Just when I thought I had seen it all, comes a movie about a killer tire. Just in case you missed that… A. KILLER. TIRE. And judging by the teaser trailer, it uses its’, um… mind?

So make that: A. TELEKENETIC. KILLER. TIRE.

Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, who has also given us other one-word-titled-movies like Nonfilm and Steak, brings us the tale of a discarded tire that… does stuff. In fact, I don’t really know what’s going to happen in this film, so your guess is as good as mine.

I’m sure this film will roll our way sometime soon.

Having never seen the original, I can’t make any comparisons, so I took this movie as its own beast. Although, I have heard that this remake is a remake in name only, not having anything to do with the original movie.

Within the first few minutes of the film, I was immediately put off by the lead actress. Bijou Phillips has one of the most annoying voices I have ever heard, and I really struggled to get past it. I never really did, so having her grating, flinty voice droning on every time she opened her mouth didn’t help much. Could someone also give this girl a sandwich?

That aside, this flick fits firmly into the ‘evil satanic murdering baby’ genre. It goes like this: pregnant college girl leaves school to have her baby, baby is evil, girl stays out of school, baby kills. Once the baby starts the killing, (outside of the hospital), the annoying voiced Mother does nothing to stop her Hellspawn. In fact, she covers up the bird and cat killings that first occur, and then later covers up the human killings without ever giving it much of a second thought. This bothered me, because they never showed us any kind of Mother/Baby bonding at all. It’s just that she instantly covers up the baby’s killing spree, and this baby kills all the time. Everyone and everything, completely indiscriminate. It’s just that they could have shown us some sort of connection between them, even if it began in the womb and the baby had some kind of ‘protect me’ spell on his host.

So halfway through the movie she’s disposing of bodies and the bodies’ cars and we really don’t know why she’d go to such lengths, aside from the fact that she’s ‘Its’ Mommy. Also, we have no idea why the baby is killing, aside from being hungry. I guess that should be good enough, (and why isn’t the baby sharing with his undernourished Mommy?). I guess we don’t really NEED a reason as to why the satanic baby is killing, but the plot summary/tagline for the movie states this:
“A baby born to a human couple turns out to be a mutant monster with an appetite to kill when scared.”
The problem is that the only time we see it ‘scared’ is in the hospital. Did the dude standing outside smoking a cigarette scare it? I think not. They should have had the plot summary be:
“Baby hungry, baby eat…flesh.”
Already I’ve made it more interesting.

So much about this movie just doesn’t add up. I like my B-horror as much as the next guy, with thin plots and cheesy effects, but those movies know what they are and what they are doing. This movie doesn’t know what it wants to be or how to get there.

It’s Alive. Yep, it sure is, but this movie is nothing but dead.