Mindhunters

I’ll be so unbelievably glad when the Japanese horror craze dies down. I suppose it’s a cultural gap, but I just don’t find dank places and dripping water scary: I just find them gross. Now, a guy with a hockey mask killing camp counselors, that’s scary, or a whip-smart serial killer who likes to play mind games, that’ll have my fingers in my ears^* every time. Lank, oily hair, old videotapes, dripping water, these just make me want to take a hot shower and get a cup of tea. None of this, however, has anything to do with Mindhunters, the latest in the profiler-CSI-serial killer genre of horror/thriller.

Shelved for so long the director (Renny Harlin, of Cut Throat Island fame) reportedly can’t remember when he made it, Mindhunters is the story of eight profilers completing their training. The last test set up for them by their unconventional mentor – because in these movies there is always an unconventional mentor – Jake Harris (Val Kilmer, in essentially a walk-on role) involves a Navy testing facility 50 miles off the North Carolina coast, a faked killing, and a lot of rain and stray cats. Things get a little suspicious when, at the last minute, Gabe Jensen (LL Cool J) joins the group billed as a Detective from Philly PD in need of refresher training as a profiler. Do any of our super smart, highly intuitive FBI agents even question this? Nah, they just go back to smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee as they helicopter the more than 300 miles from Quantico, VA to this island that is 50 miles off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (Suspend disbelief now ’cause you’re going to need to in order to stomach the rest of the film.)

Taking a page from Ten Little Indians, the profilers are picked off one by one in particularly fiendish. Up first, the group’s ostensible “leader” JD (Christian Slater in his not-Jack Nicholson mode), frozen to death by a cylinder of liquid nitrogen, the presence of which is explained away in one or two throw away lines as the group first gets to the island. Most of the characters are dispatched in fairly grisly ways, including one who has his head severed from his body and all the blood drained out while the group suffers the effects of a drugging by our unknown killer.

This movie has a few interesting twists and turns, but nothing that if you engage even half your brain aren’t perceptible in advance. Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting, Hackers) turns in performance that requires his formless American accent yet again, and Kathyrn Morris (late of TV’s Cold Case) is probably wishing she didn’t actually do this movie.

For being pretentious and predictable, for not being able to count the number of characters the film has correctly for the poster, and for making me sit through yet another trailer for Dark Water, I’m giving this movie one popcorn out of five.

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