Beautiful Creatures (2013)

I’m calling it the “Vonnegut Rule.” Anytime a teen drama needs to quickly illustrate its hero is a cool-sensitive outsider, he will be seen reading Vonnegut. Always “Slaughter House Five.” We get that scene moments into “Beautiful Creatures,” another YA adaptation about teens amongst supernatural angst and humanity-ending danger. Our reader is Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), a high schooler with a DOA mom and MIA dad who falls for the new girl (Alice Englert) in class, because she’s witchy, and has, in fact, invaded Ethan’s dreams for months: Violent memories not his own. I know nothing of the books. But writer/director Richard LaGravenese’s movie peaks midway with a family dining room table fight that literally sends table and room spinning as one silent cousin sits, eating. (Why can’t the film be about him?) The remainder is blasé and anticlimactic, with part of the cast –- Emma Thompson -– camping it up “Batman” TV style, and the rest –- Ehrenreich and Englert –- crying over doomed love, all of them wrestling Southern accents that come and go, often in a single scene. Read some Vonnegut instead, eh? C

Highlander (1986) and Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)

Has there ever been a fantasy franchise with such a genius hook more crapped from the beginning than “Highlander”? I love the premise: A 16^th century Scottish warrior is killed in battle, but arises from the grave whole and healed for he is Immortal, an ubermensch race known only to their own kind. They are determined to kill one another until only one is left. 

In the original, hero Connor McCloud (Christopher Lambert) learns of his powers, lives for centuries, relocates to New York, and finally must battle Clancy Brown as Kurgan, which means He Who Cannot Enunciate. 

The plot is good, but the cheap dialogue and director Russell Mulcahy’s relentlessly vulgar metal-band rock video antics are blinding. This bargain-bin Michael Bay never lets his actors or story breathe being too busy shattering glass and blowing up water. Sean Connery as an Egyptian-turned-Spaniard mentor living in Scotland is some kind of painful joke, and the man is dressed like a bed pillow. But it’s all watchable. 

Not so DOA sequel “Quickening,” a cinematic cluster-fuck from the start that rewrites the Immortals as time-traveling aliens in a story too baffling to explain. Michael Ironside looks ashamed as the villain. 

Original: C+ The sequel: F

Dream House (2011)

I saw an early trailer of “Dream House” that gave nearly the entire film away. What the ad didn’t spoil: This supernatural, “Oh, shit, we moved into a massacre house” film crashes at the one hour mark, leaving even the great Rachel Weisz acting shrill and lost. Pushing ahead spoiler-free: Daniel Craig plays Will Atenton, a book editor ditching NYC for the rural dream house with his wife (Weisz) and daughters. Pfft. Seems “family murdered” was left out of the realty ad. Directed by Jim Sheridan, with a solid cast of names, this not-horrifying “American Horror Story” story should rock and shock. It fails. “Dream” goes dead flat after that one-hour-mark reveal resets the plot, and then drops an endless series of awful gotch’yas. Worst offense, other than the writing and editing: The great Naomi Watts is wasted in a “helpless woman” role beneath her station. PSA hint: If your train-mate on the way to your new house is Elias Koteas, go the hell back to work. Stay there. C