In my previous review, I talked about how I was an obsessed
X-Files fan back in the day. I was rabid about the show and my house
was pretty much a shrine to it from books to magazines to toys, I
even had the not-so-bad FMV PC game they put out. Like all love
affairs, it came to a crashing halt with one party feeling betrayed
by the other. Before I talked about how the fifth season of the show
is where things started to go wrong, but it wasn't bad by any means.
You could just see the cracks starting to form. As the years went by
the cracks grew worse and worse until they gave way to the Doggett
that was the eighth season. Disaster. I meant to say Disaster.
That's when I jumped ship and never
looked back. I mean that too, I never saw another episode ever again.
I've never even bothered to look up how one of my favourite shows of
all time ended because I just quit caring completely. This also
means I never saw the second X-Files movie when it came out in
2008, but judging from the box office receipts no one else did
either. It's safe to say everyone was still watching this little
indie film that came out the previous week that I'm POSITIVE you've
never heard of, I think it was called the Dark Kite or something like
that. It had a circus clown in it doing magic tricks with pencils,
it was pretty freaking weird and has faded into the obscurity of
time. Let's just hope this movie is Doggett-free because it's now
time for A Ghoul Versus X-Files: I Want To Believe!
Our film starts in Somerset, West
Virginia with a woman driving along a snow covered road to her house.
As she parks her car, she hears her dog barking like crazy and
discovers there's someone right outside. She gets attacked by a bald
man, using a garden too to slash the hell out of him. A second man
appears and she tries to run away but he catches her. Hey, that guy
is Leoben from Battlestar Galactica! He sure is a fan of
kidnapping women, isn't he?
All of this is cut with footage of the
FBI searching the area for the woman, led by a gangly looking man
with long gray hair. The agents are being led by Amanda Peet and
Xzibit, and I'm already cringing. Amanda Peet is quite literally one
of the worst actresses in Hollywood, and Xzibit, well... I'm already
trying to suppress making endless Pimp My Ride jokes. The old
man falls to the ground, declaring “it's here”. The agents start
digging, finding a black bag with Baddie’s severed left arm in it.
We know it's his because we see the slash marks from the gardening
claw on his hand.
We go to a Catholic hospital where Dana
Scully is now working apparently. I did absolutely no research before
I watched this, last I knew (as of Season 7 of the show) she was
still working for the FBI with her new partner Agent Debacle.
Doggett. I meant to say Doggett. She is updating everyone on the
status of a young boy she is treating, who is dying of a very rare
disease. After the meeting, Scully is talking to the boy and his
parents when she is interrupted by Xzibit, who is looking for Mulder.
Scully tells him she no longer works the FBI and has no idea where
Mulder is. Xzibit says “well, if you COULD contact him it might
save the life of an FBI agent”.
She returns home, where we find she's
living with Mulder. He is holed up in the patented Room Full of Crazy
where he's cutting out articles on the paranormal to pin to the wall.
To really drive this scene home, Mulder now has a Crazy Hermit Beard.
I have to take points off for not having a red string connecting
several of the articles or having articles circled with his notes
written next to them. We learn Mulder is wanted by the FBI with
absolutely no explanation WHY. Oh, it's going to be THIS kind of
movie is it? What did Mulder do? If the FBI is looking for him, why
wouldn't they search Scully's house? The FBI can catch the guy who
hacked Scarlett Johansson's cell phone but can't catch a guy living
with his most well known associate?
Scully tells him the FBI wants his help
and will drop all charges if he agrees to help them solve a case. He
says the FBI can cram it with walnuts as they put him on trial for
bogus charges and tried to discredit his work, and I'm immediately
finding this “standalone movie” harder to follow than the one
that had five years of insanely complex back story to deal with. She
wants him to do it, worrying about how his isolation is affecting his
mind. He again refuses, Scully saying she'll tell the FBI his answer
and leaves. Wouldn't her telling the FBI this tip them off that she
just might be in contact with Mulder? It's kind of insinuated that
the FBI is happy to have Mulder out of their hair so they aren't
trying too hard to find him, but you can't tell me some young agent
wouldn't try to crack this case to make a name for him or herself?
Huh. That would have been a better movie than this one.
As she closes the door, Mulder sees a
picture of his sister Samantha pinned to the back of it. Sighing, he
tells her he'll do it but on one condition. I assume this condition
is that Scully comes with him because we're never told what it is.
They arrive at Washington D.C. where they wait outside an office.
There's this very weird shot where they look at pictures of George W.
Bush and J. Edgar Hoover while the X-Files theme plays. Suck
it Bush and Hoover... I guess?
Xzibit has them enter the office, where
they meet Amanda and get the low down. The woman that Leoben
kidnapped is Monica Bannan, an FBI agent. A ex-Catholic priest and
convicted pedophile (original!) named Father Joe called them and said
he had a vision of her, leading them to the severed arm. They go to
Richmond, Virginia where Joe lives in a “dorm” for habitual sex
offenders where they police themselves. What?! Who the hell would
allow that? The law in this movie is less competent than the police
in Max Payne.
Mulder does get a good joke in though probably his only one in the entire movie,
when he advises “to avoid the activities room”.
They meet with Joe, who Scully treats
with outright hostility as he molested 37 boys. DAMN! Oh, and just to
be sure his character is a walking exaggerated stereotype he has an
Irish accent too. Scully thinks he's a fraud on top of being a
monster, so leaves. Mulder asks Joe to show them how his visions
work. The FBI and Mulder take Joe to the crime scene, pulling into
the wrong driveway on purpose. Joe senses this is the wrong house,
walking to the right one. He has a vision of her abduction, ending
with him crying tears of blood. I want to point out how wretched the
acting from Joe and Amanda is in this scene, it's WORSE than soap
opera bad.
Back at the hospital, Scully learns her
patient is being moved to a different hospital because the higher ups
thinks his case is hopeless. She goes to her office and starts
crying- really? Scully? One of the toughest and strongest women in
television history is reduced to tears? Are we sure Chris Carter
wrote this? This movie's making me mad. What else is going on?
Leoben kidnaps a young woman he was stalking at a swimming pool.
Boring, let's change the channel. We join Mulder and Scully in bed-
oh, I guess they're a couple now? It wasn't that clear earlier in
Mulder's Room Full of Crazy. Scully can't sleep because she's upset
about the little boy, whose name is Christian. No way that name's
going to be used in a clumsy religious allegory later on. Or right
now, as Scully says she's mad at God for making Christian suffer.
Oof. This is going to be a looooooooong movie. Mulder thinks Scully
is so attached to Christian because their son left them with an
emptiness that can't be filled.
WHAT?!? Mulder and Scully had a kid?
Scully was revealed to be infertile as a result of experimentation
the Syndicate did on her, so was this an adopted kid? Or did some
more medical mumbo jumbo happen to her so she could become pregnant
again? What happened to the kid? How did they think non-fans wouldn't
be curious about this stuff? But instead we focus on Scully telling
Mulder she reviewed the medical report on the arm, learning it had
traces of animal tranquilizers in it. PleasebeDexter,
pleasebeDexter...
You'd think she would have told him
this earlier, seems it might have been important with time ticking on
the missing woman. Mulder mentions Joe heard barking dogs in his
vision, wondering if its the same kind of tranq you'd give to a dog.
They get a call that Joe had another vision, arriving at a barn a few
hours later. As they arrive Amanda shows concern for a cut Mulder
incurred while shaving his epic beard off. It's made pretty obvious
from the dialogue Amanda is infatuated with Mulder, alas the acting
doesn't pull that off like it was meant to. This is still probably my
favourite part of the movie because of the look Scully throws Amanda
when she touches Mulder's face.
This was always one of the best parts
of the show, how not-so-subtlety jealous Scully would get whenever a
woman would show interest in Mulder. Joe's vision shows him they'll
find a body, just not that of the missing agent. As the agents search
the area, Mulder and Scully get in a fight over his believing Joe. He
acts like a total asshole towards her, and this is so out of
character I'm fighting the urge to hit fast forward on the remote.
Digging in the area, they agents hit
ice and Xzibit calls off the search. The entire movie he's been
portrayed as not believing in any of this vision crap and his
patience is fast running out. But once again, the acting isn't strong
enough to convey this. He's LIGHT YEARS ahead of Amanda though.
Earlier Joe made a reference to “looking though dirty glass” from
his vision, which Mulder realizes is the ice. Examining the ice
closer, he sees a woman's frozen head inside. Far up above, Leoben
watches them dig. Xzibit calls for an extraction of the ice as
Mulder walks by Scully without saying a word, because he'd SO do
that. Joe tells Scully to “not give up”.
Leoben drives to a fenced off building,
which has a dog kennel inside it where the woman he kidnapped is
locked up inside one of the pens. She can see there's a lab inside
with Russians doing science-y things. We also catch a glimpse of
Baldie lying on a table. At the hospital Scully argues with her boss
over Christian's relocation, as she wants to try a highly
unconventional stem cell therapy treatment. These hospital scenes all
feel like padding, but only because they're padding.
At the FBI building in Quantico,
Virginia agents work on the ice block they removed from the
wilderness. Mulder leaves Scully a message that they've found 11
limbs in the ice so far, and that some are years old. They're from
men and women, but do share one common trait: all have the animal
tranq in them. Come on Dexter, it's not too late to make this movie
awesome... Some time later we see the FBI
searching over the car of the woman Leoben kidnapped, one Cheryl
Cunningham. Mulder finds her medic alert bracelet sitting in plain
sight that apparently no one else saw, probably because they're all
idiots. They're able to retrace her steps to the swimming pool she
visited for a completely pointless scene that I think was supposed to
be funny but, um, I didn't laugh.
Scully performs the first in a series
of procedures on Christian. Afterward she meets with Mulder, who
tells her about Cheryl and the fact she swam at the same place as the
missing FBI agent did. I can't even remember what her name was since
the movie has moved her to the back burner. Scully thinks it could
be a black market organ scheme, Mulder wanting her help with it. She
refuses, which leads to another argument and I guess break up.
They're talking in such flower language with ridiculous metaphors
it's hard to tell. I wonder if Carter wrote this on purpose to stick
it to fans who wanted Mulder and Scully together, to show how bad
it'd be?
At a different hospital, we see Leoben
works as an organ delivery man and that's the least dirty way I could
find to phrase that. Bow-chicka-WOW-WOWWW! The police stop him and
question him in regards to the organ smuggling theory, which goes
nowhere. Scully goes to see Joe, asking what he meant when he told
her not to give up. He replies he has no idea, and THEY have a fight.
This movie is pretty much people yelling at each other and using the
fanciest multi-syllable words they can think of to do it. Joe quotes
Proverbs 25:2 at her (“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,
but the honour of kings is to search out a matter”), which
absolutely will NOT be important later on. Luckily for people who
hate really bad acting, Joe suddenly has a seizure to put this scene
out of our misery.
Mulder arrives at Joe's Pedo-dorm just
in time to see him being loaded into an ambulance. Amanda shows him a
picture of Leoben, who was released by the police because they didn't
have any evidence to detain him. Xzibit shows him a picture of
Leoben's husband, who is the bald man we saw at the beginning of the
movie as well as being one of the boys Joe molested.
Click here for Part 1!
Click here for Part 1!
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