Necrophobia 3D (2014)

AUGUST 16, 2016

GENRE: GIALLO (!), PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

It's rare, but every now and then I see an underwhelming movie at (or, in this case, out of) Fantastic Fest, and my reaction is always the same: I've done something wrong as a viewer. The festival is so fun and its programmers so like-minded (yes, before anyone points it out - I work for one of them), and most of what I see is, even if I don't love it, at least so nutty or unique that I can ADMIRE it, that those odd lackluster entries almost make me feel bad for saying so. Such is the case with Necrophobia 3D, which played at the festival in 2014 - a year I missed due to my son's recent birth, but had I been there I almost certainly would have been at one of its showings, as on paper it sounds exactly like my kind of thing. Plus I still get a kick out of legitimate 3D when used properly, and lacking a home set I usually make extra efforts to see them in their native gimmicky glory.

But this would have been one of those screenings where I start looking at my food instead of the screen, because it landed in that decidedly un-sweet spot of being both hard to follow and also not particularly compelling - the movie didn't do enough to make piecing together its narrative worth the effort. It's got a good hook: a giallo-esque thriller about a man whose twin brother dies and then everyone in his life starts following him to the grave, but there are no viable red herrings to keep the "mystery" afloat, so you're just waiting for the obvious reveal. When it comes, rather early (then again the movie is only 75 minutes with credits so even scenes in the 3rd act are "rather early"), I started wondering if it was a misdirect, and one of the other characters would turn out to be the REAL culprit, but that didn't happen. Instead...

(OK, spoilers are coming!)

...the movie keeps doubling down on its central "twist", which is a Raising Cain kinda deal with multiple incarnations of the same character. Whether they're figments of his imagination or actual physical beings that have come to life somehow, I'm not sure - I even rewatched the last 25 minutes or so and still couldn't come down hard on either answer. Then writer/director Daniel de la Vega throws a fun but even less coherent time travel element into the proceedings, showing that the mysterious phone call our protagonist got near the beginning of the film was sent by one of his doubles here at the end of the (otherwise linear) movie. It's the sort of twist that'd be great if it was the only one in a film (and, you know, had some logical way of occurring), but it's one too many for the film, which - again - already suffered from simply not being particularly engaging. Our killer wipes out all of the supporting cast almost as soon as they become important, and even a 75 minute movie should have time for more than 5-6 important characters - ESPECIALLY for an alleged mystery.

Plus there's no real story. The brother dies, our main man Dante freaks out, then the wife is killed, he freaks out, then a priest is killed... you get the gist. Not that any of the classic giallo movies had current-day narratives that were really terrific, but you'd get the nutty backstory and colorful cast of characters to make up for it, not to mention the usually stylish murder sequences. Here, most of them are fairly quick - the priest is offed almost the second Dante leaves the room, instead of de la Vega giving us a nice buildup with the guy wandering around his church and being pursued by the gloved killer. In fact, I often wondered why they bothered with the 3D - apart from a couple of the scenes where Dante was having a mental collapse, and maybe (if done well) the wide shots of his tailor workshop (mannequins pop up with frequency), there wasn't anything in the film that seemed like it would benefit from the technology, so I am curious what inspired them to do it that way in the first place. If it was five years ago, sure - every other movie was in 3D, it seems. But this was shot in 2013, when 3D was already past its peak popularity, so who knows. Maybe they got a tax break or something? Whatever the reason, not counting post-converts it's the most pointless 3D entry I can recall since the woeful Julia X.

The titular phobia is equally pointless in the narrative - it's the fear of being near a dead body, but this isn't something particularly worth revolving a movie around. For starters, it's not like this is some weird tic - who the hell DOES want to be around dead bodies (well, I'm sure there's a term for it, but it'd be more interesting to watch), and phobia or not, all of the people who die in the movie are very close to him, making his inability to be around them kind of understandable. When a protagonist suffers from a phobia, part of the filmmaker's job is to get the audience - who presumably doesn't feel that way for the most part - to walk in his shoes a little bit. Agoraphobia movies usually do a fine job with this; you and I don't feel any particular fear of going outside, so they will employ heightened sound effects, off-kilter angles, etc. to make the act of walking out the front door seem like a herculean feat. Here, actor Luis Machin just sort of yelps and staggers around, which I'm guessing lots of people would do if they found their brother or wife dead. And by the halfway point he's around corpses in every other scene anyway so it's not even a "thing" anymore.

On the plus side, Machin does a fine job with the various incarnations of his character; the main one, Dante, is kind of a Toby Jones-y nebbish, but the others are like Richard Lynch level menacing - it's a shame we don't get to see much of his brother Tomas, since we'd get a fleshed out third version. Also, I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but the killer's dark appearance and black hat give him a Halloween Man in Black vibe that amused me (especially considering that mystery was equally easy to solve and woefully underwhelming). If the movie threw Druids into the mix I might have actually liked it more, now that I think of it - it's nutty, but not nutty ENOUGH to elevate to "WTF" kind of cinema. It's just got some twists for the sake of having twists, I suspect, and when you consider the 3D, it's not hard to think the movie was an exercise of some sort to try out the cameras for a more elaborate project. You can almost hear a producer asking for some horror script that could be banged out quickly so they could work out the kinks on a movie that would find an audience anyway.

Oh well. I'm all for filmmakers trying to revive the giallo genre, but Necrophobia lacks a lot of the things that make those movies so enjoyable, and doesn't really do anything unique on its own to make up for it. It's watchable enough, and again quite short, so you can't accuse it of wasting too much of your time, but apart from admiring Machin acting opposite himself in a few scenes and the Lost Highway-tinged phone call stuff, there isn't enough here to really make it worth seeking out. I later asked some attendees of that year's Fantastic Fest and few even remembered the title let alone the movie, so it clearly didn't make much of an impression, and I probably would have been downright angry if I picked it over (scans that year's lineup) Spring, Cub, or Let Us Prey to name a few. Of course, that's the nature of fests, and even part of the fun to take such gambles, but it really stings when those gambles don't pay off. The food would have been good though.

What say you?

p.s. I'm not sure when it's coming out to see for yourself, I saw it via screener for my freelance job but that means nothing with regards to a looming release. I couldn't find it on Blu even in other regions, so maybe it's just in limbo? I normally don't bother reviewing movies like this since it defeats the purpose of the site, but it was the only thing I've watched in two weeks thanks to my move (which I'm STILL technically in the middle of doing) and I wanted to post something so you guys knew I wasn't dead.

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The Purge: Election Year (2016)

JUNE 30, 2016

GENRE: SURVIVAL, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

It's amusing that our most interesting (not BEST, before you get angry) ongoing genre franchise is from Platinum "Michael Bay" Dunes and the producers of all those generic supernatural movies you're getting tired of, but what's even more notable is that so far, each Purge film has improved on the one before it, a rarity for ANY franchise but particularly unusual within the horror genre. It's not as big as the leap from the first one to Anarchy, but by not-too-subtly zeroing in on our current Presidential election, The Purge: Election Year gets a few digs in at our current landscape, and never loses sight of this issue. What could have just been window-dressing for another Judgment Night-esque all night chase through the city (as the "Purge" concept itself was to the first film's otherwise routine home invasion flick) remains its primary focus all the way until the end, giving it a leg up on its superficially similar predecessor.

Even if the setting (urban streets, though DC this time instead of LA) was vastly different, it'd be hard to forget about the previous movie since it also retains that one's hero, Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo). Having survived his attack thanks to the guy he was out to kill, he's changed his tune about Purge so much that he's become the head of security for controversial - but very popular - Presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), who is running on a promise to end Purge if elected. As shown in the trailer, her family was murdered on Purge night when she was a teenager, so there's little chance of her backing down - something that scares the "New Founding Fathers" (read: typical Conservative old white guys, though they throw in a Latino and a lady or two to mix it up) enough to plot to have her killed on Purge night this year. They're very protective of their racist holiday, you see.

It would have been easy for writer/director James DeMonaco (continuing his role from the first two films, another rarity for horror) to use that as the setup and then leave the politics in the background while running through the usual action/horror moments as Mitchell and Grillo try to survive the night (much like Grillo's vengeful quest was often forgotten in the last one as he protected others), but it's never long before there's another discussion of the repercussions this night has on people, and why it should stop. Charlie is a "man of the people" type who never fails to stop to talk to someone about their own life, how they've been affected by Purge, etc., and the action culminates at the NFF's "Purge Mass", where the assholes all meet in a church (led by a priest who seems like he teleported from an Argento or Fulci movie) and ready their sacrifice of Charlie. In an ironic twist, she's actually trying to save their lives from a giant massacre that Dante Bishop is planning to help ensure she wins the candidacy (she wants to stop them so her victory is a clean one, without making the NFF folk into martyrs), a big improvement over my own cynical idea of how the movie would progress (which would have her ultimately forced to engage in Purging to save herself).

The politics even extend to the random acts of violence and "Purge vignettes" (the random little scenes we see that are unrelated to anything else but flavor up the reality of the situation) - rather than the usual scary masks the Purgers wear, this time a lot of them are adorned in costumes that are just scary versions of Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, etc. The news shows a group of tourists who have come to America to join in the Purge for the first time (they show up again later, won't spoil how), and our pursuers are equipped with drones that help track the good guys' every move. To his credit, DeMonaco gets a little more subtle for other things (the bad guys all use assault rifles whereas the heroes never brandish anything heavier than a shotgun, for example), but whereas you could watch the first two for what they were at face value, there's no mistaking the political commentary going on here.

And because of that, I almost wish the movie was angrier about it. Modern horror films rarely have anything to say the way many did in the 60s and 70s, so if Purge movies are the sole source (at least on a mainstream scale) for social minded genre fare, it would have been great if they had just said "fuck it" and actually named names instead of letting the audience draw their own comparisons. The "Minister" (the other main Presidential candidate) won't remind anyone of Trump, really - in fact we don't know too much about him at all beyond the fact that the NFF is really calling the shots and letting him be their mouthpiece (which isn't like Trump, either - key members of the GOP seem to hate him as much as the Democrats). His aforementioned dig at the gun control debate will probably go over the heads of many, and without getting into spoilers, the movie has a more optimistic tone than I was expecting - I kind of wanted the filmmaker to really let it all out, the way Serbian Film's filmmakers did about their own government via their warped movie. Not that optimism is a bad thing (it's actually kind of nice!) but again - with this bound to be the only horror film of the year with something to say, I wouldn't have minded if some of its viewers left the theater a little more riled up about what was going on instead of an affirmation that everything would be OK.

DeMonaco doesn't skimp on the crowd-pleasing moments, however. Along with the optimism is a decidedly less grim story this time around; there are a number of good guys in the film and many of them are left alive at the end, and no one really gets tortured or anything this time around, either (Mitchell gets tied up and a minor wound but is otherwise left unharmed). But when it comes to the villains, he goes all out - one Purger is hit by a car AND shot with a shotgun at close range, and he even lets a bunch of Crips (!) play hero at one point, having them lay waste to some of the NFF's hit squad (who have swastikas on their uniforms to lay it on even thicker). Williamson also has a number of great lines (he's kind of a variant on Sam Jackson's character from Die Hard 3), and with all due respect to Black Widow and Wonder Woman, the year's number one female superhero is Betty Gabriel as Laney, a reformed troublemaker who now spends Purge night driving around in an armored ambulance, assisting the wounded and also firing back on Purgers if necessary.

And that's the other thing I liked about this one - it opens up the reality of Purge night a bit more. In addition to her triage van (one of many in a network overseen by Bishop), we also see a truck driving around collecting the corpses, presumably to make everyone's commute the next morning slightly less unpleasant. The foreigners give us a small taste of how the event is seen in other countries, and part of Joe's subplot involves a massive rate increase on his Purge insurance - something I'm not sure if they have ever addressed in the past (I guess there ARE people who, like I would, just rob stores on the free crime day instead of murdering people. I just want some free games and maybe a new receiver, dammit). But that stuff is brief; murder is still the only crime anyone seems to commit when they can do anything they want, though there are some variations we haven't seen, like a lady who kills her husband and instantly regrets it. There are still a million unanswered questions about how it works, but I like that with each film we get to learn a little more about the nitty gritty of it all, which I found (perhaps too) fascinating and would almost rather watch than see another scene of Frank Grillo ducking his way through a street before killing some random Purger.

One of those unanswered questions is even more frustrating here than it was in the other two, however: the rule that says high ranking government officials are not viable Purge targets. This year, in order to curry favor with the populace (whose interest in the Purge is waning, albeit slightly), they've decided that they are fair game as well - but that means nothing since they all hide out in heavily armed fortresses anyway. It's not like our Senators and cabinet members are out wandering around on Purge night with "Sorry, You Can't Shoot Me" signs, so I never understood why DeMonaco included this exception in the first place. Besides, even if Purgers DID somehow get access to Senator So-and-so - are they simply not going to shoot because it's against the rules? How would the law even know to come after you once Purge was over, anyway? (I also never got the "no demolition weapons" thing, because again - if someone decides to blow up a building when the police/fire aren't out on the streets anyway, how would they be caught? Is it an honor system, the Purge?)

Luckily, the film is set to nearly triple its budget with its opening weekend, so we can expect another Purge film down the road that will hopefully continue the trend of improving while also filling in the blanks a bit on how it all actually works. I'm sure DeMonaco has it all laid out in a notebook somewhere - it might be interesting to see him make photocopies of it and supply them to other filmmakers who might want to use the concept for their own idea. As I said in the other reviews, there is so much potential here, and he's only one guy - even if he made one every year, we might never get a full picture of how Purge works unless he's got some help. If Marvel can do 2-3 movies a year that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm sure Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes can pony up 10-15m more than once a year to fully develop this universe (or they could do a TV show or comic, I suppose). And at that low cost, they can also afford to be a little more biting, too - before someone else beats them to the punch.

What say you?

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The Shallows (2016)

JUNE 24, 2016

GENRE: PREDATOR, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Considering how much I love Orphan (and really like House of Wax), I was starting to get nervous that Jaume Collet-Serra might have left the horror forever in favor of Liam Neeson(s); a would-be master of horror who didn't seem interested in cementing his status or even adding to the defense for it. Orphan was seven years ago, and since then he's made three action films (and a fourth is on the way) with bigger budgets and (usually) higher box office returns - why would he come back? Well, maybe he just needed a killer idea, which he got with The Shallows, in which a woman is stuck on a rock with a hungry shark endlessly circling her, waiting to make its move. That's pretty much it - it's a home invasion movie where the home is a small (and not stable) bit of the ocean, and instead of a guy in a mask we get a hungry Great White.

Luckily, Collet-Serra knows precisely how to pace the movie, never letting it get boring but also not jumping the gun and straining credibility too early either. The movie is barely over 80 minutes with credits, and he makes them all count, giving us just enough character development time before heroine Blake Lively grabs her surfboard and heads into the water. A quick lunch break offers a little more backstory (and allows for a Facetime cameo from Brett Cullen, playing her dad - a Lost vet safely at home is a cute casting choice, if it was intentional), but then she goes back in and gets in trouble right around the 20 minute mark, giving us nearly an hour of woman vs. shark action. She utilizes three "locations" to stay safe, each with their own major setbacks - the first is a dead whale that the shark doesn't plan on leaving intact for long, the next is a rock that will be submerged once the tide comes in, and the third is a buoy that the shark can easily tip over if he gives it a big enough headbutt.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything to lay all of that out - the trailer does that anyway. At first I was annoyed that the trailer shows her making it to the buoy after setting it up as a sort of main goal (akin to showing Tom Hanks leaving the island on the Cast Away promos), but it's clear that Collet-Serra (I'm going with just Serra from now on, that OK?) knows staying too long in any one spot will kill the movie's pace and also have us start picking apart the logic, so he keeps her moving and thus even if you haven't seen the trailer you'd know she got to here or there. She's the only main human character - we know that if she's going to die at all that it won't be until the runtime has nearly expired, so the trick is to keep giving her new injuries and obstacles to deal with (and that said injuries will keep her from Open Water-like water treading, as she'd be dead instantly with the blood loss). Like, sure, she gets to the rock before being eaten, but NOT before she scrapes her foot up on the coral - the fun doesn't come with seeing whether or not she'll survive, but how she'll managed to get out of her latest predicament. I should note that the trailer does wreck some of the fun by showing a moment that probably should have happened earlier in the movie than it does, because it involves a character who leaves fairly early on and thus we know he'll come back later - it would have worked a bit better for her to be isolated for good earlier on, I think.

But as a whole it still works better than it has any right to, though we can't chalk the success up just to Serra and/or Lively (who I never liked much, but acquits herself nicely here) - they are assisted greatly by Steven Seagull, Lively's closest thing to a major co-star. He's one of the many gulls flying around and pecking at the whale carcass, and gets a broken wing during one hectic scene, grounding him on the rock with her for the bulk of her time there. I can't recall ever seeing a seagull "act" before, but if I have that one wasn't nearly as good as Steven (yes, that's how he's credited), who gets closeups and everything. With Lively's survival not in question anytime soon, he provides the bulk of the movie with its "Will they make it out?" suspense, and damned if I didn't tense up every time it seemed he might be served up as bait or just to give the movie a horror jolt whenever it had been a while since the last one. I wouldn't dare reveal his fate here, but suffice to say his time onscreen, and "chemistry" with Lively, more than made up for the movie's paper-thin narrative and eventually ridiculous spectacle.

On that note, I should stress that for the most part this is more like Jaws than any of its sequels, but near the end - particularly when she's in the buoy, which functions not unlike Hooper's shark cage - I started wondering if the thing had a personal vendetta against her, a la Jaws 4. I know we need a big finale, but when it starts chewing through metal to get at her after it had eaten three people in less than 24 hours (plus whatever it got out of that poor whale), it starts coming off more like Jason Voorhees than a regular ol' shark. For his part, Serra dives headfirst into the silliness, with a money shot I am so happy the trailer didn't spoil (as I was with an earlier one that gave the movie its best jolt), but if you were enjoying the more grounded aspect of the film, you might want to duck out as soon as she leaves the rock and make up your own ending.

(Speaking of ducking out, a guy went to the bathroom and missed the climax, even though it was obviously time for one or both of them to meet their maker - you couldn't hold it for another minute, guy?)

As he did in Non-Stop, Serra spices up his single location imagery with graphic overlays, like a 32 second countdown that times out how long she can jump into the water to retrieve something before the shark can swim back to her, Facetime calls, and pictures of her mother, whose memory she is honoring by traveling to this remote beach (as she went to it when she was pregnant with her). But unlike that film, which was in a sterile, boring environment, he really didn't need the assist - the film is GORGEOUS, and no not because it stars a beautiful woman. He gives us these great (way) overhead shots of the crystal clear water and its various rock/plant formations under the surface, big widescreen vistas showing how far she is from this or that safe spot, etc. - I can't recall the last horror/thriller that looked this lovely. Even the horror stuff has its own sort of beauty, like when she is first attacked and the water turns crimson red around her - Argento will be proud, if he sees it. Such shots more than make up for the film's sometimes lacking CGI - there's a pretty terrible shot of a victim who has been cut in half where the bloodstain on the bottom of his torso seems to be floating around the screen, and the facial replacement for Lively on her surfing shots will have you yearning for the relative perfection of the CGI Myers in H20. With such a minimal cast and lack of location changes, roughly half of the film's credits are for VFX folk, so I'm not sure who is to blame for the bad shots, though at least the ones of the shark all look good to great. Still, its such a technical and aesthetic marvel 98% of the time, it makes those blunders really stand out as laughable.

Ultimately, the singular nature of the film means it won't be one I revisit often, if ever, but that's fine - it's just great to have another Jaume Collet-Serra horror movie again. I think it's a must-see on the big screen to appreciate the scenery and the major shark scenes, however, and certainly a better use of your summer moviegoing dollars than Independence Day 2, which feels like everyone involved is just doing it out of obligation (even Goldblum seems bored more often than not, and Emmerich couldn't even be bothered to destroy anything you didn't already see get blown up/knocked over in the trailer). Those who wanted more alien action in the first one will be satisfied, I think (we see them a LOT this time around) but otherwise if you want big silly fun at the movies this weekend, this is the movie that will provide it - along with some genuinely good editing and craft. And it's been a long time since there was a "serious" (by comparison) shark movie after all the Syfy/Asylum stuff, so it's worth seeing just for the sheer fact that it's daring enough to lend itself to more Jaws comparisons than Sharknado ones. And it pays off - I think Spielberg would have fun watching it without feeling like he should sue someone.

What say you?

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Don't Hang Up (2016)

JUNE 8, 2016

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (FESTIVAL SCREENING)

Last week I saw I Know What You Did for the first time, so it's kind of funny that today I found myself sitting in a theater watching a pseudo-remake. Don't Hang Up, like William Castle's lesser film, concerns a pair of crank callers who pick the wrong random number to dial, and face the consequences of their actions. Unlike that earlier movie, there's a body count on both sides of the equation here, and the movie doesn't stop cold to address the killer's romantic complications, so overall it's a much better film - though it's not quite a home run, either (more like a solid double if you want to stick with baseball metaphors). Maybe crank calls just aren't the key to genre masterpieces?

Of course, the main problem is that unless you're a 12 year old, you're probably not going to be too endeared to anyone who spends their free time bothering and in some cases downright terrorizing people, as our two "heroes" don't exactly ask about running refrigerators or Prince Albert's whereabouts. We learn how far they go right off the bat when they call a woman in the middle of the night, pretending to be the police and telling her that there's an intruder in the house who may be about to enter her daughter's room. Later they tell someone that his daughter died in a car crash - I mean, JESUS, that's a pretty horrible thing to do, so you're kind of on the killer's side when he starts tormenting them. The big difference between this and Castle's film (besides the gender change - our crankers are male here) is that the murderer isn't even identified until the very end, let alone become his own (unmasked) character, so we get to play a guessing game, wondering if they just called the wrong guy (i.e. a murderer) that night or if it's someone they wronged in the past.

I don't think it's spoiling much to say it's the latter, as it doesn't take long for the killer to reveal that he's got one guy's parents tied up in their home and has potentially kidnapped the other guy's girlfriend - he couldn't have set all of that up in the hour or so that occurs between them making their calls and the killer calling them back. He also forces them to make tough choices (i.e. "Kill your friend and I'll let your parents go" sort of stuff), and since it's a modern horror movie, he also has to play mind games with them and reveal that one has slept with the others' girlfriend. If you've read my Collins' Crypt this week you already know about that, as it inspired a rant that's been brewing for quite a while now (so long that I momentarily had to wonder if I had already written the same thing with a different movie as the inciting example), and it certainly didn't help endear the characters to me further - now I also have little reason to like the girlfriend, who was at least not involved with the prank calls.

The weirdest thing about the movie is that it only focuses on two of the guys, despite the fact that the opening sequence establishes four of them. One of them shows up briefly and is removed from the suspect list at around the halfway mark (he works as a pizza delivery guy and is on call - they even buy the pizza they prank deliver to a neighbor), but the other, known to us as "Prankmonkey", is completely wiped out of the movie after the first five minutes. I'm not sure if they wanted us to wonder if the 4th guy was actually the one tormenting them for some sort of ultimate prank (or if he just followed the natural progression of someone who would tell a woman her daughter was about to die into full blown psychosis), but it's a pretty unsuccessful red herring if that was the case, and the fate of "PrankMonkey" remains maddeningly vague until the very end - are they saving his comeuppance for a sequel? I mean he was kind of the main guy for their little group (they post very popular videos on Youtube), so leaving him out of the revenge scheme would be like if the killer in Terror Train took his revenge on the group when Doc was out of town or something.

Plus, having a third guy in the house where 95% of the movie takes place would mix it up a bit, so loyalties could be further tested, alliances could be made, etc. It gets a bit repetitive watching the two guys have the same arguments over and over ("Let's make a run for it!" "We can't!" - we hear like five variations on this discussion), not to mention, again, the small issue that they're assholes who deserve what's coming to them. Indeed, ultimately we learn what exactly they did to earn the killer's scorn, and I was sitting there thinking "Wait, if that's what happened, what took you so long to strike back at these assholes?" It's a weird thing to be thinking about in a horror/thriller movie like this - it's not even a "gray area" kind of thing, I was fully on the killer's side once all of the information was laid out.

Where the script let me down, the filmmaking made up for it, however - for a movie that's set almost entirely in a upper-middle class living room, it's got a lot of visual flair. The directors (another directing pair! So many these days - remember when it was almost unheard of?) mentioned Panic Room as an influence and it shows - there's a great swooping tracking shot that carries us from high above the ground, down to the house, through the keyhole, in between knick-knacks... it's a technical marvel and not at all what I expected to see in a movie about people talking on the phone. They also pull one of those Strangers-y moments where the killer is just standing in the house behind one of the (unaware) protagonists, which will never not spook me out. Incidentally, after coming home I got distracted by something when I pulled into my garage and forgot to close the door, noticing it a half hour later - I was definitely on the lookout for random masked people standing silently in my house for the next few minutes.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the movie more or less, but more for its technical showcasing and almost admirable decision to make the killer more sympathetic than the "heroes". Had the killer been just some random guy with no clear motive, it'd be a disaster - the reveal kept it afloat, though it doesn't change the fact that we spend 75 minutes focusing on two assholes and precious little else. Kind of asking a lot of an audience, in my opinion. I bet it'll be a bit easier to digest at home though, when you have the added tension of wondering if anyone is silently stalking you as you watch a horror movie (a feeling you can't quite get in a crowded theater). Hell, playing with your phone during less thrilling moments might even add to it!

What say you?

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Fender Bender (2016)

JUNE 2, 2016

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (SCREENER)

Thanks to the existence, and, far as I'm concerned, UTTER PERFECTION of Halloween, you can't ever really fault a filmmaker for mimicking any part of it for his own slasher film. Sure, it probably won't be as good, but a slasher fan will have to find something else to complain about unless he wants to sound stupid. Case in point, Fender Bender has a low body count compared to many other slashers, but it's also identical to Halloween's (even the sexes are the same - three girls, two guys) and not a lot of motivation for our murderer, but to consider these things a detriment is to say Halloween is also wrong in those departments. You can't have it both ways; either a slasher flick is allowed such behavior, or it's not.

And actually, we do get a "motive" of sorts, one that actually made me smile as it almost seemed like writer/director Mark Pavia was making fun of the very idea of explaining everything. I wouldn't dare spoil it for you, but if you can honestly tell me that it's worse/stupider than what we ultimately learned about Michael Myers, or even any number of one-off killers with shockingly silly motivations (Urban Legend 2 and Shredder come to mind), then I'll quit reviewing slasher movies. However, I ask you to think about it for a few minutes - yes, what we see is goofy (in a charming way), but even real life murderers have odd "traditions" - phases of the moon, shared birthdays, etc. (not to mention the so-called "Alphabet Killer"), and his thing fits in just fine with those. I'll take simple over complicated any day of the week.

The reveal also erased one of the problems I had with the movie, which is that he didn't use his car enough. Again I don't want to get into the killer's particular MO, but it works out, if perhaps a bit too late. I mean, the killer is called The Driver and the movie is titled Fender Bender - I was hoping for a little Highwaymen/Death Proof-esque vehicular manslaughter. He only uses a car for one kill (and it's a good one), which until we know why he prefers to be on foot seems like a waste of a killer/concept. Luckily, Pavia makes up for it with a pretty sweet costume, accentuated by a black leather mask that gives him a Prowler/Harry Warden-esque appearance - it definitely passes my "Would I want an action figure/model kit of him?" test, always a big plus for me with a modern slasher. Especially for one where we know who the killer is - we see him unmasked early on when the eponymous incident occurs (and it's a recognizable actor too - Bill Sage from We Are What We Are and the "other" The Boy), so there's no reason to mask him for the audience's benefit - it's just cool, dammit.

And I think that's why I dug the movie - Pavia clearly has respect for the slasher genre, even though he is actively aware that doing the usual thing just doesn't cut it anymore. I've ranted over and over that we need more slashers, but the simple fact remains that you can't really DO those kind of movies anymore - the locations (and holidays) have all been used over and over, and the simplicity of the older ones can't be replicated anymore, as we just expect too much from our modern films. Add in cell phones and GPS and all of the other things that didn't exist when the best slasher movies were made, and you realize that filmmakers have to adapt - with a sub-genre that has a pretty rigid formula. Pavia has found a way to straddle that line, making a "throwback" (most of which suck) in some ways but not shying away from modern touches - our characters have and use cell phones, and our heroine learns about the killer's previous misdeeds within hours of reporting their accident to her insurance company. I think about movies like My Bloody Valentine, where an important plot point hinges on the lack of information being available at one's fingertips (namely, Harry Warden's current living situation) - that wouldn't fly today, so you can't do that kind of storyline anymore unless you compress it to a couple hours, max. In his own little way, Pavia found a way to live up to old-school slasher standards without a bunch of contrivances (we can generalize it with the "no signal" approach), and in a way even using technology as a tool to tell his story without it being intrusive.

I do wish the accident was as drastic as its outcome for our heroine though. The Driver rear-ends her, and basically just scrapes up the paint on her rear bumper, but she acts as if the car was totaled. And she's also grounded; while to be fair the grounding is technically for taking the car without asking, it all still feels like her whole world was thrown into upheaval for the sort of accident that you'd forget ever happened (and, again, wasn't even her fault). The parents' punishment is also a bit odd, as they decide not to take her to a show they're planning to go to as a family, and go away for the weekend without her. A 17 year old girl being "punished" by not having to hang out with her parents and getting the house to herself for a night or two doesn't exactly track - perhaps they should have reworked it a bit to have it so she pretended to be sick or had too much homework to do or something so that they'd leave her behind and she could get the car fixed before they noticed (it's her mom's car that's damaged and the parents take the dad's, I should explain). It'd feel a bit more realistic, I think, instead of leaving me kind of puzzled about everyone's reaction to a pretty simple, not particularly damaging bump on the road.

WARNING: this next paragraph is MAJOR SPOILER TERRITORY so please do not read it if you don't want part of the film's ending given away!!!

But ultimately, same as with the "motive", the film's conclusion made it easy for me to overlook its occasional lapses, because it didn't commit one of my pet peeve "sins" for this kind of movie - our heroine does not survive against this veteran serial killer. I don't need every movie like this to end on a grim note, but I've always been annoyed when they establish that our killer (or family of killers!) has been doing this for years without incident, but our protagonist manages to off them or at least escape by doing pretty standard things like "run away" or "fight back". You're Next is one of the few I can think of that actually gave an explanation for why THIS hero/heroine succeeded, because we learn Sharni Vinson's character has had extensive survival training - I loved that! But our girl here hasn't been so fortunate, and when she discovered that The Driver had like dozens of licenses of his previous victims (most of them older than her) I had to roll my eyes, assuming she'd somehow overcome this guy when none of the others had ever been able to. So when I was proven wrong, I was pleasantly surprised - sure, it's a bummer, but it's not really nihilistic or anything - Pavia doesn't want to send you on your way laughing, but he doesn't seem to want to depress you either. It's just how it is.

Long story short, it gets more right than wrong, and is another winner for the Scream Factory/Chiller partnership that also yielded Bite. I wish it had one surprise in its narrative earlier, because until the last five minutes or so it's kind of basic (not BAD, just pretty meat-and-potatoes), and it would have been nice to have been won over sooner, but as I've said in the past - better an OK movie has a great finale than a great movie sputtering out of gas and ending on a shrug. And it's a modern slasher where the heroine's boyfriend isn't fucking her best friend (he IS cheating on her, but with some random we don't see/care about, and she takes her revenge on him to boot) and the group of pals seem to genuinely like each other, so even if it DID have a shitty ending I'd probably recommend the movie on the strength of that alone. Enough with the toxic friendships in these things! Let us LIKE the people, even if most of them are gonna end up dead!

What say you?

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The Darkness (2016)

MAY 20, 2016

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

It's rare that I don't see a new wide release horror movie on its opening weekend (outside of the busy October period, anyway), but I'm glad I waited to catch The Darkness until today for presumably once-in-a-movie's-lifetime experience I had waiting for the damn thing to start. For starters, I went to a theater I don't usually go to (because it's a dump) due to the fact that their first showing was 25 minutes earlier than my usual theater (both about the same distance from my house), so that was 25 minutes earlier I could get to work. Alas, as the sole ticket buyer who arrived right at the scheduled showtime, the "projectionist" (button pusher) apparently wasn't planning on running the movie, so after a few minutes of sitting in, yes, the darkness (the timed lights still went down) I went out and told them to start it. After a few more minutes, the dimmed lights went out entirely, and the trailer reel began... but I could only hear them - there was still no image on the screen.

Of course, if I was seeing Civil War, it'd just be "a thing that happened", and also I probably wouldn't have been alone in the theater. But for a movie called THE DARKNESS, sitting for 10-15 minutes in total darkness (the exit signs don't illuminate here) with no one to joke about the situation with (besides my Twitter followers, of course) was kind of a delightfully strange occurrence - someone could have conceivably walked into the theater quietly and I wouldn't have even been able to see them. And, needless to say, by the time they finally got their shit together (apparently the system had to be reset or something) and got the movie going, it was just about the same time the screening at my preferred theater started, meaning my time-saving measure had been a total bust.

Oddly, this was the 2nd time in a row for me that a projectionist had to be told to do his/her job, as myself and some friends were the only ticket buyers for another movie over the weekend, and as with this showing it seems word that a ticket(s) had been purchased never reached him/her. While we waited for that movie to start I told my friends about the only time that had ever happened to me before, which is when I was the only person (meaning: no friends to share the experience) at an afternoon weekday screening of Urban Legends: Final Cut and had to go out and find someone to show me and me alone the movie. I don't know what the odds are that this could happen to a person twice in a week, so I certainly wasn't expecting it to happen again today... but I'm pretty sure the odds are better than they are for the other insane coincidence - which is that when The Darkness finally started, I was greeted with the sight of Jennifer Morrison. Yes, the STAR OF URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT! I would seriously believe that I'd have a better chance at winning the lottery than I would at somehow being the only person in the theater for two Jennifer Morrison movies and having to go back into the lobby to ask someone to let me see her in action.

I also couldn't have predicted that they'd hire a recognizable actor (and another - Matt Walsh - as her husband) to appear in a single scene, with no actual closeups or even much dialogue, never to be seen again. But I also highly doubt that is the case, because I spent a good chunk of the film's 90 or so minutes being reminded that it had clearly been re-edited and/or re-shot, and thus Morrison and Walsh probably had at least one or two other scenes that were removed in the process. Almost until the very end the movie feels truncated; characters are introduced and quickly forgotten (Radha Mitchell's mother being the worst example), conversations suddenly blow up into arguments (or arguments quickly reach their cutoff point), as if a chunk was removed in order to move things along, etc. It is suggested that Kevin Bacon's character is having an affair with Morrison in this one scene (they're at the Grand Canyon and Mitchell, on an elevated hike, spies them returning from some unknown spot, with Walsh asking "Where did you two sneak off to?" or something along those lines), but since we never see her again it's not something you'll still be thinking about by the time - an hour or so into the movie - that it actually comes up. And there's a subplot about their daughter's bulimia that is resolved so quickly that viewers with actual eating disorders might take offense. She also asks Bacon if she can take her driver's license exam and he says "A promise is a promise," but I am still unsure if he's saying "Yes, I promised you could and that hasn't changed", or "No, you promised you wouldn't do this shit anymore and now there has to be consequences" - not that it matters because it too is never mentioned again anyway. I mean, I don't need to be hand-held, and it's not like the movie is confusing as a result, but it's hard to get a firm grasp on the characters when so much of their meat has been taken off the bone, so to speak.

Luckily, they DON'T seem to disrupt the character arc for Mikey, their younger son who has autism. His behaviors are the usual sort of things we see in movies (forgive me if I'm somewhat ignorant on autism; most of what I "know" comes from movies so if any of this rings false blame them, not me): he counts things, gets fixated on certain objects (he forces Mitchell to buy a pair of balloons that get more screentime than Jennifer Morrison, that's for sure), carries a backpack everywhere, etc. His "off" behavior allows for the obligatory ignorance on the parents' part when he unknowingly invites some demonic presence into their home by taking some stones from a burial site he finds at the Grand Canyon. Weird handprints start appearing everywhere, faucets are left on, he gets an imaginary friend named Jenny... all of these things are the demons' fault, but they chalk it up to new mannerisms related to his disorder. It's not until Mitchell's mom gets attacked by a snake that appeared out of nowhere that they start considering other options. Unfortunately, that's an "end of act two" decision (and mostly on Mitchell's part - Bacon needs further convincing), so you have to wait a damn long time for these people to finally get proactive about their increasingly dangerous situation.

And how do they get proactive? If you guessed "calling in an expert to cleanse the house", you are a genius (but not really, because that's what always happens). True to the movie's form, it's very clunky; basically at about 40 minutes or so into the movie Bacon's boss (Paul Reiser!) and his wife (Ming-Na Wen) tell them about a healer woman who helped their son (whose affliction is unexplained, and we never see the kid of course, so if he had like cancer or was similarly being haunted, we do not know). For some reason it takes like five extra steps for them to tell them the person's name - Reiser has to remind Bacon about her in person, then Bacon emails Reiser asking for the person's name, and a day later Reiser replies (via text) something like "Have your wife call my wife to get the number". Huh? In this day and age, why is it taking this long to obtain contact information? And if Wen had the number, why can't she just give it to Mitchell on her own? Why are so many people involved in this simple bit of information relay? And then the lady shows up (actually ladies; she speaks Spanish so her granddaughter translates) and goes through the usual Tangina/Merrin motions, again making me wonder what she did for Reiser and Wen's son since she never even seems to talk to Mikey.

It's also far too little too late, as she shows up with only about 15 minutes to go, thanks to the movie wasting so much time on things that don't ultimately matter. I mean, the film is clearly inspired by the original Poltergeist, right down to the chubby neighbor that our hero doesn't get along with (it's also set in a California suburb), so it'd be like if Carol Anne didn't disappear until an hour or so into the movie and we just spent that entire time watching chairs get stacked or whatever other little things happened in that film before she got snatched. Since I had the place to myself I considered texting friends who had seen it if it even HAD a second act, since nothing was really progressing in a meaningful way, though to be fair the minor scares along the way are at least novel ones. Grandma being menaced by the snake is a pretty good one, as is the genuinely unsettling bit where the neighbor's dog somehow makes his way into their house and attacks the daughter in her sleep. And later, a wolf is seen just stalking around their house, which isn't the sort of thing you usually see in these kinds of movies. It's the rare horror film that keeps you in suspense not from its story or setting, but just from wondering what other random stuff the director will offer in place of more traditional fright-makers.

That director is Greg McLean, with his first theatrical release since Wolf Creek (its sequel and his followup, Rogue, which starred Ms. Mitchell as well, went DTV here in the US). It's obviously much tamer than his other movies, with a PG-13 rating and (spoiler?) a body count of zero, so while I appreciate him branching out his hardcore fans might be disappointed that it's another run of the mill Blumhouse joint, as the studio once again tries to recapture that Insidious magic (Dark Skies and Sinister being previous, superior attempts) by placing an average family in a suburban home and having them face some form of terror. Considering their low-risk budgets (this one was only $4m) and the mostly successful track record at the box office, I'm not sure why they don't take more chances - the Purge sequels and (even though it wasn't very good) Unfriended are the kinds of things I wish they would make more often, high-concept stuff that at least you can remember (good or bad) down the road. It seems like their more interesting movies (like Hush) get sent straight to video, which baffles and saddens me in equal measure.

At any rate, it looks nice and McLean gets good performances across the board, but it's just so aggressively "stock", to borrow a term from the Metallica documentary. The autism angle and even the villain itself (the Anasazi) give it just enough flavor to keep it from being a total loss, and it's better than the Poltergeist remake (yeah, tall order), but I can't help but feel disappointed how formulaic it was, given the pedigree. Maybe the original cut (again, if there was one, though I would place sizable amounts of money that at the very least the final film doesn't 100% resemble the script the actors signed on for - and it's worth noting that the film was shot in 2014) offered more of those brief glimpses of personality and a more fleshed out set of supporting characters, enough to put the movie in the win column, but as is it's just too "eh" to really care one way or the other about it. I'd almost rather it was flat out awful, because then it'd at least be interesting. Instead, all I'll remember a few months from now is that I should have just let myself sit in the darkness for 90 minutes and imagine a better movie (or taken a nap, I mean how often do I get to sleep in a total blackout?).

What say you?

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Hush (2016)

MAY 11, 2016

GENRE: SURVIVAL, THRILLER
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX)

No, it makes no sense that Hush has been available for weeks and I'm just getting to it now. I mean, I HAVE an excuse - I was told it should be watched in the dark with the sound cranked, a situation that no longer presents itself since dark means my kid is asleep and thus there will be no cranking of sounds (especially with his bedroom directly above the TV room). But I feel I shoulda figured something out (a hotel?) just because it was a new film from a filmmaker I really like (writer/director Mike Flanagan of Absentia fame), that had drawn comparisons to Halloween, and was a merciful 75 minutes long without credits - I fear I am just getting out of habit. I think I mentioned this before, but the lack of discipline of "having" to watch/write every day has made it that much easier to let things pass me by, which sucks when it means I could be late to the party - or missing entirely* - quality films like this.

Now, with all due respect to Stephen King (who MAY have been a bit swayed by the appearance of a couple of his books on the heroine's shelf), I don't think it's up to Halloween standards - but let's not forget I don't think any film is, being that it's my favorite one ever. However, it definitely shares a very important trait with that film: it's basically plotless, devoting its runtime to little more than wanting to spook its audience and jolt them out of their seats when necessary. It's also a bit like The Strangers (another one I quite like), but even more stripped down - it's just the one woman (Maddie, played by co-writer Kate Siegel) and the one killer, who makes his presence known to her at like the 15 minute mark or so (Liv Tyler didn't know about that guy in her house for about double that, if memory serves). If anything Flanagan could have dragged out the "toying with her" part of the movie a bit, as that sort of stuff is always good for a scare - prowling in the background as she remains completely unaware, but I have to admire that he kind of made things harder for himself by letting her know about the killer so soon (and setting it more or less in real time after).

It's even more impressive/ballsy when you consider he had the license to let her go an entire movie without knowing that a guy was in her house, because she is deaf - he doesn't even have to worry about footsteps or anything alerting her as he makes his way around behind her. Her impairment forms the basis for one of the movie's most chilling moments, which starts out as a seeming direct homage to Halloween, with the heroine making her way back and forth in a kitchen that has a big glass door behind her. Just as Annie never noticed Michael appear (and disappear) as she talked to Paul, we astute horror fans keep expecting the killer (who hasn't made an appearance yet, but I and you probably know what the movie is about) to pull a similar move - but instead it's her neighbor who shows up, frantic and screaming (and eventually - spoiler - being murdered) as Maddie remains completely oblivious. It's the film's first real scare scene and also remains its best; a perfect blend of genuine terror and maximum utilization of one of the character's defining traits.

I should mention that the killer learns in this moment about her predicament, letting us know that it's not someone with a particular vendetta against her - the fact that she can't hear him was a surprise bonus, it seems. Flanagan just posted a few days ago a response to the people who have complained that the killer's motives and origins are left unknown (he doesn't even have a name), name-checking The Strangers' "Because you were home" as a more chilling "explanation" than anything he could cook up (he also amusingly reminds people that Silence of the Lambs didn't tell us much about Lecter, and that when they did in Hannibal Rising - everyone hated it). And he's 100% right; the movie gives us a few glimpses into his personality in order to make him a real character (as opposed to say, the nameless "Killer" in Final Exam), but where he came from, why he does this, etc. are all left unknown, and that's how it should be for this kind of film. Scream can't end without Ghostface taking off his mask and giving Sidney/us a reason for his behavior, but this is a terror exercise, and thus is exempt from that requirement.

Plus, you know, it worked just fine for Michael Myers. While I like my Halloween sequels just fine, I will be first to admit that they tainted the original's power forever, as it's nearly impossible to forget what the sequels told us about Myers and why he's doing these things. And I think people forget that when they make these complaints - since it all blends together (the TV version of Halloween makes it even worse, hinting at the sister thing in the newly shot scenes) they forget that there was a time (1978 until October of 1981) where we had no idea why Laurie Strode was being targeted by this guy, and it didn't stop people from loving it. There are other examples, of course, but it's best/easiest to use Halloween when it's hard to argue with - is there anyone out there who really thought it needed more explanation and thank the sequels for providing it? I mean, maybe, but they're probably also voting for Trump. As Flanagan says in his piece, the moment you start explaining things is the moment they get silly, and I laud him for sticking to his guns and avoiding such nonsense. Knowing this guy's name wouldn't have made that aforementioned scene or any of the other solid scare scenes any more effective. It's just not the point of this particular film.

Back to the actual movie, another thing Flanagan does that I liked a lot was that he kept the cops out of it entirely. Again, she can't exactly call them for help anyway (he cuts the power, making internet pleas impossible), but if he wanted that usual kind of scene I'm sure he would have figured out a way to include one. But such scenes always play out the same way - the cop shows up, can't find anything, and gets killed just before he leaves (or he DOES find something and is killed before he can do anything about it). Instead, he just gives us the neighbors - the aforementioned victim and her boyfriend, who comes looking for her and encounters the killer - who poses as a cop! It's such a great inversion of a home invasion movie trope (getting rid of the cops who show up), and it plays into the film's other strength, which is that you're not sure how it will end up. Maddie is a novelist, and during the film's brief "let's get to know this person" sequence at the top we learn that she has multiple endings for her stories and never knows which she'll go with. That, along with Flanagan's not exactly super happy endings in his other films (and this being a movie Blumhouse didn't think could be a hit, i.e. potentially dark) had me never quite sure if anyone would survive, which aided the proceedings greatly.

See, with such a stripped down premise and cast (there are only five people seen in the film, one just briefly over a Skype call), you'd think the movie might be kind of boring, but he manages to make it work for the most part. Again, he might have let the killer fuck around for a bit longer instead of going out of his way to make her see him so soon, and there's one too many "she tries to go outside, fails, and runs back inside just in time to lock the door before he gets her" bits, but you know what this movie is with the heroine not knowing anything is wrong until the end? The goddamn When A Stranger Calls remake. I'll take a bit of repetition over "realistic" tedium any day of the week (and since she's deaf, the icemaker can't scare our heroine anyway!). If I had one legit complaint about the movie, it's that Flanagan doesn't explain that the glass on the doors is (inexplicably) just shy of shatter proof, as the killer has considerable trouble busting through it when he finally decides to do that - near the film's conclusion. Until then, even though he says he's in no rush to kill her, he clearly wants to get inside, but is seemingly incapable of just grabbing a rock or branch and smashing any of the doors or windows to do that. When he finally does we see that it's not that easy, but after 50 minutes or whatever it's been, it's a bit late to answer a simple question most audience members will probably have. There should have been a bit early on where he tries that and finds it to be too much trouble (especially with her being deaf - it's not like he'd have to worry about alerting her if he used a window she wasn't currently looking at).

The other "flaw" (note the quotes) is that it's not a movie you'll want to return to again and again; this is a one-timer if there ever was one. Maybe in 20 years I'd like to look at it again, or perhaps go to a revival screening to watch it with a crowd, but it serves its lean and effective purpose with just the one view. I say this to make sure I am clear that this is not a horror masterpiece that we need to induct in the hall of fame along with The Exorcist or whatever. It's what I like to call "blue collar" horror - it gets the job done, striving for no more and achieving no less. People will see these raves and touts from Stephen King and get their expectations inflated to an unreasonable degree, and that's a disservice to the film. I can almost see why Blumhouse opted to send it DTV; it's not worse than any of this year's releases (it's better than most, in fact) but it's so stripped down (and short) that I think people would be angry to pay the same ticket price they paid for the latest Marvel flick. No, it's perfect for Netflix or (eventual) VOD viewing, as it keeps your investment tiny and this allows for maximum rewards.

What say you?

P.S. As for why I finally watched it today - it was super cloudy and not a landscaper day for my apartment complex, so with almost no light coming through the cracks in the blinds and everything besides my surround sound being relatively quiet, I was able to get my living room as close to that ideal setup as I'll ever get.

*I was at the used DVD store the other day and was legitimately sad about all the stuff I hadn't seen. Sure, it was probably mostly crap, but I literally wrote a book on the movies I wouldn't have seen if I wasn't doing this, and thus it's possible some of them could have been included had I seen them. It really bummed me out.

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Summer Camp (2015)

MARCH 22, 2016

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

In a way, it's almost kind of charming to watch a foreign horror movie that's kind of generic. We US horror fans (well, the more well-rounded ones) often look to foreign sources when American horror is in a slump, but the problem with that is that we're often selecting from the creme of the crop (via recommendations, since they're not exactly loaded with such fare in Redbox kiosks). Other countries make perfectly OK, forgettable horror movies too, though it's rare that they get theatrical releases like Summer Camp has. I'm not sure how wide the release is; it's on six screens here in LA but it's not listed on BoxOfficeMojo - using past, similar experiments as a guide I would guess somewhere in the 40-50 screen range in the US, a fine number for a foreign horror flick. The [Rec] films, to compare, played in fewer than ten theaters.

In fact that's a pretty obvious point of comparison, as Summer Camp is directed by those films' producer Alberto Marini, making his debut here. And Jaume Balagueró is the executive producer, so it's kind of a reunion (Paco Plaza is nowhere to be found, however), not to mention that the film belongs to the same sub-genre of "infected"/zombie movies (I'm sick of the idea that the difference is big enough to matter - it's like separating Jaws from Deep Blue Sea as if the details change the fact that they're both killer shark movies). Relax, though - it's not found footage! The similarities end with what I've listed, and there's also another big difference: the movie is actually in English, starring recognizable actors from American productions (the awesome Jocelin Donahue, Diego Boneta from Scream Queens, and Maiara Walsh, who is sadly best known to horror fans for playing the Emma Stone role in that terrible Zombieland pilot). The screening actually had Spanish subtitles throughout, which was a new one for me - and possibly the reason that the only other guy in the theater with me left after 10 minutes.

Had he stayed, he would have been rewarded with... an OK movie. There's a fun wrinkle to the usual "oh no he/she's turning!" zombie movie plot that I'll get into soon, but otherwise it gets pretty repetitive and even drawn out despite only being 80 minutes long with credits. And the title never really comes into play; the movie is about a group of counselors getting things ready for the arrival of the kids they'll be overseeing at the titular camp (yes, very early Friday the 13th), but it's actually being held at a house, so it never really feels like a camp at all - especially since the kids (spoiler!) only arrive in the final five minutes, at which point the far more awesome plot described on the IMDb finally kicks in (they say it's about the counselors defending themselves from the infected children). Those final few minutes are great, but it's one of those things where you can't help wonder why they didn't make it the thing that happened at the halfway point, as it promises more fun than the movie actually delivered. It'd be like if you knew From Dusk Till Dawn had vampires but the RV/Fuller family stuff lasted 90 minutes and then the movie ended after that first big attack.

Instead, we get an endless series of scenes where two of the heroes run or hide from the third one, as this is a unique virus in that it wears off after a while. Unlike a traditional zombie, killing the infected person isn't a good idea, because they will be back to normal soon, which adds a fun twist to the mix but ultimately doesn't really have much zing to it due to the limited cast (a fourth counselor is killed off almost instantly, which minimizes the possibilities). Marini gets some mileage out of Walsh not once but twice knocking out Donahue (whose infection had already worn off, something Walsh's character hadn't realized), but that doesn't sustain a 45 minute stretch where the only real difference is which actor is the one wearing the zombie makeup. There are some random locals that pop up from time to time, but none of them count as real characters and their appearances are usually limited to showing up for a scare and then getting killed moments later. This leads to the other novel idea, that our heroes legitimately feel guilty about defending themselves but also of the things they did while infected (which they can't remember, but obviously know they did SOMETHING once they see another infected in action). It's never as compelling as the filmmakers probably hoped, but it's at least something you don't see very often, and for that I laud them.

Less laudable is Marini's direction, as he utilizes shakey-cam almost nonstop, to the extent that I suspect it might even give Adam Wingard a headache. He also favors cramped, close-up action, so many of the big attack scenes are little more than a jumbled mess of flailing arms and shouted incidental dialogue like "Go!" and "Shit!" Like the plotting itself, it got mighty tiresome after a while, and I'd come to relish the quieter scenes because even if they weren't particularly exciting they'd at least be easy enough to process. And speaking of repeating tricks, it's kind of endearingly goofy the first time two of our infected heroes scream in each others' faces (it reminded me of football players smashing helmets together and yelling "HOOHH!" or whatever) but by the 3rd or 4th time it was just plain stupid to see. Worse, the narrative requires everyone to get infected a second time, which as you can guess certainly doesn't help the film's cyclical feeling. What I wouldn't give for two more characters to mix up the dynamic (it's pretty much always Boneta and one of the girls vs. the other girl) and give the attack scenes more variety.

And the repetition isn't limited to the infected attacks - Boneta loses his glasses twice, Walsh stops everything to make a phone call to her mother twice, Donahue does something self-serving twice... you get the idea. Again, this is an 80 minute movie - when you're repeating stuff in such a compressed timeframe, it's much more noticeable (you can get away with that sort of thing in Titanic, for example), though Marini DOES nail one element that seems like it's going down that same route, involving a sharp branch that's sticking out in the woods that people are constantly running around in, starting in the very first scene. He goes back to it a couple times, and it's not a matter of IF someone will eventually get impaled on it, but WHEN (and WHO, for that record). That opening scene, I should note, has a great payoff of its own but also has a fun little twist for people who have watched a lot of modern horror movies that start at the end and then rewind to how things got to that point (including Cub, another camp in the woods movie) - it seems like this is going that route, only to have a much better explanation for what's happening.

To be fair, twisting those expectations and cliches is something that carries throughout the film, with the infected people becoming human again, the characters who you think are heroic turning into spineless jerks, etc... but the obnoxious direction and endless repetition clouds those ambitious spins. At times it feels little more than a Cabin Fever remake (something we actually just got for real - I haven't seen it yet), and I couldn't help but wonder if I saw it at a festival with a big crowd (and perhaps a few adult beverages) that it might play better. Sitting alone in a theater didn't seem fitting for this particular style of movie (ironic since some of this team's other movies, like Sleep Tight, would be almost perfect for such a setting), and after glancing at a couple of (mostly positive) reviews I wasn't surprised to see how many of them were based on festival screenings. If you've picked up my book (hero!) you'd know I devoted an entire chapter to movies that I think would be better to watch at home, perhaps even alone - this is certainly not one I ever would have selected for that chapter. If I were to include it at all, it'd be in the August chapter - movies that are best watched when you're not really wanting to be blown away by a horror masterpiece. Again, it's an OK movie and I'm happy that it got a theatrical release, but unless those screenings are packed, I suspect you'll find its flaws too easy to notice.

What say you?

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The Other Side Of The Door (2016)

MARCH 4, 2016

GENRE: GHOST, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I have a son now - have I mentioned that? (pause for groans) But seriously, as mentioned in, oh, every other review I've written for the past two years, having a kid changed how I approach horror movies, in particular ones like The Other Side of the Door, as the movie is about a woman (Sarah Wayne Callies, someone I'm always happy to see) who loses her son in a car accident and tries to kill herself to end her grief. The family's nanny, Piki, feels sorry for her and tells her about a place that will allow her to contact her son; she can't SEE or TOUCH him, because he's (see title), but she can talk to him and say what she needs to say. Under no circumstances, Piki warns, should she open the door no matter what - and this being a horror movie, you can guess what she does (spoiler: she opens the goddamn door).

Since he dies in flashback (he's already dead when the movie begins), thus softening the blow, this was probably the most conflicting moment for me to watch as a horror fan who is also a parent; two years ago I'd probably end up hating the movie because of this moment. Because the horror fan part of me is rolling his eyes, yelling at Callies for doing the one thing she was instructed not to do - but the dad in me was wondering why she took so long to do that. If my son was taken from me and I had a chance to talk to him on the other side of a door, you can bet your ass that I'd have the damn thing opened before he finished saying "Daddy is that you?", damn the consequences. I have come to realize I am far more sensitive than some other parents when it comes to things like this (they're able to separate the "it's a dumb horror movie" element enough to know that such a thing would be impossible in the first place, whereas I am not), so I just want to make that clear when I say I enjoyed the movie. When the plot hinges on something that 90% of the audience might consider completely stupid (it's the equivalent of a road trip movie that goes to hell because our heroes opt to take some creepy ass "shortcut"), I know it's bound to keep them at bay for the rest, but for me I was totally fine with it.

But I think the real reason it didn't affect me as much as I feared once I knew it was about a dead kid (I didn't know much about the movie before I sat down) is because it's more or less a Pet Sematary remake, with a grieving parent being told of a place that would bring their loved one back to them, albeit with warnings that are ignored. Bad things happen, more people die, and at the very end we realize no one's learned their damn lesson. In fact, Mary Lambert is actually thanked in the credits, which made me wonder if they had to run the movie by her to make sure there was nothing legally actionable about the movie. I kid; there's obviously enough of a difference that no one could be held accountable any more than Costner and Reynolds could be sued over Waterworld re: Road Warrior, but speaking strictly as an easily upset dad, the similar beats of a story I know very well kept me from freaking out for the most part, because I've more or less been down this road before (and in far harsher manner - nothing here is remotely as awful as the little coffin spilling over at the funeral in Pet - good lord that is traumatizing).

One of the biggest changes (besides the dynamic - it's the mom, not the dad, who goes off to the magical burial place) is the setting. India, to be specific, which gives the film a unique look and invaluable production value - the authentic, slightly rundown (and giant) family home alone sets it apart from the countless anonymous middle/upper class homes we've seen over the past few years in (name a Blumhouse movie). But there are some city-set scenes that also give it plenty of personality the plot occasionally lacks, and the script wisely skips past the "stranger in a strange land" element - we learn early on that they moved there for the husband's job several years ago, so they're obviously pretty comfortable in the locale instead of bumbling about needing everything explained to them.

The husband is played by Jeremy Sisto, who is always an interesting guy to watch and chooses his horror projects carefully (or at least, he has since Hideaway). Callies is the main star here, with Sisto usually off at work or something and thus not witness to any of the spooky goings-on. It doesn't QUITE land maybe as well as they hoped, but this allows a late-period wrinkle where Callies starts to confess what she's been seeing to him and he starts wondering (as do we) if she's just crazy, that her grief finally got the best of her. It'd be a fun twist to take (and would make the Pet Sematary lifts actually kind of inspired - distracting us with a familiar story to distract us away from the more plausible answer), but (spoiler) they don't opt for that route. Sisto finds out about all the supernatural stuff in a pretty good way, however, and he makes the most of his slightly reduced screentime. Indeed, one of the few times my "dad gene" kicked in was when he broke down at the sight of his son's toys and clothes on fire, which is something the wife had done to try to ward off his evil ghost.

Unlike Gage Creed, their kid doesn't really come back in a flesh and blood way - we see him in flashes, but for the most part he's just a "presence", with chairs moving by themselves and books being dropped at Callies' feet when he wants to hear a bedtime story. But modern horror movies need something physical to cause people to jump, so we learn early on that there are these creepy Rob Zombie-looking dudes who live on the flesh of the dead, and once Callies opens the door they start menacing her on a regular basis (read: when the movie needs a jump scare). The director is fond of showing one of them off in the distance, startling the characters into walking backwards a bit into another (obviously much closer) one, a trick that gets a bit old but is still preferable to fake ones where she's scared by her husband or a coat rack or whatever the hell. In fact I don't think the movie actually has any of those cheap shot ones at all, though I did leave for a bit to get a drink (this theater allows alcohol and it was my birthday, so I indulged) so maybe I missed one. Either way, it's hardly Insidious in terms of effective jolt moments, but at least they aimed to make them honest jolts, and however successful they ultimately are is kind of up to the viewer anyway.

I knew so little about the movie before going in that I didn't realize until it was over (there were no titles at the beginning of the film) that it was directed by Johannes Roberts, someone I consider myself a fan of based on his previous two films. One was Storage 24, a fun little flick that takes a slasher template and applies it to an alien monster movie (and sets it inside a personal storage warehouse), and the other is Expelled, which I saw as F and liked enough to put in my book. It's his first wide(ish) release in the US, and it's a shame that Fox didn't seem to have much faith in it, doing the same thing they did with the inferior The Pyramid in the December before last (namely, putting it on a few hundred screens and not really advertising it). It's not the best movie of the year or anything, but it's a solid entry in the "careful what you wish for" sub-genre of supernatural horror (the minor allusion to "Bobby" from Dead of Night should make some old-school fans smile) and, for genre fans, a far better showcase for Ms. Callies than Walking Dead ever offered her (seriously, did the writers just hate her guts or what?). It'll be a big Redbox hit, at least.

What say you?

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The Witch (2015)

FEBRUARY 18, 2016

GENRE: POSSESSION, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PRESS SCREENING)

Of all the independently produced horror movies to be granted a wide release after being acquired out of a festival (Sundance, in this case), there is none less likely to become a huge hit than The Witch. And even if I'm wrong (which would be great), that will just mean more people hating it because it's not the kind of typical horror movie they expect to see at their multiplex. The trailers aren't misleading in any way, but I'm sure there will be a healthy percentage of ticket buyers who expect more scares, more gore, more of the title character, etc. - and will be angry that the film is actually thought-provoking, deeply unsettling, and (not saying this as a bad thing) slow-paced, drawing you into its narrative with carefully laid out plot developments. It is the sort of movie that you can expect to see "Worst movie ever!" type "reviews" from people who are used to live-tweeting Sharknado movies instead of paying attention, and fans like myself will certainly be accused of "overhyping" it.

(NOTE - at this point I should note that this review is mostly a month old, based on my press screening in January. I never had time to complete the review due to finishing up the HMAD book, so I went again over the weekend to a normal AMC multiplex for a refresher. And now as I go back to the review, I'd like to marvel, however sadly, at how right I was in the above paragraph, written four weeks ago and left unchanged today. Obviously I know I was not wrong, though an $8m opening weekend for something like this is FANTASTIC and kudos to A24 for taking a chance on such a film.)

Oh, and it's in English, but not the modern kind - writer/director Robert Eggers used old texts and court transcripts to make sure he offered an authentic 17th century voice to his script, making some lines a bit hard to grasp (thick accents don't help) if you're not giving the film your undivided attention, which it richly deserves. Given how I've ended every review on this site (for reasons I can't even recall) I was delighted to hear "What say you?" a few times, but that's probably also the easiest line to mentally translate into what's being asked - during heavy arguments it's likely you'll miss some of the particulars if you let your mind wander a bit. During a low-key scene I actually considered (as a joke) the idea of dubbing the film into a more familiar version of English for the eventual Blu-ray. It would, I think be the only bit of levity you'd find on the disc unless the commentary is uncharacteristically rambunctious.

Because that's the other thing - this is a dark movie. I knew I was going to be in for some trouble just from the trailer, when a young woman playing peek-a-boo with a baby (her little brother, as I discovered in the film - not her son as I originally assumed) is horrified to open her eyes and see that the little guy had been snatched by an unseen presence. I don't like to spoil new movies but to fellow parents I should warn you that he doesn't come back, and his fate can only charitably be described as vague - we are spared any killing blow, but there's enough aftermath to more than make up for it, including the naked witch scattering his remains around as she collects his blood. It's pretty traumatizing, and it's only 15 minutes into the movie - with worse things to come. In the first scene, our protagonist family of seven (two parents, the four older children, and the baby) are driven out of town for being TOO religious (by Puritans! It'd be like someone being considered too conservative for Fox News, or me accusing someone of being way too into Shocker), and once they arrive at their home well outside of the civilized area, they're the only ones we see besides the title character (in brief moments). So with the cast limited to a family and an R rating for graphic violence, you don't need much of an imagination to know that the baby gets off easily in the grand scheme of things.

But again, this isn't a movie about kill scenes or jump scares. These startling moments of violence are meant to be as shocking to the characters as they are to the viewer, and thus there isn't usually much buildup or "traditional" scariness about them. Instead, Eggers devotes his energy into getting under your skin the old fashioned way - long shots, ominous music, and careful editing that delivers the shocks as quick buttons to long buildups. In fact, this movie could have easily been made in the 70s, as it would sit rather comfortably next to occult-driven movies like Satan's Skin and of course The Wicker Man, albeit not as batshit as either of those (for modern films, it reminded me more than once of Sauna, which shares more than the gloomy look). The unsettling tone is established before they even get to the house - you can go in completely blind to this movie and before a single "horror" thing happens (the baby being snatched is the first) you'll probably know you're watching a horror movie, just from how uneasy Eggers is able to make the audience feel with just a few scenes (mostly exposition to explain why they're leaving town).

Another thing setting it apart from most modern horror movies is that the acting is award-worthy across the board. The parents are familiar faces (both from Game of Thrones, in fact - Kate Dickie was Lysa*, and Ralph Ineson played Dagmer Cleftjaw), but the four children were totally new to me, and they were all terrific. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Thomasin, the oldest daughter (the one playing peek-a-boo) who the family starts to suspect is a witch and is thus to blame for all of their bad luck as of late. She's in just about every scene and has to toe a rather tough line (IS she a witch?), but she sells it 100% and pulls off her character's horrible late-film ordeals with ease. But possibly even better is Harvey Scrimshaw as Caleb, the 2nd oldest child who is currently questioning how strong his faith is, worried that his baby brother has gone to Hell since he (like everyone, per their beliefs) was born in sin and never got the chance to atone. Both of them are so good at handling the heavy dialect and just general LOOK of this bygone era that if I didn't know better I'd swear they had teleported from the 1600s and placed as is in front of the camera. Not that the parents were any less authentic, but since I recognized them from other films/shows they couldn't quite escape that disconnect - when they were on-screen I was reminded that I was seeing a (very good) movie, whereas when focus stayed on the older children I was able to get totally immersed in that time and place.

Indeed, I wasn't surprised at all to discover Eggers was primarily a production designer before switching to directing (he has done some shorts, but this is his first feature), as well as a costume designer - he worked on YellowBrickRoad, in fact, making him the go-to guy for creepy New England horror (YellowBrickRoad was shot in New Hampshire; Ontario subbed in here but apart from Canadian horror staple Julian Richings' brief appearance as the judge who orders them out of town, you'd never know it was anywhere but some gloomy New England farmland). Nothing felt out of place, and he and his crew kept things to a minimum inside and out. Sometimes you see a period movie (not just horror) where they pack in old timey props in every nook and cranny of the set as if to hammer home the fact that this was a long time ago, but here they were smart enough to know less is more. And apart from the brief excursions to the woods (and the opening), pretty much the entire movie is set inside their house, so they could (should?) easily pack up the whole prop department and turn this into a stage production.

Then again, if told on stage they'd likely have to drop Black Phillip, the goat that is much loved by the younger children (I know I haven't talked about them, but that's for a reason - I want you to remain blind to their storyline). If the movie has any lightness, it's the unavoidable fact that goats are kind of funny to look at, especially when they're not doing anything in particular and yet they're getting closeups and given silly names like "Black Phillip". I can only pray that a few months after release, when we've all seen it and enjoyed it untainted by anything, some bright spark does a mod to that Goat Simulator game and makes it about good ol' Phil. I would maybe even try to play it again (good lord, that game is terrible - I don't know how people can possibly enjoy it even on an ironic level).

One final thing I want to say without spoiling specifics - you know all of those Return of the King jokes about how many endings it has? This movie has not one but two points where you think it might end and you'd be OK with it, but keeps going and makes things even more satisfying. I loved that! It's almost disappointing when credits come up and you realize Eggers wasn't going to take it a step even further, but I guess I shouldn't be greedy. Needless to say, if you thought the movie lacked what you came for, the last 15 seconds or so should, if nothing else, send you on your way smiling.

I originally ended this review with a plea to see the film theatrically, but after doing just that (and now that it's a success anyway) I would actually rather you, intelligent reader, waits to see the film at home on VOD or Blu-ray, unless you are somehow guaranteed of seeing it in a theater with absolutely no one else around. I have never in my life witnessed such an awful group of people seeing a movie as I did this past Saturday, and I saw plenty of tweets and FB posts that echoed mine. Because the movie is genuinely good and not filled with jump scares, audiences are quick to turn on it, if the language didn't turn them off even sooner. I saw at least four couples walk out in the first half hour, each just as if not more distracting than a cell phone going off (which also happened) or some asshole MST3k-ing the damn thing (ditto). Add in the guy next to me who inexplicably brought his 4-5ish daughter along and had to keep assuring her that it was almost over (he also pulled his cell phone out several times, and after realizing he wasn't going to listen to my requests to put it away, I moved up a row. He kicked my chair in response. Because I'm the bad guy here.) and you have pretty much every moviegoer sin in the world at one screening. Had I not seen the movie already I would have been too distracted to enjoy it or even follow the damn plot (again, thickly accented olde English), and I'd hate for that to happen to you. Dumb people will ruin too many experiences of seeing this terrific film, so it is with a heavy heart that I ask you to wait until you know that the only one to blame for distractions is yourself if you keep your cell handy while watching from the couch. Let the movie whisk you away to its setting, and let it get under your skin the way so few modern genre films ever manage (mostly because they rarely try). If you hate it, that's fine - but at least give it the respect of a proper viewing, one you're sadly not likely to find anywhere that has Star Wars playing in the adjacent screen (yep, I also heard lightsabers and explosions during the quieter scenes, of which there were many). Sigh.

What say you?

*Curiously, there's a horrifying breastfeeding scene involving her character. Weird niche this actress has.

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