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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up and see the blood-chilling horror of another movie not screened for critics by WW deadlines! It opened yesterday! It is terrible!

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant

When the inevitable Simpsons on Ice tour takes to the road, John C. Reilly will be a shoo-in for the role of Sideshow Bob. He’s well rehearsed after this performance as Crepsley, a wainscoted, carrot-haired carnival barker with a supercilious mince and a touch of vampirism. It’s sort of sad to see Reilly come to such a pass, the logical next step in a progression away from idiosyncratic projects toward tentpole weekends. Even his dialogue seems to comment on the devolution: “It’s deeply depressing,” he says of life as a bloodsucker. The movie is filled with these awful moments of recognition. Is that Patrick Fugit, the wonderful kid from Almost Famous, painted green as Evra the Snake Boy? Is that The Wire’s Frankie Faison as a fire-eater named Rhamus Twobellies? Poor Patrick! Poor Frankie! How this Paul Weitz eyesore is related to Twilight I don’t know and don’t really care to find out, although Weitz’s brother Chris is directing New Moon, so maybe opportunism is in their blood. Cirque has its own dueling teen vampires, though its origin story owes more to Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man, what with the best friends turned against each other after an arachnid bite and the subsequent bestowal of superpowers. (This at least leads to an immortal line: “I became a vampire to save you, Steve!”) It’s lurid and silly and boring, and around halfway through I was reminded of the circus scenes from The Elephant Man, and became a little obsessed with the idea of sneaking into the movie and freeing the actors. John C. Reilly is not an animal! He is a man! PG-13. AARON MESH. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

The comic created by Portland’s Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber got a big-screen treatment starring Kate Beckinsale as the Antarctic heroine. Sadly, it didn’t get a press screening before WW press deadlines. Here’s a review:

Whiteout

You wouldn’t think there would be much demand for U.S. Marshals in Antarctica, but there they are. Following the same logic, you might think that a movie about one of those Marshals conducting a homicide investigation would have a spark of originality—after all, as one character notes, there’s never been a murder on the entire continent before—but once again, you’d be mistaken.

Adapted from the comic book by the Portland team of Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, Whiteout has been translated into a South Pole police procedural that might as well be titled CSI: Antarctica. The picture divides its time evenly between shots of characters shivering against blue-screen icescapes, and low-angle close-ups of frozen corpses—one of whom, as we are repeatedly reminded, is missing most of his face. I entertained a hope that the victim had been pecked to death by inquisitive Emperor penguins, but no such luck. In fact, the malfeasance in Whiteout could take place pretty much anywhere, except that the filmmakers are convinced that the usual quick-grab-the-dropped-gun scrambles will be more interesting if conducted in a pretend blizzard.

Kate Beckinsale, playing Marshal Carrie Stetko, certainly doesn’t pay a lot of notice to her surroundings: Her ever-petite build suggests she’s been skipping the ramen rations, and her line readings are unvaryingly flat. In a particularly ridiculous slow-chase sequence, she freezes her gloveless hand to a door handle—her plight recalls Ralphie from A Christmas Story—and lets out a little whining noise, as if she’s chipped a nail. She’s joined in her indifference by Tom Skerritt and a parcel of meatheads (the term seems especially apt as regards the faceless guy) who clamp down on every piece of brittle dialogue. Even without reading the comic, it’s easy to spot the lines that must have marked the punctuating panel on a page: “Looks like we’ve traded one desert for another,” says an Iraq war veteran. “Except much colder.” Because it’s Antarctica, you see, and it’s very cold there.

Stretched over 101 minutes, the plot of Whiteout is awfully thin soup. Its complete dullness might be chalked up to director Dominic Sena (Swordfish) trying to make an action-adventure picture out of material that has very little action or adventure—but it’s not like this story didn’t have any potential for eerie loneliness. (One of the summer’s better movies, Moon, surrounds the premise of a guy stationed in a very cold desert.) No, I think the problem is too much mimeographing: Whiteout is a movie adapted from a comic copying the tropes of old detective movies borrowing from crime novels. (This is a problem for a lot of neo-noir comics, even when they aren’t asked to include a somnambulant Kate Beckinsale.) The picture is so far separated from an initial animating force that it might as well be set at the end of the world. R.

Opens today at Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas and Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema. See showtimes here.