‘Dark Times’ takes on teen violence – ‘Flatliners’ deadly dull remake

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LOS ANGELES, Sept 30, (Agencies): Three decades after “Stand by Me” cast its long shadow over coming-of-age storytelling, Stephen King’s influence continues to resonate with theater-goers and TV audiences.

Based on King’s novella “The Body,” Rob Reiner’s 1986 cult hit spawned its own genre, typically featuring a group of wise-cracking, cursing kids, often on bikes, facing up to teenage trauma in Anytown, USA.

Several Steven Spielberg movies fit the mold, as does J.J. Abrams’s “Super Eight,” but critics also point to small screen fare like the Duffer Brothers’ “Stranger Things” and the 1990 horror TV miniseries “It,” remade this year as a smash-hit theatrical film.

The latest example of the genre, indie movie “Super Dark Times,” is unlikely to reach anything like as wide an audience as “It,” but the critical plaudits are comparable.

Part coming-of-age fable, part brutal teen slasher, Kevin Phillips’s feature directorial debut is not itself based on a King novel, but owes a clear debt to its “kids on bikes” predecessors.

“The themes that were present in the script both enticed me and scared me,” Phillips said at a preview screening ahead of the film’s US release on Friday.

“It took me a while to truly come around to deciding this was the movie to make.”

The events take place in a pleasant but prosaic suburb in upstate New York, where Zach (Owen Campbell) and his intense, mop-haired friend Josh (Charlie Tahan) are negotiating young adulthood in the mid-1990s.

It is the era before social media and smartphones but teenagers have never needed the internet to find their kicks in first loves and experimenting with drugs.

The boys’ relationship changes suddenly and traumatically when Josh accidentally kills their overbearing companion Daryl (Max Talisman) with a samurai sword in a tussle fueled by an argument over cannabis.

They hide the body and Zach goes back to his everyday life, trying to present a cool front but backing away from a budding relationship with high school crush Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino).

Josh, apparently traumatized by guilt, retreats to his bedroom at first — only to return suddenly to school and his social life, acting like he doesn’t have a care in the world. But the nightmare of what has happened sets in motion an increasingly complex set of circumstances that spiral into dark paranoia and spectacular violence.

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Phillips worked with cinematographer Eli Born to create something that “could harken back to films we loved growing up when we were kids in the 1990s,” he said.

Co-writer Ben Collins recalls how the idea for the movie came to him in his sleep.

“I don’t dream a lot or I don’t remember my dreams, but it was like I woke up and the fact that I even remembered it was striking,” he told the audience at the screening, part of the Downtown Los Angeles film festival.

“When I was taking a shower it was coming back, and it was basically just kids (messing) around with a samurai sword.”

Collins, whose dream featured Japanese children, assumed that he had been influenced by a real-life event in the news.

“In the dream the kid got decapitated, and I was like, ‘That sounds insane — let me make sure that didn’t really happen.’ I spent the day Googling it, and it didn’t happen,” he said.

He decided that if it wasn’t real, it was a compelling enough idea to pursue in film, although no one actually loses a head in “Super Dark Times.”

Joel Schumacher’s 1990 schlocksterpiece “Flatliners” was perhaps most notable for taking a silly but strangely compelling premise (a gang of sexy, thrill-seeking medical students who intentionally “flatline” to experience a little slice of death) as well as a stacked cast of young talent (Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon), and somehow doing nothing much of note with either of them. So say this much for director Niels Arden Oplev’s decent-looking yet deadly dull remake — it’s nothing if not faithful to the original. About as inessential as reboots get, “Flatliners” finds a replacement cast of equally overqualified actors, and beefs up its depictions of the afterlife with some updated visual effects, but otherwise offers no reason for reanimating this long-expired property.

Taking over Sutherland’s old role is Ellen Page, who stars as Courtney, a serious medical student for whom a childhood tragedy has prompted an interest in the afterlife. Discovering an unused basement facility beneath the hospital where she’s a medical resident, and perhaps moved by the tough-love motivations of her cranky professor (Sutherland, appearing for purely meta reasons), she hatches a plan to research brain activity after death by using herself as a test subject.

The film doesn’t waste much time exploring what pushed this promising future doctor to risk her life in the name of nebulous research, and neither do the two fellow students she recruits to stop her heart and subsequently jolt her back to life: Sophia (Kiersey Clemons), Courtney’s spunky buddy beset by self-confidence issues, and Jamie (James Norton), a callow trust-fund himbo who lives on his own private yacht. After a short spell of handwringing, they go along with the plan — Courtney flatlines, and the film’s visual effects team cooks up some trippy if unimaginative imagery to illustrate her sojourn to the great beyond. Arriving just in time to help bring her back into the light are Ray (Diego Luna), the one halfway reasonable student in the group, and Marlo (Nina Dobrev) a hotshot resident who wears spiky high heels while on rounds and righteously exclaims things like, “this isn’t science, it’s pseudoscience!”

At first, the experience seems to have been a positive one. Courtney’s brain gets a jumpstart, and she finds herself suddenly remembering arcane details from old medical textbooks, jealousy from her hypercompetitive peers, who all want their turns going under. (Herein lies the film’s one clever update: While the Gen X flatliners cheated death for a cheap thrill, their millennial counterparts do it in search of better grades.)

Despite the film’s brief attempts to convince us otherwise, none of these experiments seem to reveal much of anything about post-mortem brain activity, nor do they spark any sort of philosophical or theological epiphanies. They do, however, put our motley gang of medicals in the mood to party, and the film’s running time swells an extra 10 minutes to accommodate some mild sequences of drinking, dancing and screwing.

In spite of their medical training, it comes as something of a surprise to our heroes to learn that temporarily killing themselves might bring about unintended consequences, and all of them begin to experience spooky visions and hallucinations. It takes them an agonizingly long time to figure out why this is happening, and the film promptly devolves from a goofy ‘90s throwback into a thoroughly flat J-horror throwback, full of cheesy jump scares and plenty of angry figures with dark eye makeup glowering in doorways.

As dull as it gets, “Flatliners” never sinks all the way into outright fiasco, and there’s enough talent both behind and in front of the camera to keep things on the right side of basic competence. The actors do what they can with the material, and Oplev happens upon a few decent visual ideas. What’s missing, however, is any indication why anyone involved wanted to revisit this material. While many remakes struggle to break out of the shadow of their hallowed source material, the original “Flatliners” was no one’s idea of a classic, providing ample opportunities for improvement on which this film stubbornly refuses to seize.

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