Let's say you're a 20-something actor whose career has been launched by a vampire film franchise. No, not you, Chris Massoglia! I'm referring to Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone. If you were one of those people, what would you do with all of your newfound fame and clout? Would you blow it on cheap rom-coms? Would you throw yourself into another surefire franchise only to have it blow up in your face? Would you just buy some blow? Or would you try to forge a real career for yourself, blow all your critics away? For the stars of Twilight, that is an open question that really will be answered after Breaking Dawn wraps in a few months. But a glance at projects said actors have already completed between installments might give us an indication of what they are thinking. Today we look at Ashley Greene, A.K.A. Alice Cullen.
This is a "what might have been" kind of story: Ashley Greene seemed poised for a while to be a fun, slutty horror chick in the classic mold. First came Summer's Blood (later changed to Summer's Moon to capitalize on the release of that other film New Moon), a charmingly schlocky direct-to-DVD release, and then came rumors of her involvement in Scream 4. A fun, if not artistically fulfilling, career trajectory full of screaming and brief nudity seemed apparent. But then everything changed.
Summer's Moon is about Summer, a troubled young woman who has fled her home in search of her missing father. She meets a man named Tom (I find it deeply amusing that the main characters of this movie have the same names as the ones in 500 Days Of Summer) while shoplifting, shares some drugs with him, then goes to his house where she utters the immortal line: "So are you going to take me upstairs and fuck me or what?" From there, shit gets weird: Tom chains Summer up in his basement where he keeps a few other girls and proceeds to do some vaguely incestuous shit with his mom.
The end of the movie is crazy in an admirably understated way, so highlight the rest of this paragraph if you don't care about spoilers: Tom's father, who basically is a professional prostitute murderer, comes home and takes a liking to Summer, who has been promoted from basement prisoner to sex slave and house keeper. It becomes increasingly clear that he is the missing father she has been looking for, which means Summer has been having sex with her brother. She is unfazed by this information. For more or less no reason, the father kills Tom and his mother and takes Summer on the road, presumably to be his parter in murdering prostitutes. Again, she goes along with little resistance. But when they stop in a park to court their first victim, Summer repeatedly stabs her father in the back and sort of awkwardly tries to justify her actions to the bewildered woman she has saved. The end. What's great about it is the twists are very casually revealed, without the ornament of a Saw movie, say. It's sort of like horror-mumblecore. It doesn't really even end, it just stops because most of the characters are dead.
It's a fun movie despite being very badly made, and it signaled a future in higher quality horror for Ashley Greene if no one else involved in the production. Unfortunately the release of Summer's Blood/Moon and New Moon coincided with a nude photo scandal, and Greene changed course. She hitched her wagon to the Disney empire, started dating a Jonas Brother, and will soon star opposite Miley Cyrus in a film originally titled LOL: Laughing Out Loud. I was disappointed by this turn of events; the world needs another fake Disney role model like it needs another term for Hosni Mubarak. Topical!
Luckily, you can take the girl out of the horrorshow but you can't take the horrorshow out of the girl. LOL turned out to be a remake of a French film that is basically about sexting, and Greene courted tabloid controversy when she literally fucked the promise ring right off of Joe Jonas's hand. Her upcoming slate of films, LOL aside, is a mixed bag. There's Skateland, a derivative but pleasant-looking 80's-era bildungsroman, and Butter, and indie comedy (starring Jennifer Garner and Hugh Jackman) that has been described as "like Juno with butter." Then this fall, right in time for Breaking Dawn pt. 1, Greene will star in The Apparition, which has a synopsis as vague as its title: "A couple are haunted by a supernatural presence that is unleashed during a college experiment." But Draco Malfoy is in it, so it can't be bad, right?
It's hard to know if The Apparition is a return to form, since it wrapped many months ago and has been kicking around in limbo ever since. It will be interesting to see which way Ashley Greene takes her talents in the future. I mean, "interesting" is relative here, but soon we'll look at the doomed career of Jackson Rathbone and the surprisingly promising careers of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, and Greene will emerge as the wild card. Bear with me here.
Until next time: I'm not a twi-hard but I play one on my blog.
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