, AvH: Alien vs. Hunter.

11/11/11 was none of these things. It was just there. It was the movie equivalent of the last game of the NFL preseason. It resembles the real thing in certain ways, but there's nobody you recognize involved and it feels entirely pointless. When it's over, all you can say is, "well, I'm glad we got that out of the way."